Ripper

by Michael Slade

  “He reviewed a book I wrote for Publishers Weekly. I didn’t like the review. I think it hurt sales.”

  “You mentioned another mission? Who?” the American asked.

  “A Mountie named DeClercq,” the Canadian replied.

  JOLLY ROGER

  Vancouver

  4:15 P.M.

  The youth sitting on the bench outside DeClercq’s office was your quintessential nerd. He didn’t have tape on his glasses or a plastic pocket-protector, but three different-colored pens protruded from his shirt, matching the hues of writing on the back of his hand, notes no doubt recording his latest fantastic ideas. Now that teens wore their clothes loose, his fit tight, and—horror of horrors—his sneakers weren’t brand name. His chin was spattered with pimples and his teeth were caged in braces, and he repeatedly pushed his glasses back on his nose. DeClercq, who’d been a nerd himself, sympathized with him.

  “Doug,” Chan said, “Chief Superintendent DeClercq. I want you to tell him what you told me.”

  The youth held a paperback in his scribbled hand, raising it so Robert could read the title Jolly Roger. The jacket illustration was of a skull and crossbones. Doug’s fingers, nails nibbled to the quick, hid the author’s name.

  “I like horror,” he said defiantly. “I read everything in print and go to every movie. The newsletter I publish is called Renfield. I don’t suppose the name means anything to you?”

  “He was the madman in Stoker’s Dracula,” DeClercq said, joining Doug on the bench to put him at ease.

  “Are you a fellow traveler?”

  “I was,” the Mountie said. “But my taste would seem retro to you. I Am Legend is where I phased out.”

  “Matheson. Fifty-four. A classic,” Doug said. He directed the comment to Chan, whom he assessed as an outsider. To DeClercq: “What’s your all-rime favorite?”

  “Novel: Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. Story: “Rats in the Walls.””

  “Lovecraft. Twenty-four,” Doug said to Eric.

  “Runners-up are “Yellow Wallpaper,” “The Monkey’s Paw,” “Lukundoo,” and “Small Assassin.” So what do you have to tell me?”

  Doug waved Jolly Roger in the air. “The woman hanging from the bridge? The one found this morning? Her killing copycats the first victim in this novel. Skinned face, cross-bones, hook, and all. The only difference is Jolly Roger also stabs his victim in the belly.”

  Robert glanced at Eric, who indicated no. The stabbing was a detail not released to the media. If they collared a suspect, the fact would test the truth of any resulting confession. It would also eliminate copycat crimes. Now Doug was saying the cops’ secret matched what was in print, while Eric confirmed the stabbing fact hadn’t been leaked.

  “Give him the background,” Chan said.

  “My uncle works for the wholesaler that distributes books and mags around Vancouver. Anything new in horror, he bags a copy for me. Jolly Roger hit the warehouse yesterday. I got first copy off the top and read it last night. Today I woke up to find the novel a reality. I checked with my uncle who says the stock’s not been distributed. I thought you should know.”

  DeClercq asked Doug for the book to check the copyright page to see if it was a hardcover reprint. Jolly Roger was a paperback original published by Fly-By-Night Press in December 1992. Today was December 2nd.

  “Eric …” Robert said.

  “I’m way ahead of you. Doug, how’d you like to be my partner for a while?”

  “As long as it doesn’t disqualify me for any reward.”

  DeClercq checked the copyright holder, searching for the author.

  The rights were held by a company, Death’s-Head Incorporated.

  The author used a nom de plume.

  Pen name: Skull & Crossbones.

  Alone in his office, DeClercq read Jolly Roger:

  Chapter One

  Magick

  You ask how it began?

  Well, I’ll tell you.

  Beast 666 opened the key.

  You’ll recall he wrote in The Confessions:

  Her name was Vittoria Cremers… She was an intimate friend of Mabel Collins, authoress of The Blossom and the Fruit, the novel which has left so deep a mark upon my early ideas about Magick … She professed the utmost devotion to me and proposed to come to England and put the work of the Order on a sound basis. I thought the idea was excellent, paid her passage to England and established her as manageress.

