West Vancouver

With the smell of Canadian bacon and maple syrup awaft in the house—you can't get any more nationalistic than that—well, the coffee beans weren't grown here—Robert cleared the breakfast dishes while Katt was in the shower. He wondered if all teenagers thrived in pockets of sound, darting from one to the next while lugging interim music with them, sort of like a junkie with a carry-over fix, kill the racket for too long and they'd go into withdrawal. Maybe not all teenagers. But certainly the one in this house.

Katt was in the bathroom with the ghetto blaster blaring, Bryan Adams wailing he wanted to be her underwear, Katt singing along she wanted to be his, too, one or two meows from Catnip in the chorus, claws probably scraping the toilet seat to keep time, for all he knew Scratch Bear was in the shower, too, as he struggled to hear the overwhelmed CBC News. He gave up and returned to the Watson chair.

The hound of the Baskervilles lay sleeping by the cheery fire.

"All quiet on the Western front?" he inquired of the guard. "Aren't you supposed to be super-sensitive to sound?"

Napoleon snored on.

Perhaps a guard cat was needed.

Especially one that could run the perimeter in a nanosecond.

Surrounded by the creature comforts of hearth and home, the fire crackling as darkness and the overnight snowfall held hands outside, the chief superintendent concentrated on the developed print of Natasha Wilkes's head. Focusing on the maple leaves mixed with sand in the pail, he sensed it was time to let his mind play ouija board, so he unwilled himself to slip the reins of conscious restraint which bridled subconscious links made by his instinctive id.

Maple leaves, he thought.

First his mental ouija pointed to the funeral. How small Jane's coffin had seemed beside her mother's, the sun setting fire to the fall maples shading the Quebec graveyard. The caskets were lowered deep into the black earth. "Bless this grave," intoned the Catholic priest, sprinkling holy water on the lid covering Jane, ". . . and send Your angels to watch over it and grant this child peace. ..."

The aftermath of his daughter's death in 1970 had driven Robert from Quebec and the Mounted Police. The youngest superintendent ever promoted to that rank, he had flouted orders by undertaking a rogue investigation into Jane's whereabouts, the upshot of which was five dead murderers in the woods. There was an internal investigation into his conduct. Force protocol being he couldn't have a lawyer, he was represented by Inspector Francois Chartrand. Public sympathy was on his side, and he had a legal defense of protecting his family, and the odds were five to one, so he was never charged but instead retired from the Force.

Fleeing from ghosts and memories too haunting to face, British Columbia was as far away west as he could run.

But Jane's ghost followed.

"I knew you'd come, Daddy. I knew you wouldn't fail me. ..."

With proceeds from selling the Montreal house and insurance on Kate's life, he had purchased this waterfront hideaway just before property values went through the roof. The wooded lot was treed with firs, arbutuses, cedars, and maples. Rambling around his lonely estate that first autumn, what struck him was the washed-out yellow of the maple leaves. Without the cold snap back East, they never caught fire.

Maple leaves, he thought.

His mental ouija moved to the crest of the RCMP on the cover of his first published book. Military history had brought him to the Force, which was an outgrowth of the British Colonial Army, so to occupy his mind in forced retirement in the early seventies, he'd written the definitive history of the Mounted Police. Men Who Wore the Tunic was its original title.

The jacket of the book was the color of Red Serge. Title, crest, and author's name were embossed in gold. The crest had a buffalo head at center surmounted by a crown. The bison was circled by the motto Maintiens Le Droit. Flanked on both sides were six maple leaves, one for each of the country's ten provinces and two Arctic territories. Scrolled below was Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Shortly after publication, the title Men Who Wore the Tunic was obsolete. In 1974 the Mounted commenced recruiting women into the ranks. Katherine Spann was in the first female troop. Her grandfather was Inspector Wilfred Blake, the British soldier dispatched across the Canadian prairie by dog sled in winter to report on conditions there after the Manitoba Rebellion of 1870. Blake had recommended recruiting the North-West Mounted Police, which he suggested should be an amalgam of the Texas Rangers and Royal Irish Constabulary. Because the Plains tribes honored Queen Victoria's redcoats, having sided with King George during the American Revolution, the Riders of the Plains should wear Red Serge. Wilfred Blake—until recently—had been the icon of the Force, and the focus of Robert's second book, Bagpipes, Blood, and Glory.

