Headhunter (7 page)

"Anyway, this one day I was home alone. My mother was in the hospital, he had beaten her that bad. She lied about the reason.

"In the early afternoon, my father began drinking. By suppertime, he was drunk. He started punching me, calling me by my mother's name, swearing and screaming at me. Then he raped me. I was then fifteen years old—a year younger than you—and I was a virgin.

"I remember lying there, feeling torn and battered, empty, mostly empty as if I were not in touch with myself. And I remember his breath foul with garlic.

"After a while he began to sober up and realize what he had done. He begged me for forgiveness, but I just lay there. Eventually he fell forward with his head on my breasts, sobbing like a baby. I was filled with revulsion."

"Did you tell anyone?" Crystal asked softly.

"No, but my mother suspected. Shortly after that I was sent to Montreal to continue my education. That's where I met my husband. That's where I got married. And that's the end of the story."

"I hate men!" Crystal said. "Especially
my
father."

"Well that's good, sweetheart. That's the way to be. Besides, I can satisfy you like no man
ever
can."

"Then why did you get married if you feel the way I do?"

"That's a long story," Suzannah said, glancing at the clock. "I don't have time to tell you, though I wish I did. I don't want you
ever
making the same mistake. Let's just say that I was blinded by the color red. The man was old enough to be my father and maybe that's what I wanted—a replacement. I was young and stupid. What more can be said?"

Suzannah let go of the girl and retreated several paces. She stood with her legs apart, her head held high, her backbone erect. She looked the girl up and down, smiling, and thought:
I can't wait any longer. It's time to reel her in.

According to the clock on the wall, it was 12:28 a.m.

"Crystal," Suzannah said slowly. "I must ask you a question. Listen before you answer. Okay?"

The girl nodded.

"The moment I saw you this afternoon, I knew we were the same. That's why I followed you from the laundry after work and sat beside you in that greasy little restaurant. You looked so alone. Have you enjoyed what we've done this evening?"

The girl nodded again.

"Well, there's no reason in the world that this must ever end. No one knows that you're here. No one knows that you're with me. And no one needs to know. Would you like that?"

Once more the nod.

"Good. Cause tomorrow night I'd like to take you to Europe. To London, Paris, Rome. I'd like to buy you fine clothes. I'd like to give you all the cocaine you want. I'd like to spend just hours and hours playing with your pussy, getting you so hot you think you're going to melt. Sound like fun?"

The girl swallowed.

"Here," Suzannah said. "Let's run away for good." She pulled open a flat drawer in the washstand and removed a stack of $100 bills which she tossed to the girl. Crystal's mouth dropped. The bills slipped through her fingers and tumbled to the floor.

"Go on. Pick them up. They're yours," the woman said. "That's $10,000 lying at your feet. And that's just spending money."

"Where did you get that?" the girl exclaimed, her voice breaking in a croak.

"Why, from the man
before
the guest who comes tonight. The one this evening will bring another twenty grand with him. And once he's finished, well then we're off and free. I'll have made $100,000 off Mardi Gras this year. Not bad for two weeks' work, eh?"

The girl said nothing. She stared at the stack of money with a dumbfounded look on her face.

"Crystal," Suzannah said softly, "it's time to answer that question. Do you want to stay with me—or shall we call it a night and you can return to your job at the laundry? The decision is yours."

In a flash, the girl was across the space between them and cradled in the woman's arms. Warm tears touched Suzannah's shoulder where the glove joined her corset. As the woman whispered, "That's my girl," over and over again, she caught a glimpse of the two of them in the washstand mirror.
This one was easy,
she thought with a smile.
Once you know the market of life—and what people need to buy.

For a moment longer she held the girl, then gently pulled away. "No turning back, dear, is that agreed?"

"Yes," Crystal said.

"Good. Let's have some more cocaine."

Back in the room with the masks, Suzannah drifted over to the middle door in the wall on the left and pulled it open. Beyond the jamb a spiral staircase disappeared below. "Come on," Suzannah said, "there's something weird to see." Her words held out adventure like honey to a cub.