  Technically, I digress; but I cannot refrain from telling her favourite story. She boasted of her virginity and of the intimacy of her relations with Mabel Collins, with whom she lived for a long time. Mabel had however divided her favours with a very strange man whose career had been extraordinary. He had been an officer in a cavalry regiment, a doctor, and I know not how many other things in his time.: He was now in desperate poverty and depended entirely on Mabel Collins for his daily bread. The man claimed to be an advanced Magician, boasting of many mysterious powers and even occasionally demonstrating the same.

  At this time London was agog with the exploits of Jack the Ripper. One theory of the motive of the murderer was that he was performing an Operation to obtain the Supreme Black Magical Power. The seven women had to be killed so that their seven bodies formed a “Calvary cross of seven points” with its head to the west. The theory was that after killing the third or the fourth, I forget which, the murderer acquired the power of invisibility, and this was confirmed by the fact that in one case a policeman heard the shrieks of the dying woman and reached her before life was extinct, yet she lay in a cul-de-sac, with no possible exit save to the street; and the policeman saw no signs of the assassin, though he was patrolling outside, expressly on the lookout.

  Miss Collins’s friend took great interest in these murders. He discussed them with her and Cremers on several occasions. He gave them intimations of how the murderer might have accomplished his task without arousing the suspicion of his victims until the last moment. Cremers objected that his escape must have been a risky matter, because of his habit of devouring certain portions of the ladies before leaving them. What about the blood on his collar and shirt? The lecturer demonstrated that any gentleman in evening dress had merely to turn up the collar of a light overcoat to conceal any traces of his supper.

  Time passed! Mabel tired of her friend, but did not dare to get rid of him because he had a packet of compromising letters written by her. Cremers offered to steal these from him. In the man’s bedroom was a tin uniform case which he kept under the bed to which he attached it by cords. Neither of the women had ever seen this open and Cremers suspected that he kept these letters in it. She got him out of the way for a day by a forged telegram, entered the room, untied the cords and drew the box from under the bed. To her surprise it was very light, as if empty. She proceeded nevertheless to pick the lock and open it. There were no letters; there was nothing in the box, but seven white evening dress ties, all stiff and black with clotted blood!

  You ask how it began?

  Now you know.

  Chapter Two

  Hangman

  I hung the first body from a suspension bridge. Here’s how I skinned her …

  The rest of Jolly Roger was a splatterpunk’s gourmet feast. The city in which it unfolded wasn’t identified. The excerpt in Chapter One was never attributed, leaving whose Confessions an unsolved mystery. The murders—four of women, the fifth of a cop—were described in so much detail they rivaled American Psycho. The author, however, didn’t have Bret Easton Ellis’s style. Jolly Roger was bloodletting for bloodletting’s sake.

  The ending baffled DeClercq:

  … the ax hit the cop before he turned. The thick V-blade cleaved his skull like a soft-boiled egg. His arms shot up as if he were a Sunday-morning preacher, all hallelujah and sucking brain. First came the blood, then pink tissue, ballooning around the ax-head like bubble gum. “Take that, fucker!”

  His legs did a spastic jig as his ass hit the ground, then his entire body wen
t into convulsions. The steel squeaked on bone when I wrenched it from his skull.

  One of his eyes kept blinking like the guy was flirting with me. “Take this, fucker.” I hit him again. This time the ax-blade caved in his face.

  The cop stopped dancing.

  Well, there you have it. So ends the beginning. One thing you can’t accuse me of is not playing fair. Other cops will find the bitch and their nosy buddy, so that’s why

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  I’m laying out the cards.

  THIS IS AN EXIT:

  BUGS

  4:16 P.M.

  Bob George—Ghost Keeper—was head of RFISS. “Ree-fiss” to the Mounties, the Regional Forensic Identification Support Service provides state-of-the-art backup to cops in the field. A full-blooded Plains Cree from Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, the Staff Sergeant was a hefty man with black hair, bronze skin, and wide cheekbones. Proud of his native heritage, Ghost Keeper usually wore faded Levis and a denim shirt alive with Cree designs, the pattern sewn by his mother who lived on the reserve. Today, however, George was sporting a Brioni suit, looking natty, fresh from giving evidence in court.