But that was another story.

The Cutthroat case.

Robert had known Katherine Spann's father back in the fifties, when Alfred Spann was his mentor in the Force, training young Constable DeClercq how to police the north. Alfred was a Mountie attracted to the wilds, and all his postings until he vanished on patrol in the icy Arctic were near the Northern Lights. Katherine Spann was just a baby the last time mentor and student met in Montreal, at which time Alfred entrusted Robert with Wilfred Blake's gun. "Keep this for me till I return," but he didn't.

Men Who Wore the Tunic was dedicated to Corporal Alfred Spann.

Robert was still in retirement when the Headhunter raped, killed, and decapitated Greiner, Grabowski, and Portman in 1982. Public panic ensued. By then Frangois Chartrand was commissioner of the Force, so I he brought back the homicide hotshot he'd defended in Quebec years before. Murder was Robert's business. He had the "knack." That rare combination of tactics and intuition found in every supercop. Before there was ViCLAS or crime-scene analysis or criminal profiling, there was him. And just as British cops used to "call in the Yard," flummoxed detachments would summon DeClercq. Troubleshooting the tough cases earned him his reputation and skyrocketing rank, for he was the Mountie who ensured the Mounties always got their man.

The first thing he did on taking command was form the Headhunter squad. Like all major dragnets, the task force was organized like a pyramid. Such investigations had failed in the past, allowing the Yorkshire Ripper and Ted Bundy (and soon Paul Bernardo) to slip through, so for backup DeClercq borrowed a trick from the past and revived flying patrols. Last century, when Mounted detachments had policed the Northwest by regular patrols, outlaws had evaded capture by learning the Force schedule. In 1890 Commissioner

Herchmer plugged the breach with flying patrols: Mounties who galloped irregular trails and manhunted independently outside the ranks. DeClercq revived flying patrols to hunt the Headhunter laterally without H.Q. control.

Force commandos.

When he was given a list of Members to choose his squad, Robert was surprised to find Katherine Spann had joined after he retired. Intrigued to test how Alfred Spann's kid had turned out, he dispatched her as one of the flying patrols. Not only did his mentor's daughter take the Headhunter down but, six weeks later, shot it out with a renegade cop.

Blake.

Alfred.

Katherine.

Maintiens Le Droit.

Wounds from the Shootout nearly killed Katherine Spann. In place of her father, Robert sat vigil by her hospital bed and, when she came out of her coma, bequeathed her Blake's gun. Since then, discreetly to avoid hints of nepotism, he'd followed the woman's service abroad with Special X, hunting assassins in India and heroin importers in the Far East. Having proved herself without help from him, Spann had been recently summoned home for promotion as Zinc Chandler's co-commander of Special X Operations.

Inspector Katherine Spann.

Men Who Wore the Tunic was out of date because of her. The second edition was retitled Those Who Wore the Tunic. The dedication and crest on the jacket remained the same.

Maple leaves, he thought.

Suddenly, his mental ouija tugged in a bedeviling direction. The hackles raised on his neck by the change told him he was closing in on that elusive detail which was vexing his conscious mind. The letters his subconscious planchette spelled were F-L-O-O-D.

Al Flood.

Detective.

Major Crimes Squad.

The Vancouver Police.

The cop who filed the photo of Wilkes's hacked-off head.

The cop killed with Genevieve, DeClercq's second wife.

The cop who shot it out with Constable Katherine Spann.

Maple leaves?

