Fatal Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  The skittering, nebulous suspicions had taken on the complexity and color of a solidified and dreadful idea. While everyone else was busting their humps to bring in a maniacal killer, Dr. Archer was playing a sinister little game of his own right under their noses, so bent was he on being Luther Darius' heir.

  “Son of a bitch,” she muttered to herself.

  But doubts lingered. Could Archer have killed Darius for the top rung on the ladder here?

  Her mind was now racing faster than the computer, which was still refining the graphic display on the possible weapon used by the Claw.

  Darius found out. He somehow stumbled onto the fact there were two sets of teeth marks, after all, and therefore someone within his organization was, or had been, tampering with physical evidence. It all made sense.

  He suspected a number of people before getting around to Archer, but he finally had. Bringing this to light would ruin Archer's career forever. He'd never again see the inside of a forensics lab. Tampering with the medicolegal materials of the crime was against every precept of the medical examiner's office.

  Could it be? she asked herself. If so, how could she best prove it? No doubt, Archer had by now covered his tracks thoroughly.

  She could review the original autopsy tapes on every victim, cull through them for nuggets of information that might or might not lead to an obvious wrong done, but such an error could be seen as a mistake, a fumble or a bad judgment call. Even if she found out that Archer had ordered slivers of flesh taken before from each and every bite mark on the victims, the lab had such a jumble of tissue samples taken from so many bodies that she couldn't prove a thing, one way or the other. At best she might prove the NYPD coroner's office was guilty of being overburdened.

  The obvious goal to Dr. Archer's scheme was the moment when he, and he alone, would unveil telling evidence that would lead directly to the Claw. It had been Archer who was in control of all the chips. All this hidden beneath a veneer of the reticent, self-effacing, loyal and trusted assistant. It almost ranked with the nightmare of the Claw himself.

  Bastard, she thought. Or was it bitch? Had she been turned into a suspicious bitch by the years, by the terrible convolutions of the plots she had unraveled? By virtue of having seen so much mendacity, was she overly suspicious?

  Still, even if he hadn't actually physically pushed Luther Darius through that window, Archer may well have driven his superior to jump.

  This made her wonder anew about Darius' fall in the dressing area. Might they have had an argument? Might Archer have shoved Dr. Darius?

  It was all too perfect and all too mad. Darius' return marked a move back down the ladder for Simon Archer, just when Archer felt secure in the position he had yearned for, for so many years.

  The computer had become insistent, flashing a single graphic on and off at her, as if the machine were daring her to turn and look at it.

  She did so and came face-to-face with the actual claw used by the killer. It was a deadly, three-pronged prostheticlike attachment or glove that fit over the human hand. The killer had fashioned his own cougarlike claw, his own killing machine. Rychman had to see this.

  But Jessica was almost afraid to tell him her theory about Archer. He might think she was mad, especially since she'd already accused Darius of tampering with his own “sacrosanct” evidence for personal and professional gain. It had been Archer all along, but she'd been blind, or rather he had been invisible. Either way, she had no proof, only the gut-wrenching certainty of her intuition, and that wouldn't cut any ice with Rychman any longer.

  She got on the phone to Quantico and caught J.T. in the lab there. She asked twenty questions about how he had received the forensic materials from the NYPD, what kind of postal service was used, how it was boxed, how it was labeled and how many actual samples were forwarded to him.

  It all checked out. Archer had covered himself well. She began to feel like a drowning victim gasping for air. She started to hang up but stopped to make another request. “Oh, J.T., see what you can find out for me about a Dr. Simon Archer. You know, what schools he attended, where he worked before here, that sort of thing.”

  “Sure, Jess.” He knew her well enough not to ask why. When she wanted to tell him she would, but not before.

  “Call me when you've got it.”

  He hung up, and she was sure that she had thoroughly confused him.

  She dialed Rychman, who was out. She left a message for him to see her at the lab the moment he returned. Alone, she turned to stare at the computer replica of the deadly weapon used on the eight victims of the Claw.

