Ripper

by Michael Slade

  A bark of laughter from the rear interrupted them. Chandler, Yates, and Franklen turned in their seats. Discounting the pilot, the man in back was the only other passenger aboard. He was reading Kiss by Ed McBain.

  “Listen to this,” Bolt said, grinning from ear to ear. “Detective/Third Grade Randall Wade looked as mean as tight underwear. Now that’s the best one-line description I’ve ever read.”

  Chandler and Yates laughed in tandem; Franklen merely smiled. Perhaps you had to be male to get the full grasp of the simile.

  “Two more coming,” the pilot apprised.

  Bolt glanced left out the window, squinting to see through the rain. In profile, his face displayed simian features: a cramped receding forehead with a strong chimpanzee jaw, a gorilla nose squashed flat by an unducked punch. His leer reflected a mind as clean as a Cairo sewer, his sprawl of a tongue parting his lips as he watched the female landlubbers negotiate the heaving dock. An I-want-what-I-want-when-I-want-it sexuality came off him like a bad smell, branding him in Zinc’s mind as a back-door man whose ham-fists would beat his chest in dominating triumph when he came.

  Ugh, Chandler thought.

  Lou Bolt, according to Franklen’s thumbnail sketch in the cab, wrote gritty LAPD police procedurals. He wore one of those baseball caps American bulls prefer, the peak so erect it made him look like Donald Duck. Highway patrol his motorcycle jacket declared; undercover drug squad whispered his jeans; we walk the beat clomped his heavy-soled boots. Cop groupie, Zinc thought, taking in the clothes. On first impression he disliked Bolt as much as he liked Yates. The guy actually sniffed the woman who climbed up into the plane.

  “I’m Luna Darke,” she announced to those already aboard. “And this is my daughter Katt.”

  The teenager tipped her top hat like a gentleman. A Tarot card, Zinc noted, was tucked in the band. Death. Card XIII. A skeleton with a scythe.

  “Seems we have a stowaway,” Franklen said to the captain, a pimple-faced kid who could be playing hooky from school.

  “Want to fly the plane, Katt?” the pilot asked, patting the seat beside him.

  “Rad,” Katt said, working her way to the front.

  Luna Darke plopped into the seat next to Franklen, kitty-corner to Zinc and behind Wynn Yates. As she slumped, the slit up her skirt bared one thigh, challenging Chandler to submit to her will. Her eyes threw him a smoldering I-dare-you look … until she noticed the square indent where the surgeon had entered his brain. Yanking her skirt shut like a curtain closing a matinée, she switched to the look she’d give a sideshow freak.

  “Last minute screw-up, Elvira.” Luna nodded at Katt. “The choice was I bring her, or stay behind myself.”

  “Two heads are better than one,” Franklen said. “Perhaps she’ll give you the edge.”

  “For fifty thousand dollars, I hope so,” Darke replied.

  Zinc could see her at Woodstock twirling naked among the boys, all peace, love, have a nice day, and what do you think of my tits? He could see her marching topless in last summer’s protest, all men have freedom, why don’t we, and what do you think of my tits? Antsy at the bottom, jiggly at the top, she was Playboy bunny, Earth mother hippie, and strip-Jack-naked freewoman in one. Five’d get you ten she had a tattoo on her rump.

  Bolt went back to reading.

  Darke and Franklen yakked.

  Katt learned how to fly the plane.

  And Wynn Yates said:

  “I feel guilty, keeping it to myself. Want a quick lesson in how to solve a locked room?”

  “You bet,” Zinc said. “I have a premonition I’ll need it.”

  He was right.

  It is one of the elementary principles of practical reasoning, Zinc recalled Miss Deverell quoting from Conan Doyle, that when the impossible has been eliminated the residuum, however improbable, must contain the truth.

  “The Three Coffins,” Yates said, “is Carr’s most famous book. Published in 1935, it contains the classic ‘Locked-Room Lecture’ by Dr. Gideon Fell. Fell outlines seven situations involving ‘a hermetically sealed room, which really is hermetically sealed, and from which no murderer has escaped because no murderer was actually in the room.’

  “One: it isn’t murder, but a series of coincidences ending, in an accident that looks like murder.”

