Headhunter (9 page)

The hat was a prairie Stetson, worn and slightly off-color, the sort of headgear that was common in Alberta and in Texas and in John Travolta's closet. At the base of the crown and above the rim was wound a thin Indian bead hatband and sticking out from this on the left side was a tiny flag pennant. Small words printed on the pennant read: DALLAS COWBOYS.

The two men were sitting in the White Spot coffee shop at Cambie and King Edward, several blocks north of Head-hunter Headquarters. They had both ordered bacon and eggs poached, with brown toast on the side. They both drank their coffee black. The Stetson lay on the table between them and off to the right.

"Is that the
same
hat you were wearing in 1970?" the Superintendent asked.

"Yep. The same one."

DeClercq shook his head. "I don't understand," he said.

"Don't understand what? The hat or the pennant?"

"Both," the policeman said.

The Russian grinned. "Have you ever been around immigrants, newly arrived? Well when you first set foot on foreign soil and know you're there to stay, that you can never go home, a kind of depressing alienation inevitably sets in. Clothes, food, language, manner, cut of hair, way of walking— everything around you is so vastly different. You know you don't belong. And you fear you never will.

"When I arrived in Calgary in 1964 the Stampede was in full swing. Indians dancing in the streets, chuck-wagon breakfasts, rodeo acts, everyone walking around in a ten-gallon hat.

"There I was walking the streets surrounded by pseudo-cowboys. I bought the Stetson and was immediately lost in the crowd.

"When the Stampede was over I kept the hat—it keeps my head warm."

The waitress refilled their coffee cups and in doing so glanced at the hat. Arching one eyebrow slightly, she looked at DeClercq. "Want some oats for your horse?" she asked with a smile. The Russian laughed.

"Okay," DeClercq said. "What about the pennant?"

"In Russia everybody plays chess. I've played since I was five. Here few play chess, but a lot follow football. In both games the win depends on psychology and strategy. And to really enjoy the football spirit you need a team. Mine's the Dallas Cowboys cause I like their style of play. People see the pennant and if they share my interest they start a conversation. It provides an opener—and like the hat itself, helps me find some friends."

DeClercq had interrogated too many people in his time not to have learned that it mattered less what was said than how it was delivered. Too long an explanation meant lack of conviction.

I think you're very lonely, Joseph,
the Superintendent thought.
Same hat. Same fear you don't fit in. Now I do understand.

Robert DeClercq said: "I don't think it's possible to leave your roots behind. That's what I tried to do by leaving Quebec. After what happened to Janie and Kate all I wanted to do was run and try to escape. I discovered you can't. It's been twelve years, Joseph, yet every day the memory still comes back to me. It'll haunt me till I die. Particularly my child. All I did was take my roots and transplant them out here. I suppose that's the real reason I came back to work. Time to stop running. Life's too short. Do you know what I mean?"

Avacomovitch nodded, but didn't meet his eyes. "Some days I worry that I'm not even alive. That somehow
I've turned life into an empty game of chess. That all I've got waiting is checkmate at the end."

"Then welcome to the West Coast," Robert DeClercq said. "You don't escape from here. You either go back where you came or sink into the sea. And that's a narrow choice."

For a moment they both were silent, as if each was using the other to assess where he had been, to put twelve intervening years into some rough perspective. Finally Joseph Avacomovitch shrugged and said: "Chartrand told me you made a special request."

"I told him I'd only take command if he put you on special assignment to the case. He agreed."

"Just like the old days," the scientist said.

"Just like the old days," the policeman repeated.

"And we'll have a celebration if we nail this guy?"

"I'll have you out to my house, to meet Genevieve."

"Then no more crying in the beer. Let's pick up the pieces. Robert, I really mean it. I'm damn glad you're back and it's good to see you again."

"And I feel the same way. Let's get to work."

They paid the check and walked out onto Cambie Street. All the way back to Headhunter Headquarters the pale October sunshine shone down on the park to their left, bringing the color of the grass to a vibrant green, dazzling off the patches of snow which remained in the shadier parts protected from rain by the trees. Several small children were throwing slushy snowballs.

