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  "MO fits," said Zinc.

  "What bothers me." said Robert, "is the scent from the house. Dog teams tracked it from the back porch, up the path along the face of Mary Hill, toward the Indian Reserve and Port Coquitlam Town Center. If Schreck left the scent, there should be two trails, one climbing the hill from Colony Farm, the other as found. Instead, the dogs seem to say the killer backtracked the same route he arrived."

  "Unless Schreck angled north along the ditch network," said Zinc, "then climbed the hill, reached the path, and came south to the house."

  "That's fleeing in the wrong direction. Toward the cops on his tail. If only the trail from the sheriff's car didn't end at the river. And if only the dogs could tell us the scents on both sides were left by the same man."

  "It's dark," Zinc said. "Schreck's in the bush. He turns the wrong way."

  "None of his fingerprints were found in the murder kitchen."

  "Surfaces were wiped clean."

  "Hardly the act of a psychotic on the run. Schreck kills the deputies with prints all over the scene, then stops to wipe Dora's kitchen clean?"

  "A crazy doesn't act rationally. Irrationality is his hallmark. A different killer at Dora's house flouts the odds. Too great a coincidence."

  "Is it?" Robert said. "Schreck kills the deputies at five-ten. Nick leaves his mom alive about that time, and soon whoever came down the path arrives at her back door. The kitchen window overlooks Colony Farm Road, so he witnesses the manhunt below, perhaps catching a news flash on the radio. An escaping madman has crushed two skulls on Colony Farm. If X clubs Dora and wipes up his prints, then flees up the path by which he came, surely the police will blame the missing psycho. Sounds like a perfect smokescreen to me."

  "Okay, we keep an open mind and follow both trails till one gets blocked. The problem I have with X is his motive. Did he come to kill Dora, or decide to kill her there? If preplanned, why? If spontaneous, what set him off? Be interesting to see Kidd's report. I hear she's smart," said Zinc.

  Mary Hill was down near the tip of the V where the Coquitlam and Pitt rivers joined the Fraser. Northeast across the map, Robert slid his finger up the right arm of the V to Minnekhada Lodge. "Schreck killed the deputies and killed Dora. Schreck killed the deputies and X killed Dora. Who killed Jack?"

  The central third of the Strategy Wall was for the Craven murder. Moving right, they stood before the MacDougalJ third. Photos of Jack, disemboweled, crowded by reports.

  "Whoever it was came and left by car," said Zinc. "A third killer would really stretch the odds. A double smokescreen?"

  "Say it's X."

  "Motive? Link? Why kill Dora and Jack?"

  "Say it's Schreck."

  "Gotta be. Then everything fits. The deputies are Bone Police, so he crushes their skulls. Dora's on his escape route, so he clubs her down. He steals a car and follows Jack from Dora's house to the lodge when Jack

  returns from driving Nick. Jack's with the Bone Police, so he crushes his skull. Four psychotic murders in a row."

  "What doesn't fit," Robert said, "is gutting Jack. Schreck sees the Bone Police as animate skeletons. Why disembowel a psychotic hallucination without any flesh? As you said in the parking lot, The bludgeoning killed him. So why the disemboweling?' Good question. It's the key."

  HARD ENTRY

  When this city has a ghetto, it will be the East End. Late last century, the area was a timber stand for Hastings Mill, and Indians hunted elk here to sell to white settlers as a substitute for beef. The only roads back then were skidroads for logs, and skid road is the future many see now. In 1891, East Vancouver was born, thanks to the new electric interurban railway that shot east to New Westminster. The streets were laid by chain gangs from the city jail, and cows were soon limited to twenty-five per household. One of the streets, Adanac, is Canada spelled backward. The summer of 1904, Edward Odium was standing with friends on a rise within sight of False Creek. "What a grand view," someone said, and he replied—the story goes—"Yes, Grand view would be an excellent name for the area."

  So Grandview it is.

  But a "grand view" it's not today.

  First to settle Vancouver's first suburb were the British, of course. But after World War I, the Chinese, Italians, and East Europeans moved in. After World War II, East Indians arrived, followed by waves of refugees from the Third World, drawn by the fact Canada's immigration laws are a mess. Land and claim you're persecuted back home—it matters not whether it's California, which wants you for rape-murders, or Iran, which wants to cut off your head—and you get welfare and medical

  while your case is mired forever in a bureaucratic bog. The country's known as a pushover around a world on the move, so Canada's a haven for offshore crime, and those fighting foreign battles from afar.

