Headhunter (15 page)

The Jack-o'-Lantern

Monday, November 1st, 1:03 a.m.

Robert DeClercq had seen more of death than was healthy for any man—no matter how professionally anesthetized his human sensibilities.

As with all men and women who deal daily with homicide, the Superintendent had been forced to take it in his stride and discover his own way to objectify this most subjective of human fears—the knowledge you're going to die. DeClercq had found it impossible to eschew all emotion. Nor was he able to develop a sense of gallows humor. In the end his mind reached a compromise with itself: reason was left to do its job hindered only by an accumulating overtone of sadness. Sadness about the loss.

For thirty years that technique had worked.

But it didn't work tonight.

It was the total outrage of what DeClercq saw that made the anger well up inside him.

The body of the nun lay on the ground bathed in arc light about thirty feet from the garden path. Around her the men who made murder their business went about their work, the Ident. crew flashing their photographs and sweeping the ground with humming metal detectors, the dog masters leading the German shepherds out from where the nun lay sprawled in the mud. Joseph Avacomovitch was crouched on his heels about a foot and a half from the victim, flanked on his left by Inspector MacDougall and on his right by the Superintendent. It was what had been done to the Sister that enraged Robert DeClercq.

"Same MO," Avacomovitch said, "in the pattern of the killing." He pointed toward the flesh of the neck where the head had been severed. "You can see the perpendicular stab just below the horizontal cut of decapitation. I'll want the top vertebra, Jack, once the autopsy's over."

Inspector MacDougall nodded. He too was angry for this was the second body found within North Van jurisdiction— and North Vancouver Detachment was MacDougall's home turf. He looked away to size up the progress of the ongoing search.

"She's been raped," the Russian said, "and slashed across the breasts." He looked up for a second, his forehead frowned with distaste. "The intercourse was brutal."

"You mean with her a virgin?"

"Virgin or not, it wouldn't matter. This guy's a savage."

"Were the clothes ripped or cut?" the Superintendent asked.

"Both. The one from the crotch to the feet is a knife slash. It was torn from the neck to her waist."

"Was she killed here?" asked Inspector MacDougall.

"Yes. Too much blood for it to be otherwise. The rain's done damage to any footprints or ground marks but it looks like she was walking down the path and dragged into the bushes. There's the sign of a struggle over near the walk."

"Who found her?" DeClercq asked.

"Another Sister," MacDougall answered. "She came out to close and lock the gate. She saw the candle burning."

"I'd like to know what a shrink would make of all this."

Just then the almost full moon emerged through a break in the rain clouds. The crime scene turned a metallic silver as the three men stood in silence around the corpse of the nun. Each had his own thoughts about what had happened. Not one of them would pretend to even begin to comprehend the mind of the Headhunter. That they were dealing with a maniac was all that was certain. It appeared to DeClercq that the killer had either been waiting to ambush his victim or else had followed her. He had raped her and stabbed her and cut up her clothes and then had cut off her head. What nagged at his mind once again was the vertical cut to the throat. He knew that in order to catch the contractions of the body in its death throes, such a wound was common to homicidal rapists. But this was something different. This one was a monster. For not only had he cut off the nun's head and also carried off her cowl, but in its place at the top of her neck he had left a jack-o'-lantern. The face of the pumpkin had two triangles for eyes, another triangle for a nose, and a mouth which was fang-filled and shaped into a malevolent grin. A candle had been burning inside. It was the light of the candle the Sister had seen when she came out to close the gate, and though the 
wax had now melted away the grinning pumpkin still looked blankly down at the butchered body.

One of the corporals involved in the search came over to speak to MacDougall. His hands and uniform were covered with mud, his clothes soaked. He had just climbed out of the reflecting pool.

"Not a bloody thing," he said. "We've given the grounds a once-over with dogs and metal detectors. At least as far as I can tell nothing was thrown in the pond."

"Do it again," MacDougall said. The Corporal nodded and walked away to carry out the order.

