Very Bad Deaths Read online

  A MAN CAN’T EVEN DIE IN PEACE?

  Blind to the beauty of his island home in Canada, shattered by the death of his wife of 32 years, American expatriate Russell Walker is ready to join her. But Smelly won’t let him!

  Smelly—notorious for his refusal to bathe—was Russell’s college roommate back in 1967. He’s lived a hermit’s life ever since, and only Russell knows why: Smelly reads minds, can’t help it—and it hurts. After all these years, Russell is still the only person Smelly can stand to be near. And now Smelly urgently needs an intermediary with the police—suicidal or not.

  He’s learned that a serial sadist who would terrify Ted Bundy is at play in the Vancouver area. Unfortunately, he’s got only scraps of information that aren’t enough to ID either the killer or his next victims. And he can’t even come close enough to a cop to tell his story.

  Against his better judgment, Russell brings this unlikely tale to Constable Nika Mandiç, a tough but unlucky Vancouver policewoman—and soon the mild-mannered Sixties survivor finds himself conspiring with a telepathic hermit and an uptight cop to track a monster to his lair.

  But are the three together smart enough to stalk a creature who thinks of himself as the first true scientist of cruelty? If not, Russell’s suicidal urges may be fulfilled sooner—and much less painlessly—than he planned…

  Books by Spider Robinson

  * Telempath

  Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

  * Stardance (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Antinomy

  The Best of All Possible Worlds

  Time Travelers Strictly Cash

  * Mindkiller

  Melancholy Elephants

  * Night of Power

  Callahan’s Secret

  Callahan and Company (omnibus)

  * Time Pressure

  * Callahan’s Lady

  Copyright Violation

  True Minds

  * Starseed (with Jeanne Robinson)

  * Lady Slings the Booze

  The Callahan Touch

  * Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Off the Wall at Callahan’s

  Callahan’s Legacy

  * Deathkiller (omnibus)

  * Lifehouse

  The Callahan Chronicals (omnibus)

  * The Star Dancers (with Jeanne Robinson)

  * User Friendly

  The Free Lunch

  Callahan’s Key

  * By Any Other Name

  God is an Iron and other stories

  Callahan’s Con

  The Crazy Years

  * Very Bad Deaths

  (* = Baen Book)

  VERY BAD DEATHS

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Spider Robinson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 0-7434-8861-X

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First printing, December 2004

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Spider.

  Very bad deaths / Spider Robinson,

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-7434-8861-X (hc)

  1. Widowers--Fiction. 2. Psychics--Fiction. 3. Serial murders--Fiction. 4. British Columbia--Fiction. 5. Police--British Columbia--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.O3156V47 2004

  813'.54--dc22

  2004016880

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH (www.windhaven.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to Daniel Finger

  For the Jura Scala Vario,

  and to Guy Immega

  for keeping it alive this long

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

  This book would not have been possible without the generous and knowledgeable assistance of two of my neighbours, noted Simon Fraser University Criminology Professor Neil Boyd, author of The Beast Within and the forthcoming Big Sister [Greystone], and his wife Isabel Otter, who since graduating from Osgoode Hall Law School has been an advocate assisting—at various times—physically, mentally and/or emotionally handicapped adults and children, prisoners, and people having trouble with Worker’s Compensation. Additional valuable aid was provided by my good friend Guy Immega, as usual. Walter and Jill, proprietors of Vancouver’s superb mystery store Dead Write Books () as well as the equally superb SF/Fantasy bookstore White Dwarf Books (same URL), have long been my native guides through the worlds of mystery, suspense, thriller and detective fiction, and were of enormous help to me with the writing of this book. The books of Lawrence Gough, police procedurals set in Vancouver, were a particularly fruitful recommendation of theirs; I hope you’ll try one. At least one other substantial contributor of relevant information has specifically declined the honour of being identified here; my heartfelt thanks nonetheless.

  As always, none of these people should be held responsible for the way I’ve misunderstood, misrepresented, mistyped or forgotten what they told me, unless it’s the only way to get me out of a lawsuit.

  —Howe Sound,

  British Columbia

  6 February, 2004

  CONTENTS

  2003

  Trembling-on-the-Verge

  Heron Island, British Columbia

  Canada

  1.

  Flashback:

  1967

  St. William Joseph College

  Olympia, New York

  USA

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  Flashforward:

  2003

  Trembling-on-the-Verge

  Heron Island, British Columbia

  Canada

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  Flashback:

  1968

  Grand Central Station

  or possibly

  Pennsylvania Station

  New York, New York

  USA

  1.

  Flashforward:

  2003

  Trembling-on-the-Verge

  Heron Island, British Columbia

  Canada

  1.

  Flashback:

  1968

  Postoperative ICU Ward

  Bellevue Hospital

  New York, New York

  USA

  1.

