Ripper (23 page)

Bread crumbs hit the Mountie's shoes as he passed through. Suddenly he was dive-bombed by a hundred chirping sparrows. Madcap laughter cackled from one of the trees, then a head with lunatic eyes poked around the trunk.

"Ever see
The Birds,
man?"

Ah, New York.

Hammerhead

Bowen Island 

10:49
A.M.

Damn airlines,
Luna thought, hammering one of the small wheels on the bottom of her suitcase back into line.
If they don't lose your bags they wreck them.
Hers had been damaged on a recent cross-country junket, a quaint Canadian custom where taxpayers fund CanLit readings Ottawa thinks they should embrace but no one buys. Surviving in the marketplace is strictly for the States.

Someone knocked at the door.

Mainland residents had learned to triple-lock their homes, adopting the bunker-mentality that comes with "world class status," but here on rural Bowen that wasn't the practice yet. Luna walked from her bedroom to the porch door, and swung it open to face a stranger on the dripping deck. He raised a Polaroid camera and flashed it in her eyes.

"Hey!" Luna grumbled, raising the hand without the hammer to shield her face, the hammer hidden by the half-open door. "What gives, man?"

"Luna Darke? Lenore Dodd? Nona Stone? Name's Pete Trytko. Boston private eye."

Luna froze.

The man on the porch backed by rain smelled of last night's booze, his eyes as bloodshot as the label of Johnnie Walker Red, quaffed no doubt as a bracer to ward off this harsh Canadian cold. In that regard he fit the Hammett/ Chandler archetype, but everything else about him said the guy was a wuss. The dandruff on his trenchcoat. The face like Elmer Fudd. He even wore one of those dorky hats with flaps tied over the ears. "Chiclets" replaced several teeth knocked out by a philandering husband caught in the wrong bed. Compared to him, Columbo was a dude.

"I'm Luna Darke," Luna said, "but not the other two. You've mixed me up with someone else."

Trytko withdrew a composite drawing from inside his trenchcoat. The likeness was Luna, take away fourteen years. "Snatching a mother's baby burns your features into her mind. Game's up, lady. I wanna see your kid. If she doesn't mirror my client, I'll eat my hat."

Tough guy,
Luna thought,
with a tiny cock.
"Katt's not home."

"Fourteen years to find her, I got time to wait. Police gave up eventually, but not Mrs. Baxter. First you cost her kid, then her accusing husband: 'How could you be so trusting, you naive bitch?' Eighty thousand bucks she's paid, working herself to the bone. That kinda fee and commitment, I wait till Hell freezes over."

"Get off my property, or I'll call the cops."

"Call 'em, lady. Makes no difference to me. No way you're disappearing until the kid's informed. I want the question in her mind if you try a bunk. No matter where you go, she'll want the answer. Jig's up, Nona. Get it off your chest."

"What'll it take to prove you're wrong?"

"Nothing short of a DNA test on the kid. You or Mrs. Baxter? Who will her genes match?"

Cat and mouse, a Mexican standoff, they stood eye to eye. Then a single tear rolled down the woman's cheek. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, said Trytko's smirk. "How'd you find me?" Luna asked.

"Snatching a baby, no ransom, is a nut-case crime. Gotta be a woman who desperately wants a child. Gotta be a woman who can't have one of her own. Flashed the composite in every ward on the East Coast. Finally got a lock on you in Maryland. Traced the car you rented to Washington State, then your marriage of convenience up here. Citizenship, huh? Before you dumped the guy? Only thing not recorded was your daughter's birth. Storks don't bring babies in my world."

Another tear.

"So where's the kid?"

"In the front room. Watching TV."

The PI stepped into the kitchen, easing Luna aside, her right hand visible, her left behind the door. "Let's get this over with," he said.

"Yes. Let's," Luna agreed, whirling like a Cossack with the hammer in her hand, striking the man's forehead as hard us she could, the nose of the weapon punching through his skull in a crunch of bone, ripping splinters with it as she yanked the hammer out, Trytko dropping to his knees like a penitent before God, as "Yes. Let's," repeated, another blow cracked his skull, Luna bringing the weapon down in both hands like an ax, the metal snout caving in his crown like a volcano, spewing red lava in an eruption of blood and brains, hitting the walls, spraying her, raining down on the floor, Trytko shaking like all that booze had brought on the d.t.'s, one leg banging in counterpoint like a hoedown foot, the third blow driving his head
splat!
 
against the tiles, a pool of blood spreading crimson red across the white, as "Yes. Let's. Let's. Let's," Luna mashed his skull, flattening his brain like a pancake until his death shudders stopped.

