Most mornings DeClercq would then pour himself another coffee, dress for the weather and go out through the back door of the greenhouse and down to the edge of the sea. There he would sit very still in the old driftwood chair on a knoll above the ocean, the sundial at his left, and think about the day's work while he awaited dawn. Only when the eastern horizon was ablaze with shafts of glory would he return to the greenhouse, to the wicker chair, and place the clipboard on his knee.
That, of course, was most mornings. Today was different.
DeClercq put the kettle on and ground the coffee as usual, then he went to the closet in the spare bedroom and took his
uniform down from the rack. For eleven years it had hung there, unused and untouched. Finding a soft-bristled brush, he sat down on the bed and with short brisk strokes removed the lint of a decade from the dark blue serge. He pressed his trousers and shined his shoes. Then sitting in the greenhouse with his first cup of coffee, Superintendent Robert DeClercq polished each brass uniform button until it gleamed in the light from the desk lamp. Only then did he return to the spare bedroom and put the blue serge on.
The man who stared back at him from the closet mirror was a man who had not been seen since the Quebec October Crisis of 1970.
Twenty minutes later when DeClercq closed the front door and stepped out into the dark, the chill of autumn was in the air and maple leaves scraped the ground. For a fleeting moment his mind was touched by a sense of deja vu, a pale glimpse of that other autumn many years ago, of dead leaves in a moaning wind moving through the graveyard — but he shook it off sharply and began to climb the driveway. He had parked the cars up near the road after the freak snowstorm. He warmed up the engine of his Citroen, then drove off down Marine Drive and toward the center of town.
Dawn was yet an hour and a half away.
6:35 a.m.
They had set up Headhunter Headquarters in the old Command Building of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Located at the corner of 33rd Avenue and Heather Street, this was a structure of massive stone blocks and acute-angled timbers that very much resembled an Elizabethan mansion. The Maple Leaf was flying on the flagpole outside. Once the Vancouver Headquarters of the Force, the building had more recently found use as an officers' mess and a police training academy. Even more recently it had been gutted, and was now in the process of reconstruction. Gutted or not, however, it still looked from the outside like a Headquarters should. That's more than could be said for the real Headquarters building up on 73rd. It looked like a transistor.
It was now just after 6:30 a.m. and a light rain overnight had washed the mist from the air and left the lights of the city sparkling like diamonds on black velvet.
As DeClercq walked toward the doorway at the front of the Headquarters building the air felt crisp and clean within his lungs and the freshness of the morning seemed to add a clearness to his sense of purpose. It had been a long time since he was last a cop. It feels good to be back,he thought.
The first day of his resurrection — October 29th, the morning of Chartrand's call — DeClercq had met Sergeant Jack MacDougall of North Vancouver Detachment and Corporal James Rodale of Richmond Detachment to form the second Headhunter Squad. Earlier that morning while the Sergeant was overseeing the investigation out at the totem poles in front of the Museum of Man, Rodale had done a computer projection of the manpower available to the Force. A printout on the background and service record of each member in "E" Division was ready by noon that day.
That same afternoon, DeClercq, MacDougall and Rodale had put together the Squad. Then the duty calls had gone out.
The second day of his comeback DeClercq had spent shut up in his new office working over the files. He had read, digested, culled, and reconstructed each report on each crime at least seven times. The room now showed his work.
The office was at the end of a corridor that met the top of the stairs. A spacious room, thirty feet square, with a bank of windows along one side that looked out at St. Vincent's Hospital across 33rd, it had once been an officer's billiard room and an adjunct to the mess. But whatever purpose it had once served, it had now been modified to DeClercq's specific instructions. For on the first day of his resurrection — while he had been putting together his squad — a team of workmen had stripped the place and then reconstructed the three windowiess walls with floor to ceiling corkboard. And it was the Headhunter's work that now adorned the corkboard walls.
For furniture the office contained three Victorian library tables arranged in a horseshoe surrounding a single chair. The chair — which had once been at the center of the commanding officer's quarters generations ago and only just discovered in the basement — was highbacked with a barley-sugar frame and the crest of the RCMP carved in wood to crown its user's head. The chair faced six seats in front of the desk.
It was now 6:46 a.m. on the third day of the return of Robert DeClercq — and it was time to take off his jacket and sit in the chair and analyze yesterday's work. It was time to ride out on the hunt for the ghoul who was standing in the graveyard.
DeClercq sat down and rolled up his sleeves.
At the center of the wall across from his chair a large map of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia was pinned to the corkboard.
Next to it was a section of wall visually depicting the North Vancouver murder. In the center the Superintendent had pinned the unidentified Polaroid photograph sent to Skip O'Rourke at the Vancouver Sun. The Polaroid had itself been photographed and blown up, but though this enlargement was also on the wall it was too grainy in texture to add very much. The photo was of a young woman's head — she was probably in her teens. Her eyes were rolled back into her skull with just the barest trace of pupil moon peeking out beneath the eyelids. Her hair was black and tangled and matted with blood, her mouth open slackly as if stopped in a scream. Shreds of skin at the base of her neck dripped gore and curled toward the pole like several thin snakes.
What struck DeClercq was the fact that except for the head and the top of the pole on which it had been stuck, the photograph revealed nothing. No ground. No backdrop. Just a white surface as though the snap had been shot facing a linen sheet set up to highlight the head and the pole. A specially constructed pose,was the thought that entered his mind.
To the right of the Polaroid of the victim's head, DeClercq had attached two helicopter shots of the area around the bone site. They both revealed the North Shore hillside from about two hundred feet. With a sharp eye it was possible to make out the tattered tent half hidden by the bushes.
To the left of the Polaroid photograph, beside the police blowup, DeClercq had yesterday tacked up four Ident. Section pictures taken on MacDougall's orders. Two of the photos were shots of the shallow creekbed grave. Though the bones could clearly be seen, the amount of dirt dug away from them by the two girls' father — plus the statements later taken from the three of them — indicated that before the disturbance the remains had been hidden from sight. The creekbed was clogged with autumn leaves and broken branches, several of which appeared to have been cut and placed over the grave. One of the other two Ident. shots was of the cut ends of several of these branches. On later examination, the police lab had found striation marks identical to those discovered by Dr. Singh on the neck bones of the river floater and of the skeleton in question. The fourth photograph was a blowup of the marks on the upper neck of the unidentified corpse where the head had been cut from the body.