Fatal Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  The Claw's terrible weapon, which Jessica now held in her hands, was weighty, the prongs trying to pull themselves from her grasp, until she pulled it over her gloved hand and tied off the thong that held it cinched to her, making her think of a falconer's harness for an osprey, a coverlet to protect the trainer's flesh from the bird's talons.

  There was blood on the casing and thongs, Emmons' blood. But when they picked up the weaselly little man who had supposedly overpowered Emmons, his clothes were free of blood, as were his hands. In fact, not so much as a fiber of Emmons' hair had been found on the man's clothing. Fur-thermore, Emmons had not suffered a hammer blow to the skull.

  Jessica had now to slit open the coverlet of the weapon in order to run the MAGNA brush over the interior for any telltale prints the killer might have left inside the glove. The sable-hair brush was used to lift the grease stain for a print, but there was nothing here. Could Leon Helfer have been so methodical as to wear a glove beneath the gloved weapon?

  Not the Leon Helfer she had met and spoken with. To be so precise and careful and organized in his thinking while he hacked away at the life of his victims... not Helfer. There had to be another Claw. Leon simply could not have been so methodical.

  Proving it would be quite another matter, however, and she knew she'd get no help from Archer, who kept his own secrets now.

  She certainly hadn't time for Archer's well-hidden pettiness, not now; not if she wanted to lash out at Leon's still-unknown accomplice. The real Claw was still at large. She wanted to shake this creature to his core, to make him feel fear, fear that his carefully constructed walls would come crumbling down like brittle parchment.

  He surely must believe, as did the papers and everyone else in the city, that the police were satisfied with Leon Helfer's life. Leon was fattened and ready to die for his master. She believed that the dominant half of the killing duo had set up the weaker half to take the fall, so that the Claw someday might again take up where he left off, perhaps in another city in another state, perhaps next month, perhaps next year, perhaps ten years hence.

  Twenty-four

  At his pretrial hearing a week later, Leon Helfer presented a pitiful sight, a man that had sunk so low as to become a cannibal, a true human monster whom the press painted in as lurid a color as possible and then some. He argued at the beginning that he had not killed alone, that there was an accomplice, and that the other was the real Claw; he argued that he had just been the Claw's dupe, his procurer, his Igor.

  The few inclined to believe Helfer's side of things, anyone with doubts about the Claw's being in custody, quickly lost that position when Leon began calling himself Ovid in open court. Then Ovid was questioned on the stand by Dr. Richard Ames, who had been appointed by the court to determine if Leon Helfer was criminally insane.

  Ames found himself in a quandary. He believed Helfer was not criminally insane by the strict letter of the law, but that he was clinically insane. Ames drew out the second personality even further. Ovid did not do as expected on the stand; rather than accuse Leon of the murder spree, he accused a third party, someone Ovid knew only as the Claw, someone Leon had met in some mystical interlude at a darkened funeral home where his mother's body lay in waiting.

  “The Claw,” said Ovid in a near whisper as his eyes moved about the room as if searching for this other, “the Claw is powerful and strong. He has eyes that glow red in the dark . . . like a mad dog... like Satan. He keeps coming back to me, in my cell at night.”

  “In your dreams, Mr. Helfer?” asked the prosecutor.

  “No, not in my dreams. He's just there, standing right there.”

  “In your cell?”

  “No, just outside, just staring in.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Nothing. He won't talk to me anymore. He won't help me. He's... he's abandoned me.”

  Leon slumped in the witness stand. “He comes and goes right through the concrete walls.”

  It was generally agreed in that moment by almost everyone in the courtroom that Leon Helfer was quite mad, and that he was the maniac with the unquenchable hunger for flesh and blood; that the ugly instrument entered as people's exhibit A was fashioned by Leon after hours at the pipe factory where he worked, coworkers testifying to seeing him fashioning what they had thought to be a garden tool. “In fact,” said one woman who had worked in the same department as Leon, “I think he made more than one of them things.”