Now DeClercq was worried.
God,
he thought,
four bodies and not a thing to go on. That's against the odds.
Avacomovitch murmured something.

"Sorry Joseph, I didn't hear that. My mind was on something else."

"I said I'm going to try and fingerprint the pumpkin."

"Fingerprint it? Print a rain-washed pumpkin?"

"Yeah, I'll Krazy Glue it."

MacDougall caught DeClercq's puzzlement and said, "He's talking about Visuprint. You've been gone a while, Robert."

"I guess I have. Fill me in, Joseph."

"Well the way I see it," Avacomovitch said, "all we've got to go on is the jack-o'-lantern. We know the killer brought it with him as a head-substitute. It wasn't carved here. Maybe the hairs and fibers section will turn up something on it—dust or lint from his home, chemical traces, something like that. Maybe we'll get something out of the marks made in the carving. Or maybe I can pick up the killer's prints upon it.

"A few years ago a policeman from Ontario named Paul Bourdon was using Krazy Glue to repair a photographic developing tank. After the repair was completed. Bourdon discovered that his fingerprints had appeared on the inside of the plastic tank. Subsequent experimentation revealed that the chemical in Krazy Glue—its name is cyanoacrylate—reacts with the moist residue left by a person's fingertips on any number of articles—handguns, plastic bags, porous metals— which had previously been impossible to print with existing powder and iodine fume techniques.

"In one case a robbery suspect's fingerprints were recovered from a whisky bottle discovered floating in the bilge of a stolen yacht. In another case prints were lifted from an oil-covered cashbox at the scene of a business break-in."

"I must be going to rust," Robert DeClercq said.

"Not your department," the Russian replied. "But I'd like something else."

"What's that?" asked the Superintendent.

"Remember this morning you suggested that I take a look at the bones kicked up by the two young girls? Well I think I'd like to take a look at all four victims. I might find something in my field that a pathologist wouldn't look for."

"Good idea."

"That means a court order. They've already released Port-man's remains to her mother. But the other three are around." He looked once more at the nun.

"We'll apply for the order tomorrow," the Superintendent said.

"Do you think there's anything in the fact that both the Portman woman and the nun were Catholic?" MacDougall asked. "Maybe some sort of satanic cult. Black mass or black magic."

"Might be," DeClercq replied.

"I'll check it," the Inspector said, "but in the meantime, why don't you go home and grab some sleep? No use all of us being wasted when the panic hits later this morning. I know where to reach you if anything comes up."

"I agree," the scientist added.

For a moment DeClercq hesitated then he said, "I guess you're right." He glanced at his wristwatch and at the sky to the east. Four hours and it would be his normal time for waking. He did feel fatigued. There was little more he could do here, and come the groundswell of terror that was sure to arrive with morning a clear mind would be important. He had set the machine in motion, so let the machine do its work.

"I'll see you later," he said, and the other two men nodded.

DeClercq turned his back on the victim and followed the silver path up to the gate. Outside he could see the cordon of royal blue patrol cars, and beyond that a hodge-podge of spectators and reporters. As he reached the gate flash bulbs started popping. And just as thunder follows lightning, the second he went outside he knew the questions would be coming. At the gate he turned.

Back down the path near a silver statue depicting the Crucifixion, a group of three nuns were huddled together as if seeking warmth from each other. Behind them the convent rose up like a silver mausoleum.

It had been a long time since Robert DeClercq had been a practicing Catholic. In fact he had not set foot in a cathedral, except for the funeral, since the day that he had walked down that country road with his dead daughter in his arms.

What was it Christ had said?
he thought.
" Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." So where does that leave me? Are those men damned who have seen too much and therefore cannot accept him?

Robert DeClercq went home.

Riot

Dawn.

It hit like a plague, the fear that came in a wave with the morning papers. Then from mouth to mouth it spread like a virus uncontrolled throughout the city.

