Psychos: Headhunter, Ripper, Bed of Nails, and Hangman

Psychos

Headhunter

Ripper

Bed of Nails

Hangman

Headhunter

A Special X Thriller

Michael Slade

Praise for Michael Slade

Michael Slade's books are blood-chilling, spine-tingling, gut-wrenching, stomach-churning, and a much closer look at the inside of a maniac's brain than most people would find comfortable—but always riveting.

—Diana Gabaldon, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of the Outlander series

Crime writer Michael Slade is the real deal! As a trial lawyer, Slade knows psycho killers, sex predators, and their horrific crimes inside out. As a Mountie, I worked sex crimes and led a team of ViCLAS psycho-hunters for seven years. If reading Slade makes you react, ‘Wow! Serial killers don't really do that to people, do they?’, I can tell you, yes, they do.

—RCMP Staff Sergeant Christine Wozney (ret.), CO of the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis team (West Coast)

Praise for Headhunter

"Headhunter stunned me. It’s really good."

—Alice Cooper

A real chiller! The most gruesome I have ever read.

—Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, on the original edition of Headhunter

"First rate, compelling, nerve-tingling. A novel of sex, death, and the macabre. Extraordinarily vivid. A thinking man’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It works exceptionally well. One of the novel’s more noteworthy achievements is a complex structure of flashback sequences and parallel story lines, which allows Slade to artfully play the old genre game of posing various solutions to the identity of the killer."

—The Vancouver Sun

Full of spooky weird stuff, fast-paced shoot-em-up action, and a surprise ending. There are twists and turns, false leads and sudden shocks. You probably won't be able to figure out whodunit.

—The Gazette, Montreal

WARNING: Not for the squeamish. A novel so terrifying it will haunt your dreams for weeks.

—Book of the Month Club Magazine

"An encyclopedia of weirdness. There’s enough assorted kinkiness, perversion, and psychosis in Headhunter to fill a dozen insane asylums. The setting is refreshing, with real suspense and interesting characters."

—Asbury Park Press

Also by Michael Slade

Ghoul

Cutthroat

Ripper

Zombie

Primal Scream

Burnt Bones

Hangman

Death’s Door

Bed of Nails

Swastika

Kamikaze

Crucified

Red Snow

The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Part One

Horseman

Old is the tree, and the fruit good

Very old and thick the wood.

Woodsman, is your courage stout?

Beware! The root is wrapped about

Your mother’s heart, your father’s bones;

And like the mandrake comes with groans.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, Fables

The Nightmare

Medicine Lake, Alberta, 1897

The body hangs upside down from the ceiling by nails driven through both feet. The head is missing, the neck severed to expose artery and vein, muscle and bone in a circle of raw flesh. What’s left of the corpse is dressed in the bright scarlet tunic of the North-West Mounted Police. The arms, in sleeves with gold braid, dangle down toward the plank floor. Blood as red as the uniform pools under the headless Mountie. Blood drips from the fingertips, but the sound of the drops hitting the floor is masked by the rhythmic thud of a drum beating overhead. The drumbeat booms down from atop a trapdoor in the ceiling.

Thump … thump … thump … thump …

He awoke with a start.

His muscles tense.

His mind alert.

His nerves as taut as a bowstring at full draw.

Under the blanket he used as a pillow, Blake closed his right hand on the Enfield’s grip and eased back the hammer with his thumb. The telltale click as the sidearm cocked was smothered by the multiple folds of the coarse blanket. Slowly, the manhunter eased the revolver out from under his head and into the bitter cold. Then he lay stock-still in his buffalo robe. Silent. Listening. Waiting.

Thump … thump … thump …

The night was cold and moonless. To the north, the aurora borealis trembled across the frozen landscape with that weird flicker the Indians call the Dance of the Dead Spirits. Above the Mountie, countless stars pierced the ink-black sky, while east of the Rockies, beyond the endless flatlands of the Canadian plains, a meteor shower stabbed the ruddy smudge of dawn.

It was 6 a.m.

During Blake’s hours of fitful sleep, a storm from the Arctic had shrouded these mountains with a sheet of thick, fresh snow. Now the midnight blizzard had passed and frost crept down from the hoary peaks to encrust his camp with ice. Around him, the whole world seemed to sleep in savage desolation.

Thump … thump … thum-thump … thump …

The Mountie was camped in a thicket of pines on the rim of a frozen lake. Though he strained his ears to the silence, not a sound cracked the brittle air of this snowbound valley. But in his gut—his primal core—Blake knew something was out there.

Enfield in hand, breath held, the Horseman rose to his feet.

Wilfred Blake was a tall man with firm, unflinching eyes. As protection from winter, he was bundled up in a beaverskin hat and a thick buffalo coat. For nineteen years, the Scotsman had served in the British colonial army. That was followed by decades more in the Mounted Police. Although he was now almost sixty years of age, that lifetime of fighting and exposure to the world’s harshest climates had failed to sap his strength. Muscles still roped his broad shoulders and barrel chest to a backbone as straight as a ramrod down a rifle barrel.

In 1857, Blake had been with the Highlanders posted on the Ganges River. During the Sepoy Mutiny, he was garrisoned at Cawnpore. There, he slept through the screams of captured comrades being skinned alive and nailed to makeshift crosses by the mutineers, and he saw the well near the Bibighar filled with the heads, limbs, and bodies of dismembered British women and children. That bloodbath fueled the revenge the Highlanders later wreaked at Lucknow, where Blake—kilted and shouting Remember Cawnpore! as his battle cry—spiked and slashed with his bayonet, taking no prisoners and showing no mercy as the bagpipes drove him on. Finally, returning to Cawnpore, he forced the Indian rebels to lick every drop of British blood off the Bibighar’s floor.

After clashing in China in the Second Opium War and suppressing the Red River Rebellion in western Canada, Blake had served with the Black Watch on the Gold Coast of Africa. Half a century earlier, in 1823, the British governor, Sir Charles MacCarthy, had foolishly invaded the inland Ashanti empire with woefully insufficient troops. The Africans cut off his head, and the Ashanti king had from that point forward used MacCarthy’s skull as a drinking cup and paraded the trophy annually through the streets of Kumasi.

In 1874, Sir Garnet Wolseley had recruited Blake for a new Ashanti campaign. On January 31, the Ashanti attacked with a force five times larger than that of the British colonial army. Against wave upon wave at the Battle of Amoafo, Blake exhorted his men to Fire low, fire slow! as African bodies piled up in front of the Black Watch rifles. On entering Kumasi, the Highlander faced the grisly remains of human sacrifice, and while torching the king’s palace, he recovered MacCarthy’s gold-rimmed skull.

