Ripper (45 page)

"Why am I excluded?" Crossbones asked.

"'Cause I'm up here and you're down there," Skull replied.

Their crimes had all been furtive, not face-to-face acts, but now Craig suggested "nutting a bum." His plan was to cruise London for a lone derelict, lowering his pants to loop piano wire around his balls while he was passed out, each yanking an end of the wire to nut him and run. Later they'd phone Scotland Yard anonymously to report the "gland robbery." When Coy recoiled from die risk of overt maiming, Craig told him to fuck himself and their friendship fell apart.

November to April, Craig shunned Coy. To find a new accomplice, he haunted Soho clubs, making friends easily with his money and poise, but dumping them just as quickly when they weren't awed by his mind. His plans were dead in the water now that Coy was gone from his orbit, causing dark mood swings to deep depression. Blackballed by the Brits as a wonk, Coy, too, was unable to fill his void.

Without Angus, I'm a nowhere man . . .

The pair renewed their friendship with
The Guillotine,
a contract Craig signed
Skull
and Coy signed
Crossbones
in blood. The first covenant deemed both parties Supermen. Coy promised to assist Craig in his crimes, now focused on Tautriadelta's Great Occult Event. Craig promised to sex Coy after each murder, and to credit the
Jolly Roger
killings to both demons. Coy could question any of Craig's plans, unless Skull insisted "The Ripper wills it." Speak those words and Coy had to submit.

Coy wrote in the notebook:

Lust, greed, and hatred motivate the common man. Our acts are murder for murder's sake:
pure
murder for mental stimulation. Each is as easy to justify as an entomologist impaling a bug. Curiosity is the
right
of Supermen. Just as great painters once attended the torture chamber to study muscles working in the faces of those on the rack, so we do whatever satisfies our interest. It cannot be wrong for Supermen to commit superacts. It is their destiny.

DeClercq closed
The Guillotine
and switched off the light. He considered the title a fitting one. Just as the beheading device needs
two
guide posts for the blade to drop, so these crimes resulted from the interplay between
both
personalities. Each man felt inadequate unless there was someone else in his life to complete him.

Craig displayed the symptoms of a classic psychopath: lack of empathy, remorse, and guilt; egocentric grandiose plans; impulsive, deceitful, manipulative, irresponsible, glib, superficial behavior; and—above all—lust for aggressive excitement. Like all serial killers born from "parental" abuse, he courted detection and punishment by playing cat-and-mouse with the police. The
Jolly Roger
murders weren't an isolated spree; they climaxed an illness that developed over years. Unable to get "kicks" from his crimes unless he had an audience, his adulating "gang," he
needed
Samson Coy to fulfill his fantasy.

Coy had a disintegrated personality before he met Craig. The Dianics had seen to that. Starved for affection and a sense of identity, he craved someone to fill the hollow and satisfy his subserviant sexual needs. Coy lacked the balls to commit these murders by himself, but fate made Craig the "superior" who fulfilled his fantasy.
You cored me, cunt
, Coy wrote of his mother. Craig and the demon Crossbones filled that hollow.

Just as one post doesn't make a guillotine, so this case could not be grasped in terms of either man. It truly reflected the interweaving of both personalities. These murders weren't the acts of one, they were the acts of two. Chance brought the posts together and some sort of alchemy fused their fantasies. Neither understood the importance of living his own life, so Craig became Skull and Coy became Crossbones, but in effect they became Skull & Crossbones. In the sum of their psyches,
the two were one.

"The chopper will never fly in this," Chan said. The words were barely out of his mouth when a van crossed Granville against a red light, slamming the Mounties broadside to spin them around. Before the Mad Dog could brake to a halt, they were involved in a seven-car pileup.

It's up to you, Zinc,
Robert thought.

Flushed

Deadman's Island
     6:05
P.M.

Eye to the peephole through the wall at the end of the Hogger Gallery, Skull watched the survivors emerge from the bedroom across the hall: Chandler with the crossbow, Melburn with the spear, Hunt with two kitchen knives, then Franklen and Katt. The call of nature had flushed them out, for he knew they wouldn't piss and shit in each other's presence. Doing your business in public was the one taboo the civilized couldn't countenance.

