Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  The Dogfish Burial Pole was fifteen feet high. Two vertical struts supported a horizontal cross beam carved with the stylized face of a shark. Hands nailed to this crosspiece and head cut off, the corpse of a woman hung between the struts. Her white nurse's uniform torn down the front revealed a strip of flesh from neck to groin. Blood ran down this path to both feet and dripped from them to a pool below. Tongue stuck out, the face of the Dogfish replaced her head.

  "Same marks on the neck bone?"

  "Same knife, Katt. Caused by a sweeping slice that lopped off each head. See how the M.O.'s changing? The killer is upping the taunt. The first two women weren't displayed to be found. The skeleton was buried, and the floater could wash out to sea. The taunting began with just Polaroids of the heads, then expanded to include corporal remains. The killer carried the body to the totem pole, then climbed up some sort of ladder to nail it to the beam, then poured blood collected during her murder over Portman's remains."

  "Why do that?"

  "To make the taunt more grisly. The nurse had been dead for a day."

  "Was she raped?"

  "Her genitals were bruised. But immotile sperm may have come from a secret boyfriend we were told about later."

  "No safe sex?"

  "This was before AIDS, Katt. Or DNA fingerprints."

  The teenager shuffled to the Polaroid of Portman's head mounted on a stake. Clipped to it was a note sent to DeClercq, constructed from cut-and-paste newspaper headlines: Welcome aboard, Robert. Do you think you're up to this?

  "Why send a note to you?"

  "Psychology of the killer. The taunts were to show he's superior to the police, and by then it was known I was in command. At that point the killer's focus fixed on me."

  "The three heads have black hair. Did you notice that?"

  The Mountie nodded. "Black hair's a fetish tied to mental trauma in the killer's past."

  "Tied how?" Katt asked.

  "That we never found out. Our prime suspect died during a takedown by the Force."

  Katt inhaled a sharp gasp when she flipped to the next photo. In it the moon, one day from full, shone down on the body of a nun sprawled dead in a convent garden. Her habit was torn from neck to waist and slit from waist to feet. Blood and her spread legs indicated rape. In place of her missing head and cowl, a jack-o'-lantern leered at the camera. The face of the pumpkin had triangles for eyes and nose, above a mouth filled with fangs in a malevolent grin.

  "The nun was killed on Halloween," said DeClercq. "Stabbed sideways through the throat as she was raped, presumably so the killer could have her death throes during sex. Severe penetration injuries, but no semen found, leading us to believe his anger welled up from inability to ejaculate. Rape's a crime of violence, not sex, Katt."

  "Why rape and kill a nun?"

  "Because it's the ultimate outrage. The Polaroid of her head on a stake was found under a pew in Christ Church Cathedral. You can't see her hair because of the black cowl, which seems to be a symbolic stand-in for the killer's fetish. It's almost as if black head hair stands in for something else." "What?" asked Katt.

  "You're the consulting detective. You tell me. How is hair tied to childhood trauma?" "Spanking with a hairbrush?"

  "I think it's worse than that."

  "The nun's breasts were slashed, too. The villain must be his mom."

  The fifth victim, Natasha Wilkes, was skiing on a cross-country trail when she was attacked. Katt gaped at the next photo in the pile. The woman lay spread-eagled on her back in the snow, jacket ripped to slash her breasts, clothes on the lower part of her body cut to shreds, boots four feet apart with the rear half of each ski rammed vertically into the drift. Her pubic hair was matted with ice and blood, and in place of her missing head was a porcelain beer mug. The mug bore the face of W. C. Fields, that hard-drinking, misanthropic braggart with a bulbous nose. Clipped from a newspaper, across the nose was pasted the single word Robert. The base of the mug was etched with an inscription: Never give a sucker an even break.

  "Upping the taunt," said Katt.

  "His final killing would have been a coup de grace for me, had he not stalked the wrong victim by mistake, beheading a student of my wife's instead of Genevieve. In a cabin up the North Shore Mountains that night, we shot our prime Headhunter suspect in taking him down. Hidden within the cabin were four half-pound bags of cocaine, the freshly severed head of the student mistaken for my wife, and a bowie knife with a nick in its blade."