  Alongside the jars and several organs that were near unrecognizable as such, hammers, axes, and tire irons, all with flecks of blood from a variety of victims, were entered into evidence. Dr. Elliot Andersen, a thin, handsome serologist under Archer's guidance, laid out the various damning evidence, convincing everyone that Leon Helfer was none other than the Claw.

  Ames capped off the thinking when he told the court that when Leon became Ovid, Ovid was in fact the Claw. There was very little to add after that.

  All the ends were neatly joined together, the package tightly bound.

  Throughout the swift trial, which had been held quickly to appease public demand, Jessica had labored over the findings she had brought back from the last of the Claw's victims. She had put in late hours, upsetting Alan Rychman among others, Alan now as certain of Helfer's guilt as the rest, as nothing he or his men could do could turn up a mysterious doctor at the Street Hospital who had disappeared, a man named Casadessus. According to the hospital, the papers the doctor had filed were accepted without question, and they had felt glad to have him. From their description, the man sported a mustache, was well-proportioned and tall, with dark hair and blue eyes. He disappeared a few days before Emmons' death and was not seen again.

  Jessica had stopped going to the courtroom to watch the pitiful Helfer and the mounting case against him, utilizing whatever time remained to scrutinize the slides and scrapings she had taken from Emmons, knowing that O'Rourke had pulled the plug and ordered her back to Quantico. To offset this, she had already taken preliminary steps to see that Emmons' body and all the materials she had taken at the scene would travel back with her to Quantico for further investigation. Thus far, she had told no one about her plans, but everyone would know soon enough, and she expected a fight.

  She knew that Emmons' family was already upset that the body had been kept this long. But she expected an even greater fight from Archer.

  And maybe another from Alan, not to mention her chief, Theresa O'Rourke.

  As she was giving thought to the hurdles she faced and while she worked over several fibers and hairs she had tweezered off the dead Emmons and placed in a plastic bag and labeled, she realized with almost a photographic sense of deja vu that what was staring back at her from the bottom of the microscope, she had seen somewhere before. The hair with its unmistakable patterns was that of Dr. Simon Archer, once again. His hair, like Luther Darius', Perkins', and her own, had had to be ruled out from the outset of the investigation, as the various hairs of the investigators, working in such close quarters with the corpses, usually showed up somewhere under a microscope. But there was a significant difference about this particular specimen.

  Her hand began to shake. She had circumstantial evidence in her possession that Dr. Simon Archer had been in the vicinity of the deceased before she had died, before Jessica had shown up at the death scene. She looked again at the tiny packet, labeled in her handwriting, the time clearly marked. It was tagged seven minutes before Archer's arrival. How had his hair adhered to the body? How did it get there before him?

  She shivered over the discovery, wondering who would believe it. If she raced to Alan with it, he'd dismiss it. A single hair, a labeled packet. She could have been wrong about the time, he would say. The D.A. would say the same thing. So would O'Rourke; so would anyone.

  Perhaps she had made a mistake; she could hardly believe it herself. It could easily be refuted and no one suspected Archer of murder, of being the Claw... no one now but her.

  And she was scheduled on
a flight to D.C. tomorrow. Since there had been no Claw attacks since Leon Helfer's incarceration, everyone connected with the case was at blissful peace with the notion of case closed, and that was nowhere more true than in the mayor's mansion and in C. P. Eldritch's office. Rychman, too, was basking in new celebrity as the head of the task force that had brought down the Claw.

  She still must tell Alan her new and terrible suspicion brought on by the errant hair strand. At the same time, she feared letting it out of her hands, unsure if she could trust that it would be in the medical lockup when she again looked for it. She decided to take a high-intensity photograph of the strand of hair and she pulled the one on file with Archer's name on it. If nothing else, she could show this to Alan, perhaps convince him that she wasn't completely crazy.

