Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  “Quite a shock, huh? Finding a severed head?”

  “For sure,” said Gebhardt. “It almost made me do my own business by the bush. In hindsight, it was predictable. Sooner or later, something was bound to happen at that house.”

  “How so?” Stein asked, the bloodhound in him sniffing around the question.

  “That’s the Bundy house.”

  “Does Bundy have enemies?”

  Gebhardt frowned. “Lots, I would think.”

  “Ones who’d do him harm?”

  The frown deepened. “Not unless they know how to get to him in hell. Bundy fried in Old Sparky, Florida’s electric chair. That house is where Ted Bundy lived from 1969 to 1974, back when he was stalking coeds in Seattle.”

  Det. Ralph Stein felt like a buffoon. Who did he think Bundy was? W. H. Bundy, the Australian manufacturer of time clocks? McGeorge Bundy, the special assistant to JFK and LBJ on national security? True, it should be noted in Ralph’s defense that Ted Bundy had just rented a room in the house and never owned the place. But still, Ted Bundy had ranked as Seattle’s worst serial predator until the Green River Killer topped his body count. And it didn’t help Ralph’s attempt to forget his memory flub that Mac, the rookie taking notes in the rain, muttered in disgruntlement, “I knew that.”

  Luckily for Ralph, the cavalry arrived.

  “So, Detective Stein, what new forensic challenge do you have for me on this enchanted evening?”

  The detective turned to find the medical examiner approaching the trio blocking the sidewalk. Her car was parked behind Ralph’s on the far side of the cordon. Known as Ruthless Ruth to homicide bulls, the M.E. was a mannish woman in dress and appearance. Bundled up in a trench coat like Ralph should have been wearing, and a brimmed hat that owed its inspiration to film noir, she looked about as feminine as Bogart would after a beating in The Big Sleep. Her pants were thick stovepipes capped by steel-toed boots. Her hands and wrists were those of a sumo wrestler. And her round face, devoid of makeup for maximum butch, resembled a ham.

  “We’ve got a real doozie here, Doc,” Stein said. “A severed head stuck on a stake outside of what was Ted Bundy’s house. Mr. Gebhardt and Murphy—Murphy’s the hound, not the waterlogged youth taking notes—found the remains. You’re just in time to catch the story of Ted Bundy’s lair.”

  “Bundy!” Ruth exclaimed. “Is this where he lived?”

  “Evidently. You were saying, Mr. Gebhardt?” Ralph continued, in a smooth handoff of the fumbled ball.

  The lobsterman sighed. His was a tired tale.

  “Bundy rented the large room in the southwest corner of the upper story from an elderly German couple named Ernst and Freda Rogers. He was studying deviant personality in the psychology curriculum offered at the U Dub. His roommate was a Boston fern that sat in the corner where the windows meet. He called it Fern, and he fussed over it. Bundy kept his stereo tuned to Seattle’s classical music station to help Fern grow. Freda kept the rooming house in immaculate condition. Everything was orderly and spotless. The hardwood floor in Bundy’s room was covered with an old pink-patterned carpet. A starched doily was stretched across the top of his dresser. The ceiling was high and airy, like those charming houses in Europe. For decoration, Bundy hung a raft over his bed and suspended a bicycle wheel from a chained meat hook. He was active in Republican politics. In 1968, he supported Rockefeller’s campaign at the convention in Miami, and he kept a souvenir from it in his room: an imitation straw hat made of Styrofoam.”

  “You have a remarkable memory, sir.”

  “Not really, Detective Stein. When you have resided as long as I have on the block where Ted Bundy lived, have you any idea how many people pump you for details?”

  “Tell us more.”

  “You’re the detective.”

  “Bundy was before my time. Sure, I can look it up. But why should I, if I have a prime source in you? You don’t want Murphy to come out of this as the hero of the moment.”

  Gebhardt laughed. “You hear that, dog? Should I tell him to take a walk?”

  The hound barked again, wagging its tail in excitement.

  “While Bundy lived here, the university doubled in size to thirty-five thousand students. That was the time of Vietnam, and there were protests down in Red Square.”

  “Named for its bricks,” Ruth said to keep the record straight. “Not its politics.”

