Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  The taunt Flood entered in the closed-out file.

  The taunt Flood enlarged and mounted on the wall at home.

  Maple leaves.

  Magnifying glass in hand and bum in the air, the Mountie got down on his elbows and knees like the Great Detective himself. Beside the photo of the head lay the book on trees. DeClercq bounced the magnifier back and forth.

  Elvira, he thought.

  For what he confirmed was the leaves in the sand were from two species of maple. Those with classic deep lobes were big leaf maple, like the illustration in the top row of leaves on page 45. The big leaf maple, acer macrophyllum, is native to western North America. Those with less distinctive lobes were sycamore maple, like the illustration in the third row. The sycamore maple, acer pseudoplatanus, is native to Europe and western Asia.

  The big leaf grows here.

  The sycamore doesn't.

  Unless someone transplants the Eurasian tree.

  Like the tree that shed the leaves in the Headhunter's taunt.

  History takes time to develop perspective. History is like the Academy awards. Voted Best Picture of 1941 was How Green Was My Valley, but hindsight reveals the Oscar belonged to Citizen Kane. As cop and historian, DeClercq knew only passing time fit disparate pieces into a whole. Only now did he grasp the significance of what Elvira Franklen, the city's greenest thumb, told him a few years ago during the Ripper case.

  About Flood.

  And maple leaves.

  His mind flashed back . . .

  Her house was a tree-embowered bungalow in Kerrisdale, an affluent and fuddy-duddy part of the city. The rain had washed the last tenacious leaves from maples and chestnuts in the yard, scattering a soggy red and yellow carpet across the lawn. The dwarf-sized woman who answered the door reminded him of Yoda in the Star Wars films. A lively octogenarian, with bulgy blue eyes sparkling with mischief in a creased, rouged face, her hair was combed down Caesar-like in a snow-white bowl, and she wore a frumpy wool suit with a broach clasped at the throat.

  "Oh, do come in, Chief Superintendent. Do come in," she enthused.

  As he stepped into the hall, something brushed his leg.

  "Shoo, Poirot! Scat, Maigret!" Elvira clapped her hands. "You must own a dog," she said as both felines scampered away.

  "Napoleon. My German shepherd."

  "Thank goodness!" Elvira sighed with mock relief. "With everyone downsizing these days, I feared you'd say Chihuahua.

  "Two cats?" he asked.

  "Five," she answered.

  "Expect Dalgleish and Morse to sniff-test you, too. Miss Marple will stay aloof and watch you from her cushion."

  She led him down a hallway of dark oiled wood and snug alcoves crammed with Royal Doulton figurines. The parlor they entered was as cluttered as the study at 221B Baker Street. Left alone while Franklen scurried off to the kitchen, the Mountie surveyed the Victoria and Albert Museum she called home. overstuffed sofa and armchairs had doilies of Belgian lace, one with a cushion on which lounged a suspiciousl Siamese cat. The overmantel and several tables placed around the parlor displayed a complete set of coronation mugs, even one for Edward VIII, who was never crowned. A portrait of Queen Elizabeth commanded the far wall. Beneath it hung separate pictures of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Marks on the wallpaper indicated the photos of Charles and Diana had recently been moved apart to reflect the state of their marriage. What held his attention, however, was the gallery opposite French doors that led to an English garden. Seventy-four head shots, personally autographed.

  "The one of Conan Doyle is my favorite," Franklen said, wheeling in a tea trolley with enough fattening goodies to clog his arteries. "He signed it just before his death in 1930. Dame Agatha gave me hers ovefc tea at Greenway. Of the moderns, I adore Dick Francis and Ed McBain. I may buy a dozen more cats and name them after the boys of the 87th Precinct."

  Sayers, Van Dine, Queen, Hammett, Gardner, Stout, Carr, Chandler, Simenon, MacDonald, and Macdonald ... He scanned her rogues gallery of the criminal elite. "Very impressive," he said.

  The mystery maven's smile cracked her face into a thousand pieces. She served Poonakandy in forget-me-not cups. DeClercq munched a blueberry scone smothered with clotted cream. Morse or Dalgleish jumped into his lap. He fed the tabby a nibble, but not content, the animal pawed off a chunk.