In a banner headline from every newsbox
The Province
informed each working citizen
HEADHUNTER STRIKES AGAIN
in 96-point type. The subhead screamed out
NUN AS FOURTH VICTIM.

There are times when information is dispersed at lightning speed, but only once since the end of the Second World War had it spread so fast in this city. That was the day that President Kennedy took a bullet to the head.

The panic that came along with the fear showed itself in a number of ways. All of them edged in black.

7:00 a.m.

Artie Fripp drove down to the warehouse to count his profits. All of his staff as usual had the first of November off.

Fripp parked his Corvette behind the building in the space marked "President" and entered the warehouse through the rear door. Weaving among the shelves of merchandise, he made for his small front office. Business this particular Halloween had been even better than expected: monster masks had sold out, makeup kits had sold out, fireworks had sold out, trick-or-treat candy sales were up a whopping 31 percent. It looked as if Artie Fripp would once again winter in the Caribbean.

As he passed the section of his warehouse reserved for pornographic supplies—the soft-core paperbacks and sexual toys that sold so well in the winter—Fripp was smiling to himself, thinking of all the jerks who put out money for this junky titillation while he, dressed in Bermuda shorts under the tropical sun, got a real eyeful of almost-naked female flesh.
Titillation,
Fripp thought,
now that's my kind of word. Any word that starts with ' 'tit' 'is . . .

And that was the moment that Artie Fripp, president of Get-A-Whiff Productions, stepped on a twelve-inch dildo left lying on the floor and instantly was airborn. The dildo was one of those electric types sold under the byline of "hum a different tune." During the party last night after work the staff had used it for their own version of that time-honored game known as "spin-the-bottle." Someone it seems had forgotten to put it back on the shelf.

So that was how Artie Fripp found himself flying with arms akimbo down the pornography corridor of his Burnaby warehouse, past the penis-shaped cigarette lighters sold as "Flick My Dic," past the stacks of paperback books like
Hump Happy,
whizzing by cartons of "Prolong Cream" and "Lustfinger," and "Hap-penis," zooming by a special display platform of "Anal Intruders" complete with batteries and an additional free "Butt Plugger," finally crashing into a four-tiered plywood shelf stocked with lifesize "Johnnie The Bucking Stud" and "Suzie Your Wild Teen Nympho" dolls, wrenching his back in the process.

"Oh, shit!" Fripp screamed as the pain spread out from his spine, for he had just injured the same vertebra that he had dislocated last year in Vegas while trysting with a blond show girl by the name of Belinda.

It took Fripp more than five minutes to drag himself to the nearest telephone, and it was just as he was about to pick up the receiver to call hospital emergency that the instrument rang. This particular telephone was reserved for his bookie so it was a single line.

Fripp grabbed it and groaned into the mouthpiece: "Call me a doctor and get the fuck off this circuit. I might not walk again!"

"Hey, Artie, it's me. The Flashman. At Play-It-Safe

Security."

"Get me a doctor, Flashman. My sex life is in danger. Minutes count."

"Artie, Artie, baby. No time for that. You read the morning rag. Some nun got iced. My phone's been ringing off the hook for those lipstick alarms. The ones that screech like a banshee."

"Flashman, you prick. I'm dyin'. Now get the hell off . . ." "I'll take two thousand to start, with an option on two thousand more."

"Flashman, you jerk ..." But suddenly, Artie Fripp shut up. He had just remembered that the mark-up on those lipstick alarms was 400 percent.

"When?"

"Now!"

"Cash on the line?"

"If I get 'em right away. I just drew up an ad to run in the afternoon rag. Catch the panic before it breaks."

"Okay," Fripp said. "Call me back in five minutes."

As soon as the phone was free it rang again—then again— then again—for Artie Fripp did a sideline business in Mace, pepper squirters and whistles.

By 11:00 a.m. all of his staff were back on the job at double pay filling an endless stream of orders. It was only then as he sat in his office smiling at the green numbers in the little window of his Japanese calculator that Fripp remembered the pain in his back and his need to see a doctor. Who knows, maybe this year he should forget the Caribbean. Go a bit further afield, like the French Riviera.

