Headhunter

One Mind's I

Vancouver, British Columbia.

October

Rain. Rain. Rain.

Pain. Pain. Pain.

It feels like a ghost

Come back

To haunt me once again.

Slow days. No gain.

I don't think I'm up to this!

I spent the night in her old chair sitting next to a shuttered window.

Now that my mother's in the ground I really must sell her house. Outside, an October wind in barren trees moaned so mournfully.

I just sat there most of the night, staring at the pictures.

While the pictures lay on her tabletop.

Staring back at me.

OBSESSIONS — It is not uncommon for neurotics to develop a special concern about some danger or problem. If these exaggerated concerns become very intense they are called obsessions. For example it may be necessary for a person to climb out of bed countless times a night to check the gas valves on the stove. Or like Howard Hughes, someone may be so concerned about the slightest contact with dirt that he is compelled to wash his hands constantly or to become a recluse. Neurotic obsessions are thought to conceal some wish that is often either of a destructive or sexual nature. This wish is usually quite obscure in most obsessions and hidden in symbolic distortion.

What do I know about death? Well, let me see.

I know that the true way of defining the end of life is "as a state where time no longer exists." Time needs activity by which to measure it, so without activity there can be no time.

I know that the human obsession with death is called thanatophilia. And I know that a person who fears death in an abnormal sense is termed a thanatophobe. If the shoe fits wear it.

Father. Brother. Mother. Son.

Starting over: how many times? Is not will the very core of character? Is the rudder of the ego not a person's will? All the past and all the future, Do they not determine the now?

The course of Life surely depends upon the deftness of the helmsman. So, sail away!

I must remember to pick up my suits from One Hour Martinizing. Also I need more Gillette Atra blades. Is it just my imagination or do they really put the sharp razor blades in the first and last position with duller ones in between?

I dreamt about you last night, Cathy — about the accident. When I awoke I found I had my pillow grasped tightly in my arms.

Again I saw the gravesite, but I couldn't go near the grave. It was raining and all the mourners were standing under black umbrellas. Your mother was crying and I wanted to hold her, but somehow I couldn't join in. I stood at the periphery of the graveyard getting soaking wet. I was the only one present without protection from the rain. God, sometimes I get so lonely. So fucking tired of life.

I felt like that this evening so I spent some time in the sky. You should have seen Jupiter! So magnificent and alive with cloud activity. With a camera-shot through my telescope I caught Saturn at a good angle for the rings. Tomorrow night after shift I think I'll develop and blow up the film. Maybe I'll put a picture up on the bedroom wall. I could use the company.

When you're tired — alone — and afraid of the future, what else can you do? Maybe see a shrink!

Am I having an anxiety attack or is anxiety attacking me? Tonight is Halloween.

I lay the pictures — there are three pictures now! — out on the developing table beside my photo enlarger. I had just finished blowing up the shots taken in the sky. I found my hands were shaking and my body had gooseflesh crawling. It took me more than an hour to overcome the urge. But I did it. Once again I managed to keep my MONSTER! in its cage. Next time I might not be lucky. Next time I might not win.

I fear that next time I might just blow those three pictures up.

God save me from that.

November

Well, I saw Dr. George Ruryk today and this is what he told me.

First of all ask yourself: where do my thoughts come from? We've all heard of complexes. "Stop treating the child that way, you're going to give him a complex." "That man suffers from an inferiority complex." "I tell you the guy is weird. He's got some sort of Oedipus complex." "She's got this Electra complex. She wants to fuck her father." So what is a complex?

A complex is a group of ideas that dominate your thoughts and color your experiences. You come to see everything in relation to those ideas. If you're in love, for example, the slightest thing, like just a whiff of perfume, will bring immediately to mind all the ideas and feelings that make up your "love complex." A complex is to psychology what Force is to physics. But here comes the rub!

What happens if a particular complex is for some reason totally out of harmony with the rest of the conscious mind? Perhaps its ideas are unbearably painful. Perhaps it is of a sexual nature incompatible with the person's rigid views and principles.

What happens is that a conflict arises — a struggle commences and ensues between the rebel complex in question and the rest of the personality.

Perhaps the complex can be modified by the mind so that it is no longer incompatible with the rest of the personality.

Perhaps the mind can weigh the merits of each opponent and consciously choose to abandon one in favor of the other.

Or perhaps this is impossible and there must be a fight to the finish.

If there must be a fight then the common method used by the human mind is the sledgehammer of repression.

In using repression, conflict is avoided by banishing one of the opponents to the cellar of the mind. From there the exile is no longer allowed to achieve normal expression, and the victor of the fight is left in control of the field of consciousness.

But here, Dr. Ruryk said, comes the second rub!

Though the complex is shut up downstairs in the dark and denied its normal function, it is not annihilated. It continues to exist within the deeper layers of the mind, festering, while prevented from rising to the surface by the constant resistance of the guard at the door, namely the mind's force of repression.

Have you ever put tarmac on a driveway before the winter snows set in?

Well if you have — and if you failed to kill every last living seed on the ground before doing so — come spring the tarmac will crack and up through its surface will sprout a small plant shoot.

Same with the human mind.

But in a much more devious way.

For a repressed complex can only influence the conscious mind indirectly. This is because of the "censor"' guard standing watch at the cellar door. It must slip out in disguise.

The uglier the monster, the more circuitous its route.

So, Dr. Ruryk said, back to your inquiry about an obsession with death.

Assume something has happened which has caused remorse in a person's mind. Perhaps you know such an individual?

(Yes, I think I do.)

Now say this remorse is painful to that person's mind. Perhaps it's guilt over a death. To deal with this upset to equilibrium the complex related to this remorse is repressed by the conscious mind. But that complex still tie.. press itself. So how does it manifest?

Sometimes the mind uses symbolism to express these repressed and dissociated ideas: here you have the man who thinks that he is Napoleon. The man with the delusion.

Sometimes the mind uses the device which we call projection. Here the repressed complex is no longer regarded by the personality as being part of its own self. The complex has been projected onto another person — and thus conflict is avoided.

If the complex is projected onto a real person, then a delusion of persecution by that individual may result. And in self-defense the patient may try to kill that other person.

If the complex is projected onto an imaginary person, or one who is long since dead, then the repressed set of ideas appears as an hallucination. The patient sees ghosts. Or hears commanding voices telling him what to do. Perhaps a voice from Hell.

What you must realize. Dr. Ruryk said, is that any one of our instinctive drives may give rise to a conflict in the mind.

Freud said that most cases of repression arise from the instinct of sex.

Perhaps he was right.

But right or not, the fact remains that the origin of a mental aberration is not to be found in any disturbance within the mechanics of the mind.

It is to be found in the material from life fed into the brain of any particular human being.

Therefore to answer the question of whether or not you yourself may go insane, ask yourself: Do I have monsters lurking in the cellar of my mind?

But there's a final rub!

For if you do they've been repressed, and you won't even know they're there until they break out of the dungeon.

That's what Dr. Ruryk said when I saw him early today.

He suggested that if I was interested in pursuing the matter further I might wish to sit in on a psychology seminar given by one of his former students. He told me her name is Genevieve.

I might just do that and find out where it leads.

Of course I didn't tell Dr. Ruryk about my problem with the heads.

Complex is to psychology what Force is to physics. Let's see where this goes. Eh, whadda ya say?

1954

That would have been the year.

I remember my father standing at the drugstore counter with his change in one hand and whisky on his breath, talking to Mr. Thorson. I was walking toward the rear of the pharmacy where the comic racks were kept. It was the first Tuesday in the month so the new Blackhawk would be in. I remember I never made it to those racks.

