Michael Slade - Headhunter

The only positive fact in the investigation so far was that the tent had been traced to an outdoors shop in Luzern, Switzerland. It had been purchased eight months ago.

DeClercq rose from his chair and crossed over to the wall. For the next twenty minutes he again reviewed the entire North Vancouver case as reconstructed and focused on the corkboard. At the end of that period he had confirmed that on this part of the investigation there were only two constructive things to do: wait for the European Missing Persons reports requested through Interpol.

And have Joseph Avacomovitch go to work on the bones.

It was 7:23 a.m. when the Superintendent turned his attention to the Helen Grabowski case. Though technically the corpse had been found within the jurisdiction of University Detachment, because that outpost was so small the investigation had been usurped by Rodale out of Richmond. DeClercq was pleased to see that the Corporal had done a thorough job.

Again, however, there were questions — and not very many answers.

As with the case of the North Van bones, this display centered around the Polaroid print sent to Skip O'Rourke. Once more there had been a blowup by the lab — same grainy quality — and this along with the subscription form from Buns and Boobs Bonanza was pinned up to the left. MacDougall had determined that the form came from the July 1982 issue of the publication which was available at any corner store. DeClercq's eyes moved back and forth from the clipping to the Polaroid.

The picture was of another head with the eyes rolled back in the skull. Helen Grabowski had black hair, a narrow face, and her mouth hung slackly open. Even in the photograph she looked like a junkie, the ravages of the drug having pinched and lined her skin. Blood ran from both comers of her lips. And again the picture was confined to the head and the top of a pole, no ground, no backdrop except for the same white surface.

Another pose, DeClercq thought.

It also occurred to him, judging from the lack of decomposition and freshness of the blood, that both photos had been taken immediately after the killings. The bodies had probably then been dumped very shortly after. Obviously the pictures were saved for the killer's titillation and his subsequent taunt. But what had then happened to the heads?

Immediately to the right of the Polaroid was tacked an aerial shot of the wharf where Heller and Simpson had found the floater, and next to that a close-up of the bloated nude remains stretched out on the dock. The slash through her chest had halved her breasts, each withered wrinkled quadrant pointing in a different compass direction. Bare ribs could be seen. Two other photographs were off to the right of these. One of them showed the striation marks on the vertebra that Dr. Singh had removed. The other the woman's fingertips. DeClercq could see that Dr. Singh had injected glycerin beneath the fingertip skin to smooth out the washerwoman's wrinkles before printing the remains. Singh was obviously a very cautious man. He knew that without the head a dental identification was gone forever. And that left just her prints. In the photo — which was a blowup — the fingers of the corpse were positioned below the individual print of each one on a fingerprint sheet. Thus, though the flesh would have long since rotted before any case got to court, Singh's opinion on identification could withstand any cross-examination. Look for yourself, counselor!

Beside that photograph was Rodale's earlier fingerprint sheet. And tacked next to that the reports from New Orleans.

The Superintendent picked up his pen and turned to his Question sheet. He began to write:

1. Where was Grabowski killed? No water in the lungs so it wasn't in the river. Was it on a boat, the best of murder scenes? Is that a connection between the two remains? The North Van woman killed at sea and then taken ashore? If so why not just use a sea dump like Grabowski?

2. Does bruising to vagina mean sex attack? Is vertical stab to the throat made during intercourse? Sexual stimulation connected to female death throes? Slash to the breasts significant as mother mutilation?

3. Was Grabowski picked up hooking by a sadistic client? Perhaps the North Van girl too? Perhaps, but then Portman doesn't fit. Drugs?

4. What about John Lincoln Hardy aka "The Weasel"?

5. Connection with New Orleans?

DeClercq once more got up from his chair, crossed over to the wall, and scanned the papers and reports pinned there.

Helen Grabowski, also known as Patricia Ann Palitti, was an American heroin-addicted prostitute from New Orleans. Dr. Singh, in his report, estimated that her body had been in the Fraser River approximately a week. Just over a week before the body was found she had been arrested on a charge of junk possession while hooking near the Moonlight Arms. She had been released in the early morning and no one had seen her again. Rodale had done a blanket sweep through skid row questioning the street people and greasing the palms of the stoolies but all to no avail. As near as anyone could tell, Grabowski had been in Vancouver no more than three or four days. She had been identified from her mug shot by several working girls — and one or two had also tentatively fingered John Lincoln Hardy as being around from a rather poor stakeout photo wired up from New Orleans.

The follow-up from Louisiana did not advance things much further. Grabowski was a runaway from Topeka, Kansas — then a fresh-faced country girl. Her family had not heard from her since January 1980. At the beginning of April that same year she had been arrested in the city of New Orleans defrauding a restaurant of food. She had pleaded guilty and been given a suspended sentence. Though she had run up no subsequent record or charges, she and one John Lincoln Hardy, also known as "the Weasel," had been under suspicion of being involved in a prostitution ring. Four persons had been charged out of that investigation, but not Grabowski and Hardy. And that was it, the lot. New Orleans had sent up Grabowski's 1980 mug shot for fraud and a surreptitious undercover snapshot of Hardy taken from the back seat of a car.

So where did that leave the Headhunter Squad? DeClercq saw nothing but questions.

Unless these were random killings, what was the connection? Although it was not uncommon for the murderer of a particular person to attempt to mask his crime within the hysteria of a false psychopathic rampage, could that apply to Hardy given the short time he'd been in town? Not unless this was at least his second trip.

Was the most sound conclusion not the obvious one: Grabowski had been killed by a marauding john?

If so, DeClercq thought, then why Joanna Portman?

The Superintendent took one last look at the remaining photographs on this part of the wall. Above the Polaroid of Grabowski's head on a pole, he had yesterday pinned up both the Vancouver and New Orleans police mug shots of the woman. In both of them the fresh-faced innocence of a Kansas prairie girl was gone forever. Instead, all that remained was a wasted subservient woman. The final photograph was of her pimp — a black male with a receding hairline and a pencil-thin moustache whose massive shoulders were so thick that they totally usurped the space where his neck should have been.

It was now 7:55 a.m. and DeClercq was about to move on to the Portman killing with its macabre implications.

The focus of this section of the corkboard was a Catholic nurse's graduation photograph, all black hair and happy mirthful eyes.

She reminded DeClercq of his first wife, Kate, when she was young, and he turned his gaze away.

Outside, morning had set in with a wash of molten copper. Across 33rd Avenue the glass panes on the top two floors of St. Vincent's Hospital were dazzling sun-smeared mirrors.