  And damn if Mac didn’t write that down.

  The lobsterman sighed again. Back to his tired tale.

  “Early in 1974, Sharon Clarke was beaten with a metal rod as she slept in her home here in the U District. While she was unconscious, Ted Bundy raped her. Later that month, Lynda Ann Healy vanished from her basement room. That was also around here. Her bloody nightgown was found in the closet. Five more coeds disappeared in the next five months, the last being Georgann Hawkins, a U Dub student, who vanished from the back doorstep of her sorority house. That July, two more evaporated from Lake Sammamish Park. In the fall of 1974, Ted Bundy left Seattle. The abductions followed him to Utah and Colorado. Then Bundy met his Waterloo in Florida, after an orgy of sex and violence at the Chi Omega sorority. Old Sparky fried him in 1989.”

  “Spoken like a historian.”

  “I teach history, Detective Stein,” Gebhardt said.

  “So this house was the anchor point from which Bundy spread out to hunt his victims?”

  “Yes, but there were never heads lined up on the mantel.”

  “Heads?” said Ralph, puzzled.

  “That’s my point. The severed heads are a bogus attempt to create an urban myth.”

  “What severed heads?”

  “The story goes that Bundy, at one point in his rampage, had four severed heads lined up on the mantel in this house.”

  “What are you saying? That that story might have inspired some nut to stake a head out front tonight?”

  “That’s possible.”

  “Because the house is a shrine?”

  “It might be to a copycat. To a Bundy clone.”

  “Is that why you stated, ‘Sooner or later, something was bound to happen at that house’?”

  “Lies become urban myths by capturing imaginations.”

  “You walk Murphy”—the dog barked expectantly—“every night,” said Stein. “Have you spotted anyone suspicious near Ted Bundy’s house?”

  “No,” said Gebhardt. “But the bus went by yesterday afternoon.”

  “What bus?”

  “Spooky Seattle Tours. They’re the ones trying to spread the bogus myth. What they tell passengers to spice up their tours is that at one point during Ted Bundy’s stay in the Twelfth Avenue house, he had the heads of four women lined up on the mantel. How did he do that when the room he rented didn’t even have a fireplace?”

  The detective and the M.E. left Mac to tie up loose ends with Murphy and Gebhardt while they went to look at the head. The knot of blues around the crime scene moved aside to let Stein and Ruthless Ruth through. As the two approached the stake that had been stuck in the muddy ground behind the bush at the southwest corner of Ted Bundy’s house, Ralph connected what he saw to a conversation he’d had with another cop during his convalescence from his two broken ankles.

  The head mounted upside down on the stake belonged to a man. The stake was buried deep in the crown of the skull, but not so deep that it protruded through the raw flesh of the severed neck, which the driving rain had washed so clean of blood that the vertebra above the cut and the mess of tubes truncated by the blade were clearly visible in the pool of light cast by several flashlights.

  Ruth crouched on her haunches, gathering in her coat flaps to keep them out of the mire.

  “It could be a Christian crazy,” she said.

  Ralph squatted beside her. “So it seems. That ring of nails driven into his skull resembles a crown of thorns.”

  YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

  Coquitlam

  What caused Zinc to recollect this particular memory of
Alexis Hunt was the laughter echoing out of Minnekhada Lodge from the enraptured male Mounties gathered around Mad Dog’s wife, the ex-hooker Brittany Starr. Standing alone where the overhead awning protected him from the downpour that splattered the open veranda, the inspector recalled that noon a year and a half ago when he and Stan the Accountant had joked with another humorous hooker, Moaning Mona, at the Lions Gate. Between that midday laugh-fest in the hotel bar and Zinc’s return that night to question Gord and Joey, the pimp and the hooker who’d rumbled off to die in the high-speed chase, the Mountie had gone home for dinner with the now lost love of his life. Erasing the past seventeen months, Zinc’s mind traveled back …

  “What’s for dinner?” Zinc asked, sniffing the aroma of exotic cuisine as he entered the kitchen of the Kits Point house that he and Alex shared in central Vancouver.