  She next logged her Findings and put these under lock and key in her office and, following chain of custody procedure, returned the tiny packet and the hair to its place, signing the register for it and everything else she had removed from the lockup, realizing how simple it would have been for her, the attending M.E., to substitute another strand of hair for Archer's.

  Was that how he had altered the evidence to make the Claw one man instead of two? To hide his own ugly tracks?

  She was seeing Alan tonight to bid him farewell. In fact, time was running late and she must go to her hotel, freshen up and prepare for their parting. She was halfway out the door when Laurie Marks shouted that there was an important phone call for her.

  “From Quantico?”

  “Some guy in Philadelphia. Says he's a shrink.”

  Arnold at the loony bin. She hesitated, wanting to run from the call, but thought better of it and said she'd take it in her office.

  “This better be important, Arnold,” she said impatiently.

  “Matisak wants to speak to you.”

  “Come on, Arnold! Case closed, or don't you have any newspapers in Philly?”

  “Matisak's read every paper, every account... following this case as if his life depended upon it, and... and he says he's got something more to report to you.”

  “Who's in control there, Arnold? Dammit, you or your fucked inmates?”

  “Why... I... Dr. Coran, I am just doing my part! At the request, I might add, of your superiors!”

  “O'Rourke,” she said. The woman could do nothing right. No way could she step in for Otto Boutine. She wasn't even in his league. “All right, put the creep on,” she finally told Arnold.

  Matisak was insanely polite. She endured him for as long as she could before she said, “To the point, Matisak.”

  “This Leon Helfer is not the Claw.”

  “And just how do you know that?”

  “You don't believe it yourself, Dr. Coran. Do you? Well, do you?”

  There had been remarks made in the papers. Matisak was picking up cues from the news items. He must have put it together, must have decided that her staying on this long on a case that was supposedly closed signaled that there was more. Ironically he had more confidence in her intuition than her superiors did. How fitting, she thought, that the only one who had any faith in her at the moment was a madman and serial killer.

  “You're right, you know,” he said. “I was wrong before. Helfer is crazy, and he has been a bad boy, but he doesn't really turn into the Claw any more than he's this Ovid character. He's just a weak kitchen mop, a dishrag, used by the Claw, set up by him. That's what you believe and that's what I've come to believe.”

  “What have you based your belief on, Matisak?”

  “You, Dr. Coran. I'm basing it on you.”

  “A vote of confidence from you isn't going to do me much good.”

  “But it has.”

  “What're you talking about?”

  “Why do you suppose O'Rourke allowed you to stay on?”

  “Son of a bitch,” she muttered into the phone.

  “That may be, but all the same—”

  “Why are you even interested, Matisak?”

  “You know the answer to that. Besides which this guy is as cunning and dangerous as I am, and I wouldn't want to read of your death, Jessica. I still fervently believe you're mine, and one day when you least expect it, Doctor, you and I will return to that interrupted dance. I still taste the blood I drew from your throat as fresh and as wonderful as if it were only—”

  “Shut up!” she shouted.

  “Look for a nurse who knew this guy Archer when he was a punk intern.”

  She hung up on the madman in Philadelphia. She was shaken by both his threat and the revelation that O'Rourke was more willing to accept the recommendation of a convicted serial killer than her own. But she was even more shaken by his suggestion to investigate Archer's past. Her reports were being funneled to Matisak. She resolved to have it out with Chief O'Rourke on her return.

  Matisak was playing his own game of averages. Since he knew that Simon Archer had interned somewhere, the doctor would have had to work with many other doctors and nurses during his residency. Doctors kept secrets while nurses didn't. Matisak also knew that the grueling “boot camp” of a residency could make or break a would-be doctor. With all his time to think about the case from his safe and objective distance, Matisak was telling her what she already knew.

