“Your lice fit the second choice. Where does that lead us?”
“Couplet seven,” he said.
Nick flipped to page 278. “Here we choose between ‘Tarsi with two claws; antennae five-segmented,’ and ‘Tarsi with one claw; antennae usually three-segmented.’ ”
“Your lice fit the first choice, indicating which couplet?”
“There is no number. Instead it says ‘Philopteridae.’ ”
“Good, that’s the family at the end of the road. You follow the couplets until you get a family name. Philopteridae are lice parasitic on birds.”
“Which birds?” Nick said.
“Here we reach a roadblock. The next step is to break the family down into genera and species. Find the species and we isolate the host. In North America there are about 60 genera and 450 species of Philopteridae. The problem is there are no comprehensive keys beyond this point. Keys do exist for domesticated fowl like chickens and pigeons, but there are only checklists for other birds. Texts like Emerson and Price contain Mallophaga host-parasite lists, but it might lake a week to work through them. I’d have to compare your lice with an example of each species on the list.”
“Willing to try?” Nick asked.’
MAGICK
Vancouver
5:25 P.M.
DeClercq studied the Tarot cards at the end of Jolly Roger: the Hanged Man, Judgement, and the Devil. He tried to fathom their meaning.
His knowledge of the Tarot was rudimentary, consisting of one or two basics encountered here and there. He knew the Tarot is one of the great systems of divination, others being the I Ching and Scandinavian Runes. Tarot magic is “in the cards,” for each symbol relates man to the physical and spiritual worlds. Symbols evoke both conscious and subconscious reactions, so each card is a door to the occult mind. Divination motivates the mind to bring it about, so the cards reflect what is, has been, and will be. The Tarot’s magic is in the reader’s response.
A person wanting his fortune told cuts the cards, concentrating on the question to be answered. The cards are then laid out in a prescribed manner, how they fall and how they relate determining the future. The simplest layout is a three-card Gypsy Spread. A card called the Significator is chosen to represent the inner being of the querent. This card, placed faceup, may be any from the deck, and in the Jolly Roger spread was the Hanged Man. Two cards selected at random are placed facedown to the right: in Jolly Roger, Judgement and the Devil. Read together, all three cards divine what will be.
The Hanged Man.
Judgement.
And the Devil.
What in hell did they mean?
Robert DeClercq had seen more of death than was healthy for any man. Not clinical death, sanitized, like a pathologist sees, but death in situ with all its pathos and wrenching raw emotion.
His first year in harness, he’d arrived at a farmhouse in rural Saskatchewan to find a woman sprawled on the kitchen floor, a long-handled wood ax buried in her skull, two bloodied kids clinging to her screaming in rage at what their father had done. In Alberta he had been introduced to Seppuku when a visiting Japanese businessman spilled his intestines onto the carpet of his hotel room. Four men had been ice-picked to death in a filthy Saltspring commune, the aftermath of a feel-good acid trip that went bad. Handprints clawed in blood along a Manitoba garage told the story of a homosexual lovers’ spat settled with a razor. In Newfoundland an old priest had smothered in church while masturbating with a masochist’s plastic bag over his head. A Yukon politician had stuck a shotgun in his mouth, pulling the trigger with his toe, soon so stiff from cadaveric spasm it had to be broken to free the barrel. A Jamaican nanny in New Brunswick had been skinned alive by a patient on the run from the local asylum. Ten years after an Ottawa bomb had blown a car apart, the driver’s mummified hand was found on the roof of a nearby apartment block. A man pushed through a fifth-story window in Quebec had been left to die impaled on a spiked iron fence. Protesting a parking fine at city hall, a Nova Scotia motorist had doused the clerk with lighter fluid then had set him aflame. DeClercq had opened a shopping bag abandoned in P.E.I, to find a newborn baby strangled with its umbilical cord. He’d collected the limbs of a teenager scattered along a railway line after they were methodically thrown from a commuter train. The worst was a_ Yellowknife autopsy in 1969 when the corpse, already certified dead from asphyxiation, had cried out and died from shock when the pathologist cut open its chest. So many cases. Hell on Earth …
What made DeClercq a good detective was occult intuition: the fact he’d trained himself to tap his jungle sense.
