Ripper

by Michael Slade

  … blind to the theater of surgery, he sees monsters instead. Hunched, deformed, and hairy, their black faces knobbed like the Elephant Man, they lumber from his limbic brain to torment his mind. Hair sloughs off their pustular skin in ugly pink patches, oozing slime into their matted fur. Drool that smells like goat cheese dribbles from their fangs, two inches long and caked with human meat. Bloodshot, their piggy eyes are rabidly insane, a condition echoed in their ravenous growls.

  Welcome to Hell …

  … like in a photograph, no one moves. White on white, they circle him under a halo of frozen light. His eyes crack, close, then crack again. His mouth’s as dry as cotton balls. Is this heaven, or is it a dream? Cold, he’s ice cold, the ice cube man. Consciousness slips and he’s sucked down by the tide …

  … above his bed are a zillion drips, bags, and snakelike tubes. His forearms, black and blue from needles, itch maddeningly. From under the heavy white turban wrapped around his head a line carries blood to a lemon-shaped drain. Slowly the mystic union of body and mind returns. With it comes a craving for maple walnut ice cream …

  … the world is outrageously ugly, and he looks like shit. Why is he so tired? The anesthesia? They’d shaved his head for surgery, then had cut a square from his skull to remove the piece of lead. Enter, Stranger, at your Riske: Here there he Monsters …

  … who’d have thought recovery would be this quick? Soon he’s eating and walking, trailing his pole and bag of serum. The tubes, like cut umbilical cords, come out one by one. When blood stops draining from his scalp, removing the threat of clots, that line is pulled too, leaving nothing but a pencil-sized stab mark. The turban’s replaced by a skullcap, and each day’s dressing shrinks. The square of bone, held in place by silk strings, bounces like a trapdoor on his bruised brow. The nurse gives him a stool softener. “Don’t push too hard …”

  … healing is up to him, not up to doctors.

  Life becomes a struggle to relearn control. Control, which always came naturally, now requires concentration. If he doesn’t concentrate, he wavers when he walks. If he doesn’t concentrate, his mind picks the wrong word. Strange to have to think about thinking itself.

  After brain surgery, you sleep a lot. Twelve to fourteen hours, well into the next day. Released from the Hong Kong hospital, he returns to the farm. The headaches he gets are screamers, but gradually they ease. On the mend, he doesn’t envision lasting consequences …

  … he’s to take Dilantin prophylactically for a year. The anticonvulsant guards against seizures while his brain heals. A plastic pinwheel by his bed reminds him to take two caps in the morning and two at night. Later the quadruple dose is reduced. The postop nightmare fades …

  … when he was a boy there was this story in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. A man walked past a shop window as a burglar inside blew the safe. The blast hurled an iron bar through the glass, striking the passerby in the head, entering his brain. Still conscious, the injured man found a doctor’s office, and later the missile was removed by hospital surgeons. By chance the shaft had speared an unused part of his brain, so believe it or not, the wound healed with no lasting effect.

  A year after the gunshot, Zinc hopes that applies to him …

  … the seizure comes unexpectedly when he’s mending a barbwire fence. First he tastes licorice, which he hasn’t had in years. Then the wire squiggles as if it’s alive, the barbs folding and unfolding like a spider’s dance. As the fit takes hold, his head revolves on his neck like a wobbly top. Objects around him shrink until he’s Gulliver trapped in Lilliput. His legs are rubber, akin to a bad dream. He knows he’s going to topple, then he does. The fit knocks the wind out of him, catching him short. The earth heaves as one by one his motor capabilities—walking, talking—are lost. Consciousness slips and he goes into convulsive shakes. Tom, his brother, finds him jerking on the ground, with his neck arched, making mewling sounds …

  … head inside a CT, white noise surrounds him as the machine CAT scans his brain.

  Discussing the results, he says, “Give it to me straight, Doc. No bedside manner.”

  “Combined, the bullet and surgery left an internal scar. The lesion is on the anterior aspect of your frontal lobe. Luckily it’s on the same side as your dominant hand. If it were on the opposite, the effect would be worse.

