Headhunter

by Michael Slade

  The nurse had asked him calmly not to smoke in the Admitting Hall.

  Snapping the cigarette in two and tossing it into a trash can, the man had watched his waddling, bloated wife disappear into an elevator.

  "I don't trust hospitals," he said. "I want that clear from the start. Isn't this the place where they left a sponge in some guy?" Again removing his pack of Kools he had shaken a cigarette loose.

  The nurse had asked him calmly not to smoke in the Admitting Hall.

  The complications had started at 5:21 p.m., not long after Joanna Portman's shift began.

  Joanna had found the next five hours draining. She enjoyed working as a nurse in the Maternity Ward, for although a hospital by definition was a place of sickness and death, here she was located at the wellspring of life. She thrived on the feeling of her own rebirth that each delivery gave her. And besides, she liked the mothers. She felt needed, the way they depended on her to see each one of them through.

  Mrs. Walker, however, had been a tough one.

  For hours the poor woman had been tortured by labor pain, awaiting each coming contraction with terror in her eyes. Joanna had held her in her arms. She had soothed her and calmed her with quiet words of encouragement, and toward the end she had even quoted from the Bible. It had never ceased to surprise her how even with agnostics and atheists that seemed to do the trick.

  That night Joanna's nursing shift had ended at midnight. The Walker baby, however, had waited till 4:19. So as usual Joanna had remained and seen the delivery through: when a mother had come to rely on her she just couldn't desert in the crunch.

  Never bail out,she told herself,until the bomb is dropped. What a day! Isn't it amazing that any of us survive?

  It was now 5:15 in the morning. Joanna was sitting on a bench waiting for the Macdonald bus. There was a smile on her face.

  Joanna Portman was a petite woman, twenty-two years of age. On shift she wore her hair in a bun, but now she had released it and let it tumble free. A breeze down Burrard Street blew black strands across her face so she turned part way around on the bench back toward the hospital. Founded by the Sisters of Providence in 1894, St. Paul's was a rambling red brick building right in the heart of town. Over the years as the city had grown, additions had been added. Now the plan was to tear it down and build another in its place. Joanna looked up at St. Paul's statue in its alcove below the roof. Will you still look down and protect me, she thought, once the new hospital's built?

  The Macdonald bus arrived and Joanna climbed on board.

  Ten minutes later when she alighted at Macdonald and Point Grey Road, a cold wind from off the water slapped her across the face. She pulled her collar up and thought. It almost feels like snow! But that, of course, was ridiculous. After all, this was Vancouver. Lotusland. And it was only October. Still, it feels mighty cold. Joanna started walking.

  The shortest route to her upstairs suite in a house three blocks away was through Tatlow Park. Normally, she would skirt the side of the tennis courts and cut across the grass until she reached Bayswater Street. From there it was but a quick walk up to the corner of Third.

  This morning, however, that route was unthinkable.

  For one thing, it was still pitch dark, and what with the newspapers screaming about this Headhunter being on the loose . . . well, she'd just have to resign herself to taking the long way around.

  Joanna Portman was less than two blocks from her home when she heard the car, in low gear, coming up behind her.

  With it came apprehension.

  Easy, girl, she told herself, let's not get too jumpy. (Jumpy! That's a laugh. I'm scared shitless!)

  There was not a single light burning in any one of the old houses that lined the tree-shadowed street.

  Well, go on and take a look. You can scream and run if you have to.

  So she took a glance, a quick one, over her left shoulder. And then, relaxing, she sighed with relief as the car pulled up beside her.

  Friday, October 29th, 2:03 a.m.

  The sweet pungent smell of marijuana began to fill the car. The windows fogged. As the young man puffed on the joint, drawing rapidly in order to fill his lungs to capacity, the burning tip of the cigarette pulsed orange in the dark. Then he blew out a stream of gray smoke that swirled around Val's face.

  "I think I'm off," he said, his voice vague and far away.

  "You know what's wrong with you, Chris? You're never serious."