Luna dropped the hammer.

Her breath came in gasps.

Then she looked at the kitchen clock.

Katt would soon be home.

What time was she off school today for that damn rotating strike?

Fucking teachers.

So afraid of work.

Pull yourself together.

Got to clean up this mess.

First she fetched from the bloom closet a plastic sheet, always on hand in case a "Squamish" sprung a leak in the roof, then she wrapped the corpse in it and tied the shroud with twine. Humping the bundle to a cleaner area of the floor, she wiped the plastic of blood and humped the body again, repeating the process until it left no telltale trail. Stripping, she washed her skin of blood with a dishrag from the sink, then opened the cellar door and dragged the corpse downstairs, bumping it like Christopher Robin lugging Winnie the Pooh. The body stretched out on the earthen floor, she returned to the kitchen.

Working frantically with a mop, brush, and pails of water, Luna scrubbed, wrung, and rinsed until the blood was gone, then scoured the floor with ammonia, vinegar, and Comet. Some of the tiles were cracked from the hammer blows.

She washed herself again.

Wrapped in a rubber raincoat like a lobster fisherman, with rubber boots on her feet and gloves on her hands, Luna descended the cellar stairs to dig a makeshift grave. Thank the Earth Goddess pioneer homes were built on dirt foundations.

Pick . . .

Shovel . . .

Pick . . .

Shovel . . .

Four feet down . . .

Then Luna rolled the plastic bundle into the underground hole, filling it in and stomping on the mound until it looked like . . . a grave.

Think, girl, think!

Up the stairs and out the door, she sloshed to the side of her home, and there unlocked the slanted chute that once fed wood to the cellar. The ramshackle house clung to the slope south of Snug Cove, this side gazing across the incline toward Point Grey and the States, both now swallowed up by the hungry storm. Down was to the left, up to the right, with runoff collecting in a trough parallel to the wall, before it tumbled below to Queen Charlotte Channel. Across the strait, Lighthouse Park winked through the rain.

On hands and knees, Luna built a dam across the trough.

Soon the rain rivulet was diverted down the chute, gurgling into the cellar where it inundated the floor, smooth-ening the mound of the grave into an even layer of silt.

Luna dismantled the dam.

Then relocked the chute.

Then went in, shucked off her clothes, and took a long, hot shower.

Everything bloody was in the washer when Katt returned home, Luna drying her hair by the stove. The kitchen was spic and span with no trace of murder about. A day or two and the cellar would be dry, its floor the same flat layer of earth it was before the killing. Until then, Luna didn't want Katt poking around, alone in the house while she was gone for the Mystery Weekend.

"Mom, you look spooked. Like you've seen the Devil himself."

"Pack a bag, Katt. We've got a ferry to catch. You're going to help me win fifty thousand dollars."

Zoophilia

Vancouver

11:15 
A.M.

The pressure was off externally, but not internally. Both morning papers were plastered with coverage of yesterday's shootout at the Buckley Hotel, accompanied by photos of the Tarot cards on the walls of the seedy room.
The Sun
had linked the occult decor to the plot of
Jolly Roger,
comparing Tarot's "coven" with the cards at the end of the book.
The Province
connected the "human" candles forming the pentagram to dark Satanic rites. The deadlier the adversary, the more justified the force, so Special X encouraged such speculation to ensure CIIS—the Complaints and Internal Investigations Section—kept Chan and Craven off the hook. People believe what they want to believe, especially when it advances their political agenda, so having tried and convicted Tarot for the "Jolly Roger" crimes, the Heather Street protesters had transformed into media spin doctors pontificating about and capitalizing off the affair, packing their signs away until the next cause celebre. What they didn't know because it hadn't been released, was Karen Lake's assertion Tarot "boned me all night . . . The humping didn't stop till Tube Steak knocked." If so, Tarot wasn't free to go and hang the twins. And that meant "Jolly Roger" was still on the prowl.

