Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  "Why the padlock?"

  "I'm caught in the middle. The college wants me to comb our files for evidence of abuse, while at the same time maintaining patient confidentiality. They asked me to ensure George doesn't sabotage my search while he's under suspension."

  "Am I allowed in?"

  "I think you can be trusted." Anda Carlisle rebolted the door and led the chief superintendent into Ruryk's office. File drawers were pulled open and empty of contents, and every surface and half the floor were buried under folders. Hundreds of boxes with audiotapes lined the perimeter each with a label tied to a file.

  "You're snowed under."

  "Worse than it looks. Listening to the monologues he recorded from his patients takes hours. Bright side is, if I'm to assume George's practice, it must be done anyway."

  "And your patients?"

  "I'm coping," she said. "Overnight I've become the busiest shrink in town. In the right place at the wrong time."

  "Hard to believe George is kinky."

  Anda cleared files from the seat of a chair facing the desk for him. Before she sat down behind the desk, the psychiatrist withdrew a volume from a shelf weighed down with texts.

  "Havelock Ellis is an authority on sex."

  She opened the volume to a bookmark and read:

  "Every normal man in matters of sex, when we examine him carefully enough, is found to show some abnormal elements, and the abnormal man is merely manifesting in a disordered or extravagant shape some phase of the normal man. Normal and abnormal, taken in the mass, can all be plotted as variations of different degree on the same curve. The loving woman who exclaims: 'I could eat you!' is connected by links, each in itself small, with Jack the Ripper. We all possess within us, in a more or less developed form, the germs of atrocities."

  She closed the book.

  "As Jung said, Chief Superintendent, The spirit of our time believes itself superior to its own psychology. Human sexuality is ten percent biological, twenty percent physiological, and seventy percent psychosexual. Nature and man differ about the aim of sex. Nature seeks procreation, while we want the fullest possible satisfaction in sexual orgasm. The orgasm has two parts: physical and mental. The physical is that tingling of electricity seeking discharge. The mental, however, is what determines release. Raw sexual energy is the bullets in the gun, but the mind controls which finger pulls the trigger."

  DeClercq's gun was loaded and had a hair trigger from years of celibacy, but his aim had recently vacillated between Anda and Gill. The gun was now directly aimed at the psychiatrist.

  "In early life we are 'hypnotized' by something we link mentally to erotic satisfaction. It may be the sex organs of the opposite sex. Or the sex organs of the same sex. Or some object or activity we associate with sex. What differs from man to man is the means by which orgasm is procured. The sexual impulse works at a deeper subconscious level than other primal urges. When we think we understand it, it takes us by surprise, for it has the power to override conscious checks. Do you feel as if you carry a separate 'sexual self around with you? I do," said Carlisle. "Colin Wilson calls it: that strange, poisonous, shocking world of sex. I treat pedophilia, voyeurism, exhibitionism, partialism, frotteurism, sadism, masochism, zoophilia, coprophilia, urophilia, necrophilia, cordophilia, hypo-xyphilia, and so on. Psychiatry teaches me everyone has skeletons in the sex closet. Did George let his out?"

  "I don't see him as a sadist."

  "Neither do I. The women he may have abused were symbolically subjugated, not bodily hurt. The whippings left no marks, and the patients could leave. Psychiatry draws some doctors who seek to solve their own mental problems more than patients', and at the same time puts them in a position of master-slave dominance over weak, crumbling minds. It could be George is a dinosaur who can't adapt. An overbearing mother made him afraid of women, so he became a shrink to fathom the depths of our minds. That control worked until feminism took hold and he found himself losing ground to a gynecocracy at academe. Women's liberation has a spill-over effect in that unconscious transmissions of feminist dominance by an aggressive manner and over-assertiveness may enhance a male's castration anxiety with consequent fear of the vagina. So George whips women to put us back in place, but women drive him from the university, resulting in a repeat here."

  "If he did it."