History had advanced more than a decade since the last time he'd opened this drawer, so there was a layer of dust on the single file inside. He carried it from the stereo cabinet back to the Watson chair, then swept the accumulation of years into the hungry flames. Like sand removed from an archeological site, the file gave up the name typed and buried on its labeled tab. Almore Flood.

Robert cracked the cover and journeyed back in time.

Quebec he had left behind, but there was no escape from Jane's ghost. Night and day, guilt over her death haunted him, rattling his mind as he had researched Men Who Wore the Tunic. Finally, in a last-ditch effort to lay her soul to rest in the mid-seventies, Robert enrolled in a self-analysis workshop at UBC. The psychologist who led the class was Genevieve:

"Most of you are here because you feel cursed by your past. Emotions swirl within you which you can't work out. Suppose you have a friend who is messing up his life. Though he is unable to see the solution, you know immediately what he should do. That's because your friend is mired in the quicksand of subjectivity, while you work out his conundrum from an objective point of view.

"If you feel mired like our hypothetical friend, I want you to write a letter only you will see to the one you perceive as the source of your turmoil. After you have bared your emotions to paper, imagine the person who wrote the letter is your friend, not you. In this way, by objectifying your subjective conundrum, I hope you'll be able to tell your friend how to solve his problem."

That night Robert wrote a letter to Jane, begging forgiveness for drawing the kidnappers to their door, and for venturing into the woods too late to save her. "I knew you'd come, Daddy. I knew you wouldn't fail me. . . ."

"You are Ulysses," Genevieve said next class. "And this is your odyssey to self-awareness. Henceforth, you will keep a journal of thoughts, feelings, and actions prompted by your letter. The letter I will never read. The journal I shall. And hopefully through discussing it, you'll find your Golden Fleece."

In Robert's case the odyssey was extended, for he and Genny were married within the year. Only when they were honeymooning in Western Samoa did he tell her the Golden Fleece was Jason and the Argonauts, not Ulysses.

"It's all Greek to me," she laughed, and he loved that laugh so much he didn't spoil it by telling her Ulysses was the Latin name for Greek Odysseus. When you dealt in archetypes, did it matter? Her picture on the mantel behind the Watson chair had been taken in the South Pacific on that honeymoon. Body tanned in contrast to the white bikini she wore, Genny held a conch shell to one ear. Her auburn hair was wet from the sea, and green eyes sparked with mischief as if the shell was whispering the secret of the elusive detail with new meaning Robert sought in the Flood file open in his lap. Flood, too, had taken a workshop with Genevieve. In 1982, during the Headhunter case. Flood, too, had fallen in love with his vivacious teacher. At a time when Robert was falling apart emotionally.

Flood, too, had written a letter to jump-start his odyssey.

Seized from his apartment after the shoot-out with Spann, six weeks after she took the Headhunter down.

The letter was spiked on the metal fastener in the file:

To Dad:

I don't know why, but I feel responsible for your death. Perhaps it's because I mouthed off and called you a no-good drunk, and think if I hadn't done that you wouldn 't have flown to Toronto for job upgrading, and therefore wouldn't have been on that plane when it crashed.

Whatever the reason, I can't stop dreaming of hacked-off heads, and now find my neurosis fed by the psychosis of a killer on the loose. The killer sends us Polaroids of mounted severed heads, and I find myself compelled to blow them up on the photo enlarger I use for astronomy shots.

Dad, I'm fucked up.

To do something about it, I spoke to Dr. Ruryk. He is a shrink working with us on the Headhunter case. I'm the VPD liaison assigned to the Horsemen's squad. The squad is led by a superintendent named Robert DeClercq. On Ruryk's advice I enrolled in a self-awareness course at UBC, and find myself smitten by the instructor who leads the workshop. Her name is Genevieve DeClercq, and she's the Mauntie's wife.

I want her, Dad.

"Some of you are here because you feel cursed by your past." That's what she said in our introductory class.

"Emotions rage within you which you can't work out, so I want you to write a letter only you will see to the person you perceive as the wellspring of your problem."

That's you, Dad.

