Headhunter

by Michael Slade

  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 wo
rked 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.

  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.