In London, the queen herself had pinned the Victoria Cross to his chest.

Through forty years of advancing the flag in far-flung corners of the British Empire, Wilfred Blake had embraced the soldier’s crowning lesson: cunning honed on instinct is the key to survival.

Honed on instinct then.

And honed on instinct now.

So as dawn began to redden the jagged peaks, the manhunter crouched on his heels and shivered in the keen hoarfrost, listening intently for any sound that might give his quarry away. The frostbitten fingers that gripped the Enfield were going numb.

Thum-thump …

The ice encrusting Medicine Lake creaked from the weight of the overnight snowfall.

Thum-thump …

A white-on-white snowy owl hooted from atop one of the pines.

Thum-thump …

An alpine breeze made the trees whisper like conspirators.

Thum-thump …

Nature sounds. Nothing human.

The only man-made noise was the blood throbbing in his ears.

Thum-thump …

Wilfred Blake had jerked awake from the clutch of a haunting nightmare, the genesis of which went back almost thirty years. The black delirium had seized him in the darkness before dawn. It too had commenced with a pounding in his ears. Now, as he crouched listening to the hammering pulse from his heart, he wondered if the night tremor alone had wrenched him from sleep …

Thump … thump … thump … drip …

No! Blake thought as the unbidden nightmare plagued him again …

It’s not the thumping that rattles him. Nor is it the dark. It’s the ghastly collection of still-bleeding scalps nailed to the fortress walls. This room without windows has lurked in his mind for close to three decades. The plank door braced with ironwork is bolted firmly shut. The hand-hewn logs are stacked one on another. Mud is packed between the logs to keep out the cold.

Again, it’s a winter month in 1870.

Again, this room is where the fort does its Indian trade.

Beside him are sacks of feed and crates of ammunition. A candle on a table casts the only light. Along the nearest wall lean eight oblong crates, the lid of one pried off and lying on the floor. The candlelight illuminates a barrel within. At twenty rifles to a crate, that’s a hundred and—

The attack came without warning.

As happens in the Rockies, the breeze reversed direction. Barely strong enough to bend smoke or twist a feather, a frigid zephyr puffed in from the edge of the woods. Instantly, two dogs awoke and turned in that direction. The huskies were sleeping near the dogsled.

Dogs? Blake wondered. They’re nae in this dream.

Then reality bit and shook him loose from fantasy. In the cold light of dawn, the Horseman understood that his cross-country manhunt was done.

Aye, laddie, Blake thought. It’s a good day to die.

The Plains Cree churning toward him was hardly out of his teens. He wore the winter dress of his tribe, but it offered little protection against this harsh environment. He’d stuffed his ice-caked leather leggings and moccasins with dead moss to insulate his limbs. His naked chest was cloaked by a snow-covered buffalo robe. On his head, Iron-child wore a horned bison cap adorned with broken feathers and tattered weasel skins. While one hand paddled the deep drifts to propel him across the valley to where the Mountie was camped in the pines, his other gripped the barrel of a rusty Winchester rifle and wielded it as a war club.

A jolt of adrenaline hit the white man’s blood. Addicted to life-or-death combat, Blake thrived on the thrill of a kill. For forty years, he’d lugged his battered regimental trunk around the British Empire, adding trophies to the macabre collection concealed in its false bottom. Here was another memento mori to join those glories on his return to NWMP headquarters in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Come and get it, laddie!

The Scotsman aimed his frosted handgun. Beyond the sights of the Enfield, Blake watched the Cree warrior shed the buffalo robe that was encumbering his attack. As war paint, the fugitive had streaked his face and chest with charcoal, likely scraped from a tree struck by summer lightning.

Dinnae fire till ye can see the whites of their e’en, Sir Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw had told his Royal Scots Fusiliers before they cut down French infantry at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. This morning Blake adopted that tactic, not to ensure that his bullet would drill the forehead of its oncoming target, but to savor the glory in smiting another heathen for his God.

When Iron-child was close enough to glimpse the hate in his eyes, the Horseman pulled the trigger … and the Enfield refused to fire! Either his finger was frozen or the mechanism was jammed.

The Cree’s war whoop shattered the solitude, rousing nature from its hibernation. With flapping wings, the snowy owl took flight from atop the pines, soaring up the surrounding mountain peaks. As powdered snow sifted down from the wobbly branches, Blake jammed his left mitt into his mouth, bit hard, and wrenched the stiff glove from his fingers. Gripping the cold revolver with both bare hands, he tugged the trigger as hard as he could to free the mechanism and fire the reluctant weapon.

Ten feet away, Iron-child clawed through the knee-deep snow, his breath billowing out in wispy white clouds. His arm rose to slam the rifle down on the Horseman’s head, but then—as if his protecting spirit had warned the brave of certain death—he ducked from the Enfield’s muzzle.

A flash of yellow blazed at the heart of the shocking explosion. The revolver lurched in Blake’s grip as the blast roared out at the towering peaks, echoing back like a multi-shot barrage unleashed by a British colonial army firing line.

The bullet missed its target and zipped over Iron-child’s head, smashing against the breech of the Winchester. A fragment ricocheted off the metal, striking the Cree just above the temple, slashing down his cheek, and lodging in his shoulder. The velocity stunned him, and the force of the slug hitting the rifle hurled him back into the snow.

With a crack, Iron-child’s leg snapped below the knee.

Gasping, he passed out.

Thump … thump … thump … drip …

Junkie

Vancouver, British Columbia, 1982

Monday, October 18, 5:02 a.m.

In this city, it often rains. Geography demands it. Beyond the western islands roll endless miles of ocean, while northeast at the city’s back jut jagged mountain peaks. With the slate-gray skies of autumn come the cyclone westerlies, raging winds and roiling clouds that storm in from the sea. In waves, these bloated bellies tear open on the peaks, and rain rattles down from each gut.

To live in this city, you learn to stomach rain.

The woman stumbling through the early morning downpour was soaked to her skin. Staggering up Chinatown’s Pender Street with one arm clutching her abdomen, she flailed her other arm wide for support from the derelict buildings along the sidewalk. She was tall and slender, this jitterbugged junkie splashing through puddles stained with garish neon, this long-legged, black-haired hooker in her early twenties. Despite the October chill, her drenched coat flapped open to expose a scoop-neck T-shirt that flaunted her breasts and clung to her puckered nipples. Shivering, tired, hungry, and sick, she was badly in need of a fix.

