Headhunter (18 page)

"The name of the cut is
Jimmy Jazz.
The name of the group is The Clash. Third cut. Side one. Off the double,
London Calling.
Great disc," he said.

"When was it put out?" Robert DeClercq asked.

"1979. Epic Records."

MacDougall asked: "What's Jimmy Jazz?"

"I've no idea," the youth said, shaking his head. "Dope, I guess. Isn't that what you guys are usually looking for?"

"Not this time," the Inspector replied. "Where can we get the album?"

"Any record store. The Clash are very big time. If you want I'll lend you the copy we got at the radio station."

"Please," DeClercq said. "And I'd like it tonight."

Scarlett and Spann skirted one side of the group of music lovers and made their way to the second floor. The reason that they had come into the building was to take another look at the corkboard visual. As they reached the top of the stairs Rick Scarlett said: "Punk rock, huh! Puke rock's more like it!"

"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.

The Splinter

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.

Perhaps a piece of bark? Or picked up in the moving to the hospital morgue?

Whatever it was it was all that the scientist found that morning.

When the first pathologist came on duty with the light of dawn, the Russian asked him for a small glass plate and a pair of tweezers in order to prepare a slide.

The Hippie

On the Santiago River, Ecuador, 1969

"Wanta do some acid?"

"Huh?"

"LSD. Wanta do some?"

"Oh ... uh, ... no ... no, I don't think so."

Selena cocked her head to one side, arching her right eyebrow. "What's the matter. Sparky? Why the hesitation? You have done dope before, haven't you? I mean you can't be
that
straight."

"Yeah, I've done drugs."

"Well then . . ." Selena said, shrugging her shoulders. "I mean acid ain't a turn-down, now is it? It's not like I'm offering you grass or coke or bombers or speed or something else like that. This is acid, babe. The ultimate. Straight from God to Owsley to me to you ... I mean you have done acid before, haven't you?"

There was a pause of silence, then Sparky replied quietly, "No. No, I haven't done that."

"Well then, look at the living you're missin', the fun you've never had." Selena chuckled. "Try
everything
once I say. Don't you agree?"

There was a second pause of silence. Then with hesitation Sparky said: "Yeah . . . yeah, I guess so."

"Good! Then it's settled." And with that Selena held out her hand. In her palm two small tablets of White Lightning were washed by the tropical sun. The woman wet the index finger of her other hand and touched it to one of the hits, then she transferred the drug on her fingertip to the end of her protruding tongue. Closing her mouth, she swallowed.

"Okay, now it's your turn. Go on. Sparky, take one."

Taking the tab. Sparky examined it, swallowed it and waited for something to happen.

Nothing did.

The two of them had spent the previous day drifting lazily down the Santiago. As the afternoon wore on the sun leaned out of heaven to beat down harshly upon the surface of the water; a shimmering haze hung between the trees and a languorous smell of vegetation drugged Selena's senses. Occasionally Sparky would tap her arm and point to the riverbank.

On one occasion Selena heard a
woof
of displeasure and saw an evil eye go blank, a long snout and gray-green body sinking into the water. When she looked toward the brown mudbank not twenty yards from the side of the boat she saw another knobbly reptile with a pale throat, its eyes glassy and half-closed, its jaws wrinkled and half-open, its expression as wicked as a Notre Dame gargoyle. "They're called
jacare,"
Sparky said, "or sometimes
cocodrilo.
They make nice handbags."

Another time she saw a covey of vampire bats hanging upside down in a hollow tree, their bellies bloated with blood that their victims could ill afford.

Then yet another time she heard the crack of twigs and voices murmur with a low, guttural sound. Scanning the riverbank to the right and squinting her eyes, Selena could just make out the features of several dark faces peering from behind the trunks of trees. It shocked her to notice that some of their mouths were filled with sharpened teeth. Then they were gone, these furtive men, leaving only the rustle of disturbed leaves and the soft smack of released branches.

Abruptly a disagreeable stench, a fetid musky odor came off the riverbank. Wrinkling her nose, Selena turned in that direction just in time to see something detach itself from the ground and flap up into a tree. As she watched, another followed. Then another. And another. And another, until the foul air resounded with the flap of wings and the branches of the vegetation lining the river were covered with black and white
urubu.

"Vultures," Sparky said, as the boat nosed toward the shore. "They're Nature's gravediggers. They bury the jungle dead in the warmth of their gizzards."