  "Who was it?" Katt asked.

  "Grabowski's pimp. John Lincoln Hardy. The black in the mug shot."

  "Strong case."

  "Yes, but with a troubling gap. We never found the five missing heads. Now I've been sent a headhunter's taunt by someone who's alive, prompting the voice at the back of my mind to wonder if the shrunken head is somehow linked to the Headhunter crimes."

  "So that's why you're combing through the closed Headhunter file?"

  "Because the voice nags the missing link is something I missed back then."

  Yes, they might have been Holmes and Watson on a winter night, close friends side by side to share this cheery hearth, discussing their latest adventure at 221B Baker Street, as here, "consulting" Katt about the Headhunter case, DeClercq felt the same contentment he had felt in Domfront, as if all the tragedy in his past was the price he paid for now.

  His contentment would soon be shattered.

  When the psycho got Katt.

  It was midnight before Robert closed the file and went to bed.

  Whatever it was that troubled him, he didn't find the answer in the Headhunter file.

  In The Name Of God

  Vancouver

  While DeClercq spent the evening with one file, George spent it with thousands.

  Ironically, it was the Cree in him that made Ghost Keeper such a crack Mountie. He'd joined the Force as a special constable under the 3(b) Program to police the Duck Lake Reserve. There his uncanny ability in hunting down fugitives earned him the nickname The Tracker and brought him to the attention of the RCMP Forensic (then Crime Detection) Lab. His lab work with Hairs and Fibers added the sobriquet "The Human Vacuum Cleaner," for when he was through with a crime scene it was "all in the bag," and got him promoted to staff sergeant in charge of RFISS. "Ree-fiss" to Mounties, the Regional Forensic Identification Support Service provides state-of-the-art backup to Members in the field: like archeological excavation of burial sites, blood-stain analysis, laser equipment, entomology, and chemical processing. George was the Mountie who marshaled RFISS expertise until the whistle blew on pedophiles who had preyed at the residential schools.

  The first residential school in B.C. was opened at Mission by the Catholic church in 1861. When the colony joined Canada ten years later, the federal government assumed responsibility for West Coast Indians. By the 1880s the Department of Indian Affairs was forcibly removing kids from native homes to board them in a network of fourteen schools run by the Catholic, Anglican, and United churches. Parents who resisted were jailed or confined to the reserve. The goal wasn't education; it was cultural genocide. The kids were warned, "We're going to take the savage out of you," when truth was the savages were those with keys.

  The walls of the room in which George sat tonight, tapping the keyboard of a Force computer, were covered with class photos clumped by school. Year to year, the photos were the same: Indian kids in uniform outside wooden buildings, flanked by the Christian whites who brainwashed them. Files shelved under the photos revealed crimes behind the facade.

  In some schools the regimen began at six a.m. Bed inspection was followed by fifteen minutes to wash and dress; then morning chores were completed or no breakfast, chores like scrubbing floors with a toothbrush or genital inspection by the staff. In other schools the focus was on sports. Girls were fingered by the ump as they stepped up to bat, and boys sucked the coach off to make the soccer team. Heads were sheared and doused with poison against lice, as straps enforced discipline and punished rebels.
In one school the dorm prefect had the only TV. One by one the kids were invited into his bedroom to watch. Those who failed to satisfy him weren't invited back. Those who did watched a lot of TV.

  Complaints by Indians had always been dismissed as lies. Kids who ran away were returned to their abusers. Finally, when native suicide rates and tales of rape, beating, and torture got too hot for politicians, they struck the royal commission on Aboriginal Peoples. In its report of 1992, the commission compared the schools to Nazi Germany. Dumbfounded whites wrung their hands and wondered, "What went wrong?" The answer is nothing went wrong. British Columbia neared its goal of erasing Indian culture.

  In 1994 the Mounties stepped in.