  "About you,I'm serious," he said, moving over on the seat and giving her breast a squeeze.

  "Get serious," Val muttered. Then she closed her arms tightly across her ample chest.

  The young man laughed and retreated. He took another long drag off the smoldering joint. "This is good shit, Valerie. You don't know what you're missing."

  An hour ago they had parked the car at the Simon Fraser Lookout, a pulloff on the University cliff road that marked the spot where the explorer had first sighted the Pacific Ocean. A few minutes later the RCMP had checked them and shone a light into the Volkswagen, so Chris had moved on, muttering something about Trudeau having promised to keep the State out of the bedrooms of the Nation.

  Now they were parked on an access road near the Museum of Anthropology. Normally they would have been able to see the building in the distance with its great glass walls sixty feet high, a modern showcase for the totem art of the Pacific Coast Indian tribes. They would have looked out through the windshield on several carved poles that stood in front of the Museum. But tonight a fog rose from the ground and they could see nothing at all.

  Chris reached for Val's breast again.

  "Hey, listen, Chris. Really, we've got to talk. I do not want to fail."

  "Fail?" he said, laughing at her. "You're not going to fail. This is only October. Exams aren't till December."

  Chris Seaton was a blond-haired youth, eighteen years old. Val Pritchard had met him at a freshman dance four weeks ago. She had liked his mirthful eyes, his strong, square chin, and the fact he was always laughing. Now she was beginning to realize that he laughed a little too much.

  "You know your problem?" she said. "You got laughter anxiety."

  "Great. The chick enrolls in first year psychology, attends four or five classes, and she's got me analyzed. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I'm just horny?"

  "You're horny cause you're anxious. You got a buried neurosis."

  "And you? What's your cop-out for fucking like a mink?"

  "You pig! I do not fuck like a mink."

  "Oh, yeah. You should hear my tapes. I keep a little recorder hidden in the back seat."

  "You don't!" Val said, though she wouldn't put it past him.

  "How much money you got? Buy 'em back right now or I send them to your mother."

  "You asshole," Val said, and both of them laughed.

  It was beginning to get cold in the car so Chris cranked over the engine and kicked in the heater. The defrosters started blowing. The windshield began to clear. And that was how they noticed that it had begun to snow. Large but scattered fluffy flakes were landing on the glass, melting, and slowly slipping down to the hood of the Volkswagen.

  "Will you look at that?" Chris said, and he blew out a low whistle.

  "I thought it rarely snowed down here on the coast."

  "It doesn't. I've lived here all of my life and ... I mean this is mid-October. It's not supposed to snow."

  "Well it is."

  "Yeah, I can see that, silly. Come on. Let's fuck."

  "Not tonight," Val said. "Let's go back to the dorms."

  "Jesus, Val. We always fuck when we park."

  "Not tonight, I said."

  "Why?" Chris asked.

  "Why? Because I want to get some sleep and it's already two a.m., that's why. Because I want to pass my exams, that's why. Because my mother works her ass to the bone up in Quesnel cooking in a restaurant so I can go to university, that's why. I get a little freedom and what do I do? Smoke my bloody brains out and hump each nigh
t away. Well I'm not going to fail. Come on, let's go to the dorms."

  Chris slipped his hand up between Val Pritchard's thighs.

  "JESUS!" the girl shouted, and she pushed him away. "Don't I have any say around here?"

  Before the youth could answer, she swung the car door open and jumped out into the night.

  "Get your shit together, man. And get off my self-esteem!" Val slammed the door shut and stomped off through the curtain of snow.

  "Women," Chris muttered.

  For several seconds he just sat in the driver's seat, rubbing mist from the inside of the windshield, trying to catch a glimpse of the girl through the tumbling snow. She was heading toward the totem poles, of that he was certain. From there Val would pick up one of the paths that led back to the campus. That is unless she lost her way, walked off the cliff, and fell over one hundred feet to Wreck Beach below. So he opened the door, climbed out, and started after her.

  Now it was really coming down. He couldn't see her for the wall of flakes that pressed in around him.Snow in October. Man, oh man. What a freak,he thought.

