Ripper

by Michael Slade

  A fourth scream stabbed the woods like an ice pick from somewhere close ahead. Zinc pressed on, head down to hunt for tracks in the snow, then head up rotating like a Spitfire pilot checking for Messerschmitts. That’s how he spotted the speaker.

  Battery powered, the speaker was fastened to a scrawny pine, several feet above Zinc’s eyes. Laughter barked from it as he cursed himself, followed by a Satanic whisper, “Now Quirk’s dead.”

  Slip-sliding precariously along the crest of the bluff, Zinc ran back to where he’d left the disabled man. There he found two sets of footprints on the great divide, from which a pair of wheel tracks descended the slope to the edge of the cliff where they vanished into oblivion.

  LEOPOLD …

  Vancouver

  8:17 A.M.

  Havelock Ellis School for Boys looked more like a monastery or youth correction center than it did a school. It gave DeClercq the creeps. As a boy he’d served time in Quebec Catholic schools, and now every paper seemed to report another Father charged with lowering the shorts of orphans or native kids under his care. As he and Craven trod the halls of this hallowed institution, footsteps echoing off the ranks of metal lockers, live-in boys who crossed their path smartly acknowledging their usher as “Sir,” images from the school’s past formed in Robert’s mind. He saw birchings in the Headmaster’s office between cricket and classics, licensed barbarism intermingling with the niceties of Ovidian verse. He saw prefects overseeing hazing and peer-punishment, one boy riding another around the dormitory with spurs fashioned from pins. He saw chapel, hall, meals, and classes injected with so much ceremony they were rituals. And instead of ogling girls in class as boys have always done, and always will until someone rips out their endocrine glands, he saw the boys of Havelock Ellis eyeing the buns of their school chums as they traipsed into the shower.

  Ah, the English “public” school.

  Home of le vice anglais.

  The Headmaster sipped his morning tea as the cops were shown in. He greeted them with the enthusiasm he would a dentist about to ream a root canal. His body was a sack of bones rattling around in a hound’s-tooth suit, topped by an oversize head with wavy white hair and spiked eyebrows resembling a phalanx of rockets about to be launched at Mars.

  His stern face—What have you boys done?—was marred by liver spots.

  “Tea?” he offered.

  DeClercq declined.

  “Coffee?” Said with contempt as if it were the Devil’s brew.

  “No thanks,” replied DeClercq.

  “Your inquiry came to my attention when I arrived this morning. The staff referred it to my desk yesterday afternoon. I want the school kept out of this. Do you understand?” The bite of a birch stick was in his tone.

  “Samson Coy,” DeClercq said. “Was he a student here?”

  “Do I have your undertaking? As a gentleman?”

  “I’m investigating a crime in which one of your former pupils may be involved. I need all the background on him you can provide. I won’t trumpet the fact he attended this school, but if it comes out it comes out.”

  “Chief Superintendent, these are woeful times. In today’s economy, it’s difficult for Havelock Ellis to keep ahead of the rabble. We offer the finest education at daunting cost to us, in an institution unbesmirched by any scandal.”

  “The crime is murder,” DeClercq said. “Answer the question.”

  “Murder! My God!” The eyebrows launched. “Murder of whom?”

  “Samson’s mother.”

  “Delilah Coy?”

  “Her real name’s Brigid Marsh.”

  The Headmaster dropped his teacup, which bounced and spilled, slopping English Breakfast all over his inlaid desk. “Shitty ass bum fuck,” he groaned. But groaned like a gentleman.

  “When was Samson here?”

  “Please, I need time to—”

  “Headmaster, this is a warning, not a threat. Four women are dead, and we suspect Coy. We’re here to learn everything you know about him. If you hold out on us and someone else dies, we’ll be back to read you your Charter rights.”

  Tag-team tactics, Craven weighed in, “Which would be a scandal with a capital S.”

  “When was he here?” DeClercq snapped.

  The Headmaster gave in. “Grades one to twelve, 1971 to ‘83. Coy was one of the brightest students we ever enrolled; 210 IQ. He topped every class.”

  “Description?” Craven said, opening his notebook.