Yeah! 
Fripp thought as he picked up the phone.
Like the Riviera. The broads go topless there.

8:05 a.m.

Avacomovitch was finished.

The room stank of Krazy Glue and his head was light from the chemical as he stood up, stretched, rubbed his eyes with the backs of his giant hands and strode over to the open window to get a breath of fresh air. Outside a bird was singing.

After a few minutes of deep breathing he returned to his workbench in the room at Headhunter Headquarters and picked up the treated pumpkin. He was pleased with himself, for the prints he had lifted were three in number and each of them was perfect.

Now if only—hope on hope—the person with those fingerprints also had a record.

9:00 a.m.

The Dragon Kung Fu Studio was located on Marine Drive in the heart of North Vancouver. It had been open for business the sum total of three days, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at the end of the previous week. The sole proprietor and only employee was a young man of twenty-six named Bruce Wong whose greatest disappointment in life was that he had not been born Bruce Lee.

On Friday, October 29th, Wong had put an ad in the Sunday edition of the
North Shore News
to announce his grand opening.

That Monday morning when Wong arrived at his studio he had the sum total of two clients recruited the week before.

By twelve noon when the phone circuits finally overloaded and blew, he had signed up another four hundred—all of them women.

At 12:07 Bruce Wong ran next door to the barber shop to use the phone and try to rent larger space.

9:40 a.m.

"Okay," Chan said with determination. "Let's run it by one more time."

The Inspector was standing at the blackboard in the parade room at Headhunter Headquarters. MacDougall was off to his left. The members of the Central Corps of the Squad were seated on the chairs.

"The first thing to know is that our Computer Command has been assigned the highest priority rating in the country for tapping the Ottawa data base. This will give us an immediate sketch of criminal activity in any part of the province or the criminal history of any particular offender.

"The second thing to know is that our civilian programers have transferred an indexing system generated specifically for this investigation to one of the IBM machines in Ottawa. I generated this particular program myself on one of our local computers. Here's how it works.

"The program is code-named Cut-throat.

"It will provide us first of all with an index to all paper-file material. Those files contain all of our regular police information: criminal records, outstanding warrants, suspected offenders, and each and every query from each and every officer each and every day in each and every police force in this country. This is called 'the blanket' and it's tied to Interpol.

"In addition—and this is important—this blanket also contains all the information collected on all known sex offenders identified during the Clifford Olson case. It has been updated to yesterday. When supplied with specific search criteria— such as the description of a person or car or registered weapon— the program generates a list of the numbers of all documents that refer to the person or vehicle or weapon that matches the description."

"How detailed will it go?" one of the cops asked.

"The search criteria can be as specific as a person's name, date of birth, age, height, weight, sex, race, hair and eye color, or the place where the person was last checked by police. It can contain as little information as say, just hair color." Chan took a moment to sip from a cup of coffee rapidly cooling on a desk top to his right.

"Finally, I am in the process of preparing an up-to-date skin list. I have culled all known possible sex offenders from our files and as soon as we get a psychological profile of the Headhunter from our psychiatric services I will computer-enhance it into a formal sweep sheet. This list will have the necessary key word to retrieve information on any offender listed in the margin.

"And that's about it, unless there are any questions. Remember, Computer Command is set up to reflect the present state of the art. Use it!"

There were no questions so MacDougall took over. "All right," he said. "You all know what happened last night and you all know what that means. You heard the Superintendent yesterday morning. So let's roll."

Then as MacDougall was turning away to have a quiet chat with Inspector Chan, someone in the audience made a
sotto voce
comment: "Well, I'm disappointed. After all that he didn't even say, 'Let's be
real
careful out there'."

No one laughed. Most cops don't watch cop shows on TV.

10:35 a.m.

