Headhunter (31 page)

Crack in the Wall

3:30 p.m.

Where do
you
go when you're worried, when you need some time to think?

Francois Chartrand was worried, so he put on his coat, left the Westin Bayshore hotel by the back door and walked along the Seawall beside Coal Harbor until he reached Stanley Park.

As the Commissioner strolled through the afternoon chill, his collar turned up at the neck, he breathed in great lungfuls of air, exhaling slowly, slowly and willing himself to relax. When he reached the entrance to the park he saw an old man fishing off the dock near the rowing club. Two lovers were smoking a joint as they played with their reflections in a small pool left by the rain. Two old people, a man and a woman, were hunched together over a checkerboard on the ground. Leaves fell constantly from the trees and he could hear the sounds of the zoo.

Eventually Chartrand found a bench by the penguin pit. The walk had cleansed his mind, so he ambled over and sat down to think.

He was worried about DeClercq and felt guilty about him.

For there was no doubt in his mind now that it had been a very foolish move on his part to have brought the Superintendent back. He cursed himself for not having realized that the fissures created by the man's past were just too deep to have healed over even with twelve years. The fact that DeClercq was in torment was written all over his face, the way that his flesh hung from his bones.

So what am I going to do?

Pull Robert from the command and destroy his self-esteem?

Let him go on and allow this madman to slowly shred him to pieces?

He had to do something, that was
for
sure,
to
try and relieve the pressure. For Chartrand had spent his whole life
working with men at the line of combat. He knew all the signs, and he could see them building.

DeClercq was on that combat line. And Robert DeClercq was cracking.

4:15 p.m.

It was MacDougall's idea to draw lots to see who would go and who would stay.

The North Vancouver Detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was filled to overflowing with men and women all bedecked in their red serge uniforms. The men wore heavy scarlet tunics with stiff choker collars. Stetson hats, breeches, white lanyards, Sam Browne belts and riding boots and spurs. The women wore the tunic, turtleneck sweaters and long blue skirts. They all wore gloves. Some had stitched to their sleeves the insignia of appointment: rough riders and dog masters and bandsmen and lancers of the musical ride. Some wore the crown and firearm badges that set apart the distinguished marksmen. All wore the regimental badge of the RCMP.

It was no secret that Jack MacDougall was damn proud of the Force. It was also no secret that he expected every other Member under his command to feel exactly the same way. That was why he had ordered them to attend a dress rehearsal before proceeding from North Vancouver Detachment to the Parade.

"All right," MacDougall said. "Those who are going, polish your brass and form into groups of five. Those who are staying, hold the fort, and luck be with you next time."

They were just about to leave for their cars when a very excited dispatcher came running in from the radio room.

"Bad news, Inspector," the man said. "We got another one."

For a moment MacDougall hesitated, stunned, then he recovered himself and said: "You mean here? In our jurisdiction?"

"Looks like it. Number three. Up on Seymour Mountain. Found about forty-five minutes ago by two cross-country skiers."

Good God!
MacDougall thought.
Not here! Not again!

Then he held up his hand for silence among the Members gathered around him.

"Okay, let's roll," he said.

4:18 p.m.

"My, my," Genevieve stated, leaning against the doorjamb.

"Now I see why women used to go for a uniform."

DeClercq turned from the mirror and gave her a wan smile.

He was dressed in the blue serge of an RCMP Superintendent. "At the present rate of recruitment," he said, "we'll soon have more women in uniform than we do men."

"Well don't you turn the tables and fall for a woman dressed in red serge."

"I won't," he said as the telephone rang.

Together they moved to the living room where DeClercq picked up the receiver.

As she watched him listen, Genevieve saw her husband's face fall apart and his spirit disintegrate. She saw him swallow dryly and his shoulders actually slump. Instinctively she comprehended the news coming over the line.
Oh no, not another one. Please don't do this to him.

DeClercq put down the phone. "Don't wait up," he said.

4:53 p.m.

By the time Chartrand reached the murder scene it was swarming with uniformed Members. For a moment even he was surprised—all those years in the Force and here was his first red serge investigation.
It certainly gives one a sense of history,
he thought as he walked over to the body.