As the dugout neared the bank, the birds sat in glum silence along the limbs of the trees. The meal of which they had been deprived still lay on the sundrenched mud. The back of the animal was now a sea of blood, clotted and sticky where the hide had been wrenched from the muscles of the flesh. Great strips of skin dangled downward from these wounds, and the horns of the bullock had been smashed and splintered by savage blows from wooden clubs. The intestines lay looped about the hooves and a number of broken spears stuck out from the haunches of the beast. Most unsettling for Selena, however, was the fact that no sooner had the
uruhu
abandoned the corpse than it was covered with a blue and white and yellow flock of butterflies. She could plainly see brilliant wings fluttering in ecstasy as their slim legs pressed into the flesh and their faces sank into the prey.

With eyes wide Selena said: "I thought butterflies lived on flower dew."

"Even the world's most beautiful hunger with hidden desires," Sparky replied.

"Yeah, but who butchered that animal and smashed it up like that?"

"Probably Jivaro. In a violent mood."

"You mean those Indians I saw back there? The ones along the river."

"The same ones," Sparky said, guiding the boat back out into the stream. "They used to be headhunters not so long ago."

"Fuck me! I hope they're civilized now."

"They are," Sparky said. "Or at least that's what I'm told."

As the boat passed on, Selena saw the vultures dropping one by one back down to their interrupted meal.

But that was yesterday.

Selena had awakened this morning to dawn in the Ecuador jungle. She rolled over onto her back and looked up at the sky, awed by what she saw. Here the huge equatorial forest was set in an eternity of somber gloom—a gloom as silent as a cellar filled with clinging mist. Enormous trees with trunks almost forty feet in diameter stretched two hundred feet above her head, their lower branches rich with every shade of green, their dense leafy canopy almost white where the sun had bleached the life-blood from the leaves. Already it was stifling down here yet it was only 6:00 a.m.

What struck Selena most of all was the network of parasitic growths that hung down in a tangle from the armpits of the trees—bright purple orchids adhering to gum-tree trunks, spiral creepers hundreds of feet in length that twisted like gigantic serpents slithering from branch to branch, poisonous fruits that fell down into the undergrowth emitting noisome odors. It was a world so strange, so alien, that down here among the ferns that held the low ground mist she felt as if she lay at the bottom of an ocean.

Selena looked around for Sparky but her companion had left the campsite. Climbing to her feet and rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she began to head for the river a hundred feet away.

When Selena reached the bank of the stream. Sparky was in the dugout thirty feet from shore.

"Hey good mornin', savior. What the hell ya doin'?"

Sparky turned to look at her while screwing the lid on a jar. "Just taking the last of the water samples. I'll only be
a
minute."

"Take your time," Selena said. "I ain't going nowhere."

As she sat down on the riverbank, the young woman took a
long, slow look around her. Late yesterday afternoon they had abandoned the main channel of the Santiago River for a small sidestream. Two miles up, this tributary had opened into a lagoon, and they had pitched their camp for the night by its shore. Sitting now at the water's edge, Selena let herself relax and revel in the morning—for gone here was the oppression of the forest with its constriction and decay. Gone too was the dirty flow of the Santiago, its current opaque with loam scraped from its banks in the scurry to connect with the Amazon. Here instead was stillness, peaceful and serene. The mud flats, barren and free from life, were shadowed purple by massive overhanging trees that paddled their roots in the water. The fireflies were not awake. No fish mottled the surface of the river. The bullfrogs were asleep, preparing for their nightly choir practice.

Low in the sky to the east, the sun and the moon had paired off to spend the day blazing at each other, while down on Earth their light shone on the clear lagoon, forging it into metal. The eastern side was silver, tinged here and there with mauve; the western part was glaring like a sheet of hammered bronze.

As Selena watched, through the water, slightly raised by the weight at the helm, foam creaming around its prow, the blunt nose of the dugout came in toward the shore.

"Jesus!" she said, standing up. "This place is a blow-away."

"Like it, eh?" Sparky said, as the canoe bumped against the bank.

"And how! What a day! Here, you want some help?"

"Sure. Take these jars up the bank while I moor this thing." Sparky passed the water samples to Selena, then stepped out of the boat.

"How long ya been with the Peace Corps, out in this wilderness?"

"About six months," Sparky said. "I'm not a member though. I just work with them."

"Yeah? Why's that?"

"I'm not a US citizen. That's a bar to volunteering."

"Well then, how the fuck did you ever end up in this lost neck of the woods?"

