Ripper

by Michael Slade

  Nick flashed the tin.

  “Cup of coffee?” the guard asked, making no move to get it.

  “No thanks,” Nick said, saving him the strain.

  “It’s Starbucks Sulawesi. A man can’t afford good coffee, it’s time he topped himself.”

  “On second thought, where do I find a cup?”

  “Far left cupboard. Bottom shelf.”

  The mugs were an exercise in gender-sensitive humor. The first was stenciled In Her Teens, the second In Her Twenties, etc. Moving up the scale, each stripper had saggier breasts.

  “Busy day?” Nick asked, choosing a mug and filling it from the pot on the stove.

  “The usual,” the guard said, swiveling in his chair. “There’ll be thirty-five in and out before the day is through. Parks Department. Weather Station. Water samplers. Seismic people. Chlorination mechanics. Our own boys. And logging crews. They all sign in,” he added, tapping his clipboard chart.

  “What if someone uninvited slips by you?”

  “Chance of that is next to nil,” the guard replied. “But hey, I’m human. Bears shit in the woods. I use the john.”

  “Like someone trying to bag a spotted owl?” said Nick.

  “That why you’re here? You found the car?”

  “Getting close,” Nick said, “so thought I’d hear it from you.” He kept his interest muted: just two guys having a chat. Low-key always plumbed the important details. Play up your excitement and fantasy crept in. Limelight lures.

  “Nothing more, really, than’s in my report. A week ago, ten days, one of the Parks Department told me on the way out he’d heard a spotted owl in the woods. Said the hooting was two klicks up and east of the Cap Main line. My son was here so I had him watch the gate. If it was a spotted owl, shit would hit the fan. Logging’s expanding in the shed and some folks want to stop it. Look what the bird’s done to Oregon.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Bit after eight.”

  “Date?”

  “A week Wednesday. Unsolved Mysteries was on.”

  “You try to solve this one?”

  “Bet your ass. No one’s ever seen the Cap shed spotted owl. It’s like Ogopogo and the Loch Ness Monster. Maybe it’s here. Maybe not.”

  “Is it?” Nick asked.

  “Not that night.”

  Deputy Dawg—his name was Floyd—led the Mountie to a map taped on the back of the door. The wall beside it was hooked with keys for the Fireshed and Mountain Highway Gate, and bracketed with a fire extinguisher and first-aid kit. The map was a topographical print marked with the various access roads throughout the watershed: Cap Main running north for twenty-five kilometers beside Capilano Lake, with branches forking from it like a tree.

  “Two klicks up, I parked the truck near Grouse Creek. It flows west above the Skyride parking lot.” Floyd pinpointed the location on the map. “Damn if I didn’t hear the owl, so I hiked in, and there was this guy in a parka playing a spotted owl tape. He ran when I yelled.”

  “Description?”

  “Sorry. Didn’t see his face. Just the blue parka with a hood.”

  “Then what?”

  “I chased him. We’re not allowed to arrest. And he lumped over the barbwire fence into the gondola lot. I got to the fence as he squealed away.”

  “Car?”

  “Red. Toyota. Datsun. Some sorta Jap import. Can’t tell those invaders apart. I always buy a Chev. Economy’d still be strong if everyone did the same.”

  Nick held his breath. “License plate?”

  “As I said in my report, the light was poor. And the guy was leaving at quite a clip. My boss checked and found the plate was on a car visiting Disneyland that night. Guess I got it wrong.”

  “What’d you think you saw?”

  Deputy Dawg checked a note taped to the desk. “B.C. plate. ZMY 353.”

  At Cleveland Dam, Cap Road became Nancy Greene Way, named for Canada’s Olympic ski champ. Continuing up the mountain, Nick drove through Grouse Woods to the Skyride parking lot, advertised as The Peak of Vancouver. The gondola car coming down was covered with snow, an accurate weather report on what the storm was doing up top. Passing under the Skyride cables, he parked at the far edge of the lot beside the barbwire fence that sealed the watershed.

  The fence was crooked.

  In places the wire was loose.

  Even without the cut strands it wouldn’t keep poachers out.