Early in evolution, back when we were apes, jungle sensitivity ruled our lives. Animals have a built-in clock. They turn up the minute it’s time to eat. Animals have a built-in homing device. Abandoned thousands of miles from home, they’ve been known to return to where they live. Animals have an intuitive sense akin to “second sight.” A dog will stand by the door prior to its master’s return even when its owner’s gone for an unset duration. Human beings have these latent powers, too.
The subconscious mind—our “jungle sense”—works with a speed and accuracy beyond conscious grasp. It makes connections missed by rational thought, for certain facts become invisible in bright light. As a boy DeClercq had noticed on a still day you can hear people talking miles away. In school he’d learned our nervous system has small gaps, synapses that filter out “background noise.” If not for them we’d be aware of every aspect of our environment, greatly diminishing our powers of concentration. Existence—for LSD affects these synapses—would become an endless acid trip.
Intuitive people are able to plumb levels of subconscious meaning. The word “occult” means “unknown” or “hidden.” The occult mind is a spider at the center of a web, attune to vibrations pulsing along the strands. An occult experience occurs when subconscious insight enlightens the conscious mind. Threads of meaning reach out to bind reality together, solving problems that defy rational thought. Such intuitive powers are what we’ve learned to block, so the trick is to bring this “sixth sense” into everyday life. Only by ignoring our rational filter can subconscious truths be grasped, so occult intuition is developed by willed unwilling. DeClercq had trained himself to slip the leash.
To do this he used the walls of his office like an ouija board, moving maps, reports, and pictures around until something clicked subconsciously. Now, sitting at his desk, he tried the same divining technique on Jolly Roger, plumbing the Tarot cards at the end.
The Hanged Man.
Judgement.
And the Devil.
What in hell did they mean?
Something’s missing, DeClercq thought.
He flipped to the start of the book:
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 …
Magick, DeClercq thought.
Booting up the IBM computer on his desk, he searched the file directory for LIBRARY.WCM, then kicked in the modem. Soon a list of options filled the screen:
1.Title
2. Title—Keyword
3. Author
4. Author—Keyword
5. Subject
6. Subject—Keyword
The library catalog requested a command. He punched in “6. Subject—Keyword” from the list. Asked to “Enter the subject keyword(s),” DeClercq typed “Magick.” The catalog responded, “The word Magick is not indexed.”
He typed “SO” for “Start Over.”
From his Catholic background, DeClercq knew 666 was the number of the blasphemous beast with seven heads and ten horns in the Bible’s Book of Revelations. Doubting that was the meaning here and sen
sing a subject search would make that connection, he entered “2. Title—Keyword” and typed “Beast 666.”
The catalog responded, “Beast 173 and 666 7. Total matches: 0.”
“Beast” was too generic: 173 books. So he typed in “666” and checked the titles. America’s Best Vegetable Recipes: 666 Ways to Make Vegetables Irresistible, Selected and Tested by the Food Editors of Farm Journal, Doubleday, 1970. 666 Jellybeans! All That! An Introduction to Algebra by Malcolm E. Weiss, Crowell, 1976. Et cetera.
DeClercq laughed. Back to the drawing board.
Again he typed “SO,” entered “2. Title—Keyword,” then typed “The Confessions.” The library offered him a choice of 238 titles.
Sighing, he scrolled down the list until The Confessions of Aleister Crowley appeared on-screen.
Bingo, DeClercq thought, grabbing the phone.
“Dispatch. Nikkei.”
“Chief Superintendent DeClercq.”
“Yes, sir,” Nikkei said. “What’ll it be?”
“Send a car to the library. And to the late-night book- stores. I want everything available on Aleister Crowley, Jack the Ripper, and the Tarot.”
BRADY & HINDLEY
7:55 P.M.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley worked in the same office. He was twenty-eight; she was twenty-three. After hours they developed a mutual interest in Nazism, sadism, and pornography. Hindley was Brady’s disciple. To prove he was no idle boaster when it came to murder, Brady axed a homosexual named Evans to death in front of Hindley’s brother-in-law. Brady whacked him fourteen times. “It’s the messiest yet,” he said of this demonstration murder. “Normally it takes only one blow.”