"Last night I took the red-eye special out from Ottawa," Avacomovitch said. "I got in at five and couldn't sleep so I went to the lab. I spent about an hour on the envelope sent to the
Sun.
This one's smart, Robert. There are no prints on either photo, on the subscription form, or the envelope—except for employees at the newspaper. I did a serology examination on the gum of the manila flap, hoping to show the saliva was from a particular blood-type secretor. I found nothing. I don't think the Headhunter even licked the envelope. I think water was used to wet the sealing gum. It's almost as if the killer
knew
that we'd do such a test. I did manage to isolate the typeface on the address. It's from a small portable Commodore, made in Toronto. If you find the typewriter, I'll be able to match it. The letter 'C' is off-mark and holds up the carriage."

As they entered the Headquarters building the sun was still shining. Off to the west there were storm clouds on the horizon, boiling in from the sea.

        8:55 a.m.

If DeClercq had found little to work with in the files on Helen Grabowski and the North Vancouver skeleton, the case of Joanna Portman presented other problems. Her file was over three inches thick already, and the body had only been discovered two days before. MacDougall and Rodale had obviously been working around the clock. Their squad had interviewed over a hundred people already: doctors and nurses and administrative personnel at St. Paul's Hospital; the BC Hydro bus drivers on the Macdonald route; Portman's landlady in Kitsilano and every neighbor in every house between the bus stop where she had alighted and the home she had never reached. Nothing had come up. Nothing had been seen.

A team of detectives had been dispatched to Regina, Saskatchewan, where the nurse had grown up. They had interviewed her mother, her high school friends, the staff at Gray Nuns' Hospital where she had been trained. The victim profile that emerged was of a well-liked, kindhearted young woman strong on religion and love of human beings. She didn't have a boyfriend. She had her work instead.

As DeClercq had read the Portman file again and again, he had been confronted with evidence that conclusively proved that Jack MacDougall was an officer of high caliber. All the reports as they came in had been digested, analyzed, indexed, and then cross-referenced into a cohesive whole. More than most, DeClercq knew the prominent role that morale had played in the history of the Force. Indeed it was that history which was their greatest strength, that sense of continuity that lies at the heart of the world's most elite fighting machines. Had the RCMP not evolved from the British Imperial Army? And who revered tradition more than the British did? Indeed that had been the thesis of DeClercq's first book: that the sheer weight of experience handed down from officer to officer over the years remained the Force's most powerful weapon, the feeling that they were a team. The Superintendent was well aware that he had stepped in to take command of MacDougall's squad and that it was only human nature to resent such a usurpation. For the sake of morale and that sense of team if for nothing else, DeClercq knew that no matter what the Sergeant's ability it would be necessary to find a place for him. It was a God-given bonus that MacDougall was this good.

On the wall of DeClercq's office the visual on the Portman case revolved around the nurse's graduation picture. To the left of that was a large Ident. blowup of her body hanging between the struts of the Dogfish Burial Pole. Several aerial shots of the Museum of Anthropology high on the cliffs of Point Grey overlooking the entrance to the Harbor were tacked up to the right. A photo of her vertebra revealed the same striation marks found on the other two victims. Police, autopsy, and serology reports completed the visual.

Sitting at his desk DeClercq reviewed the Portman case. To his mind certain points stood out and seized his attention.

In the first place, though MacDougall's squad had found no footprints in the snow nor in the earth beneath it—in fact the area around the totem poles was covered with loose gravel—it had discovered a line of deep indentations among the stones like those that might be left by a person overweight—or someone carrying the load of a body. These indentations ended at a paved loading area beside the museum itself. No tire tracks had been left on the tarmac.

In the second place, according to the autopsy performed on her remains, Joanna Portman had been dead for about eighteen hours before her corpse was found by Valerie Pritchard and Chris Seaton. Her head had been cut off just after she died. The killing had produced a lot of blood which had pumped out over her body, but this had dried and clotted within a matter of hours. What was strange was that the Headhunter had apparently collected most of the blood at the time of the murder and then poured it over the corpse after nailing it to the totem pole.