  Somehow, she sensed that the body count was going to escalate, largely because police were being stymied by their own forensics people. As before, despite the so-called evidence, despite Dr. Ames' assessment of the killer's mind, she continued to believe there were two monsters at work in all this, and she felt it strangely scary that only she and, of course, the killers knew the truth about the Claw. One of the lab assistants was coming, a cup of coffee in one hand, the daily paper in another. Jessica shut off the monitor with the graphic detail of the claw as she watched Laurie Marks approaching.

  “Dr. Coran, have you seen this?” asked Laurie, her eyes wide.

  “What is it?”

  Splashed across the front page was Ovid's poem.

  “Christ, how'd the papers get hold of it? Damn!”

  She began scanning for the informant, but beneath Jim Drake's byline and all through the rutting piece, she saw only references to “sources” close to the investigation.

  “All hell's going to break loose,” said Laurie. “I hear Captain Rychman didn't tell the mayor's office or the C.R about the poem, and they just got it by the papers, and Rychman's on the warpath for whoever leaked it to the press.”

  Jessica's mind flashed on the image of Rychman choking Dr. Ames to death in his office. “I've got to find Rychman,” she said. But she first went back to her computer and pressed for the file menu, storing her information under a code known only to her. Impatiently waiting for the computer to run through its final program, she asked Laurie a few questions about Dr. Archer, about how he seemed around the office and the labs, especially lately.

  “Nervous, kinda touchy if you ask me, but who wouldn't be? I mean with this kind of an investigation going on, with Dr. Darius killing himself, and with the possibility of his having to take on—”

  “Has he ever asked you to do anything... questionable or anything that you've wondered about?”

  She hesitated. “Once...”

  The computer whine turned into a click, telling her that storage was complete and that she could now pop the disk and take it to Rychman. But now Laurie had her undivided attention.

  “Please, Laurie, it could be important.”

  “Well, once... maybe it was an accident... we were working late—”

  “Yes?”

  “And he... his hand just kinda grazed my... my breast... I... I don't think he meant anything by it, but maybe he did, but he... he just isn't my type.”

  Jessica's disappointment was painted in broad strokes across her face. “I'm off to locate Rychman.”

  “You... you won't tell him I said anything about... will you?”

  She shook her head, grabbed the computer disk, the autopsy tape and her cane before she rushed out. Laurie Marks frowned as she watched Dr. Coran march away, wondering to herself if the sometimes clumsy, sometimes callous Dr. Archer had hit on the FBI woman. Then she thought of some of the strange stories she'd heard about Archer, stories she'd never repeat to anyone—the kind of sick tales told about a lot of people in their profession.

  Nineteen

  Leon Helfer was hungry and tired; his head ached, his sinuses were clogged and he feared that soon the Claw would know what he had done. If his poem was discovered, and surely it would be, and if the news leaked out, the Claw would know. Even if the news didn't leak out, the Claw would know. Somehow he'd pluck it from Ovid's brain.

&n
bsp; Leon had just finished work for the day. His job was a boring one, filled as it was, from hour to hour, with the same mechanical process. And him like a robot for the duration of time he was in the factory. But it was a living, and it kept his mind off the Claw and off killing, off what he had become.

  It was his job to inspect pipe. The company made every kind of pipe known, from plumbing pipe to irrigation and city lines, some of the pipe large enough to walk through. The Claw might need to lower his head, but the average man could stand fully upright inside the largest concrete pipe the company made.

  Once the pipe was inspected for safety and quality-control purposes, it was loaded onto trucks and sent out into the world. Sometimes Leon felt that his work here was important, but the Claw made it clear that there was only one important task in Leon's life...

  Machine noises at the factory were deafening, so much so that Leon could talk at the top of his lungs to himself about the Claw and no one could hear. Sometimes he caught his coworkers staring, but he'd gotten used to that, and they'd gotten used to his talking to himself. Or so it seemed.