To reach the comic stands at the rear of Thorson's Drug Store you had to pass a long shelf filled with adult magazines. Life and Look and Ellery Queen and Saturday Evening Post. The head was waiting for me buried in among these books.

The head was on the cover of a pulp magazine, Real Man's Adventure. As I recall, those words were printed in red. the same color as the blood which dripped from the neck, from the eyes and from the nose of that head stuck on a pole. Between the shreds of skin that hung down from the hacked-off skull you could just make out a trace of neck vertebra peeking through. But most of all what I remember is the eyes. Rolled back into their sockets, just a slivered moon of pupil showing beneath each eyelid, both eyes definitely staring right at me. I was seven years old.

For at that moment a very strange thing happened, and I was no longer in that store. It was as though I had been sucked right off my feet and transported through the door of that magazine cover. I recall clearly sitting in the front of that dugout canoe facing the Great White Hunter who was crouched in the stern. His khaki jacket was soaked with sweat and plastered to his chest. I remember bullets sewn into loops across the front of the jacket. I could see a St. Christopher's medal around the tense muscle cords in his neck. He wore a safari hat with a leopard skin band pushed back from his forehead. His index finger was on the trigger of the Remington in his hands.

And I knew we were surrounded.

There was a circle of severed heads ringed around our boat, each head stuck on the end of a pole fixed to the front of a dugout. The dugouts were manned by South American Jivaro Indians (I know that now), all conspiring to close off any chance of an escape. The Indians all had bronze skin and long black hair. Their bodies were naked except for breechclouts covering their loins. Each man was armed: a few with spears that were decorated with hanks of human hair, others with long hollow blowpipe tubes resting on lower lips, most with machetes three feet long with the sun glinting off sharp edges spattered with blood and gore.

Then something bumped our dugout and a hand touched my shoulder.

I could have died of fright.

For there was this grip trying to steady my trembling body before a blade swooped my head away.

"Easy, son," a voice said. "Just turn and look at me."

Though I tried to do as it said, I couldn't — that picture would not set me free.

Then I saw another hand reach over me to turn the copy of Real Man's Adventure face down on the stack of magazines below.

"There," my father said, squatting down on bended knees. "Out of sight, out of mind. That picture bothers you?"

"No," I remember saying, now back in the store. I was shaking my head from side to side.

"Well it bothers me,"my father said. "That's what it's meant to do. It's like your comic Tales From the Crypt but a little more realistic. Don't be afraid of fear, son. We all have to conquer it someday — one way or another. Now go on and pick out a comic. Your mother's got supper waiting."

I did what he said.

Then with his arm on my shoulder, the two of us left the store. But I do remember one final look back at that stack of magazines.

On the back cover of Real Man's Adventure. Charles Atlas was flexing his biceps and asking: Would you like to look like me?

The plane went missing that December as my father was flying to Toronto. He had managed to stop his drinking long enough to land a job and was on his way back east for some sort of business upgrading.

For two months I spent every day sitting by the front door waiting for him to return.

It was the second week in February before they found the wreck of the aircraft. It had smashed to pieces on a Rocky Mountain peak. The papers said my father's head was severed in the crash. I cried for several days.

The second head was waiting for me on the first Tuesday in March.

My eyes must have seen it at once but neglected to tell my brain, for I distinctly heard the sound of a snake slither across the drugstore floor. I recall my sweat bursting from every pore as if I were in steaming tropical heat. And I know my mind was shrieking: 'I got to get out of here'.

This head was worse than the others.

For there he was again, my friend, the Great White Hunter in his sweat-stained khaki safari jacket. Only this time he was in the background, standing. Remington ready, in the door of a grass hut. You could see him between the Jivaro's legs which made up the picture's foreground. The cover focused on an Indian's loins from his waist down to his knees. That was all that you could see of him as he walked away from the hunter. Except, of course, for his hands.

His left hand held the machete dripping blood and gore.

His right hand held a leather thong attached to both ends of a needle. This needle was made of slivered bone about ten inches long. It had been rammed through one eardrum of the head until it had passed through the brain and out of the other ear. The head itself took up a good one-third of the page. Trickles of blood ran down from the corner of each eye. The eyes had rolled up in the head, one of them nothing but white road-mapped with red veins. The other revealed just the barest hint of a pupil.

I tried to turn away. But I couldn't. I tried to run. But I couldn't. I tried to shut my own eyes. But I couldn't.

"Please, Father," I whispered. "Turn that picture away." My hope was that he'd stop it like he had that time before.

"What's going on here? You're talking to yourself."

"It's back, Dad. It's back. Make it go away."

A hand fell onto my shoulder, giving it a shake.

"Are you all right, son?" the voice of the druggist asked.

And that was when I knew for sure that no matter how much I needed him my father would never be there again.

I guess I panicked.

For a moment there I looked again at the cover and thought that this time I saw my father's eyes staring out at me from that chopped head strung on a string. His pale gray eyes shone faintly through the flesh of those rolled back whites.

Then I broke away from the druggist and made a dash for the door. With glass shattering and exploding in razor-sharp shards around me, I ran right through the pane set into the metal doorframe.

Outside it was raining. That's usual for this city.

I was more than a block away from the store and still running through the downpour when I realized I was cut. Both my hands were slashed and gouged and smeared with blood. I stopped running abruptly and sat down on the ground beside a puddle rippled with raindrops. For maybe half an hour I sat there thinking about my father trapped inside that hacked-off head, watching the water distort my reflection and wash my blood away.

Four days later I knew something was wrong.

At Vancouver General Hospital a doctor had put forty-seven stitches into my hands. My mother was upset as hell and equally pissed off. Paying for the door had cost her fifty bucks that we could ill afford; my father because of his drinking had let his insurance premiums lapse. But more than that, the thought of her son with his hands paralyzed because of severed nerves and tendons had cost her several nights' sleep. And she had desperately needed that rest. It had only been a few weeks since they had found the wreckage of the plane and I know she was struggling against odds to hold up a strong front for the sake of me and my brother.

I never told her about the head on the front of the magazine. At eight years old I was now the man in this family Men like Charles Atlas weren't afraid of magazine covers.

She was the best type of mother. She didn't pry.

The only punishment I got was that four days after the accident she sent me to the drugstore to buy replacement bandages for my injured hands. Like most mothers she saw me off with words something like this: "I hope this trip reinforces the lesson you should have learned. You know you could have been killed."

I bypassed the drugstore with the piece of plywood set into its door — in fact I never went there again — and walked six blocks down from Victoria Drive till I came to a Rexall Pharmacy. Through its glass door I could see shelves of medicine, Band-Aids, candy, toys, and that the bald-headed druggist was passing a youth a package that seemed to emharrass him. There was a young teenage girl about the same age as the youth waiting expectantly outside the store.

I first knew something was wrong when I couldn't through the door.

It was science fiction come true: I was held off by some sort of force field.

Holding both arms out before me I tried to will my hands to press the metal bar that stretched across the door. But my arms refused to move. It was weird and I felt frightened.

The girl outside noticed I was in difficulty and she came sauntering over, peeking shyly into the store as she did so. "Must hurt, eh?" she said, looking at my bandaged hands and pushing open the door to help me.

"Yeah, it does," I said, and I tried to step forward. But now my foot refused to move. It was as if the sole of my penny-loafer was glued to the concrete. I tried to move a second time, and then the fear really set in.

Something's wrong with me,I thought. I can't get into the store!

Just then the youth rushed out through the door, pushing me aside. "I got'em," he said excitedly. "An' these ones are lubricated."