  Nick turned east on Highway 1 and followed the Upper Levels across the slope of Grouse Mountain. At Exit 22, he circled over the freeway by the Coach House Inn, then drove up Lillooet Road toward the Demonstration Forest, this gate locked at 9 P.M. read the sign about a mile up from the highway. The road beyond was a gravel strip through dripping green wilderness, no dogs or trail bikes allowed. In rags of cloud, the peak ahead loomed over the Sitka spruce, Douglas fir, western hemlock, and red cedar forest. Within rifle range of the Pacific Shooters Association, several deer munched winter greens from the roadside ditch. Through the trees to Nick’s left was Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge where Brigid Marsh was found hanging early Wednesday morning.

  Significant?

  This side of Rice Lake and left of Twin Bridges, Homestead, and Fisherman’s Trails stood another gate, guardhouse, and road-blocking arm. Lowered and waving the same pink streamers as Cap Watershed, the arm pointed toward another Fire Hazard sign. Protected from the rain by the roof of the shack, the guard stood outside smoking a cigarette. He resembled Bob Hoskins of Roger Rabbit fame, not a Toontown resident, but close enough. He puffed lazy smoke rings as Nick parked the car.

  “Gonna get soaked,” the guard said, “if you’re heading up to the dam. It’s eleven kilometers from here to Seymour Falls.”

  “Just information,” Nick said, showing his shield.

  Close-up, the guard looked more like Gorbachev than Bob Hoskins, the peaked GVRD cap hiding any blotch. He offered Nick a smoke, which the Mountie declined.

  “Seen anything unusual the past few weeks?”

  “Unusual how?”

  “A red ZX acting funny?” Nick suggested.

  “Now that you mention it, yep,” replied the guard.

  “Funny enough to note the plate?”

  “It was spattered with mud. Think it started with a Z. There may have been a Y.”

  Nick took out his notebook and uncapped his pen. “What’d you see?”

  The guard soaked the cigarette butt in a puddle and dropped it into die bin. “A week last Wednesday problems kept me up all night, so Thursday evening I slept like a log. Dawn next morning, something woke me up. I looked out and saw this guy in a hooded blue parka loading a ghetto blaster and canvas bag into a car. The car was a red 2+2 ZX. The wedge kind, before they made it look like a Corvette. Meant little till I learned the lower gate was still locked. Then I knew the guy had spent the night inside.”

  “See his face?”

  “Just the hood. The car was gone by the time I got dressed. Brad unlocked the lower gate and passed it on the road.”

  “Is that Brad’s job?”

  “No, first in. Early bird unlocks the gate.”

  “Brad see the guy?”

  “Through two windshields of rain?”

  “Is that common? Cars trapped inside?”

  “Now and then some woolhead misses the curfew. Time’s plainly marked, so don’t cry to me.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The hooded guy was drenched.”

  “Think he was up to the dam?”

  “Possibly. We call this the Rice Lake Gate. The Demonstration Forest runs eleven K’s north to Seymour Falls Gate. The dam beyond’s protected by a barbwire fence. Seymour Watershed extends forty-three kilometers into the mountains past that. For a guy on foot that’s a long overnight hike.”

  “The guard at Seymour Falls see anything?”

  “No, but next day he found the barbwire cut.”

  Significant?

  4:02 P.M.

  It
was late afternoon by the time Craven returned to Special X. He ran the gauntlet of good-natured jibes about the Then and Now pictures in The Sun, then climbed the stairs to DeClercq’s office on the second floor. Chan was on the phone with the Chief when he knocked and entered, DeClercq calling from the plane as he flew home. Eric punched on the speaker so Nick could overhear.

  “Craven’s with me,” the Inspector said. “I gather from his Cheshire cat grin he has something to report.”

  “Chief, can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear, Corporal.”

  “According to the hooker I spoke to on the stroll, the car that picked the twins up was a red Nissan 300ZX 2+2. The license she recorded was stolen earlier that night. This afternoon I got an ID on the lice recovered from Marsh’s wounds and the pellet found at the base of the totem by Zoe’s feet. Both came from a northern spotted owl. The owl’s only habitat near here is the North Shore watersheds.

  “The Inspector said zoophilia fits the profile of serial killers sexually abused as kids. They develop an abnormal obsession with animals. I think one of our team’s zoophilia centers on owls. He hunts and stuffs them using suture knots. The same knots used to tie the cords around his human victims’ necks.