Robert DeClercq looked up from where he was squatting on his knees.

"It's a bad one," he said.

It wasn't that Inspector Jack MacDougall was any more hardened than the others, it was just that for him the outrage of the crime had no sexual element. When he looked down at Natasha Wilkes all he saw was the violence.

The woman lay spread-eagled on her back in the snow a yard from the bank of the river. On her feet were a pair of cross-country skis. Her legs were spread apart, the left boot four feet from its partner. The back half of each ski had been rammed vertically into the snow. The clothes on the lower half of the corpse had been ripped to shreds with a knife. Her pubic hair was matted with ice and blood. There was a long slash across her breasts, rending her jacket open. A great deal of blood had stained the snow, particularly in a wide pool circling out from the throat. Rivulets of red were still seeping into the Seymour River where they washed toward the sea. The head was missing.

As MacDougall watched Avacomovitch pick up what had replaced the skull, he thought:
DeClercq does not look well.

But if you mean, was it Mr. Hyde?— Why, yes, I think it was!

4:55 p.m.

Joseph Avacomovitch pulled on a pair of surgical gloves before he picked up the mug. It was sitting in the center of the pool of blood that had pumped out through the severed arteries and veins of Natasha Wilkes' throat. Careful not to smudge any latent prints, the scientist stood up and held it out.

The beer mug was the size of a large grapefruit and made from fine bone china. The porcelain had been fashioned into the face of W. C. Fields—that hard-drinking, misanthropic braggart with the big bulbous nose. Across this nose was pasted one word clipped from a newspaper. The word was:
Robert.

As Avacomovitch slowly revolved the mug in his gloved hand, Chartrand, DeClercq and MacDougall saw that its ceramic base was etched with an inscription: 
Never give a sucker an even break.

4:56 p.m.

Inspector Jack MacDougall broke the silence among them. "It's your command, Robert. Let's have the orders. My men are ready to move."

The Superintendent turned to him with anger in his eyes. When he spoke it was through teeth that were clenched with rage.

"Jack, I want divers in this river and I want every inch of it covered for a mile both up and down stream.

"I want a cordon with a diameter of 500 yards, no,make
that 1000. around this body and every ounce of snow sifted with a sieve.

"I want dog masters from around the mainland out here as soon as possible. Put a quarter of the dogs on search lost, a quarter on search small, and the other half on command to search large. They cover every square inch of this mountain until we know there's nothing here.

"I want a hands and knees search of every road for tire tracks and then a police dog follow-up. This killer arrived and left somehow and I want to know his route.

"I want choppers over this mountainside armed with infrared. The slightest change in temperature I want thoroughly investigated.

"I want a house-to-house with every cabin inspected, every owner interviewed.

"I want this woman identified
now
and I want her whereabouts traced. Have every person from the sweep reinterviewed as to exactly where they've been since she was last seen alive and do a computer match for any possible connection.

"Get out a media blanket calling for public information.

"As soon as the autopsy is completed, set up a funeral and spread the time and place around. Have a squad outside the service to photograph secretly whoever comes and goes. Have every motor vehicle license recorded for a quarter mile around.

"I want a running log computer enhanced hourly from Chan.

"I want
every
traffic ticket given out on the North Shore within the last twenty-four hours examined.

"Have someone contact the British cops on the Ripper Squad, the Atlanta task force, and the guys who got Son of Sam and pick their brains for any technique we're missing. If one of them wants to help, buy the man a ticket.

"I want the Attorney General called and a $100,000 reward posted by tonight.

"Get a couple of psychics here and see what they have to say."

DeClercq then turned to Chartrand. "Francois," he said, "I want triple the manpower."

"You got it," the Commissioner replied.

5:12 p.m.

"I think you'd better look at this," a voice from up above said.

Avacomovitch turned from the body of Natasha Wilkes and glanced back up the hill. Corporal Murray Quinn of North Van Ident. Section and a dog master named Ingersoll were crouched down on their haunches about halfway up the slope that led to the cross-country ski trail. They were squatting alongside the route where the woman had tumbled down. Ingersoll was rewarding his German shepherd. King.

