Up at Headhunter Headquarters, Scarlett had not found Rabidowski. What he had found was a group of constables sitting around a tape recorder listening to a lecture by a guy named Dr. George Ruryk. Hoping for something to one-up Spann, Scarlett had joined the crowd. He had left when one of the other cops had turned to him and asked: "Don't you think hearing this ruins your independence? I thought you were part of a flying patrol?"
Tonight as he had inserted his key into the lock of his apartment door Scarlett had wondered what Katherine Spann would be like in bed. Hot, he suspected.
It was now just after 11:30 and he was thinking that same thought.
Scarlett got up and walked over to the living room window to see if Miss Torso was dancing tonight. The window of the apartment across the street was dark and the curtains were drawn.
With a sigh Scarlett went to put on his strip and go for a run in the park.
Wednesday, November 3rd, 12:31 a.m.
From an upper floor window of Sussex Manor the old woman looked down at the groundkeeper's house in the yard. Framed in one window by firelight she could see Katherine Spann reading.
In the development of voodoo, the most important feature was the way the original African beliefs and practices were combined with Catholicism. For just as the Roman Catholic Church has a pantheon of its God and saints, so the slaves who came to the New World had a religious pantheon of their own. Thus a form of the Catholic religion became at once acceptable to these transplants from Africa.
A tvpical slave religious altar might bare a statue that was flanked by colored oleographs of St. Peter, St. George and St. Patrick. To the African these figures represented the Loa: Legba, the god who guarded the way to the world beyond; Ogoun, warrior god to the Dahomey; and Damballah, god of the snake. Under this altar the slaves would place bottles of rum or whisky, alternating them with cloth-covered bundles and white porcelain pots which were used to house their loa and the spirits of the dead. These spirits eventually came to be called by the African word zombi.
Among the slaves carried off to America there were voodoo priests, medicine men and sorcerers. It was these priests who connected the African pantheon with the Roman Catholic religion of the New World. It was the sorcerers — who in Africa had thrived during times of war and destruction — who now found their position enhanced by the confusion and disorientation rampant among the slaves. It was not long before the sorcerer rose in power and totally absorbed the profession of the priest. And out of this blurring came to flourish the practice known as voodoo.
The appeal of voodoo was basic and it spread very fast: for only by voodoo practice could the African slaves strike back at the hated white man.
After the slave uprisings in Haiti and the formation of an independent black republic in 1804, thousands of French fled the island, taking with them as many of their African slaves as possible. Ten thousand of these refugees ended up in New Orleans. With them came the practice of voodoo.
Soon there were wild group dances in that city's Congo Square. Both serpent worship and the drinking of blood were a common phenomenon. Rituals were performed around trees in St. Tammany Parish. When the backlash came in the form of waves of anti-voodoo sentiment, this practice of the black arts merely went underground. As before it was disguised as the Roman Catholic religion.
What is not common knowledge, however, is that from the very beginning of the organized use of voodoo in New Orleans, whites could be found among the secret cultists.
In August of 1850 several white women were among those arrested for dancing nude in a bloody voodoo ritual.
12:45 a.m.
Every great city, no matter what size, has by definition at least one major park. For there must be some place where its citizens can escape from the hustle. London has Hyde Park. New York has Central Park. Paris has the Bois de Boulogne. Vancouver has Stanley Park.
Scarlett was beginning to open up for the final stretch. He was running the Seawall clockwise around the perimeter of the park, with seven miles behind him and less than a mile to go. Pumping his arms and breathing hard he came around Hallelujah Point, passing the Brockton Point totem poles on the right and closing the distance between him and Dead-man's Island ahead.
The moon was now at Scarlett's back and as he jogged, his moonshadow stretched out longer and longer on the ground in front of him. Suddenly a second shadow split off from it like some weak Gemini twin, this sub-shadow caused by the moon's reflection off the waters of the harbor. To his right the Douglas firs were swaying. Leaves the color of dried blood were slipping their hold on the maple branches and tumbling like falling acrobats to be crushed under his feet. The tide was out and the mud at the base of the Seawall was glistening like a quicksilver flow. Then, without warning, a veil of cloud slipped across the face of the moon. The wind turned cold. All light was gone. And the rain came once more.
By the time Rick Scarlett returned to his apartment in the West End he was soaked to the skin.
Shucking his clothes off on the bathroom floor he turned on the shower. Once under the piping hot spray he let himself relax. He found that the run had cleared his mind and he brought his thoughts once more around to the investigation in progress. Theories came into focus.
The way Scarlett saw things at the moment there were mainly three active and pregnant possibilities.
The first of these was the theory that the Headhunter was a psychopathic killer acting on his own. The strength of this theory was in the fact that it was the simplest explanation. It gained credence from the number of similar cases that had surfaced in so many other cities over recent years, Clifford Olson's rampage being merely a local example. Also, Vancouver is one weird town. Most seaports are: ask any cop or criminal lawyer. Here, however, there were not only the usual drifters and perverts who float in each day with the tide, but this town is also the foremost North American gateway for the import and traffic of heroin. And that means a lot of burnt-out freakos come here to tap the source.
The second theory — more subtle-arose out of Superintendent DeClercq's tape on psychology. For it had struck Scarlett while listening to Dr. Ruryk's examples, that if these crimes arose from psychosis, from some madman with a hole in his brain, then the Headhunter quite literally could be any man in this city. He could be a homicidal rapist, living a life of surface normalcy, going about his legitimate daily business and all the while keeping a watch for his next female victim. In fact if you accept what Ruryk said about the Imposter, the killer might not even know that he himself was the Head-hunter. Taken to its extreme that could even mean that one of the other guys on the Headhunter Squad could be the killer for whom all of them were searching. A madman hunting himself and not even knowing it.
The final theory was the one that he and Kathy now seemed to be onto. This theory was that the Headhunter was actually a cult. A voodoo cult? A cannibal cult? A cult of North American Indians? Perhaps it was an active form of mass psychosis. For Scarlett had read earlier today about a psychiatric concept known as folie a deux. That was where insanity starts with one person and then by close association passes from that individual to another. The "Reverend" Jim Jones' Guyana cult might be explained in this way. Perhaps there was a voodoo cult active in Vancouver, with Hardy a lone psychopath using it as a blind. Anything was possible. The history of murder showed that.