  Not only was Elvira the city's greenest thumb, but she was also the country's foremost reviewer of crime fiction. Since the 1930s she had written hundreds of interactive whodunits. Months ago she'd asked DeClercq to provide a "real sleuth" for a Mystery Weekend to be auctioned off hi aid of Children's Hospital. Promising to do so brought him here.

  This visit would lead to the carnival of carnage on Deadman's Island.

  Eleven grisly deaths.

  Who could have foreseen?

  And what changes that bloodbath had brought to so many lives.

  Zinc met Alex.

  Katt entered Robert's life.

  And Elvira got to solve life's greatest mystery.

  But that later.

  This was before.

  After tea she gave him a guided tour of her home, tut-tutting protestations he had to return to work, all too true, what with a psycho having hung a woman with a skinned face from Lynn Canyon Bridge. The rear windows of the house overlooked what would rival Kew Gardens in spring, but hibernated now. The back room shelved more books than the Library of Congress: all spine chillers, judging from their lurid spines. A door off it entered a chamber cluttered with pamphlets and magazines piled on the floor, tables spread with faded yellow newspaper clippings, cubbyholes stuffed with mimeographed sheets, and framed certificates crammed into vacant patches on the walls. Everywhere were large-paged books of pressed flowers and leaves sandwiched between layers of ironed wax paper.

  "I've been president of twenty-four horticultural societies," she said. "You're looking at the gardening history of the Northwest. When I die, Vancouver Public Library inherits."

  "Historian to historian, it looks like a thorough job. But duty calls, and I must go. Crime waits for no man, Miss Franklen."

  Reluctant to let her "real sleuth" go, she stalked him like a shadow, first to the parlor to retrieve his overcoat, then up the hall while he pulled it on, then to the front door as he flipped the collar up against the rain. Will she slide the bolt, he wondered, to bar my way?

  "I, too, was once involved in a real case, Chief Superintendent. I was deputized by the detective killed with your wife. Sure you won't stay for another cup of tea?"

  "Flood?" he said.

  "Detective Almore Flood. What's up, doc? I teased him. Get it? Elmer Fudd?"

  "When was this?"

  "December 1982. The month after the Headhunter was shot."

  The last thing DeClercq wished to discuss was that bastard Flood and a case which had nothing to do with him. He listened halfheartedly while Franklen rattled on, waiting to escape.

  "He came to me with a most intriguing puzzle," she said. "A body caked with dirt and leaves and wrapped in a plastic sheet was dumped in the city. The killing, he explained, happened elsewhere. The leaves were a mix of two types of maple. Big leaf maple, which is native to British Columbia, and sycamore maple, native to Europe and Asia. Find where a sycamore was transplanted here, and we might pinpoint where the man was killed. It took us weeks to search my records. The Arborist, June 1931 to September 1952 The Horticulturalist's Digest from 1923 on. Finally we found the location in the July 1955 Pacific Planter. Shall I show you the article on the bomb shelter?"

  "Yes," said DeClercq. "But another time. Give me a rain check until you return from the Mystery Weekend. I look forward to hearing how good a sleuth Inspector Chandler is."

  So he escaped; Elvira died; and the rain check was never cashed.

  Until now.

  The flashback faded.

  * * *

  DeClercq dealt a second photo faceup on the floor beside the print of the head and the bucket of sand. It was a head sho
t of Al Flood, dressed in the blue uniform of the VPD. Late thirties, strawberry blond, freckled and puffy face, his eyes reflected the self-awareness letter to his dad: tired, haunted, cynical, and burnt-out. For years he had pigeonholed Flood as a renegade cop mixed up with drugs who took Genny down with him, but now historical perspective offered another point of view.

  He fetched the honeymoon shot of Genny on a beach in Western Samoa from the mantel, and set it on the floor beside the head shot of Flood.

  Think, he thought.

  The Headhunter is on the loose, and I'm cracking up. Flood is VPD liaison to my squad, and neurotically obsessed with severed heads. He takes the self-awareness course from Genevieve, and falls for her like I did. His love is unrequited because Genny loves me, but he'll do anything for her. Afraid I'm going to snap and unable to consult the Mounted for fear I'll be yanked from the case, she goes through the file at home and consults the outsider—Al Flood—over lunch.

