Primal Scream by Michael Slade Page A

through Vancouver rain to his office at Special X, where the shrunken head sat on his desk.
    "Grueling trip?" Zinc Chandler asked as DeClercq dropped his suitcase just inside the door and shucked his raincoat.
    "Except for the half hour of Mr. Bean crossing the Atlantic."
    "Is Katt peeved to lose a day?" inquired Gill Macbeth, craning her neck to see if the teenager was standing in the hall. The pathologist sat on this side of his desk with the head blocked from view behind her.
    "It worked out well," said DeClercq as he hung his coat on the stand. "We parted in Toronto, where she took a flight to Boston. She'll spend the time with her mom, then fly back for school."
    "Corrine's living Stateside?"
    "On and off. She purchased a mansion to redecorate in Boston this summer. Katt will work with her and get to know that city, and Corrine doesn't have to pull up roots."
    "So everyone's happy?"
    "Most of all me. How Corrine handled this mess is class all the way. I think Katt harbors the fantasy one day I'll marry her mom."
    The mess DeClercq referred to was a mess indeed. A situation pregnant with tragedy for all involved. After Katt had been rescued from Deadman's Island—father unknown and mother one of the Ripper's victims—she had become the daughter death stole from him. Katt was his replacement for Jane. But then he discovered Luna wasn't her mother after all, having kidnapped Katt as a baby from Corrine in Boston, before smuggling her into Canada to raise as her own. DeClercq called Corrine, who wanted her daughter home. Katt, who had lost her "mother," balked at losing her "father" for a mother she didn't know. Were Corrine not Corrine, heartbreak would have happened, but instead of ripping Katt out of her "home," she adapted her life to the teen's. Katt, American by birth, lived in Canada for citizenship, so she could apply to become a Mountie like DeClercq. Corrine, who bought, then refurbished old homes for profit, lived with Katt when she worked here, and shared her with DeClercq when she worked in Boston. Corrine had Katt. DeClercq had Katt. Katt had Corrine and DeClercq.
    "Will you?" Gill asked.
    "Will I what?"
    "Marry Corrine so Katt can live happily ever after with you?"
    "Why are women such meddling romantics?"
    "Is it not a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife?"
    "No," he said.
    "Yes," she said.
    "No," he said.
    "Yes," she said.
    "And if it were, a wife of his own choosing."
    "So," said Gill, cocking her head, "is she not the woman for you?"
    No , thought DeClercq. My kind of woman is you.
    The more he was around her, the more he felt drawn to Gill. Handsome, not pretty, she could pass as a twin for Candice Bergen. His side of forty, with auburn hair and emerald eyes, she still had a figure trim enough to turn heads on the street and awaken fantasies in him he had thought long gone. Her mother, who had died from hepatitis, a risk of the job, was the first female pathologist in the Commonwealth, so while other girls were busy baking cookies with mom, Gill was learning how to dissect dead things, and was now the best forensic sawbones in town. As heir to her father's chain of Caribbean hotels, from which she split the profits with on-site managers, Gill owned the crown atop Sentinel Hill, a West Coast modern of cedar and glass, in which she lived, menage a trois , with Binky and Gabby.
    DeClercq had been there once.
    A party she threw for all who survived the sinking of the Good Luck City during the Africa case.
    "He's not for you, Gill," Gabby said from a perch he paced hi the huge aviary-cum-solarium he shared with Binky.
    "Don't mind him," Gill laughed, champagne flute in hand. "Gab makes disparaging comments about everyone he fears may take me from him."
    "A West African gray."
    "You know parrots?"
    "Bird-watching's a pastime I revive whenever I'm in the tropics."
    "Impress me," Gill said. "What's Binky?"
    "He's a green-winged macaw,