What was it Christ had said? he thought." Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." So where does that leave me? Are those men damned who have seen too much and therefore cannot accept him?
Robert DeClercq went home.
Riot Dawn
It hit like a plague, the fear that came in a wave with the morning papers. Then from mouth to mouth it spread like a virus uncontrolled throughout the city.
In a banner headline from every newsbox The Province informed each working citizen HEADHUNTER STRIKES AGAIN in 96-point type. The subhead screamed out NUN AS FOURTH VICTIM.
There are times when information is dispersed at lightning speed, but only once since the end of the Second World War had it spread so fast in this city. That was the day that President Kennedy took a bullet to the head.
The panic that came along with the fear showed itself in a number of ways. All of them edged in black.
7:00 a.m.
Artie Fripp drove down to the warehouse to count his profits. All of his staff as usual had the first of November off.
Fripp parked his Corvette behind the building in the space marked "President" and entered the warehouse through the rear door. Weaving among the shelves of merchandise, he made for his small front office. Business this particular Halloween had been even better than expected: monster masks had sold out, makeup kits had sold out, fireworks had sold out, trick-or-treat candy sales were up a whopping 31 percent. It looked as if Artie Fripp would once again winter in the Caribbean.
As he passed the section of his warehouse reserved for pornographic supplies — the soft-core paperbacks and sexual toys that sold so well in the winter — Fripp was smiling to himself, thinking of all the jerks who put out money for this junky titillation while he, dressed in Bermuda shorts under the tropical sun, got a real eyeful of almost-naked female flesh. Titillation, Fripp thought,now that's my kind of word. Any word that starts with ' 'tit' 'is…
And that was the moment that Artie Fripp, president of Get-A-Whiff Productions, stepped on a twelve-inch dildo left lying on the floor and instantly was airborn. The dildo was one of those electric types sold under the byline of "hum a different tune." During the party last night after work the staff had used it for their own version of that time-honored game known as "spin-the-bottle." Someone it seems had forgotten to put it back on the shelf.
So that was how Artie Fripp found himself flying with arms akimbo down the pornography corridor of his Burnaby warehouse, past the penis-shaped cigarette lighters sold as "Flick My Dic," past the stacks of paperback books like Hump Happy,whizzing by cartons of "Prolong Cream" and "Lustfinger," and "Hap-penis," zooming by a special display platform of "Anal Intruders" complete with batteries and an additional free "Butt Plugger," finally crashing into a four-tiered plywood shelf stocked with lifesize "Johnnie The Bucking Stud" and "Suzie Your Wild Teen Nympho" dolls, wrenching his back in the process.
"Oh, shit!" Fripp screamed as the pain spread out from his spine, for he had just injured the same vertebra that he had dislocated last year in Vegas while trysting with a blond show girl by the name of Belinda.
It took Fripp more than five minutes to drag himself to the nearest telephone, and it was just as he was about to pick up the receiver to call hospital emergency that the instrument rang. This particular telephone was reserved for his bookie so it was a single line.
Fripp grabbed it and groaned into the mouthpiece: "Call me a doctor and get the fuck off this circuit. I might not walk again!"
"Hey, Artie, it's me. The Flashman. At Play-It-Safe
Security."
"Get me a doctor, Flashman. My sex life is in danger. Minutes count."
"Artie, Artie, baby. No time for that. You read the morning rag. Some nun got iced. My phone's been ringing off the hook for those lipstick alarms. The ones that screech like a banshee."
"Flashman, you prick. I'm dyin'. Now get the hell off…" "I'll take two thousand to start, with an option on two thousand more."
"Flashman, you jerk…" But suddenly, Artie Fripp shut up. He had just remembered that the mark-up on those lipstick alarms was 400 percent.
"When?"
"Now!"
"Cash on the line?"
"If I get 'em right away. I just drew up an ad to run in the afternoon rag. Catch the panic before it breaks."
"Okay," Fripp said. "Call me back in five minutes."
As soon as the phone was free it rang again — then again — then again — for Artie Fripp did a sideline business in Mace, pepper squirters and whistles.
By 11:00 a.m. all of his staff were back on the job at double pay filling an endless stream of orders. It was only then as he sat in his office smiling at the green numbers in the little window of his Japanese calculator that Fripp remembered the pain in his back and his need to see a doctor. Who knows, maybe this year he should forget the Caribbean. Go a bit further afield, like the French Riviera.
Yeah! Fripp thought as he picked up the phone. Like the Riviera. The broads go topless there.
8:05 a.m.
Avacomovitch was finished.
The room stank of Krazy Glue and his head was light from the chemical as he stood up, stretched, rubbed his eyes with the backs of his giant hands and strode over to the open window to get a breath of fresh air. Outside a bird was singing.
After a few minutes of deep breathing he returned to his workbench in the room at Headhunter Headquarters and picked up the treated pumpkin. He was pleased with himself, for the prints he had lifted were three in number and each of them was perfect.
Now if only — hope on hope — the person with those fingerprints also had a record.
9:00 a.m.
The Dragon Kung Fu Studio was located on Marine Drive in the heart of North Vancouver. It had been open for business the sum total of three days, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at the end of the previous week. The sole proprietor and only employee was a young man of twenty-six named Bruce Wong whose greatest disappointment in life was that he had not been born Bruce Lee.
On Friday, October 29th, Wong had put an ad in the Sunday edition of the North Shore News to announce his grand opening.
That Monday morning when Wong arrived at his studio he had the sum total of two clients recruited the week before.
By twelve noon when the phone circuits finally overloaded and blew, he had signed up another four hundred — all of them women.
At 12:07 Bruce Wong ran next door to the barber shop to use the phone and try to rent larger space.
9:40 a.m.
"Okay," Chan said with determination. "Let's run it by one more time."
The Inspector was standing at the blackboard in the parade room at Headhunter Headquarters. MacDougall was off to his left. The members of the Central Corps of the Squad were seated on the chairs.
"The first thing to know is that our Computer Command has been assigned the highest priority rating in the country for tapping the Ottawa data base. This will give us an immediate sketch of criminal activity in any part of the province or the criminal history of any particular offender.
"The second thing to know is that our civilian programers have transferred an indexing system generated specifically for this investigation to one of the IBM machines in Ottawa. I generated this particular program myself on one of our local computers. Here's how it works.