Chinatown at 5 a.m. had lost a century. At this hour of the morning, the inscrutable mystery of the East was tangible. In rundown facades as ornate as Chinese theater masks, the windows above the street watched her like dead men’s eyes. In some of these buildings, sinister tongs had met in secrecy as thick as the smoke fuming from their opium factories. In one, Dr. Sun Yat-sen had lived out his exile.

None of this the hooker knew, for she was new to this city. The addict had squirmed in Vancouver’s clutches for only four days.

Johnny. Help me, Johnny, she mumbled as she wobbled.

Twenty minutes had passed since the bulls let her go. They had stopped her at nine last night out front of the Moonrise Hotel. She was leaning against the corner of that sleazy dive, with her back to the stinking side-alley where working girls scrawled messages on the Wall to warn their sisters about sadistic creeps on the prowl. Her raincoat hung open to offer the erotic wares of her dangerous trade, and with each curb-crawling car that slowed down to check out her tits and ass, the streetwalker bent forward to deepen her cleavage and blow the cruising john a kiss.

The bulls had used a bait car to take her by surprise. The mud-spattered vehicle advertised 24-hour plumbing and had a phone number on the doors. The windows were shut against the rain when it pulled in to the curb, so she sashayed out from under the eaves in her tight top, miniskirt, and high-heeled boots to tap on the glass and ask, Wanna party, boys?

Sure, said the bull riding shotgun as he flashed his badge. Suck on this.

Hey, that’s entrapment. I know my rights.

You hear that? Shotgun asked the bull behind the wheel. Southern accent as thick as hers, she’s got to be Scarlett O’Hara.

Rights? scoffed the Wheelman. This ain’t the US of A.

What gives? the hooker asked.

Routine check. Shotgun opened the door and climbed out of the passenger seat. Nothing personal. We roust all you working girls.

I said ‘party.’ There’s nothing sexual in that.

You speak Latin?

Huh?

"Res gestae. Mean anything to you?"

No.

It’s a legal term for words that form part of a physical act.

Shotgun poked one of her breasts.

The physical act is you bouncing your eye-popping rack. And the words are displayed on your T-shirt.

The T-shirt read deep throat.

Your tits speak volumes. So get in the car.

The cop shop was just a few blocks away. It too was in the skids. Because Shotgun rode in the back with her, she couldn’t ditch her stash. Normally, the junkie would have carried the cap in a plastic balloon in her mouth, ready to swallow the H before any narcs could clamp her with a chokehold. Work, however, trumped that. You can’t chat up johns if your yap is stuffed with a balloon.

She hoped these cops were vice bulls working the pussy patrol.

But of course, they were narcs.

They parked the car in the alley behind 312 Main, beside the door to the elevator that rose to the jail. Rain drummed on the trash cans out back of the neighboring greasy spoon, thrashing tin like a wannabe heavy metal rocker in a garage band. Waterfalls gushed from the gutters gurgling overhead, then foamed out to the storm sewers draining Cordova Street.

Let’s play a game, Shotgun said. He was the younger of the two, a beefy bully with mean eyes and a sneer like Elvis Presley’s.

What kinda game?

From down south. Called Mississippi Gambler.

Gimme a break.

I’m doing that, hon. A fifty-fifty chance.

What’s the bet?

I say your stash is hidden in one of your boots. No question you’re a druggie. It’s written all over you. Want to pass me your footwear or suffer a cavity search?

The Wheelman turned in the driver’s seat and slipped her a wink. His embalmed features were blotched with drinker’s veins. Take the bet, he said. It’s less invasive.

Shotgun nodded. "Good advice. If you bet the cavity search, I’ll know your stash is tucked away in one of those come-fuck-me heels."

The junkie knew they had her, so she relinquished her boots. Turning the footwear upside down, Shotgun smirked when the balloon with her cap of H fell into his palm. Worse for her, the junk was for tonight’s fix. Just one more trick hooked off the stroll out front of the Moonrise Hotel and she’d have cooked the smack up in a spoon and spiked it into her arm.

The lift took them up to the city jail attached to the police station. By the time they’d booked her in, rolled her prints, and snapped a photo, the mug in the shot was beaded with sweat. Then they locked her in a cell on the fourth floor and let withdrawal have her.

Before long, her eyes, her nose, and the pores of her skin were running. She stewed in her rain-dampened clothes and her own body juices. She jerked from fever to shivers. Too weak to stand, she flopped on the bunk and curled up into a ball. Her legs twitched as her vision blackened around the edges. A phantom hand squeezed her heart until she thought she would die. Finally, the bulls hauled her out and dragged her to the interview room. With the monkey weighing heavy on her back, she had to clutch her guts with both arms to keep them in.

You look like shit, Shotgun said as he dropped her on a chair.

The room was claustrophobic, with tight walls, a scarred table, and two wooden seats. Shotgun sat down opposite her, and the Wheelman stood by the door. Grabbing her wrist to extend her bare arm, the narc exposed the crook of her elbow, where the vein had retreated back to the bone to hide from probing needles.

Keep jabbing that spot, he said, and it’s gonna get infected.

The Wheelman dumped the contents of her purse onto the table. Cosmetics, condoms, combs, and tissues tumbled out with her wallet. Rifling through the billfold, Shotgun extracted her birth certificate.

New Orleans, Louisiana. I pegged you right, Scarlett.

That was Atlanta.

Her voice was no more than a whisper.

Close enough, said the bull. The South’s the South to me. He held up the cap of H he’d recovered from her boot. The penalty for possession is up to seven years. The shape you’re in, even minutes will seem longer than that. Appears you swapped the Big Easy for the Big Hard.

He dropped the cap on the table amid the scatterings from her purse.

Mississippi Gambler. Let’s play again.

Shotgun flicked the cap with his finger so it rolled toward her.

You want to go back to your cell? Or you want to pick up the contents of your purse and vamoose out the door?

"All the contents of your purse, the Wheelman emphasized. Everything on the table."

We’re reasonable men, Shotgun said. Poor sick girl like you.

Name your pusher.

Name your pimp.

Or give us something better.

The choice is yours.

The jackpot awaits.

You can be a winner. But give us nothing, and what can we do? Shotgun shrugged his shoulders with his palms up, like Frenchmen do.

So she told them to fuck off and the narcs made good on their threat, caging her in with the monkey until she thought she’d go insane.

Then—about twenty minutes ago—they’d issued her an appearance notice and chucked her out in the rain.

