Ripper (8 page)

"Sucking lice attack humans and mammals. They have mouthparts adapted for sucking blood. During feeding, three piercing stylets extend from their heads while tiny hooks attach their mouths to the host's skin. The lice on the left are Anoplura. The top one's a human body louse,
Pediculus humanus.
The bottom one's a genital louse,
Pthirus pubis.
It and its cohorts we call 'crabs.' The name fits, huh?"

Staring into the microscope, Nick felt itchier. The body louse was longer and thinner than its pubic cousin, with legs that looked less like claws. The "crab" resembled its namesake, with a rounded body and large pincer-legs. If not for Wong, he'd have indulged the psychosomatic need to scratch his groin.

"Where was the victim stabbed?" the entomologist asked.

"In the abdomen, around her womb."

"Different species of lice attack different hosts, and each species usually infests a particular part of the body. Because the lice in question come from a human corpse, they should match one of these two Anoplura species. The reason they don't is they're chewing lice, Mallophaga.

"Chewing lice infest animals and birds. They don't attack humans, but people who handle infested hosts occasionally get chewing lice on themselves. When this happens, the bugs don't stay long. You'll note the lice on your slide have mouthparts adapted for biting. Their mandibulate jaws once nibbled bits of hair, feathers, or the host's skin."

"What host?" Nick said.

"There's the problem."

Wong dismantled one of her "chairs" to find a specific text: Borror, Triplehorn, and Johnson,
An Introduction to the Study of Insects.
Her bookmarks were
Far Side
cartoons.

"Examining their host is the only effective way to find lice," Wong said. "Unless the host is domestic, it must be trapped or shot. We often find lice attached to the skins of museum animals and birds. Because specific hosts are prey to certain species of lice, lice, unlike other insects, are categorized by host. When, like here, the host isn't known, identifying the species becomes a daunting task."

Wong opened the book to page 277. The header read
Keys to the Families of Phthiraptera.
The illustration showed a pair of lice: the shaft louse of chickens and the cattle-biting louse.

"Each of the two orders—here Mallophaga—subdivides into family, genus, and species. I use the keys in this book to determine family. Each key is a couplet that offers an either/or choice. Each choice directs me to another couplet, blazing a trail to follow until the family's identified. Read the first couplet," Wong said, taking Craven's place at the microscope.

Nick scanned the page to orient himself. "The choice is between 'Head as wide as or wider than the prothorax; mouthparts mandibulate,' and 'Head narrower than prothorax; mouthparts haustellate.' "

"The lice on your slide fit choice one. Basically the couplet confirms they're chewing lice. What's the number after that choice?"

"Two," Nick said.

"And if we'd gone the other route?"

"Eight," he said.

"Okay, that means we go to couplet two. If we'd made the other choice, we'd go to couplet eight. Read two," Wong said.

"Here the choice is between 'Antennae clubbed and concealed in grooves; maxillary palps present,' and 'Antennae filiform and exposed; maxillary palps absent'."

"Your lice fit the second choice. Where does that lead us?"

"Couplet seven," he said.

Nick flipped to page 278. "Here we choose between 'Tarsi with two claws; antennae five-segmented,' and 'Tarsi with one claw; antennae usually three-segmented.' "

"Your lice fit the first choice, indicating which couplet?"

"There is no number. Instead it says 'Philopteridae.' "

"Good, that's the family at the end of the road. You follow the couplets until you get a family name. Philopteridae are lice parasitic on birds."

"Which birds?" Nick said.

"Here we reach a roadblock. The next step is to break the

family down into genera and species. Find the species and we isolate the host. In North America there are about 60 genera and 450 species of Philopteridae. The problem is there are no comprehensive keys beyond this point. Keys do exist for domesticated fowl like chickens and pigeons, but there are only checklists for other birds. Texts like Emerson and Price contain Mallophaga host-parasite lists, but it might lake a week to work through them. I'd have to compare your lice with an example of each species on the list."

"Willing to try?" Nick asked.'

Magick

Vancouver 

5:25
P.M.