  “The victim’s skull is cracked,” Zinc said, “as if by a bludgeon, but actually he fell and struck a piece of furniture?”

  “Two: it is murder, by impelling the victim to kill himself or meet an accidental death.”

  “Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte?” said Zinc.

  “A better example is watching a film interspliced with subliminal messages prompting the fatal action. Years ago a test was done where split-second Buy Popcorn ads were spliced into a drive-in movie. The popcorn stand was mobbed at intermission.

  “Three: it is murder, by a mechanical device planted in the room.”

  “The bed with the ratchet,” said Zinc.

  “Another ingenious device is Carr’s ‘The Wrong Problem.’ ” The old man’s eyes were shrewd and sharp. This was his element.

  “Four: it is suicide, intended to look like murder. A man stabs himself with an icicle, which then melts and evaporates.

  “Five: it is murder, complicated by illusion or impersonation.”

  “The magician’s sleight of hand? Sawing a woman in half? ‘They do it with mirrors’?” Zinc said.

  “Example: thought to be alive, the victim lies dead in a watched room. The murderer, dressed to look like the victim, enters, sheds his disguise, then turns and exits as himself. The illusion is the two passed at the door.

  “Alternative example: the victim lies dead in a locked room. The murderer, with witnesses, shines a flashlight in though the window from outside. A shadowy figure moves within, but when the room is entered, no one’s there. Unknown to the witnesses, the killer had taped a small silhouette to the flashlight lens.

  “Six: it is murder, committed by someone outside the room, though it appears the killer must have been inside.”

  “The victim is stabbed through the keyhole while snooping?” Zinc said.

  “The door-bolt within is drawn across by using a magnet outside.”

  “A knot in the window frame is removed to shoot the victim through the knothole, then replaced?”

  “You’re catching on.” Wynn laughed.

  “Seven: the victim is thought to be dead long before he actually is.”

  “A man locks the door, then faints in a room?” said Zinc. “The door’s broken down and the first person in kills him while those following are distracted?”

  “You graduate with honors as teacher’s pet,” said Yates. “Every locked room is a variation on those seven themes, yet knowing that, we still get stumped.”

  “I’m ready,” Chandler said, shadowboxing the air.

  “Locks, keys, and sealed rooms aren’t essential to the problem,” said Yates. “A body found with its throat cut on a sandy beach unmarked by any footprints except those of the victim offers the same puzzle. How did the murderer kill and escape without leaving tracks?”

  “By using a bullwhip with a razor tied to the end,” said Zinc.

  “By throwing a knife-edged boomerang,” Wynn countered.

  “The victim’s a hemophiliac whose blood doesn’t clot while the tide goes in and out.”

  “The victim’s a—”

  “Land ho,” Franklen said, sighing with relief. “The last pilgrim arrives.”

  Barely visible through the rain was the city’s downtown core. Huddled like a waif at its feet was the shack of Thunderbird Charters. From the shack to the plane on the water stretched a gangway and hundred-foot dock. The woman sea-legging down the gangplanks struggled against the storm, suitcase lugged in one hand, umbrella opposite fighting the wind to block the slanted rain. She wore a black tight-waisted jacket over black slacks tucked into black cowboy boots, and a black trenchcoat that flapped about her like Dracula’s cape. Her blond h
air pulled back in a ponytail held by silver heart-shaped clips, wayward strands snake-danced about her face, masking it. Near the plane, she looked up, and Zinc’s heart was gone.

  Eyes the hue of Caribbean lagoons.

  Narrow, delicate chin around a kissable mouth.

  Fine-boned nose just the right length.

  But how she moved, this ballerina, was what captured him.

  Grace under fire.

  The quest of his dreams.

  Zinc touched the indent in his forehead, subconsciously hiding it.

  He wished—God how he wished—he was the man he once had been.

  So he might stand a chance with her.

  Not this cripple.

  The only seat vacant was beside Lou Bolt. While the dock attendant stored her bag in back, the blonde climbed up into the plane and smiled at everyone. “Sorry I’m late, but cross-border shoppers clogged Peach Arch. I’m Alex Hunt,” she said as the engines coughed to life.