  “Blond hair, blue eyes, sickly lad. Adrenal insuffiency. Overactive thyroid gland. Cricket, soccer, rugby, aquatics— ours is an excellent program—but he was excused from all school sports, which prompted the more active boys to dub him ‘Flea.’ ”

  “Interests?” asked DeClercq.

  “Applied science. His mind innately grasped electronics and mechanics. He built an array of Rube Goldberg devices to accomplish human tasks robotically, which prompted some of the duller boys to dub him ‘the Crazed Genius.’ On graduation, Coy won a scholarship to study engineering at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. Last I heard, he topped the school.”

  “In what?”

  “Robotics.”

  “When was this?”

  “Five, six years ago. Then he went to Cambridge.”

  “To study what?”

  “Philosophy.”

  “Odd combination.”

  The Headmaster mopped his desk with several paper napkins. “As a rule, I applaud the marriage of science and ethics. In Coy’s case, however, I’m not so sure. He idolized Friedrich Nietzsche, a nineteenth-century German who held—”

  “The goal of evolution’s struggle for survival is the emergence of a dominant Superman,” said DeClercq.

  The Headmaster blinked as if surprised the Great Unwashed could be literate, too. “I teach a class in ethics to all our boys. Philosophy, the lumber of the schools.”

  “Swift,” said DeClercq.

  “Quite,” the Headmaster replied. He peeked inside a thick tea-spattered file on his desk. “Coy’s bible was Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. He considered himself Ubermensch.” The Headmaster peered at DeClercq expectantly, as if to say Definition?

  “One not bound by the rules that govern other people.”

  “I asked our counselor to have a talk with him. He reported Coy’s reply. ‘I hate my mother. God would be cruel to make me her son, so I reject him. Satan is more to my liking. At least he offers something in return for my pain. My image of elation is cold-blooded intellect doing what it wants. Cutting out emotion is my religion. The universe is merely a mass of electrons. The mind is nothing but an electronic reflex center. There is no difference between right and wrong. Justice has no objective reality. The only crime is to squander intelligence. The only wrong is to make a mistake.’ ”

  “How often did Coy’s mother visit him?” asked DeClercq.

  “Never, as far as I know.”

  “Did you meet her?”

  The Headmaster shook his head.

  “Isn’t that unusual? Not checking out the school?”

  “Our reputation precedes us,” he replied.

  “Coy went home for the summer?”

  “No, he boarded here. We have enrichment courses for summer boys.”

  “Coy’s mother dumped him?”

  The Headmaster stiffened. “Every month, she sent a sizable check. I hardly call that dumping, Chief Superintendent. At Havelock Ellis we pride ourselves on providing the same nurturing as a responsible parent.”

  “We need every file you have on Coy. And a picture of him.”

  The Headmaster removed a class photograph from the wall and pointed to one of the boys.

  “Graduation Eighty-three. I want it back,” he said.

  GOD’S TOILET

  Deadman’s Island

  8:22 A.M.

  On hands and knees and crawling parallel to the wheelchair tracks, his fingers grasping grooves in the granite beneath the snow, Zinc inched himself down t
he slippery slope to the edge of the cliff. Peering over, he saw a narrow ledge twelve feet below, the snow on its outer lip unmarked except for two lines where the wheelchair had hit and bounced. Fissures cracked the face of the cliff like wrinkles, crevassing the yellow-lichened rock with streaks of black, wedged in which were the nests of cormorants that fished from the bluff. The snow from above and the spray from below combined to hide the beach.

  A voice behind cried, “Zinc!”

  He turned to see Alex Hunt standing on the crest, Katt and Melburn to one side, Holyoak to the other. “Stay back,” he warned. “I’ll come up.”

  Now on his belly, he wormed his way back to the great divide. “I fear Quirk went over,” he said, brushing snow from his clothes.

  “He did,” Katt confirmed. “We saw it happen from the Banquet Room. Barney, Wynn, the doctor, Elvira, and me.”