"Jeez, Tim," the girl said, her face becoming bright pink, "you hit that little kid."

"Oh, yeah. Sorry, kid." He gave me a disdainful look. Then noticing my hands he said: "You need some help?"

"Would you buy me some bandages?" I asked. "While I wait out here?"

He looked at me queerly but did as I requested. A few minutes later as he walked away with his girl I heard him say, "You know there's somethin' odd with that kid."

And he was right.

I knew it too.

It wasn't long before my friends were privy to the secret. When one in their midst is unable to go into a confectionary to buy Double Bubble gum and has to tell his compatriots what comic books to buy him while he waits outside the drugstore, eight-year-olds cotton on fast to the fact that something's queer. Eight-year-olds also have this need to set the world a-right.

I suppose that's why Jimbo made the mistake.

You see, we had gone to the Queen Bee Market one fine April afternoon — Corry and Jimbo and I — to buy ourselves each a pop. I was hooked on cream soda at the time, and hoping to find a bottle of white stuff, not the usual red kind. The woman who ran the Queen Bee was a woman who knew her pop. And just for me she kept her eyes peeled for a case of white each time the delivery truck came around.

I know I should have been wary — what with it being April Fool's Day and all — but the morning was bright with sunshine and my bandages had just come off for good. Much to my mother's surprise, my fingers weren't paralyzed. Anyway, we reached the store and I gave Jimbo my dime. "The white kind, right?" Jimbo asked as Corry opened the door.

"Yeah," I said, totally unsuspecting. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the magazine rack. I was turning a little more to the left to put the rack out of sight at my rear when they pulled the trick.

"April Fool!" Jimbo said and he pushed me through the door.

I have never felt such panic: it literally closed my throat so I couldn't get any air. My heart was leaping about in my chest as I scrambled to get back outside. But they were both blocking the door. Jimbo was laughing and chortling and Corry was slapping his sides. That's when I broke Jimbo's nose. I recall wildly swinging my arm in a pitcher's circle and giving him the old one-two. I popped him square in the middle of his face and heard the small bone crack. Jimbo dropped like a sack of onions down onto his knees. Corry had stopped laughing but was still blocking the door. With a flying tackle I hit him in the chest and with one hand clawed at his eyes. I distinctly remember shouting "Lemme out! Lemme out!" as I pounded him again and again.

"Stop it!" Corry yelled. "You're hurt…" (I hit him) "Stop it, you're hurting me!"

Both of us were now thrashing as we stumbled back out through the door.

Then once outside, I stopped.

When I got home that night it was my brother who opened the door.

He took one look at me all bashed up, and then he began to cry.

Different guy my brother. Then only five years old. Why'd he have to go and die?

It was later that month that I developed a fear of blood.

I recall my mother in the kitchen chopping vegetables! was at the table drawing my own comic book. It was about a superhero I called "The Butcheress." She wore these blue tights and a purple cape shaped a bit like Batman's. She was armed with that most sensible of weapons for today's superhero — a giant meat cleaver. I was getting very good at drawing her breasts.

Plop… plop… plop…

I could hear the sound of the vegetables landing on the chopping board. Heads would make a sound like that when they dropped from the guillotine.

Plop… plop… plop…

Then my mother cried out in pain and ran out of the kitchen. Holding her hand. The knife was on the cutting board with its tip stained crimson.

I ran into the bathroom after her and saw her blood all over the floor. There was the whoosh of tapwater flowing which seemed to magnify and grow into the hoarse roar of a waterfall. The room began to wobble. "Will you get me a Band-Aid?" my mother asked as the bathroom walls swayed, as the sound of the water faded in and out, as the tiles of the floor came up to meet me and slam against the side of my head.

I came to, to find myself cradled in her arms.

She was crying (we all seemed to cry a lot that spring) and she was holding me against her, while one hand gripped her other palm still trying to stop the flow of blood as she coaxed me back to consciousness.

I loved you, Mom.

That night I awoke in my room all alone in the dark. I could hear whispering.

When I looked around there was nothing but black, black, black.

And then I saw a point of light up in the comer off to my left where two walls met the ceiling. It was this light that was whispering as it slowly, ever so slowly, began to spin in a circle. Imagine a tiny point of light on the tip of a pinwheel blade and you'll know what I mean. Round and round and round it went in an ever-widening circle. Spinning as it corkscrewed down toward me.

I remember pulling the bedcovers up to the bridge of my nose.

Then I waited, transfixed and watching, until the point of light was halfway across the space separating it from me.

That was when I saw the face.

It was this little wee miniature face circling slowly round and round, shining with eerie light.

Its features were those of the Great White Hunter and he was whispering at me: "Watch out! Watch out! Watch out! I'm going to take her too."

I never got back to sleep that night, not until dawn came peeking in with the light of the following morning. It was Jimbo who found the solution. I'll give him credit for that. The opportunity to find it had cost him a broken nose.

"Okay, here's what we do," Jimbo said confidently. "I go in and scout the place and find the magazine rack. Then I come out and tell you where it is and the three of us go in. You, me, and Corry. You in between. Got it. Okay?"

No, it was not okay.

"Now once we get through the door, I'll hold up my jacket so you can't see the rack. If you try to look, then Corry grabs you, I throw the jacket over your head, and we drag you back outside. Then we try it again."

It took half an hour's persuasion before the three of us came through that door.

But it worked, by God. Somehow it broke the spell.

Or maybe it was just the fact that I never saw another magazine cover drawn by that particular artist.

And so it was that Jimbo — in a triumph for amateur psychology — took care of the drugstores, took care of the newsstands, took care of the confectioners.

But he didn't take care of the blood.

Good Lord, I don't believe it! I think I'm in love!

I went to the seminar, God knows why — maybe cause Ruryk suggested it and maybe I thought I'd find a key to unlock more of myself. Who knows why! Who cares!

Good God, what a woman! You should see her!

Genevieve, Genevieve, Genevieve — where have you been all my life?

Just my luck she's married — so what if it's one-way love.

Oh God, to have this feeling again.

Genevieve DeClercq — I LOVE YOU.

Oh happy day.

So let's talk about severed heads.

The human brain can live for up to a minute on the blood-oxygen supply within it at any given time. Cut the head from the body and the mind lives on. Consciousness survives. Why do human beings so fear a severed head? Is it because we know instinctively that if decapitation should happen to us, our mind lives on? But tell me something.

If this is everyman's general fear, why must I be plagued with it multiplied a thousand times?

Why must this fear also be my particular neurosis? Can you answer that, YOU IN HERE WITH ME?

Genevieve, Genevieve, Genevieve! Will you be my salvation?

I listened to every word you said in the seminar tonight. Did I get it right? Genevieve, will you be my secret therapist? I hope you will — as long as you don't know. This will be my secret.

After the seminar tonight I spent some time in the sky. My camera caught a nebula and I saw the canals on Mars. I developed some shots of Jupiter taken the other evening, placing the prints — unenlarged — out on the drying table.

The Polaroids of the severed heads are now four in number. They were off to the side.

Genevieve, I've made up my mind to meet this MONSTER! head on.

Tomorrow after work I'm going to rephotograph the Polaroid prints and put the negatives through my enlarger. I hope it works!

I guess my brother's murder precipitated my decision. But maybe it's deeper than that.

They never found his body so the motive's speculation, but I had seen the needle marks on the inside of his forearm. In this city we ail know that the monkey is motive enough.

My mother was devastated: she never came back from it. I watched her spark just fizz away as she aged a hundred years. She used to sit in my father's chair staring out through the shutters. The same chair I used when she died.