DeClercq studied the Tarot cards at the end of
Jolly Roger:
the Hanged Man, Judgement, and the Devil. He tried to fathom their meaning.

His knowledge of the Tarot was rudimentary, consisting of one or two basics encountered here and there. He knew the Tarot is one of the great systems of divination, others being the
I Ching
and Scandinavian Runes. Tarot magic is "in the cards," for each symbol relates man to the physical and spiritual worlds. Symbols evoke both conscious and subconscious reactions, so each card is a door to the occult mind. Divination motivates the mind to bring it about, so the cards reflect what is, has been, and will be. The Tarot's magic is in the reader's response.

A person wanting his fortune told cuts the cards, concentrating on the question to be answered. The cards are then laid out in a prescribed manner, how they fall and how they relate determining the future. The simplest layout is a three-card Gypsy Spread. A card called the Significator is chosen to represent the inner being of the querent. This card, placed faceup, may be any from the deck, and in the
Jolly Roger
spread was the Hanged Man. Two cards selected at random are placed facedown to the right: in
Jolly Roger,
Judgement and the Devil. Read together, all three cards divine what will be.

The Hanged Man.

Judgement.

And the Devil.

What in hell did they mean?

Robert DeClercq had seen more of death than was healthy for any man. Not clinical death, sanitized, like a pathologist sees, but death
in situ
with all its pathos and wrenching raw emotion.

His first year in harness, he'd arrived at a farmhouse in rural Saskatchewan to find a woman sprawled on the kitchen floor, a long-handled wood ax buried in her skull, two bloodied kids clinging to her screaming in rage at what their father had done. In Alberta he had been introduced to Seppuku when a visiting Japanese businessman spilled his intestines onto the carpet of his hotel room. Four men had been ice-picked to death in a filthy Saltspring commune, the aftermath of a feel-good acid trip that went bad. Handprints clawed in blood along a Manitoba garage told the story of a homosexual lovers' spat settled with a razor. In Newfoundland an old priest had smothered in church while masturbating with a masochist's plastic bag over his head. A Yukon politician had stuck a shotgun in his mouth, pulling the trigger with his toe, soon so stiff from cadaveric spasm it had to be broken to free the barrel. A Jamaican nanny in New Brunswick had been skinned alive by a patient on the run from the local asylum. Ten years after an Ottawa bomb had blown a car apart, the driver's mummified hand was found on the roof of a nearby apartment block. A man pushed through a fifth-story window in Quebec had been left to die impaled on a spiked iron fence. Protesting a parking fine at city hall, a Nova Scotia motorist had doused the clerk with lighter fluid then had set him aflame. DeClercq had opened a shopping bag abandoned in P.E.I, to find a newborn baby strangled with its umbilical cord. He'd collected the limbs of a teenager scattered along a railway line after they were methodically thrown from a commuter train. The worst was a_ Yellowknife autopsy in 1969 when the corpse, already certified dead from asphyxiation, had cried out and died from shock when the pathologist cut open its chest. So many cases. Hell on Earth . . .

What made DeClercq a good detective was occult intuition: the fact he'd trained himself to tap his jungle sense.

Early in evolution, back when we were apes, jungle sensitivity ruled our lives. Animals have a built-in clock. They turn up the minute it's time to eat. Animals have a built-in homing device. Abandoned thousands of miles from home, they've been known to return to where they live. Animals have an intuitive sense akin to "second sight." A dog will stand by the door prior to its master's return even when its owner's gone for an unset duration. Human beings have these latent powers, too.

The subconscious mind—our "jungle sense"—works with a speed and accuracy beyond conscious grasp. It makes connections missed by rational thought, for certain facts become invisible in bright light. As a boy DeClercq had noticed on a still day you can hear people talking miles away. In school he'd learned our nervous system has small gaps, synapses that filter out "background noise." If not for them we'd be aware of every aspect of our environment, greatly diminishing our powers of concentration. Existence—for LSD affects these synapses—would become an endless acid trip.