  Flashforward:

  2003

  Trembling-on-the-Verge

  Heron Island, British Columbia

  Canada

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  2003

  Trembling-on-the-Verge

  Heron Island, British Columbia

  Canada

  1.

  I was fifty-four years old the first time a dead person spoke to me. Wouldn’t you know it? It was the wrong one.

  To be fair, he did manage to save my life. Just for openers.

  I don’t actually believe in ghosts. I stopped believing in them even before I stopped believing in the Catholic church, and that puts it pretty far back. Not that man
y years after I stopped believing in Santa. It’s just that a few decades later I stopped disbelieving in ghosts, too. My wife Susan told me that when she was in her mid-twenties, at a time when she was awake and not under the influence of drugs, her dead father appeared to her. She said he asked for her forgiveness, and she gave it.

  I never knew Susan to tell a lie unless it was to spare someone’s feelings, and she had fewer delusions than just about anyone else I ever met. She had been dead herself for five years now, and I still hadn’t given up hoping to hear from her. She didn’t need my forgiveness, and I’d had all I was ever going to have of hers, and like I said I didn’t believe in ghosts. But still I hoped. So I guess I still didn’t entirely disbelieve in them either.

  It was about the time they are traditionally reputed to appear, too, somewhere between three and four in the morning. Despite the hour, I was, as Susan had been for her own visitation, wide awake and not under the influence of drugs unless you’re enough of a purist to count coffee or marijuana.

  This was normal for me. All my life I’ve been a night owl, and now I had a job that allowed me to get away with it, and with Susan gone and our son Jesse on the other side of the planet there was absolutely no reason not to do so. I write an opinion column called “The Fifth Horseman” that runs twice a week in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, so basically I think hard for a living. What better time to do that than the middle of the night, when there’s nothing on TV and nothing that isn’t mellow on the radio, nobody comes to the door, the phone doesn’t ring, and nobody anywhere in earshot is using a chainsaw, swinging a hammer, practicing an electric guitar or riding a motorcycle?

  And what better place than my office? It’s a small outbuilding that was originally a pottery studio, well-heated, soundproof enough to permit me to scream obscenities in the small hours if that’s what the job calls for, though that’s less important now that I live alone. The noisiest thing in it is my hard drive. It sits a whole six steps away from the house—overgrown cabin, really—which, now that’s Susan’s not living in it anymore, is basically just the place my coffee and food come from and go back to, and where I spend the daylight hours in a coffin of my native earth. The noisiest things in the house are the furnace, fridge compressor and cat. House and office sit together on a secluded bluff at the end of a long tire-killing pair of ruts that wind through thick woods, in an out of the way corner of an island that’s forty minutes by ferry from North America, and contains a bit over two thousand permanent residents, two sidewalks, and not a single street light or traffic light. The noisiest thing on it in the middle of a weeknight is generally an owl, or a cat in love with mine.

  Given this unusual tranquility, stillness and peace, this near-perfect opportunity for contemplation and reflection, naturally I play a lot of music. Jazz and blues CDs, mostly. Sometimes I sing along. Contemplation needs a little challenge, the way cookies need a little salt.

  All things considered, I have an ideal existence for someone of my temperament and tastes.

  That night, however, the stillness and quiet were lost on me.

  That night nothing, anywhere, had any salt, or any other flavor. I wasn’t writing a column, or trying to, or even trying to dream up an idea for one. I wasn’t surfing the web, for either research or amusement. I wasn’t reading. The walls of the office were almost totally obscured by a couple of thousand cherished books; not one contained a line I wished to reread. I wasn’t even listening to music. Nearly 300 CDs lay within arm’s reach; not one of them held a single track I wanted to hear. The telephone hanging on the wall beside my desk connected me directly to everyone else on the planet; I could think of none who were any use to me.

  I was no longer trying to decide whether to kill myself—only how and how soon.

  A perfect life without Susan in it simply hurt too much to bear. I had been denying that for over a year now, waiting doggedly for the pain to recede to a tolerable level. By now I knew it was never going to recede at all, even a little. Maybe there are no good deaths, I don’t know. I know Susan had one of the bad ones.

  I estimated I had at most another day or two in me.

  It would call for a bit of cunning. The only thing left I could possibly give my son Jesse that he would accept from me was my life insurance benefit—and there was an antisuicide clause. So it would have to look like an accident. I was going over a short list of three finalist methods, weighing their respective pluses and minuses, when the knock on the door startled me so badly I backhanded a cup of coffee clear off the warming plate and onto the floor.

  An unexpected knock in the dead of night is alarming even if you have a clean conscience—or so I imagine. I had my brain do a hasty search for Things This Could Be That Wouldn’t Be Catastrophic. By the time it reported failure, a small pipe and a gray plastic film can had been rendered temporarily invisible, and I was up out of my chair, halfway to the office door, and my fist was unobtrusively wrapped around the trackball of my TurboMouse, a solid plastic sphere about the size and weight of a cueball. I can only wonder what organ directed all these actions, since my brain was fully occupied in the fruitless search for harmless explanations. Spinal cord, maybe.