I know a guy who was terrified of hypodermic needles. He overcame his fear by becoming a doctor.

I guess it was preordained that I'd become a cop. God, why did I blow up those heads!

I'm back! You won't believe this! She asked me out to lunch! "Brunch," she said on the telephone. "Ten-forty-five." Oh happy happy day.

Another picture arrived tonight, and then the news we got him.

This one was different, not a Polaroid. It's almost as if the Headhunter knew we were looking to identify people buying that type of film. Genevieve will be happy now that her nightmare's over. I never got off the blocks.

"Watch out! Watch out! Watch out! I'm going to take her too."

Back to you, Cathy Jenkins, high school heartthrob of mine.

I think there are people in this world who Death likes to follow around. People like me.

You know that was a silly argument we had over graduation. I know the lottery meant you went to the dance with some other guy. It was all so adolescent. It's just that you were the only girlfriend I ever had. I wish I'd been able to tell you that before the accident.

Is that why I've got no umbrella in that graveyard driven with rain?

Losing my chance with women, that's the story of my life.

It's time to fade away.

Hey, surprise! I'm back. I guess you can't keep a good man down.

A cop is a cop, I suppose.

Something strange has happened: I don't think Hardy's our boy.

Here's what bothered me. Each of the victims except for the last — and that's because of the interruption — was raped by the Headhunter before her head was carried away. Yet only the body of Joanna Portman showed signs of ejaculation. Now why would the Headhunter come only once: that doesn't fit a pattern?

Okay, start with the assumption that this particular killer is motivated by a sexual aberration.

He gets his rocks off by stabbing women before, during or after intercourse.

Or perhaps he can get it up but can't get off and holds women responsible. Then he stabs them for mental satisfaction and blows a load in his head.

So what's going on here? The night that John Lincoln Hardy was killed I had missed the seminar. It was my turn on graveyard shift — and besides I had told Genevieve I would help her in every way I could. So I spent several hours that night at my desk reviewing the investigation. That was when I found the note by DeClercq concerning the statement by Mrs. Enid Portman.

It read: Jack — have someone check out the possibility that Joanna Portman had a boyfriend. Sperm can be found in the vagina for up to thirty-six hours after intercourse. If she had sex within that period it explains the ejaculation. The point bothers me — DeClercq.

After reading this it bothered me too.

There was a subsequent report which confirmed the Superintendent's query. After a follow-up check by the Squad, a boyfriend had been located. He was a married surgeon who worked at the hospital. He had rented an apartment across the street from St. Paul's where he and Joanna Portman would slip away during supper-break when they were both on shift. And yes, during that last day of her work they had met and had been fucking.

Surprisingly, after the death of John Lincoln Hardy there had been no follow-up concerning him. Most cops don't like loose ends even when they have closed a file. But perhaps it was just overlooked in the joy that came with the release of public pressure on the Squad. Who knows the reason? Yet somehow it sat in the back of my mind and continued to bother me.

Now I'm bothered even more.

Because today I got the answer.

It took some time to find her.

First I spent a couple of nights driving up and down the streets of the West End. I checked each face on the boulevard against her mug-shot picture. The ones who were young and knew they had it stood directly under the lights, pursing their lips or plucking a nipple as I went by in my car. The ones who were ravaged by age or the needle kept themselves to the shadows. They showed more of their bodies in this competition to grab the attention of passing men. The hookers started at Bute Street, and down about Jervis and Broughton they were as thick as thieves. By Nicola they had relinquished the territory to young boys in their teens waiting for the chickenhawk. I didn't find her there.

Next I checked the Comer and all its greasy spoons, strip joints and shot palaces but she wasn't there either.

Then finally in a pub on Granville Street just before the bridge, I scored. Some score.

The guy at the beer tap must have weighed at least 280 pounds. He had a face that someone had once cut to ribbons with a very sharp knife or a barber's razor. He wore a black patch over one eye. Using his good eye to stare at the mug shot he glanced at me for a moment, then flicked a look at one corner. I found her sitting against the far wall of the pub.

I walked over and sat down opposite her.

Charlotte Clarke was slumped across a cigarette-burned table with a terry-towel cover, one hand clutching a beer glass, her face buried in the crook of her arm. Just to the side of her cheek I could see a fresh needle mark at her elbow with its telltale bubble of blood. I reached out and shook her once — then twice — then I waited awhile. After a few minutes she began to come around.

"I got the clap," she mumbled vaguely, looking at me with these opaque shiny eyes. She nodded once, then put her head back down and I had to shake her again.

"What the fuck do you want?" she growled at me from another world.

"Police," I said softly. "And I want some information."

The guy at the next table must have heard what I said 'cause he got up fast and made for the door. He left a full glass of beer behind on the table.

"Go suck yourself off," the young lady whispered. "I ain't holdin' so you can blow it out your sweet ass." When she went to put her head down this time I stopped her with my hand cupped under her chin.

"You were Hardy's girl," I said. "I want to talk about him."

"Lemme see your shield."

I flashed her the tin.

As she looked at my ID card this smile came over her face. Wrinkling her nose like a rabbit she said: "Eh, what's up, doc?" She found it very funny.

I didn't. "I said I want to talk about…"

"You killed him!" she said sharply, then her face changed expression and suddenly she slapped me. I slapped her back. The guy at the table two seats down jumped up and made for the exit. Like the junkie before him he left beer and change on the table.

"I didn't kill anyone. Don't try that again."

Tears came to her eyes. "If you're a cop, you killed him," she said. "That's how it is for me."

"Did he do it, Charlotte? Did he kill those women?"

"Aw, shit, man! Will you lemme alone? My old man's dead, can't you understand? He may not have bin worth a turd to you, but he meant a fuck of a lot to me." The rush was wearing off.

"Try me," I said.

But she didn't say a thing.

"I'll pay you the price of a cap."

"Don't con me."

I counted out seventy dollars and placed it on the table between us. She knocked it onto the floor, but then had second thoughts. I knew I was sure to win the game that junkies always lose.

"Two caps," she said finally with this smirk on her face.

"Sorry," I said. "No can do. This is from my own pocket. It's me as man wants to know, not me as cop."

"Know what?" she asked — and I knew I had her.

"Did you ever fuck him? John Lincoln Hardy?"

Her eyes opened wide and they were shining like stars. "Did I what?" she asked of me, incredulous.

"Did you ever fuck him?"

"Come on! He was my old man."

"Word on the street is he wired you. You peddled your ass for him. Word is he beat you once or twice, beat you up real bad. A girl doesn't need to screw her pimp, you and I know that. Once again, Charlotte: Did you ever fuck him?"

"Yeah, I fucked him."

"Often?"

"Every night. Johnnie was a man."

"Did he come?"

She frowned at me in wonderment, then tossed away one hand. "Everyone comes for me," she said, getting up from the table. She bent down for the money on the floor and stuffed it in the waistband of her jeans. Then she turned to leave, stopped, and this is what she said:

"That's the last of the answers, fuzz, and I don't want you comin' back. But here's somethin' for free. Johnnie was a good man and he was a hell of a lover. He was the one who hooked me on junk, kept me in junk — and he was the only guy in my life who ever made me feel wanted. Do you understand what it means to need to feel wanted? You think I was just some sweet girl working in a Dairy Queen who got fucked over by some black stud who beat her black and blue." She sat down again, and leaned across the table towards me. "Maybe I deserved it. I stole from him once, you see, when I needed some junk. I stole something precious. I stole this wooden mask. So he beat me, and beat me and beat me. But I loved the guy and you killed him. And I'd do it all over again the exact same way tomorrow."

"Why'd you sell the mask? And not his Polaroid camera?"