Intuitive people are able to plumb levels of subconscious meaning. The word "occult" means "unknown" or "hidden." The occult mind is a spider at the center of a web, attune to vibrations pulsing along the strands. An occult experience occurs when subconscious insight enlightens the conscious
mind. Threads of meaning reach out to bind reality together, solving problems that defy rational thought. Such intuitive powers are what we've learned to block, so the trick is to bring this "sixth sense" into everyday life. Only by ignoring our rational filter can subconscious truths be grasped, so occult intuition is developed by willed
unwilling.
DeClercq had trained himself to slip the leash.

To do this he used the walls of his office like an ouija board, moving maps, reports, and pictures around until something clicked subconsciously. Now, sitting at his desk, he tried the same divining technique on
Jolly Roger,
plumbing the Tarot cards at the end.

The Hanged Man.

Judgement.

And the Devil.

What in hell did they mean?

Something's missing,
DeClercq thought.

He flipped to the start of the book:

Chapter One 

Magick

You ask how it began?

Well, I'll tell you.

Beast 666 opened the key.

You'll recall he wrote in
The Confessions:

Her name was Vittoria Cremers . . . She was an intimate friend of Mabel Collins, authoress of
The Blossom and the fruit,
the novel which has left so deep a mark upon my early ideas about Magick . . .

Magick,
DeClercq thought.

Booting up the IBM computer on his desk, he searched the file directory for LIBRARY.WCM, then kicked in the modem. Soon a list of options filled the screen:

1.Title

2. Title—Keyword

3. Author

4. Author—Keyword

5. Subject

6. Subject—Keyword

The library catalog requested a command. He punched in "6. Subject—Keyword" from the list. Asked to "Enter the subject keyword(s)," DeClercq typed "Magick." The catalog responded, "The word Magick is not indexed."

He typed "SO" for "Start Over."

From his Catholic background, DeClercq knew 666 was the number of the blasphemous beast with seven heads and ten horns in the
Bible's
Book of Revelations. Doubting that was the meaning here and sensing a subject search would make that connection, he entered "2. Title—Keyword" and typed "Beast 666."

The catalog responded, "Beast 173 and 666 7. Total matches: O."

"Beast" was too generic: 173 books. So he typed in "666" and checked the titles.
America's Best Vegetable Recipes: 666 Ways to Make Vegetables Irresistible, Selected and Tested by the Food Editors of Farm Journal,
Doubleday, 1970.
666 Jellybeans! All That! An Introduction to Algebra
by Malcolm E. Weiss, Crowell, 1976. Et cetera.

DeClercq laughed.
Back to the drawing board.

Again he typed "SO," entered "2. Title—Keyword," then typed "The Confessions." The library offered him a choice of 238 titles.

Sighing, he scrolled down the list until
The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
appeared on-screen.

Bingo,
DeClercq thought, grabbing the phone.

"Dispatch. Nikkei."

"Chief Superintendent DeClercq."

"Yes, sir," Nikkei said. "What'll it be?"

"Send a car to the library. And to the late-night book- stores. I want everything available on Aleister Crowley, Jack the Ripper, and the Tarot."

Brady & Hindley

7:55
P.M.

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley worked in the same office. He was twenty-eight; she was twenty-three. After hours they developed a mutual interest in Nazism, sadism, and pornography. Hindley was Brady's disciple. To prove he was no idle boaster when it came to murder, Brady axed a homosexual named Evans to death in front of Hindley's brother-in-law. Brady whacked him fourteen times. "It's the messiest yet," he said of this demonstration murder. "Normally it takes only one blow."

Next day, the terrified brother-in-law went to the police.

As a child, Brady was an embryo psychopath. He tortured animals for "kicks" and became a teenage drunk. Worshiping Hitler and de Sade, he stocked his library with
The History of Torture Through the Ages, Sexual Anomalies and Perversions,
and
The Kiss of the Whip.
He viewed others as morons and maggots.

Hindley was a virginal Catholic when she met Brady. None-too-bright, she thought him smart because he read
Mein Kampf
at lunch. On their first date they saw
Judgment at Nuremberg,
after which Brady seduced her. Soon she was aping Irma Grese, "the Bitch of Belsen," by dyeing her hair bleach-blond and wearing leather boots. Brady called her Myra Hess.