Ripper (43 page)

The Inspector checked for Samson Coy to no avail, then began to fiddle with the letters and numbers. It was dark and the car was moving when the plate was viewed, so like the Cap guard said, he may have got it wrong. But not
all
wrong.
     ZMY 353.

The candidates for error were . . .? Z to 2?

Forget it. Plates start with a letter.
M
to
N?

Possible. A common eye chart error. Y to V?

Less likely. Both guards mentioned Y.

3 to 8?

Two 3s. A double candidate.

Substituting each in turn, Chan checked the list. The only similar plate he found for a Nissan 300ZX 2+2 was ZNY 358.

When DeClercq and Craven returned from Havelock Ellis School, Nick with several thick files under his arm, the first thing Chan said was "I found a possible match for the owl-prowler's car. The registered owner of ZNY 358 is Angus Craig III of Ravenscourt in Shaughnessy."

"Corporal," DeClercq said to Craven. "Get a search warrant."

Dying Message

Deadman's Island
     10:20
A.M.

The origin of the Turkish bath is lost in history, but the pleasure goes back at least two thousand years. The Turkish bath on Deadman's Island was constructed so Craig II's Demoniacs attending the bacchanalian orgy of the Witches' Sabbath could, the morning after, sweat the poisons from their flesh and wash the blood from their skin. The pleasure of this Turkish bath was gone for these three men, who stared down at Devlin's throat slit from ear to ear.

"How?" Chandler asked.

"Christ!" Melburn growled. "Who cares
how? Who
is the question. If Devlin isn't the killer, who in hell is? You think he walked into his own trap to knowingly die like this? There's someone else on the island. Got to be."

"Wynn?"

"Uh?"

"You okay?"

Yates was pasty-white. He looked as if a vampire had drained him. "I'm going to piss first," he said with a death's door sigh.

"You can't. It's a locked room. We need you, Wynn."

"Fuck," Melburn cursed, kicking the door. "Fuck, fuck, fuck," hammering the tiles. "God damn fucking fuck," booting the bench. "The steam bath's solid. What the fuck's going on!"

Chandler's migraine had him in a vise. "Finished? Cause if you're not, kick it again." He thought his skull was going to crack into a hundred pieces. "The killer's picking us off like cattle in an abattoir. He'll use our frustration and exhaustion to his advantage. We've got to form a firing line to hold him at bay."

"We got rifles?" Melburn said.

"No, but we've got minds. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three . . . To coordinate against him."

"We don't know where to fire."

"How
means
who,"
said Zinc.

The construction of a steam bath is standard and simple. The room is self-contained and sealed with grouted tiles. Half the width is occupied by a two-tier tile bench up one wall. A large thermometer is fastened behind the top step. A floor-level hole in the opposite wall admits the steampipe from the boiler. The steampipe is capped with an oblong head perforated by tiny holes and opened with a tap. As steam cools it condenses back to water, so a floor drain removes runoff. The single door always opens out, a safety precaution in case someone feels faint. No locking devices of any kind are used.

Foraying to the Banquet Room, the trio returned with candles, knives, and the hearth spit. Lined along the bench to give them more light, the trembling flames bottom-lit their faces so they resembled Halloween masks.

"Your ballpark, Wynn. Where do we start?" Zinc pushed Yates's intellect onto the playing field in hope he'd leave his qualms in the bleachers.

"The puzzle," said the old man. "Always start with that."

"You with us, Barney?"

"Yeah," Melbum said. He gripped the spit as if it were a Zulu assegai.

"Watched by us, Devlin entered the bath," Chandler said. "Seconds later, his throat was cut in the misty room. I ran in, fanned the steam, and found no killer. So where did the phantom come from? And where did he go?"

"Clues?" said Yates. "Are there any clues?"

"Devlin was standing when he was cut." The Mountie indicated blood splashed neck-high on the wall above the steampipe. "Forensic techs call that a
cast-off pattern.
Blood's a liquid that spills according to principles of physics. Slash a razor across a throat and the follow-through of your arm will fling blood from the blade like that. The height of the mark is the height of the cut."

"Was Devlin attacked from in front or behind?" Melburn asked.

"Normally a cut throat sprays out in a mist. Block the spray by standing in front and your outline is left on the floor. By the time the vapor cleared, Devlin's wound had re-sprayed the tiles, erasing any outline. We do know the cut ripped from the bench
toward
the opposite wall."

