Michael Slade - Headhunter

Yeah! Fripp thought as he picked up the phone. Like the Riviera. The broads go topless there.

8:05 a.m.

Avacomovitch was finished.

The room stank of Krazy Glue and his head was light from the chemical as he stood up, stretched, rubbed his eyes with the backs of his giant hands and strode over to the open window to get a breath of fresh air. Outside a bird was singing.

After a few minutes of deep breathing he returned to his workbench in the room at Headhunter Headquarters and picked up the treated pumpkin. He was pleased with himself, for the prints he had lifted were three in number and each of them was perfect.

Now if only — hope on hope — the person with those fingerprints also had a record.

9:00 a.m.

The Dragon Kung Fu Studio was located on Marine Drive in the heart of North Vancouver. It had been open for business the sum total of three days, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at the end of the previous week. The sole proprietor and only employee was a young man of twenty-six named Bruce Wong whose greatest disappointment in life was that he had not been born Bruce Lee.

On Friday, October 29th, Wong had put an ad in the Sunday edition of the North Shore News to announce his grand opening.

That Monday morning when Wong arrived at his studio he had the sum total of two clients recruited the week before.

By twelve noon when the phone circuits finally overloaded and blew, he had signed up another four hundred — all of them women.

At 12:07 Bruce Wong ran next door to the barber shop to use the phone and try to rent larger space.

9:40 a.m.

"Okay," Chan said with determination. "Let's run it by one more time."

The Inspector was standing at the blackboard in the parade room at Headhunter Headquarters. MacDougall was off to his left. The members of the Central Corps of the Squad were seated on the chairs.

"The first thing to know is that our Computer Command has been assigned the highest priority rating in the country for tapping the Ottawa data base. This will give us an immediate sketch of criminal activity in any part of the province or the criminal history of any particular offender.

"The second thing to know is that our civilian programers have transferred an indexing system generated specifically for this investigation to one of the IBM machines in Ottawa. I generated this particular program myself on one of our local computers. Here's how it works.

"The program is code-named Cut-throat.

"It will provide us first of all with an index to all paper-file material. Those files contain all of our regular police information: criminal records, outstanding warrants, suspected offenders, and each and every query from each and every officer each and every day in each and every police force in this country. This is called 'the blanket' and it's tied to Interpol.

"In addition — and this is important — this blanket also contains all the information collected on all known sex offenders identified during the Clifford Olson case. It has been updated to yesterday. When supplied with specific search criteria — such as the description of a person or car or registered weapon — the program generates a list of the numbers of all documents that refer to the person or vehicle or weapon that matches the description."

"How detailed will it go?" one of the cops asked.

"The search criteria can be as specific as a person's name, date of birth, age, height, weight, sex, race, hair and eye color, or the place where the person was last checked by police. It can contain as little information as say, just hair color." Chan took a moment to sip from a cup of coffee rapidly cooling on a desk top to his right.

"Finally, I am in the process of preparing an up-to-date skin list. I have culled all known possible sex offenders from our files and as soon as we get a psychological profile of the Headhunter from our psychiatric services I will computer-enhance it into a formal sweep sheet. This list will have the necessary key word to retrieve information on any offender listed in the margin.

"And that's about it, unless there are any questions. Remember, Computer Command is set up to reflect the present state of the art. Use it!"

There were no questions so MacDougall took over. "All right," he said. "You all know what happened last night and you all know what that means. You heard the Superintendent yesterday morning. So let's roll."

Then as MacDougall was turning away to have a quiet chat with Inspector Chan, someone in the audience made a sotto voce comment: "Well, I'm disappointed. After all that he didn't even say, 'Let's be real careful out there'."

No one laughed. Most cops don't watch cop shows on TV.

10:35 a.m.

The RCMP Report Centre in Ottawa has 24,000 sets of fingerprints on file for British Columbia alone.

Sergeant James Rodale had spent the morning putting the finishing touches to DeClercq's flying patrol concept. For that reason he had come up to Computer Command in order to arrange the independent information pool which — excised of all theory, conjecture, and conclusion — would be available to these patrols. That was how he was near the communications center as the teletype reply from Ottawa came in on Avacomovitch's fingerprint request concerning the lifts that he had obtained off the jack-o'-lantern. Out of habit Rodale glanced at the piece of paper emerging from the machine as he walked by. Then he stopped dead in his tracks.

The fingerprints on the pumpkin, Report Centre said, werea match with those on the record of one Fritz Sapperstein.

Sapperstein had a record for B and E in 1974 and an address in the Municipality of Richmond.

Richmond was Rodale's home turf.

The Sergeant tore the sheet off, leaving a copy for Avacomovitch, then checked his Smith and Wesson.38 and left Computer Command to go and find "Mad Dog" Rabidowski.

He found him.

10:45 a.m.

The good citizens of Vancouver and its many suburbs spent the overcast morning watching for more rain and waiting impatiently for the first edition of the Sun. When the paper finally hit the streets the over-run sold out in a matter of minutes and the good burghers got exactly what they were wanting. The murder of the nun was spread over two pages of print with an additional two pages of photos.

In addition to the facts of the case there were the usual color stories. One of these was a barometer reading from women interviewed on the street. These were some of the comments:

"Well I don't plan to leave my house without a knife in my purse. The police say that's breaking the law, carrying a concealed weapon. Well I don't care. The Headhunter's not going to get me without one hell of a fight."

"A nun! My God! Is any woman safe? This guy's a raving maniac. If City Council had any guts at all they'd slap a ten p.m. curfew on every male in this city."

"Why are people so shocked? I don't see this as so special. This Headhunter and his attacks are no more than an extreme version of the fears that most women suffer every day of their lives. I'm on a bus, eh, and I have to fend off a drunken businessman who sits too close and tries to put his arm around me. But — and every woman in the world will recognize this — I have to do it nicely so I don't cause a scene Then once I'm off the bus a strange guy stands in my path and asks in a tough voice: 'All alone? Don't you know there's a killer around? Where do you live? I'll take you home.' And then it takes an eternity to get rid of him — nicely. Now I ask you, do we go around putting our arms around men minding their own business, insisting on accompanying them to their homes and getting nasty if they refuse? Not on your life — sorry, that was a poor choice of words!"