Together they descended, twisting around and around on the iron steps, past the main floor and on down to the basement. Suzannah opened a hidden trap door and a gust of stale damp air swept up and out of the black pit that yawned beneath it.

Ever so faintly from below came the murmur of running water. Then as Crystal's heart pounded against her rib cage, Suzannah picked up a torch, climbed into the hole and disappeared down a rusted iron ladder.

Crystal followed.

As she descended the girl could feel the walls sweating and dripping with the ooze of centuries. When the ladder ended the two of them continued on down a narrow flight of stone steps. Crystal had counted twenty-six before a wail of anguish

from off to the right brought her to a halt. Her muscles locked tight and for a second she froze.

The noise was a low-keyed godless gibber that seemed to burst forth from no discernible point. It appeared to issue from several sources off to the right side.

Crystal turned to run—when Suzannah grabbed her by the arm. "Look," the woman said.

Continuing her grip on the girl, Suzannah swept the torch in an arc that sliced through the darkness around them. Crystal could see that they had reached a vaulted corridor. The floor was of chipped flagstone, the arched walls and roof of dressed masonry. The corridor stretched away before them into indefinite blackness. To the left there was a closed wooden door. To the right were five black open archways through which came the wail.

"What you hear," Suzannah said, her words sucked away almost the second they were uttered, "is wind off the Mississippi River. What you see is an old smuggler's vault dating from the seventeen hundreds."

As she spoke the woman stabbed the flashlight toward one of the open archways on the right. At the outer reaches of its beam Crystal could just make out the stone-banked channel of a stream.

"You see that underground river? It connects with the Mississippi. It was once used by French pirates, back in the early days. Now its mouth on the river is sealed by a mesh of iron bars."

"Is this what you wanted to show me?" Crystal asked, now embarrassed by her attempt at flight.

"No," Suzannah said, "I want you to see this." She walked over to the wooden door and ushered Crystal in.

"What's in here?" the girl asked, standing in the pitch dark as the woman reached up to light a torch set into the wall beyond the doorway and off to their left.

Crystal choked in fright. Her neck hairs stood on end. Never before had her eyes seen—or even imagined—the instruments that cluttered this hellish room.

"This is a
torture chamber!"
Crystal shrieked with a spine-jarring shiver.

"Correct," Suzannah said. Then she laughed out loud, her voice hard and brittle.

This vault was a stone crypt, twenty feet by thirty. The chimney of a fireplace ran up one wall like a great gray sucking vein, cobwebs hanging like veils from several of its bricks. Beside this hearth stood a brazier with seven branding irons dangling from its rim. Along the opposite wall there was a medieval rack, its wheels and clamps cast in mimicked shadow by the torch, dark stains discoloring the upper surface and spreading down the sides in thin drip-lines. An Iron Maiden crouched waiting in the far comer with its door gaping open on several hundred spiked teeth. Turning in panic, Crystal saw a gibbet iron hanging from the ceiling— that one wall was covered with whips and manacles and cat o' nine tails—that a skull rack containing seven leering ivory grins hung on the stone surface behind the door—that knives and needles and surgical instruments were laid out in tidy precision on a flat surface to her left—and, worst of all, that Suzannah stood guarding the doorway with her arms folded across her breasts. Reflected torch-light glinted off the metal rings in her crotch.

As the vault began to echo with the dull hideous whine that Suzannah had said came from the wind off the river, Crystal's mind screamed at her,
A knife! Grab a knife!

The girl ran to the dusty surface spread with polished, gleaming blades. Then with a butcher knife in one hand and a skinning knife in the other, she turned to face the door.

Suzannah grinned. "Crystal, you are
precious!
What a scene," she said.

"I want out of here," the girl hissed through tightly clenched teeth.

"Good. Then it works," the woman replied, never moving an inch. "For that is precisely the thought, my dear, that this theater is designed to induce."

"Yeah! What's this place for? You just tell me that!"

"Crystal, Crystal, Crystal," Suzannah said, shaking her head. "This is where I work."

"Work!"

"Yes,
work,
silly. What do you think it's for?"

"What sort of work would ever need a place like this?"