The first thing Helen Grabowski did on getting sprung from the can was totter down Cordova Street to the grotty room she shared with Johnny, her pimp, in a rat-infested hotel. hot and cold water in every room—reasonable rates, read the dingy sign outside. A drunk had passed out in the doorway with a bottle of Aqua Velva aftershave in his hand. Rodent-like—so fitting for this dump—the sot had a pointed, stubbled face and yellow buckteeth. As Helen stepped over him, he came to life and took a sloppy swig that dribbled down his chin and pooled with the puddle of piss in the alcove.

Gotta find Johnny, the junkie muttered as she zigzagged up the stairs.

But the room was empty.

Johnny was gone, and so was their stuff.

Strung out and dreading the torture in not getting fixed, Helen lurched down the stairs with bile in her throat and tried to squeeze by the wino at the door.

Gimme a kiss, the bum slurred as the jumpy junkie flattened herself against the walls, and that’s when the feel of the bricks on her palms reminded her of the messages on the Wall at the Moonrise Hotel.

Johnny, you rotten bastard! You better have left me a note!

Struggling two blocks along Carrall Street to Chinatown, she turned left up Pender Street to double back to her skid row stroll. From the pioneer days of Vancouver—when pigtailed coolies got shipped in from China to punch a railroad through the Rocky Mountains, and whores serviced the men of the nearby logging camps—hookers and Asians have shared this vice-plagued street in the poxiest part of town.

So now she stumbled up Pender Street in the early morning rain, gasping as severe withdrawal cramps cinched her insides. A cold burn seared her goose-bumped skin as ants crawled through her muscles. At the corner of Main and Pender, she tripped and her feet skidded out from under her. Her hip struck the ground with a bone-jarring wrench as the traffic light at the empty intersection turned red, suffusing the rain with a hue so intense that it seemed as if blood poured down on the city.

With her head bent and her black hair plastered across her anguished face, she sat in a crimson puddle and cried until sobs racked her body. When the light changed to green, she heaved herself back up on her feet and locked her blurred eyes on the neon Moonrise Hotel sign sputtering at the next corner. The giant letters climbed down the front of the six-story building to the marquee of its ground-floor pub, the Moonlight Arms. Sloshing her way toward the beacon and unaware that she was being stalked by a car, Helen veered to her right just before the pub to enter the message board alley.

The Wall was painted with red-and-white stripes like a flat barber’s pole. Hookers—and occasionally pimps trying to contact their girls—scrawled notes between the red lines. Light blue Pontiac: This one’s a beater, or Look out (shank!) with a BC license plate.

Hunched over to protect her shaking hands from the rain, Helen struck match after match in the darkness to search for any word from Johnny.

God, no! she gasped with rising panic. He hasn’t left a message!

Engine noise from the mouth of the alley drew her attention back to the street. A car had pulled in to the curb and sat idling with the passenger’s window down. The dim silhouette of the driver stared out at her.

Helen Grabowski’s life had shrunk down to this: earning the price of a cap. A quick blow job would score enough scratch for her to go hunting for H.

On faltering legs, she approached the car and bent over to flash her cleavage.

Wanna date? she croaked.

The driver lurked back in the shadows.

It wasn’t a light blue Pontiac, but hers was a perilous profession. Yesterday, she’d heard of a local working girl snuffed by a bad date. The creep had used the girl’s own nylon stocking to strangle her to death. At this hour of the morning, Pender Street was a wasteland. So Helen, desperate though she was for money to go score junk, probed the gloom inside the car for a benign face.

Forget it, she said on glimpsing the eyes, and turned away from the window.

Wait a minute, lady.

Fuck off, she replied over her shoulder.

You don’t look well. You look strung out. You look like you need a fix. I want you for a friend of mine. He’ll throw in a cap of junk.

No! said the hooker. But then the iron crab of withdrawal cramps clamped its vicious claws on her guts again, worse this time.

Moments later, Helen climbed into the car.

The driver hit the gas and they drove off into the dregs of night.

Floater

Monday, October 25, 11:45 a.m.

It’s common knowledge among those who have traveled the world that for physical setting, there are six stunning cities: Hong Kong, Sydney, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, and Vancouver. The torrential rains of last week had given way to sunshine, and this morning showed why Vancouver—if not for its iconic rain, rain, rain—would be home to a billion people by now.

Seen from the whitecaps of English Bay, this greenhouse, attached to a seaside bungalow at the foot of the North Shore Mountains, threw off sunbeams in a burst of blinding glare. The maple trees above it were turning a riot of autumn colors: red, orange, and yellow. Viewed from inside the dazzling panes, a breathtaking panorama swept the south shore of the bay. Stanley Park and the Lions Gate Bridge hid the inner harbor and downtown core to the east. Ahead, the sandy beaches and cliffs of Point Grey were topped by the evergreen forest surrounding the university. And to the west, beyond the dragon-like silhouette of Vancouver Island, the pounding breakers of the blue-green Pacific stretched all the way to China.

They thrived in here, the roses.

Pen and paper in his lap, the man in the white wicker fanback chair was besieged by a profusion of vibrant blooms growing in tropical wells and artificial gardens. Lately, he had taken to hybridizing his own yet-to-be-christened variety of rose, a deep maroon plant flowering by the door to the bungalow. In the years since Robert DeClercq had retired early from the Mounted Police, this hothouse had become a psychological refuge against the dark demons of his past. In here, he had written his first book, Men Who Wore the Tunic, a frontier history of the hard-hitting, straight-shooting Horsemen—the Riders of the Plains—who made Canada the only nation known chiefly for its police force.

Horsemen like the manhunter who, almost single-handedly, had forged the legendary saying The Mounties always get their man: Inspector Wilfred Blake.

This morning, DeClercq was trying to work on his follow-up book, a chronicle of serial killing from an investigator’s point of view. Write what you know is the motto for all who put pen to paper, and before the Job had tragically cost him his first wife, Kate, and his young daughter, Jane, the superintendent was pegged as the rising homicide hotshot in the federal RCMP.

Judging from the pile of crumpled paper on the floor, the writing was not going well.

DeClercq was hemmed in on all sides by every major work on Jack the Ripper. The history of serial killing always starts with Jack—hence the books littering the ex-Mountie’s desk and the tiles around his feet. Not only did that Victorian psycho have all the tropes in spades—from the name that will never be rivaled by those who skulk in his footsteps, to the degenerate, gaslit hunting ground of East End London, to the madcap taunting of the beleaguered bobbies at Scotland Yard, to the butchered skid row tarts with their missing body parts—but the hunt for the Ripper was such a botch-up in so many ways that it’s the classic lesson in how not to investigate.

