The Mak Collection (39 page)

Grant was in the woods at the Nahatlatch River looking for clues. It was freezing, and he walked through the woods in his parka and layers of uniform, battling a deep, gnawing chill in his bones—and in his mind.

This was where the girl’s body had been dumped. The spot was still lit up for the Forensic Team. She had been a real mess, just as Mike had said. The animals had got to her, they suggested. The area where she was found had already been gone over with a finetooth comb several times, and now the search was moving wider. And, like a fool, Grant had been roped into helping. He should really have been home with his wife. She needed him.
Damn
. He pulled his thoughts away from his ailing wife and focused on the job at hand.

They were finishing up the autopsy right now back in the city. She was a young girl, a teenager. That didn’t sit easy with Grant. He thought of his own daughter, and he didn’t like thinking about Cherrie while he was walking through the woods trying to find a murder weapon.

He didn’t like that one bit. Once in a while they had to deal with an ill-fated hunter or two out here. They’d had a couple of bear attacks and a shooting accident as well. But nothing like this. Not that he could recall, anyway. That girl had no reason to be out here alone.

Grant didn’t know if his body could take the chill much longer. It was getting late. They would have to pick it up in the morning. He spun around and headed in Mike’s direction, sweeping the flashlight back and forth in front of himself as he walked. The forest floor was uneven and thick with exposed
roots and ground-covering plants. He made his way into one of the clearings and looked around. Corporal Michael Rose was talking with one of the constables. He was using his hands a lot as he spoke. Mike looked up immediately when his friend approached. He ended his conversation and walked over.

“We should pack it in soon, eh?” he said.

“Yeah,” Grant replied. “You took the words right out of my mouth. We’ll make everyone sick if we keep ’em out here.”

“Tomorrow when it’s light we’ll get a search team together and take them through the steps.”

“Yeah.”

Loud barking grabbed their attention, and they swivelled their heads around simultaneously, looking for the source. A voice broke through the darkness, and a flashlight flickered through the trees far ahead.

“Sarge!”

Grant started running and Mike was right beside him.

It was Symmons. He was with one of the dog handlers a ways back from the river. “We got bones here!” he cried. “We got bones!”

Bones? Mike and Grant exchanged looks as they ran. It could be something else…a deer perhaps? That was more likely. But the interminable barking continued at a terrible pitch. The dog was really worked up.

“Human?” Grant asked as they emerged through the trees.

“Hang on…I think so. Ella’s going totally ape,” Symmons said. He was breathless, even though Mike and Grant were the ones who had done all the running.

Ella kept barking and barking, circling the spot and barking some more.

“Good girl, good girl, Ella,” the dog handler said, calming the animal down. “Such a gooood girl!” He turned to them. “Yup, she’s definitely got something here.”

A large bone stuck up through the forest floor a few paces away, stripped of flesh. It could have been anything. Grant felt a little disappointed after running all the way over. And a bit relieved, too.

A couple of members of the Forensic Team had followed them in. “Let’s take a look,” one of them said, and they brushed past.

“You know it could just be a—” Mike started to say, but he stopped short. Someone flashed a light across the area to the side of the bone Grant had initially seen, and that’s when it became obvious that there was more, what looked like a whole ribcage was poking up through the dirt and the ferns, and it was definitely human. That is, unless the local deer had taken up wearing shirts.

“Let’s get the lights in here!” one of the team called out. “Looks like we’ve got a second body.”

It was evening, and at last Makedde was feeling relaxed. She was curled up on the couch in her modest Vancouver apartment with an out-of-print copy of
Psychopathy—Theory and Research
by Dr Robert D Hare.

What more could a girl want?

She wanted to scrub up on the subject before the psychopathy conference the next day. The 1970 book was older than she was, but she thought that it would provide an interesting background to the cutting-edge research she would be hearing about during the conference in the days to follow. She was already quite familiar with Hervey Cleckley’s
Mask of Sanity
and she had read Dr Hare’s classic,
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
, a few times over, but in recent months her appetite for information on the subject had been insatiable.

