Fatal Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

Emmons was hardly recognizable.

  The sight gave Jessica pause, which the police photographer and the evidence team seemed to take as a sign of weakness. She brought herself up quickly when she heard someone say that Dr. Archer had been located and was on his way.

  She wanted to get as much accomplished as possible before Archer arrived. She gave orders for the E.T. people to concentrate elsewhere, and in particular to search for tools and deadly instruments. One of the men went straight for the open door of the basement, stepping directly into a smear of fluid. Jessica's shout—that he watch his step—came too late.

  She placed her black valise within reach and knelt over Louise Emmons' disfigured corpse, trying to control her nerves, which threatened to erupt at any moment. Her immediate reaction was that the body had been here less than an hour. Even so, the flies had found it.

  As she cut away patches of stained clothing, bagging these in paper, as was necessary in properly drying and preserving bloodstains, she thought once again about the letter of the law with regard to the chain of custody of medicolegal evidence of this nature.

  She knew that the practicalities of proof did not require the State of New York to exclude every possibility of substitution or tampering; that it need only establish a reasonable assumption that there was no substitution, alteration or tampering of the sacrosanct evidence. All that was required was to establish a “chain of custody,” a reasonable assurance that the exhibits of trial were the same as those taken from the scene, and that they remained in the same condition.

  A lot of assumptions and assurances were made and taken for granted along the way between scene of event and the medical examiner's office. She had learned from Dr. Aaron Holecraft that it was not sufficient merely to show the authenticity of the item on which analysis was based, but also to prove that the custody of the materials analyzed was absolutely reliable.

  There was always danger of adulteration, even confusion, of materials in a busy lab, but worse, there was always the possibility, however remote, of tampering. She could recall word for word what Holecraft had said on the subject.

  “It is unnecessary that all possibility of tampering be negated, but where the forensic substance is passed through several hands, the evidence must not leave it to conjecture as to who had it and what was done with it!”

  The bottom line, even for a bad M.E. who was faking it, was merely to establish a chain that afforded reasonable assurance. Archer knew this. Every M.E. knew this.

  Could he have used it to his advantage, to further his career? It would be a simple matter for the acting head of the medical examiner's office, like a Mafia accountant doctoring and falsifying books.

  As her mind played over the importance of the chain of custody in the Claw case, she took nail scrapings from below Emmons' already paper-white, stiff fingers.

  She tried desperately to tell herself that perhaps she was being too critical of Archer's performance; that given the circumstances of his situation—a shortage of people, the sudden loss of strong leadership in the department, her own threatening presence—that maybe she herself had simply become overly suspicious of everyone's motives. She wasn't happy with the idea, for she was beginning to suspect even her friends of plotting against her, like J.T. He had put off her request for other, pressing work at Quantico, and there had been something in his voice the last time he had spoken with her, a kind of backscatter that was saying between the lines how sorry he was for something unspoken. As for the background check on Archer, he'd given her only a long series of generalizations, nothing concrete.

  Maybe her growing paranoia was getting out of hand, affecting how she viewed people. Maybe...

  “Oh, God... God damn!” shouted the policeman in the basement.

  She went to the door and peered down to where the flash lit up a lump of flesh. “What is it?”

  “Looks like her spleen or a kidney... I don't know,” he replied.

  “Leave it exactly as you've found it. Don't touch anything. Any tools down there?”

  “Nothing other than brooms and rakes. It's weird.”

  “What's weird?”

  “Got a workbench but no tool chest, no tools.”

  “They travel with this creep,” she said. “They're probably in his car. See if you can find a light switch down there, and I'll get that photographer back.”

  It was a fundamental precept of jurisprudence that a jury, upon seeing the items presented in evidence relevant to a case, was powerfully affected. She knew from the Matisak case, in which she and J.T. has amassed a small mountain of forensic evidence, that such items as those from the basement of Leon Helfer's house would most certainly put him away for life. All she had to do was make sure that the genuineness of the article from here to trial was carefully authenticated by tracing its every movement and repository, and into whose hands it had passed from place to place. Only in this manner could a judge rule that the chain of custody was appropriate and thus the evidence permissible in a court of law.

  A close reading of the records with respect to each of the Claw's victims had revealed—to her way of thinking—that Dr. Simon Archer had not always been careful about the integrity of the chain of custody. She thought surely that this must have been a very abrasive thorn in Luther Darius' side; no doubt they had arguments over it. On the surface, and especially to anyone who was not an M.E., it might look like simple relaxing of rules, carelessness, errors, but to Jessica Coran, a perfectionist, it looked far more like tampering, or at the very least negligence.

  She'd earlier gone to the New York Times and had found Jim Drake at his desk, looking smug and pleased with himself. She asked him point-blank about who it was that had supplied him with the information about the poem written by the killer. He had refused to tell her.

  “You knew this would compromise our case, and yet you went ahead with the story without even giving us the benefit of knowing you had it or that you were publishing it, Drake. Don't you see that every time you do something like this, you erode any trust, confidence or cooperation built up between the press and the police?”

