Headhunter (29 page)

Then his face became a staring blank, every muscle collapsing. Suddenly he stopped moving. His body went rigid. And at that moment one of the masked women broke away from her group, dancing slowly toward him. She rolled up his trouser legs and bound a green handkerchief about his waist and draped a red cloth across his chest and up over his right shoulder. Then she placed a machete in his hand and he started to shake again.

Thump, thump . . . thump, thump . . . thump . . . thump . . . thump . . .

Her body still thrashing wildly, the old woman up on top of the tomb cried out wildly in a strangled shriek of orgasm.

Then John Lincoln Hardy dropped the skull and reached out with the bone in his hand. For a split second Rick Scarlett detected a bright glint of light near one of the knobbed ends of the bone, but quickly it was gone. Hardy looped the piece of skeleton under the belly of the snake and removed the reptile from the stomach of the woman. He placed it in a bag.

Beside him. Rick Scarlett heard Katherine Spann breathe a low whispered sigh of relief.

Afraid of snakes?
the male cop thought.
Believe me, woman, one day soon have I got a snake for you.

Then from the ring of bonfire dancers a moan rose up through the night.

With a look of desperate bewilderment on her face, one woman broke away from the group. She began to whirl herself in a private fury toward the mausoleum. She flailed around and around, crying and choking, turning once, then twice, then a third and fourth time with ever increasing abandonment until her face was twisted in agony and her hand clutched at her head. As the white darkness of a voodoo seizure set in like a rush throughout her body, she slapped her forehead and the nape of her neck in an effort to ward off possession.

Behind her the ring of dancers hopped closer to the fire. One dangled a foot into the flames, while another waved a hand ecstatically among them.

From the group of drummers one man stood up and walked over to the possessed woman, still carrying his tom-tom. He began beating sound at her in a series of vicious slaps. The woman collapsed with a wild cry striking her head on the ground. In a snarl her lips pulled back from clenched white teeth. Her body began to convulse and the drummer went wild.

As he attacked her with his frenzied pounding, the man looked as though he would burst the drumskin in his effort.

The woman was now shaking her head from side to side, silently screaming,
No! No! No!
to every throb, but it wasn't any use. For she was learning that nowhere are drums played quite the way that they are in voodoo. The spirit was perched on her neck and whispering secrets in her ear.

John Lincoln Hardy, with the bone still in one hand and a bottle in the other, ran over to the woman. He took a swig of rum, spraying it over his face and rubbing it into his hair. He took another swig and spewed this mouthful over the woman. Then he struck her four times on the head.

The woman stopped convulsing.

The drummer ceased to beat.

The old woman on top of the tomb sat up and looked at Hardy.

Hardy hit the possessed one again and then pushed her softly toward the man who held the machete. He was standing near the mausoleum.

Both Spann and Scarlett tensed. Something was going to happen.

With one hand still to her head, her jaw now working under her hollow face, the woman-possessed slouched toward the man who held the knife. There was something untouchable about her, as though she really wasn't present. Enigmatically she mumbled to herself, her voice slurring the words until they were meaningless. At the tomb she stopped to bend over and kiss its stone. She groped in her hair and tied knots in it until the old hag who still sat on top whispered something down to her.

The woman nodded and flicked her tongue like a snake.

Then turned slowly and began to approach once more the man who held the knife. She was swinging her hips from side to side and flouncing her breasts as she walked. Stopping directly in front of him, she mocked the man with her body. She placed her arms around his neck and hung there provocatively. She rubbed her body against him until he slapped her to the ground. Then laughing aloud she knelt at his feet and began clawing the earth. The man struck her four blows with the side of the machete, knocking her onto her back. She tried to rise but he struck her again, even harder this time. The woman merely laughed. She went to rise again, but the man put the point of the machete to her belly and forced her back down to the ground. In a jeering manner he smeared the blade over her breasts and arms.
He must have cut her,
Spann thought, for the woman let out a cry—

And that was when the clutching hand burst up out of the earth.

The second time the woman shrieked, Scarlett jerked involuntarily. The grasping fingers of the
zombi
were now entangled in her hair.

Clods of earth began to erupt as the buried man tried to break out of his prison under the ground.

The woman's head was being yanked back and forth as a hole opened in the earth and the man with the machete carved an X across her trembling stomach.

The old crone smiled.

Then one by one, the naked women with the red cloth bags removed the masks from their faces and placed them at the feet of the Voodoo Queen. For each mask delivered the matriarch gave to her subject a small hoodoo doll. Pins stuck out of each doll, glinting in the moonlight.

Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . .

The drums began again.

Then the
zombi
came out of the ground.