  The Bad Guys, to Special X.

  Somalia was currently enmeshed in civil war. Rival warlords and their clans fought for control of Africa's multimillion-dollar khat trade, while UN peacekeepers struggled to feed starving people. Grown in the uplands of Kenya and Ethiopia, khat is a highly addictive drug trafficked throughout the Horn of Africa. To buy guns and pay men to wage their war, warlords send "refugees" to Canada, usually their families and members of their clan. The "refugees" apply for welfare under multiple names, and import khat with pot and opium grown in the "death triangle" around Biaboa to sell. The net effect is Canada finances the war, buying arms like those that killed twenty-three UN peacekeepers from Pakistan, and almost wiped out a crack American Ranger unit. Canadian paratroops sent to dodge Canadian-financed bullets torture and kill Somali youth, while the politically correct at home muzzle truth with Partyspeak.

  War as soap opera.

  But not this morning.

  Easy for the doc to say You must avoid alcohol and sleeplessness. And never —/ repeat never— miss taking your drugs ... but Chandler was a cop and cops work around the clock, so though he was subject to epilepsy from the gunshot scar in his brain, sleeplessness it was. As head of Operations, he oversaw all cases, so having worked through the night on Jack MacDougall's murder, booting the Violent Crimes Analysis Section out of bed to computer-hunt every cop hater and killer from coast to coast and beyond, now the darkness before dawn saw him drive to Grandview in Vancouver's East End, and here stop by a gun-metal gray van innocuously hidden in a church parking lot.

  The fourteen-foot-long box of the van yawned and swallowed Zinc. Inside, he met the op commander of HQ's Emergency Response Team, a telecommunications pair with headsets, mikes, recorders, and a video screen, plus a negotiator should something go wrong. The radio man and woman sat at a small desk; Zinc and the negoti-

  ator on a side bench; while the OC kept pace with his shadow cast on the eight-foot ceiling by the washy black-and-white image on the screen.

  "Brief me," Chandler said.

  'The Somalis are in a duplex three streets away." The OC indicated the residence on the screen. "Special I installed an infrared camera up a telephone pole. Two marksmen on roofs within a hundred yards will feed us running comment from their scopes. Final check," the OC ordered telecom.

  "Sierra One. Op Command. Update the front."

  "Op Command. Sierra One. No sign of life. Windows dark with no movement in Alpha or Bravo."

  "Sierra Two. Op Command. Update the rear."

  "Op Command. Sierra Two. Alpha Half black. TV just on in Bravo Half. Upper floor, window two."

  "Alpha Team?"

  "Copy."

  "Bravo Team?"

  "Roger. Life on the top floor, second window in."

  "Alpha, Bravo, hard entry in two. Phase Line Green and hold for Go from OC."

  The duplex spied on by the infrared camera was a boxy, bland, boring Vancouver Special. A relic from the decade of disco, platform shoes, and $7.50 Led Zeppelin tickets, it featured a low-rise tar-and-gravel roof, a wrought-iron balcony railing with little balcony, and a flat stucco front above brick facing. Stippled ceilings and swag lamps with lime-green or burnt-orange wal
l-to-wall shag would showcase black velvet paintings inside. In this part of the East End, Vancouver Specials were a plague.

  "The drugs are in the Alpha Half," the operations commander continued. "Khat, hemp, and poppy from Kenya by way of London, hidden in a cargo of tobacco leaves. Our tip said the Somalis rent just the Alpha Half, but watchers caught them going in and out of the Bravo Half all day."

  "You're taking down both sides?"

  "Two eight-man teams."

  Just as Special X is the external arm of the RCMP, so Special I (for Investigation) is its electronic ears and mind's eye, while Special O (for Observation) sends out

  fleshed "watchers." As the OC briefed Zinc, sixteen shadows converged on the duplex from both edges of the screen, darting and dodging from cover to cover toward the side-by-side front doors. From how the point man on the left moved, Chandler knew Ed "Mad Dog" Rabidowski led Alpha Team.