Next day, the terrified brother-in-law went to the police.
As a child, Brady was an embryo psychopath. He tortured animals for “kicks” and became a teenage drunk. Worshiping Hitler and de Sade, he stocked his library with The History of Torture Through the Ages, Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, and The Kiss of the Whip. He viewed others as morons and maggots.
Hindley was a virginal Catholic when she met Brady. None-too-bright, she thought him smart because he read Mein Kampf at lunch. On their first date they saw Judgment at Nuremberg, after which Brady seduced her. Soon she was aping Irma Grese, “the Bitch of Belsen,” by dyeing her hair bleach-blond and wearing leather boots. Brady called her Myra Hess.
Checking the brother-in-law’s report, British police searched the couple’s home. There they found Evans’s corpse, wrapped in plastic and not yet dumped. The spine of Myra’s prayer book, The Garden of the Soul, contained a pair of left-luggage tickets. Police retrieved two suitcases stored at Manchester Central station, among the contents of which were photographs and tapes.
Though Brady and Hindley lived together, they rarely had sex. He obtained erotic “kicks” by torturing children. Stripped and forced into porno poses, a ten-year-old girl was sexually abused in some of the suitcase photos. She was Leslie Ann Downey, a local missing child. In addition, there was a picture of Hindley standing on Saddleworth Moor. When police searched the spot they found two shallow graves. The bodies of Downey and John Kilbride, eleven, were disinterred.
The trial of the “Moors Murderers” opened in 1966. Brady and Hindley were sentenced to life imprisonment that May. As evidence, the Crown prosecutor played a tape. Brady had used it to masturbate while gloating over his crimes. The recording, backed by Christmas music, was of a tortured child screaming for her mom.
Tonight, a dub of that tape played in Lou Bolt’s apartment.
Beyond the penthouse windows overlooking Stanley Park, the rain gave way to fog rolling in from the Pacific. A chart—The Raptors of Western Canada—hung near sliding glass doors that opened on a deck, night-vision binoculars hooked beneath. Bolt’s home was a black museum cluttered with crime exhibits, for he was a cop-groupie of the obsessive kind. In his wallet, he carried a fake badge. A pair of handcuffs dangled from his belt. His bookcase was crammed with Police Gazette, The CIS Bulletin, and Law And Order. Were it not for a rape conviction ten years back, he’d be wearing a uniform today.
Cuffs turned back from hairy wrists and street-fighter’s hands, shirt open to the navel flaunting his hairy chest, jeans bulging a basket that stopped locker-room chatter dead at the gym, Bolt sat surrounded by notes, plotting his next novel. Raw sexuality lurked in his hooded eyes. And in the Presley sneer that curled his upper lip. And in the way his tongue flicked when he groped his balls. For Bolt was a man who liked to rip the clothes off women.
Listening to the tape of Leslie Ann Downey’s screams, he imagined the Moors Murderers loose in California. Bolt’s formula was based on two biased assumptions. First, that Brits were the kinkiest people on Earth, a trait he attributed to overmothering, which made them the prime source for his bizarre plots. Second, that Yanks were narcissistic navel-gazers, uncomfortable with stories set outside their narrow realm, which gave him the setting for his hybrid novels. True or not, the formula had sold three million books.
The screams gave way to tape hiss as Bolt checked his watch.
Five to eight.
Almost time.
Swiveling away from the partners’ desk—the other half was where he edited his porno tapes—Bolt caught sight of the invitation stuck to his PC.
Shivers, Shudders, and Shakes, it read. A Franklen Mystery Weekend. Friday, December 4th to Sunday, the 6th. Fly to an Unknown Location for this Séance with a Killer. $50,000 Prize. RSVP.
The bedroom he entered faced English Bay. The lights of the freighters anchored below were snuffed by fog. Bolt reset the tape speed on both hidden cameras, then looped cords around the bed’s four posts. Flopping down on the pentagram-patterned bedspread, he winked at himself in the overhead mirror. The walls had mirrors, too.