  “We were having breakfast when you wheeled him up the path,” Melburn said. “We saw the two of you pause here, then you ran into the woods. You weren’t gone long when someone in a hooded parka scrambled from those trees”—he pointed left to the thicket away from the route Zinc had taken—“and shoved Quirk over the crest toward the cliff.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “We couldn’t see. They vanished down the slope you just crawled up. A few minutes later, you came back as we got dressed to help.”

  “The killer wore cleats,” Hunt said, crouching by some footprints.

  Chandler’s first concern had been Adrian Quirk. History relates remarkable feats by those who snatched themselves from the jaws of certain death, and it was possible Quirk had grabbed a handhold over the edge, his cries carried off by the wind as he desperately clung to the rock. The ledge twelve feet down was a natural crib, but Quirk wasn’t lucky enough to return to the cradle. Momentum worked against the hope he clung further down.

  Zinc turned his mind to the tracks the killer had left.

  When he and Quirk had ascended the bluff, the snow was virgin white. Though trampled by the boots of the Banquet Room group, the wheelchair tracks and his own footprints could still be discerned. Both paused at the crest, then parted ways. His boots ran to and from the woods to the right, while the tires of the wheelchair rolled over the cliff. The tracks of the killer approached from the left, emerging from the thicket along the precipice. The path from die castle crested the bluff where Zinc and the others now stood, descending the far slope at an angle until it reached the drop. There it bifurcated into a switchback down to the beach and a path through the precipice woods. In cleats, Quirk’s attacker had come along the upper path, emerging from the trees to ascend the bluff up the far side, grabbing the wheelchair and shoving it toward the drop out of sight of the house. Ten feet from the precipice, the killer had given the chair a final push, before disappearing, unseen by all, down the zigzag switchback to the beach. The cleats had kept the attacker from slipping down the incline to a similar fate.

  “Anyone see a face?” Zinc asked.

  The banqueters shook their heads.

  “Too far,” Melburn said. “And too much snow.”

  “A walkie-talkie was held in front of the hood,” Katt added.

  Broadcasting screams to divert me, thought Zinc. You cunning devil. I fell for it. No, correction. Quirk took the fall.

  Wynn’s comment about Carr’s fifth variation came to mind: It is murder, complicated by illusion or impersonation.

  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. I he illusion is the two passed at the door.

  “Any chance Quirk was both people on the ridge? Once I was gone, he shed his overcoat and slipped out of sight, then came back as the hooded man and pushed his chair over the cliff?”

  “No,” Melburn said.

  “No,” Katt echoed.

  “Quirk waved at the house while you were in the woods,” Holy oak explained. “And struggled to get away when the killer appeared. It was no trick with a substitute dummy.”

  Zinc was angry at himself. “I knew we’d lose stragglers. Now we have. I thought the victim was you, Alex, but that was just a ruse. I fell for a diversion that cost us Quirk. Henceforth, we stay in one or two groups until we’re rescued. We don’t go anywhere in the house we haven’t already been. Who isn’t accounted for? Katt, where’s your mom?”

  “Screwing Lou,” the teenager said bluntly. “He came to our room an hour ago and told me to get lost. They know each other from the Mainland.”

  “So Devlin’s the wild card. Anyone see him?”

  There was no reply.

  “Katt, Alex, go to the house and guard Elvira and Wynn. Doctor, Melburn, I’m going down to the beach. If high tide, it’s possible Quirk survived the fall. If not, the killer’s down there and may be trapped. Any volunteers?”

  “I’m not waiting to get picked off,” Melburn said.

  “Cowards die often,” Holyoak replied.

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  The trek to the beach was easier than expected. A natural fissure zigzagged down the cliff face to the sea, enhanced by steps and handholds chipped into the rock. Beneath the ledge the wheelchair hit, die tide had worn a concave arc into the precipice, hiding the switchback under the overhanging lip. They followed cleated footprints all the way down.

  A hundred and sixty feet below the looming bluff, Magic Beach stretched for a quarter mile along the base of the cliff. Here rolling waves had pounded the island for countless centuries, wearing holes in the outcrops of rock that jutted from the surf. Depending on the mood of the tide, the shore was rocky one day, sandy the next. Now the turbulent ocean fought a battle of retreat, foaming in over fresh sand toward the precipice, before being dragged out to sea with even greater force. Offshore, each wane exposed a vertical blowhole in one hump, flushing ebbing brine from it with a scatological thllluuuuppp. Eight feet wide, Melburn dubbed it “God’s toilet.”