Given DeClercq’s background, writing this book should have been a piece of cake.

But instead, he was going stir crazy.

Like the fictional character Nero Wolfe, growing orchids in his brownstone greenhouse in New York, DeClercq was in a cell of his own making. Shattered by the heartrending aftermath of Quebec’s October Crisis, the Mountie had fled from Montreal to West Vancouver, purchasing this waterfront hideaway before property prices blew through the roof. Here, he’d settled into the life of a lonely recluse, until horrific nightmares of Jane’s death had forced him to seek help.

Sometimes the wheel of fortune spins you a second chance. Having made you suffer hell on earth, fate will randomly hand you a windfall. And so it was with the psychologist who took on bedeviled DeClercq. It helped that she too was a transplant from Quebec, a francophone steeped in anglophone culture. The fact that she was so damned good-looking also didn’t hurt: twenty years younger than he was, with wild auburn hair and green eyes sparking with intelligence, she had high cheekbones and full, sinful lips, and the knockout figure of a femme fatale. She turned male heads from ages nine to ninety. But most of all, she exorcised the horrors from his sleep. And having patched up his cracked psyche, she married him within a year.

Genevieve was his salvation.

DeClercq, however, was still caged in his glass fortress. On working days, his wife would leave for the university, often returning late if she had night classes. Here, he’d sit scribbling at his antique desk, faced by three photos of those he’d loved in the past and present: Kate onstage in Manhattan, the night he’d fallen in love at first sight while watching her perform Ibsen’s Rosmersholm; Jane sitting in a pile of autumn leaves, her head thrown back in laughter, with sunlight caressing her curls; Genevieve on their honeymoon, beachcombing the South Seas, wearing a white bikini and holding a conch shell to her ear. If he became restless—like he was now—DeClercq would exit to a knoll on the shore and watch the world pass him by.

His cabin fever dated from the Clifford Olson case.

Serial killing—the big time—had sunk its fangs into Canada with those vicious murders. Over a nine-month spree, from November 1980 to July 1981, Olson had sexually assaulted and killed eleven local kids. He’d pick them up with offers of a job with good pay, then render each helpless with a Mickey Finn spiked with chloral hydrate. The girls were raped and stabbed; the boys were raped and bludgeoned. Olson used a sixteen-ounce stainless-steel hammer to crush their skulls. He was Maxwell Silverhammer in his sexual fantasy, and like the crazy head-cracker in the Beatles song, he would—Bang! Bang!—bring his silver hammer down upon his victims’ heads until he was—Clang! Clang!—sure that they were dead. In one instance, he used the hammer to pound nails into the brain of a boy who was still alive.

DeClercq had watched from the sidelines as a bizarre deal was struck to solidify the case. In what the media would later call a cash for corpses scam, the authorities paid Olson $10,000 a body for information about the murders and directions to his dump sites. Ten months ago, on January 11, 1982, that psycho pleaded guilty to eleven counts of first-degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to eleven life terms, with a recommendation that he never be paroled.

The fallout from that notorious case tarnished the Mounties. For a number of reasons—overlapping jurisdictions, turf wars, staff transfers, personality clashes, lack of coordination, fouled lines of communication—a monster had been able to prey unchecked on the kids of Vancouver. When the Horsemen finally got it together and began to hunt for links, it took less than two weeks for them to get their man.

Guilt.

That’s what DeClercq had felt.

Gnawing guilt.

He hadn’t been there for his daughter, and he hadn’t been there for those eleven kids.

All his life he’d trained himself to hunt rabid killers, to put real-life teeth to the mythology of the Mounties. But when a full-blown psycho had run amok, he’d sat here in self-imposed exile writing a history of serial killing.

Maintiens le Droit. Uphold the Law. That was a Mountie’s sworn duty. And when the call to duty had come, where was he?

This book was going nowhere. He was spinning the wheels of his mind. Unable to sit still any longer, DeClercq set his pen and clipboard of paper down on his book-cluttered desk, uncrossed his antsy legs, got up, and picked his way through the minefield of Jack the Ripper texts to stand at the hothouse windows and take in English Bay.

Move ’em in and move ’em out, he thought.

Freighters and container ships waiting to offload foreign cargoes and onload Canadian resources rocked at anchor on the choppy waves, queuing for a berth in the port sheltered by Stanley Park. Those sailing to parts unknown plowed through a flotilla of windjammers launched to catch the billowing breeze of this glorious day before foul weather returned. A lonely tugboat ran the gauntlet across the harbor’s mouth, chugging fast to avoid getting rammed broadside.

DeClercq’s robust reflection belied the cracks within. Tall and slim, with a fencer’s build that was quick to parry attacks and riposte with a lunge to his adversary’s heart, the ex-cop worked out three times a week with an old Hungarian master. His hair was dark and wavy, with gray at the temples. His aquiline nose and narrow jaw could have belonged to Julius Caesar. Only his guilt-ridden, brooding eyes betrayed the demons in the dungeon of his mind.

When the door to the bungalow opened, he turned his attention to his wife. Having had the morning off, she wore a gray tailored pantsuit over a maroon silk blouse for her afternoon class. The Greenhouse was bright with sunlight, and dangling prisms threw rainbows across the rows of roses. Yet it seemed to DeClercq—as it always did—that Genny added uplifting zest to his workspace.

Lucky me!

"Eh bien, Robert, she said in French, for in this bilingual house they switched languages day by day. Est-ce qu’on prendra un lunch aujourd’hui?"

"Oui, he replied, weaving among the plants to close the gap between them. J’aimerais bien. Combien de temps as-tu?"

"Juste une heure. J’ai une classe de seminaire en fin de la journée."

Fetching a pair of gardening shears, DeClercq snipped a rosebud off the plant he had hybridized and held it in front of her heart for a perfect maroon-on-maroon match.

"As-tu pensé à un nom pour ta rose?" she asked.

The name of the nameless rose faced him.

Genevieve, he said.

One of the boats DeClercq had watched—the lonely vessel cruising fast to avoid getting cleaved by a freighter churning out to sea—was a BC government tug returning from a salvage check up the bite of Howe Sound, northwest of the outer harbor. The young man leaning on the port rail, his blond hair whipped forward by the incoming wind, enjoyed the same view that Jonah had the moment before he was gulped down the gullet of that biblical whale. For that’s how Dan Heller had imagined this inlet—one of a million indentations that make up the ten thousand linear miles of the rugged West Coast—ever since he was a boy, when his tug captain dad would take him on nautical adventures. The Hollyburn, Grouse, and Seymour Mountains, the teeth along the North Shore, were the lower jaw of the whale. Stanley Park was the uvula at the throat of First Narrows, which fed the stomach of the inner harbor beyond. Point Grey was the flat tongue of the whale’s mouth, sticking out as if to lick Dan off the sea.

