Ripper (32 page)

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Captain Banks speaking. Our descent into Vancouver will be turbulent. Fasten your seat belts securely, and enjoy the view."

The plane dropped from a starry sky into a sea of clouds, thunderheads circling to the west like blood-mad sharks. Gazing out at the cosmos before it disappeared, DeClercq had little trouble accepting Jack the Ripper's and Skull & Crossbones's motive. In a world of TV evangelists and the Jonestown Massacre, where Charlie Manson thought killing "pigs" would precipitate
Helter-Skelter,
and religious nuts hole themselves up in armed bunkers awaiting Armageddon, signing the Hanged Man's symbols in blood to conjure the Devil fit. In a world where scientists accept E = MC
, and the Big Bang as how the universe formed, and Stephen Hawking's Arrow of Time, and "black holes" where the density of matter in space approaches infinity, and "dark matter" halos around the Milky Way cannibalizing a nearby galaxy, and "wormholes" through warped space and time . . .
In such a cosmos where human thought is E = MC
²
energy sparking through our brains, is it irrational to believe mental "wormholes" access the Occult's Astral Plane?

Now as the plane broke through the clouds to approach Sea Island from the east, he glimpsed the hazy outline of Vancouver through the rain. And there was the Ripper's Cross he'd sketched from the young boy's map:

North Vancouver 

7:05
P.M.

After dropping Skull near Thunderbird Charters early this afternoon, Garret Corke had driven across Lions Gate Bridge to the North Shore where he'd rented a motel room on Capilano Road. Locking the door, he'd drawn the drapes before stripping off his clothes, then had removed the Snoopy helmet from his duffel bag. In the years since it had served him during those glorious "lurp" raids in Vietnam, the hood had undergone a few modifications. Now when Corke pulled it on he looked like a hunter's falcon, the leather completely covering his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, with only the tiniest perforations so he could breath. Gripping the hatchet Skull had given him in one hand, Corkscrew sat cross-legged Indian-style on the cold linoleum floor, his other hand playing with the metal piercings through his cock and balls. For hours he sat in this delicious state of sensory deprivation, honing his stalking skills for the mission ahead, until the stench from the astral graveyard was so strong he erupted all over the floor.

At seven
P.M.
his internal clock told him it was time, so he took off the helmet, cleaned up the come, dressed, and left the room.

Time to hang the body.

Time to ax DeClercq.

Phantom Finger

Deadman's Island 

7:24
P.M.

Rounding the end of the table by Cohen's empty chair, Zinc scooped a still-burning candle off the floor and approached the cabinet from out of the line of fire.

The display case stood five feet high, backed against the wall beneath the stained-glass window beyond the chairless end of the table reserved for Death. It's front faced Quirk's wheelchair at the other end by the fireplace. Through the shattered glass grimed with years of dust, seven shelves were stacked eight inches apart. Displayed on each shelf was a two-and-a-half-foot prod resembling a miniature archery bow on its side. The edge of each shelf bore a label describing its weapon:

A 13th-century crossbow cocked by a cord and pulley;

A 14th-century crossbow cocked by a claw and belt;

A 15th-century crossbow cocked by a goat's-foot lever;

A 16th-century crossbow cocked by a cranequin;

A 17th-century slurbow with a barrel like a handgun;

An 18th-century stonebow for hurling pebbles;

A 19th-century Chinese repeating crossbow with a bamboo prod from the 1894-95 war with Japan.

Like a Dutch door opening into a secret passage, the back of the cabinet was ajar. Through the broken glass and between the shelves, Zinc reached in, pushed the panel, and shone the candle inside. The flame revealed a hidden nook filled with undisturbed cobwebs and dust half an inch thick. The cabinet could be secured to the wall by hooks around its back edge latched to eyebolts screwed into the frame of the nook. The hooks were now unlatched. Zinc pulled the cabinet away to expose the cubbyhole behind. The nook was a half-moon enclosure with the same dimensions as the bow in (he wall above which held the stained-glass window, its curve the solid outer stonework of Castle Crag.

"No one move," Zinc ordered, turning to the room. "Bolt, you know the drill. Preserve the scene. Devlin, grab a candlestick and come with me."

Glen Devlin was one of the muscular pair who'd carried the old deed-trunk up from the cove, and the sleuth who'd provided the Zippo to descend the cellar stairs. Dark-haired and dark-eyed with a keen competitive intensity, he'd be at home thrashing all comers on a court at Wimbledon. A soldier who'd fix his bayonet and gladly take no prisoners, Devlin had the cocky air of a man who could take care of himself and damn everyone else.

Candlestick gripped like a bludgeon, he followed Zinc.

From the Banquet Room they dashed along the corridor to the Receiving Hall, then out the front door to run the gauntlet of hail. Like Radisson and Des Groseilliers braving Iroquois lines, they skirted the Turkish bath in the Billiards Room, rounding the end of the South Wing by the Scullery and Kitchen, to reach the bow containing the nook in the Banquet Room wall. Light from the chandeliers within cast through the stained glass rainbow-lit the unmarked carpet of hail around the stone. No one had entered or exited the nook from out here.

Lou Bolt was behaving like the Gestapo when they returned, ordering this and demanding that with torture and death waiting for anyone who balked. Melburn told him to go fuck himself as Chandler and Devlin walked in. Smith, Leuthard, and Leech lifted Quirk into his wheelchair while Holyoak, his white dinner jacket now red with blood, probed the crossbow quarrel sunk deep in Cohen's chest. The pool around the body was four feet wide.