  "If," Anda agreed. "As soon as a mental component enters into a physical urge, the urge stretches beyond ordinary limits. Orgasm is a response to an act of will and imagination, not the material world. Perverted acts achieve intensity in expressing the sexual being that is rarely obtained by 'normal sex.' Perversion results to meet a need that cannot otherwise be satisfied. Kink heightens, not lowers, sex. Taboo involves the whole of our being, and resonates in the most secret desires of our psyche."

  "Tell me, Doctor, what turns you on?"

  Jesus! thought DeClercq. What am I doing?

  "Intelligence," Carlisle said, looking him dead in the eye. "Women like me notoriously find intellectuals exciting, and do so in measure as our own intelligence develops. No one-night stand with a throbbing stud can substitute deep down for an erotic relationship between like minds."

  Hey, thought DeClercq. I'm intelligent. Or do you mean superintelligent?

  The more he was around her, the more Robert found himself turned on by Anda Carlisle. That electric spark which had zapped him the last time he was here was no doubt the physical aspect of sex, his groin an electromagnet drawn to her. But he was too old or wise to fall victim to lust for long, and now he, too, sought the fusing of like minds. The problem was he had been out of the sex game for so long that—combined with shyness—he felt like an insecure teen.

  He yearned to ask her out.

  But he feared rejection.

  Bob, she's young enough to be your daughter, Katt had scolded.

  You've heard the phrase 'dirty old man'?

  "So?" asked Anda. "What's on your mind?"

  "This," Robert replied, pulling the Ident photo of rings in a burning can from his coat pocket to place on the desk. "A decade ago, the Headhunter raped and decapitated women. We found the bodies but never recovered the heads. This photo was taken six weeks later, in which you'll note dozens of rings identical to those piercing the lips of Wren's shrunken head. I suspect the missing female heads were shrunken, too, and burned in this tin to destroy the evidence. When I met with you and George to discuss the taunt mailed to Special X, I asked, 'Why send the shrunken head personally to me?' You replied, 'Perhaps the killer locked minds with you sometime in the past.' Assuming the Headhunter raped and killed the women and Wren, why switch focus from female victims to male prey?"

  "You think the Headhunter is loose again?"

  The Mountie nodded.

  Carlisle studied the rings in the photograph. "The sexual orientation of anyone can change. Sex these days means anything goes. Your girlfriend loves a girlfriend who used to love a boyfriend, and my boyfriend loves a girlfriend whose last boyfriend was psychically a girlfriend, and a patient of mine, born a man, has become a transsexual lesbian whose female lover hopes to become a man. It's the age of omnisexuals. Try-sexuals, if you like, as in try anything.

  "We know serial killers who prey on both males and females. Clifford Olson is this city's best example. If we begin with that truth, we can build on what we last discussed with George.

  "There are phases to any sexual crime. First comes the antecedent or fantasy phase. What injects a fantasy with its ritual or fetish is the 'original conditioning situation.' Every man's behavior is programmed by early experience, so we need to know his past to understand his crime. Then governs now. Say we theorize abuse in which the child who became this killer was molested by two predators. One female. One. Both with genitals pierced by rings."

  "His parents?"

  "Possibly. But I'm more inclined toward his mother and a male friend. That's why his first beheading spree focused on women. The next phase of sex crime is victim selection. Each stalker has his own
unique criteria, as the victim chosen will play an essential stand-in role in acting out his fantasy."

  "The women the Headhunter chose all had black hair or wore a nun's cowl."

  "Then chances are the Headhunter's mother also had black hair. Black pubic hair around labia pierced with rings. Assume the boy was forced during sexual abuse to perform oral sex on his mother. That's incest. That's taboo. So now we begin to fathom the shrunken head as a fetish.

  "The sexual appetite can be hypnotized by the most unlikely objects. Any 'deviations' caught in the primal hypnotism of sexual desire may be necessary for sexual orgasm. Fetishism is a definite term for an indefinite kink. It once meant only sexual obsession for inanimate objects. Later, it was extended to include parts of the body. Hair fetishist. Foot fetishist. Crutch fetishist. Apron fetishist. The list is endless. Krafft-Ebing had a patient who adored kid gloves. He collected hundreds of pairs, and bedded his wife with, gloves gripping both sides of her head, or masturbated with them jacking his penis. A Puerto Rican fetishist bought buckets of blood in a Bronx butcher shop because only if it was splashed on the floor could he get an erection and have sex with women."