"The sort of work, sweetheart, that pays a hundred grand in two weeks. The work of relieving guilt."

"Go to
hell!"
  Crystal screamed. "Let me outa here!"

"So what's stopping you? You're the one with the knives."

The girl blinked. For a split second she glanced down at her own hands and the two razor sharp instruments that they held. Then, fearing a trick, she flicked her eyes back to the door. Suzannah had not moved.

"What you see around you, dear—what you seem to be so afraid of—is really nothing more than a million-dollar fantasy— the essence of masochism. These are just a few of the props."

Crystal shook her drugged head. "But why would anyone
want
this?" She gestured at the walls.

"Ah, now that's the question . . . and it shows you don't
know men."

"Tell me," Crystal said. And she put down the knives.

The Graveyard

Vancouver, British Columbia, 1982

Sunday, October 31st, 5:30 a.m.

Twelve years, and he could still get into the uniform. The fact made him feel good.

It was usual for the Superintendent to be at work before dawn, and most mornings he would climb quietly out of bed so as not to disturb his wife, make his way into the kitchen to drip a pot of coffee, then carry a steaming cup of it, strong and black, out into the greenhouse where he would sit among his plants. For it was here at this early hour, alone with his thoughts and away from the sensory input that would come with the light of day, that Robert DeClercq would run the gauntlet which stretched back into his past. With each new day the same ghosts were lined up and waiting for him, all of them with knives. And each morning he would subdue them in that hour before dawn.

Most mornings DeClercq would then pour himself another coffee, dress for the weather and go out through the back door of the greenhouse and down to the edge of the sea. There he would sit very still in the old driftwood chair on a knoll above the ocean, the sundial at his left, and think about the day's work while he awaited dawn. Only when the eastern horizon was ablaze with shafts of glory would he return to the greenhouse, to the wicker chair, and place the clipboard on his knee.

That, of course, was most mornings. Today was different.

DeClercq put the kettle on and ground the coffee as usual, then he went to the closet in the spare bedroom and took his

uniform down from the rack. For eleven years it had hung there, unused and untouched. Finding a soft-bristled brush, he sat down on the bed and with short brisk strokes removed the lint of a decade from the dark blue serge. He pressed his trousers and shined his shoes. Then sitting in the greenhouse with his first cup of coffee, Superintendent Robert DeClercq polished each brass uniform button until it gleamed in the light from the desk lamp. Only then did he return to the spare bedroom and put the blue serge on.

The man who stared back at him from the closet mirror was a man who had not been seen since the Quebec October Crisis of 1970.

Twenty minutes later when DeClercq closed the front door and stepped out into the dark, the chill of autumn was in the air and maple leaves scraped the ground. For a fleeting moment his mind was touched by a sense of
deja vu,
a pale glimpse of that other autumn many years ago, of dead leaves in a moaning wind moving through the graveyard—but he shook it off sharply and began to climb the driveway. He had parked the cars up near the road after the freak snowstorm. He warmed up the engine of his Citroen, then drove off down Marine Drive and toward the center of town.

Dawn was yet an hour and a half away.

6:35 a.m.

They had set up Headhunter Headquarters in the old Command Building of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Located at the corner of 33rd Avenue and Heather Street, this was a structure of massive stone blocks and acute-angled timbers that very much resembled an Elizabethan mansion. The Maple Leaf was flying on the flagpole outside. Once the Vancouver Headquarters of the Force, the building had more recently found use as an officers' mess and a police training academy. Even more recently it had been gutted, and was now in the process of reconstruction. Gutted or not, however, it still looked from the outside like a Headquarters should. That's more than could be said for the
real
Headquarters building up on 73rd. It looked like a transistor.

It was now just after 6:30 a.m. and a light rain overnight had washed the mist from the air and left the lights of the city sparkling like diamonds on black velvet.

As DeClercq walked toward the doorway at the front of the Headquarters building the air felt crisp and clean within his lungs and the freshness of the morning seemed to add a clearness to his sense of purpose. It had been a long time since he was last a cop.
It feels good to be back,
he thought.