"Where's the weapon?" Yates asked. "The razor or the knife? Unless the killer took it, it must be in the bath."

Melburn got down on his hands and knees to search the drain. Three inches in diameter, it was screwed in place. Chandler joined him, candle in hand. "The holes are too small," Melburn said, "so it's not in the bow of the pipe."

Tile by tile, they examined the floor and two-tier bench, then moved the body to search beneath. Chandler pried Devlin's mouth open to look inside. "Unless it's in his stomach, the weapon's gone," he said. "The blade cut his esophagus, so I doubt he could swallow."

"That eliminates suicide," said Yates. "Devlin didn't kill himself and posthumously leave us to deal with his traps. If the killer was in the bath, he had to get out. No one escaped by the walls or roof, so that leaves the floor."

Melburn struck each floor and bench tile with the spit. "No trapdoor. The base is solid," he said.

"The walls and roof are too thin for the killer to hide inside. But pound 'em anyway," the old man said.

Melburn struck each tile with the spit, the blows producing solid thuds except above the steampipe. Floor to ceiling, he hit those tiles again, hard enough so they shattered and exposed a narrow hollow. Five inches square, the vertical cavity ran the height of the room, bisecting the bloody cast-off pattern on the wall. The niche accommodated the steampipe from the cellar, which rose from the boiler directly below, curving to end at the steamhead inches off the floor. The space above was empty, except for heat.

"Nothing," Melburn said. "Now what?"

"The light."

The bulb was encased in a glass cover screwed to the ceiling. The screws were rusted and hadn't been turned in years.

"No go," Melburn said.

"The steamhead," Yates suggested.

Backed by tiles broken by the spit, the steamhead and shutoff valve were firmly attached to the pipe from the boiler.

'Thermometer?" Yates said. But it was what it seemed: a large unbroken tube of mercury secured to the wall directly opposite the vertical hollow.

One by one, the candles in the bath sputtered and died.

"No killer. No weapon. Now what?" Melburn asked.

Yates shrugged. "Damned if I know. Conjure John Dickson Carr?"

Chandler and Melburn lugged Devlin's corpse down to the makeshift morgue, where Cohen, Leuthard, Leech, and Smith lay in a row. They'd abandoned Holy oak and Quirk on the beach, while Bolt and Darke were locked in the snakepit upstairs.

Nine down, six to go,
Zinc thought.

"Jesus, Wynn. What are you doing in here?" Chandler and Melburn stood at the Library door.

"I think best surrounded by books."

"Yeah, but—"

'There are no traps. I checked it out. I've sat in here several times since we arrived. Who gets killed in a library?"

"Colonel Mustard. With a wrench."

Yates cracked a squiggly smile like Charlie Brown in
Peanuts.
He sat in a mammoth upholstered wing chair with flanks so large they could be Dumbo's ears. The world beyond the windows was white on white on white, anemic light leeching all color from the room, shadows stumbling upside down across the checkered ceiling. A bespectacled bookworm in bookworms' heaven, the old man was surrounded by volumes of Twain, Tennyson, and Voltaire.

"Devlin's dying message? The Y he scrawled?" said Yates. "I'm the only person with Y in his name."

"You're not a killer," Zinc said. "I'll stake my life on that."

"Y," Yates repeated. "What does it mean? Was Devlin trying to tell us who the killer is?"

"Muscle spasm may have moved his finger. Not everything in life is a puzzle a la Carr."

"Queen," Yates corrected. "Ellery Queen. Dying messages were his—their—specialty."

"Assume it is a message," the Mountie said. "Devlin's throat was cut so he had little time to write. Y may be a shortcut for some longer word. Perhaps it's a rail at God, as in '
Why
me?' "

"Did he struggle to make the sign?"

"Yes, if it wasn't spasm."

"Then Y meant something important to him."

"Perhaps it wasn't Y. It could be X instead. But Devlin died before the second downstroke was completed."

"X marks the spot? X for the unknown?"

"Or XX, for double cross, if he was one of two killers."

Like a pair of cupboards slamming shut, the wings of the wing chair snapped in on Yates's face. Heavy iron plates masked by the upholstery whapped together as powerful springs closed their hinges. The seat of the chair was a timing device which sprung the trap when it was pressed for a set duration. Squashed between the iron plates, Wynn's head erupted, blood, bone, and brains spewing up like Mount St. Helens.

