Ripper

by Michael Slade

  When DeClercq brought the back of the hatchet smashing down on Corke’s skull.

  He didn’t use the sharp edge, but the ax still did the job.

  The crack of Corke’s skull fracturing was muffled by scalp and hair, the blade stopping midplunge as the soldier of fortune’s luck ran out. DeClercq gripped the knife arm while Corke’s eyes rolled back in his head, tearing it from its socket as the body fell limp. For all he cared this punk could bleed to death in his own puke.

  He had other worries.

  Napoleon lay panting, whimpering, trying to get up from the mud. Pale and in shock, his abdomen was matted with too much blood. Tearing off his coat, DeClercq wrapped it around the dog, bracing himself feet apart in the muck to lift Napoleon. Already blood was seeping through the fabric to stain his arms.

  “Not again,” he pleaded, his heart skewered by guilt. “Kate, Jane, Genevieve. Please don’t take my dog. I haven’t got it in me to bear the hurt again.”

  The phone lines were down.

  Sabotaged?

  The backup cellular phone in the trunk of his stolen car.

  The sea was behind him; snarled thickets on either side.

  Only one way to go.

  Back up the path.

  Afraid he’d slip and fall on the dog and rupture his insides—the shepherd was bleeding internally from some important organ—-Robert staggered up the swath through the trees, caked with mud from his roll on the ground and blood from Napoleon’s wound, the dog breathing so shallowly each suck could be his last, the wind mocking them from each hole through the trees, buffeting, chilling, smiting, whipping, and almost uprooting them.

  Powered by adrenaline, he made it to the top.

  Now here he stood beside the road with his dying dog in his arms, talking to Napoleon, begging him not to give up, the road completely deserted, who’d be out tonight, muddy, bloody, as if he’d escaped from Riverview or the pen, even if a car came, who in their right mind would stop?

  A pair of headlights came around the curve.

  Napoleon’s muzzle slumped against his cheek.

  The dog’s labored breath sounded like a goodbye sigh.

  “Oh God,” Robert murmured through clenched teeth and tear-salted lips, “let it be an ambulance or the West Van Police. Let it be someone, anyone, with a heart. Let it be …”

  A ninety-grand Mercedes-Benz.

  Leather interior, he thought. Slimed with blood and mud.

  Robert stepped into the road to be seen and the car swerved around, an effortless maneuver, let them eat cake. Once, twice, the taillights blinked, glaring back at him, like some hellhound’s bloodshot eyes.

  The Benz stopped.

  His legs wonky from Napoleon’s weight and the scramble up the hill, Robert splashed along the road as the vehicle backed up. The automatic window on the passenger’s side slid down a crack.

  “Help,” DeClercq said. “My dog’s been stabbed.”

  The Chinese staring at him was seventy, eighty, ninety years old, a miniature man barely able to see over the wheel, checking him out, this was the city, God knows why he stopped, Good Samaritans being an extinct breed of the past. When he spoke, the words were Cantonese.

  An immigrant, DeClercq thought. Without a word of English.

  “Please,” he said, speaking with his tears, fully expecting a squeal of rubber as the rear wheels ran over his foot, immaculate interior, who was he to him, when the driver fingered the button that unlocked the door.

  DeClercq and his dog got in.

  The 24-hour Animal Emergency Clinic was way across town at 4th and Fir. The Benz had no mobile phone. The West Van Police at Marine and 13th would have a vet on call, or they could siren the dog to the hospital. “We need the police,” DeClercq said, causing the driver to shrug. “Police,” he repeated, but the man didn’t understand. “Gong An Ju,” he added, taking a chance, using the only Chinese he knew, the name of Red China’s cops. The Samaritan was a capitalist from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Those of Tiananmen Square would be no friends of his.

  Instead of heading down Marine, the Benz turned north into a cul-de-sac of homes. Napoleon was so quiet Robert feared he was dead, and now, without a second to lose, they took this detour? The old man patted the dog’s snout as he parked by one of the doors.