  He rocked forward in his squeaky chair and stood up all in one fluid motion, speaking as he did so. “It was my editor's decision to run it, and I respect him for showing good sense and guts.”

  “That's a cop-out and you know it.”

  “Look, Dr. Coran,” he said, raising his voice, looking around at those who'd begun to stare, “I'm thirty-three years old, a veteran investigative reporter, and my first loyalty is to the story!”

  “The storyT she said snidely.

  “The story, the newspaper, the public—”

  She snorted in disdain. “You don't give a rat's ass about the public's right to know. We both know that.”

  “All right, maybe I'm not so sure what the public wants or thinks, but—”

  “Public interest too big an abstraction for you?”

  He stared a moment, realizing she was making him sound like a fool. “When I get any information that makes a good story, and it doesn't break the law, then I'm going to use it. If it upsets you or Rychman, the D.A. or the friggin' mayor, then that's no concern of mine.”

  “It just might be more concern of yours than you think, Mr. Drake. I happen to know that you obtained your information from Simon Archer, and that it was off the record.”

  “There was nothing off the—” He had stopped himself, his guilty eyes giving the rest away. She'd then turned and rushed away, leaving the reporter to stare after the cane-wielding FBI agent.

  She learned tonight that Drake was dead, the victim of a hit-and-run while out on what was described as a dangerous assignment having to do with street gangs and drugs. An assistant of Simon Archer's had done the crime scene, collecting paint chips and drug paraphernalia found near the scene. Archer was curiously unavailable.

  An awful lot of people were dying around Simon Archer. First there was Darius and now Drake. Coincidence? She had seen coincidence at work on her side in the case
involving Matisak, but this coincidence bordered on the impossible.

  Could she possibly not harbor doubts about Dr. Archer? She had already besmirched his reputation, telling the mayor, the C.P. and Rychman that she believed he had leaked the information about Ovid to Drake. Suppose that was his worst crime? Suppose the rest was all due to her history around such criminal minds as Sims and Matisak, that she found it near impossible to believe anyone was without some hidden motive or secret or ambitious drive?

  Just then Archer entered the scene, the look of shock and horror on his face convincing her how much the work of the Claw turned his stomach, and that he wanted to get this bastard as much as anyone. The killer, particularly vicious with Emmons, was their goal. All else must be shunted aside now.

  “One of her kidneys was thrown down the stairs and is in the basement,” she told Archer.

  Archer's face worked the grimace away, turning to the granite surface required of the M.E., and she understood clearly the need to throw up a protective barrier of hard professionalism.

  “Dr. Coran, you look as if you could stand some air,” he said. “If you'd like to step out for a breath, I'll be here.”

  It made her recall how solicitous he had been at the scene of Darius' death.

  “No, I'm quite all right. Over the initial blow, you might say.”

  He shook his head and pursed his lips. “It's hideous... just awful what this madman has done.” What I can't understand is why he did it here. In his own place. When before he was so careful.”

  He shrugged. “She obviously surprised him, and perhaps... Well, panic doesn't take time for calculation.”

  “But he's been so careful in the past, so organized and calculated.”

  “As I said, Doctor, it must've been the shock of her coming in on him.”

  “I don't understand that, either. Why she came in alone, against all regulation, without backup, no warrant, nothing.”

  “I understand that you once did the same thing, Doctor.”

  She could find no words of reply.

  Archer kept talking. “Has the man been apprehended?”

  “No... not to my knowledge.”

  He nodded. “With a citywide APB, it's just a matter of time.”

  “More likely he'll be shot dead after this, if I know cops.”

  “Yes, well... either way, it's . . . it's at an end; just too bad for Emmons that her last official act, while it pointed straight to him, cost her her life.”

  His tone was sincere, and she believed he must feel some guilt, if he had indeed slowed an investigation that cost more lives as a result, merely to feed his ambition. Part of her pitied him. Part of her hated him.

  He seemed to see either the pity part or the hatred, and so he quickly drew back his eyes, going for the body to begin his own scrapings and specimen-gatherings. She, too, returned to Emmons' body to finish her own findings.

  “Looks like a lot of duplication of effort here, Dr. Coran,” he said after a time. “I hope you will be willing to share? Save a lot of time and effort, and frankly, the less time with this... Afraid my heart and stomach aren't as strong as they should be. Not at all like Dr. Darius in that regard. Now, there was a man who could look at any deformity or disfigurement... So clinical... so...”

  “So like me?”

  He was taken by surprise, obviously not thinking this at all. “I... I didn't mean to imply...”

  “The samples I've taken are not going to be shared, Dr. Archer,” she said flatly.

  “What? But why not if—?”

  “I understand your department will soon be under investigation for chain of custody lapses; I'm afraid the FBI cannot align itself any closer to your department than absolutely necessary for the duration of this case, and I've been ordered,” she lied, “to... well, create my own chain, as it were.”

  He stared coldly at her now, all his former solicitousness having vanished. “No secret, is it? Well, they'll find nothing. They'll look, sure. And they may find clerical errors, missteps, but nothing your own laboratory is not guilty of at times. They'll see we have worked for years under extreme handicaps and... and... Well, why am I boring you with this? I guess I understand your situation, and if you're under orders... FBI'11 change its tune when I break this case.”