Hand on the button, Skull watched them approach the trap.

The lavatories in Castle Crag were all on the upper floor, for the house was built in an era when you hid unmentionables. The nearest toilet was next to Zinc's room, sandwiched between the sanctuary and top of the dogleg stairs. The Mountie entered the latrine to check for traps. Skull grinned on hearing the toilet flush. He almost guffawed aloud when Chandler came out to pronounce it safe.

Flush your ass goodbye,
he thought as Franklen entered and shut the door.

A battery-powered light confirmed there was pressure on the toilet seat.

Skull hit the button.

Chandler and Melburn flanked the lavatory door, at a chivalrous distance to give Franklen privacy. Hunt and Katt straddled the threshold to Zinc's room, waiting their turn before the men.

Thhhhhhhhllluuuuuuuppppp!

The inspiration for the trap was an accident the airlines tried to hush up. Flush a plane toilet and the bowl is sucked dry. A mechanic who'd been drinking set the suction pressure wrong. A passenger needing to take a crap sat down on the seat so his legs and buttocks formed a vacuum seal. When he flushed the toilet before getting up, the suction sucked his intestines out his asshole. "Haven't had a shit on a plane since I heard that," Craig had said.

Thhhhhhhhllluuuuuuuppppp!

The lavatory door swung open and Franklen crawled out on her hands and knees, skirt and panties around her ankles and trailing a glistening snake, one end between her buttocks while the other was gulped down the sucking toilet. The suction came from air holes under the rim, hidden among the holes that flushed water into the bowl. She held out a shaking hand, then crumpled to the carpet.

Turning the crossbow upside down and setting it on the floor, Chandler rushed to Franklen, with Melburn close behind. Hunt gasped and left the threshold of the room, kneeling with the men to help the disemboweled woman. Katt let out a strangled whimper, silenced before it finished. Everyone's back was to the girl as Elvira died of shock.

When Zinc smelled chloroform, he turned from the body, just in time to see Katt being dragged into the opposite room, a cloth in the hand of her captor clamped over her mouth and nose.

The killer flushed from hiding was a demon in disguise, naked except for his hideous face and bloodstained bow tie, the blood so old it powdered to dust sprinkled down his chest. Owl feathers radiated from his hair, his face chalked white as a skull with zigzag bone sutures drawn in black. Eyes darkly smudged to sink them in their sockets, his penis stood erect like Satan's downstairs.

Skull blew a kiss at Chandler as he shut the bedroom door.

HOGGER

6:17
P.M.

Spear thrown underhand as the door swung shut, Melburn was off the floor like a 19th-century Zulu going for a lion. The butcher knife bayonet slipped through the narrowing crack, bouncing the door away from the jamb. Scooping Katt's candle from the carpet where it dropped when she was attacked, he entered the room as a secret panel to his right slid shut. Fueled by adrenaline like a wide receiver on a breakaway to a goal, the crowd on its feet cheering for he could do no wrong, Melburn plucked the spear from the floor and nimbly tossed it again. Not only did the weapon stop the panel from engaging, but it provided a wedge so he could lever the false wall back.

"Damn," Melburn barked as Zinc and Alex entered the room, bashing his shin on an obstacle just inside the nook, some contraption the killer had tipped over to block his way. Stumbling across the narrow width of the secret passage, he bounced left off the opposite wall to pursue the killer down the Hogger Gallery, a sealed corridor that once overlooked the length of the Ballroom below. Spear in one hand, candle in the other, Melburn advanced so fast his speed extinguished the flame.

"Careful!" Zinc yelled as the contraption tripped him, too, one hand striking the spokes of a wheel as he fell. The crossbow fired, but luckily wasn't armed, for the quarrel was tucked in his shirt pocket beside his pen.

Suddenly, like the Big Bang forming the universe, battery-powered floodlights exploded along the gallery. Shielding his eyes, Zinc looked down at the contraption beneath him. The instant before he was blinded, Melburn caught sight of

Katt and the killer at the corridor's end, and—between him and them—the worst of all the traps.

Skull hit a button on the wall to activate the hogger.