  He broke into a light jog so as to catch up to Val.

  Cherchez la femme, Chris old boy. Cherchez la big-boobed fe-

  He was twenty-five feet from the car when Val screamed. It was not the cry of a woman falling; it was a shriek of raw terror. The scream seemed almost to ricochet among the crystals of snow.

  Chris decided to turn and run: Val could take care of herself.

  But just then he slipped in the snow, skidded crashing into

  Val, and the force of the collision knocked both of them to the ground.

  Now the girl threw back her head and let out a second scream. Chris almost pissed himself. He took one look at the lines of horror etched into her face and that was enough. The youth scrambled around, clawed the snow, tried to gain his feet. He looked up, himself terrified—and that was when he saw what was hanging in the air.

  There was a light at the foot of the totem pole ten feet off to his left. This light shone up to illuminate two vertical support struts that held an ornate crosspiece suspended above the ground. The totem—a Dogfish Burial Pole—was fifteen feet high. The crosspiece was carved with a figurehead from an Indian myth. Hanging between the struts was the body of a woman. Her hands had been nailed to the crosspiece and her head had been cut off. The carved face of the Dogpole appeared to take its place.

  Chris' mouth dropped open, but he managed to stifle a scream.

  Then he noticed that the body was wearing a nurse's whites. The garment had been torn down the front, revealing a strip of naked flesh from the neck to the hair of the crotch. Blood was trickling down this strip, down the legs, dripping off the feet dangling eight feet up from the ground. The pool of blood at the base of the totem measured four feet across.

  "Oh my Jesus," Chris said.

  Then he turned away and threw up into his hand.

  Call to Duty

  2:19 a.m.

  The call clocked into the VPD at 2:19 that morning. The telephone call shouldn't have come through to the Vancouver Police at all, but the dispatcher didn't catch the error. He had spent the previous evening drinking at the Police Athletic Club and even now his head felt as though the iron ball of a wrecking crane was demolishing it piece by piece. At the mention of the words dead body, however, he sat up straight at the switchboard and pushed the headphones to his ears.

  "Where's this body?" the dispatcher demanded, a whisky growl to his voice.

  "Man, it's hangin' from a totem pole. And it doesn't have a head!"

  "The totems in the Park?"

  "I said a totem pole, didn't I?"

  "Who's calling?" the dispatcher inquired of the nervous and jumpy voice at the end of the line.

  "Chris. Chris Seaton."

  "Well, hang on, Chris, while I patch this through. I'll get back to you." The dispatcher disconnected the line and then threw a toggle switch to feed into the street patrols. "We've got a possible 212. Stanley Park. Brockton Point totem poles. Code 4 response." Then he switched back to Chris.

  "Okay, Mr. Seaton. Full name and date of birth." The dispatcher picked up his pen and quickly began to write.

  2:20 a.m.

  Within a minute of the emergency broadcast hitting the police radio band the first blue and white car from the street patrol of the Vancouver Police Department tore into Stanley Park, its tires squealing off the Causeway and then skidding in the snow. The moment the patrol car hit the park, the cop riding shotgun kicked in the siren and started the wigwag lights Blue, then red, blue, then red. reflected off the snow. It took no more than three minutes for the car to reach Brockton Point, and its totem poles.

  Even before the car had stopped moving the officer riding shotgun was out the door and running. The driver quickly followed twenty feet behind him. Fifteen seconds later they found the totem poles, each one of the mythical giants now shrouded by crystalline snow.

  What they didn't find was a body.

  2:22 a.m.

  It was Detective Al Flood of the VPD who first caught the squeal. Because the call came into his building. Because it was a possible murder. And because he was catching up in Major Crimes.

  Flood was thirty-eight and stood six feet tall exactly. He was large-boned with broad muscular shoulders. His fair skin was a backdrop for freckles surrounding sharp blue-gray eyes. His hair was strawberry blond. Whenever he walked to the water cooler—as he was doing when the squad room phone rang—he moved like a natural athlete.