Gulp, he thought, grinning.

Down where the mountains met the waves, sunlight flashing from a greenhouse just this side of the Point Atkinson Lighthouse blurred the seaman’s vision. For a moment, his mind’s eye imagined this inlet as seen by British crewmen on Captain George Vancouver’s ship Discovery in 1792, when it engaged Spanish explorers on two galleons beneath the towering sandstone cliffs of Point Grey. Back then, all this was an evergreen forest as far as the eye could see, with Native longhouses built where the salmon fishing was best, and where lookouts could spot Kwakiutl war canoes crossing the strait from the Land of the Headhunters.

Dan! yelled a voice from the wheelhouse. Coffee break?

Wiping his bleary eyes and sucking in lungfuls of salty air, Heller rounded the bow, scaled the bridge ladder, and ducked into the wheelman’s cabin. After pouring himself black coffee from a thermos on the chart table, he joined the pilot at the controls.

Hair o’ the dog? Glen Simpson asked, wagging a hip flask of brandy.

Don’t mind if I do. Heller held out his cup.

The spiked coffee burned his throat on its way down.

Seen from up here, tide lines snaked across the harbor—dark green on one side, light green on the other. Logging debris tossed on the waves like corks in boiling water. High above them loomed the crumbling cliffs of the peninsula, topped by the soaring glass windows of the Museum of Anthropology, a storehouse for totems spirited away from the Land of the Headhunters. As the tug rounded Point Grey, Dan took in Tower Beach’s blockhouse gun emplacements, designed to blow Japanese ships and subs out of the harbor during the Second World War. Wreck Beach, at the tip of the tongue, would be teeming with nudists come summer.

To scopophilia. Dan raised his cup.

Scopo-what? the pilot asked. Under his quilted vest, he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with spinach-eating Popeye.

The fun in sneaking a peek at naked female flesh.

I’ll drink to that.

Remind me to buy a stronger pair of binoculars this June.

Having rounded the tip of Point Grey, the tug labored inland up the North Arm of the Fraser River. Across the muddy water came the roar of jets taking off and landing at the international airport on Sea Island in the delta. Lifting off from one of the log booms lining the banks of the river, a blue heron soared up to join the planes. Boats zipped around the delta channels like fish slipping through a net. As the tug neared the government wharf of the Ministry of Lands and Forests, Heller scrambled down the bridge ladder for hawser ropes to moor it to the dock … and that’s when something in the water bumped along the hull. Assuming a wayward log was to blame, he reached for a gaff to hook it. Seconds later, he whistled up to catch Simpson’s attention, then sliced his hand across his throat as a cue to cut the engines.

What gives? the pilot yelled down.

We got a floater.

A body?

Yeah. A naked woman thumped against the hull.

Whupping rotors drowned them out as a chopper landed on the wharf’s helipad. Simpson scurried down from the bridge to join Heller at the rail. Leaning out over the tire fenders on the side of the hull, he followed the gaff down to the dirty brown current.

Scopo-whatsit, my ass, Simpson bellowed over the chopper’s noise. "It’s no fun sneaking a peek at that naked female flesh."

The seamen stared transfixed at the bloated, half-submerged, fish-nibbled horror.

See what I see?

Yep. The floater’s got no head.

Commercial Crime Section (Special I: Electronic Surveillance)

Target: Steve Rackstraw (aka The Fox).

Tape installed: October 25. 0900 hours. (Tipple.)

Tape removed: October 25. 1130 hours. (Tipple.)

U/M known only as The Weasel.

Outgoing local call: 1122 hours

Weasel: Hey.

Fox: Hey. Hey.

Weasel: Sorry. Forgot to call ya. Forgot all about it.

Fox: Ya did, huh?

Weasel: Sorry.

Fox: Well, better grab yo’ ride and get yo’ black ass over here.

Weasel: Can’t. Not now. Maybe later.

Fox: That Ms. Billie Holiday I hear behind you, man?

Weasel: Yeah, pussy purrs for her. She da cat’s meow. I need time, man. To corral this filly in m’ stable.

Fox: Uh-huh.

Weasel: Y’know? Get this filly broken so I don’t need no rope to keep the bitch from splittin’.

Fox: Don’t use yo’ dick. Use Sister H.

Weasel: Can’t hear ya. Hold a mo’. (Shouting: Turn that music down.)

(U/F: Come on, baby. Make me fe-e-el good.)

(Weasel: In a bit. Get yo’ selfishness ready.)

Weasel: Ya still there, man?

Fox: Sounds like ya got yo’ hands full. Take heed, cousin. Voodoo juju’s comin’. Ya better be ready.

Weasel: I be ready.

Fox: When the Wolf calls, have yo’ shit together.

Weasel: (Inaudible) … zombie walks.

Fox: By the by, where’s H.G.? Bitch been split a week.

Weasel: I know. Cold. Real cold.

Fox: Better find her, man, ’fore the Wolf finds out. You’ll be cold—stone dead cold—if there’s a leak.

Weasel: Hear ya.

Fox: Be cool. Waitin’ on y’all.

Weasel: Bye.

Fox: Huh. Huh.

(End of call.)

The Moonlight Arms

Tuesday, October 26, 8:15 a.m.

No man was ever born to his job quite like Sharma Satalkar. He could trace his decision to become a forensic pathologist all the way back to the abolition of slavery on Trinidad’s sugar plantations in 1834. Five years later, the British had imported coolies—indentured laborers—from India to cut sugarcane. But Hindus had a religious problem in crossing the Kala Pani, the black water of the sea. Their customs said that crossing the sea not only cut a voyager off from the regenerating waters of the Ganges River (essential for reincarnation), but also caused him to lose caste, thereby knocking him down to a lesser level. The British quelled those fears with a two-pronged response. First, they stocked their ships with cauldrons of water from the Ganges to ensure the reincarnation cycle extended beyond the Kala Pani. And second, they hired a Brahmin priest—Sharma Satalkar’s direct ancestor—to conduct the purification rituals necessary to reinstall lost caste in the West Indies.