A soft knock rapped at the door.
Leaving the bedroom for the hall, Bolt used the peephole to spy outside.
He glimpsed the Erotic Witch.
With tonight’s playmate.
THE FRANKENSTEIN
CONUNDRUM
8:03 P.M.
“Okay,” DeClercq said. “Let’s put it together.” He, Chan, and Craven stood by the corkboard wall, now covered with pictures and papers linked by multicolored threads. The overview reflected dragnet footwork on the streets, scientific tests in the Forensic Lab, and software connections from the data banks. The first forty-eight hours after a murder are critical, so eighty-three cops and civilians had worked the Lynn Canyon crime.
Chan referred to the clipboard list in his hand, pointing to the wall where appropriate.
“The crime scene was stingy with physical evidence. No hairs and fibers, fingerprints, or foot and tire marks. Interviewing the locals turned up nothing, followed by zilch from the frogmen and dogs. Two on the bridge, the vagrant said, but no sex or age. Only using the flashlight briefly could mean they’d cased the scene, but nothing untoward was noted over the past week. Transporting and hanging the body suggests a car and perp with strength. So all we got from the canyon was profile patterns.”
Chalking the words on a blackboard slanted on an easel, DeClercq wrote 1. Profiles of the killers.
“The autopsy this morning yielded more,” said Chan. “Your theory, Nick. You tell the Chief.”
Craven opened his notebook to his own checklist. Special X was the elite unit in the Force. Having had a taste of it, he yearned to stay. Dot the i’s. Cross the t’s. Miss nothing, he thought.
“Marsh left the hotel Sunday night before she had dinner. No one there saw her eat and room service wasn’t ordered. The autopsy revealed her stomach was full, with several grasses mixed in with the food. The food’s in California being analyzed, and we should have the results by Friday. What if Marsh met someone at a restaurant? The meal may tell us where she dined, and those who served her might recall who she ate with. The guest or guests may be, or lead to her killers.”
DeClercq wrote 2. Stomach contents on the blackboard.
“I’m not waiting f
or that report,” said Nick. “I’ve had Marsh’s author photo reproduced so a team can canvass the city’s restaurants. The picture and a help request will hit tomorrow’s papers.”
“Good,” said DeClercq, chalking 3. Restaurant.
“While one or both killers strangled Marsh, the other or one of them used the knife. Whoever tied the ligature in a suture knot is left-handed. The one who skinned the face knows anatomy, so maybe a doctor, vet, or med student is involved. Nonhuman lice in the wounds indicates a vet. The lice are only found on some species of birds, so I asked an entomologist to narrow it down. What if the knife was on a table with the bird in the room where Marsh was killed? One of the pair picked it up and stabbed her repeatedly. Find the bird, find the place, find the killers?”
DeClercq chalked 4. Vet and 5. Bird lice on the board.
“Toxicology found chloroform in Marsh’s blood.” Nick plucked the report from the wall and passed it to DeClercq. “Marsh had dinner with someone or ate alone,” he suggested. “Later she was chloroformed and shoved into a car which conveyed her to the murder site. There she was tied spread-eagled, strangled, and stabbed on Sunday night, which fits both time of death and level of chloroform remaining in her blood. Skin wasn’t found under her nails because there was no struggle. This wasn’t a sex crime in the physical sense, so no foreign pubic hairs were mixed with hers, and oral, anal, and vaginal swabs were negative for sperm.”
Nick closed his book and added, “Chloroform’s a poison. Druggists make you sign the poison register to buy it.”
“True,” said DeClercq. “But not chemical outlets. Chloroform sold as a solvent has no controls. Thorough work, Corporal. Check it anyway.”
“What interests me,” Chan said, “is the bird lice. An FBI study of serial killers found those who suffered sexual abuse as children often developed a weird affinity for animals. The clinical term is “paraphilia of zoophilia.” Paraphilia is a mental disorder characterized by obsession with bizarre sexual acts. Zoophilia is an abnormal fondness or preference for animals.”
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