  A long honk on the horn summoned a knot of people, three generations it seemed to DeClercq. “Into the kitchen,” a middle-aged man said when he saw the blood, followed by orders to his family snapped in quick Chinese.

  Trying not to hurt Napoleon if he was still alive, DeClercq vacated the ruined seat and stepped into the rain. The man led him through the house to a kitchen in back, thumping the table as his wife brought him a black bag. Robert opened his coat and laid Napoleon on the surface, then stood back as medical instruments came out of the kit. “His spleen is lacerated,” the doctor said, probing the abdominal wound with a disinfected tool. “He’s hemorrhaging internally. It will have to come out.”

  “You’re a vet?”

  “Sorry. I’m an obstetrician. Your dog’s the first male patient I’ve tended.”

  “Will he make it?”

  “If I have a say.”

  The doctor checked his patient’s gums and mucous membranes, deathly pale from loss of blood. A young girl entered the kitchen with pairs of surgical gloves, and for a moment DeClercq feared the operation would take place here. While she filled the gloves with water from the sink’s hot tap, her mother fed dry bath towels to the dryer. “His temperature’s low,” the doctor said. “We must get it up.”

  A youth with a physics text in hand and headphones around his neck, the Walkman alive with the voice of Lou Reed, entered the kitchen to announce, “The vet’s on his way to the surgery.”

  The doctor treated the raw wound with antibiotic ointment, then pressure-bandaged Napoleon to seal the laceration. His wife spread one of the warm towels across the table, which their daughter packed with her makeshift hot water bottles. Napoleon was wrapped in it and bound with towel after towel, then the doctor picked him up and said, “Let’s go.”

  The old man was standing by the front door. While the doctor positioned his patient in the car, DeClercq asked the student to translate for him. “Tell your grandfather I’m eternally in his debt. Tell him he renews my faith in human beings. Tell him I’ll have the inside of his car redone.”

  The old man patted Robert’s arm as the teen listened to his reply. “Forget the car,” the youth interpreted. “Fate is merely telling him it’s time to buy a new one.”

  Even in Hell, there are pockets of Heaven.

  WILLIAM TELL

  Deadman’s Island

  7:48 P.M.

  While Chandler and Yates examined the nook, the cabinet, the murder weapon, and the water-soaked cards, Hunt shot four rolls of film to capture the crime scene. After she snapped the position of Cohen’s body from every angle in longshot and closeup, Bolt, Smith, Leech, and Devlin each took an arm or leg and carried the corpse through the Kitchen to the cellar stairs. Luna fetched a mop and pail from the Scullery to swab the blood pool from the floor—the second time today she’d cleaned up murder’s aftermath—while Katt and Elvira wiped the blood sprays from the table. Again Zinc was amazed by how well the group coped with the stress. The more danger, the more honor, his mother used to say.

  Soon the sleuths regathered in the Banquet Room.

  “Swig anyone?” Bolt asked, drinking his Cragganmore straight from the bottle.

  “Thanks,” Smith said, reaching out as Bolt withdrew the offer.

  “Anyone but you. I don’t want fucking AIDS.”

  Smith accepted a glass of champagne Alex poured from a bottle chilling in one of the buckets of rapidly melting ice. “No toast,” she said.

  “Cards on the table.” The Mountie addressed the group. “The way this storm is brewing, we could be stranded for days. No one knows our location except Thunderbird Charters, and since this house has survived eighty years of rough weather why would t
hey be concerned? Even if they were, no one can reach us now. So that’s the lay of the land, and we’ve no choice but to accept it.

  “I don’t know who fired the crossbow—or how, for that matter—but our situation presents two possibilities. One, we’re not alone on the island. Two, the person responsible is in this room.

  “Assuming we’re here till Sunday, and perhaps longer, are there any problems with the sleeping accommodations?”

  “Who can sleep?” Melburn said.

  “Apart from that. Elvira, what’s the present setup?”

  “There are ten bedrooms and fifteen peop … fourteen people,” she said. “Those doubled up are Alex and me, you and Wynn, Luna and Katt, Lou and Barney, Colby and Al, with the rest in separate rooms. Sol no longer needs his.”