What the Brahmin ritualist was not prepared for was the rampant opium use among Trinidad’s Asian immigrants. To curb the lucrative traffic in that work-sapping narcotic, colonial rulers decreed that only medical practitioners could dispense the drug. No slouch at thriving in the British Caribbean, the Brahmin priest got himself qualified as a drug dispenser, thereby establishing the tradition that all Satalkar offspring are destined from birth to become medical men.

Reincarnation.

So that’s why, earlier this morning, Dr. Sharma Satalkar had parked his car at Richmond General Hospital and set about his gruesome daily task of turning dead bodies into dugout canoes. Three corpses awaited his attention in the morgue: a pair of road-racing teens barbecued late last night in a fiery collision on Highway 99 (likely caused by the bottle of tequila the responding officers found smashed in the charred driver’s lap), and yesterday’s headless floater fished from the Fraser River.

As a lifelong fan of hard-boiled crime thrillers, Dr. Sharma Satalkar, Medical Detective, was well suited to his grisly job. A thickset man with a bowling-ball head shaved to the scalp, he resembled—in his own eyes too—Lex Luthor, the arch-villain of Superman. Nothing engaged his whatdunit mind more than a cadaver with a questionable cause of death, so instead of turning to the foolish crispy critters killed in the fast-and-furious drag race, he began his day by focusing his forensic skills on the floater.

Question: Was she dead or alive when she went into the water?

Question: Did a passing boat propeller behead her?

After changing into hospital greens and a plastic apron of the same color, Dr. Satalkar entered the autopsy theater with its off-white tiles and stone terrazzo floor. The morgue had several dissecting stations, each one fixed to the floor with its own sink, garburator, scales, and water supply. There was an isolation chamber for decomposing remains, and that’s where the morgue attendant had wheeled the gurney with the floater, locking it in toe-tagged foot to sink.

Music played softly so as not to wake the dead.

The pathologist stood in the crook of the L-shaped dissecting station and scanned the waterlogged corpse from neck to toes with a powerful light. Unnaturally white in color and its abdomen bloated with gas, the body was partly decomposed from at least a week in the water. Where fish had nibbled at the naked flesh—for the floater was found with no clothes—fibrous strands of muscle clung to exposed bone.

Dr. Satalkar would have to open her up to determine if she was alive or dead when she went in the water, but he could establish the cause of the beheading with an external examination. Armed with a strong magnifying glass fit for Sherlock Holmes, the morgue sleuth peeled back the soggy tissue that had closed in around the neck bone and homed in on striations scratched into the top vertebra.

A minute later, Dr. Satalkar peeled off his gloves and strode purposefully to the phone on the wall to dial the homicide cops at Richmond RCMP.

Corporal James Rodale had never been one for blood and gore. Not even horror movies. When he became a Mountie, he knew that attending postmortems was part of the job. Sure, he’d felt queasy at his first autopsy—what human wouldn’t at such a stark intimation of mortality?—but he was certain that would soon pass.

Nope.

Rodale had been elated when he and his best friend through Mountie recruit training at Depot Division in Regina, Saskatchewan, were posted to the same RCMP detachment here on the West Coast. But then one tragic night, his buddy was ambushed in a routine traffic stop, and Rodale arrived to find him shot through the heart. After a ramming car chase at a hundred miles an hour that’s now legend in the Mounted Police, two avowed cop haters were arrested at gunpoint.

Determining which of the two was the shooter required a detailed autopsy to track the course of the bullet, and rookie Rodale—as exhibit man—had been forced to watch the pathologist peel away his buddy’s skin, muscles, lungs, and heart, all the while thinking that this could also be his fate if he road-stopped the wrong car.

The stench of the autopsy theater—with its vats of formaldehyde for fixing specimens, and the nauseating smells wafting up from various body organs—was burned into the coils of Rodale’s brain and still brought bile to his throat with every postmortem he attended. So the last thing he needed on starting shift just after breakfast this sunny morning was a call from Dr. Sharma Satalkar summoning him to the dissection of a headless corpse that was floating in the river for a week before it was fished out.

Luckily, winter had arrived early within the four walls of the morgue. To retard decomposition, the air was cool and light condensation glistened on the stainless steel. Rodale could almost see the breath billowing from his bilious throat, and on spotting the gruesome mess on the autopsy gurney, he might very well have thrown up had the room been hot and muggy.

What’s up, Doc? he asked.

The corporal wore the brown serge working uniform of the Force. Self-conscious about his receding hairline, he didn’t remove his peaked hat. The Horsemen’s regimental badge—a bison head circled by maple leaves—sat in the center of his forehead. Whereas everything about Satalkar was exotic and piratical—it was easy to imagine him with rings through his ears and a cutlass in his hand—Rodale was ordinary and bland but for one feature: he had eyes of different colors. One iris was reddish brown, the other green. Back when he was bullied as a featherweight in junior high (a prod to don the red serge for its authority), thugs had dubbed him Stoplight.

Floaters, said the doc, are run of the mill for me. Some bob down the river, and others come in with the tide. The missing head isn’t unusual, with all those estuary boats put-putting around. The floater bumps against a hull and the prop whacks off its head.

Clean as a guillotine, eh?

But not here, Corporal. Take a look.

The queasy cop’s stomach lurched as the sawbones passed him the magnifying glass.

See the zigzag striations across the top vertebra?

Yeah, said Rodale, bending his head and feigning a look through closed eyelids.

You don’t get marks like that from the clean cut of a whirling propeller. You get them from sawing with a nicked blade.

She didn’t drown?

I doubt it. I’ll know more when I open her up. The lungs of drowning victims are typically full of water. People suck it in in their struggle to breathe as their blood oxygen level falls. Coughing makes it worse by triggering an inhalation reflex. Water-filled lungs—pulmonary edema—aren’t conclusive, though. The lungs of any corpse submerged for several days after death will passively fill with water. I’ll do the usual tests for drowning. Did her beating heart pump diatoms through her bloodstream to collect in her bone marrow? And I’ll do the Gettler chloride test to see if we’re looking at a saltwater or freshwater drowning.

But your bet’s against that?

Yes.

You’re thinking murder by beheading?

That would be stretching it from just the decapitation. No matter how she died, the saw marks could be from getting rid of the body.

After death? While cutting it down to stuff in a trunk or something?

Uh-huh. But not the stab to her throat.

As Satalkar pointed to several vertical punctures on both sides of the neck, the Horseman squinted his eyes to blur the ghastly stump of artery and vein, muscle and bone in its circle of waterlogged flesh.

Someone stabbed her sideways through the throat, said the pathologist, using a knife or a pointed weapon with a thick blade.