"Camera? Don't make me laugh," Charlotte Clarke said looking puzzled. "What would Johnnie have done with that? He never owned no camera." Then she got up and walked away.

I let her go: she'd told me what I wanted.

She got another fix and I got a hundred caps' worth.

But I knew that when that junk hit her vein she'd see it the other way around.

And that was good.

At least someone would be happy.

I found them in the courthouse coffee shop down at 222 Main. They were making cop-talk as I sat down at the table.

"So she told me she stole the lighter because she was so nervous about stealing the other goods that she needed a cigarette, but didn't have a light," Rick Scarlett said.

"We all smiled at that one and William Tipple said: "Not bad, but I think Mad Dog gets the prize. Anyone dissenting? Okay, Rabid, there you go. Six quarters."

"What is this?" I asked. "Some sort of reunion?"

"Nope." Bill Tipple said, "just coincidence. Scarlett, Spann and I are down here to speak to the Department of Justice prosecutor about more charges against Rackstraw. We want him for both importing cocaine and for conspiracy McDonald and Lewis are here for an evidence interview on the US application to extradite Matthew Paul Pitt. Mad Dog Rabidowski has a theft under trial."

"Ain't life a bore," Rabidowski said, "since they disbanded the Squad. I wish we hadn't caught him."

"Maybe we didn't," I said.

At that moment, with that comment, I learned just how Colonel Tibbets must have felt when he dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima.

So I told them what bothered me. Why would a man who has a normal sexual release go out and rape and kill women yet never have an orgasm? Why wouldn't he just kill them if it was a psychological thing? Wasn't the killer more likely to be a man in a frenzy unable to ever come? Maybe he picked up syphilis and hated every woman.

My theory wasn't welcome.

First Scarlett looked at me strangely, then he got up and left.

The others for a number of reasons soon followed suit.

I was left alone at the table with a rapidly cooling cup of coffee. I'd hit a dead end and knew it.

As the man says: Nothing in life is ten out of ten.

Is man not lost? Now I ask you: isn't that a hell of a question?

Is that why you started drinking, Dad?

If it is I understand.

It was as I was returning the Headhunter files to the "morgue" that the negative slipped out of one of them and dropped onto the floor. I bent down to pick it up.

I had decided already that going on was just a waste of time; the investigation was over and Genevieve had surmounted her problem. Besides, I had other work to do. Crime waits for no one.

Strangely, I had completely forgotten about the picture. Perhaps it was repression, something along the line that Dr. Ruryk had described. But the moment I held it up to the light I knew I would take it home.

At the present moment it's over there, sitting on my en-larger. I feel a little queasy but I know I'll blow it up. My life has been reduced to mental masochism.

Can you hear me. Father? Are you out there listening?

You remember that day you spanked me cause I lipped off our neighbor? How angry I got at you? I told you you were no good 'cause you couldn't hold a job.

Well. Father, I'm sorry. Believe me. I wish I'd never said that.

I've atoned a million times since, hoping you were listening.

I killed you. didn't I? It was what I said that day that made you get that job?

If it weren't for me you'd never have been on that plane to Toronto, would you?

I'm so sorry. Dad. 'Cause now I'm lost too.

I guess we're both a couple of fools. Me with my obsession. You with your booze.

I feel pathetic, Father. Can you somehow forgive me? Believe me I'm doing penance.

Watch me blow it up!

There, it's done.

I put the negative into the carrier of my condenser enlarger. I checked the easel illumination and made an exposure. Now the picture of the head is a hundred times normal size.

Look at it with me, Father. I don't want to be alone.

I wish you could turn the cover over like you did before.

God, how a negative gives tone separation. It's not like a Polaroid. Look at her face, at the rictus of terror frozen into her muscles. Look at her skin stretched tight and gray and the bulge of her rolled up eyes. Look at her hair, how black it is, all matted in hanks and strands. Look at her mouth open to scream, look at her swollen tongue. Look at the way her nostrils have flared to let out the trickles of blood. And look at how shreds of skin from her neck curl around the pole like snakes.

Hey, wait a minute. That's new. The pole's in a bucket of sand. All of the other pictures ended part way down the stick.

Yes, now I can see what the killer has done.

The Headhunter returns with his trophy and puts it down on the ground. He shovels a pail full of sand and carries it and the head inside. Once there he places the bucket in front of a pinned-up sheet. A pole is stuck into the sand, and the head is rammed down onto the pole. Then he snaps the picture.

Do you think he tried to buy more Polaroid film, saw the trap and therefore changed to an undeveloped negative''

What a joke — his psychosis and my neurosis ending up the same.

Is this all your death is to my conscious mind. Father: a miserable severed human head stuck in a bucket of sand?

And, Dad — there in that bucket — what are those leaves mixed in with the sand?

Fall leaves.

I found a botanist out working in the VanDusen Gardens at 37th and Oak. He was digging over by Olga Jancic's marble, Metamorphosis. As I showed him the enlarged, cut-out portion of the bucket of sand and leaves I asked: "Are those from a maple tree?"

He put on a pair of glasses and looked, and then said: "Why yes, they are."

"How many maple trees do you think there are in the Lower Mainland?"

He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. "A hundred thousand, I guess." He looked at the photo again, pointing to two of the leaves. "Those are acer macrophyllum. We call it a Big Leaf Maple. The leaf has a classic deep lobe and is native to Western North America."

I nodded and thanked him for his time. Then as I turned to leave he added: "Of course you won't find the other type growing anywhere around here. They're from a Sycamore Maple or acer pseudoplatanus. That type of tree is native to Europe and Western Asia."

"Come again?" I said.

"These leaves here in the bucket, mixed in with the other ones." He took the photo back from me. "You see how they're smaller than the Big Leaf, about half to three-quarters the size? They're not as deeply lobed, either. They don't grow around here."

I blinked and I guess my look made him think again.

"Well, not around these parts," the botanist said, "unless one of them's been transplanted."

I knocked on the door and waited.

After a while I heard this sound like a scurrying mouse in the attic. Then the door opened a crack with the burglar chain still fastened. All I could see was one twinkling eye at about belt buckle level. "Yes?" a brittle voice asked.

"Good morning, ma'am," I said. "I'd like to speak to Mrs. Elvira Franklen." "My name's Al Flood, ma'am," I said, and flashed her my shield.

The dwarf suddenly opened her twinkling eye very wide (at least she looked dwarf-height to me) and gasped: "You've come about the library book, haven't you? I told them I'd return it. It's not that long overdue."

"No ma'am," I said, "I'm not here for a library book. I was told at VanDusen Gardens that I'd find Mrs. Franklen…"

"Miss Franklen," she corrected.

"Sorry… Miss Franklen here. I'm a detective with Major Crimes down at the VPD."

"A detective!" the woman exclaimed, agitated, then she surprised me and swung the door open wide. "Oh do come in. Detective Flood. Do come in!"

Elvira Franklen reminded me of that little swamp creature in one of those Lucas Star Wars films. She was under five feet tall, a pudgy wrinkled little old lady with white hair and bulgy blue eyes that were alight with mischief. I would bet ten dollars that she'd seen seventy-five. She wore this frumpy wool suit and had a brooch fastened at her throat.

"May I see your shield again?" she asked as I was ushered in through the door.

"Of course, ma'am," I said. I gave her the case with my tin pinned next to the ID card.

"It says here your name is Almore Flood," she said, looking up sharply. "A person should use their full name, my mother used to say. That's why you're given it."

"Yes, ma'am. But people continually equate mine with that rabbit Bugs Bunny."