  “The onset of your seizure was out of the ordinary. Frontal lobe discharge usually produces immediate convulsions. With you, the electrical misfiring that brought on the fit traveled along the fiber tract running from your frontal lobe to the temporal lobe beside your ear. There it discharged secondarily, producing the aura—or premonition—prior to your blackout. Which means you get a warning.”

  “What’s the bottom line, Doc?”

  “You have epilepsy. Seizures will be a danger for the rest of your life.”

  “Treatment?”

  “We’re back to four caps of Dilantin a day. They worked for the past year, and should suppress onset in the future. You must avoid alcohol and sleeplessness. And never—I repeat never—miss taking your drugs …”

  … epilepsy, Zinc thinks. A stigma disease. Might as well he leprosy.

  As late as the nineteenth century, epileptics were thought to be demoniacally possessed. They were caged with the deviant or insane. Many were sterilized.

  Epilepsy.

  Welcome to Hell indeed …

  * * *

  “Who’s your friend?” DeClercq said, indicating the scarecrow.

  “Mr. Bojangles,” Zinc replied.

  “He’s seen better days.”

  “Haven’t we all?”

  Misery may like company, but DeClercq didn’t feel that way. His dedication to the Force had cost him everything he cherished at heart, yet having paid the price at least he had his job. Chandler’s deprivation now matched his own, except—having lost it all—he’d also lost his shield.

  “Why the binoculars?”

  “Watching owls.”

  DeClercq saw nothing but the barn and sunny fields of snow.

  “In the loft,” Zinc said, handing him the glasses. “The roost is on the left, high among the shadows.”

  Adjusting both lenses to his aging eyes, Robert scanned the square hole beneath the angular roof. Perched on a beam that swung bales of hay, a pair of owls, like vampires, slept away the day.

  “Barn owls,” Zinc said. “They hunt these fields. They’re the only species with that heart-shaped facial disc. The one on the left is Jack. The other’s Jill.”

  Robert laughed. “I see the pail.”

  “So, what brings you here? Good or bad news?”

  “Depends on how you view your stay in purgatory?”

  “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Everything’s in limbo till this is decided. What’s the stumbling block?”

  “Your brain,” DeClercq said bluntly.

  Across the road on the next farm, three laughing kids and a puppy built a jolly snowman. As they piled one ball on top of another, the Chief Superintendent wondered why God killed such innocence? Ah Jane, he thought.

  “The Hong Kong Police have cleared you, Zinc. The Maui authorities accept their report. It took five years but the Cutthroat case is finally resolved. The threat of prosecution is behind you now.

  “Commissioner Chartrand and I hoped that would clear the way for your return to the Force. Unfortunately, the government has cold feet. Too many cops shooting natives and blacks has them spooked. The thought of a brain-injured cop with a gun has several shitting their pants. Chartrand’s a political puppet: he doesn’t hold the strings. We have to lobby the holdouts one by one, so it’ll be a while longer before you know. With so many wannabe recruits knocking on our door, the argument we’re facing is to replace you with the best.”

  “I appreciate your honesty,” Zinc said.

  DeClercq clapped a hand on his shoulder. “The battle’s not over yet. You’re sure returning to the Force is what you want?”

  Across the ro
ad the brand-new snowman put the ragged scarecrow to shame.

  “Cutthroat cost me my mother, son, fiancée, job, and health. The fact he was killed in that alley does nothing for the pain, seeing how he took Carol with him by knifing her in the heart.

  “The Force stripping me of my shield was the final cut. Depression’s a pattern of learned helplessness, and I refuse to be helpless. Proving I can come back has kept me sane. I’ve worked the farm hard to keep in shape. I’ve remastered the motor skills blunted by the ricochet fragment entering my brain. I get occasional headaches and must suppress epilepsy, but drugs have kept me from having a fit these past four years. True, I’m handicapped, but I’m still a good cop. I want back in and will go down fighting to prove it.”

  DeClercq nodded.

  He’d do the same.

  “I have to return to Vancouver. Special X has a volatile case. A prominent New York feminist was found mutilated in Lynn Canyon. Chan radioed me a few miles south of here. Regina’s sending a chopper to pick me up.