A cry of shock behind him caused Zinc to whirl.

Alex, Katt, and Elvira stood at the door.

The cry was from Elvira.

A moment before she fainted.

Lucifer's Library

Vancouver
     11:01
A.M.

The first cop through the door was Mad Dog Rabidowski. The name suited him.

The Mad Dog was the meanest-looking member in The Mounted: in many ways the Lou Bolt of the Force. The son of a Yukon trapper raised in the woods, he could take the eye out of a squirrel with a .22 at 100 yards before he was six. A man of latent violence, he lived to kill: hunting grizzly bears at Kakwa River, packs of wolves near Tweedsmuir Park, elk on Pink Mountain, and punks with the ERT. There was a time when people said he looked like Charles Bronson—a comment he welcomed before Bronson went soft—but now he aped the screen presence of Harvey Keitel. The Mad Dog made a point of only dating whores, for as he put it, "Why mess with amateurs if you can blow with a pro?" The Mad Dog was the Mountie DeClercq sicked on barbarians so he could follow with the Charter of Rights and Marquis of Queensberry Rules. The best that could be said for having the Mad Dog on your side was then you could be sure he wasn't on the other.

Unleashed by a telewarrant under Section 487.1 of the
Code,
the Mad Dog used "the key to the city" on Ravenscourt's door. The "key" was a Ram-It II battering ram forty inches long, with handles either side of the fifty-pound tube, electrically nonconductive in case the door was "dirty-tricked." He and Craven swung the ram at the lock, one, two, three,
smash!
like hurling a sack of spuds. Waxed by an impact of twenty-four thousand pounds of kinetic force, the door and its frame were torn from the wall. Such a knock the Mounties call a "hard entry."

Heckler & Koch MP5 nine-millimeter submachine gun in hand, foregrip squeezed to activate the mounted flashlight, barrel aligned to hit the target centered in its beam, thirty rounds in the magazine in front of the trigger guard, his finger trained to fire semiauto "doubletaps," two-shot-bursts with one slug on the tail of the other, the Mad Dog entered the mansion through the battered hole.

He searched it top to bottom.

There was no one home.

Ghost Keeper spent his day off snowshoeing in the blizzard high on Seymour Mountain, testing his internal compass and Cree survival techniques. At 3:30 the Staff Sergeant returned to his Jeep and drove down to the city snuggled under a blanket of snow. HQ radioed him on Second Narrows Bridge, and an hour's hard driving through chaotic streets (West Coast lotus eaters are baffled by snow) got him to Ravenscourt.

The vine-covered mansion was an Ice Age woolly mammoth, tusklike towers trumpeting the dusk. Forensic hunters had surrounded it with cars, red-and-blue wigwag lights dyeing the white wool. Entering by a hole smashed in the mammoth's belly, Ghost Keeper wound his way through its guts, from Porte-Cochere to Vestibule to Ballroom, Dining Room, Drawing Room, Smoking Room, Gun Room, Bengal Room, Library, Gallery, Study, Living Room, Conservatory, Pavilion, Gazebo, Morning Room, Kitchen, Servants Hall, Sewing Room, Nursery, Boudoir, Master Bedroom, and six of ten guest rooms until he found DeClercq.

Ghost Keeper was raised in a one-room shack on an Indian reserve.

"Sorry to drag you in," said DeClercq, "but I need your expertise. Ident's been top to bottom without success. Have a go?"

Before heading RFISS, Ghost Keeper was a Hairs & Fibres tech, and before that, a Special Constable under the 3(b) Program on the Duck Lake Reserve. There his uncanny ability in hunting fugitives down earned him the nickname "The Tracker" and brought him to the attention of the Crime Detection Lab. His work with Hairs & Fibres saddled him with the additional name "The Human Vacuum Cleaner," for when he finished combing a scene it was
"all
in the bag."

"Stalkers hunt trophies," he said.

