Burnt Bones by Michael Slade

Author:Michael Slade [Slade, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
Published: 2013-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

Never Trust a Campbell

Vancouver, British Columbia

How well do you remember The Silence of the Lambs? In the middle of the film, Jodie Foster and her roommate sit chatting about the serial killer Buffalo Bill, and she mentions that there’s no spatial pattern to his killings, or else the computer would have picked it up. That comment was pure fiction when the film was made, because such a program didn’t exist. Not until Detective Inspector Kim Rossmo of the VPD developed one, to turn fiction into fact.

Geographic profiling.

Which brought DeClercq here.

From the parking lot sandwiched between Special X and the Annex, he entered the door to the Behavioural Science Group of the Major Crimes Section. Beyond the swing gate and past the ship’s bell on the pillar, he turned right and knocked on the open door to Rusty Lewis’s office. The cyber cop glanced up from his computer screen.

“Any luck with Hitchcock’s MacGuffin?” asked DeClercq.

“I queried the ViCLAS database for any ‘Campbell’ connection across Canada and found no link of interest. Seattle FBI queried VICAP for me. Their linkage system turned up a mysterious death in Florida in May. A recluse named Malcolm Campbell.”

“Facts,” said DeClercq.

“Health forced the eighty-year-old to forsake misty Scotland for sunny climes years ago. An obsessive hoarder, he amassed a lifelong relic collection centered on the Campbell massacre of the MacDonalds at Glencoe in 1692. Recently, the old man had suffered paranoid delusions that the MacDonalds were after him for revenge, and last May he was found floating face down in the sea near his Key West home.”

“Foul play?”

“No indications on the body. The coroner would have put it down to accident or suicide had his Glencoe collection not simultaneously vanished from his seaside estate.”

“It’s worth looking into.”

“I’ll follow up.”

“Kim around?”

“In back. He’s training Monica in her office.”

DeClercq followed Lewis to the rear of the Annex. Unlike the uncluttered working space where Lewis felt at home, the office of his partner from the Headhunter case was as cluttered as the Black Museum at Scotland Yard. Profiles of the hunting grounds of serial killers covered the walls: Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler, the Moors Murderers, Clifford Olson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Aileen Wuornos, the Yorkshire Ripper, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Stranglers, and others. Somewhere on each map was a multi-colored amoeba, a blob that reminded DeClercq of the blob in the 1958 horror film.

But these blobs were counter-horror.

With their backs to the door, Rossmo and Macdonald were discussing the geoprofile of Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror when DeClercq and Lewis walked in. The map with the amoeba showed the labyrinth of streets north of the River Thames that were London’s Whitechapel district in 1888. Between August 31 and November 9, the Ripper had killed and mutilated five prostitutes. The darkest part of the amoeba formed an oval that ran along Whitechapel High Street.

“What this tells me,” Rossmo said, “is that the Ripper didn’t live in the neighborhood where he committed five crimes. He was

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