  “The killer’s fetish is collecting owls, so like all collectors, he wants the rarest ones. The only endangered species is the northern spotted owl, and the lice in Marsh’s wounds indicate he bagged one recently. Owls are hunted by imitating their hoots. A week last Wednesday, the Capilano Watershed guard chased a guy doing just that. He escaped in a red Japanese car. The following night, Thursday, a red 300ZX 2+2, ‘86 model or thereabout, spent ten hours in the Seymour Watershed. The driver was seen placing a tape player and canvas bag into the trunk. Want to bet a spotted owl was in the bag?”

  “Get a good description?”

  “No one saw his face. But one guard got the plate wrong as ZMY 353, while the other says it might contain a Z and Y. The killers stole a plate for stalking the twins, but the owl prowl wouldn’t require that kind of security. So let’s run a check on every 300ZX in the province.”

  “Corporal, I think you have a future with Special X.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  DeClercq and Chan were formal because Craven was around. Respect for rank is the firm foundation of the RCMP, with a paramilitary tradition since 1873. “Any luck with the post box, Inspector?”

  “No, sir,” replied Chan. “It was rented in the name of Reg Skull like Fly-By-Night said, but the junk mail in it dates back several weeks. Skull’s address and phone number checked out phony, so I doubt our “ghostwriter” plans to cash his royalties check. The post box is a mask.

  “On the positive side,” he continued, “we now have California’s report. Marsh’s stomach contents analyzed as Thai food. Those grasses are”—he consulted a sheet—”takrai or lemon grass, makrut or dried kaffir lime leaves, and kah or galangal, a Siamese ginger. If Marsh left her hotel the night she died to have dinner with her killers, chances are they ate in one of the city’s Thai restaurants. We’re canvassing them all with her picture.”

  “I’ve got a piece that fits the puzzle, too,” said DeClercq.

  “Brigid Marsh mothered a son in 1964. He spent his early years in a witches’ coven where the price of admission was lulling men. Effectively abandoned, he was then raised in a private boys school ‘somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.’ I rum what I’ve seen, he’s a prime candidate for our stalking loam. I can’t shake a comment you made the other night, Injector. You wondered if the killer who stabbed Marsh’s womb kept her skinned face as a ‘Mother Mask.’ You meant symbolically, but what if the killer took the fetish literally?”

  “Son’s name?” Chan asked.

  “Samson Marsh. Or Samson Coy. C-O-Y.”

  “I’ll check the local private schools and spread out from there.”

  Punching the speaker to end the call, Chan crossed to the blackboard slanted on the easel by the wall collage. A knock on the door was followed by a Sikh constable poking in his head. “Corporal Craven. The morgue is on the phone.” As Nick left the office, Chan was updating the list DeClercq had made the other night:

  1. Profiles of the killers—Samson Marsh or Coy?

  2. Stomach contents—Thai food.

  3. Restaurant—Thai, near Marsh’s hotel?

  4. Vet—Taxidermist

  5. Bird lice—Northern spotted owl.

  Down the stairs, Nick took the call in the Special X bullpen.

  “Craven.”

  “Hi. It’s Gill Macbeth.”

  “Yes, doctor. To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  “I saw your picture … pictures in the paper. A man of action, it would seem.”

  “Do rub it in.”

  “How about dinner tonight?”

  Nick held the phone at arm’s length and gave it a good shake. “Are you asking me out?”

  “Sort of … Well, yes. Does that offend you? I’ll have you know lots of men are dying to meet me … That’s a joke. Dying to meet me?”

  “I’m not that dense.”

  “I didn’t say you are.”

  “Thanks for the offer. But I can’t.”

  “It’s my job?”

  “No,” he said.

  “The fact I spend most days up to my elbows in guts?”

  “No,” he repeated.

  “I’m being too forward? You like submissive dates?”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “I’m forty,” Gill said. “Is it my age?”

  “No,” he replied.

  “Then what is it? You didn’t like what you saw down my neckline?”

  Craven laughed. “I didn’t peek.”

  “Yes, you did. I caught you red-handed with your eyes in the cookie jar.”

  “Ever thought of writing? How you mix similes?”

  “They’re metaphors. Why won’t you go out with me?”

  “Because I plan to spend the evening reading about owls. I have one foot in the door of Special X, and this case is the break I need to earn my Sergeant’s hooks.”

  “You’ve got to eat.”

  “I’ll munch while I work.”

  “I know how to read, too.”

  “Gee, something in common.”

  “Two heads are better than one.”

  “You’re persistent.”

