just use a sea dump like Grabowski?
2. Does bruising to vagina mean sex attack? Is vertical stab to the throat made during intercourse? Sexual stimulation connected to female death throes? Slash to the breasts significant as mother mutilation?
3. Was Grabowski picked up hooking by a sadistic client? Perhaps the North Van girl too? Perhaps, but then Portman doesn't fit. Drugs?
4. What about John Lincoln Hardy aka "The Weasel"?
5. Connection with New Orleans?
DeClercq once more got up from his chair, crossed over to the wall, and scanned the papers and reports pinned there.
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
2. Does bruising to vagina mean sex attack? Is vertical stab to the throat made during intercourse? Sexual stimulation connected to female death throes? Slash to the breasts significant as mother mutilation?
3. Was Grabowski picked up hooking by a sadistic client? Perhaps the North Van girl too? Perhaps, but then Portman doesn't fit. Drugs?
4. What about John Lincoln Hardy aka "The Weasel"?
5. Connection with New Orleans?
DeClercq once more got up from his chair, crossed over to the wall, and scanned the papers and reports pinned there.
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
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