  Silly, isn’t it? I was planning my suicide…and ready to kill in self defense. No wonder humans own the planet.

  The knock came again as I reached the door. It was depressingly loud and firm. I could think of perhaps a dozen acquaintances or neighbors who might conceivably bang on my door in the small hours, but any of them would have done so softly, apologetically. They are, after all, all Canadians. There was a short list of maybe four friends who might feel entitled to whang away that assertively at that hour, secure in the certainty that I would be both awake and willing to fuck off for a while. But for one reason and another I was fairly certain none of them could be on-island just now.

  That left only discouraging possibilities. A raid of some kind. Someone bringing the news that a loved one was dead or badly hurt. A neighbor who wanted to tell me my house was on fire. The first home invader in the history of Heron Island.

  Number four was a joke; we did have a full-time RCMP officer on the island, Corporal McKenzie, but he’d never made an arrest. Numbers two or three would be bad news, but the kind I would want to open my door to. It was number one that had me hesitating at the threshold.

  I had little to fear from a legitimate police raid. Nothing, really, except annoyance and brief indignity. My house and office were always scrupulously free of any seditious, proscribed or obscene materials. My hard drive never contained anything remotely questionable whose encryption I did not trust absolutely. And the contents of the little gray plastic film can, while outstanding in quality, were of a quantity nobody could reasonably call anything but personal use. By a cheapskate. If part of your job description is pissing off the powerful in the public prints, you’re wise to keep a tight ship at all times.

  But one of the things this knock might be was a mistake. Heron Island is about half an hour from Vancouver. The drug squad, a right bunch of cowboys, loved to make surprise busts. The trouble was, they were notorious fuckups. You probably read about the time they kicked in the wrong door, and the 20-year-old college student inside was unwise enough to be caught with a TV remote control in his hand that, in a certain light, looked not too much unlike some sort of Martian weapon; he had to be killed to ensure the safety of the officers. Who then learned that the guy they actually wanted lived next door, or rather, used to; he had moved six months earlier. If you missed that story, you must have heard about the squad that crashed their way into a house they had been surveilling continuously for days, were startled to find a child’s birthday party in progress inside, and were forced to blow the family watchdog into hamburger, in front of a room full of horrified kids and terrified parents, for trying to protect them. There turned out to be no drugs or drug users present.

  In both cases, an internal inquiry totally exonerated the cops of any improper actions.
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  If, thanks to some totally typical typo, it was those guys out there knocking on my door, I definitely did not want to open it with a weapon in my hand, even one as low tech as a plastic trackball.

  But what if—as seemed more likely—it was some sort of nut-bar out there? An insomniac Jehovah’s Witless, say, or a tourist ripped on acid. Or a belligerent drunk, or the new boyfriend of an old girlfriend in search of karmic balance. In that case it might be better if I didn’t, literally, drop the ball. I’m skinny, frail, and no fighter: any edge at all was welcome.

  Most likely of all, of course, was the secret nightmare of any opinion columnist bright enough to get published: the disgruntled reader who decides to make his rebuttal in person, with a utensil. There is no opinion you could conceivably express, however innocuous, that won’t piss off somebody, somewhere. It was comforting to be in Canada, where there are almost no handguns, despite everything the government can do to keep them out.

  But that didn’t mean that the guy who was even now knocking on my door for the third time wasn’t doing so with the butt of a shotgun. Or the hilt of a butcher knife, the sweet spot of a Louisville Slugger, the handle of an axe, or for that matter the tip of a chainsaw. Maybe, I thought, I should forget my silly trackball and start thinking in terms of turning my half-liter can of Zippo fluid into a squeeze-operated flamethrower, or some speaker wire into a noose, or—

  “Owww,” whoever it was out there said. “Cut it out.”

  The voice was muffled; I could hear it at all only because he was speaking loudly. And the words were baffling, when I’d thought myself as confused as possible already. Cut it out? I was standing still, frozen with indecision—what the hell was it I was supposed to stop doing?

  “Being so paranoid,” he called.

  I stood, if possible, stiller. A comedy voice, somewhere between Michael Jackson and a Mel Blanc cartoon character.

  “You didn’t used to be so suspicious.”

  That voice tickled at the edges of memory. Deep memory. Twenty years? No. It felt like more. Thirty, maybe. Which would make it—

  Oh wow. The trackball fell forgotten from my hand to the carpet. I opened my mouth—and hesitated, caught by a ridiculous dilemma. I thought I knew who he was, now…and for the life of me I couldn’t recall his real name. Just what everybody used to call him, and I certainly wasn’t about to use that. But screw names—how could it possibly be him out there? I wanted to fling open the door, and couldn’t bring myself to touch the knob.