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near her static electricity tingled Robert's skin.
    Magnetism , he thought.
    "Yesterday the corpse was cut from the frozen pool up north and flown here by bush plane." Zinc tapped the postmortem Polaroids around the preliminary report Gill had delivered just before the chief arrived. "The stiff was taken to VGH morgue."
    The body on the autopsy table was still a block of ice.
    "Internal examination is days away," said Gill. "I have to wait for the flesh to thaw at room temperature, to soften cells now hard with ice crystals. However, we do know the corpse is that of missing Idaho hunter Jed Vanderkop."
    Macbeth-pulled an X-ray from her carry case. "This was sent by Vanderkop's doctor in the States. His chest was X-rayed for pneumonia last year." Handing it to the chief to hold up to the light, she pulled another X-ray from her bag. "This we took yesterday in the morgue, to track the arrow through organs in the chest." Gill held the second X-ray up beside the first, pointing out forensic features to him. "Here, here, and here, dips in the ribs are the same. A rib cage is like a fingerprint. It differs from person to person. See the same fracture in both from childhood trauma? Plus, the corpse is missing the same phalange."
    "The head?" said DeClercq. "Is it his?"
    "Without bone structure that's impossible to tell by comparing it with photographs of Vanderkop. Skin DNA will have denatured during shrinking, but mito-chondrial DNA in the hair shafts will remain. Wait a month, and a DNA test will answer that."
    "Nothing quicker?"
    "Perhaps," Gill said. "We may be able to match the cut skin of the stump with the cut skin of the shrunken head."
    "Jigsaw pieces?"
    "If we're lucky. The shrinking will make it hard to compare, and the stump hasn't thawed yet. The cleaner the cuts, the more difficult to match."
    Again, Robert imagined them in the Holmes and Watson chairs, playing case puzzles off each other like a game of forensic chess.
    "Vanderkop was sodomized before he was killed. The act was rape, not consensual sex. In active homosexuals the anus is funnel-shaped. The tissue here was bruised, bleeding, and torn. See how the buttocks have thawed in the Polaroids? But an internal check for sperm is still days off."
    "Visualize the killing?"
    "Yes," she said. "Vanderkop was waylaid, stripped, and raped in the bush. Then he escaped, or was released naked for sport. Fleeing through icy woods slashed skin from his legs before he was brought down by an arrow to the heart. Then his head was chopped off with a machete or similar blade."
    "Why decapitate him?" queried DeClercq. "Unless to shrink the head sent here. Which begs the question, Why taunt me?"
    "To answer that," Gill said, "you'll have to ask a shrink."

Headhunter

    The North
    Sunday, January 7

    A snowy owl flitted through the somber gloom. Gray and murky twilight gripped the plateau. Into this vague immensity trudged two men, while meteors flashed across the dark northwestern sky. The indistinct glow of first dawn smudged the horizon to their backs, then gradually turned into a broader band of light. The hunted man was naked and fleeing for his life, facial features swollen around terrified eyes, the skin of his legs frostbitten and bleeding from the ice crust beneath knee-deep fresh snow. His senses keen to everything civilization steals from us, the hunter not too far behind was on the track of blood. Black mountains stretched away to all compass points, and wind whined through them with the sharpness of a knife. From somewhere to the north a prowling wolf howled as the snowy owl dropped, with talons spread, to pluck prey from the hoary woods.
    Winterman Snow was on the hunt.
    Like the owl and the white wolf, he was all white, too. He wore a white parka with a white hood, buried in the hole of which was his pale face. Gloves, and pants, and mukluks, and snowshoes were also white, so the only color about him was the RealTree camo on his Deer Hunter bow, and the soft-yellow