The RCMP Report Centre in Ottawa has 24,000 sets of fingerprints on file for British Columbia alone.

Sergeant James Rodale had spent the morning putting the finishing touches to DeClercq's flying patrol concept. For that reason he had come up to Computer Command in order to arrange the independent information pool which—excised of all theory, conjecture, and conclusion—would be available to these patrols. That was how he was near the communications center as the teletype reply from Ottawa came in on Avacomovitch's fingerprint request concerning the lifts that he had obtained off the jack-o'-lantern. Out of habit Rodale glanced at the piece of paper emerging from the machine as he walked by. Then he stopped dead in his tracks.

The fingerprints on the pumpkin, Report Centre said,
were
a match with those on the record of one Fritz Sapperstein.

Sapperstein had a record for B and E in 1974 and an address in the Municipality of Richmond.

Richmond was Rodale's home turf.

The Sergeant tore the sheet off, leaving a copy for Avacomovitch, then checked his Smith and Wesson .38 and left Computer Command to go and find "Mad Dog" Rabidowski.

He found him.

10:45 a.m.

The good citizens of Vancouver and its many suburbs spent the overcast morning watching for more rain and waiting impatiently for the first edition of the
Sun.
When the paper finally hit the streets the over-run sold out in a matter of minutes and the good burghers got exactly what they were wanting. The murder of the nun was spread over two pages of print with an additional two pages of photos.

In addition to the facts of the case there were the usual color stories. One of these was a barometer reading from women interviewed on the street. These were some of the comments:

"Well I don't plan to leave my house without a knife in my purse. The police say that's breaking the law, carrying a concealed weapon. Well I don't care. The Headhunter's not going to get me without one hell of a fight."

"A nun! My God! Is any woman safe? This guy's a raving maniac. If City Council had any guts at all they'd slap a ten p.m. curfew on every male in this city."

"Why are people so shocked? I don't see this as so special. This Headhunter and his attacks are no more than an extreme version of the fears that most women suffer every day of their lives. I'm on a bus, eh, and I have to fend off a drunken businessman who sits too close and tries to put his arm around me. But—and every woman in the world will recognize this—I have to do it nicely so I don't cause a scene Then once I'm off the bus a strange guy stands in my path and asks in a tough voice: 'All alone? Don't you know there's a killer around? Where do you live? I'll take you home.' And then it takes an eternity to get rid of him— nicely. Now I ask you, do we go around putting our arms around men minding their own business, insisting on accompanying them to their homes and getting nasty if they refuse? Not on your life—sorry, that was a poor choice of words!"

"I say take every sex offender—maybe every male while you're at it—and cut his fucking nuts off. Amen, sister."

12:02 p.m.

Matthew Paul Pitt had a pathological hatred of his mother. She had committed suicide when he was four. Pitt's father had then placed both his sons in a foster home. Sometime later he had returned to retrieve one of the boys, leaving Pitt behind. And ever since that day Pitt had loathed his mother, for-—the way he saw it—if she had not killed herself the family would not have fractured.

As a child Matthew Paul Pitt had been misdiagnosed as "retarded but without psychosis." The result was that of the twenty-eight years the Australian had lived, twenty-four had been spent in mental institutions. In actual fact Matthew Paul Pitt had an IQ of 128. That is in the above-average to superior range.

The actual psychological problem afflicting the man was dyslexia—a learning disorder in which the affected person sees everything backwards resulting in an inability to read or write or count. The original misdiagnosis of a disorientated and angry child had never been corrected, and therefore, trapped for twenty-four years of his life in mental institutions for the retarded, surrounded daily by persons with whom he could not communicate, Matthew Paul Pitt like an ingrown toenail had slowly turned in on himself. Ultimately, as a result of this misdiagnosis and his subsequent institutionalization, Pitt had developed a real psychiatric disorder. Pitt was now a classic borderline personalityﾀ??and it had been almost two years since Matthew Paul Pitt had escaped from a Queensland mental hospital.