  A brawny loner with a heavy-browed scowl, the Mad Dog was the meanest-looking Member in the Force. Son of a Yukon trapper raised in the woods, he could take the eye out of a squirrel with a .22 at 100 yards before he was six. A man of repressed violence, he lived to kill: hunting grizzly bears at Kakwa River, packs of wolves near Tweedsmuir Park, elk on Pink Mountain, and punks with the ERT. There was a time when people likened him to Charles Bronson—a comment he welcomed before Bronson went soft—but now he aped the screen presence of Harvey Keitel. The Mad Dog made a point of only dating whores, for—as he put it—"Why mess with amateurs if you can blow with a pro?" The Mad Dog was the barbarian DeClercq sicked on savages so he could follow with the Charter of Rights. The best that could be said for having the Mad Dog on your side was then you could be sure he wasn't on the other.

  Though some wore baseball caps, this was Canada so most had tuques or balaclavas. The black turtleneck was hidden under a dark blue combat jacket with no buttons and nylon zippers to remain antistatic around aircraft. Matching blue combat pants with cargo pockets had cuffs tucked into black Canadian Army boots. Over each jacket was a dark tactical armored vest with Velcro pockets to move around for different ERT weapons: tear gas, pepper spray, or blasts for hard entry. POLICE RCMP in white blared the pull-down flap in front. POLICE on the fold-down flap behind. VPR, or Voice Private Radio attached to each vest scrambled orders so no one could intercept ERT communications. An earphone was stuck in each cop's ear.

  "Oscar Charlie. Alpha Team. Phase Line Green."

  "Oscar Charlie. Bravo Team. Phase Line Green."

  "Go!" ordered Op Command.

  The Ram-It member of each team battered one of the two doors. A thirty-inch cylinder weighing thirty-five pounds, with semiflex grips to swing it in a roundhouse

  arc at locks, the Ram-It (or "key to the city") impacts with a kinetic force of 14,000 pounds, with extra "pop" added by the follow-through handles. Even your smallest operative becomes a BIG ramer with Ram-It hints the ad, and there's a two-man Ram-It II to add 10,000 pounds of he-man thrust should testosterone demand it. Even short strokes yield high impact.

  Your Vancouver Special is cheap to build. Aluminum framed with minimal wood for a square-foot cost of $35, walls and doors are so thin you might as well be in the next room. Both duplex doors exploded in unison. Ram-It members stepping back to let their teams in. Alpha Team into the Alpha Half, Bravo Team into the Bravo Half, in four pairs of two a side, the Ram-It member joining the last odd man.

  The Mad Dog led the second pair of Alpha Team, for he had to be where the danger was.

  ERT Mounties don't give both hands to the gun. The two-hand stance, arms out, is for long-range targets. The last thing you want when you wax a door is both hands occupied, the idea being to scare the fight out of the Bad Guys NOW!, so the first-man-in-the-door on both teams tossed a stun grenade into the living room off the entrance hall, left in Alpha Half where two Somalis slept, right in Bravo Half where no one was, the bright burst and loud explosion hurling a concussion you could feel, followed by each first pair storming into the room, the Alpha two on the Somalis before they came out of shock, guns to both heads as the designated speaker yelled, "Police! Police! Search warrant! Everyone on the floor!" With each punk down, the ERT team "drops a body." so the first two into Alpha Half cuffed and guarded the dazed Somalis, while the Mad Dog rushed up the stairs toward the upper floor.

  The fourth-man-in trailed him as the second pair.

  The next two reinforced the ground floor assault.

  The last pair started up the stairs as upper floor backup.

  The Mad Dog gripped a SIG/Sauer P 226 in one hand as primary weapon, his other hand free to catch rebounding doors, or to guide him along dark halls, or to switch on lights. The 9mm pistol weighed two pounds, the fifteen-round magazine "short-loaded" bv one to

  take pressure off the spring so it wouldn't jam. The secondary weapon slung on his back was a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, thirty rounds in the mag in front of the trigger guard. Extra mags were in the Velcro pockets on his vest.

  The Mad Dog was halfway up the stairs when a door at the top jerked open.

  Night vision goggles are only used if you control all light. An unexpected flash could blind the whole team. Instead, the Mad Dog beamed the Surefire torch mounted under the barrel of the SIG, activated by a pressure plate. In the room downstairs, flashlight rays crossed like swords in the dark, but here in the stairway tunnel, only the Mad Dog lit the way. Those behind followed single file, beams out so not to backlight him as a target. The tunnel was a shooting gallery for the Somali on the landing above, who gripped a Mini Uzi in both hands, commando weapon of the Israeli Army, 950 shots a minute from a 32-round clip.