The sense of smell of a German shepherd is a hundred times stronger than man's. A dog can detect odors that otherwise go unnoticed. A police dog is trained to always work into the wind. A dog will pick up any scent foreign to an area. A police dog works for only one reason and that is its master's praise. In the present case King was one of the more senior veterans of the seventy RCMP dog teams in Canada. Once told to search up the hill it had taken him less than ten seconds to find the three threads.

"What is it?" Avacomovitch asked as he came plodding through the snow.

"The dog's found these," Ingersoll said, interpreting the animal's actions and pointing to the broken branch of a bush growing out of the side of the hill. He turned a flashlight on it, for dusk was rapidly coming down.

Avacomovitch crouched near the snow, removing a clean laboratory envelope from his coat pocket as he did so. With a pair of tweezers he removed the three ripped threads from the bramble bush. After he stood back up, he held out the envelope to Ingersoll and Quinn.

The pouch now contained two black threads.

And a third one, scarlet red.

Friday, November 12th, 6:30 a.m.

They had worked right through the night.

Robert DeClercq felt as though his body was half numb and his mind was rapidly shrinking down inside a small protective shell that hoarded what was left of his reason. He moved about Headquarters restlessly, checking and rechecking each and every aspect of the investigation, yet nothing seemed to be in perspective.

In one room a wall was papered with graphs and maps. There was a chart for the ages of the victims; there was a chart for their heights and weights; there was even a chart which showed the temperature at the time that each victim had last been seen alive.

In another room a police artist was working with a psychic.

There were a number of sketches of the psychic's impressions already tacked up on the walls.

Every computer terminal was in use, with several officers lined up waiting for time.

Two men from BC Tel were hooking up fifty more telephones.

At Headquarters paper was mounting up. The days and days and days of repetitive, tedious work processing an endless flow of data—indexing, filing and cross-filing—was threatening to drown the building. To DeClercq it seemed as though each detail within the mass was mocking him personally, challenging his weary mind to fit the pieces together.

But still he worked on.

At 7:23 a.m. a report came in that a burglar caught in the act overnight by two women had been beaten to death with a fireplace poker and shovel. Both women were over sixty.

At 9:17 that morning Coquitlam Detachment arrested a gang of seven "slasher" girls who had spent the past ten hours ripping up the faces of six men—blinding two—with knives and the sharpened spikes of high-heeled shoes.

Then at 10:05 a.m. women began to mount a vigil.

Within an hour there were more than three hundred people standing outside the Headquarters building holding lighted candles. Before another hour had passed, that number had doubled.

Still those inside worked on.

6:07 p.m.

Commissioner Frangois Chartrand found DeClercq sitting in his office staring at the corkboard overview. Softly, he closed the door. Chartrand took a seat across from the Superintendent. He lit a cigarette.

"We've known each other a long time, Robert, so I'm going to be blunt with you. I have spent a night and a day reviewing your investigation. I have not found one thing that I would do differently, but I have discovered a number of techniques that would never have crossed my mind. You've mounted as fine a manhunt as I have ever encountered.

"Now Robert, I think you know that I have loved nothing else in life quite like I love this Force. I literally grow and thrive off our tradition. And I miss being in the harness.

"That's why I've come out here. Not to check up on you, not because of political pressure, but because I want to be an active part of this undertaking. Robert, this is what we're about—this Force, you and me.

"To tell you the truth, it feels damn good to be back. So look upon me as fresh reinforcements and let's work this one together. And the first thing that I suggest we do, is have you get some rest. Let me hold matters here at the fort and you take tomorrow off."

DeClercq shook his head. "I'm all right," he said. "Robert, please, as a friend, just do as I say. Don't make me have to order you not to come in tomorrow."

6:35 p.m.

The Superintendent left Headhunter Headquarters by one of the side doors. As he walked outside he noticed a knot of riot police hidden within an alcove out of sight of the crowd. They looked edgy.

For a moment as DeClercq climbed into his car he surveyed the size of the crowd. There were now more than three thousand candles burning out on the street.

As DeClercq drove away he thought to himself:
Come tomorrow morning they'll be calling for
my
head.