  Sitting, Alex turned to search for the buckle-half of her seat belt, a move that stretched her clothes tight around her lithe figure. The resulting wink that passed between two of the passengers flashed a genetic insight through Zinc’s mind. Hive billion sex drives stalk this shrinking Earth, insatiable predators locked in a danse macabre that keeps us procreating, most aggressive, some repressed, the rest diseased or fucked-up in a mutant way, and all controlled by the irrational limbic core of our brain.

  Lou Bolt gave Alex the once-over and groped his crotch.

  Luna Darke ogled Alex’s breasts.

  Deadman’s Island

  3:37 P.M.

  Bleak was the word.

  Forlorn, perhaps.

  Beyond the mountain backbone of Vancouver Island; beyond Quatsino, Kyuquot, Nootka, and Clayoquot Sounds; beyond the ragged outer edge of Canada’s West Coast; the unbridled Pacific crashed in from the Orient. Here, too, the land, the sea, and the sky were sullen gray with rain, cowering before a black armada gathering to the West, besieged by cumulonimbus galleons flying the Jolly Roger. Miles offshore where it would bear the brunt of the attack, a black hump broke from the sea like doomed Atlantis.

  Bleak was the word.

  Cursed, perhaps.

  The plane creaked and groaned as it was buffeted by the gale. Approaching the hump from the southeast across Nootka Sound, the pilot circled the island in a sharp ear-popping descent. Deadman’s Island was crescent-shaped, its blunted spear point a rugged bluff jabbing the furious sea, both barbs sloping east to cup Skeleton Cove. Deadman’s Island was 600 acres of sparsely wooded land, the trees brave enough to root here bent by the lash of constant wind, with brooding Castle Crag surmounting the cliffed promontory. Captain Cook had passed this way in 1778 when he became the first European to set foot in B.C., but he’d shown the good sense to avoid the island and land at Friendly Cove. Beneath the morbid mansion crowning the broken precipice, the sea launched suicide runs against the lichened bluff, blowing spray like the huge gray whales that spouted offshore each spring. This time of year, the whales were gone and so were the otters that basked on the kelp bee clinging to the rocks, abandoning Deadman’s Island to the cormorants nesting in the crumbling cliff-face, and furtive mammals scurrying from tree to tree, occasionally picked off by one of the bald eagles soaring overhead. Depending on the mood of the sea, there might be a beach at the foot of the cliff when the tide retreated.

  Bleak was the word.

  Damned, perhaps.

  The waves assaulting Deadman’s Island were five feet high, but Skeleton Cove was calm enough for the floatplane to land. Bfoom … bfoom … bfoom … the pontoons water-skied, then the aircraft taxied toward its rocking mate. The passengers from the earlier flight were now onshore, huddled together for protection from the relentless downpour, all eight male, with seven standing and one in a wheelchair. A boat from Tofino had shuttled them from the plane, as there was no permanent dock for the Grumman Goose to use. The boat was now fencing their luggage ashore.

  Indian Island, Zinc thought, remembering Agatha Christie. He’d seen the 1945 version of And Then There Were None when he was a kid with mumps.

  Half an hour later, both planes took off, chased by the boat seeking shelter from the storm. Weather permitting, they’d return late Sunday morning. After the drone of the engines died, there was only Nature’s raw voice.

  “Well, well,” Franklen said, gazing around. “The setting couldn’t be better if I’d designed it myself.”

  “I hope there’s electricity and hot water,” said Yates.

  “Let’s hump the gear up to the Old Dark House,” said! Bolt. “I don’t know about you guys, but I could use a drink. Got a bottle of single malt Cragganmore in my duffel bag.”

  Zinc sighed. Avoid alcohol and sleeplessness, he thought.

  “At least there’s one sign of life … or death,” said Darke. She pointed to a warning sign staked on the beach.

  BEWARE OF ATTACK DOGS.

  White on black.

  Embellished with a skull & crossbones.

  OWL PROWL

  North Vancouver

  2:11 P.M.

  From the Biological Sciences Building at UBC, Nick drove east to the downtown core, then through Stanley Park onto Lions Gate Bridge to reach the North Shore. He turned up Capilano Road, climbing Grouse Mountain, and past the Fish Hatchery downriver from Cleveland Dam found the gate that guarded the Capilano Watershed. Rain was bouncing inches off the ground as Nick got out of the car.