  “Hmmmm,” he said, examining the lice through a microscope at the Lab. “Ugly critters, aren’t they? Especially the jaws.”

  The emphasis in police work has changed from acquiring personal evidence to gleaning physical traces. The days of Sherlock Holmes solving crimes through a triumph of logic are relics of the past, as outdated as plodding Jack Webb seeking “Just the facts, ma’am.” The magnifying glass gave way to fingerprint lasers used in conjunction with cyano-acrylate and vacuum metal deposits, to scanning electron microscopes that magnify particles hundreds of thousands of times, to gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers that separate complex compounds into their components, to DNA analysis which uses genetic markers to finger a suspect from a single drop of blood. Now with anthropologists, entomologists, botanists, and blood pattern physicists on call, scientists often outnumber cops around the corpse. George was the member who marshalled such expertise.

  “Sandra Wong,” he said to Craven. “She’s who you want.”

  Burnaby, British Columbia

  5:15 P.M.

  The reek of rotting beef liver hung heavy in the air of the narrow corridor linking a dozen closet-sized labs. Inside each environmentally controlled room, wooden shelves were lined with jars full of maggots writhing in sawdust, cockroaches clambering over wads of paper towel, and miniscule Hies savoring the leaves of potted plants. Each red door of the Insectary had a wire-mesh window for monitoring bug activity within. Craven waited outside the murder lab, the only door with a padlock and blacked-out window.

  Forensic entomology is the study of insects that invade a rotting corpse. The goal is to determine how much time has elapsed since death. Different species of insects are lured by different stages of decomposition. By knowing the succession of bugs that colonize a corpse—metallic green blowflies and house flies land first, followed by fleshflies, larder beetles, cheese skippers, et cetera—and the life span of each carnivorous wave, entomologists calculate back to when the person died. Maggots, which spawn and develop in wounds and body orifices, follow a set cycle of growth. Gathering larvae from the corpse and raising them in labs enables entomologists to narrow the time of death almost to the day.

  Wearing a face mask to protect her from the bugs and sickening-sweet smell, Dr. Sandra Wong exited from the blacked-out lab and locked its door. She was a tiny Asian woman as tall as Craven’s waist, sheathed in a white turtle-neck printed with a cartoon. Antennate male and female bugs walked across her chest, over the caption “Skip the foreplay? We only mate once and then die, and you want to skip the foreplay?” Her hands and that part of her face not covered by the mask were welted red by myriad insect bites. While she and Nick conversed in the hall she scratched them constantly, and soon the Mountie was scratching, too.

  “Mind if I ask,” Nick said, “how bugs became your passion?”

  Wong removed the face mask, revealing a buoyant smile. “My father gave my brother a magnifying glass to pique an interest in science. My brother would sit on the front stoop concentrating the sun’s rays through the glass, chasing ants with the beam until they exploded in puffs of smoke. The truth is I’m atoning for his sins.”

  “There must be more,” Nick said, grinning in return.

  “I had a torrid love affair with a zoology prof in my first semester. He didn’t last, but his work got under my skin.”

  “What became of your brother?”

  “He’s a dentist.”

  They wormed their way through the corridor maze of SFU, Vancouver’s “other university” crowning Burnaby Mountain. Twelve hundred feet above and east of the city, Simon Fraser is a Parthenonlike complex that suffers from too little marble and too much concrete. Wong’s office was a cubbyhole tucked away in the Centre for Pest Management, one of SFU’s quirky claims to fame. The university offers degrees in pestology, criminology, kinesiology, etc. It’s that land of liberal-chic place.

  “Take a seat,” Wong said, offering Nick one of the cushioned stacks of books on the floor. “The board keeps promising, but still no space. Instead of furniture, you’re sitting on my bookcase.”

  Nick passed her one of the slides from the Marsh autopsy. “These were found inside the wounds of a stabbing victim. I’m told they’re lice, but not the human kind. If the bugs were transferred on the murder weapon, identifying their host might lead us to the killer.”

