"I know," he said gently, and took her in his arms.
For a long time they sat there just looking at the embers. Red, orange, yellow sparks danced hotly before their eyes.
"Genny," he said finally. "This isn't fair for you."
She turned around and looked at him, frowning, and said: "Don't you think that I'm the one to decide what's fair for me?"
"Of course. It's just that.
"It's just that you think you're using up my youth. You think, cheri,that I have a world of experience before me, a world that if I don't taste now, I'll live to regret later. You are deeply worried that you're using me as a crutch. You think that to be fair to me, to give me the sort of love that I need, you must forget Kate and Jane. That you can't seem to do, so you think you're unfair. Have I got it right?"
She reached out and touched his face and warmed him with her eyes. "Believe me, Robert, it's good for me for you to remember them. Please try to see you and me from my point of view. I've never met a man or woman who could find total satisfaction — physical, mental, emotional — with just one other person. The odds are stacked against it: we all develop in different ways. Yet all of us seem to want that. To find somebody special in a relationship or marriage. Then later we're disillusioned and we look for someone else — maybe for a sexual fling or maybe just to talk. Even those who never break away, it doesn't stop them thinking.
"Well I think I'm different.
"I was so lucky to come of age within the women's movement. I could seize a freedom that no one before me had. And seize it I did. Job. Men in numbers. And lots of self-esteem.
"The job and the equality, those I'll never give up. But the men became a bummer. Indiscriminate fucking makes for a female or male slut. The benefit of my freedom was I got that out of my system. Men for me are easy. I've always been lucky that way — and maybe that's why I know in my heart that I only want one guy. That's just the way it is, Robert. And baby, I want you."
She cast him the slightest trace of a very wicked smile.
Then without another word she slowly extricated herself from his arms. He remembered her standing up before him by the dim light of the fire, remembered thinking in earnest Genny, I'm blind compared to you,remembered the way she straightened her back and planted her feet apart, reaching for the top button of her blouse, pausing for one long erotic moment before she let it…
"I think I've found what you're talking about," said Genevieve, excited, on the other end of the phone. "The ritual of Hamatsa. Will you just listen to this!"
Robert DeClercq moved his notepad into place.
"It seems that just over a hundred and twenty years ago, cannibalism was general among the Kwakiutl Indians. Two fellows named Hunt and Moffat brought back firsthand accounts of the custom. Sometimes they said slaves were killed for the benefit of the Hamatsa. At other times the Hamatsa were content merely to rip mouthfuls of flesh from the chests and upper arms of their own tribesmen.
"It would appear that the Hamatsa held a special privileged position within the group. They were literally licensed cannibals.
"Hunt and Moffat swear they saw the following near Prince Rupert. A Kwakiutl shot and wounded a runaway slave who collapsed near the water's edge. Immediately he was set upon by a group including Hamatsas. They watched the Kwakiutl cut the slave to pieces with knives while the Hamatsas squatted in a circle crying: 'Hap! Hap! Hap!' According to Hunt and Moffat, who were helpless to intervene, the Indians snatched up the flesh still warm and quivering and offered it according to seniority to the members of the Cannibal Cult who were present. In memory of the episode, a rock on the beach was subsequently carved into a likeness of the mask of Baxbakualanuxsiwae, He-who-is-first-to-eat-Man-at-the-mouth-of-the-River. Baxbakualanuxsiwae — the Cannibal God — was said to live in a spirit house high up on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains where day and night blood-red smoke billowed out from the chimney of his home.
"There's then a whole list here of evidence collected from other whites who confirm the practice.
"When Hamatsas were interviewed it was noted that their teeth were rotting away. This was from filing them sharper in order to better deal with their food.
"Do you think it possible that Hamatsa is being used as a modern terrorist tactic?"
"I don't know what I think right now, but stranger things have happened," DeClercq said.
"Don't I know it. I can think of four examples of cannibalism — or close to it — in the annals of abnormal psychology. Fish in New York. Gein in Wisconsin. Kemper in California. And maybe Nelson here in BC."
"So maybe I'm not off base."
"Maybe not. But I hope so. 'Cause if you're right this killer is restricting his diet to brains."
"For now I'd settle for any Indian who popped up in the case."
"Well," Genevieve said, "who knows what the future holds? Perhaps you'll only find the answer in the lair of Baxbakualanuxsiwae himself. Maybe the truth is hidden high in the Rocky Mountains."
10:07 a.m.
Robert DeClercq was smiling when he hung up the phone.
The Superintendent stood up and crossed over to the window. DeClercq glanced at his wristwatch, then removed his uniform jacket from the back of the chair and put it on. As he was heading for the door his eyes fell once more on the blowup of Joanna Portman's body nailed to the burial pole. His impression was that the carved Dogfish face was laughing at whoever was looking.
And in that instant he remembered another laugh many years ago. He recalled a shack in the wilderness in the northern part of Quebec, where a child lay on a cot in death, its head twisted at too sharp an angle. He had felt the knife pierce his abdomen but knew it didn't matter. All that concerned him was the fact that his hands were closing rapidly around the laughing man's neck, squeezing the very life out of him and choking, crushing, annihilating that black laugh from his throat.
Even after the man was dead, the Superintendent could hear it.
Black laughter.
Axe-Man
New Orleans, Louisiana, 1957
The man with the briefcase chained to his wrist was thinking about his rabbit.
He sat on a chair to one side of the dance floor, watching all the pompous people in their ties and evening gowns oozing etiquette and snobbery, only half aware of the pageantry of the "Rex Ball" that was now in full swing around him.
At 12:41 he glanced at his watch and felt a chill of excitement. Then the thrill made him remember.
He recalled how as a young boy he so loved to climb into his mother's lap and nuzzle his face between her soft warm breasts. How she would lock him tenderly in her arms, at the same time kissing him, then press him against her so tightly that it almost hurt. Sometimes his mother would take a nap on a very hot afternoon, sitting him on the bed as she removed her clothes, letting him lie beside her with his body nestled to hers. On those days she would dab the perfume that he liked so much on the secret parts of her body and he would lie in that hot room almost drunk on the fragrance of her skin.
That, of course, was only if his father wasn't home.
For his father abhorred coddling. "I'll raise no Mama's boy!" he'd shout every time he caught them. And that happened often.
On those occasions when his father surprised them, his mother would act as if she were suddenly angry with him and push him violently away. Grabbing her hairbrush from the dresser, she would lock his head firmly between her legs and bend over his back to smack his buttocks till he screamed.