Headhunter

formed and had it been reported by the press that he was in command, than the Headhunter had sought him out and paired off for a fight. Why? DeClercq wondered. There's some special reason. What is it? Some personal link to the Force?

At the moment he had no idea.

It bothered him in the same way that the pose of the last two bodies nagged at his mind, and the feeling of pose he got from the Polaroids of the heads. There was something going on here that didn't meet the eye. The Headhunter wanted something more than the thrill that came from the killings. DeClercq was sure of that.

So what's the missing motive?

I don't know.

For a long time he sat there contemplating this problem and a host of other ones. Eventually the sun came up and burst upon the onyx waters, highlighting the crest of each raging Pacific wave. A cormorant swooped out of the sky and knifed cleanly into the sea, diving for something unseen beneath the chilling surface. When it came up, its bill was empty.

The Superintendent stood up.

During the motion it occurred to him that from his very driftwood chair he could see the sites of all four murder scenes, or at least where the bodies were found. The thought didn't please him: it was like another taunt. Off to his right the Point Atkinson Lighthouse winked.

Slowly DeClercq climbed the path back up to the house. Once inside he stripped off his clothes now wet with spray, dressed again and took a second coffee back out to the greenhouse. There he picked up Lazarfeld's Woman's Experience of the Male and turned to the marked section.

For the next two hours DeClercq read, diving for something unseen beneath the chilling surface.

Outside, pale sunshine beat down upon the words etched in a circle around the sundial's edge. The words said: The time is later than you think.

5:20 a.m.

Avacomovitch felt like a ghoul.

His frame of mind no doubt came from the fact that he was standing alone in the center of one of the autopsy rooms at Lions Gate Hospital surrounded by a couple of bodies, each at a different stage of putrefaction and decay. But that wasn't all of it: he had done this before.

More than anything else, Avacomovitch's frame of mind came from the time of day.

For never before, with the black of night outside the windows closing in on him, with the stillness of a deserted laboratory surrounding him, had the scientist worked alone in a room among the rotting dead. The stench was nauseating, so he wore a chlorophyll mask on his face. In one hand he held a magnifying glass and in the other hand a scalpel. And it didn't help matters that in the four hours that he had been here, two new residents had been wheeled down from the hospital, toe-tagged, and tucked into drawers. This place gave him the creeps.

From somewhere something unknown sighed, and the air conditioning groaned.

A water tap was dripping.

Far off in another wing was the soft sound of laughter.

The scalpel scraped on bone.

Turning to the bones from the hillside, he pushed the corpse of the nun aside.

It was necessary for Avacomovitch to work at this time of the morning in order to gain access to the lab; come dawn the pathology section of the hospital would be reclaimed by the living.

Earlier he had been to Richmond General Hospital to examine the remains of Helen Grabowski. He had found nothing there.

The body of Joanna Portman was still in the process of being returned. The scientist half expected it to be carried into the morgue by Messieurs Burke and Hare.

Compared to Dr. Kahil Singh, Avacomovitch had taken the North Van remains in reverse order: least to most ugly. He had X-rayed the corpse of the nun to find any metal fragments, and then had used ultrasound equipment to scan the soft body tissue for non-metallic particles. As far as he could tell from analyzing the screen pattern, the sound waves that were penetrating the flesh were bouncing back from nothing but bone.

That left the hillside skeleton.

For half an hour Joseph Avacomovitch traced the pattern of injury recorded on the skeleton and compared what he found to the X-rays of Liese Greiner sent by Interpol. The match proved almost identical. There were several cracks in the femurs of both legs and a break in the fibula and tibia of the left one; the part of the ilium on the left side had been fractured as had the left humerus. There was a crack in the left ulna although the radius hadn't broken.

It was while Avacomovitch was running his magnifying glass over the bones comparing and charting these fractures that he happened to also notice a hairline crack in the pubis. The pubis is the bone which forms the lower front of the pelvis. And it was in this particular fracture that the scientist found the splinter.

The splinter was minuscule and dull black in color.

The fracture in which it was lodged was not on the X-rays sent by Interpol.

That of course meant little: it could have been caused when the bones were kicked up by the little girl.

Is it from the sole of a shoe?Avacomovitch wondered.

Perhaps a piece of bark? Or picked up in the moving to the hospital morgue?

Whatever it was it was all that the scientist found that morning.

When the first pathologist came on duty with the light of dawn, the Russian asked him for a small glass plate and a pair of tweezers in order to prepare a slide.

The Hippie

On the Santiago River, Ecuador, 1969

'Wanta do some acid?'

'Huh?'

'LSD. Wanta do some?'

'Oh… uh… no… no, I don't think so.'

Selena cocked her head to one side, arching her right eyebrow. 'What's the matter. Sparky? Why the hesitation? You have done dope before, haven't you? I mean you can't be that straight.'

'Yeah, I've done drugs.'

'Well then…' Selena said, shrugging her shoulders. 'I mean acid ain't a turn-down, now is it? It's not like I'm offering you grass or coke or bombers or speed or something else like that. This is acid, babe. The ultimate. Straight from God to Owsley to me to you… I mean you have done acid before, haven't you?'

There was a pause of silence, then Sparky replied quietly, 'No. No, I haven't done that.'

'Well then, look at the living you're missin', the fun you've never had.' Selena chuckled. 'Try everything once I say. Don't you agree?'

There was a second pause of silence. Then with hesitation Sparky said: 'Yeah… yeah, I guess so.'

'Good! Then it's settled.' And with that Selena held out her hand. In her palm two small tablets of White Lightning were washed by the tropical sun. The woman wet the index finger of her other hand and touched it to one of the hits, then she transferred the drug on her fingertip to the end of her protruding tongue. Closing her mouth, she swallowed.

'Okay, now it's your turn. Go on. Sparky, take one.'

Taking the tab. Sparky examined it, swallowed it and waited for something to happen.

Nothing did.

The two of them had spent the previous day drifting lazily down the Santiago. As the afternoon wore on the sun leaned out of heaven to beat down harshly upon the surface of the water; a shimmering haze hung between the trees and a languorous smell of vegetation drugged Selena's senses. Occasionally Sparky would tap her arm and point to the riverbank.