  Wong positioned the slide on a comparison microscope. While she hunted for a slide of human lice, Nick surveyed her cluttered desk. Animal eyes in the dark peered from the screen-saver of her PC, switching to tropical fish as he watched. Trays of bugs stuck on pins flanked the computer, evidence aids showing the insects plucked from various corpses. The bulletin board sandwiched between her desk and the window was papered with a poster that read Bug Your Parents To Come To The Museum. Stuck to it were phone messages torn from an exterminator’s advertising pad: Name of Pest who called; Time Pest called; Pest’s supposedly oh-so-important message. The sky beyond the window was dripping gunsmoke gray.

  “So,” Wong said, “what do you know about lice?”

  “They give me the creeps and I don’t want to get them.”

  She motioned Nick to her seat in front of the microscope. “Lice are small wingless ectoparasites,” she said as he took a look. “They externally infest skin, as opposed to internal endoparasites. Lice divide into two orders. Anoplura, or sucking lice; and Mallophaga, chewing lice.

  “Sucking lice attack humans and mammals. They have mouthparts adapted for sucking blood. During feeding, three piercing stylets extend from their heads while tiny hooks attach their mouths to the host’s skin. The lice on the left are Anoplura. The top one’s a human body louse, Pediculus humanus. The bottom one’s a genital louse, Pthirus pubis. It and its cohorts we call ‘crabs.’ The name fits, huh?”

  Staring into the microscope, Nick felt itchier. The body louse was longer and thinner than its pubic cousin, with legs that looked less like claws. The “crab” resembled its namesake, with a rounded body and large pincer-legs. If not for Wong, he’d have indulged the psychosomatic need to scratch his groin.

  “Where was the victim stabbed?” the entomologist asked.

  “In the abdomen, around her womb.”

  “Different species of lice attack different hosts, and each species usually infests a particular part of the body. Because the lice in question come from a human corpse, they should match one of these two Anoplura species. The reason they don’t is they’re chewing lice, Mallophaga.

  “Chewing lice infest animals and birds. They don’t attack humans, but people who handle infested hosts occasionally get chewing lice on themselves. When this happens, the bugs don’t stay long. You’ll note the lice on your slide have mouthparts adapted for biting. Their mandibulate jaws once nibbled bits of hair, feathers, or the host’s skin.”


  “What host?” Nick said.

  “There’s the problem.”

  Wong dismantled one of her “chairs” to find a specific text: Borror, Triplehorn, and Johnson, An Introduction to the Study of Insects. Her bookmarks were Far Side cartoons.

  “Examining their host is the only effective way to find lice,” Wong said. “Unless the host is domestic, it must be trapped or shot. We often find lice attached to the skins of museum animals and birds. Because specific hosts are prey to certain species of lice, lice, unlike other insects, are categorized by host. When, like here, the host isn’t known, identifying the species becomes a daunting task.”

  Wong opened the book to page 277. The header read Keys to the Families of Phthiraptera. The illustration showed a pair of lice: the shaft louse of chickens and the cattle-biting louse.

  “Each of the two orders—here Mallophaga—subdivides into family, genus, and species. I use the keys in this book to determine family. Each key is a couplet that offers an either/or choice. Each choice directs me to another couplet, blazing a trail to follow until the family’s identified. Read the first couplet,” Wong said, taking Craven’s place at the microscope.

  Nick scanned the page to orient himself. “The choice is between ‘Head as wide as or wider than the prothorax; mouthparts mandibulate,’ and ‘Head narrower than prothorax; mouthparts haustellate.’ ”

  “The lice on your slide fit choice one. Basically the couplet confirms they’re chewing lice. What’s the number after that choice?”

  “Two,” Nick said.

  “And if we’d gone the other route?”

  “Eight,” he said.

  “Okay, that means we go to couplet two. If we’d made the other choice, we’d go to couplet eight. Read two,” Wong said.

  “Here the choice is between ‘Antennae clubbed and concealed in grooves; maxillary palps present,’ and ‘Antennae filiform and exposed; maxillary palps absent’.”