  "Major Crimes," Flood said, catching the phone call on the third ring.

  "It's Jenkins in Dispatch, Detective. We got a possible 212. Caller says the totem poles in Stanley Park."

  Flood moved a pad into place. "Where's the caller now?"

  "At a phone booth."

  "Which phone booth?"

  "Uh . . . I forgot to ask him." The dispatcher's head was still pounding.

  "Well, if he's still on the line, do it now. I'll wait."

  The phone went dead.

  For about two minutes Flood remained standing where he was. It was now 2:25 a.m. on a snowy graveyard shift and the squad room was practically empty. It felt like a deserted cavern of unmanned desks and stilled typewriters. One of the fluorescent lights was failing and it softly strobed the floor space about him. In some other part of the building a telephone was ringing. It wasn't answered. As he stood by the desk biding time until the dispatcher came back on. Flood picked up a circular put out by the RCMP. It was a Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit request for any information remotely connected to either of two deaths. Both bodies, CLEU said, had been found without a head. Flood was still reading when the line reactivated.

  "Detective. It's Jenkins again. You still there?"

  "Of course. Where is he?"

  "Out at UBC. Guy says he's phoning from the Museum of Anthropology, a phone booth nearby."

  "That's at least five miles from Stanley Park. How does he know of the body?"

  "Well, it seems it's not Stanley Park. It's the totems at UBC."

  "I thought you said that he said that it was Stanley Park."

  "I made a mistake."

  "Uh, huh. Didn't I see you, Jenkins, yesterday, surrounded by empty bottles in the Athletic Club?"

  "Uh . . . yeah, maybe."

  "Well get onto the Mounties. The stiffs in their jurisdiction."

  "Right. Thank God it's not in ours. The body's got no head."

  Flood almost dropped the phone. As with most people in this city who could read, he had consumed the front page story on the headless bodies in one of the two major newspapers. And he had seen it on TV. He had just read the RCMP flyer on the crimes sent out to the private municipal police forces—and then to top off all this, here he had a hungover police dispatcher telling him there was yet another headless body around and that for those most important moments in any police investigation—namely the first few minutes when the force reacts to the squeal—they, the VPD, had been fumbling the
ball. Flood did not need to remind himself of the police response equation: that for every initial minute lost the chance of a case being ultimately unsolved went up by mathematical proportions.

  "Well, go on! Move it, man! Get the Mounties on the line!" Flood almost shouted the words into the phone. It was out of character, for usually he was an easy gentle-mannered man.

  "Right!" the dispatcher said, and the line went cold.

  2:31 a.m.

  Constable Ron Mitchell stood among the tumbling flakes and stared up in disbelief. The scene was almost surreal: it was that weird. The body nailed to the Dogfish Burial Pole was now illuminated not only by the light at the base of the totem but also by the headlamps of Mitchell's patrol car. He had driven the vehicle down the access road off Chancellor Boulevard and right out onto the plaza in front of the Museum of Man. Then, careful not to get too close and do damage to the scene, he had climbed up onto the hood of the car to get a better look. What he saw was diabolical.

  For whoever had carried the body out here and nailed it to the wood had also dumped a container of blood over what remained of the corpse. The plastic container, an Imperial gallon in size, was lying on the ground and Mitchell could make out streaks of dried blood on the body in among the wet ones.

  2:36 a.m.

  The phone beside the bed rang and wrenched him out of sleep. He reached for it quickly, fumbling in the dark, hoping that he would catch it before it woke his lover up. He yanked the receiver from its cradle before the second ring. There was a mumble from across the bed as he spoke in a whispered tone.

  "Hello," Jack MacDougall said, glancing at the clock.

  "Sergeant, this is Constable Ron Mitchell. University Detachment. I don't think you know me."

  "I don't," MacDougall said frowning. Then he waited.

  "I'm sorry to bother you, sir. I hope it's the right decision."

  MacDougall felt like telling him that for his sake he hoped so too. "Well," he said.

  "We've got another body. One without a head."