First the earth broke away from around him in large chunks and clods. Then his head popped up all smeared with mud, his eyeballs vacant and bulging and dull, his voice groaning out broken noises from deep down in his throat. He bit the screaming woman and tossed her to one side.

By now the old women with the red cloth bags had joined the dancers around the fire. The air was filled with booms and rattles and whistles and chants and passionate wails and whines. As their skeletal, wrinkled, empty-breasted bodies began to shiver to the drums, the old women worked the dolls with their hands, jabbing them with the pins.

John Lincoln Hardy, bone still in hand, walked to one end of the tomb. A hinge squealed as he pulled open a stone door. With his free arm he reached inside.

The
zombi
was out of the ground.

He stood in the moonlight, motionless, his arms held limply out from the sides of his body.

Gyrating abruptly on one foot, the man with the machete strode grandiosely over to the fire dancers. A few of them were now slapping their necks out of time with the drums

Still dancing, the group surrounded him—and even the woman whom the
zombi
had bitten ran to join the crowd. Then the man with the knife whirled savagely and sliced out at the air, missing the dancers by inches as each powerful stroke came down.

John Lincoln Hardy walked over and cut the carcass of a goat down from one of the gibbets. To do this it appeared to Scarlett that Hardy used the end of the bone still clutched in his hand. Then a moment later he saw the attachment screwed into one knobbed end. It was a razor-sharp sickle about four inches in length. Like a silver eye, the steel winked in the moonlight.

Hardy returned to the tomb once more, and this time when he reached in, pulled out a wooden crate on rollers. From this crate he dragged another goat by the horns.

As Hardy struggled to get the animal over to the scaffold, the
zobop
with the machete knocked each dancer to the ground. They lay in a circle like hour strokes around the edge of a clock, each naked body on its back with its feet to the gallows pole.

Finished, the
zobop
joined Hardy. Together they dragged the goat, bleating and struggling, between two of the supine figures. Then hoisting the animal up, they hung it by its horns. The goat was left thrashing about, fear riveting each eye.

Hardy passed the bone with the sickle attachment to the
zobop
and returned to the tomb. After a nod from the old woman he began to collect the masks, stuffing each one carefully into a large black bag. Spann wondered if that was the same bag as the one for Damballah the Snake. The thought, however, was snapped off when she heard the unearthly gibberish of an animal unhinged by pain.

Her eyes jerked to the gallows.

The
zobop
had handed the
zombi
the bone with the sickle on the end. The
zombi's
arms were red. The sharp silver crescent of the sickle was streaked with dripping blood. The
zombi
—
once given the weapon and the order—had staggered over to the hanging goat and ripped its belly open. A mass of raw viscera had tumbled out of the gaping wound. The thin legs of the animal were now jerking and quivering, kicking the gray cords of intestine that dangled down to the ground. The goat turned on the scaffold as the moon shone down.

Even at a distance, Scarlett and Spann could see into the red maw of the cleaved belly where glossy tubular glands and bulgy membranes slid about, the entrails still palpitating. The screams of the animal were now climbing to a terrible pitch. It was like a wild cry that burst up and out until something in the tortured throat tore, and the wail trailed away to the hiss of a hoarse whisper.

The
zombi
reached into the cavity and pulled out the animal's guts. Then slowly the Undead creature began to drape the ropes of steaming intestine across the upturned faces of the voodoo dancers circled on the ground around the scaffold.

"Damballah," someone whispered, barely audibly.

Rick Scarlett felt light-headed. Nearby a fly buzzed, its sound a little too loud.

The goat jerked and died.

As the stretched-out dancers covered with gore now began to writhe in ecstasy, the two cops turned and looked toward the tomb.

Only then did they realize that John Lincoln Hardy had disappeared. With the bag over one shoulder, he had been swallowed into the grave of night like a stone sucked into quicksand.

Rick Scarlett tapped Katherine Spann on the shoulder.

"Let's get the fuck out of here," he whispered into her ear.

Less than a minute later, they too were gone.

10:35 a.m.

Banks of cloud swept north from the Gulf and the tropics. When the ball of the storm finally cracked open, a white flash of wavering light filled the horizon, showing up each leaf, each twig, each bough on the trees in stark black relief. An emphatic crash of thunder followed shortly after. As the storm drew closer to Moisant Field each lightning blitz was yellower than the last, each volley of thunder succeeding it at shorter intervals. Ultimately the brilliance and the noise met in one consummate explosion right above their heads—and the rain came down. The hood of the police car rumbled like a roll of military drums. For Scarlett and Spann the downpour made them both feel right at home.

