Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  As with the headless body spiked to the tree, The Tracker trudged in a closing circle to spiral in on the lodge. He crossed a set of snowshoe tracks heading away to the south, already losing form under this blanketing snow. Rounding the lodge as if preparing to undertake a sweat, he poked his head and flashlight into the gaping flap.

  Face, to face, to face, to face, he faced a grisly totem pole staring back.

  The miniature totem was erected on the far side of the central pit.

  The four faces shone white in the dark. When the Cree undertook a sweat to ground himself, he moved clockwise within the lodge to hang four of the ribboned tobacco plugs to mark the four directions. Red to the east, white to the north, black to the west, and yellow to the south. Then he'd sit in the sacred circle of life, with his eagle feather, a bucket of water, and a cedar bough, now Ghost Keeper, the medicine man, here to heal himself. In the heat and dark of Mother Earth's womb, he would sing a song and say a prayer to link the spirit world to him— concluding with the amen, "All my relations." Dipping the bough in water, he'd then flick it at the rocks, so the sweat steamed hotter and hotter with each prayer. Prayer one in this round was said for the Creator, followed by prayers for the "sisters," then "brothers," then last for himself. A roll in the snow or dunk in the river would cool him off; then he'd return to the lodge for another sweat to cleanse spirit and being.

  By the end sweat ran all into one. "All my relations." But not in here.

  For not only was the sole tobacco plug on the outside mound self-centered red, but layered over the four carved wooden faces stacked on the totem pole were four faces skinned from whites.

  Short Eyes

  Vancouver

  Exiting from the airport with DeClercq lugging her bags, Katt sniffed the downpour and dramatically threw her reach skyward like a Broadway thespian. "Rain!" she rejoiced. "I must be in Vancouver. Goodbye, snowy Boston. Hello, damp and mildew."

  "Good flight?"

  "Lacking. No Mr. Bean."

  "I missed you," he said. Which was true, though it was but a day.

  "Of course you did. The abode must be dull without me."

  True again. For when Katt was near, there was always something going on. Her latest kick was converting the parlor of their West Vancouver waterfront home into Holmes's and Watson's sitting room. "Bear with me, Bob. It's for a photo project." Though now he suspected that it was because 221B Baker Street was perennially untidy—in short, a mess.

  "How's your mom?"

  "Sends her best. You're to look after me. And curb my excesses."

  "You? Excesses?"

  "That's what I said. But you know how out of touch mothers are."

  The car was parked by one of the short-term meters near Arrivals. A dollar per second, or something close to that. Katt took the keys and zipped through the rain to unlock the trunk, unlock the doors, and climb in out of the deluge. Like Friday, he sloshed and splashed and brought up the rear with her bags. As he got behind the wheel to chauffeur her to school— catching the ted-eye from Boston meant she'd reach first class on time—the teenager frowned at the CDs in the carry case. "Bob, I like the classics as much as anyone else" (to Katt, the classics were eighties rock) "but these old dudes" (the old dudes were Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms) "will put me to sleep."

  She turned on the radio and twizzled to a symphony of tortured guitars.

  "Did I say I missed you? I take that back," Robert groaned.

  Katt killed the noise. "You're right. The Vampires suck."

  They bridged the Fraser River with rush-hour traffic and inched across the city toward the North Shore. To fill the silence Katt drummed the dash in time with the slap, slap, slap of the wipers. "Anything juicy to report?"

  "I met a bright woman I'm contemplating asking out on a date."

  "Bob, it's winter. Raging hormones are for spring. How bright?" Katt asked, eyeing him with suspicion amid proprietary interest.

  "A psychiatrist."

  "Oh, no," Katt sighed, rolling her eyes. "The goal is to swell your loins, Bob. Not shrink your moonstruck head."

  "I'm not an adolescent. My thoughts are not slaves to sex."

  "You're a male," Katt said. "That's enough for me. But, hey, I could be wrong. Shall we try the test? Just how old is this babe?"

  "What a sexist accusation."

  " 'Fess up, Bob." She gave him her Spanish Inquisition look. "Is she in her fifties? That would be acting your age. No? In her forties? That would fail the test. Oh, oh! You're squirming. Does—"

  "She's in her thirties." He slapped down his poker hand bereft of cards.