  “Sorry, but that's how it must be, Doctor,” she said.

  He nodded and went back to his work. He had put on a surgical mask, surgical gloves and a hair net. As she went back to her own work, her own surgical precautions seemed limited by comparison. She merely wore gloves. However, she had taken every precaution with the samples she'd now fixed to slides, packeted, bottled and bagged, down to the precise time that she placed each label onto the gathered evidence. She had also brought along a separate officer, Sergeant Pierce, Rychman's aide, to take custody of the materials. In his safekeeping, the materials would go to the medical lockup, where each was catalogued, and only then could she regain them for laboratory examination. In some in-stances, Archer had been remiss with such materials for fifteen, twenty and sometimes forty minutes, easily enough time to subvert or tamper with the material for reasons only he fully understood.

  “One way or another,” she told him across Emmons' body, “I'm going to prove there is a second killer.”

  “You're still clinging to that impossible notion? Doctor, one would think you obsessive.”

  Meanwhile, the entire apartment building was still being scoured, turned inside out for any sign of a murder weapon or anything else that might further incriminate Leon Helfer, the owner and resident of the premises.

  As she worked she felt eyes on her. Archer was watching askance from where he worked. Some of the men in the room were watching them both. It was difficult working a corpse whose face was familiar, the woman having been a walking, talking, laughing associate not a few hours before. For Jessica, it brought back lurid memories of the terror of being rendered helpless by a maniac bent on slowly taking her life from her, bleeding her like a stock animal. At least Emmons' suffering appeared to have been short-lived, far shorter than the suffering Jessica had tolerated at the hands of Mad Matisak. But she was alive.

  She reached up to her throat where all the scar tissue had been surgically repaired.

  Twenty-Three

  Leon Helfer had cut his lights as he pulled off the overpass and down into the dirty little construction road that led into the depths of Holland Construction Company. The place had been recently shut down over debts owed to creditors, one of them the place Leon had worked for, Oleander Pipes. Leon had been out to the site on more than one occasion to inspect the use of the pipes in the field, because Holland had been claiming there were a number of costly problems attributable to faulty pipe.

  He had long had it in his head that this area, with its direct open pipe to the raw sewage of the city, would be the ideal dumping ground for the organs if and when he had to go against the Claw. He searched in the darkness for a night watchman but saw no one, nothing but signs warning people off. He drove up to the fence, and letting the motor idle, got out his bolt cutters. It was a simple matter to get inside now.

  He snapped the giant lock and yanked back both sides of the gate. In moments he was cruising over the stone path. He knew exactly where he wanted to go and was quickly parked and unloading the cargo that could implicate him in the killings.

  He worked steadily, dumping the contents of each jar down an enormous drain pipe, the bottom of which could barely be made out. The organs slipped like dead fish into the mire below, never to be seen again.

  He would bury the jars in a dump heap on the other side of the delapidated buildings. He unscrewed another cap, dumped the contents, screwed the cap back on and placed the empty jar back into its box.

  The work was going well when he noticed a police cruiser 222 with its lights out on the overpass that he'd come off of. His heart felt like an enormous stone inside his chest, weighing him down. His hands froze on the jar he held, and he held himself statue-stil
l, his eyes scanning for any movement, his ears pricked, listening. He saw nothing, heard nothing. But what was the meaning of the silent cruiser overhead? Were they laying in wait for him? Had he been spotted coming in? Was a SWAT team on its way to the sight?

  He had to rush. He unscrewed all the lids. He began tossing the full jars clattering down the pipe. He knew that closed jars would float on the surface, and he meant to have them sink.

  Suddenly flashlight beams hit him from two separate directions and then a third, and men were shouting at him. “Freeze!”

  “Police! Drop what you're doing and lie facedown on the dirt! Now! Now!”

  The lights blinded him, but in a panic, he lifted the last of the boxes and began dumping its contents into the pipe. The lights were racing for him, closing the distance, when suddenly Leon felt the powerful boot of one of the men slam into his jaw. The force sent him reeling backward, and he dropped the empty box in his hand. One of the jars had spilled over the side and lay in the sand at his feet. He lurched for it, trying desperately to knock it out of sight just before a nightstick caught him in the temple, bloodying his face, sending him down again, the pain shooting through him as he took another kick, this time to the stomach.

  Demons, he thought. They surrounded him, continuing to kick and beat him. They were sent, no doubt, by the Claw himself. He tried to get up and was sent flying into a mound of brick and debris. He felt the nightsticks rain down until he was senseless with the beating.

  “Kill the bastard here and now!” one of them was shouting.

  “We can make our own death penalty for cop killers!” agreed a second.

  Leon blubbered and sputtered from a near broken jaw, trying to speak with a mouth full of blood. “I... I'm not the Claw! I didn't do it! He did it!”

  He was hit again, so hard he saw only blackness over him. Still he cried out, “He made me do it! The Claw made me do it! I didn't wanna! Didn't wanna!”

  Another boot came up, striking Leon in the right eye, breaking off his words and his consciousness.