  She knows he'll do anything for her.

  The night the Headhunter is supposedly shot, Flood receives the taunt of the head and the bucket of sand mixed with maple leaves. Genny's ordeal is over. But not his neurosis. So, still obsessed, Flood enlarges the taunt as he did the Polaroids.

  He spots the different maple leaves.

  For some reason he doubts Hardy's guilt. Perhaps the same reason that vexes me. The Headhunter raped his victims but didn't come. Before AIDS and DNA, that was evidence of sexual dysfunction. Hardy climaxed with the hookers he pimped.

  Flood conveys his doubt to Scarlett, Lewis, Spann, Tipple, Mad Dog, and Macdonald.

  He follows the trail of maple leaves to Elvira and beyond.

  Flood finds the missing heads and takes them home. All are shrunken, with stitched lips pierced by small rings.

  At lunch Genny had asked him to help save me from public disgrace.

  I got the wrong man, so disgrace looms again.

  Flood still loves her, and has honor.

  He calls Genny before she leaves to join me at the Red Serge Ball, and asks her to meet him as she passes through the West End.

  She does, learns what he found, and phones me at ' the ball.

  "Fetch Robert, Jim. It's important."

  "He's not here yet. We expect him soon."

  "The moment he arrives, pass this on. I'm with one of my students, and there's a serious problem. Tell him he's a policeman and has to speak to him on a matter of grave concern."

  "I'll make sure he gets it."

  "Good. I'm on my way."

  DeClercq reached for the booklet of Ident photos from the alley shoot-out. He opened the Acco fastener to remove the prints, then discarded those above the shot of ashes and gold rings in the burning tin. Dealing the photo off images below, he laid it on the floor beside the taunt of the head stuck on a stake in the bucket of sand.

  The Headhunter discovers the shrunken heads are gone.

  He recalls Flood expressing doubts to him and the other Members.

  Back when he framed Hardy by planting the head of Genny's student and the nicked knife in the mountain cabin, hoping the bust later that night would boost him up the ranks, he stole a bag of coke from Hardy's cache under the floor.

  He takes the coke to Flood's apartment in the West End.

  Flood meets Genny away from home.

  While he's gone, the Headhunter breaks in to steal back the heads, and burns them in the tin smoldering in the alley.

  Flood returns with Genny, and they park their cars. They take the elevator up to his apartment to show her the heads. The Headhunter plants the coke in the hubcap of Flood's car, then calls Spann anonymously and tips her to the fact.

  Spann arrives and finds the drugs a moment before Flood and Genny return to the lot, on their way to the ball to tell me.

  The shoot-out between Flood and Spann is a set-up, Flood mistaking her for the Headhunter on the prowl, and Spann reacting in self-defense to a coked-out cop going for his gun.

  Flood runs.

  Spann follows.

  It fits, he thought. If Spann was mistaken about Charlotte Clarke phoning in the tip.

  No longer was he the child arranging soldiers on the floor, for now—or so he thought—the battle plan was clear, prompting him to rise from his knees to sit in the Watson . . .

  ... no, the Holmes chair.

  But no sooner did his flayed bum hit the cushion than a wince of pain jerked both hands in the air, and there before his eyes was the final clue to solving the Headhunter mess.

  The armchair detective stared in disbelief.

  Jesus Christ!

  When he had been called this morning about the attack at UBC, DeClercq had been going through the Ident photos of the shoot-out scene. Interrupted at the picture of the burning tin, he'd bookmarked the booklet to continue on later. The photo jerked up before his eyes was the next in the pile: shot into a garbage can beside the burning tin.

  In the can was an open Adidas bag.

  In the bag was an object resembling a Janus head. Two small faces back to back, with eight-inch rounded tongues protruding from each mouth curving up in opposite directions.

  It was a fetish.

  And something else.

  DeClercq wrote a note for Katt, then went to get his gun.

  He had a reopened file to close.

  And a score to settle.