  "Wren had an album with locks of hair snipped from kids he abused," said DeClercq.

  "Remember the case of P from last time? When he touched hair with scissors he got an erection, and when he cut it, he ejaculated."

  "Do you not find it ironic that one hair fetishist fell victim to another?"

  Carlisle tapped the rings in the Ident photograph. "Shrinking a head as a fetish is more complex. Usually, the fetish takes part in the commission phase of a sex crime, when the offender acts out his fantasy with the stand-in victim. Here the fetish is made from the head of the victim in the post-offense phase, and comes full circle back to how the fetish developed. This fetish is a warped image of the 'original conditioning situation' that hypnotized his mind."

  "We found no semen in the bodies of either female or male victims," said DeClercq.

  "That's because this killer climaxes in the post-offense phase. Penetration is nothing more than an act of anger reflecting what was done to him. It's not the core of the fantasy. The core is using the fetish as a masturbation aid. The child was hypnotized by the rings through the lips of Mom's sex, surrounded by a tangle of black public hair. His face was buried in the fearful, shameful maw, which he must stitch shut to conquer his fear and shame. The female body has a limited number of orifices. Fear and shame transfer mental focus from the dreaded, yawning hole below to the unthreatening head. The killer shrinks the head to hide what it really is. Now the hair can stand in for pubic hair, and the lips can stand in for lips of Mom's sex. The killer pierces the lips with rings to make a fetish of Mom, and laces shut the dreaded maw to try to bring his psychic stress to an end.

  "Fetishism springs from a form of 'rape complex.' The need of the fetishist to impose himself on the sex substitute. When he tugs the thong through the rings to yank shut the lips, the Headhunter ejaculates a stream of rage."

  "A primal stream?" punned Robert.

  "A primal scream," Anda concurred. "To see orifice transfer at work, consider the Marquis de Sade. He, too, feared and hated his mother. De Sade first came to the notice of police when prostitutes reported his penchant for cutting shallow incisions in their skin with a penknife to pour hot wax into the slits. The symbolism is obvious. Having rejected natural orifices, the marquis made his own 'entrances' into the female body, before psychologically raping it by filling the pits with wax. At twenty-eight, de Sade was arrested for kidnapping a pastry cook's widow so he could make the same fetish of her.

  "During the Reign of Terror, de Sade's prison cell overlooked the guillotine to which 1,800 men and women lost their heads in a single month while he was jailed. In 1792 he wrote to tell his lawyer that the Princesse de Lamballe had gone to the blade. Her head, stuck on a pike, was shown to the king and queen, and her body was dragged through the streets for eight hours after being subjected to debauchery. This included the slicing off of her mons, which the executioner stuck on her upper lip as a pubic mustache."

  "Orifice transfer," echoed DeClercq.

  "Because reality never lives up to fantasy," said Carlisle, "for fantasy is perfect and reality never is, the killer shrank fetish after fetish to try to get it right, while you recovered the discarded bodies of the women."

  "Why'd he stop?"

  "Perhaps he didn't. There could be headless women scattered around the globe. But my theory is what drove him to kill went into remission, then a recent incident reactivated him. Say an aggressive male made homosexual advances. The rage that welled up focused the fetish on the other abuser, the man with genital piercings like Mom's who raped the boy while she watched. Here we have psychology like we discussed before. After the attacks on men, he shrinks each head to mask what it really is, then, to reverse the rape, symbolically sews his anus shut against the rings."

  "The fetish makes a psychosexual jump from female to male?"

  "The complexity of psychosexual murder is directly proportional to the intelligence of the offender," said Carlisle.

  "The Headhunter read de Sade?"

  "I wouldn't be surprised. Sex offenders often read the literature of sex crimes. Are you aware the killer Up north is patterning his bush hunts on a real serial predator?"

  "Who?" said DeClercq.