So here goes.

1954.

That was the year.

I remember you standing at the drugstore counter talking to the pharmacist while I walked back to where the comic racks were kept. It was the first Tuesday in the month, so the new Blackhawk would be in. That's how I saw the head.

To reach the racks I had to pass shelves of adult magazines: Life and Look and Ellery Queen and Saturday Evening Post. The head was on the cover of Real Man's Adventure. The title of the pulp mag among the slicks was as red as the blood dripping from the eyes, nose, and neck of the mounted trophy. Between shreds of skin dangling from the cut peeked an ivory vertebra. What I remember most is the eyes, rolled back in their sockets so just slivers of pupil hypnotized me.

I was seven years old.

A strange thing happened as I gawked at the eyes. I was no longer in Thorson's Drug Store. As if sucked off my feet and vacuumed through the door of the pulp's cover, I sat in the prow of the dugout canoe facing the Great White Hunter at the stem. His khaki jacket was soaked with sweat and plastered to his chest. I could see a St. Christopher's medal around the tensed muscles in his neck. Bullets in loops sewn across the front of his jacket. A safari hat with a leopard-skin band was pushed back from his knitted brow. A finger was on the trigger of the Remington.

We were surrounded.

A circle of severed heads ringed our canoe, each trophy stuck on a pole affixed to the prow of a dugout. The boats were manned by Amazon Indians. . . .

Assuming command of the Headhunter squad was the second-worst decision of DeClercq's life, topped only by what resulted from his successful involvement in the Quebec October Crisis. Marriage to Genevieve had done wonders for his psyche, eventually repressing his guilt over Jane's death, so when the commissioner asked him to lead the Headhunter manhunt, Robert thought himself a healed man taking on the case.

He was wrong.

For no sooner was it public knowledge that he was top cop than the psycho zeroed in on him as a worthless : adversary. His first day on the job brought the taunt WELCOME ABOARD, ROBERT. DO YOU THINK YOU'RE UP TO THIS? with the Polaroid of Portman's head. Already tinder dry with fear, the city exploded in riot when the rape and beheading of the nun ignited a feminist rally decrying the lack of police suspects. A grinning jack-o-lantern left in place of the nun's head was followed by another Polaroid and taunt: a punk-rock; tape of "Jimmy Jazz" by The Clash. No matter what tactics Robert employed, the killer stayed one step ahead. Guilt over Jane had been repressed, not exorcised. Bodies and taunts came faster and faster as cracks opened in his mind. Each butchered woman mirrored the daughter he hadn't saved in time. All my daughters. All my fault. All this blood on my hands. First he popped Benzedrine to work around the clock, then began drinking to kill the pain, sliding rapidly downhill after Natasha Wilkes was raped and beheaded, his name pasted across the nose of the W. C. Fields mug replacing the skier's head, etched with the taunt NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK. Again and again he dreamed of finding Jane too late in the cabin, and awoke with night fright to the pitiful cry from her head stuck on a pole: "I knew you'd come, Daddy. I knew you wouldn't fail me. ..."

November 13, 1982, it all came to a head.

Public hysteria spooked the politicians. Chartrand, was forced to yank DeClercq from command of the; squad. Haunted, depressed, sleep-deprived, and on thef verge of public disgrace once news he was fired was released the next day, Robert drank. Unknown to him, another taunt had arrived at the VPD: SAY UNCLE, ROBERT. HAVEN'T YOU HAD ENOUGH! PS YOU DEVELOP THIS ONE, with the negative of Wilkes's head. The taunt wasn't necessary. He'd already had enough. So after pulling the phone from the wall, he locked himself away in the greenhouse of his home to commit suicide.

Hara-kiri.

I'm coming, Jane.

The honorable way out.