Ten minutes later the rain stopped and Ernie Hodge, head ducked, lumbered out through the Air Express door of the cargo building.

The sudden calm was deceiving, however. For no sooner had the NOPD detective opened the rear door of the car than a wind almost tore it off its hinges. High above, the trees sighed and swayed and moaned.

"Je-sus Ke-rist!" Hodge exclaimed, yanking the handle shut. "What are we in for anyway, some sort o' typhoon?"

The rain began again.

"Why don't you fly anyway?" Luke Wentworth said. He sounded like he meant it.

"What's the situation?" Spann asked of Hodge.

"They're booked in, all right. Same flight as you guys, if the plane flies. Once you get to Seattle, they take a different route. They're not going to Vancouver."

"Where are they being shipped?"

"Spokane, Washington. According to the bill of lading."

The woman looked at Scarlett; Scarlett shrugged his shoulders.

"You're sure that's the package?"

"Says right on it; voodoo masks. Just how many shipments like that do you think they got on board? Of course it's the package."

"Okay," Spann said.

"If you think there's drugs hidden in them masks, why don't we scoop it right here? Drugs in a case smell as high as a bayou outhouse."

"No way," the woman said. "This is not a drug bust. It's a murder investigation. The masks stay put. Right, Luke?"

Wentworth didn't turn from looking out the window. Hf was still wearing his glasses though it was dark as sin outside. "It's your case," he said. And then the wind died down.

John Jefferson said: "You two had better get into the terminal. Otherwise the masks will fly and we'll still be yakking."

He put the car in gear and they all drove away. Ten minutes later they pulled up in front of the entrance to Eastern Airlines. They shook hands all round, just as they did on arriving. Then the two Canadians climbed out into a dying rain.

Just before she closed the door Spann turned to Wentworth. "Does it always rain like this down here?" she asked the FBI man.

"Sometimes," Wentworth said, not turning from the window.

"Too bad," Spann said. "I hate rain."

The last thing she saw as she closed the door was John Jefferson Jr., smiling.

The Ritual of Blood

Vancouver, British Columbia

Wednesday, November 10th, 10:25 a.m.

He could feel the pressure building. And he did not feel well at all.

Since 4:45 in the morning DeClercq had been working at breakneck speed. His greenhouse at home was now littered with books and files and a videotape machine. He had spent the hours before dawn reviewing every memo, interview, police report, picture and note of importance. Around him his roses were dying. Those which bloomed in the autumn—Erfurt and Eternal Flame and Ferdinand Pichard and Golden Wings— were showing the signs of neglect in their petals scattered about the floor.

At six he had left the house and driven down to Headquarters. The past hour and a half had been spent on the phone. First he had heard from Victoria where the A-G was calmly wondering, "Just what the fuck's going on?" The Mayor of Vancouver had called to say that she was sick and tired of questions and henceforth would be directing all press inquiries to him. Then Chartrand had phoned from Ottawa to see how he was doing. It seems the Opposition in the House of Commons had been giving the Government a rather rough time, so the Minister responsible was putting pressure on him.

"Men and equipment, Robert. Requisition whatever you need."

The work and the politics, however, were not what was bothering him. For though he was careful not to vocalize his fear, DeClercq was almost certain that soon the Headhunter would strike again. If his previous pattern set the pace he had already waited too long. The thought terrified the Superintendent no matter how calm he tried to be. For if a riot had followed the last killing, what would come this time.
Go on, admit it,
his mind said.
You're afraid of another taunt!

Robert DeClercq sat at his desk and opened another file.

The case was turning bad. To start with the sweep and its aftermath had become a paper chase. Not one of the sex offenders picked up had in any way panned out. Matthew Paul Pitt was still their best suspect, yet Special O after several days had nothing to report. Pitt spent each day and every night front row center in the strip clubs. During the day he slept in the bushes of Stanley Park.

Equally disturbing, John Lincoln Hardy had disappeared. It had been two days since Spann and Scarlett had returned from New Orleans. DeClercq had read their report on the voodoo ceremony and the follow-up memos again and again. The Squad knew that Hardy had returned to Canada by a flight from the USA into Calgary, Alberta. They knew that the parcel of masks had gone to Spokane, Washington. But Hardy had somehow slipped away and vanished into thin air. Now all they could do was wait.

DeClercq was almost tempted to throw the entire investigation on to the cases of Pitt and Hardy. In other words to make the same mistake that the British had over the alleged Yorkshire Ripper tape. But he resisted the temptation, knowing full well that it was born out of desperation.

God!
DeClercq thought.
Why did I ever take on this case?

Then he remembered Janie. Why, oh why, he asked himself, was she always in his mind? At least when he was writing, the more he went into history the more he forgot the past.