  "Robert Hansen. The Alaskan businessman who acted out his fantasy in the 1980s. Attacking at least thirty prostitutes, he killed twenty of them. Hansen picked up exotic dancers in Anchorage topless bars for cruel oral sex. When one woman drew a knife, he yanked it away and stabbed her to death. 'When I thought about it,' Hansen later confessed, 'it was the sort of feeling I got when I bagged a trophy animal.' He was an expert big-game hunter. He soon began fantasizing about hunting naked women down in the woods, eventually turning his fantasy into reality. He'd drive a hooker into the forest for sex in his car. If she satisfied him, he let her go. If she didn't, he forced her out of the car at gunpoint to pursue naked across the snow with a rifle. 'I would let her think she got away, then flush her out to get her to run again.' Finally, he would shoot her, then bury the body."

  DeClercq turned the information over in his mind. "The Headhunter reactivates as Shrink," he mused aloud. "Assuming we have two killers loose—Head-hunter here and Decapitator north—how have different psychologies led to such similar crimes?"

  "Intriguing question," said Carlisle.

  Where, Not Why

  Nick Craven's emotions swung back and forth like a pendulum: I love her, she loves me not, I love her, she loves me not. . . . Last night saw him maturely swallow the fact if Gill didn't love him, he couldn't change that, so Give me grace to accept the things I cannot change. This morning the moment he saw Gill sharing the coffee cup and laughing with DeClercq,, he flip-flopped back in resolve. But what right had he: to feel betrayed? If not for DeClercq in the Africa case, Nick would be serving life in prison for killing his mom. And if not for Gill in the same case, he would be food for fishes in Davy Jones's locker.

  Why do fools fall in love? The lover's question, he thought.

  Nick felt like a stalker.

  Was that next?

  From UBC, Nick drove to Headquarters and parked in the lot behind Special X. Trudging up Heather from Thirty-third to Thirty-seventh was a slip and slide. He entered the Operations Building, passed Security, and climbed to ViCLAS on the second floor.

  Vancouver leads the world in geographic profiling. The Where, not the Why of hunting serial killers and sex offenders. Like most human activities, choosing a crime site has geographic logic. When you go to the store for a quart of milk, you don't bypass twenty stores to shop across town; you stop at the nearest one. What governs you is a quantifiable spatial rule as the least-effort principle. The same behavior governs crime, just as fear of arrest creates a buffer zone of predictable dimensions around a serial killer's home. Right-handed killers tend to flee to the left, but move to the right when t
hey encounter obstacles. They discard evidence to the right, and hide near outside walls in buildings. A serial sex offender prefers a corner house which offers four, not two, escape routes.

  And so on.

  Each time a serial offender meets, attacks, kills, or dumps a victim, he leaves behind a point on a map. Except in the case of a transient killer with no roots, the crime site is linked by spatial behavior to anchor points like the killer's workplace or home. Since such behavior is governed by quantifiable rules, it can be analyzed by a computer. All the crime sites are plotted on a screen map. The computer draws a box around this "activity space" and divides it into a grid. Then using an equation based on criminology research into typical journeys to crime sites, the computer takes a beginning point on the grid and determines the distance from that point to the first crime site. The equation calculates the probability of that point being the bad guy's home, then repeats the process for all points on the grid and each crime site.

  The result is a geographic profile of the activity space. Overlaying the street map of the city, it looks like a three-dimensional isopleth relief map like those used in school texts to show elevation or rainfall. The amoebas of the profile are different colors. Gray areas are least likely to be the bad guy's home. Hot spots in red predict the most probable home base of the serial offender.

  His anchor point.

  Nick was after nothing that elaborate today. Since he already knew where Bron Wren had lived twenty-five years ago, what he required was a map of the "activity space" generated by the six cases from four sites that had gone to court. The space would indicate where to look for other victims in the hair-fetish album. Album photos would be sent to all primary schools in the catch basin to match with past enrollment records. Once he had the names, he could hunt them down.

  "All you want is a pin map?"

  Rusty Lewis, the ViCLAS hotshot, was disappointed.

  "Pins for the homes of his victims. And a star for Wren's basement suite."