  “Eloi,” Alex said, referring to the human prey of the cannibalistic Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. She was stirring a pot of something that bubbled and let off delicious steam.

  “Mmm, my favorite,” Zinc replied, kissing her cheek and hugging her from one side. “Is it female?” he asked as a morsel of succulent meat bobbed to the surface. “If so, serve me a breast or a thigh.”

  “You pig!” Alex scolded, threatening him with the spoon.

  “Hey, you chose the menu. If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, expect cooking Eloi for dinner to bring out the cannibal in me.”

  “The cannibal’s okay. It’s the sexist I abhor.”

  “Blame Mona.”

  “Mona who?”

  “Moaning Mona,” said Zinc.

  Alex rolled her eyes. “It goes from bad to worse. Who’s Moaning Mona? Do I want to know?”

  “Mona’s a hooker.”

  “I never would have guessed. When’d you meet her?”

  “Today. In a bar.”

  “Great,” said Alex, and she rolled her big blues again. “I spend the day slaving over a hot stove to cook my beau something special, and he spends the day hanging out in a bar with hookers.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “In your wildest dreams.”

  The kitchen table was cluttered with books, scribbled notes, and a pair of DVDs. Both were films of The Time Machine—the 1960 George Pal version and the 2002 remake by Simon Wells, the great-grandson of H. G. Wells. Picking up one of the movies, Zinc read the back: “Rod Taylor stars as a young scientist whose ingenious machine propels him to a civilization thoroughly devitalized by war. Humanity has been reduced to a colorless passive race, the Eloi, who are held in the thrall of loathsome mutants known as Morlocks.”

  “Remember that?” Alex asked, stirring the pot of “Eloi.”

  “You bet,” Zinc said. “One of my favorite stories.”

  “What do you remember most?”

  “The Morlocks, of course. Such ugly, white-haired creatures, with glowing eyes and mouths pegged with crooked teeth.”

  “It’s a fine dichotomy,” Alex said. “The Eloi, a gentle, ineffective people, seem to have descended from us. They do no work and appear to spend their days in the Eden of the surface world in amorous dalliances and other pleasures of the flesh.”

  “You mean like me and Mona?”

  “Careful, Zinc. I’m the one preparing the curry. Wells describes the insipid Eloi as having blond hair and finely chiseled features. Theirs is a Dresden china prettiness.”

  “That’s Mona.”

  Alex twisted her face in a snarl. “The Morlocks, on the other hand, are a sinister, savage race of mutants who dwell underground. From time to time, they seize Eloi from the surface world and haul them off to work in their subterranean caves.”

  “I know the story, Alex.”

  “But do you know where I’m going with it?”

  Zinc shook his head. “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “The Morlocks, as Wells describes them, have bleached hair, pale and chinless faces, and large, lidless, pinkish-gray eyes. He says they are nauseatingly inhuman, and they dwell in the darkness of their world of eternal night because they are blind and helpless in daylight.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Zinc teased.

  “When the Morlocks steal the Time Machine and drag it into their lair, the Time Traveler must descend down one of their wells. He barely escapes from their clutching hands up a narrow ventilation shaft. That’s when Wells’s hero is shaken by the memory of meat that he saw in the underworld.”

  “Eloi meat,” said Zinc. “The Morlocks are cannibals.”

  “Well?” asked Alex, crossing from the stove to sweep her arm in a wide arc over the table.

  “You’re writing another book?”

  “My, you’re a good detective.”

  “Got a title?”

  “Uh-huh. You Are What You Eat.”

  “A cookbook,” Zinc said. “A nice change from true crime. That’s why you’re in the kitchen. To get in the mood.”

  “Ah, but what am I cooking?”

  “Uh-oh,” said Zinc.

  “You Are What You Eat: Cannibal Killers. That’s the full title.”

  “And The Time Machine?”

  “That’s the motif. The Eloi are content to dance away their golden days with fatalistic pleasure, while the Morlocks see them as fatted cattle—as merely a source of food.”

  “That’s how you’ll frame the book?”

  “We’re Eloi, with Morlocks among us. The difference is that my time machine goes into the past.”

  “How far?” Zinc asked.