  Jessica had embarked on her own search into Archer's background, and it had quickly led to rumors of the sort that cling to anyone in the profession—her included—that the doctor who sliced and diced the dead perhaps enjoyed himself just a little too much for the comfort of others. So came the usual stigma. Archer was called names behind his back. Just as Jessica was called “the Scavenger,” Dr. Archer'd come to be known as both “Arrowhead” and “Dr. Ghoul” for his penchant of getting his “head” deep into his work, and for the undeniably long hours he spent in the company of the female bodies in particular. Morgue humor was something that followed every M.E. she had ever known, but usually such remarks were made by cops and lab assistants in gallows jest with some redeeming quality of black humor about them. In Archer's case, for some unaccountable reason, the remarks seemed devoid of humor, black, white, yellow or otherwise.

  She continued to dig into his past, and the trail led to a retired nurse named Felona Hankersen. Lou Pierce had been persuaded to drive Jessica into the ghetto where Mrs. Hankersen lived. The thin, once pretty Mrs. Hankersen didn't want to talk to her, had nothing to say and pleaded with her to leave, but Jessica kept hammering at her with a barrage of questions about Dr. Simon Archer. As soon as Felona Hankersen heard the name, she blanched, weakened and crumpled, retreating to the safety that the interior of her apartment afforded.

  Inside, several grandchildren scampered and played with toy pistols.

  “I took early retirement. Left that part of me behind. Don't know nothing about Dr. Archer anymore.”

  “I just want to ask you a few questions,” Jessica insisted, baring her teeth.

  “I've been out of that so long. I can't help you.”

  “From your record, from what I saw, you were an excellent nurse, and then something happened. A lawsuit settled out of court—a wrongful-death claim—and suddenly you were taking early retirement. Is that right?”

  Her eyes had filled with thick tears.

  “I'm sorry, Mrs. Hankersen, but it's very important.”

  “I... I took the fall,” she muttered.

  “You were blamed for the boy's death, Mrs. Hankersen? Is that right?”

  “That was a lie!” Her tears left milky gray streaks along her black face.

  “Who lied, Mrs. Hankersen?”

  “What difference it make now? I just don't want no more of it. Said my piece at the time and there wasn't one of them wanted to hear the truth, not one!”

  “I do, Mrs. Hankersen... I do.”

  “It's been too long.”

  “Please.”

  “They believed the intern and I was quietly let go, and the parents were paid to keep shut. Officially the boy died of pneumonia with complications, but it al
l come about because of a mistake.”

  “Whose mistake?”

  “Mistaken dosage.”

  “Who ordered the dosage?”

  “Dr. Archer, but then you already know that. Whatchu need me for?”

  “You told the hospital authorities? There's no record of any such thing.”

  Her eyes flared in anger. “You expect there to be? I saw and I told, and it got me gone. I questioned Dr. Archer's motives but nobody was listening. Now, I don't care to talk 'bout it no more. Now, if you will, please, just go.”

  “I can't do that,” Jessica fired back. “Please, what you say to me could save another's life.”

  The elderly woman's eyes had been held by Jessica's gaze, but now they went to her trembling hands. Jessica reached across and covered her hands with her own. “I know it's difficult.”

  “He... the little boy...” she began tentatively, her lip quivering, “was gettin' better when he... he got into some mischief. Climbed out of bed night before . . . got to wanderin' the halls, you know. God... good God...” She sniffled and fought back more tears. “I... I wasn't believing a word the boy said. He looked like one of my own when they was little, sweet thing, and I just thought he was having a nightmare, you know, or maybe he was full of a devilish imagination... I don't know.”

  “What did the boy tell you?”

  “Told me”—she gasped for air—”told me he saw one of the doctors, and the man was cuttin' out a woman's heart and... and that he was eating the heart.”

  Jessica drew in her own breath now, surprised by this, having expected something else. “Did he say where he had seen this?”

  “Somewhere in the basement. He was running when I caught him. Ran frightened into my arms.”