  "Ah, yes," Katt said. "A meeting of the minds. You dirty dog."

  "Is age so important?"

  "Bob, she's old enough to be your daughter. You do need a shrink." "You're old enough to be my daughter," he grumbled sheepishly.

  "Lust is blind. Work it out, Bob. I'm young enough to be your granddaughter."

  DeClercq winced.

  A sobering fact, he thought.

  Having dropped Katt at school in West Vancouver at the foot of the North Shore Mountains, DeClercq crossed Lions Gate Bridge to Stanley Park, at the edge of which he entered the downtown core. Through canyons of towers financed with Hong Kong exodus— the building crane was now Vancouver's most prolific bird—he was approaching the Expo site, which had fostered the boom, when a cell phone call summoned him to join Chandler, Macbeth, and Craven at ViCLAS.

  The Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System ("Vigh-Class" to the Mounties) is a specialized section tasked with identifying serial killers in Canada. In the early 1980s sex killer Clifford Olson murdered eleven teens and kids across British Columbia. With each body found, local police investigated, but it was not until Olson's murderous rampage stopped that Mounties saw the pattern which linked the killings to onej man. Political fallout from that oversight motivated] development of the SexCri database, later replaced by MACRoS (Major Crime Organizational System), in turn replaced by ViCLAS, a nationwide computer program that stores and links all murders and sex crimes.

  "If the case isn't on ViCLAS, the job isn't done." Here's how it works:

  Step one is tracking. With every homicide (solved, unsolved, and attempts), sexual assault (real and false allegations), missing person where foul play is suspected, or finding of unidentified human remains, the cops investigating complete a crime analysis report. Each of the 263 questions has a specific purpose, ranging from establishing victimology, to developing offender behavioral traits, to determining geographical similarities. When the answer to each question is fed into the ViCLAS program, the computer scans the crime for patterns that reveal a serial killer or predict repeat behavior. It's like putting a jigsaw together. When you've got all the pieces in one box, it starts to make sense.

  "In a world of serial killers, ViCLAS isn't a nice to have, but a need to have."

  Step two is linking. In most murder cases police begin with the victim. Who is dead? And how did he get that way? From this center cops move out. But focusing on the victim won't work in serial killing, for fantasy is more important than who is dead. The scenario may be planned, but the victim is random. Stranger-to-stranger crimes require wide perspective, as recreational killers often strike from coast to coast. So ViCLAS goes a step beyond collecting basic crime data, in order to capture and profile the killer's behavior patterns. What's from within the offender's mind versus what's from without. This profile gives cops the basis to compare their case with other murders throughout the country for links. If there's a suspect from one of those crimes, so much the better.

  "ViCLAS linking is a tool to surface your psycho." The link is fantasy.

  Serial murder is a sexual act. Most serial killers also at some time commit sexual assaults. Serial crimes always have a ritual aspect in which the attacker plays out a secret fantasy. Though we all have fantasies, the difference is serial predators need to make reality fit theirs. In such fantasy everything unfolds the way the psycho wants it to. But w
hen he does a killing, reality never lives up to fantasy, so he's driven to repeat the murder to get it right. He acts out this fantasy like a movie script, so ritual elements of his behavior remain unchanged from crime to crime. ViCLAS calls this ritual the "signature" of the crime.

  It may be a fetish.

  The distinctive feature of ViCLAS is how it seeks to surface a suspect by getting inside his mind. Human sexuality is ten percent biological, twenty percent physiological, and seventy percent psychosexual. Fantasy-motivated behavior rarely changes in us, so this is a fundamental premise on which ViCLAS is based. Sexual violence services some non-sexual need like power, control, or venting rage to avenge abuse in a psycho's past. Behavioral analysis examines in detail what occurred during the crime. Every single thing that happened and the sequence of events. Then it determines all the possible reasons why the psycho might have done what he did. Was it M.O.: to ensure success, or protect identity, or facilitate escape? Was it ritual: for psychosexual gratification? Was it a reaction to what the victim did, or prompted by the environment? A decision is made as to the most probable reason(s), then—based on what and why—the analyst draws conclusions on who would do such things for those reasons.