"The arrow-bolt—I think it's called—hit his heart," the doctor said, glancing up at the painting of Saint Sebastian over the mantel. "The artist doesn't capture the damage done."

"Not when it smashed through the glass, punched through the back of the wheelchair, and still had power enough to do that," Zinc said.

"Want the body left in place or moved downstairs?"

"Depends how long we have to wait."

What surprised Zinc most was the level of panic in the room: no passing out at the sight of blood, no hysteria, no screaming-meemies. You'd think the sleuths—including Katt—were seasoned cops, responding to the latest squeal just called in. Was that because Cohen meant little to them, or
did
violence on the tube dull sensitivities?

Whatever the reason, he was thankful.

"Everybody with me?" Zinc addressed the group. "It's obvious the party's over and we've got a serious problem. The positive aspect is no one's falling apart. Down to brass tacks. Who brought a cellular phone?"

When no one responded, Melburn said dryly, "We're writers, not stockbrokers."

"I didn't know we'd be isolated," Elvira said, taking blame.

"Anyone come across a shortwave radio? No? Then it looks like we're cut off till this storm breaks. Sorry, folks, but I'm the police, so what I say goes. Any problems with that?"

"You heard the man," Bolt said. "Trouble, and you deal with
us."

"With me," the Mountie corrected. "Who brought a camera?"

"I did," Alex said.

"Good, I want you to get it and shoot this room. The body, the cabinet, the works. Don't anyone touch anything until she's done. Bolt, Devlin, check the cellar. Find a cool place away from the boiler where we can put Cohen. The rest of you wait in the corridor. Wynn, I need your help."

Zinc led Yates to the shattered cabinet and pulled Cohen's chair around for him to sit down. "Don't ask me to make sense of this. Let's just accept we're here and puzzle it out. Someone acquired this house, which hasn't seen life for years, and spruced it up like a Gothic theater set. Our host outbid all rivals for Elvira's Mystery Weekend, then Sent her a list of those to be invited to partake. Fifty thousand dollars was the bait to lure us here, and now we find ourselves enmeshed in this."

"Must be someone crazy. Making us
live
our fiction."

"Whoever it is," Zinc said, "is clever indeed. Unless I missed something, you've got your locked room."

The front of the cabinet was secure and there was no key, so Zinc reached in through the shattered glass and released die catch from inside. While swinging the door open to expose the seven shelves, the leaky roof above dripped water on his arm. He pulled the top shelf out to check the crossbow on display and found both it and the surface beneath were gray with dust. As he pushed the shelf in, drips pocked the dust layer like a dry moonscape.

The next shelf down was the same.

The third shelf, however, was wiped clean. So was the crossbow cocked by a goat's-foot lever it displayed. Zinc checked the shelves below and found them all thick with dust, then returned to the weapon resting at the same level as the trajectory of the bolt hurled at Cohen.

Drip, drip, drip, the leak spattered two cards piled on the shelf, prompting Zinc to push the cabinet clear of water damage.

"The nook behind the cabinet is self-contained," he said. "Its curve is the solid outer stonework of the castle. Even if the masonry could be breached, no one escaped that way as the hail on the ground outside is unmarked. The
only
path in and out of the nook is through this room."

"Think Craig I or II used the space to eavesdrop on his guests?" asked Wynn.

"Probably. He pulled the cabinet away from the wall and crawled into the nook, then dragged it back into place from inside and secured it with the hooks. To spy, he opened the upper half of the false Dutch door back of the cabinet. The locked glass front picked up voices in the room, and if the guests whispered it was unlatched from inside."

"The problem is our killer didn't do that," Wynn said.

"The floor of the nook is covered with dust undisturbed by footprints, and the airspace above is filled with unbroken cobwebs. Logic says someone fired the bow from inside the nook, opening the cabinet's false back to reach the weapon, but the physical evidence proves no one was in there."

"Not the dust on the floor."

"No? Why's that?"

"If there was another way out, the killer could cover his tracks through the dust with a fruit-tree sprayer or a vacuum cleaner switched to reverse. Either device would leave the same unmarked thick layer of dust."

"Wynn—"

"I'm not saying it happened. No vacuum was heard. I'm saying don't jump to conclusions. A devious mind can always find ways to bamboozle logic."

"What about the cobwebs?"

"Got me there. Only a ghost could pass through and leave them undisturbed. It looks like a spiders' convention was held in there."

"So?"

"The nook's a red herring. The killer wasn't inside."

"Which begs the question: Who fired the bow how?"

"Let's ask the weapon."

Careful not to smudge any latent fingerprints, Zinc lifted the crossbow out of its cradle. The display frame consisted of two parts: a notched block holding the stock (or handheld part of the weapon) just behind the prod (or bow), and a separate notched block back near the false panel for the butt (or shoulder end of the stock). The crossbow weighed close to fifteen pounds.

Piled on one side of the shelf were two hand-lettered cards, wet and warped by water so the ink was smudged. Wynn spread them on the table so he and Zinc could read:

For hundreds of years, crossbows like the one that killed Cohen were fitted with a "nut-and-trigger" release. The nut
was
a thick circular disc with a claw groove on its upper curve to hook the string, and a notch cut into its lower curve lo take the snout of the trigger. The trigger, all but the handle of which was lodged inside the stock, looked like a duck with a pointed bill. The trigger mechanism pivoted through I lie duck's eye. As the string was drawn back, the bill of the duck was wedged into the notch on the undercurve of the nut, which kept it from rotating. The string then dropped into the claw groove on the nut's top, cocking the weapon. A fletched bolt was placed in the trough that ran along the stock's top edge. Cocked and loaded, the crossbow was ready to fire.