  Headshrinker

  The Headhunter passed DeClercq on Marine Drive. So deep in thought were hunter and hunted that neither saw the other drive by. From his home DeClercq headed east toward Lions Gate Bridge. The killer passed him driving the opposite way. Conversation with Mother an hour ago in town echoed in the psychotic mind unable to separate fantasy from reality:

  "Mommy, he knows!"

  "Easy, Sparky. We've been through this before."

  "DeClercq isn't Flood!"

  "DeClercq can be broken. You broke him once. We'll break him again."

  "It's too late! He knows!" "If he knew, you'd be under arrest. Or there would be a takedown alert for you."

  "If he doesn't know, he's damn close."

  "And that's why you must do exactly what I say to cover our tracks."

  "Our tracks, Mommy?" "The tape of you and me. We're not the only head-shrinkers in this." "What tape, Mommy?"

  "Think, Sparky. Think. The tape in the recorder on his desk."

  "I was taped!"

  "You were under hypnosis. Taping what patients say is standard procedure."

  "What did I say?"

  "You spilled the beans. His office, and his desk, and his tape recorder. Your deepest secret on the tape in his hands. What if he decides to play the tape for DeClercq?"

  "I'm fucked."

  "We're not fucked yet. Both he and the tape must be erased."

  "What about DeClercq?"

  "Break him, Sparky. Fill his mind with anguish so he can't solve the case."

  "The kid?"

  "That'll break him."

  "What if it's too late and DeClercq comes for me?"

  "I'm dead, child, yet I live on. Death is a door to afterlife. If he comes for you, come to me. Promise you won't let him take you alive."

  "I promise, Mommy."

  "Good. Give 'em hell."

  Beams probed the darkness for numbers up the road. Except for artificial light, this was a black-and-white world. The night was clear; the stars were out; and the moon had yet to rise. From black sky right to black sea left the mountain sloped white. The Jeep scurried along Marine like a black bug. Trees looming along the route gloomed it with shadows. The eyes of houses glared gold from the seaside woods. The address jumped like a jackrabbit into the beams. Sparky drove on and parked the Jeep out of sight.

  Like Marine, the path to the house was shadowed by trees. Wind jerked the shadows like a silent film. Bony black bogeymen stripped of leaves voodoo shuffled amid thin pyramids on a snow-white screen. One hand around a limp sack to bag the head, the other gripping that two-foot machete with sliding six-ounce weight, the sh
adow of the Headhunter spooked the dark.

  The windows of the cottage ahead glared like cat's eyes. Twin gables jutted from the roof like cat's ears. Bushes bristled by the door like cat's whiskers. Jagged icicles over the threshold yawned like cat's fangs. The Headhunter crept close to peer in one eye.

  A real cat snoozed in front of the cheery hearth. The hearth was flanked by reading chairs. Glow from the fire gilded several books circling one chair. Window to window, the psycho circled the house, but there was no sign of the reader within.

  No one home.

  Sparky would have to wait.

  The wait was filled with winter sounds. Foghorns out on English Bay. Trees groaning and creaking before the wind, and occasionally the snap of a broken branch. The swoop of an unseen owl overhead, then the squeal of prey caught in its talons. Cars slushing by on the road up the path. A car pulling in off the road, followed by the slamming of a door. The trudging of footsteps along the path. The soft crunch of snow as Sparky hid behind a tree near the cottage door.

  Machete raised.

  Weight near the handle.

  The footsteps drew closer as a new shadow entered the horror film. The newcomer passed the bogeyman cast by Sparky's ambush tree. The shadow hugged something to its chest. Breath plumed from passing lips to blow back on the breeze. Swoooshhh! the machete arced from behind the tree. The leafless bogeyman near the door sprouted an extra arm. The weight slid to the tip of the blade with a metal-on-metal clang, centrifugal force added to the beheading.

  The head of the shadow jumped off its shoulders in fright.

  A fountain of fake blood exploded on-screen.

  Moments later, real blood showered the path.

  The headless body crumpled to its knees, releasing the bag clutched to its chest, then pitched stump first toward the door.

  Sparky emerged from behind the bogeyman.

  Sparky plucked the head with twitching lips out of the film.

  Sparky gazed into the fading eyes of consciousness dying.

  Like a servant of Madame Guillotine, Sparky showed the head to a mob of one.