  Different killers kill for different reasons:

  The thrill killer murders for no other reason than to get a thrill from the act. Some people find violence erotic.

  The over-killer inflicts more injuries than needed to kill the victim. Such frenzied activity is a venting of inner rage.

  The lust killer covets and fantasizes about a victim until he acts out and kills. He may dehumanize his prey through mutilation.

  The sadistic killer tortures in a way that reveals enjoyment, often to vent cold rage.

  And so on ...

  "To hunt a psycho, let ViCLAS be your bloodhound."

  DeClercq parked his car at Special X, then splashed up Heather Street. The ViCLAS section covering B.C. and the Yukon was on the second floor of E Division H.Q. at Thirty-seventh. The office he entered was stark and computerized, basically desks, video monitors, and Members processing data. A guided tour of foreign cops was underway. Those from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands were already on the ViCLAS program. The Suits from the FBI had frowning faces. Two "It's-bigger-in-Texas" types, they had developed VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, only to have a thundering herd of states pick up ViCLAS. Tennessee, Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and others were now on line. In a war between VHS and Beta, they were flogging Beta.

  It hurt.

  Chandler, Macbeth, and Craven were gathered around a computer in the corner office of Sergeant Rusty Lewis off ViCLAS central. A veteran of the Headhunter manhunt back in the eighties, Lewis had worked with Eric Chan—now the boss of E Division and top cop in B.C.—when the deputy commissioner programmed ViCLAS in 1992. Chan had promoted him to head of the section. Now he sat at his desk, watched by the trio staring over his shoulder and the boxed shrunken head, a red-haired man with freckles that clashed with his uniform when he donned Red Serge, feeding his computer crime analysis report data on this body part.

  DeClercq joined them. "What's up?" he asked.

  "The corpse from up north has thawed enough for me to examine," said Gill. "Though Vanderkop was raped, I found no semen in the rectum. The killer used a condom or didn't ejaculate. When I compared the beheaded stump with the shrunken head, the cuts didn't match. One slice slants down to the throat. The other slopes down to the nape."

  "The head isn't Vanderkop's?"

  "No," she said. "And when I did a magnified examination for marks, moles, and age, I discovered this. The missing Idaho hunter had no such mark."

  Macbeth passed him the tzantza and a philatelist's magnifying glass. A spark shot from her to him as their hands joined, causing the head to jump in the box as if coming to life. "Must be the electricity zapping here," he said, to which she replied, "North and south poles?" Again he whiffed the sirens' perfume. Then, at the corner of his eye, he saw Craven glance from Gill to him.

  A red light went on in his mind.

  "What am I looking for?"

  With tweezers Gill spread a wrinkled fold of skin near one stitched eye. In the crease Robert saw a tiny teardrop tattoo through the magnifier. It looked like a jailhouse mark.

  "Get a hit?"

  "No," said Lewis. The ViCLAS program on the screen mirrored the questions in the crime analysis report. On his desk, the booklet lay open at VICTIM INFORMATION—SCARS/MARKS/DEFORMITIES. ViCLAS had just run a check on "tear" and "teardrop" tattoos, in hope this distinctive feature might provide a link to a VICTIM/MISSING PERSON elsewhere in the country.

  DeClercq picked up the crime analysis report booklet and flipped to page 9. There, under OFFENDER INFORMATION, he penciled in:

  SCARS AND/OR MARKS

  "If the tear's a jailhouse tattoo," said DeClercq, "we may find him under OFFENDER instead of VICTIM. Give it a try."

  Lewis page-downed to SCARS AND/OR MARKS, and there entered LOCATION. ViCLAS presented a human outline like an acupuncture model. The sergeant clicked the mouse on the site of the left eye. Starting tight, he'd move out to head, then body if necessary, in case some slack cop had entered the tattoo without a location. If Question 91 didn't score, he'd use 90, too, in case the teardrop wasn't recognized as a tattoo.

  No need.

  ViCLAS scored a hit.

  A child molester—"short eyes"—named Bron Wren, recently released after serving twenty-five years of an indeterminate sentence as a dangerous sexual offender— a DSO.

