Headhunter

Headhunter

A Special X Thriller

Michael Slade

Praise for Michael Slade

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

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

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

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

Praise for Headhunter

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

—Alice Cooper

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

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

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

—The Vancouver Sun

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

—The Gazette, Montreal

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

—Book of the Month Club Magazine

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

—Asbury Park Press

Also by Michael Slade

Ghoul

Cutthroat

Ripper

Zombie

Primal Scream

Burnt Bones

Hangman

Death’s Door

Bed of Nails

Swastika

Kamikaze

Crucified

Red Snow

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

—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Part One

Horseman

Old is the tree, and the fruit good

Very old and thick the wood.

Woodsman, is your courage stout?

Beware! The root is wrapped about

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

And like the mandrake comes with groans.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, Fables

The Nightmare

Medicine Lake, Alberta, 1897

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

Thump … thump … thump … thump …

He awoke with a start.

His muscles tense.

His mind alert.

His nerves as taut as a bowstring at full draw.

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

Thump … thump … thump …

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

It was 6 a.m.

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

Thump … thump … thum-thump … thump …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honed on instinct then.

And honed on instinct now.

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

Thum-thump …

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

Thum-thump …

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

Thum-thump …

An alpine breeze made the trees whisper like conspirators.

Thum-thump …

Nature sounds. Nothing human.

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

Thum-thump …

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

Thump … thump … thump … drip …

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

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

Again, it’s a winter month in 1870.

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

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

The attack came without warning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come and get it, laddie!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gasping, he passed out.

Thump … thump … thump … drip …

Junkie

Vancouver, British Columbia, 1982

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What gives? the hooker asked.

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

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

You speak Latin?

Huh?

"Res gestae. Mean anything to you?"

No.

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

Shotgun poked one of her breasts.

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

The T-shirt read deep throat.

Your tits speak volumes. So get in the car.

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

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

But of course, they were narcs.

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

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

What kinda game?

From down south. Called Mississippi Gambler.

Gimme a break.

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

What’s the bet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was Atlanta.

Her voice was no more than a whisper.

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

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

Mississippi Gambler. Let’s play again.

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

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

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

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

Name your pusher.

Name your pimp.

Or give us something better.

The choice is yours.

The jackpot awaits.

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

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

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

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

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

But the room was empty.

Johnny was gone, and so was their stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wanna date? she croaked.

The driver lurked back in the shadows.

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

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

Wait a minute, lady.

Fuck off, she replied over her shoulder.

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

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

Moments later, Helen climbed into the car.

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

Floater

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

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

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

They thrived in here, the roses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But instead, he was going stir crazy.

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

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

Genevieve was his salvation.

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

His cabin fever dated from the Clifford Olson case.

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

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

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

Guilt.

That’s what DeClercq had felt.

Gnawing guilt.

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

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

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

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

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

Freighters and container ships waiting to offload foreign cargoes and onload Canadian resources rocked at anchor on the choppy waves, queuing for a berth in the port sheltered by Stanley Park. Those sailing to parts unknown plowed through a flotilla of windjammers launched to catch the billowing breeze of this glorious day before foul weather