Watched by DeClercq, Chan, Craven, and Rabidowski, Ghost Keeper stood on the threshold surveying the Bengal Room. Above the hearth hung a portrait of Angus Craig I, all tweeds, beard, and shotgun, with one hand on his hip and one foot on a bear. The heads of lions, tigers, panthers, pumas, leopards, cheetahs, jaguars, and cougars surrounded him. Staring from the left wall were the faces of baboons, gorillas, orangutangs, and mandrills. The horns of reindeer, caribou, antelope, moose, and elk spiked from the right, while lacquered marlin, swordfish, sawfish, stingrays, and sharks arced around the door. The sofas were unholstered with zebra skin, the neck of a giraffe rising like a potted palm. Stools were made from elephant, rhino, and hippopotamus feet, around serving tables that rode on the backs of turtles, alligators, caymans, and crocs. Light reflecting off the glass of myriad display cases hid their specimens, but from the zeal with which this "sportsman" ravaged Queen Victoria's Realm, Ghost Keeper wouldn't be amazed if dragon, unicorn, griffin, yeti, and sasquatch trophies were inside.

Now he was on the hunt.

The state in which he entered the room was almost a trance, his eyes those of animal spirits in the primal forest, seeing the room in black and white and hues of gray like them, feeling the room for any sense of recent prey, searching it intuitively until he saw the spot.

When he crouched beneath the primate faces, the cops gathered around.

What they saw was a spot of blood on the floor.

Or rather,
half
a spot in this room.

The other half hidden under the baseboard along the wall.

"Let's ram it," the Mad Dog said.

The chamber hidden behind the secret panel in the wall was another trophy room. A taxidermy table flanked by a projector and screen extended toward a pulpit backed by shelves at the rear. Gouged like juice troughs in a steak board, a pentagram was carved into the scarred wooden surface. Ringbolts looped with cords tipped the four lower points of the star, the fifth point touching the pulpit so anyone tied to the table would form an upside down pentangle.

The trophies on display within were grimmer than those next door. Seven hell-hags mounted on the walls aimed their talons at the pentagram. The faces on the table were from the biggest game of all: Chloe, Zoe, and Lyric Stamm. The humanhunters had carefully skinned each face from its skull, before smoothing the flesh over a wax mold from the victim. Several coats of varnish preserved the grisly fetishes, three
death masks more lifelike than those in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.

The Mounties entered the room.

Ignoring the snowy, screech, hawk, great horned, great gray, and barn owls, Craven homed in on the recently stuffed northern spotted owl. Parting its feathers, he found the bird's skin infested with dead
Strigiphilus cursor
lice.

DeClercq and Chan stood at the foot of the taxidermy table, facing the pulpit at the far end. Knife marks splintered the wood where the womb of a spread-eagled victim would be. The tabletop was stained from pools and gouts of blood, except for a large rectangle at this end. The oblong was the size of a 19th-century deed-trunk.

"Viewed from the pulpit, the pentagram is upside down," said Chan.

"Symbolizing evil," said DeClercq. "Like the sign on the Devil Tarot card."

"The star carved on Chloe pointed at her feet. If she was on this table, it would point
up."

"Not if it was meant to point here," said DeClercq, tapping the blood-free rectangle. "Carved to point at Jack the Ripper's trunk."

"Marsh's face is missing."

"They took it to use on victim five in the Magick Place."

"This hellhole's got to hold a clue to where that is."

DeClercq approached the bookshelf behind the devil's pulpit. A tarnished plaque along its edge read LUCIFER'S LIBRARY. One by one, he withdrew the musty volumes and leafed through pages centuries old. Whoever collected these hellish texts had money to burn, for here was everything from the
Malleus Maleficarum,
the "hammer of the witches" (1486), to satanic
grimoires
for conjuring Occult demons:
Clavicula Salomonis,
the
Lemegeton,
a German
Faustbuch, Tuba Veneris, The Magus,
et cetera. Three gaps like missing teeth showed where books were removed, texts DeClercq found open on the wide pulpit.

Stephenson/D'Onston/Tautriadelta's first draft of
The Patristic Gospels
lay to the left. In a chapter excised before publication in 1904, he explained his motive for Jack the Ripper's crimes and why he turned to God when the Ritual went wrong. A Hanged Man Tarot card bookmarked the volume.

The text in the center was a 14th-century
grimoire
titled
De Occultus Tarotorum.
Two years of high school Latin was insufficient for DeClercq to translate the print, but the hand-drawn illustrations were enough. They were Tarot symbols akin to Waite's Rider pack, revealing why
Jolly Roger
used a deck first published twenty-two years after Jack the Ripper's crimes. A Judgement Tarot card bookmarked the volume.