  Then suddenly today Mr. Malthuesen called him into his office and told him that he needn't come back; he said the company was facing hard economic times, and that layoffs were necessary. He said that he was sorry, and that he'd write him a letter to help him find another job, but that he could do no more.

  Leon thought it strange that only he was being laid off, especially since there were any number of men who had come to work for the company after he had, people he had seniority over. He guessed it was due to his behavior since his mother's death... since the Claw had come.

  Maybe the Claw had arranged for him to be fired.

  The Claw wanted all of his time... wanted him all to himself, wanted Leon to become Ovid twenty-four hours a day.

  That seemed quite possible. He would not put it past the Claw to visit Malthuesen in the night to convince him to fire Leon, so that Leon could devote himself completely to being Ovid.

  It made sense... made perfect sense...

  Now, home alone except for the dead remains surrounding him in every cupboard and cabinet, Leon awaited with mounting apprehension the Claw's certain arrival. He waited hour on hour for him to come, knowing that in having killed two victims the night before last, the Claw would be craving even more, and tonight he'd want to attack and take apart three, and maybe four victims next. This certainly seemed logical to him.

  The Claw would come when Leon least expected it.

  He'd better be prepared... better be a good Ovid.

  Better pray that the Claw was in a merciful mood.

  God help him if he had angered the Claw too greatly by planting the poem.

  The light-emitting diode of a digital clock began to get on Leon's nerves. He wondered what he'd do now without a job. He knew that if the Claw could get him fired from one job, it'd be a simple matter to keep him from getting another.

  The Claw most likely wanted Leon to use his days to increase the number of victims they could take. The Claw wanted the city to run with blood... wanted the skies to rain blood.

  And if Leon was not a good provider... a good Ovid, he'd become a good victim.

  As the night stretched on, Leon Helfer waited in dread anticipation of his master, his fears colliding with one another to form a knot of anxiety he thought would burst his brain, until late evening turned into morning, and he came to realize that the Claw wasn't coming.

  Going with only haphazard sleep where he sat with his knees to his chin in a corner of his living room, thinking about poor Mrs. Phillips, the only victim he had known. Leon realized just how cruel the Claw could be. He had taken old Mrs. Phillips for only one reason, knowing Leon would be devastated by his having to eat from her entrails, to take on the old woman's sins, as the Claw had taught him. Mrs. Phillips had always had a kind word for Leon, always with a smile on her lips. She had seemed innocent of any sins, and yet the Claw had, by virtue of having dispatched her, claimed that her body was riddled with the maggots of sin upon which they must feed.

  And so the Claw had fed like a voracious animal over her.

  Then the Claw, as if it were just an afterthought, had begun to replace one victim's organs with another's, taking some from the jars he had brought with them, refilling these with the younger organs of the Olin woman.

  It was then that Ovid, taking a moment when the Claw was not looking, impetuously shoved the wadded-up poem into Mrs. Phillips' body.

  He had felt compelled to communicate with someone outside himself, as compelled as he had been the night Leon had telephoned the all-night radio talk show. He had had to blame it on Leon because this action had made the Claw grow large with anger and strike Ovid with the deadly claw, a razor-sharp series of talons fastened to the Claw's right arm. It was in sharp contrast to the human hand that dangled at the end of his left forearm. The claw itself was made up of three fingerlike extensions, ice-pick sharp, tapered, with cold-steel edges, extending from beneath the black coat at the wrist. It was far deadlier than a hook, each of the three talons having a jagged edge, like those of a fish scaler.

  Ovid was the only one alive who had seen the Claw's weapon... and he had seen it in action.

  It was so fast his eyes could not possibly follow.

  Swwwwissssh, swwwwissssh, swwwwissssh. He heard the horrible sound of it as if it were in the room now with him. It made him get up, stumble around in the dark and cry and shout, but he found himself alone, after all, alone except for the odor of what was in his kitchen cabinets.