  “At least half a million years, to the days of Homo erectus. Erectus—the hominid that evolved into us—enjoyed supping on the brains of his fellow cavemen.”

  “I’m hungry,” Zinc said.

  “Eloi?” Alex asked. Returning to the stove, she spooned a morsel of meat from the curry and held it out for him to taste. “See if this whets your appetite.”

  “Mmm. Good.”

  “Eloi and Morlocks. A good theme, don’t you think? Wells’s novel provides a grotesque reminder that the taboo urge to feast upon human meat lurks just beneath the surface of the comforting illusion that we have evolved into modern creatures who live a supposedly civilized life.”

  “Hannibal the Cannibal?”

  “Precisely,” said Alex. “Of all the horrors we associate with serial killers, cannibalism strikes us as the worst. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s favorite meal is human liver served with fava beans and a nice Chianti. That’s why he’s become the icon of the genre.”

  “So what’s on your menu?”

  “The real thing,” Alex replied.

  Crossing to the table, the cook rummaged among the notes spread across its surface until she found a list of nations and names scrawled in her almost-illegible hand. “Here,” she said, holding it out so the Mountie could read:

  Britain:

  Jack the Ripper

  David Harker

  Germany:

  Fritz Haarmann, “the Butcher of Hanover”

  Georg Grossmann

  Karl Denke

  Joachim Kroll, “the Ruhr Hunter”

  France:

  Nicolas Claux

  Issei Sagawa

  America:

  Albert Fish, “the Moon Maniac”

  Ed Gein, “the Plainfield Ghoul” (?)

  Edmund Kemper, “the Co-Ed Killer”

  Lucas and Toole (?)

  Stanley Dean Baker

  Daniel Rakowitz

  Albert Fentress

  Arthur Shawcross

  Gary Heidnik

  Jeffrey Dahmer, “the Milwaukee Monster”

  Russia:

  Andrei Chikatilo, “the Mad Beast”

  Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev, “Metal Fang”

  Canada:

  Dale Merle Nelson (?)

  “Good lord,” said Zinc. “That many?”

  “I’m still working on it. The list is under construction.”

  “Jack the
Ripper. There’s no escape from him.”

  “We may not know who Jack was, but we know his predilections. We have the famous ‘From Hell’ letter accompanied by a human kidney, with the taunt ‘Tother piece I fried and ate.’ And we have organs missing from three of the Ripper’s victims: Annie Chapman’s uterus, Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney and womb, Mary Jane Kelly’s heart. He removed them for some reason. To eat is the likeliest answer.”

  “Jack the Cannibal. Who’s David Harker?”

  “A modern Brit. He strangled a woman with her tights when he got bored during sex. He chopped off her head and limbs, sliced skinned flesh from her thigh, and cooked it with pasta and cheese. Tattooed on his scalp were the words ‘subhuman’ and ‘disorder.’”

  “When was that?”

  “1999.”

  “Four Germans, huh?”

  “Shows how hard their nation was shaken by the First World War. Many turned to Nazism. Three to cannibalism. Haarmann may have butchered as many as fifty young refugees who flooded into Hanover after the war. He lured each starving boy home from the train station with the promise of a meal, then attacked him like a werewolf, chewing at his throat. Death resulted from his almost biting off each head, an act that gave Haarmann a sexual climax. Later, he butchered the body and disposed of the leftover flesh as black-market beef. His near downfall was a dissatisfied customer who complained to police about the quality of his ‘steaks.’ The analyst, however, pronounced it was pork! So Haarmann was able to continue his nefarious trade.”

  “Selling ‘the other white meat’?”

  “Georg Grossmann, just after the war, ground fifty or more plump young women he met at the Berlin train station into sausage meat, which he sold the following day, on the same platform, as frankfurters. When he was arrested by police, Grossmann was butchering a trussed-up woman in his apartment.”

  “Sausages scare me,” the Mountie said. “You never know what’s in them.”

  “Karl Denke was an innkeeper in Silesia. He killed and consumed at least thirty of his lodgers. He chopped them up, ate certain parts right away, and pickled the rest in tubs of brine for later feasts. He confessed that for three years he’d eaten nothing but human flesh.”