The text to the right was a medieval
Bible.
Also in Latin, it was open to
Apocalypsis, Caput XIII.
The manuscript was priceless, being centuries old, but someone had run a yellow highlight pen through this passage:
18. Hie sapietia est. Qui habet intellectum, computet numerum bestiae; numerus enim hominis est, et numerus ejus sexcenti sexaginta sex.

Failed Catholic though he was, DeClercq knew the translation. It was
Revelations 13:18: Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.

A Devil Tarot card bookmarked the
Bible.

Standing at the pulpit, DeClercq recalled where the trail began:
Jolly Roger
quoting Crowley's story about Vittoria Cremers finding Jack the Ripper's trunk. When she related the incident to reporter Bernard O'Donnell decades later, Cremers said the trunk contained bloodstained ties and "a few books." DeClercq knew he was staring at those volumes.

"Found something, Chief," Rabidowski said.

The Mad Dog squatted behind DeClercq, pointing at the shelf beneath Lucifer's library. The shelf was bare except for a notebook and miniature guillotine. Like the cigar cutter used by Inspector Clouseau's boss in that Pink Panther film, this tiny blade dropped between two posts to behead a condemned Havana. One post was labeled
Skull;
the other labeled
Crossbones.
A newspaper photo of Brigid Marsh advising she'd be guest speaker at "next week's feminist symposium in Vancouver" was rolled so her head stuck through the beheading hole. Across the photo was scrawled
You cored me, cunt.

The Guillotine
was written on the cover of the notebook.

As DeClercq reached for it, Ghost Keeper flicked a switch on the projector, filling the screen opposite with a jerky black-and-white film.

. . . down, down, down the nude procession snakes into the bowels of the grotto where wooden monsters wait . . . A black trunk squats behind the mounted skulls, faced by seven mummified owls perched on the carvings . . .

"The Ripper's trunk," said DeClercq. "Passed on by Crowley."

. . . beside the trunk is an iron-barred cage . . . Something furtive moves within as cowled Death floats through the silent film . . . Death sheds the robes to expose a man, pale fat sagging his breasts and drooping his belly. His face is masked by the beak and feathers of an owl . . .

"An owl cult?" Craven said. "With hell-hags their Doppelgangers?"

Ghost Keeper stepped into the flickering image as if walking into the cave. "The Magick Place is a Nootka Whalers' Washing House. Carvings like these were stolen by the Americans. There must be another shrine in Nootka territory."

. . . the owl man bends the flailing woman facedown over the trunk . .. The Demoniac carves a flesh pentagram into her back. Knife in hand, the Satanist grabs her by the hair, yanking her head back to expose her throat. A blur of steel. An arc of blood. And black and white goes black . . .

A loose sheet of paper fell from
The Guillotine
in DeClercq's hand. He picked it up as Ghost Keeper switched off the projector. The sheet read:

DEADMAN'S ISLAND SLEUTHS

Lou Bolt

Zinc Chandler

Sol Cohen

Luna Darke

Glen Devlin

Elvira Franklen

Stanley Holyoak

Alexis Hunt

Al Leech

Pete Leuthard

Barney Melburn

Adrian Quirk

Colby Smith

Wynn Yates

UNTIL THERE ARE NONE

"Commandeer the chopper," DeClercq said to Chan.

Madhouse

Deadman's Island
     11:05
A.M.

Zinc cut into Cohen's chest, working the knife around the bolt barbed in the dead man's heart. He'd searched the shattered cabinet for missiles to arm the crossbow, but this was the only quarrel in the house. The bolt tore loose from the corpse.

Not only did Chandler's head pound like a pile driver gone mad, but he'd sprained his back maneuvering the chair down the cellar steps. They couldn't leave it in the Library—not with Elvira around—and the only way to separate Wynn was to cut off his head, an indignity Zinc wouldn't commit. Though he'd never been to war, this must be how it felt: dog eat dog, kill or be killed, and fuck your humanity.

"Let's go," he said to Melburn.

Crossing from the makeshift morgue to the cellar stairs, wavering candles lighting their way through the subterranean dark, Chandler detoured to the coal bin. Scuffs across the dusty lumps led to the chute from outside, beneath which he found the parka worn by Quirk's attacker. The hooded man on the bluff
had
to be Devlin. The others had alibis.

A person doesn't vanish into thin air,
he thought.
If the Turkish bath was sealed so whoever killed Devlin couldn't get out, the murder weapon has to be a mechanical device. What sort of gadget slits a person's throat on its own, then disappears? And where does it go?