Nick welcomed every excuse to avoid Special X. Someone in
The Sun's
morgue—God knows how—had dug up the earlier story on him from 1975. Under the cutline
Then and Now,
the paper had juxtaposed two photos of him.
Now
was a shot taken yesterday outside the Buckley Hotel: Nick being given first aid while a stretcher was carted off behind.
Then
showed him astride the hog with the tyke in his tattooed arm, jean jacket frayed from torn-off sleeves, hair long and tangled like the roots of a tree, bugs squashed on his stubbled cheeks and jaw. Just thinking about the ribbing he'd take at HQ made him wince. Why does the past always come back to haunt you?

UBC crowns this city's finest real estate. Spread across the cliffed plateau of Point Grey, the old university (as opposed to upstart SFU) juts west like a tongue French-kissing Georgia Strait. To the south, beyond Musqueam Park where Chloe's body was found, Lulu Island chokes the mouth of the Fraser River. To the north, guarded by the Dogfish Burial Pole from which Zoe hung, English Bay washes the foot of Hollyburn Mountain. Across the strait from the tip of the tongue lies Vancouver Island, and beyond that, dotting the sea that stretches all the way to Asia, is Deadman's Island.

Thanks to the blinding rain, Nick couldn't see the end of University Boulevard, let alone the view. But that didn't stop the golfers who drowned on both sides of the road. He parked near Fraternity Row and splashed the rest of the way.

Whereas SFU is stark, clinical, and clean, UBC is ivy-covered and shabby genteel. The Cowan Vertebrate Museum was on the fourth floor in the third wing of the Biological Sciences Building on Main Mall. The building wore a tweed coat with patches on the sleeves, and had a short-stemmed pipe clamped in its teeth. It took three inquiries to find the elevator, which Nick rode up and back in time to the 1940s. The museum curator, he was convinced, would look like Ronald Colman, cocked fedora, pencil-thin mustache and all.

The door was open so Nick knocked and called out, "Hello."

"Back here," a voice answered, light years away.

The Cowan Vertebrate Museum looked like a locker room, 1940s style. The aisle that ran from the door to the far high-windowed wall was flanked by three rows of tall wooden cabinets. Stuffed alligators surmounted the row to Nick's left; five deer heads above the door watched him cross the room; an iguana from the Galapagos topped the case filled with birds to his right; while a bald eagle perched on a branch at the end of the next row. The counter beneath the windows was crammed with computer equipment and other dusty specimens. A SONA-Graph Spectrum Analyzer stood ready to voiceprint songbird recordings. An emperor penguin with the name "Bob" on a scrap of paper clamped in its beak stared from the corner under a great blue heron.

"Here," the voice repeated, off to Nick's left.

Caribou and mountain goat heads mounted above, anteater and platypus skeletons shelved beside, another door led from the museum to a cramped and cluttered office. Here there were skulls, books, bones, photos, skulls, bird wings, books, and a pileated woodpecker dangling from the ceiling.

"In here," the voice called through yet another door facing this one.

At last, the inner sanctum.

With one live specimen.

The taxidermy workroom behind the disheveled office tripled as a museum annex, lab, and lecture hall. To the left beyond a counter, sink, empty cages on the floor, hooked apron, and goat's head with paper buckteeth, a globe, screen, and blackboard ranged along the wall. Chalked on the blackboard were Latin species names. A pair of benches spanned the room from the blackboard to an ornothology map. The far bench and the shelf behind displayed stuffed exhibits: snowy, barn, great gray, great horned, and short-eared owls; a kiwi, African crowned crane, pelican, and gibbon; and several hands-on specimens stuck on sticks like furred and feathered lollipops.

Working seated on a stool at the end of the near bench, almost finished skinning a barred owl, Marty Fink was a specimen indeed. Far from the laid-back ecotype zoology often attracts, moon face capped by corkscrew curls as bouffant as Louis XIV's powdered wig, Fink was Pear Shape in
Dick Tracy,
Cousin Elmo in
Harold Hedd,
Fat Freddie in
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers,
and Mark Volman of Flo & Eddie. No way in God's green acre was he Ronald Colman.
One thing about a past of drugs,
Nick thought,
is it tunes you to the subtle nuances of people.