He pushed the thought aside violently and tried to concentrate on the case. When he made a note he noticed that his handwriting was degenerating. That his hands were shaking. Suddenly he felt very tired. He shook himself sharply and looked at the corkboard.

Then he opened a drawer and dug to the back where he had hidden his prescription for Benzedrine. He took another one.

11:41 a.m.

"Damn," Rick Scarlett said. "What a colossal fuck-up."

He knew it had been a mistake and that it was a big one.

They figured the voodoo cult in New Orleans was centered around the Haitian matriarch, her two sons and their cousin. One of her sons was Rackstraw. now living in Vancouver; the other was the
zobop
who controlled the ceremony. John Lincoln Hardy, the cousin, was the white sheep of the family.

The voodoo cult in New Orleans was run to make some money. Like that of Marie Laveau so many years ago, it was based in the slums of the city where the most converts would be found. The group sold tricks and spells and dolls and operated the drugstore. Who knows, perhaps they had a chain of pharmacies all across the States.

As with all long-founded religions, there was a core of lunatics waiting for the Messiah. Now she had come from Haiti and they had gathered around. In exchange for the ceremonies to satisfy their blood-lust, the old crones supplied the voodoo masks which had probably been in their families for several generations.

The Wolf had remained in New Orleans to oversee the cult, but Rackstraw—the Fox, as he was known on the taps—had decided to set out on his own and for some reason chose Vancouver. Perhaps black competition was too tight in the States. Perhaps because his scams were doing well.

Rackstraw was into corporate fraud, land deceit, music industry kickbacks and now the traffic of cocaine. The co-caine was hidden in the masks and brought across the border, The drug was removed and dealt in Vancouver while the empty masks were recycled in the Voodoo Chile performance. Part of the drug sale profits no doubt went back south Of the border and into the hands of the
zobop
and Mama.

It was the theory of Spann and Scarlett that John Lincoln Hardy, the Weasel, had been making his living in New Orleans off the profits of prostitution. The taps seemed to how that he held his girls by a combination of drug addiction and a pervading fear of his "hoodoo."

As Spann said: "After what we saw in New Orleans, that man could keep
me
in line too!"

Hardy had now for some reason also arrived in Vancouver. Perhaps Mama had sent him to learn a thing or two from her son From what they could tell, when Hardy hit town he was living the role of a lowlife, so perhaps Mama was out to kick her nephew out of a skid. Perhaps he'd been fucking up.

So Hardy hits town and takes a room down near skid road. With him he's also brought Helen Grabowski aka Patricia Ann Palitti. She's peddling her ass for money while he gets Ins trip together. "No doubt," Spann had theorized,
"he starts the girls on coke and then adulterates it with junk. Once he's got their noses hooked he jabs them in the mainline. The first thing he did on hitting the city was seek out a connection to get junk for his whore. In the end the man he finds is Joe Winalagilis, our Indian. Hardy connects with his cousin and soon he's on the way up. Rackstraw puts him to work as his cocaine go-between."

Meanwhile, however, unknown to the cousins, Tipple out of Commercial Crime was into his investigation.

So the flying patrol gets on to Hardy and . . .

"Damn! We had to lose him!" Rick Scarlett exclaimed.

"You know," Spann said, "if we're right and Hardy is a skinner using this voodoo trip as a blind, or even if the murders are part of the ritual itself, we're going to look awfully silly if another body shows up. People are going to ask why."

"Do you think he takes the heads in order to traffic in the skulls? Do you think that's his reason?"

"Who knows?" the woman said. "Perhaps he just wants to fuck them and kill them and takes the skulls as a sideline. Maybe he's into some personal ritual of his own. Maybe the bones go Stateside and into the voodoo market. Or maybe the bones end up on the ground out on that bayou island. Anything's possible."

"Okay, let's say Grabowski crosses him and becomes his second victim. Perhaps he has no need for her once he connects with Rackstraw. Perhaps he's pissed off cause she gets herself busted and raises his profile in town. She's an alien working the streets and that's bound to draw him heat. So assume all that, what about the bones in North Vancouver? What about Liese Greiner?"

"Maybe he was up here once before trying to find Rackstraw and didn't make a connection. Perhaps he killed her then. Or maybe Rackstraw did it and they're in this together. Like the allegation about a Hillside Strangler team."

"And maybe killing is now in his blood and he's unable to stop it. Damn! What a colossal bummer. Why did we have to lose him?"

"Because we played this tail too loose, that's why. We should have bugged those masks. We should have followed Hardy instead of counting on him to call Rackstraw when he returned. We should have had the FBI stake out that air freight office in Spokane to see if someone picked up the masks. We should have done a lot of things which stupidly we didn't. We shouldn't have been so smug."