Elvira Franklen smiled. "Just like Meyer Meyer," she said. "You'd think people would learn."

"I don't understand."

"Meyer Meyer, Detective Flood. The 87th Precinct. Surely they make you read those books when you're in police school?"

"Ma'am?"

"Did anyone ever tell you that you talk like Jack Webb?" She lowered her voice several octaves and growled, "Just the facts, ma'am."

She was putting me on. This time I smiled.

"Do you remember at the end of Dragnet how there used to be that sweaty hand stamp out the letters 'Mark VII' with a heavy hammer. Did you know that was Jack Webb's hand ' I like an actor, don't you, who does his own stunts? Would you like some tea?"

"Thank you. Yes, I would."

"Darjeeling or Poonakandy? Queen Elizabeth drinks Poonakandy. That should be good enough for us."

"Yes, ma'am," I said. "It sounds like that decides it."

Down a dark hallway she led me, all rich oiled woods and Royal Doulton figurines. She ushered me into a living room to wait while she put the kettle on to boil. That wait was like being in a museum. For there were shelves and these tiny antique tables everywhere around me. On one of the tables she had out on display every Royal Coronation mug since the days of Queen Victoria. China was displayed on another surrounded by photographs of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Prince William had a wee table of his own. The furniture in the room looked so old and delicate that I was afraid to sit down for fear of breaking it. But the pictures hanging on the walls were the best part of all. I counted fifty-two of them. Detective writers. Each of the photos was autographed and set in a silver frame.

I heard the clink of china and turned to find Elvira Franklen wheeling in a tea trolley. There were two fragile teacups, a silver pot smothered beneath a crocheted cosy, a cream and sugar set, two spoons, two knives and enough plates of scones and crumpets and muffins and Eccles cakes and pastries to feed the entire British Falkland Islands Expedition.

"I see you're looking at the pictures?"

"Yes," I said. "Quite an illustrious company."

She smiled and the movement made her face crack into a hundred pieces.

"The one of Conan Doyle of course is my favorite. He signed it for me personally just before his death. Will that be one lump or two, Detective Almore Flood?"

"One, thank you," I said.

She poured me out a cup of tea then offered me the fattening feast spread out on the trolley. I took an Eccles cake. As I munched it Agatha Christie watched me from one of the walls.

"Well now tell me, Detective. What brings you to my door?"

"I was hoping, ma'am, that you might help me catch a killer."

I'm sure if the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe had walked into the room she would not have been more surprised. Or any more pleased. in fact.

"Me?" she said, sitting bolt upright and putting down her

tea.

"Miss Franklen," I said, lowering my voice so Raymond Chandler could barely overhear, "we have had a body dug up and dumped in our jurisdiction. This body was covered with dirt and leaves and wrapped in a sheet of plastic. The leaves are of two types of maple. One type is called a Big Leaf…"

"That's an acer macrophyllum,"she whispered, leaning forward in her chair.

"Yes, which is native to British Columbia. The other, however, is not. It is a Sycamore Maple, or acer pseudo-platanus,which grows in Eurasia. Now if we could…"

"… if we could find some place where both trees grow," Miss Franklen continued, "then we might be able to find out where the body was originally buried. And maybe killed as well."

"Precisely," I said.

"Well," Miss Franklen said abruptly, "I think we'd better get started. No time like the present, my mother used to say." And with that she sprang to her feet and beckoned me to follow.

We went down a hall that led toward the back of her Edwardian house, and I found myself looking out at what in spring would be a most magnificent garden. Even though it was late November there was color here and there, a brown or red or yellow leaf clinging to one of the trees the pastel shades of Nature's paintbrush splashed within many a greenhouse. At the end of the L-shaped corridor we came to another door. She swung it open.

I was stunned by the number of books. There were probably several thousand more volumes than in the Library of Congress. All of them hardcover.

"I do reviews," Miss Franklen said, "for several publications. You don't read mysteries, I gather."

"Cops don't read detective stories, ma'am," I said. "They read science fiction."

Elvira Franklen crossed the room to yet another door. She pushed it open and disappeared.

We were now in a somewhat smaller chamber, but just as overwhelming. And I thought I was obsessed! For here then-were pamphlets and magazines everywhere in stacks around the floor. Tables were spread with sheafs of faded and yellowed newspaper clippings. There were cubbyhole shelves crammed full to overflowing with curled mimeographed sheets and thousands of newsletters. All around there were large-paged books of pressed flowers and leaves preserved between pieces of ironed wax paper. Otherwise vacant patches of wall space were covered with numerous framed certificates.

"I've been President of eighteen different horticultural societies," Miss Franklen said. "You take the desk by the window," she said. "I'll take the one over here."

"But this could take years!"

"Shame on you," Miss Franklen said, wagging her finger at me. "And you a detective."

And so we set to work.

December

Cold turkey, from that moment on I managed to quit my smoking. There were rules in this house and that was one of them.

But even more amazing was this woman's capacity for work. She literally left me exhausted. The first day we spent six hours going through her clippings.

By the time I arrived after shift the next day she had covered over seven hundred publications. Having finished with The Arborist — June 1931 to September 1952 — she had moved on to The Horticulturalist's Digest starting in 1923.

For ten days straight we worked.

By the second week in December I managed to wangle a few days off and we really covered ground (no pun intended). On one of those nights Elvira suggested that I sleep at the house. "Then we can get a real early start tomorrow," she said.

"Won't the neighbors talk?" I asked, giving her a wink.

"It wouldn't be the first time," the old woman replied.

So I stayed.

That night before retiring we had Horlicks and Peek Frean biscuits. When I settled into the guest room I found this book laid out on the table. It was Ten Plus Qne by Ed McBain, and I tell you that guy missed his calling.

Instead of being a writer, he should have been a cop.

You would have liked her, Mom: I felt like I'd been adopted.

We worked for seven days straight, at one point spending six hours in the same room and never speaking a word.

That night I had to work graveyard shift and when I showed my face at her door next day she looked at me sadly and shook her head. She told me to take a day off. That she could hold the fort. But I refused.

That afternoon we were sitting in her sanctuary as I was reading about the Arborist's Convention held in Stanley Park in 1917, when suddenly Elvira Franklen literally leaped out of her chair. I thought she was having a stroke. "Oh, my Goodness Gracious!" she squealed.

Do people really get that excited?I wondered, as I watched my Lovable Dwarf wave a mimeographed paper in the air.

"I found it!" she exclaimed — and my God my heart skipped a beat.

In a streak I crossed the room.

Then Elvira smoothed the page out on her desk and pointed to an article in the July 1955 issue of Pacific Planter. This is what it said:

READY FOR WAR. BUT HOPING FOR PEACE

Maple trees flourish today above Mr. Albert Stone's bomb shelter. Mr. Stone acquired his property at a public auction of land confiscated from the Japanese during the Second World War — and this he says accounts for its fertility. "The place used to be a truck farm before the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor," Mr. Stone informed this columnist. Mr. Stone is quite a character.

We stood today in his garden fronting on the mighty sweep of the South Arm of the Fraser River. This writer asked him why he had planted a maple garden above his recently completed atomic bomb fallout shelter. "Is that not a strange juxtaposition?" your astonished reporter asked.

"Not at all," Mr. Stone countered. "When the Commies send their nukes and The Big Hot One is on, this is one old man who's going to be ready. But until then me and my wife's memory will sit in our front garden."

And that, gentle readers, is what brought your columnist out here today. For among the varied saplings of acer macrophyllum stands the only Sycamore Maple so far planted in Western Canada. It is a hardy little plant and certainly worth the drive on a Sunday afternoon It is perhaps the only acer pseudoplatanus that you might ever see.