  The task force they set up launched the largest investigation in B.C. history. The core team of sixteen cops assisted by sixty-five native Members in the field required a special computer system to handle the flood of complaints. Now the Force was closing in on ninety suspects who preyed on kids in the residential schools. Until the standoff at Totem Lake had summoned him north, George had been second in command of the core team. Tonight he was back at task force central hunting for Winterman Snow.

  The computer showed no file on him.

  Because the probe was "victim-driven," there were large gaps. It was up to natives to approach the task force, and Mounted policy was not to search for those abused. Past experience had proved hunting victims down often led to suicide, so those who didn't want to were not obliged to get involved.

  Winterman Snow could be hiding in such a gap, from which he launched his own campaign of revenge against whites.

  The Tracker moved on to footwork.

  Some residential schools had a wide catch basin, capturing native children from villages up and down the coast. The crucifix smeared on the floor of Cy Flint's cabin seemed to George to have Catholic overtones, so he began with the Catholic school nearest to Winterman Snow's hunting ground.

  Forsaking his computer for a magnifying glass, the Cree crossed to the clutch of class photos pinned to the wall above the complaint files for St. Sebastian's School near the Alaska panhandle. The 1950s seemed like a good decade to start, so George swept the magnifier year by year along the rows of sullen native kids. He found what he was looking for in the class photo taken in 1954: a boy with Indian features among other Indian boys, but whose skin color was as snow white as his hair.

  Unpinning the photo from the wall, George checked its back, and sure enough, the names of those pictured were recorded row by row.

  The Indian name of the albino boy was "Winterman Snow."

  Ghost Keeper removed the master file on the school from the shelf, and carried it and the class photo over to his desk. In the 1950s St. Sebastian School had been run by Reverend Paul Noel, the great-grand-nephew of Rector Luke Noel, the Roman Catholic missionary who plied the west coast of Canada last century on a holy crusade to convert native "heathens" to God. George knew all about Rector Luke Noel, for while the Christian zealot had been denouncing native spirituality as demonic and pagan, admonishing Catholic converts to relinquish all ungodly idols, crests, and masks to him, on several occasions demanding the public burning of totem poles, the Rector was busy selling Haida, Tsimshian, and Gitxsan artifacts to American and European collectors and museums, some of them the oldest and most sacred Indian art in existence. Many of the pieces—spirit headdresses, shaman rattles, dancing blankets, slave-killer clubs, ritual pipes, and totem clan masks—later ended up in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. Where other pieces were now was unknown, probably hidden away in estates of rapacious and avaricious turn-of-the-century tycoons.

  Pieces like the Headhunting Blanket.

  Inside the file was a photograph of Reverend Paul Noel writing a sermon at the desk in his office at St. Sebastian School. A dark-haired man wearing bible black with a clerical dog collar, the reverend's sinful mouth was pressed razor-thin beneath sunken eyes haunted by visions of hell. Two pictures hung side by side on the wall behind. One was of martyr Saint Sebastian pierced by Roman arrows, his near-naked body bound with ropes to a tree, the look on his heaven-turned face like that of Jesus in so many paintings in European galleries. The other was a black-and-white photograph of Rector Luke Noel, a bony and bushy-bearded priest with spiked eyebrows, bedecked in spiritual artifacts relinquished to him. Draped around his stooped shoulders was a dancing blanket, the design of it suggestive of a time when one totem tribe was warring with another. Small faces on the blanket represented the trophy heads of enemies slain in battle.

  The Headhunting Blanket.

  Ghost Keeper read the first complaint in the thick file:

  My name is Simon Joe. I'm from Metlakatla Village north of Prince Rupert. My life changed in September of 1955 when the Indian agent arrived to take me away. It was sunny, and I recall my grandmother crying and begging him to let me stay. The agent threatened to jail her. I was spirited away from a family that loved me to St. Sebastian School.

