Helen Grabowski, also known as Patricia Ann Palitti, was an American heroin-addicted prostitute from New Orleans. Dr. Singh, in his report, estimated that her body had been in the Fraser River approximately a week. Just over a week before the body was found she had been arrested on a charge of junk possession while hooking near the Moonlight Arms. She had been released in the early morning and no one had seen her again. Rodale had done a blanket sweep through skid row questioning the street people and greasing the palms of the stoolies but all to no avail. As near as anyone could tell, Grabowski had been in Vancouver no more than three or four days. She had been identified from her mug shot by several working girls — and one or two had also tentatively fingered John Lincoln Hardy as being around from a rather poor stakeout photo wired up from New Orleans.
The follow-up from Louisiana did not advance things much further. Grabowski was a runaway from Topeka, Kansas — then a fresh-faced country girl. Her family had not heard from her since January 1980. At the beginning of April that same year she had been arrested in the city of New Orleans defrauding a restaurant of food. She had pleaded guilty and been given a suspended sentence. Though she had run up no subsequent record or charges, she and one John Lincoln Hardy, also known as "the Weasel," had been under suspicion of being involved in a prostitution ring. Four persons had been charged out of that investigation, but not Grabowski and Hardy. And that was it, the lot. New Orleans had sent up Grabowski's 1980 mug shot for fraud and a surreptitious undercover snapshot of Hardy taken from the back seat of a car.
So where did that leave the Headhunter Squad? DeClercq saw nothing but questions.
Unless these were random killings, what was the connection? Although it was not uncommon for the murderer of a particular person to attempt to mask his crime within the hysteria of a false psychopathic rampage, could that apply to Hardy given the short time he'd been in town? Not unless this was at least his second trip.
Was the most sound conclusion not the obvious one: Grabowski had been killed by a marauding john?
If so,DeClercq thought,then why Joanna Portman?
The Superintendent took one last look at the remaining photographs on this part of the wall. Above the Polaroid of Grabowski's head on a pole, he had yesterday pinned up both the Vancouver and New Orleans police mug shots of the woman. In both of them the fresh-faced innocence of a Kansas prairie girl was gone forever. Instead, all that remained was a wasted subservient woman. The final photograph was of her pimp — a black male with a receding hairline and a pencil-thin moustache whose massive shoulders were so thick that they totally usurped the space where his neck should have been.
It was now 7:55 a.m. and DeClercq was about to move on to the Portman killing with its macabre implications.
The focus of this section of the corkboard was a Catholic nurse's graduation photograph, all black hair and happy mirthful eyes.
She reminded DeClercq of his first wife, Kate, when she was young, and he turned his gaze away.
Outside, morning had set in with a wash of molten copper. Across 33rd Avenue the glass panes on the top two floors of St. Vincent's Hospital were dazzling sun-smeared mirrors.
"You're looking for me?" a voice asked from the door behind DeClercq.
"Am I?" the Superintendent asked, starting around.
"Yes," the man in the doorway said. "Somebody moved my hat and I think it was you. It was put down exactly the way it was found, only reversed around. Shows a person of precision, distracted by other things."
"Well, I declare. You must be the great Sherlock Avacomovitch," DeClercq said with a smile. "I've heard of you."
"Hello, Robert," the Russian said. "Long time no see. How about some breakfast? My treat."
"You're on," the Superintendent said — and that was the moment he saw it. Strange that he had not noticed the fact before; it was a detail of importance. He had been looking at Joseph Avacomovitch, having just turned from the window, and in that turning his eyes had brushed over the wall with the photographs of the two heads on the two poles and had then touched on Portman's picture. The section of corkboard reserved for the last crime was just off to the right of the door. It took about a second for the connection among the three pictures to register on his mind. Then his thoughts turned inward.
Avacomovitch was too sharp a man not to notice the signs. "What just struck you, Robert?" he asked of the Superintendent.
DeClercq was a moment coming around, then he pointed at the pictures of all three victims.
"Notice anything?" he asked the scientist.
For a moment the Russian thought. Then he nodded his head. "Yes. All three women have raven black hair."
Joseph Avacomovitch's background was unique.
He had been born in the Russian Ukraine of parents who worked on a rural collective. Both were slaughtered during the Nazi advance on Stalingrad when the boy was fourteen. Avacomovitch had been brought up by the state and selected early because of his academic brilliance for a first-class Soviet education. By the early 1960s when he was in his thirties he held four university degrees and was a leading forensic scientist in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Even then, the techniques that he developed were being recognized and picked up for use in the West.
In 1963 Moscow had sent him to the city of East Berlin. Shortly after President John F. Kennedy had made his statement" Ich bin ein Berliner!" to the ecstatic response of West Germans, the East German police had been confronted by a baffling series of homosexual slayings. In each case a middle-aged German man had been found sodomized and strangled, with both hands tied by rope to the sides of the neck. In the clutched hand of the fifth victim had been found a button from a Soviet soldier's uniform. The day that this news leaked out the East German Army had had to crush an anti-Russian riot. That night there had been a sixth victim, minutes before Avacomovitch had arrived.
It took the Russian scientist fourteen hours to break the case. He did it by examining a rope.
The first five murder victims had been found indoors. But the last one had been different. It had the same MO of sexual assault, trussing, and strangulation — but a second rope had been looped about the neck and the corpse tossed out through a fifth floor window above a darkened street.
Every rope has properties peculiar to its fibers. Avacomovitch found several points of fiber rotation twist. Then he discovered at the points of the twist flakes of either car paint or chrome plate. After two hours' work by chromatography he had isolated the vehicle year and make. It was a Nazi Volkswagen, vintage 1943.
Two hours after that East German Motor Vehicle Records had found the registration, for after the Soviet bombardment of East Berlin at the close of the Second World War there had not been that many intact Nazi vehicles left. Then an hour and a half later an East German was arrested. The KGB linked him to the American CIA. Avacomovitch linked him to the body hanging from the window. Then the case itself was closed — and passed on to Propaganda.
The points of stress and the location of the paint and chrome deposits on the rope used to hang the sixth victim indicated that the same rope had been tied around the vehicle's roof rack and then run down the back of the car and wound several times around one side of the bumper.
When the East German agent of the CIA had been arrested, an examination of his car revealed that one of two ropes used to support the right rear bumper had recently been removed and had gone missing. It was unfortunate, however, that the man never came to trial and that Joseph Avacomovitch was once more denied an opportunity to test his precision in a case. Inexplicably, the man had suffered a heart attack under KGB questioning — but not before he had blown a network of seventeen NATO spies.