  Quirk’s wheelchair lay crumpled and twisted on one of the beach outcrops. Blond hair matted with kelp, he sprawled prone on another. Quirk’s rock was surrounded by fresh sand dusted with melting snow. Fingers of foam reached for him, then withdrew, like the briny hands of a hesitant pickpocket. A misty waterfall tumbled down the cliff beyond.

  “I’ll check him,” Holyoak said, splashing along the beach.

  If the sounds of the shore were nature’s symphony, the suck of God’s toilet was the bass end, a hollow whistling the top. The sort of sound produced when you blow in the neck of a bottle of pop, Zinc unsuccessfully scanned the cliff looking for a cave. The toilet filled, flushed, filled, and flushed again. “Stay clear of that,” he warned Holyoak. “It’ll suck you out to sea.”

  The ebbing tide had erased the killer’s tracks from the sand. The beach was blocked at both ends where the cliff plunged directly into the sea. The only visible escape was up the zigzag path, so where had the killer gone once he reached the shore?

  At first, Zinc thought the hungry suck was God’s toilet flushing again, then Holyoak shouted, “Oh my Jesus! Quicksand!”

  Another slurp and he was in to his waist.

  “Do something!”

  To his chest.

  “For God’s sake, help!”

  Quicksand it wasn’t.

  Sucksand it was.

  The doctor had run into trouble a few feet this side of Quirk. Splashing toward the outcrop where the disabled man lay, across the stretch of sand between the zigzag path and his possible patient, Holyoak had stepped into God’s other toilet, the one plugged with fresh sand. These days, every one keeps a spare john for guests.

  “I’m going to SMOTHER!” the frantic man cried, sinking to his neck as both hands waved in the air. Testing every step, Zinc pussyfooted toward him, then stretched out flat live feet from the doctor as Melburn gripped his legs.

  Two feet short of the nearly swallowed man, Zinc’s arm ink into the sinkhole, which now claimed Hol
yoak’s head. The Mountie fought like a tar baby to reach the doctor’s hands, the upper arms gone, the lower arms gone, the wrists descending fast, but mired facedown in the muck, he was sucked in, too.

  Desperately trying to dog-paddle, Holyoak’s hand disappeared.

  Zinc stretched for the other hand, but it was no use.

  Fingers twitching in horror as if waving goodbye, the last trace of the doctor sank from view.

  Zinc recoiled at the satisfied slurp of that final obscene suck.

  The toilet burped.

  POINTED STICKS

  8:50 A.M.

  The harder he tried to free himself, the deeper he sank in the sand. When Melburn let go of his ankles, he thought, God’s toilet claims another lump of shit. Then Melburn grabbed his knees and gave a hearty tug. Zinc quit fighting and went limp so the lifeguard could reel him in.

  Back on solid ground, he struck it in frustration. Never had Chandler felt so thwarted as a cop. In half a day, six people had died in front of his eyes, and he was no closer to knowing why than before the first killing. On Deadman’s Island, each murder set up the next.

  “I owe you,” he said, tossing Melburn a look of gratitude. “The upside is I know one person isn’t the killer. Thanks.”

  “What about Quirk? We still try to reach him?”

  “He looks dead to me. He look dead to you?”

  “If that’s what the fall did to the wheelchair, his neck’s gotta be broken.”

  “We’ll never lug him up the cliff. The sea can be his grave. With the killer still loose on the island, the living take precedence.”

  “We feel guilty,” Melburn said, “and we’ve rationalized the act. Now let’s get outta here before this loony starts sniping.”

  “He won’t,” Chandler said. “Not his style. More fun for this sadist if we set ourselves up. The guy’s got to be a mad engineer. It took a year or two to rig this deathtrap. Who’d have time except the owner or someone with his blessing? If we survive, or if we don’t, either way he’ll be exposed in the investigation.”