Headhunter (8 page)

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.

"You're looking for me?" a voice asked from the door behind DeClercq.

"Am I?" the Superintendent asked, starting around.

"Yes," the man in the doorway said. "Somebody moved my hat and I think it was you. It was put down exactly the way it was found, only reversed around. Shows a person of precision, distracted by other things."

"Well, I declare. You must be the great Sherlock Avacomovitch," DeClercq said with a smile. "I've heard of you."

"Hello, Robert," the Russian said. "Long time no see. How about some breakfast? My treat."

"You're on," the Superintendent said—and that was the moment he saw it. Strange that he had not noticed the fact before; it was a detail of importance. He had been looking at Joseph Avacomovitch, having just turned from the window, and in that turning his eyes had brushed over the wall with the photographs of the two heads on the two poles and had then touched on Portman's picture. The section of corkboard reserved for the last crime was just off to the right of the door. It took about a second for the connection among the three pictures to register on his mind. Then his thoughts turned inward.

Avacomovitch was too sharp a man not to notice the signs. "What just struck you, Robert?" he asked of the Superintendent.

DeClercq was a moment coming around, then he pointed at the pictures of all three victims.

"Notice anything?" he asked the scientist.

For a moment the Russian thought. Then he nodded his head. "Yes. All three women have raven black hair."

Joseph Avacomovitch's background was unique.

He had been born in the Russian Ukraine of parents who worked on a rural collective. Both were slaughtered during the Nazi advance on Stalingrad when the boy was fourteen. Avacomovitch had been brought up by the state and selected early because of his academic brilliance for a first-class Soviet education. By the early 1960s when he was in his thirties he held four university degrees and was a leading forensic scientist in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Even then, the techniques that he developed were being recognized and picked up for use in the West.

In 1963 Moscow had sent him to the city of East Berlin. Shortly after President John F. Kennedy had made his statement
" Ich bin ein Berliner!"
  to the ecstatic response of West Germans, the East German police had been confronted by a baffling series of homosexual slayings. In each case a middle-aged German man had been found sodomized and strangled, with both hands tied by rope to the sides of the neck. In the clutched hand of the fifth victim had been found a button from a Soviet soldier's uniform. The day that this news leaked out the East German Army had had to crush an anti-Russian riot. That night there had been a sixth victim, minutes before Avacomovitch had arrived.

It took the Russian scientist fourteen hours to break the case. He did it by examining a rope.

The first five murder victims had been found indoors. But the last one had been different. It had the same MO of sexual assault, trussing, and strangulation—but a second rope had been looped about the neck and the corpse tossed out through a fifth floor window above a darkened street.

Every rope has properties peculiar to its fibers. Avacomovitch found several points of fiber rotation twist. Then he discovered at the points of the twist flakes of either car paint or chrome plate. After two hours' work by chromatography he had isolated the vehicle year and make. It was a Nazi Volkswagen, vintage 1943.

Two hours after that East German Motor Vehicle Records had found the registration, for after the Soviet bombardment of East Berlin at the close of the Second World War there had not been that many intact Nazi vehicles left. Then an hour and a half later an East German was arrested. The KGB linked him to the American CIA. Avacomovitch linked him to the body hanging from the window. Then the case itself was closed—and passed on to Propaganda.

The points of stress and the location of the paint and chrome deposits on the rope used to hang the sixth victim indicated that the same rope had been tied around the vehicle's roof rack and then run down the back of the car and wound several times around one side of the bumper.

When the East German agent of the CIA had been arrested, an examination of his car revealed that one of two ropes used to support the right rear bumper had recently been removed and had gone missing. It was unfortunate, however, that the man never came to trial and that Joseph Avacomovitch was once more denied an opportunity to test his precision in a case. Inexplicably, the man had suffered a heart attack under KGB questioning—but not before he had blown a network of seventeen NATO spies.

The next day all seventeen were summarily shot and it was announced in Moscow that forensic scientist Joseph Avacomovitch had been awarded the Order of Lenin for his deductive achievement.

The day after that Avacomovitch defected to West Berlin.

* * *

After his defection to the West in 1963, Avacomovitch had been debriefed in London by both British and American Intelligence Units. After that he had been offered a sizable "resettlement" fee. He had chosen to move to the Canadian prairies and was reported to have given this as his reason: "I long to return to the Ukraine in the years of my early childhood. That I cannot do, but this land serves my purpose. This land is like Russia—minus the Russians."

Two days after Avacomovitch set foot on Canadian soil in the city of Calgary, Alberta, the RCMP—ever pragmatic when it came to top-notch personnel and well aware of his forensic exploits—had offered the Russian emigre a non-security-access laboratory appointment. From then on Joseph Avacomovitch was employed on Her Majesty's Service—and five years later he was granted Security Clearance.

DeClercq and Avacomovitch had first worked together in Montreal in 1965. One night that November, with baby Jane sitting on his knee, Robert DeClercq had asked Joseph Avacomovitch the reason for his defection. "That's if you don't mind telling," he said.

It was after dinner and they were sitting, the four of them, Robert, Kate, Joseph and Jane, in front of a cracking fire while the snow once more tumbled down beyond the frosted windows. Old Man Winter already had one icy toe in the door.

"I don't mind," the Russian said, "it's all a matter of record. The reason's half political and half academic."

Avacomovitch took a sip of cognac, then rolled the glass in his very large hands.

"The political part is straightforward. I was never a member of the Communist Party at heart and I didn't believe in the system—although it was good to me. One look at East Germany and I knew I wanted to go. Besides, except for position I had nothing to leave behind." He smiled down at Jane who was rapidly falling asleep.

"But it was really intellectual incentive which gave me the mental push." Avacomovitch looked from the baby directly at Robert DeClercq. "When I was involved in studies toward my final two degrees, we were encouraged to pore over all the classic works on famous Western murderers. The official line was that they revealed the sickness in bourgeois society. The ones who intrigued me most of all were the killers who slaughtered for no other reason than the fact they enjoyed it

The Germans have a word for this—they call such a motive
Lustmord.

"Now it just so happens that we don't have such murderers in the Soviet Union. At least not that I could hunt—and that's a realistic fact. Those with the
lustmord
instinct are recognized early in that country and channeled into the Secret Police. Their aggression is utilized, and as a group of natural killers they are jealously protected like an endangered species."

Jane had fallen asleep, cradled in Robert DeClercq's lap. Raising his glass the Russian drained the last of his cognac.

"The reason I defected was to find an adversary. That's why I came to the West. There are so many of them here."

8:25 a.m.

Joseph Avacomovitch was a giant of a man. He stood six four in his stocking feet with shoulders and chest as massive as an old-fashioned, wood-staved beer barrel. Like most men his size the Russian had a slightly stooped posture, as if subconsciously attempting to shrink to the size of the majority of men around him. Although it had been twelve years since Robert DeClercq had last laid eyes on him, the Russian had changed little. His hair was still almost albino white and luxurious, combed back in a pompadour. His gray eyes still twinkled behind a pair of wire-rim glasses. He still wore no jewelry on his large hands, save a ring removed from his father's body when the Nazis left the old man sprawled in the blood-splashed Ukrainian snow. And he still wore the hat.