But also unknown to him, a flying patrol of Spann and Scarlett was closing in on John Lincoln Hardy, the pimp of the headless hooker recovered from the river. Earlier that same night the killer had made a mistake, beheading a student of Genevieve's instead of her when the luckless woman left a North Van seminar to fetch a bottle of port from her instructor's car. DeClercq knew nothing of this because the phone was unplugged. When Spann and Scarlett located and searched Hardy's North Van mountain hideout, they discovered a cache of coke, the freshly severed head of the student, and the knife with the nicked blade secreted under the floorboards. Then Hardy arrived and was shot by Spann as he lunged to knife Scarlett.

Robert had his gun in his mouth when Genny burst into their home. Finger pulling the trigger, he heard the news. "Don't do it, Robert! You got him! A flying patrol brought him down!" A smidgen away from joining Jane, he didn't blow his head off.

Later, he wished he had. For the tragic irony of it was that history repeated itself. Just as success in the October Crisis brought kidnappers to his door, so solving the Headhunter case had a heartbreaking aftermath. Exactly what happened remained unclear, but the facts gleaned by subsequent investigation were:

Flood enrolled in Genevieve's workshop during the Headhunter case. Obviously the beheadings exacerbated his childhood trauma. Whatever the reason, I can't stop dreaming of hacked-off heads, and find my neurosis fed by the psychosis of a killer on the loose. The killer sends us Polaroids of mounted severed heads, and I find myself compelled to blow them up on the photo enlarger I use for astronomy shots.

While Robert's psyche fractured under stress from his past and the taunts, Genevieve met Flood privately for lunch. They were seen together by Joe Avacomovitch of the forensic lab. About the same time Robert caught traces his wife was delving into the Headhunter file he had brought home from work. Was she reading it to help Flood with his neurosis, the same way she had once helped Robert deal with Jane, and had that relationship blossomed into an affair?

Whatever happened, Flood gave in to his compulsion to blow up the heads, for after his shoot-out with Spann on the night of the Red Serge Ball, investigators found the walls of his apartment plastered with enlargements of celestial wonders and the Polaroid taunts. The blow-ups were still exhibited six weeks after John Lincoln Hardy was shot, so evidently Flood never conquered his neurosis.

Did it drive him mad?

With the help of cocaine?

Robert was the hero who took down the monster. If not for his tactic of reviving flying patrols to secure the dragnet, the Headhunter might still be stalking women. The same politicians who had called for his head were now demanding he be made chief superintendent. In December, six weeks after the case was closed, the RCMP feted him with a Red Serge Ball. The governor-general himself flew west to host DeClercq at his posh men-only club for congratulatory drinks, so Robert asked Genny to meet him at the ball in the Armories.

He was still at the G.G.'s club when Genny phoned the Armories and got Sergeant Rodale:

"Fetch Robert, Jim. It's important."

"He's not here yet. We expect him soon."

"The moment he arrives, pass this on. I'm with one of my students, and there's a serious problem. Tell him he's a policeman and has to speak to him on a matter of grave concern."

"I'll make sure he gets it."

"Good. I'm on my way."

Katherine Spann had been undercover on a drug bust when she was called to duty with the Headhunter flying patrols. As she was leaving for the Red Serge Ball, one of her snitches from back then called with a cocaine tip. Later that December night the fink died from an overdose. The tip was half a pound of coke was hidden in the left front wheel of a Volvo parked in the underground lot of a West End apartment building. Detouring on her way to the ball, Spann found the drugs in the hubcap of a car registered to VPD Detective Al Flood. As Spann replaced the hubcap to summon backup, Flood and Genny emerged from the elevator servicing the lot. The VPD cop drew his gun and fired at the Mountie. In the ensuing shoot-out a ricochet killed Genevieve. Flood escaped from the lot down the back alley to a costume shop. Breaking a cellar window, he scrambled inside and hid among the costumes. Afraid her quarry would get away through the shop, Spann followed. Guns blazed underground, and when the smoke cleared, Flood was dead and Spann was critically wounded.