  An hour ago, he had lunched with Sandra Wong and Marty Fink in the SUB cafeteria of the Student Union Building. The freshpersons around them were hyped by the prospect of exams, and Nick’s hamburger tasted like the meat was camel dung. He was sure the coffee was drained from an oil pan.

  “Comments from the peanut gallery are welcome,” he said. “One of the killers we’re hunting bagged a spotted owl. He tracked it by searching the forest floor for owl pellets, which he collected in his pocket as he went. The woods in question are one of the two North Shore watersheds. He later gutted the bagged owl with a taxidermy knife, and during the process lice stuck to the blade. When the knife was used to stab Brigid Marsh, the bugs were transferred to her wounds. That’s why they were found at the autopsy.”

  The girl at the next table fondled her boyfriend’s butt. Two Engineers in red jackets reading back issues of The Red Rag took a moment to strip her with their eyes.

  “Yesterday, wearing the same coat,” Nick continued, “the killer hung the second victim from the totem pole. Anxious to drive around the point to dump the third body, he reached for his car keys and snagged one of the pellets. Unnoticed, it fell to the foot of the totem where it was later found.”

  “Comment,” Fink said, his arm shooting up like a student in class. “Both watersheds are off-bounds to the public. They’re fenced in and secured by guarded gates. The GVRD religiously patrols all roads and trails, so hikers who wander in through the woods are quickly expelled. Repeat offenders are prosecuted. The Capilano and Seymour Watersheds cover twenty thousand hectares each. Search that large an area for owl pellets and you are going to get nabbed. Conclusion? The killer’s owl prowl took place at night.”

  “How big’s twenty thousand hectares?”

  “About eighty square miles.”

  “Then how, pray tell, do you bag a spotted owl in the dark?”

  “Sex,” Fink said. “Owls locate sounds at night better than all other birds. They see more in the dark than humans do in daylight. If you want to bag an owl at night you imitate its call. Windless evenings are best for prowls since sound caries better and is easier to locate. Moonlight helps. Midwinter to spring—starting now—is the time owls are most vocal because they’re establishing territory. Obtain a cassette of recorded hoots by a spotted owl, then enter an old-growth habitat and broadcast the tape. If a spotted owl’s within earshot, it will return the call, throat puffing as it emits eerie, tremulous sounds. If the tape doesn’t get a response, move and try again. An alternativ
e method is imitating the owl’s hoots yourself. The bird will fly close to investigate, expecting a mate or sexual adversary. It’ll arrive noiselessly, but flashing a light will catch its orange-red eyeshine. That’s when you shoot it with a camera or a gun.

  “I told you there are only three or four spotted owls near here. All roost and hunt in the North Shore watersheds. If the lice in the wounds and the pellet found at the base of the totem came from one of the watershed owls, it’s possible the poacher was seen by a GVRD guard.”

  So that’s why Nick drove from UBC up Grouse Mountain to the gate that blocked public access to the Capilano Watershed.

  Sloshing through the bouncing rain, he knocked on the guardhouse door.

  “It’s open,” a gruff voice shouted from within.

  The guardhouse was a single-story green-and-white shack to the left of the access road. The road was blocked by a chain with flapping pink streamers, while the crossing arm was raised like a black-and-yellow striped finger telling the storm “Up yours!” Right of the road, a lean-to sheltered the Forest Fire Hazard Warning sign. The graph along the bottom was graded Very Low, Low, Moderate, High, and Extreme. Some joker up to his ears in runoff had pushed the sliding arrow to the Extreme mark. Above the blocked road that vanished into waterlogged trees, the Grouse Mountain Skyride fed skiers to the clouds.

  The white linoleum floor within led to a fridge, stove, sink, and small TV tuned to I Love Lucy. Against the window to the right overlooking the access road were a desk, metal cabinet, and radio phones by a speaker labeled security. The man with his feet up on the desk was drinking a mug of coffee. He wore a blue baseball cap with the GVRD crest, a navy blue sweater and navy blue pants over a potbelly, and the thickest pair of woolly socks Nick had ever seen. His jowly face combined the sad features of Droopy and Deputy Dawg. Craven and Chandler shared a trait essential for anyone keeping an eye on politics and groovy social trends: namely a firm grounding in the wisdom of cartoons.