  “Months ago I made a promise I may have to break. A woman named Elvira Franklen asked me to provide a “real sleuth” for a Mystery Weekend to be auctioned off in aid of Children’s Hospital. Chan said he’d do it, but now that’s changed. With Jack MacDougall on holidays, I need him for this case. The mystery takes place this weekend. So I have a favor to ask.”

  Across the road the puppy and kids were playing tag.

  Watching DeClercq watch them, Chandler could read his mind.

  He knew the Chief Superintendent would never get over Jane.

  DeClercq—in vain—had killed five men while trying to save his daughter.

  Children’s Hospital, Zinc thought.

  “When do you want me in Vancouver?” he said.

  GRAND GUIGNOL

  Vancouver

  11:35 A.M.

  Yes, they still use toe tags.

  The cop who had accompanied Marsh’s body from the suspension bridge to VGH morgue broke the continuity seal on the locker, allowing the autopsy attendant to wheel out the corpse. The mortuary room at Vancouver General Hospital is the best in the province, a fifty-foot-square dissecting theater of off-white tiles over a stone terrazzo floor. Adjacent to it is an isolation chamber used for carving up infected or decomposing remains. While the autopsy attendant X-rayed Marsh’s body in the side chamber, hunting for foreign objects lodged in her flesh, Craven and his support team waited in the main room.

  The mortuary was equipped with six dissecting stations: each unit fixed to the floor with its own sink, garburetor, scales, and water supply. Overhead was a microphone to record whatever the gleaming instruments found. Near the photography area was a large band saw for cutting bones. Three freestanding refrigerators were backed by metal shelves, and flanked by clear-plastic bins filled with formaldehyde for “fixing” specimens. Rolling the stainless steel gurney out of the X-ray room, the attendant locked it feet-to-sink into the closest unit. He turned on the stereo and soft classical music filled the morgue.

  Whatever Craven expected, it wasn’t Gill Macbeth. The forensic pathologist entered the morgue wearing hospital greens under a green plastic apron down to her ankles. The butcher’s outfit matched the color of her emerald eyes, complemented by auburn hair pulled back in a French braid. The grace with which she wore the getup made it belong in Vogue. Macbeth was handsome, not pretty and fine-boned. She vaguely reminded Nick of Candice Bergen. He noted her seductive lips and ringless hands, then caught her quick, appraising glance and brief, amused smile. Love at first sight, he wanted this bone-cruncher in bed.

  “Nice music,” Nick said, promoting himself as a cultured man.

  “You like Tchaikovsky?” Refined English voice.

  “One of my favorites,” Nick bluffed, sitting out on a limb.

  “Then you must be disappointed we’re playing Mozart today.”

  Oh, oh, Nick thought, reaching for the rip cord.

  “Your favorite Tchaikovsky piece is …?”

  Backpedaling now, he mumbled, “The symphonies.”

  “Which symphony, Corporal?”

  “The Seventh,” Nick said.

  “You must have very acute hearing,” Macbeth countered. “Considering Tchaikovsky only wrote six.”

  The Ident and exhibit men grimaced for Nick. The autopsy attendant shook his head sadly. “I lied,” Craven confessed. “I’m not that cool. Fantasia’s the closest I’ve ever been to classical music.”

  “Hopefully Disney will double-bill that with Pinocchio. There’s a lesson for you in what happens to the puppet’s nose. Shall we get to work, gentlemen, and quit wasting time?”

  Macbeth stood in the angle of the L-shaped station, with Marsh’s body to her left and the stainless steel dissecting unit to her right. Now double-gloved, she used a hand-held Philips recorder instead of the overhead mike. Before taking a scalpel to the victim’s flesh, she scanned the remains from head to toe with a powerful light. Working down one side, then the other, she noted all bruises, scratches, and wounds. Each was marked with a numbered label bearing a two-centimeter scale. The Ident man shot close-ups of her finds.

  Macbeth cut hair samples from the head and pubic region. Ringed by the four men, two of whom thought her job unsuitable for a woman, she swabbed Marsh’s mouth, throat, vagina, and anus. “No bite marks on the skin,” she said. “Except for the abdominal wounds, there’s no evidence of sexual assault.”