…During periods of relaxation and painful stimulation, the pattern of adrenergic (sympathetic) and cholinergic (parasympathetic) activity is the same for neurotic subjects as it is for normal ones…

A half-eaten bowl of pasta sat on the coffee table beside her.

However, following the termination of the stimulation, the autonomic activity of the normal subjects…

The phone rang, breaking her concentration. Makedde reached across and picked it up without taking her eyes from the page. She was pretty sure she knew who it would be.

“How’s it going, Dad?” she said.

“Fine. And you?”

“Fine as well, thanks,” she replied, and read another line.

Experiments recently reviewed by Malmo (1966) are consistent with Rubin’s hypothesis…

“How’ve you been feeling?” her father asked.

The relevance of Rubin’s theory to psychopathy is that some of the characteristics of the psychopath are more or less opposite to those of the neurotic…

“Have you been sleeping?” he went on, his voice a little louder this time, indicating that he knew she wasn’t giving him her full attention. She took her eyes off the page.

“Hmmm, sleep?” Mak furrowed her brow and looked to the ceiling, making a show of racking her brain even though the only audience she had for her little performance was her house plants. “Oh. Oh, that. Overrated.”

“Makedde—”

She held the phone from her ear as he raised his voice, and with the other hand marked her page and lowered the book into her lap.

“Dad,” she finally said. “Calm down. I’m fine. I’m sleeping fine.” A lie.

“Who do you think you’re kidding?” her father said. “Ann thinks she can help you. She knows all about that stuff. She said she would be very happy to talk to you about it, or perhaps recommend someone.”

“Oh really?”

“I think you should take her up on it,” he said.

“You do, eh? So, when did she get divorced anyway?” Mak asked.

Pause. “I guess they divorced a few years ago.”
Bingo
. “What has that got to do with the price of tea in China?”

“Nothing.” She wondered just how interested her father was in Ann. “I just saw how you were looking at her. I like her, Dad. She’s nice.”

“Good. Then maybe you’ll consider taking her up on her offer. She wants me to give you her number, just in case you ever need it.” “Okay, go ahead.” He gave her the details, and she took them down dutifully, with no intention whatsoever of calling.

“Now, you got another message from Detective Flynn.”

“Andy?”
Oh, damn.

“He left a number for you to call him at Quantico. I think he was afraid to ask for your home number. He said he would only be available on that number until tomorrow afternoon, though.”

“Okay.”

She took it down and stared at the digits after she hung up the phone. The piece of paper in her hand held two phone numbers of people she didn’t really want to speak to. Talking to either of them would only open up a can of worms.

It was too late to call Andy in Virginia anyway. She’d leave it till tomorrow.

Maybe.

That night Makedde dreamt of psychiatrists, FBI agents and psychopaths. And the devil. Right before she woke up screaming, he shot flames from his eyes and Makedde—dressed in her father’s police uniform—fell backwards, her hands still frozen
uselessly on the trigger of her gun. Once again the devil violently ripped her mother’s life away before her eyes.

That was at 3.00 am.

She couldn’t get back to sleep after that.

Harold G Gosper PhD, a Professor of Social Psychology, arrived at the University of British Columbia at eight-thirty and chose a seat at the back of the Graduate Center Ballroom. He wore his favourite forest-green cardigan and matching corduroy pants with a mauve button-down shirt. As he scratched at a spot of toothpaste on his pants, he vaguely recalled some protest from his wife when he had left the house, something about his wearing the same thing for four days in a row. But no matter. She’d hardly said a word to him the last few days and he didn’t really care.

