Bed of Nails Read Online Free PDF Page B

cooks, old boy.”
    Zinc peeked in through the door frame but couldn’t see the corpse. Just the black sergeant and two techs in “bunny suits”—disposable white coveralls with hoods and full foot coverage so that the crime site wouldn’t be contaminated—vacuuming for hairs and fibers.
    “You’re thinking Easter, right?”
    “Huh?” said Chandler, turning his attention back to the coroner.
    “Easter’s more appropriate than Halloween.”
    “Oh, you mean Jesus on the cross?”
    “Right, Easter’s the proper time for crucifixion. Unless, of course, the crucifix is upside down.”
    “Is it?” Chandler asked.
    The coroner nodded, licking his lips as if it were time to wet his whistle again.
    One of the techs spied Zinc and called out, “Suits are in the bag by the door, Inspector. We’re through with that half of the room. No need to avoid the path of contamination.”
    Fetching the Ident bag from beside the hinges, Zinc removed a bunny suit and began to pull it on.
    “It reminds me of that myth from the trenches in the First World War,” the coroner said. “The rumor emerged from the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. A Canadian sergeant, the story goes, was found nailed to a barn door with German bayonets through his hands and feet. The details changed with each retelling. He was nailed to a house. He was nailed to a tree. He was tied up with rope. He was tied up with wire. Nothing mattered but the image of crucifixion. In a Christian era, what better propaganda? A Hunnish enemy had mocked Christ’s agony on the cross. When the rumor spread to New York, Yanks began enlisting even though they weren’t in the war. And heaven help the Kraut who fell into our hands. After the crucified soldier, Canucks got a bad rep for abusing POWs.”
    “I’ve seen that image,” Zinc said.
    “ Canada’s Golgotha. A sculptor cast the myth in bronze after the war. In it, the soldier hangs crucified in his great coat as Germans mock him from below like Romans did Christ. The rendition outraged postwar Germans, and they demanded that we prove the atrocity really occurred. When we couldn’t, the offending sculpture was crated up and stored away for fifty years.”
    “It’s like that guy in Wyoming,” said one of the undertakers from body removal.
    “What guy?” the coroner asked, shifting his attention to an anecdote that he could include in his memoirs. Out came pen and notebook to jot the salient details.
    “It was in the paper a few years ago. Some rednecks in Wyoming, or one of those cowboy states, abducted a young gay man and drove him out onto the prairies. They pistol-whipped him until his skull caved in, then left him lashed to a fence for eighteen hours to freeze to death. How many murders are there annually in the States? How many gays endure hate crimes every year? Few of those make the news, but that one caused a fuss. Politicians fronting the Christian right had to cope with the martyr image of a gay, who supposedly sinned against God’s law, being crucified on a fence.”
    The coroner smiled as he scribbled notes. “Crucifixion carries baggage.”
    On that note, Zinc turned and crossed the threshold. A short entry hall with a bathroom on the left expanded into a wide room overlooking the front street. The last words Zinc caught from the coroner were “Find out if this vic was gay.”
    The trouble with a rumor is that it distorts the facts. Zinc had no idea what crime-scene hearsay had spawned the image of crucifixion in the old boy’s mind, but there were problems with bringing this reality into line with that description.
    The entrance to Vancouver’s harbor is dubbed the Lions Gate. It takes that name from two North Shore mountain peaks, which are called the Lions because they resemble a pair of crouching cats. In pioneer times, lumber equaled money, so a skid road slid logs down the mountainside to the harborfront village of Lonsdale, which was basically a few shacks around a rickety dock. The