  A note on file said Wren was missing, in breach of his parole.

  The photo on-screen showed long black hair tied in a ponytail.

  "Look like the head to you?" DeClercq said to Macbeth.

  "No skull structure makes it hard to tell, but the tattoo is exact."

  Lewis entered a command to call up Wren's crimes:

  ViCLAS Analysis Report/Crime - Narrative Summary 4/19107

  "Nick," DeClercq said to Craven, "find Wren's home and toss it."

  Craven had left for Wren's hotel in skid road, and Macbeth had driven the shrunken head back to the VGH morgue for more postmortem. Chandler went down to H.Q.'s canteen for cinnamon buns and coffee, and now DeClercq and Lewis sat munching hi the sergeant's office. Outside in ViCLAS central, the Suits wore smiles.

  "Why the change in attitude?" asked DeClercq.

  "I told the corporal guiding them to point out our Acknowledgements." Lewis flipped forward in the booklet to page iii:

  This questionnaire and computer-aided system used by the ViCLAS units are based on the research and experience of members of the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (VICAP), the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation's Sex Crimes Analysis System, the Washington State Attorney General's Homicide Investigation and Tracking System, the New York State Police's Homicide Assessment and Lead Tracking System, and RCMP E Division Violent Crime Analysis Unit's Major Crime Organizational System.

  "You brown-noser," said DeClercq, grinning.

  "Ours is the first time any country has programmed a system for murders, sex crimes, missing persons, and abductions on a national level. The FBI's contains just murders. ViCLAS casts a wider net, and bridges language barriers through no key words, just point and click. So we're asking the FBI to look at upgrading our system by adopting it in theirs.

  "The piss-off," added Lewis, "is we've got foreign police beating a path to our door, yet it's a hard sell to convince our own to use the system."

  "We're notorious for overburdening our detachments with paper," said DeClercq. "A survey of twenty-five hundred Members found 'excessive paperwork' the top cause of stress. No wonder with nine hundred different operation forms to fill out. We'd rather tackle a crook than wrestle with an arrest report. Risk from working alone was far below. I pray the Simplified Paperless Universal Reporting System helps."

  "SPURS won't help me," grumbled Lewis. "T
he ViCLAS joke with Members is 'We're not here to prevent crime—we're here to report it.' "

  "The Bic is mightier than the Smith & Wesson, eh?" said DeClercq. "A cop can pass through his whole career without drawing his gun, but an hour into the job will see him Sourish a pen. We don't lug briefcases around because we like big lunches. Someone in Ottawa seeks to explore the outer limits of clerkishness at the Force's expense. Why sixteen pages of forms for run-of-the-mill impaireds?"

  "One thing for sure," said Chandler. "You'll never see me write up another UFO."

  "You're kidding?" laughed Lewis.

  "I wish I were. That file was a nightmare from the idealistic period of my service. This guy swore he saw a UFO over the Rockies. From what he reported, it could have been a distress flare. If I had written it up like that, it would have taken two pages. But no, I was dumb and went by the book. Twelve volumes, each six to eight inches thick, and sure enough, our manual has procedure for UFOs. In following it, I had to check with National Defense, Search and Rescue, the Weather Service, nearby airports, air traffic controllers, et cetera, et cetera, for rational explanations. The file kept growing. Next, calls and letters started coming in. Scientific groups, wanting me to check this and that, find witnesses, work with Fox Mulder. Before long the file was thicker than the manual. But never again. Unless I see the UFO land, then little green buggers running around."

  Droopy bedroom eyelids made Lewis look like he was going to cry. "That's the problem," he said. "It's hard to persuade skeptical cops to invest an hour in filling out a ViCLAS report. Behavioral analysis is mumbo-jumbo to some, and those who already have a suspect see us as a waste of time. The big push now is to get one hundred percent reporting, with fifteen thousand cases a year flowing in. Veteran cops moan they've yet to see a computer that'll solve crime. We reply a computer will never replace the gut feelings of a detective, but—like the Fingerprint Identification System and Forensic Lab—ViCLAS will be a useful tool. If tied to a national DNA databank, this will be twenty-first-century policing."