He wet the toothpaste mark with a bit of saliva, and once satisfied, pulled his hand away and ran a palm over his slick hair. He adjusted himself in the stiff plastic chair and licked his lips. Professor Gosper had picked a spot in the far corner of the room specifically so that he could leave quietly when things got boring. There were heavy exit doors to his right and his
vantage point offered a full view of the room and its occupants. He liked watching people. More than attending psychology lectures that was for sure. He was interested in social not forensic psychology, and the truth was he didn’t have a lot of time for “psychopathy” and Dr Hare’s theories on the psychopathic mind.

Sure, Dr Hare had his awards and his honorary medals and his documentary specials, and his Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL) was widely accepted as the diagnostic tool for psychopaths. Gosper was all too aware of those facts. And of course there was his popular book,
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
. He certainly couldn’t forget that. But even so, Gosper found Hare’s apparent guru status a bit hard to take.

In his own mind he was quite convinced that his secret animosity had nothing to do with the multiple rejection slips he had received for his own manuscript.

Perhaps one of Dr Hare’s publishers would be attending the conference?

With his arms folded, Gosper sat back and observed the slowly filling room. A clique of uniformed police officers filed in and eschewed the name tags offered at the entrance. They were from the local Vancouver PD, and they moved in a single pack towards the long tables of Danishes and choc-chip muffins. Upon noticing that the food was still covered with plastic wrap they went for the coffee and ended
up hovering around the coffee dispensers with empty styrofoam cups in their hands. Their caffeine fix wasn’t ready yet. They would most likely have to wait until nine.

A number of students came in, dressed in jeans and running shoes, and struck up conversations with the graduates who were working as volunteers giving out the name tags and handouts. A couple of men, who Gosper guessed were plain-clothes cops or Feds, leaned against the long row of coat racks at the back of the room and talked with animated gestures.

As the various attendees chose their seats, an obvious pattern emerged. Eager students and friends of the speakers sat up front in small groupings, and the police and RCMP sat along the back rows in segregated camps. Psych students, with their notebooks and knapsacks, filled up the middle rows.

A young man in casual pants and a dress shirt walked over and sat a couple of seats away from Professor Gosper. Gosper noted that he had brought his own coffee in a Starbucks’ cup.

The big room was now about half full and people were still arriving. There were students and cops, but still no one who looked like a publisher. The speakers hadn’t arrived yet, either. Gosper kept watching.

At around eight-fifty, a female student walked in who caught his attention. She was quite striking and tall, and a number of other males in the room took the time to glance in her direction before resuming their
conversations. She didn’t seem to notice. She wore her blonde hair straight and past the shoulders, and was dressed in black pants and boots and a turtleneck sweater the colour of English toffee. No jewellery. Something about her dress sense, or the quality of her clothes, set her apart from the typical student.

Gosper knew her. Makedde Vanderwall.
And a strange name at that,
he thought. He had often wondered where someone got a Christian name like “Makedde” from. Was it Irish? Welsh? She looked Scandinavian but he didn’t know of any Scandinavian names like hers. In fact, the closest name he had ever come across was the Japanese name “Makaira”, which meant happy. Her last name—Vanderwall—was, of course, pure Dutch.

Professor Gosper also knew that she was bright and creative; that she sometimes worked as a fashion model; that her Masters was in Forensic Psychology and that she was currently working on her PhD thesis on the subject of the variables affecting the reliability of eyewitness testimony. He knew that she had recently taken a great interest in the area of psychopathy, and he was sure she would be attending the conference today.

Makedde had enrolled in Professor Gosper’s Psych 203 Introduction to Personality and Social Psychology course in her second year, but it was only recently that he had focused on her. Unlike some of the other people around the campus, he was not interested in
her obvious physical qualities. His interest was purely professional. He had reason to believe that she would make a very enlightening subject, psychologically. Earlier in the year, one of the university staff had tipped him off about her involvement in a serial killer case in Australia during the previous summer break. Sensational stuff. Seems she’d been abducted by a multiple murderer and only survived because the cops managed to bust in the room and save her at the last minute. She was the only surviving victim of how many? Ten?