"My wife was from the Ukraine. God rest her soul.

She brought that seedling to the West — it was her

Freedom Tree. Well when she died…"

I stopped reading and skimmed through the rest. When I found the address of Stone's garden I took out my book and made a note.

Then I leaned over to Miss Elvira Franklen and kissed her on the cheek.

The maple trees beyond the fence grew wild in the overgrown garden.

And this was one fence that did not look inviting. Perhaps Mr. Albert Stone just got fed up with all those Pacific Planter readers scampering about his garden, but whatever the reason, someone had certainly done a number. A very paranoid number, indeed. For the fence was a wire-mesh barrier that ran across the front of the land and back down both sides to the river. The spikes that stuck up skyward would rip your balls to shreds. Not of course that anyone would really want to enter. For the only structure visible on the land was a Quonset hut made of corrugated iron, the roof of which had long since rusted, seeping streaks of orange down its metal sides.

I decided to approach from the water, so I drove by without stopping. Besides, there was no gate.

Steveston is just a small sea-breeze community sitting serenely on the dykes of the Fraser where the marshes of Lulu Island slip quietly into the sea.

A sign in the local hardware store window said: Small boat for rent. Enquire within. The store was Filled with boiler plugs, blocks and tackle, ship's barometers and lamps, blue yacht braid, anchors, any-sized corks and Greek fishermen's hats. The man behind the counter was mending a ripped fish net. A notice above the counter read: People who believe the dead never come back to life should be here at quitting time.'

"Help you, mate?" the man asked.

"I'd like to rent your boat."

Ten minutes later I set sail heading west toward the sea. Out beyond Steveston Island to my left was the South Arm of the Fraser. I could just make out its choppy waters through a sparse string of trees. There was a shack on the island that looked like an outhouse with smoke curling out of its ceiling.

Birds were everywhere. Out on the end of a rotting pier and fishing in the water sat a very old man. He waved at me.

At 2:53 I passed Garry Point and rounded the west end of Steveston Island to double back up the river.

The slough had seen better days.

It branched off the river to the left like a small indent of water snaking off into a field. On either side of its entrance stood a shanty and a houseboat. Up the slough I could make out a row of rundown buildings, some of them made with tarpaper siding, others constructed from split shiplap lumber or old shingle slates, all of them looking as if deserted a long, long time ago.

At 3:09 I sailed into the slough and found the back of the Quonset hut.

The land fell off to the water, ending in a small sandy beach strewn with maple leaves which had once wafted down on the wind. The hut itself sat like a hat on top of a concrete bunker. The bunker was only visible when you came in from the rear. A rickety wooden staircase descended down the backside of the concrete until it ended at a plank and piling pier that jutted out over the slough. That bunker looked as though it could withstand full-scale nuclear attack.

Now it is entirely possible that there was another Sycamore Maple tree within the Lower Mainland.

It is also possible that even if the sand in the bucket was from here it was carted to some other place.

But when you've been a cop as long as I have, you learn to trust your instinct. And my gut told me the Headhunter had been inside this structure. I broke out in a sweat.

For, you see, I had spent my whole life living in fear of this moment. Sure I had become a cop to confront my psychological dread of blood. But the night we caught the squeal on the John The Baptist killing, where an old man in a derelict rooming house had murdered his best friend, cut off his head, put it on a plate and knocked on his landlady's door, I stayed in the squad room and let Leggatt take to the wheels. Sure, I may have confronted those pictures, blowing them up in size. But a photograph is one thing. Butchered human flesh another.

I wanted to cut and run. Instead my right eye started twitching.

"Don't be afraid of fear, son. We all have to conquer it someday — one way or another."

And I knew my day had come.

I moored the boat to the bunker pier and climbed the rickety stairs. Halfway up I removed my.38 from the holster clipped to my belt.

From the rear the Quonset hut didn't look much different than it did from the front. Same streaked metal. No windows. Only a single door secured with a new combination lock. I knocked on the door and stood off to one side just in case some shots came through. When nothing happened, I waited. Then I knocked again. Once more. Once again. And decided no one was home.

That was when I noticed the smell that was coming from inside the hut. It was like the stench of rotting meat combined with the stench of rotting fish. I knew for certain then that I did not want to enter this place, just as I knew for certain that I would. I'd have to go back to that hardware store to obtain the necessary tools. So I climbed back down the rickety stairs and cast off in the boat.

It was as I inched off to the left of the pier to make for the open slough that I saw the gap between the back of the dock and the concrete wall of the bunker. The wall was shadowed by the ladder down to the pier but in the murk I could still discern some sort of opening. I secured the boat again to a piling and stepped into the water. Knee-deep in sludge I waded up onto the sandy, leaf-strewn shore.

The space behind the dock was no more than three feet wide. It was a day of cold clear weather and sunlight stabbed deep into the shadows through cracks in the plank-joins above. Where there was protection from the rain I saw a mass of tangled spiders' webs and the oozy trails of summer slugs.

The opening was a square wooden door, more a hatch, set into the concrete wall just over five feet up from the ground. The high tide mark was a foot below it. This door was secured with a padlock that it took me ten minutes to pick. In my job the tools for this sort of work are constantly on your person.

The hinges squealed as I eased open the hatch.

I removed the police flashlight from my back left pocket and shone the torch inside. The beam illuminated a concrete passage about three feet square. The tunnel sloped down at an angle, then straightened out again so I couldn't see its end. Taking a deep breath, I used the pier supports to hoist myself up so that I could wriggle in through the opening. Working my feet and using my hands I inched my way down the narrow passage — until I got stuck.

Have you ever had claustrophobic fear slip inside your skull and begin eating small chunks of your brain? Well there I was, halfway down this incline, the slope of it making blood rush to my head, my body stuck, my arms confined. I thought my mind would snap if I couldn't move my arms. I'd be stuck like this until what? I starved to death?

Details began to flood into my senses. A smell within this tunnel, the smell of burnt human flesh. Two red eyes of a water rat just up ahead and sniffing at my fingers. Green slime on the roof, shaded a glistening black where the torchlight died away. The squish of rat shit in small lumps on the floor beneath my face. And then into the realm of my misery intruded this germ of an idea.

Pulling with my fingers, pushing with my toes, then reversing direction I began twisting and turning my body, trying desperately to coat both my skin and clothes with the foul-smelling ooze. Rat shit and slime: that might just get me moving.

And it worked.

Soon I was once more advancing, centimeter by centimeter down this mushy incline. I reached the bend in the tunnel where the passage opened wider only to find myself confronting yet another barrier — this one a crosshatch of iron bars with a padlock on the other side.

Twenty-five minutes it took me to do a job on this one. I had to work my fingers with the pick through a couple of the crosshatch holes, moving the flashlight with my chin to get the right illumination. If the pick dropped from my sweaty fingers there would go the ball game. But I finally did it and pushed the bar-door open. Wiggling through I dropped head first six feet down to the floor.

Thank God the flashlight survived the tumble. I picked it up and shone it around.

Mr. Albert Stone's fallout shelter was something to behold. The walls were of concrete, no doubt many feet thick, surrounding a room ten feet by twelve. The floor was of concrete. The roof was of concrete. And there was a concrete slab off to one side of the tunnel I had just come through, positioned so that it could be slid across as a radiation barricade. A second slab of concrete stood to the right of some stairs, and these I immediately climbed.

The stairs ended abruptly at yet another doorblocking my progress. This door was of steel sealed by a combination lockset right into the metal. So much for that. I had no doubt that this threshold led to the Quonset hut.