Put together, these facts worried DeClercq. For it appeared to him that the Headhunter had hoped that the North Vancouver body would not be found. It was buried in an isolated location and cut branches had been placed on top of the remains. Likewise, it was possible that the floater in the river might wash out to sea and never be discovered. So why, all of a sudden, had the murder pattern altered? For here in the Portman case the Headhunter had killed his victim, then at great risk of detection transported the body to the University, carried it down to the totem poles, climbed up on some sort of ladder and nailed the corpse through both palms to the crossbeam of the Dogfish Burial Pole. And then poured collected blood over his creation.

Was this bizarre scene meant as some sort of statement?

Had the finding of the first two victims and the subsequent publicity given the killer a thrilling taste of notoriety?

And if so, then next time, next murder, would he try to outdo the last one? DeClercq believed he would.

Several other matters were also playing on his mind.

Grabowski's body had been found at the foot of the University cliffs. Portman's body had been found on the campus itself. Was the killer therefore connected to UBC? Was he perhaps a student or member of the staff?

The autopsy on Joanna Portman had revealed that as with the other two victims, there was a vertical wound to the throat. In addition the pathologist had been able to take swab smears from her vagina and anus for an indication of whether or not there had been a sex attack. The slide prepared from the vagina swab had shown sperm. The sperm were immotile and few in number. DeClercq knew from Portman's file that the investigation had not turned up a boyfriend. One unkind staff member had even termed her "prissy." From previous cases the Superintendent was well aware that the detection of sperm in the vagina and the determination of the length of time since intercourse depends on a number of interrelated factors: the amount of ejaculation and the depth at which it occurs; the condition of the vagina for acidic/alkaline balance, menstruation and infection; sterility of the male; whether the woman has rested prone or walked around in the interim. As a general rule sperm will not be found thirty-six hours after intercourse. By twenty-four hours the tails of the spermatozoa will have broken away. Motility is lost at about the six-hour point. In the case of Joanna Portman, the sperm found in her body were immotile with the tails snapped off. That, plus quantity, would indicate intercourse had occurred during the time-span of twenty-four to thirty-six hours before the autopsy. Death and body cooling was a complicating factor. Though the presence of semen itself does not indicate rape, here the pathologist had also noted that both the vagina and external genitalia were bruised and traumatized. His conclusion, therefore, was one of a murder/sex attack. And with that DeClercq agreed.

He reached for his question pad. This is what he wrote:

1. Sexual psychotic or sexual psychopath?

2. Is each victim's gender their only connection?

3. Does the killer get sexual release from ending the lives of women?

4. Does immotile sperm = sterility?

5. Is it the memory of the crimes which enables the killer to maintain a normal relationship with his wife or girlfriend? Is his subsequent arousal secretly based on the thought of what he did before?

6. Does he pathologically hate all women?

7. Or is it all a smokescreen for some personal reason connected to one of his victims?

8. 
Will we ever know? 
he thought, but didn't write it down.

That left the totem pole.

During the winter of 1973 to 1974 the city of San Francisco was stunned by the so-called Zebra killings. Zebra was the investigative name for a cult of Black Muslims who systematically attacked twenty white victims, killing four of them. Several years earlier in Los Angeles, Charles Manson's Family cult of "creepy crawlies" had butchered seven "straights" in the hope of bringing down "Helter Skelter." Then there was the "Reverend" Jim Jones. And of course there had always been the Ku Klux Klan.

These days there were cults everywhere, at least one for every motive.

The totem pole bothered DeClercq.

It bothered him partly because the Portman murder marked a change in the pattern. The killer had taken a great risk to make some form of statement. Perhaps that statement was nothing more than a sudden demand for attention, the totem being nothing more than a random method to get it. Or perhaps the totem pole was a part of the statement itself.