  “Forsaken by the wind, you must use your oars.”

  “Seven o’clock? Main library? And don’t forget my corsage.”

  CASTLE CRAG

  Deadman’s Island

  4:05 P.M.

  A pitchfork of lightning struck the heaving ocean to the West, bifurcating several times before it fried the sea, zapping through the thunderheads that boiled toward the island, flashing and fizzling behind Castle Crag on the bluff in front of them. Each twig, each branch, each tree quivered in stark black relief as the group trudged up the soggy path from Skeleton Cove. An ominous crash of thunder followed the livid electric bolt, deafening them as it shook the ground beneath their feet. The path wound through landscaped gardens long gone to seed, past an overgrown shrub maze like the one at Hampton Court, between balding thickets of stunted pines broken by granite outcrops, up, up, up toward the house on the brow of the hill. Another sear of lighting: another boom of thunder: this deadly duet closer than the one before, until blitz and blast met in a raucous explosion overhead, and the ozone-stinking downpour became a solid curtain of rain.

  Two young men from the other plane led the procession, each lugging a suitcase in his outer hand, both carrying an old battered deed-trunk between them. A prop for the mystery, Zinc thought. Or someone doesn’t know how to pack.

  Behind the trunk, Elvira helped Wynn struggle up the hill, the old man wobbly on a weak bum leg. He needs a hip replacement but surgery’s a risk, thought Zinc.

  Then came the wheelchair with its young occupant, a para- not quadriplegic it seemed since he
helped wheel with his hands, pushed by Katt and a muscular man from the other plane. Adrian Quirk is disabled: Elvira’s thumbnail sketch.

  Trailing the wheelchair and just in front of Zinc, Lou Bolt and Luna Darke had Alex Hunt boxed in. Beauty caught between the Beast and Cruella De Vil, thought Zinc. A suitcase in each armpit and another in each fist, Bolt waddled up the hill with that overbeefed swagger common to football players, muscles on muscles forcing him to walk like he’d pooed his pants. Darke bent Hunt’s ear between thunderclaps, her canine teeth so close she could nibble on the lobe. Luna was Catwoman trying to hide her claws. You watched too many movies convalescing, Zinc thought.

  Picking up pace, he closed the gap.

  “… occult mystery, the history of Castle Crag. Rumor is a coven once conjured Satan here. Back in the Twenties. Demoniacs, they say. I wrote a novel about it titled Devil’s Advocate. Who’d have thought we’d land here? Been off-bounds for years. Did research on the Craigs at the public library.”

  “Craigs?” Zinc said, poking his nose between the women.

  “Pioneers,” Luna scowled. “Family with money to burn …”

  Angus Craig I (1850-1915) was an immigrant Scot who amassed a fortune in Nanaimo coal, Alberni lumber, and Colonial railroads. Desiring a rural retreat away from public life, he purchased Deadman’s Island from the Department of Indian Affairs in 1903. The island was an ancient Nootka burial site, abandoned by the natives when its ghosts became taboo. Castle Crag was built between 1908 and 1913. No one had lived on the island since 1957, shortly after Angus Craig II died. To settle an Indian land claim by the Nuu-Chah-Nulth people, the government planned to expropriate the island in January. The Murder Weekend, it would seem, was Castle Crag’s last hurrah.

  “The house was built by Rattenbury and Maclure,” said Darke. “They designed mansions for rich Colonial Brits.” Her voice took on a snooty tone as she tweaked the underside of her upturned nose. “Ratz did the Legislature in Victoria, the old Vancouver Courthouse, and the Banff Springs Hotel, before the stud his wife was fucking beat out his brains …”

  Social life bored Angus Craig I. He was a taciturn sportsman who enjoyed isolation, so Deadman’s Island was where he hoped to get away from it all. His wife, Juliet, however, was a socialite who thrived on dispensing hospitality. Each Craig mansion required a ballroom to meet her needs. The West Coast social season began with a summer’s end fete at Castle Crag, moving by yacht to Five Oaks in Victoria for autumn’s first ball, then on to Ravenscourt in Vancouver for I he debutantes’ coming-out. Each year the party grew grander as more bluebloods joined in, until the Lusitania sank with Juliet’s favorite son. Four days later saw her dead from suicide, and that same year, 1915, Angus died from a stroke. Their younger son—Angus Craig II—inherited it all.