  “Any problems?” Zinc asked, one arm sweeping the group.

  “Colby and I write together,” said Al Leech. “If he’s involved, there goes my living, so I might as well be dead.”

  “Problem here,” Melburn said. “No offense,” to Bolt. “I don’t know this guy from Attila the Hun, so if one of us is a killer, I want my own room.”

  “Anyone else?”

  The question was met by silence.

  “Okay, Melburn, you take Cohen’s room.”

  “And pray his ghost doesn’t getcha,” sneered Bolt.

  The hail against the windows melted back to rain, the rat-a-tat-tat of the pellets replaced by the shriek of banshee wind. Tree limbs scraped the stonework like zombies trying to get in, flashing Night of the Living Dead through Chandler’s mind.

  “I want to get out of these clothes and clean up,” Holyoak said, shedding his blood-soaked dinner jacket for shirtsleeves and suspenders. “I can’t tend Quirk’s wound like this.”

  “All of you—except Quirk and Yates—please go to your rooms,” said Zinc. “I’ll be up to question you individually, then anyone who’s hungry can return here to eat.”

  “I’m hungry now,” Bolt said.

  “Deputies dine last. When you’re ready, Doctor, your patient will be here.”

  The sleuths departed in a group for the Receiving Hall, leaving Chandler, Quirk, and Yates alone in the Banquet Room. “Am I your suspect?” Quirk asked as soon as they were gone.

  “No, I want to apologize for setting you up. The bolt was meant for me and I put you in danger. How the weapon was fired I don’t know, but setting the trap took manipulation, which I doubt you could accomplish from your wheelchair. Whoever snuck in here had to work fast.”

  “Apology accepted. But not your bullshit. For all you know, my injury’s a fake. I don’t think you’ve let me off the hook.”

  “I saw you struggling across the floor after the bolt was fired. Your legs were useless. Tough act for a man in fear.”

  “Why fear,” Quirk said, “if I’m the killer? I’d know there was only one arrow and it was spent.”

  “If you were the killer and I inadvertently made you the target, you’d have wheeled yourself out of the way fast. An inch to the left and you’d now have a severed jugular vein.”

  “You win,” Quirk said with a lopsided grin as Zinc recalled Elvira saying he was the unpublished author of a courtroom thriller. Save me from lawyers, Zinc thought. Including the paper kind.

  Moving toward the cooking hearth left of the cabinet, the Mountie unbuttoned his tunic for relief from the brazier’s heat. Yates sat at the end of the table rereading the waterlogged cards. As Zinc joined him, the old man said, “You’re right, it is a locked room.”

  “So the answer must be one of Carr’s seven variations?”

  “We can eliminate accident and suicide,” said Yates. “If the crossbow was loaded long ago and simply malfunctioned with the passage of time, accident might be a consideration. But here there are seven crossbows, and six are covered with dust. Obviously the dust-free weapon is the one that fired, so someone removed it from the case, cleaned it, cocked it, loaded it, and replaced it recently. Suicide? Hardly, since you were the near victim, and Quirk had no way of knowing he’d be placed in harm’s way. That leaves murder. Planned, deliberate murder.

  “A moment ago, you posed two possibilities to the group. One, we’re not alone on the island. And two, the person responsible sat at this table. If those are the alternatives, where does that take us?

  “Assuming the killer wasn’t in this room, how did he/she enter the nook and exit without us seeing, given the only way in and out is through this room?”

  “Impossible,” Zinc said, “without disturbing the cobwebs and dust in the nook.”

  “The other alternative reworks Carr’s sixth variation: It is murder, committed by someone outside the room, though it appears the killer was inside at the time. In our case the puzzle is reversed: It is murder, committed by someone inside the room, though it appears the killer was out in the nook at the time.”

  “The only answer to that is Carr’s third variation,” said Zinc. “It is murder by a mechanical device planted in the room. And that device is a crossbow that fires itself.”

  “Has to be,” Wynn agreed.

  “There’s too much water.”

  “Huh?”

  “On the shelf. Too much for the leak in the roof.”