  The Mad Dog shone the Surefire at his unadjusted eyes.

  The wincing Somali swung the machine gun to spray the cops on the stairs.

  He was asking for it, so the Mad Dog let him have it.

  Bam! Bam! . . . Bam! Bam! . . . Bam! Bam! . . . Thunder boomed along the narrow tunnel as yellow muzzle flashes licked up the stairs. Shoot to kill, the Mad Dog fingered "double taps" at the man, second round following on the tail of the first, all shots at the "center of mass," both the largest target and home to the heart, lungs, and spine. Ping! Ping! . . . Ping! Ping! . . . Ping! Ping! . . . Casings flew from the ejection port, bouncing off the staircase wall as the SIG semiauto action used each blast to slide a live round into the spout.

  In white undershirt and white underpants, his dark head and limbs lost in dark shadows at the top of the stairs, this Somali was begging Shoot me here. The six shots tore his undershirt, red holes sucking light from the Surefire beam, as forward motion pitched him headfirst down the stairs, the 9mm not an abattoir gun, no hurling back of mangled bodies like the guns of TV cops do, but the Bad Guy gone all the same.

  "One coming down," the Mad Dog yelled to those

  behind, the body tobogganing down the aisle beside their single file.

  Two more gunmen appeared above.

  The naked one who emerged from the same doorway as Underwear had a shortened version of the AK-47, Chinese model. From the hall that branched left from the top of the stairs to another bedroom, a thug in a leopard-skin jockstrap joined Bareballs, this Somali so big they had to form two ranks so both could command the tunnel. In one hand he carried a flashlight. The other aimed a MAC 10.

  The Mad Dog snuffed his beam as Jockstrap's torch lit the hall above, reversing the shooting gallery. Trained to keep climbing until he was clear of stairs, dominating each Bad Guy in turn, the Mad Dog shouted ^Police! Police!" while bounding up the steps, Bam! Bam! . . . Bam! Bam! . . . Bam! Bam! . . . blasting the SIG at Jockstrap in a volley of double taps, feeding him slug upon slug to cut him down. Twelve gone, Ed thought, keeping count of shots, so he raised the gun and . . . Bam! . . . put one between Jockstrap's eyes.

  The arm with the flashlight smacked back to whack Bareballs. It conked him as he triggered the AK-47 down the stairs, jerking the barrel high to machine-gun the top of the tunnel. Pffdrdrt! Pffdrdrt! Pffdrdrt! rained
plaster down, and Bareballs stumbled back into the dark bedroom. As Jockstrap cried blood from his Cyclops eye, crumpling to his knees, then crashing to the floor, the Mad Dog crested the top of the stairs. The Mini Uzi and MAC 10 were both machine pistols, unable to pierce the armor the ERT cops wore. The AK-47 was an assault rifle armed with military full metal jackets, so now was the time to make the last shot count, Bareballs collecting himself in the dark for an armor-piercing burst, as the Mad Dog gave both hands to the gun, shone the Surefire into the room, and fired the SIG.

  The Mountie was trained to watch arcs of fire, to ensure he didn't hit one of the team or blast through a wall with someone on the other side. The Mad Dog's aim was true and Bam! the bullet drilled through Bare-balls's heart, killing him instantly. What the sergeant could not control was cadaveric spasm: the Somali's finger twitching as he twisted from the shot, triggering a

  Pffdrdrt! at the wall dividing Alpha from Bravo Half in this sturdy Vancouver Special.

  Knives through butter.

  ERT Mounties train to synchronize attacks. Third man into Bravo Half was Corporal Wayne Tarr, a wiry and fiery redhead with nerves to match. As he dashed up the stairs parallel to those next door, gunfire exploded in Alpha Half. On his last assault, Tarr was almost shot, so adrenaline hit him hard as he topped the stairs, the fact a cop killer was loose cinching him another notch, SIG itching to fire, door on the landing closed, one, two, three, turn the knob, kick it wide open, this door to the bedroom second in, from which Sierra Two reported TV glow.

  The room was dark except for a Scooby Doo cartoon Tarr couldn't see, an armchair facing the set with its back to him blocking the screen.

  As the door burst open, a figure jumped and turned toward him, a black silhouette against flickering glow, just a head, hand, and gun visible over the back of the chair.

  Bareballs's bullets from next door blew through the wall, zipping from the dark to whiz past the corporal's face, chunking plaster beside him.