Michael Slade - Headhunter

"Well I happen to like The Clash," Katherine Spann said.

"You would," the man replied.

The woman cocked her head to one side and slightly raised one eyebrow. "Chances are you don't even know where the band is from, you're so narrow-minded."

"Don't put money on it, Kathy. I'm not Rabidowski. The Clash came out of England along with the Sex Pistols. Part of the first wave of New Wave music."

"My my!" the woman said. "And I thought you were stupid."

The first thing they saw on entering DeClercq's office were the books scattered everywhere. They each picked up a volume and looked at the title. One was Murder for Sex and the other Psychopathic! Sexualis.

"You know why he's reading this stuff?" Rick Scarlett asked.

"Cause he's Jung at heart," Spann replied.

All three walls of cork were now covered with information and in some areas the reports now overlapped. Spann immediately saw the pinned-up wiretap transcripts and crossed to them. She flipped through the pages while Scarlett read over her shoulder. When she was finished she walked to the bank of windows and stared out at the street, thinking.

Scarlett walked up behind her.

"I wonder what they're talking about in those wiretaps," she asked. "What's a hoodoo?'

"So now who's stupid?" the male Constable said. "Seems your education is lacking when it comes to geography. 'Hoo-doos' are eroded pinnacles of rock that stick up out of the ground. The Indians used to believe that spirits lived in such sandstone towers. There are some of them in the Deadman Valley of BC — but most jut up out of the Alberta foothills of the Rockies."

"Well now I know," Spann said.

But that told them nothing.

5:15 a.m.

Robert DeClercq was up before dawn. He climbed out of bed and padded into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee, then while it was dripping went into the spare bedroom to dress warmly for the weather. Returning to the kitchen to pour himself a cup, he then carried the steaming mug into the greenhouse and out through its back door down to the edge of the sea. It was dark outside and the air was brittle with the sharp chill of late autumn. He sat down in the driftwood chair, the sundial on his left, and began to think. The sea was wild this morning, spitting forth its spray. The Superintendent ignored it.

What bothered him more than anything else was the attitude of this killer. There had been psychotics and psychopaths before who had taunted the police — Jack the Ripper and Zodiac were two notorious examples — but never quite on this level. For this was almost personal. No sooner had the squad been formed and had it been reported by the press that he was in command, than the Headhunter had sought him out and paired off for a fight. Why? DeClercq wondered. There's some special reason. What is it? Some personal link to the Force?

At the moment he had no idea.

It bothered him in the same way that the pose of the last two bodies nagged at his mind, and the feeling of pose he got from the Polaroids of the heads. There was something going on here that didn't meet the eye. The Headhunter wanted something more than the thrill that came from the killings. DeClercq was sure of that.

So what's the missing motive?

I don't know.

For a long time he sat there contemplating this problem and a host of other ones. Eventually the sun came up and burst upon the onyx waters, highlighting the crest of each raging Pacific wave. A cormorant swooped out of the sky and knifed cleanly into the sea, diving for something unseen beneath the chilling surface. When it came up, its bill was empty.

The Superintendent stood up.

During the motion it occurred to him that from his very driftwood chair he could see the sites of all four murder scenes, or at least where the bodies were found. The thought didn't please him: it was like another taunt. Off to his right the Point Atkinson Lighthouse winked.

Slowly DeClercq climbed the path back up to the house. Once inside he stripped off his clothes now wet with spray, dressed again and took a second coffee back out to the greenhouse. There he picked up Lazarfeld's Woman's Experience of the Male and turned to the marked section.

For the next two hours DeClercq read, diving for something unseen beneath the chilling surface.

Outside, pale sunshine beat down upon the words etched in a circle around the sundial's edge. The words said: The time is later than you think.

5:20 a.m.

Avacomovitch felt like a ghoul.

His frame of mind no doubt came from the fact that he was standing alone in the center of one of the autopsy rooms at Lions Gate Hospital surrounded by a couple of bodies, each at a different stage of putrefaction and decay. But that wasn't all of it: he had done this before.

More than anything else, Avacomovitch's frame of mind came from the time of day.

For never before, with the black of night outside the windows closing in on him, with the stillness of a deserted laboratory surrounding him, had the scientist worked alone in a room among the rotting dead. The stench was nauseating, so he wore a chlorophyll mask on his face. In one hand he held a magnifying glass and in the other hand a scalpel. And it didn't help matters that in the four hours that he had been here, two new residents had been wheeled down from the hospital, toe-tagged, and tucked into drawers. This place gave him the creeps.

From somewhere something unknown sighed, and the air conditioning groaned.

A water tap was dripping.

Far off in another wing was the soft sound of laughter.

The scalpel scraped on bone.

Turning to the bones from the hillside, he pushed the corpse of the nun aside.

It was necessary for Avacomovitch to work at this time of the morning in order to gain access to the lab; come dawn the pathology section of the hospital would be reclaimed by the living.

Earlier he had been to Richmond General Hospital to examine the remains of Helen Grabowski. He had found nothing there.

The body of Joanna Portman was still in the process of being returned. The scientist half expected it to be carried into the morgue by Messieurs Burke and Hare.

Compared to Dr. Kahil Singh, Avacomovitch had taken the North Van remains in reverse order: least to most ugly. He had X-rayed the corpse of the nun to find any metal fragments, and then had used ultrasound equipment to scan the soft body tissue for non-metallic particles. As far as he could tell from analyzing the screen pattern, the sound waves that were penetrating the flesh were bouncing back from nothing but bone.

That left the hillside skeleton.

For half an hour Joseph Avacomovitch traced the pattern of injury recorded on the skeleton and compared what he found to the X-rays of Liese Greiner sent by Interpol. The match proved almost identical. There were several cracks in the femurs of both legs and a break in the fibula and tibia of the left one; the part of the ilium on the left side had been fractured as had the left humerus. There was a crack in the left ulna although the radius hadn't broken.

It was while Avacomovitch was running his magnifying glass over the bones comparing and charting these fractures that he happened to also notice a hairline crack in the pubis. The pubis is the bone which forms the lower front of the pelvis. And it was in this particular fracture that the scientist found the splinter.

The splinter was minuscule and dull black in color.

The fracture in which it was lodged was not on the X-rays sent by Interpol.

That of course meant little: it could have been caused when the bones were kicked up by the little girl.

Is it from the sole of a shoe? Avacomovitch wondered.