The inference drawn from these facts by detectives who investigated the shoot-out was that Flood was a renegade cop who had cracked under the stress of neurosis. Unable to cope with the torment, first he turned to the self-help workshop, then to cocaine. Whether he was a coke addict or dealing to run away rich, the blown-up heads proved Flood was a sick man. Genevieve had sought to help him as a psychologist or lover, and ended up in the wrong place when he crumbled.

The file in Robert's lap was the police file which condemned Flood. Too many times had he studied it back then for answers, and finally gave up when nothing but questions rose. If Genny loved Flood, why had she loved Robert so ardently to the end? Had Genny sought solace because her husband was lost in a realm of depression, Benzedrine, and drink? If coke drove Flood mad, why was no trace of the drug found in him at the postmortem? If he was trafficking, why stash valuable contraband in a car registered to him, in a hubcap which could easily fall off? If Flood wrote the letter on file to his dad at Genevieve's suggestion, why was no follow-up odyssey journal found? And if this file held no answers, why did maple leaves draw Robert back to it now?

The Mountie thumbed through the booklet of Ident photos.

Here was Flood's apartment with blow-ups of the severed heads pinned to the walls. Enlargements of the Greiner, Grabowski, Portman, and Catholic nun taunts. The Polaroid copies among shots of the heavens through a telescope.

Here was . . .

Wait a second.

Robert flipped back.

For only now did he grasp the fifth taunt on the wall.The Ident shot was framed so it was barely seen, just a few black lines within the border of the blowup extending beyond the width of the camera's lens. Robert recognized the pattern of the black lines as strands of Wilkes's hair, and realized Flood had also enlarged the taunt the cabbie had brought to VPD headquarters the night Hardy died.

The taunt with the pole in the pail of sand mixed with maple leaves.

The maple leaves his mental ouija linked to Flood.

Now the ouija spelled E-L-V-I-R-A.

As Robert thumbed on in the booklet of photos.

Here was the elevator from Flood's apartment down to the underground lot.

Here was Genny sprawled dead beside the Volvo in the parking lot.

Here was the trail of blood Flood left in the snow when he fled wounded up the ramp from the underground lot to the back alley and down the alley to the costume shop.

Here was Flood shot dead among the costumes stored in the cellar of the shop.

Here was a sequence of photos recording details in and around the lot: bullet holes and shell casings and the glove-marked hubcap full of coke; a burning tin and garbage can across the alley from the mouth of the ramp sloping down into the lot ...

The phone in the greenhouse rang.

His finger for a bookmark, Robert pushed up from the Watson chair to answer the call as Katt led Catnip like the Pied Piper from the bathroom belching steam to her bedroom. Instead of a pipe, the cat followed a boom box playing Depeche Mode.

"DeClercq," he said.

"Chief, it's Katherine Spann. Rick Scarlett of UBC Detachment called. This morning, four headless men were found near Pacific Spirit Park. One was cuffed around a tree and anally raped."

Through the greenhouse glass Robert gazed across the onyx bay at the wigwags flashing along the Spanish Banks shore. A sense of deja vu washed over him, for back in 1982 the Headhunter victims also had been dumped within sight of his home.

Upping the taunt.

"Where are you, Kathy?"

"I'm driving to the scene. The Oak Street Bridge is dead ahead."

"I'll meet you there," he said, and punched off the portable phone.

Returning to the Watson chair, he found a bookmark to replace his finger in the book of photographs. About to mark his place to continue later, the Mountie froze in the act.

Hackles rose on his neck, and a chill ran down his spine.

For in the photo under his finger was that elusive detail with new meaning now.

The Ident shot was taken vertically into the mouth of the burning tin across the alley from the parking lot ramp. Nestled among the ashes was a small triangle that could be the unburned corner of a book. Robert had wondered back then if it was Flood's journal, but too little remained to confirm or reject the suspicion. His mind recorded and dismissed the other unburned objects in the tin, for only now did he possess a reference to give them meaning.

Scattered in the ashes were dozens of small gold rings, identical to the rings through the lips of Bron Wren's shrunken head.