"It's a long story," Sparky said, trudging up the bank. "When my mother died some years ago, my maternal grandmother took me in. She liked the sun, so we lived for a while in Tahiti. Then Martinique. Then finally French Guiana. Eight months ago my grandmother passed away and I started kicking around the north coast, trying to decide where to go from there. One day I met these two guys in Venezuela, down on the beach. They were with the Peace Corps and had just been reposted to Ecuador. Anyway, one thing led to another. I had some money from my grandmother's estate, so I asked if I could tag along and pay my own way. They said yeah.

"When we got to Quito, where I was to leave them, one guy came down sick. Dysentery or something. The other guy didn't want to go into the jungle alone, and I was looking for adventure. Anyway, he arranged with the Corps to take me on as local labor, or some such lie.. They don't pay much, but that doesn't matter. I like it here. I can do what I want. Mostly I take river excursions by myself. I like my own company."

"Yeah?" Selena said. "Well, I like your company too."

Sparky smiled. "Here. You hold the jars while I tape them and mark the sample location."

As Selena held the first container Sparky removed a knife from its belt sheath and cut a piece of adhesive tape from a larger roll. Together they labeled the jars.

It was as Sparky was resheathing the knife that a yellow and blue macaw, four feet from beak to tail, shrieked in the branches above them. Selena glanced up just in time to see a flight of green parrots rise from the tops of the trees. Then there was silence. Again nothing stirred in the brazen sunlight. Not a cloud flecked the hard blue of the sky. And with the silence came a thought. Selena looked at Sparky.

"Are you finished your work?" she asked, digging into the breast pocket of her shirt and removing a small glass vial.

"Uh huh," Sparky said.

"Then we got some time to relax?"

"Sure. I don't see any hurry."

"Good," Selena said grinning, and removing the lid from the vial.

"Why?" Sparky asked. "What have you got in mind?"

"This," Selena said, and she tapped the contents of the container into the palm of her hand.

"What's that?"

"Just
heaven,
babe, that's all. Wanta do some acid?"

"I don't feel so good."

"It'll p a s s."

"No, really. I don't feel well a t a l l."

"Hey don't freak out on me, babe. Acid always starts in the gut."

"It's not my gut I'm talking about. It's
my h e a d!"

"Shush. Just listen to the sounds."

It was forty minutes since they had dropped the acid, and now it seemed to Sparky as though the slow moving river had become a great sound conductor, an evil whispering gallery that gathered the noise of an entire continent and delivered it in distorted form to this very spot. It was as if the world had gone electric, each tiny movement adding to an increasingly tinny hum that rose eventually into a nerve-shredding, brain-vibrating crescendo of metallic abuse. This jungle was altering in its very form, transmogrifying into something evil, miasmic, swampy—like a warm festering wound. Sparky was afraid.

Soon loosely associated thoughts were slipping through Sparky's mind . . .
nothing to fear but fear itself . . . fear itself afraid of fear . . . nothing but fear . . . fear . . . fear . . . help! I've got to get out of here. . . .

Abruptly Sparky stood up, almost stumbling in the effort.

Before the rush hit, they had broken camp and moved their supplies down to the bank of the river; they had then sat down by the water and waited for the effect of the drug. But whatever Sparky had expected, it certainly wasn't this.

Oh God! What's happening to me?

Unchecked and coming in sporadic flashes, refusing to fall into any scheme of order, sharp barbs of unwanted thought now pierced the flesh and hooked themselves inside Sparky's brain. With each tug on a fishing line, fear moved up a notch.

Nausea! Weakness! Tremors! Distortion!
My body is out of control!

Sparky's heart had lost its rhythm and begun a crooked beat. Lungs now choking, unable to squeeze oxygen out of this atmosphere of decay. Throat dry, very dry, tasting the color gray. Each sound, each slight insignificant noise, had now begun to form its own geometric pattern before Sparky's eyes—weird objects in a phantasmagoria of kaleidoscopic colors seemed to change in size and shape, to fuse with the background until the very boundaries of life, the body, the self were fluid and disintegrating. Sparky had become a part of this vast, foul-smelling, oozy stretch of bog that undulated with the motion of an unsqueezed sponge.
Oh God! Now my brain is out of c o n t r o l!

Then Selena started to go.

At first it was gradual, like the rot that comes with death. Her skin began to fluctuate between pallor and flush. Her pupils dilated, her eyes beginning to bulge like a fish. And then rapidly her body took on a terrifying pulse, each throbbing vein and artery visible just beneath the surface of her skin. The skin itself was changing, half flesh, half metallic blue, and the muscles below the outside shell seemed to give off a succession of silent cues. Her face distorted into a frightening caricature, a perversion of woman incarnate, lips, eyes, nostrils flaring and dripping with sex . . .
sex . . . sex! Oh no! Let me out of here!