The first day of his resurrection—October 29th, the morning of Chartrand's call—DeClercq had met Sergeant Jack MacDougall of North Vancouver Detachment and Corporal James Rodale of Richmond Detachment to form the second Headhunter Squad. Earlier that morning while the Sergeant was overseeing the investigation out at the totem poles in front of the Museum of Man, Rodale had done a computer projection of the manpower available to the Force. A printout on the background and service record of each member in "E" Division was ready by noon that day.

That same afternoon, DeClercq, MacDougall and Rodale had put together the Squad. Then the duty calls had gone out.

The second day of his comeback DeClercq had spent shut up in his new office working over the files. He had read, digested, culled, and reconstructed each report on each crime at least seven times. The room now showed his work.

The office was at the end of a corridor that met the top of the stairs. A spacious room, thirty feet square, with a bank of windows along one side that looked out at St. Vincent's Hospital across 33rd, it had once been an officer's billiard room and an adjunct to the mess. But whatever purpose it had once served, it had now been modified to DeClercq's specific instructions. For on the first day of his resurrection— while he had been putting together his squad—a team of workmen had stripped the place and then reconstructed the three windowiess walls with floor to ceiling corkboard. And it was the Headhunter's work that now adorned the corkboard walls.

For furniture the office contained three Victorian library tables arranged in a horseshoe surrounding a single chair. The chair—which had once been at the center of the commanding officer's quarters generations ago and only just discovered in the basement—was highbacked with a barley-sugar frame and the crest of the RCMP carved in wood to crown its user's head. The chair faced six seats in front of the desk.

It was now 6:46 a.m. on the third day of the return of Robert DeClercq—and it was time to take off his jacket and sit in the chair and analyze yesterday's work. It was time to ride out on the hunt for the ghoul who was standing in the graveyard.

DeClercq sat down and rolled up his sleeves.

At
the center of the wall across from his chair a large map of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia was pinned to the corkboard.

Next to it was a section of wall visually depicting the North Vancouver murder. In the center the Superintendent had pinned the unidentified Polaroid photograph sent to Skip O'Rourke at the
Vancouver Sun.
The Polaroid had itself been photographed and blown up, but though this enlargement was also on the wall it was too grainy in texture to add very much. The photo was of a young woman's head—she was probably in her teens. Her eyes were rolled back into her skull with just the barest trace of pupil moon peeking out beneath the eyelids. Her hair was black and tangled and matted with blood, her mouth open slackly as if stopped in a scream. Shreds of skin at the base of her neck dripped gore and curled toward the pole like several thin snakes.

What struck DeClercq was the fact that except for the head and the top of the pole on which it had been stuck, the photograph revealed nothing. No ground. No backdrop. Just a white surface as though the snap had been shot facing a linen sheet set up to highlight the head and the pole.
A
specially constructed pose,
was the thought that entered his mind.

To the right of the Polaroid of the victim's head, DeClercq had attached two helicopter shots of the area around the bone site. They both revealed the North Shore hillside from about two hundred feet. With a sharp eye it was possible to make out the tattered tent half hidden by the bushes.

To the left of the Polaroid photograph, beside the police blowup, DeClercq had yesterday tacked up four Ident. Section pictures taken on MacDougall's orders. Two of the photos were shots of the shallow creekbed grave. Though the bones could clearly be seen, the amount of dirt dug away from them by the two girls' father—plus the statements later taken from the three of them—indicated that before the disturbance the remains had been hidden from sight. The creekbed was clogged with autumn leaves and broken branches, several of which appeared to have been cut and placed over the grave. One of the other two Ident. shots was of the cut ends of several of these branches. On later examination, the police lab had found striation marks identical to those discovered by Dr. Singh on the neck bones of the river floater and of the skeleton in question. The fourth photograph was a blowup of the marks on the upper neck of the unidentified corpse where the head had been cut from the body.

Put together, 
DeClercq thought,
these pictures raise a number of questions. They offer very few answers.

He removed a sheet of paper from the drawer of the library table that formed the bottom of the horseshoe and began to write:

1. Was the woman killed at the location of the tent? Or was she carried there after her death by the Headhunter? If the latter, then a strong person indeed! It's very rugged terrain.