  Unbagging the hands, she scraped each nail before the Ident man printed Marsh’s fingers. “No defense slashes on the palms,” she noted, severing both hands at the wrist to preserve them.

  “Professional work,” Macbeth said, returning to the head. “The face is thoroughly skinned of all underflesh yet there are no instrument scratches on the bone. The hair is scalped from the top of the skull and back from both sides of the face. The skinner knows anatomy, at least the rudiments. Possibly a doctor, or medical student.”

  The Ident man with Craven was a forensic knot specialist. He photographed the ligature around Marsh’s neck in place, then cut the cord so as to retain the knot. “Recognize the hitch?” he asked Macbeth.

  “It’s a suture knot,” she replied. “We use it to close wounds and tie off blood vessels. The advantage is the first bend won’t slip before the knot is completed. Being flat it doesn’t produce disfiguring scars.”

  The Ident man pulled a length of cord from his pocket. One end in hand, he looped it three turns around the other, then pointed both ends upward and looped them again. Tugging the ends tight completed the knot.

  “As it doesn’t slip, the hitch is ideal for slow strangulation,” he said. “This knot was tied by a left-handed person.”

  The Ident man compared the twist and weave of the ligature cut from Marsh’s neck to rope burns on her severed wrists and ankles. “She was bound with cord cut from the same line.”

  As Macbeth leaned forward to examine the lower wounds, the apron snagged her hospital greens, gaping them from her chest.

  Nick was caught in a moral conundrum. Am I harassing her if I take a surreptitious peek? he wondered. Or is she harassing me by exposing such an erotic vista?

  He peeked.

  No bra.

  And wanted her even more.

  You don’t suppose …?

  Christ, he thought. Don’t even think such things. What if the feminist Thought Police got wind of this sexist crime? Probably burn me at the stake like some McCarthy witch.

  Macbeth glanced up, and caught his wayward eyes.

  Oh, oh, Nick thought, and tried a squiggly smile.

  Macbeth responded by wrinkling her nose like he was stale fish.

  “Twenty stab wounds,” she said, freeing her top from the apron. “Punctures, not slashes. And all in the womb. Punctures are more sexual than mutilating swipes.”

  With a wicked-looking instrument she probed the raw slits. “Some were enlarged through frenzied stabbing or struggling by the victim. Some show tears from twisting of the knife. Other
s were doubled by partial withdrawal and reentry of the blade. The fishtail or notch at the top of each wound means the weapon is single-edged. Some cuts—but not others—have bled into the subcutaneous tissue. That indicates the wounds were made before and after death. She was stabbed as she was strangled.”

  “Two killers?” Nick asked, recalling the vagrant’s comment about footsteps on the bridge.

  “Likely,” Macbeth replied.

  Again the apron gaped her greens as scalpel in hand she bent over the corpse. “You’re sure you’re up to this?” she said, glancing at Nick. What in hell does that mean? he thought.

  With a sweeping cut from throat to pubis, Macbeth peeled skin and fat away to access the internal organs, cracking the rib cage with bone shears to get at the lungs and heart. She preserved the relationship between organs by removing some in groups. Each organ was weighed and a note made of its appearance and characteristics. Slices cut from tissue were placed on microscope slides, while blood and fluid samples were bottled and sealed. Macbeth examined the stomach and found what looked like grass inside, mixed with other half-digested food. The stomach contents were packaged for transport to the lab, Macbeth signing each exhibit tag as did the exhibit man.

  Because Marsh was suspended under Lynn Canyon Bridge, gravity had bulged bowel balloons from some of the slits. As Macbeth stripped the corpse of its abdominal muscles, one by one the ugly tongues popped back inside. She reached to remove the coils en masse and leave Marsh a dugout canoe, but paused, frowned, and then reached for a magnifying glass instead.

  “Find something?” Craven asked.

  “Lice,” Macbeth said. One eye gigantic behind the convex lens, she used a thin flat tool to transfer specks from the intestines to slides. The autopsy attendant fetched a microscope.