As I began to descend the stairs I heard twigs crunching underfoot. When I shone the light down I saw that I was treading on hundreds of little rat bones. Then as I reentered the fallout shelter I was met by another uneasing thought. With the door at the top of the stairs locked, the only way out of here was back the way that I had come. And I was not yet ready for that.

Stalling, I began to examine the details of the room. Before long I had reached the conclusion that I would rather fry in a nuclear war than spend a couple of years in here.

There were stacks of canned goods and rows of glass bottles scattered around the floor, one wall nothing but shelves of tins, their labels long since disintegrated, piled up to the ceiling. Here was a rusted first-aid medical kit; there a coal-oil hurricane lamp. There were several boxes of 350 paperbacks, all of them science fiction. There was a…

There was a water rat with beady eyes watching me intently from a breach in one of the walls. I hadn't noticed the opening before.

I crossed over to this alcove door and shone my torch inside. Instantly I was horrified, shocked almost numb by what met my eyes.

The chamber was approximately ten feet by ten. Once again it was constructed entirely of concrete. Against the wall to my left there was an old-fashioned full-length mirror. In front of me, raised up from the floor, was this square slab of cement that looked much like an altar. On top of it were two candlesticks and a very large silver box. The surface of the slab was stained and streaked by puddles and rivulets of dried and clotted blood. Fingers of blood ran down its sides and across the floor. In a semicircle behind this altar were seven sharpened poles. And rammed down on each pole, the sticks bursting through the bone at the top of the cranium, were seven grinning skulls.

It was at that moment that the rat bit me on the ankle (rabies!)and I dropped the flashlight.

This time it broke and the room went black.

Oh God! I cursed myself. Why did I give up smoking?

But on fumbling in my pockets I found I still had a box of matches. I lit one and put it to the wick of one of the candles. Then I approached the silver metal box.

As I touched the lid my palms were sweating, and as I began to lift the cover, hackles rose on my neck. I was so sure — so certain — that inside I was going to Find a severed head.

When I peered inside what I saw was even worse than that. There were eight of them, plus the other object. And then it all came together, at last.

Tzantza

Thursday, December 23rd, 7:10 p.m.

Genevieve DeClercq closed the notebook and then sat very still. She was curled up in an easy chair and she was wearing a formal dress, the green velvet low-cut and tight-waisted, its shade the color of a glade in late spring. Her hair was combed up at the sides of her head, there held by two mother-of-pearl clips before tumbling back down to her shoulders. She had kicked off her shoes and had tucked up her feet into the folds of the skirt. Now she was playing with a strand of her hair and asking herself quite seriously: Do I believe him?

She was afraid of the answer.

Across the living room of his apartment Al Flood stood at the large front window and stared down four floors to Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park. Beyond Genevieve's reflection in the glass he could see the stream of Causeway traffic streaking through the night. Everyone rushing,he thought to himself, with nowhere important to go.

He abandoned her image on the windowpane and turned back into the room. "Would you like another brandy?" he asked quietly.

Genevieve nodded her head. "Please," was all she said.

Flood walked over to the small bar set beside the window. He selected a bottle of Remy Martin which he carried across the room to pour two fingers in her glass. The woman held out the snifter. She drank a third of the refill in a single gulp. Flood watched her wince and thought, I love you even more.

"How do you feel," he asked her, "about what I wrote in the book?"

"Flattered," she said. "Skeptical. Sorry. And somewhat afraid."

"Not afraid of me, I hope." And he struggled to give her a smile.

"Afraid for you, Al, if what you wrote is from your imagination."

"Do you believe me?" he asked.

Genevieve took another sip and then looked him in the eye. "Before I reply to that will you answer a couple of questions?"

"Sure."

"What did you do after you opened the box?"

"Took off my jacket and placed the contents inside. I added the unlit candlestick, then carried both my satchel and the burning candle over to the hole in the wall." He paused. "I put the light down on the floor and piled up some boxes as a ladder. Then pushing the sack in front of me I crawled back out the way I had come. It was easier without the thickness of my overcoat."

"Why the candlestick?" she asked.

"Fingerprints," he said. "I took the boat back to the hardware store" — he laughed — "and you should have seen the look on the owner's face when I came in covered in shit. Then I stopped at a doctor's for a rabies shot and came back here to clean up. That's when I called you."

"Why?" Genevieve asked.

Flood's eyes wavered from hers as he said: "You're the wife of Robert DeClercq. Besides, didn't we make a compact, that day that we had brunch? What was it you said?"

Her face took on the hint of a frown. "I told you that I was desperate and asked for your discretion as a friend. I said that my husband was… well having problems and that I had to help him somehow. I had stayed up all night reading those files and I didn't know where to start. Then about five in the morning I came upon your name listed as the Squad liaison officer with the Vancouver Police. I recognized you as the fellow auditing one of my seminars and…" Her eyes wavered.

"And what?"

"And I knew that you were in love with me and would do anything to help. So I suppose I used you, didn't I?"

"I don't mind," Flood said.

"It's just that I had nowhere else to turn. I couldn't go to the RCMP and say that Robert was… was cracking up. He was senior officer, with everyone else below him Beside, there was so much public pressure they'd have pulled him in a minute. So I came to you and asked for secrecy I made you promise to tell me first anything you found out. I hoped your

feeling for me would both make you want to help me and also keep you quiet. God, I sound awful, don't I?"

"No, it was good for both of us. If you hadn't motivated me I'd never have seen it through. But to answer the question why did I call you first? — it's both to keep our pact, and also to now use you. I need access to DeClercq. You can give me that."

"Why did you start the diary?" Genevieve asked, changing the subject abruptly.

"My life was getting out of control, what with the Head-hunter crimes playing on my neurosis. I had to set things down to get them in perspective. Catharsis, I guess."

"So John Lincoln Hardy was framed?"

"Yes."

"And all those things in that mountain shack — they were all planted there?"

"Everything but the masks and the cocaine."

"But who would do that?" Genevieve asked.

"A cop," Flood replied. "Only a cop could be in position to manipulate the frame."

"Why?" the woman asked.

"I can only guess. Maybe the Headhunter felt like I did, that things were out of control and a little too hot to handle. Maybe the killer's psychosis — and I'm sure we're talking psychosis after what I found in that box — was slipping into recession. Who knows? Maybe the hope of promotion that might come from solving the thing. You understand a mad person's mind far better than I do."

For a moment there was silence, then Flood asked a question: "Tonight you've got the Red Serge Ball to attend, so why did you come when I called?"

"Because you sounded desperate. Because you were my friend when I needed help so bad. And because I like you."

Then she surprised him. Leaning forward, she took his face gently in one hand and kissed him lightly on the lips.

"Do you love me enough," she whispered, "that you could just be my friend? Believe me, inside I'm old-fashioned. I really am a one-man woman. And Robert is the man."

Al Flood shook his head. "I love you that much," he said.

"Good, then I'll love you too."

"Even enough to believe the things that I wrote in that book?"

"Even enough for that. What did you find in the box?"

"Tzantas," Flood said.

The detective held out his hand and helped Genevieve out of her chair. He led her toward his bedroom and motioned her inside. Then he turned on the light — and the woman audibly gasped.

For each of the heads, except for the nun, had long black flowing hair. The eyes of each had been sewn shut and so had each pair of lips. Each head had skin that was shriveled and cracked and was now almost pure white. Each head was no larger than the size of a navel orange.

"Mother of God!" Genevieve said as one hand involuntarily rose to touch her open mouth.

But it wasn't the sight of the eight shrunken heads that filled her with shock.

It was the dull black gleaming object lying in front of them on the bed.