2. If deposited there after death, was the corpse carried down from the road up above? Or up from a boat on the sea? Or along the shore? It was probably done at dusk or in the early morning—dark enough for cover, but light enough to see.

3. Was the body meant to be found? Cut branches indicate that it was purposely hidden. Was the stream running at the time that it was left? Was it buried mainly by the act of nature?

Looking over the questions, DeClercq's gut reaction was that the woman was killed at the tent site, that she was probably camping there, and that the killer had then cut off her head and buried the body and in a frenzy ripped the tent to pieces. His reasoning was that up in the North Shore mountains there are a thousand sites more deserted than this one where a body would never be found. Here the risk of being seen was just too great. But the corpse
was
left at this location—so that indicated that either the Headhunter had stumbled upon her in the wood, or they had met at some other location and returned to the murder scene. If the Headhunter was camping here, one of the people in the houses nearby might have seen him coming and going. And that could lead to a description. No, the chances were the victim was the one who pitched the tent. But even that was conjecture. It might have been there before.

What concerned him most and tugged at his mind was not, however, the answer to these questions. It was the question that arose from these questions in the light of subsequent facts.
For if this corpse was meant to be hidden, why had the Headhunter changed his style?

Look at the case of Joanna Portman.

Tacked to the corkboard wall in the section for the North Vancouver crime there were many other sheets of paper: lab and autopsy reports, police memos, witness statements, interforce inquiries—but these added little to his knowledge. From the angle of the cuts on the branch ends (plus the blade shape left in the flesh of Grabowski and Portman) the lab had determined that the weapon was probably a large bowie knife. That was more an American instrument than one found in Canada. The autopsy report revealed that there were cuts on several of the rib bones indicating that the North Van corpse might also have suffered a slash through the breasts. The time of death was estimated at between three and five months ago, but probably closer to three, since the last days of August had been very hot and decomposition would have advanced rapidly. A soil search of the entire gravesite was negative; a diver search of the shore waters by the RCMP frogman team had turned up nothing; an infrared helicopter scan of the area recorded no temperature differences that might indicate other rotting human remains. A check of the Harbor Patrol had proved fruitless and not one of the neighbors living on top of the hill had noticed anything suspicious. In fact only one had known that the tent was there.

The only positive fact in the investigation so far was that the tent had been traced to an outdoors shop in Luzern, Switzerland. It had been purchased eight months ago.

DeClercq rose from his chair and crossed over to the wall. For the next twenty minutes he again reviewed the entire North Vancouver case as reconstructed and focused on the corkboard. At the end of that period he had confirmed that on this part of the investigation there were only two constructive things to do: wait for the European Missing Persons reports requested through Interpol.

And have Joseph Avacomovitch go to work on the bones.

It was 7:23 a.m. when the Superintendent turned his attention to the Helen Grabowski case. Though technically the corpse had been found within the jurisdiction of University Detachment, because that outpost was so small the investigation had been usurped by Rodale out of Richmond. DeClercq was pleased to see that the Corporal had done a thorough job.

Again, however, there were questions—and not very many answers.

As with the case of the North Van bones, this display centered around the Polaroid print sent to Skip O'Rourke. Once more there had been a blowup by the lab—same grainy quality—and this along with the subscription form from
Buns and Boobs Bonanza
was pinned up to the left. MacDougall had determined that the form came from the July 1982 issue of the publication which was available at any corner store. DeClercq's eyes moved back and forth from the clipping to the Polaroid.

The picture was of another head with the eyes rolled back in the skull. Helen Grabowski had black hair, a narrow face, and her mouth hung slackly open. Even in the photograph she looked like a junkie, the ravages of the drug having pinched and lined her skin. Blood ran from both comers of her lips. And again the picture was confined to the head and the top of a pole, no ground, no backdrop except for the same white surface.

Another pose,
DeClercq thought.

It also occurred to him, judging from the lack of decomposition and freshness of the blood, that both photos had been taken immediately after the killings. The bodies had probably then been dumped very shortly after. Obviously the pictures were saved for the killer's titillation and his subsequent taunt. But what had then happened to the heads?