"I wonder where those masks are now?"

"Maybe they're crossing the border hidden in among a museum consignment."

"Maybe they're being trucked in through the wilds of the Rocky Mountains."

"Wherever they are they were picked up and we lost them in Spokane."

"So what are we going to do?"

"Let's have a talk with Tipple," Katherine Spann suggested.

"I'd rather go find Rackstraw. He knows where Hardy is. They're his masks and the stuff is his cocaine."

"What good would that do? It would only tip him off. He didn't talk last time. He won't talk now."

Kick Scarlett smiled and looked her straight in the eye.

You don't know me, Kathy. I won't be played for a fool. The next time we see Rackstraw, believe me, I'll
make
him talk."

"I do believe you're serious. Let's find Tipple."

Ottawa, Ontario

5:.30 p.m.

At half past five on that dark afternoon Commissioner Francois Chartrand left his office at RCMP Headquarters. As usual he strolled slowly along the crowded streets of the capital, watching the civil servants queue up for buses as ambassadors in long black limousines swept by. It was the time of day that Chartrand savored, so when he reached the parliament buildings he found himself an empty bench on the conncourse out front and sat down to relax. Lighting another Gauloise, he inhaled the smoke in deep.

Before leaving his office that afternoon the Commissioner had received yet another call from Edward Fitzgerald. The Minister was phoning to tell him that the Opposition in the

Commons would not let the matter die; they wanted to know exactly what was being done to ensure that the Headhunter was caught before he struck again. The Solicitor General was jumpy. "Francois," he had said, "I tell you we cannot afford another killing. Not one more."

This particular call had not disturbed Chartrand greatly: it was all a part of the job. There were those who thought the Commissioner no more than a figurehead, a man put out to semi-retirement as Commander of the Force. All one had to do, they said, was sit behind a large desk with so many levels strung out below that every problem was resolved before it reached the door. But Chartrand knew different.

To Francois Chartrand his job was one of awesome responsibility. For as he saw it he was one man assigned the duty of protecting an entire nation. In Canada if something went wrong it was
his
responsibility. And something was very wrong now.

Chartrand was bothered by his last call to Robert DeClercq.

There was nothing to put his finger on, other than perhaps a certain tone that came through in the Superintendent's voice, but the Commissioner was far too shrewd a leader not to know that every man at war has a breaking point. It was fair to say that the Force was now facing a challenge far out on its western flank that was quite unlike any war that it had ever fought before. The difference was that public hysteria was mounting at a mathematical rate. Chartrand was receiving reports. He knew that incidents of violence involving women in Vancouver were exploding in number, mostly over-reaction to minor situations. People were frightened. That fear was building every day the killer wasn't caught. And every day the pressure on DeClercq screwed up a notch.

Chartrand was worried that Robert DeClercq might be near that breaking point.

It had happened to the man who led the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. It could easily happen in Vancouver.

What am I doing in Ottawa? 
the Commissioner asked himself.
The true place of a General is with his men in the field.

Then Chartrand reached for a cigarette and knew he had made up his mind.

Tomorrow he'd go to Vancouver; tomorrow he'd meet with DeClercq. It was time to troop the colors. And to bring out the uniform.

Vancouver, British Columbia

Thursday, November 11th, 3:45 a.m.

"Sparky."

"Shut up! Go away! Fuckin' leave me alone!"

"Sparky, now really, is that the way you talk to your mother?"

"You're dead! Get lost! I know you can't be here!"

"Sparky, I'm waiting for you. Come down and stroke my hair.

"No!"

"Soft, soft, so soft—and how long and black it is. Black, black, black, child. Black as the time of night.

"Mother, why must you torment me? Why won't you leave me alone!"

"Because I love you, Sparky."

"No you don't. You make me do awful things."

"Sparky, how can we have pleasure—unless we also have pain?"

"Well, I won't do what you ask!"

"You'll do anything I say."

"No I won't."

"Yes you will."

"No I won't."

"Then I'll tell "

Silence.

"It makes no difference to me, Sparky. I'm well-hidden away. It's you who they'll cage like an animal. And you'll have no one to talk to. They'll all think you're weird."

"I'll find someone else."

"Bullshit, Sparky. You know that isn't possible. I've fixed you so that I will be the only lover you ever have."

"I hate you, Mother! You hear that? I hate, hate, hate . . .
AUUGGHH!
"

"Now will you do what I say?"

"Oh, please, no, no, no. Don't do that a .
. .
 
AUUGGHH!
"