  As Quirk wheeled himself toward the cabinet, Zinc pulled (he top shelf out to expose the 13th-century crossbow cocked by a cord and pulley. The dust on the weapon and surface beneath was dry except for the pockmarks left by the dripping roof when the shelf was last withdrawn. And the moonscape on the shelf below was the same.

  “If the roof leaked on the cabinet and soaked through,” said Zinc, “causing the water damage that saturated the cards, how come it missed the top two shelves and just soaked the third? The answer has to be the water didn’t come from the leak.”

  “Where’d it come from?” asked Quirk.

  “This,” Zinc said, reaching into the nearest ice bucket on top of the cabinet to obtain a half-melted cube. “One of your examples on the plane, Wynn, was the suicide victim who stabs himself with an icicle. As a solid, ice is a killer, but as water, converts to a benign puddle. Here the situation is reversed. Gentlemen, meet William Tell.

  “The women are in the Turkish bath and we’re upstairs dressing for dinner when someone sneaks in here to set the trap. He pulls the unhooked cabinet away from the wall because its glass front is locked, and removes the crossbow from the shelf through the false Dutch door panel. The weapon was probably dusted and checked when the entire house was cleaned before we arrived. The champagne’s on ice when he enters or he brought his own cubes from the Mainland. Using the lever, he cocks the bow and loads it with a bolt, then wedges a cube of ice between the stock and the trigger handle. When he replaces the crossbow in its frame, the stock sits higher in its notches because the handle resting on the shelf isn’t in its usual squeezed position. He pushes the cabinet back against the wall and leaves the room, his time bomb locked and hidden behind the grimy glass. As the ice melts, the fifteen-pound weight of the bow squeezes the handle toward the stock, firing the bolt because the trigger pressure required to release it is less than the weight of the bow. The bolt was designed to pierce armor at 200 miles per hour. The cabinet’s glass and back of the wheelchair offer little resistance. The chances were excellent the bolt would kill me at the head of the table. The half-melted ice cube slips to one side of the shelf where it dissolves and soaks the hand-written cards.”

  “Risky business,” Quirk said. “What if someone walked in while he was setting the trap?”

  “Then he was just exploring the house to kill time before dinner.”

  “Or he had a lookout at the door,” said Wynn.

  “He may not have anticipated Cohen using the hearth to cook dinner,” said Zinc. “In which case the room was hotter and fire was closer to the cabinet than planned. What with the séance and dinner to eat we’d be at the table for hours. The bow went off quicker than expected.”

  “Howdunit solved,” Wynn said. “Whodunit remains.
Any one of us could have slipped into this room while the others—”

  The lights went out.

  HELL-HAGS

  West Vancouver

  8:05 P.M.

  Viewed anthropomorphically, the face of an owl resembles ours. The large blinking eyes seem almost capable of human expression. The upright stance, round head, high brow, and short “nose” mimic us. Our fascination with these birds dates back to the dawn of history when primitive man with poor night vision longed to hunt quietly in the dark like them. Many cultures attributed the owl s hunting prowess to occult powers, and felt, since our eyes resemble theirs, owls were us transformed into spirits.

  Lilith, the Mesopotamian goddess of death, and Athena, the Greek goddess of war, were both depicted as accompanied by owls. This led to the superstition owls foretell death, a belief the Romans inherited. Horace, a Latin scholar of the first century B.C., associated these “funeral birds” with witchcraft. So great was their fear of owls that Romans killed the birds on sight, cremated the remains, then threw the ashes into the Tiber River. “When Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus named the boreal owl in 1758, he chose the Latin term funereus, or funeral owl. The Roman word striges, plural strix, referred to both witches and owls,” Gill read aloud, “so Strix is the genus of the northern spotted owl.”

  Nick switched his fork for his pen to make a note with his uninjured hand. Not used to writing with it, his scrawl looked like a four-year-old’s.

  On their way from the library to Gill’s house atop Sentinel Hill in West Van, they’d stopped at the Thai House for takeout food. “Must be a lot of people dying,” Nick said, awed as they parked in the driveway of her terraced home. “Or do you bill the government by the slice?”