Secreted in the gallery when Skull rode the dumbwaiter up from the Billiards Room, the contraption was a folded wheelchair. Like film run backward to reassemble a broken cup, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.

The Deadman's Island killers were Devlin and Quirk.

Obviously one of them was Philip Craig's heir, inheriting when his parents died in the Pan Am crash. In sole possession of the island since 1988, he and his accomplice had rigged the traps. Outbidding all contenders for the Mystery Weekend, they'd sent Elvira a list of sleuths to invite
including themselves.
Both Devlin and Quirk had allegedly written
unpublished
books.

Prior to last night's seance, Quirk guarded the Banquet Room door while Devlin armed the crossbow. Zinc was marked as victim number one, but that plan was foiled when he wheeled Quirk to his place. No wonder Quirk was sweating: the crossbow was aimed at him with heat from two fires melting the ice instead of one,
while Cohen stood behind the wheelchair blocking any retreat.

A deadly game of chicken resulted from a twist of fate, and there was Devlin sitting nearby doing nothing to help. Was Quirk pissed off? Did they have a falling out? Which Devlin thought was a tantrum? While Quirk plotted revenge?

One kink in that scenario nagged Zinc: he'd have sworn Quirk wasn't faking when he dragged his useless legs away from the table. Escaping a severed jugular by a millimeter was hardly the time for a smokescreen performance. But if he was disabled, who was this with Katt?

It was Devlin who doused the lights on the stairs to hang Leuthard. Devlin who backed the trip to the bar where Leech was acid-bathed. Devlin who lured Smith to the scythe by seeing an eye at the peephole. Devlin who was the only sleuth—except Bolt and Darke—without an alibi for Quirk's "death."

Quirk, his partner.

The plan was to snuff their next victim in God's toilet, so Quirk asked Zinc to wheel him up to the cliff. Supposedly stoking the boiler, Devlin used the coal chute to sneak outside. He circled through the precipice woods to the bluff, stepping on the punji stake lid to set that trap, while broadcasting fake screams through a portable mike. Zinc diverted, he "attacked" Quirk on the crest, where those in the Banquet Room saw him push the wheelchair toward the cliff, before losing sight of the struggle on the far slope. The chair
minus Quirk
plummeted over the edge, and muscular Devlin carried his accomplice down to the beach. Chandler's rescue party followed
one
set of prints.

The killers knew where to step for solid rock, so they positioned Quirk as bait for the quicksand trap. Did Devlin vanish behind the waterfall tumbling from above, or was there a camouflaged cave along the shore? With Holyoak dead and Zinc nearly sucked into the sinkhole, the beach foray was scrubbed without confirming Quirk's death. After the duped rescuers were gone, both killers returned to Castle Crag by a shorter
alternate
route. That's why they weren't seen cresting the bluff by those in the Banquet Room, and how Devlin steamed in the Turkish bath long before Chandler and Melburn arrived.

Devlin didn't know Quirk was plotting revenge. If he was the dominant half of the team, he'd assume submissive Quirk would lick his crossbow wound. So Devlin went ahead with their plan to trap the next sleuth, unaware his partner was out to trap
him.
A chance Quirk got with the Turkish bath.

Lacking an alibi for Holyoak and Quirk, and nudged by the lie about the gallows nails, Devlin became Chandler's prime suspect. Both killers knew he'd be told to enter the steam bath first, so the plan was
not
to use the trap this time. Quirk hid somewhere in the house after his bogus "death," probably in a hollow wall with access to the cellar. When the sleuths rushed upstairs to the snakepit bed, he wheeled himself past the boiler and cranked the dumbwaiter up to the Billiards Room. There he armed the razor tape in the Turkish bath, then returned to the cellar to sweep away the wheelchair tracks. Off guard, Devlin entered the bath and got his throat slit.

But again the kink nagged.

If Quirk could walk and being disabled was all an act,
why
wheel the chair across the cellar? And why the
extra
wheelchair stored in here, a passage in the wall of what had been Quirk's room? The wheelchair from the Mainland had crashed to the beach.

Zinc noticed a handrail screwed to the ceiling, running the full length of the Hogger Gallery. If Quirk could walk and being disabled was all an act, why the rail to pull his useless legs along?