Like a Bowie knife?

That would do it.

Sex attack? asked the Mountie.

There’s bruising around her genitals, but that could be from prostitution. Note the needle marks on the interior aspect of both arms. Addiction to drugs often leads to the sex trade. But the slash across both breasts, bisecting the nipples, suggests a sexual element to the attack. It cuts deep to the sternum.

Semen?

Too long in the water for a swab to be productive.

Okay, Doc, from what you see, how’s this for a theory? Junkie hooker runs afoul of a vicious john. While they’re going at it, he stabs her through the neck for sadistic kicks. To make a statement, he also slashes her breasts. Then, to impede the ID, he cuts off her head and dumps her body in the river.

Maybe, the sawbones slowly replied. But if he decapitated her to hinder identification, why not snip off her fingertips as well?

Satalkar leaned over to take scrapings from under each fingernail. Then he injected glycerin into the wrinkled tips to smooth them out. After Rodale had fetched a fingerprint sheet from his briefcase, the doc pressed the arches, loops, and whorls into an inkpad, then he rolled each finger across the form. On retrieving the exhibit, Rodale labeled it and filled in a box with time, date, place, and his regimental number.

If the vic was a junkie hooker, odds were a drugs bust had left her prints on file.

Who were you? the Mountie wondered.

1:15 p.m.

To: Richmond Detachment, RCM Police

6900 Minoru Blvd., Richmond, BC

Attn.: Cpl. James G. Rodale

From: Vancouver Police Dept.

312 Main Street

Vancouver, BC

Repl.: Det. Bernie Zebroff, Drug Squad

Re: Fingerprint Enquiry/Floater (Fraser River)

ID confirmed.

Helen Ann Grabowski, aka Patricia Ann Palitti.

Outstanding charges: NIP heroin (October 18, 1982), Vancouver (Moonrise Hotel, Moonlight Arms).

DOB: June 12, 1961, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Check with FBI.

Mug shot to follow.

Description from booking sheet: white female; height, 175 cm; weight, 50 kg; slim build; large breasts, unusually firm (believe me, that’s what it says here); black hair to collar; brown eyes; needle tracks both arms; long scar down center of spine (skin search by nurse).

B. Zebroff (Det.)

3:45 p.m.

To: E Division, RCM Police

Richmond Detachment

Attn.: J. G. Rodale (Cpl.)

From: N Division, RCM Police

Ottawa, Ontario

Re: 4722067

FBI confirmation print record: Helen Ann Grabowski, aka Patricia Ann Palitti.

New Orleans Police Department.

Soliciting (April 12, 1980). Suspended sentence.

Known prostitute. Pimp: John Lincoln Hardy, aka The Weasel.

No record.

Pictures to follow.

5:33 p.m.

It hit you as soon as you came through the door. Nothing definite, nothing concrete—just a gray, amorphous atmosphere that hung in the air like the opium smoke from Chinatown’s sinister past. You sensed at once without being told that this was Junk City. Junk time ruled here, with real time suspended. The fifty patrons in the Moonlight Arms made no more noise than twenty. Most were content to lurk in the gloom of this cockroach haven, nursing a beer until it was time to shoot up again and watching each other furtively through tombstone eyes. The only drunk was a fat, slovenly Native woman who banged on the top of the jukebox offbeat to a Loverboy tune. In the rooms upstairs, there were probably a dozen hypes lolling on crumpled, stained sheets in various states of undress, nodding in and out of life with needles clinging to their arms like glass leeches.

Odds were, on sensing this, you backed out the door.

The Amazon who was slumped against the wall on the far side of the bar would have been striking had she taken care of herself. Six feet tall, with a muscular, statuesque figure, she resembled Ursula Andress in the Bond film Dr. No. Same high cheekbones. Same honey-colored hair. Same almond eyes. But in her demeanor, the likeness slipped away. Her clothes were loose and grubby. Her nails were painted with chipped red polish. Her sloppy makeup failed to mask the dark smudges beneath her sleepless eyes. And at least a week had passed since her rat’s nest of greasy hair had last felt a comb.

The woman was jittery and jumpy …

Her eyes jerked here and there …

Beseeching all who were pushing …

I need junk!

The Indian who strode into the bar had headhunting in his blood. That history was proudly emblazoned on the T-shirt just visible in the gap of his frayed jean jacket:

The photo harked back to a time when his ancestors were feared warriors on the West Coast, before white men arrived to pollute their land with plastic and malls. Now, his people were ground down to drinking on shabby reserves and trolling through downtown dives like this to eke out a living. His tattooed arms were bare from the shoulder down, the sleeves of his jacket and T-shirt torn off to boast his thick biceps. The short, stout man wore soiled jeans cinched with a Harley-Davidson belt. Strung round his neck was a whale’s tooth dangling from a leather thong. From under the brim of his dirty Stetson leered a pockmarked face punctuated by eyes cold with the meanness of the streets.

Are you lookin’? the Indian murmured as he weaved among the tables.

Are you lookin’?

Are you lookin’?

The pusher’s version of the hooker’s Want a date?

When he spied the twitchy blonde across the bar, his mouth cracked into a grin of yellow, rotting teeth. Like a wolf on the prowl, he zeroed in on his prey.

Are you lookin’, baby?

You got? the Amazon asked.

Uh-huh.

How much?

Sixty for one.

Where?

The Indian—whose street name was Bax (for Baxbaxwalanuksiwe)—rolled his bloodshot eyes toward the pub’s rear door.

Meet me out back in five.

Turning on the heels of his cowboy boots, he quickly walked away.

Is Someone Hunting Heads?

Wednesday, October 27, 9:34 a.m.

Gumby!

Nose-honker!

Poo stain!

Bitch!

The tiff between the five-year-old twins was heating up.

Bitch was the word their dad had spat repeatedly at their mom in the volatile days leading up to their parents’ recent split. Bitch was also the word their mom used to refer to their dad’s new girlfriend, Roz. Mom never said the name Roz—she just hissed That bitch! whenever she mentioned the pretty young woman who’d moved into their old house to live with their dad after the separation. Whatever bitch meant, it was obviously a big step up from Gumby, nose-honker, and poo stain—the usual taunts in their girlhood lexicon. So as tempers flared in the current argument—about whether to break Mom’s strict Don’t go near the creek! rule in order to explore a tattered tent spotted at the foot of the hillside—first one twin and then the other had pulled out the loaded word and hurled it at her sister.

"You’re a double bitch, Cindy!" retorted Diane, standing nose to nose with her rosy-cheeked