  The first class after lunch was the time every boy feared. That's when the reverend would call one of us to his office and lock the door. The day I arrived, he chose me. I was told to strip naked like Saint Sebastian in the picture on the wall, then forced to bend forward over the office desk. The reverend asked if I knew what a martyr was. When I said no, he said it's a person who chooses to suffer rather than renounce his religion. He told me how Jesuit martyrs had suffered torture and death at the hands of Indians in the early days, and asked if I was a martyr to my people's pagan beliefs.

  I began to cry when he dropped his pants.

  I began to scream when he spread the cheeks of my ass.

  Then he pierced me with what he called his Arrow of God, and ordered me to pray to Saint Sebastian for salvation.

  It took him forever to finish with me, and as he grunted over my back, he repeated Latin words again and again.

  When it was over, and blood ran down my legs, the reverend asked if I was a Christian convert or a pagan martyr. I told him I was a Christian, but that didn't stop him doing it to me next time.

  One day I ran away, but the local Mountie caught me. He called my story lies, and dragged me back to the reverend. The reverend put this knobbed ring around his cock, and told me boys who tried to escape suffered the arrowhead.

  One boy couldn't take it.

  He drowned himself in the river.

  The reverend called it an accident and buried him on the bank.

  Though it's been forty years since I was raped, a dirty, crappy feeling still hangs over me like a dark cloud. I know I'll never shake it. That's why I drink. School taught me to fear whites. I'm filled with anger and hate. . . .

  There was no mention of Winterman Snow in the St. Sebastian file, but George had no doubt the albino boy had suffered similar rapes. The lingering effect of these shocks of family separation and sexual abuse on native communities was termed "Residential School Syndrome" by the royal commission. Many turned to drugs and alcohol to forget. Many had low self-esteem from being taught native culture was inferior to white society. Many had trouble raising their own kids because separation from family prevented them from learning parenting skills. Some took their own lives, and others became predatory abusers themselves.

  Was that what happened to Winterman Snow? wondered George.

  Using his computer, he sent an e-mail message to all native task-force Members in the field, asking them to locate the Indian village from which Winterman Snow had been plucked for the residential school. Unfortunately, the reverend would never stand trial for his crimes. He'd accidentally hanged himself decades ago while engaged in autoerotic asphyxiation.

  Damn his soul, thought George.

  He carried the 1954 photo back to the year-by-year progression of St. Sebastian class photographs pinned to the wall. The albino boy reappeared in the photo for 1955, but vanished from school pictures after that. Did he run away for good? wondered George.

  The past few
days had been stressful on the mental tug-of-war inherent in Ghost Keeper's mind, pitting his Mounted and Cree halves against each other. Though he eschewed violence to advance native claims, he knew the frustration that led the Sundancers to seize the sacred land, and that's why he had established a spirit bond with Moses John to peacefully resolve the standoff at Totem Lake. Whoever had shot the spiritual leader while powwowing with Sergeant Spann made it appear to natives as if George had baited a trap. If the gunman was one of the Doomsdayers, Grizzly had scored twice, eliminating the challenge in camp to his control, while proving the New World Order planned to use quislings to crush their own people. Then, flying in a plane chartered by the RCMP, Ghost Keeper, a native, had shot a blood brother. Indians on both sides of the line would see his killing of Grizzly as a traitorous act. And now, to add to the stress, there was Snow. Whites had systematically used residential schools for 123 years to wipe out native culture, maiming how many thousands of innocent lives, but when one of those abused fractured and ran amok, it was Ghost Keeper who was dispatched to take the madman down.

  Maintain the Right.

  The motto of the Force.

  The way he viewed it, there was no "right" in the case of Winterman Snow.

  Just a vicious circle.

  As Ghost Keeper studied the 1955 photo through the magnifying glass, the tug-of-war tightened its pull on him, causing anger to well up into his heart. In many ways the photo was identical to 1954's, for here were the same sullen Indian kids dressed in uniform, while Reverend Noel and the white families who ran the school boxed them in, smiling piously for posterity. In only one detail was the photo different, for standing guard to one side was the local Member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  "Why didn't you protect them?" Ghost Keeper asked the corporal.

  Unpinning the picture from the wall, he turned it over to read the Member's name.

  Female of the Species