  It was the first night in so long that the Claw had failed to materialize.

  What did it mean? he wondered.

  He couldn't hazard a guess, but an overwhelming fear gripped his heart, a double-edged fear. He was afraid that the Claw would come again, but he was equally afraid that the Claw would never come again...

  At almost nine the next day Leon was awakened by an insistent knock at the outer door. He owned the building. It was paid off finally with his mother's inheritance, and he had evicted the tenants from upstairs so that now only he and the Claw kept house here. Who could be at the door?

  He never had visitors.

  He was still in the same clothes as when he had left work the day before. He hadn't brushed his hair or his teeth in all this time. He stared out between the curtains at two people, a man and a woman, both dressed relatively well for the neighborhood. The woman banged on the door again, staring, trying to make out the movement inside from behind the faded curtains, when she decided to hold up a badge. She shouted, “Police, please open up!”

  Her partner muttered something about forgetting about it, but she swore she saw some movement from inside, and so she banged again.

  Leon wondered if it was a test; if the Claw was testing his loyalty.

  Suddenly the glass shattered where the female cop hit it with the butt of her gun. She was shouting an apology to the occupant or occupants inside.

  Leon, shocked into action by the shattered glass, fearful of their coming in, rushed to the door, shouting, “What the hell're you doing, breaking my glass? You're going to pay for that.”

  “Mr. Helfer?” she asked.

  He was shaken that she should know his name. We stopped by last night and yesterday to speak with you, but you're always out, it seems.”

  “Speak with me? About what?”

  “You must be aware that a neighbor of yours was killed a few doors down,” she replied. “Look, I'm Sergeant Detective Louise Emmons, and this is my partner, Sergeant Turner. We've been assigned to question everybody in the building about—”

  “I'm the only one in the building.”

  “So we've been told.”

  “Don't like boarders... don't trust them... can't.”

  Turner, who had come closer, eyeballing Helfer, said, “I know what you mean. I rent a space over my garage... real nightmare.”

  Both Emmons and Turner were staring at the way Helfer was dressed. He looked a
s if he had been ejected from a boxcar with the train going forty. His bloodshot eyes were wide and wild. An odor exuded from his body that spoke of more than mere perspiration and bad breath. Emmons tried to place the odor but it was elusive.

  “Can we come in and ask you a few questions about Mrs. Phillips down the street?”

  “No, no! I mean, I've got to get to work, and... and the place is a mess, and besides... I don't know anything.”

  Emmons took in a great breath, her breasts rising in exasperation, but she was also trying desperately to place the odor that seemed to be wafting out to her from the building. “Smells like you've been using cleaning fluids,” she said. “Place can't be any worse than mine.”

  He blocked her way. “No, I'm sorry, but I got no time. I'll be fired if I'm late. I got a nasty boss, real nasty.”

  “Mr. Helfer,” said Turner, sounding stern, “am I to understand that you're refusing us entrance to your domicile?”

  Leon stared at him, weighing his options, it appeared. “You... you got a warrant? If not, you ask your questions right here and now, and let me get on with my life. I'm sorry about Mrs. Phillips, but I don't know anything and there's nothing I can tell you that will change the fact she's dead.”

  She and Leon stared back at one another. Leon finally said, “Go ahead. Ask your questions. I don't have all day.” Emmons asked the questions while Turner reached for a cigarette and asked Leon if he wanted one.

  “How well did you know Mrs. Phillips?”

  “Cigarette?” repeated Turner, holding the packet up to him.

  “No, no thanks... Not well. Just seen her around.”

  “Like at the park?”

  “Sure.”

  “And the supermarket?”

  “Yeah, places like that.”

  Emmons noted something in her little book that made Leon nervous. Turner was puffing heatedly on his Marlboro.

  Emmons looked Leon directly in the eye for a second time and said, “Your neighbors said you once or twice visited her in her home.”

  “What?” he asked. “Me? That's... that's a lie.”