Fatal Instinct

Twenty-One

Sgt. Louise Emmons and her partner, Dave Turner, had continued all day long in Leon's neighborhood, asking questions. More and more their questions led them back to the strange character named Helfer at the center of the block down from Mrs. Phillips. It seemed everyone thought Leon Helfer a little queer in the head, especially since his mother had died and he was on his own. They heard how he had gotten rid of all of the former tenants in the building when their leases were up, isolating himself inside. They heard about his late night drives and how he talked to himself all the time. But they heard nothing that could be in any way construed as evidence.

Emmons, tiring of the door-to-door, went back to her idea regarding the man's boss at the pipe factory. After arranging to see him late that afternoon, she and Turner went to the factory, where Leon's immediate supervisor promptly said, “He don't work here no more.”

“ Whoa, Mr. Malthuesen. He told us he was in your employ.”

“ Was, yes, but not no more.”

“ When was he fired?”

“ We like to say let go.”

“ All right, then. When was he-”

“ Yesterday, just yesterday. Why? Is the little weasel in some kind of trouble?”

“ We're only interested in what you know about him, sir.”

Malthuesen revealed things they had already heard about Helfer that he had changed dramatically after his mother's death, that it seemed to have had a profound effect on him. Malthuesen also explained why he had let Leon go.

Emmons sensed intuitively that there was something the man was either lying about or omitting. She dug at him, with Turner's help, but he wouldn't come out with it all. They threatened with legal jargon, and still the man would not tell them anything else.

When they left the plant, Emmons shared her feelings about Leon's boss with Turner, and Turner agreed that the man seemed to be sincere about his reasons for firing Leon, but that he was nervous and fidgety and closemouthed, all tell-tale signs that he was uneasy with the police.

“ But that could mean a million things unrelated to the case,” he cautioned her. “Who knows, maybe he's got outstanding tickets.”

“ Who doesn't in New York?”

“ Or that he's had a brush with the law in the past himself. Doesn't necessarily mean what he's hiding is relevant to our case, Louise.”

She scratched behind her ear and said, “Maybe.”

“ It's almost quitting time and I'm hungry,” said Turner.

“ You're always hungry, but you're going to have to postpone eating, pal.”

“ Whataya mean?”

“ Leon lied to us. That's a little more heavy-duty than denying us entry to his place.”

“ Probably not enough for a judge to issue a search warrant, and if I go down there now, I won't see my kids tonight.”

“ You bailing out on me? Hell, Turner, this creep could be the Claw. I'm dropping you off at the courthouse and I want you to get us some paper on this.”

“ That could take hours. Why don't we do it tomorrow?”

“ Because if he is the Claw, we've scared hell out of him and he could run, if he hasn't already.”

As they drove for the courthouse, he asked, “What're you going to be doing while I'm busting my chops with some judge?”

“ I'm going to get back to his place, keep him under surveillance. You'll have to get another car and join me.”

“ Whoa, I don't like the sound of that,” he argued. “You're not going anywhere near that creep without me.”

“ For Christ's sake, Turner, I'm just going to keep an eye on him. I won't go inside until you get back with the paper, got it?”

“ We can't add on another false arrest. We do and it's our butts, Louise. You know that, don't you?”

“ I got a feeling about this guy.”

“ Like your feeling about Conrad Shaw? Look, maybe we'd better not communicate this to the other task force guys just yet, you know?”

They were both smarting about the Conrad Shaw arrest, which had looked so good but had been so wrong. They had been working Shaw for two months. It seemed unlikely that they might have simply stumbled onto the real Claw so easily. It felt like winning the lottery on a found ticket.

“ Agreed,” Emmons said. “Let's first see what a search uncovers.”

“ Be careful out there,” Turner cautioned.

“ Don't worry,” she said. “I was born careful.”

Once again, it was growing late and still no further word from the Claw. Inside his apartment building, Leon was panic-stricken. The cops were on his doorstep, for God's sake, and where was the Claw? Had the Claw abandoned him? He had killed old Mrs. Phillips, he'd said, because she was a useless person, just taking up space on the planet, without value to anyone or anything beyond the pigeons she fed in the park. Decrepit, her body riddled with pain and injury and disease, the Claw said that he had done the old woman a service, ending her suffering. But now Leon wondered if the Claw hadn't had a more deceptive purpose in mind for Mrs. Phillips all along, an ulterior motive for killing someone so close to Leon.

It led the police into his neighborhood, up to his front step, to point a finger at him.

Had the Claw turned against him?

He had long feared it, yet he had thought that when it came, it would come in a murderous rage with the Claw skewering him as it had all the victims before now. He had not expected this kind of chicanery and deceit and yet it couldn't have been any other way.

He had lied to the police. They need only run a few checks, ask about him where he used to work. Then they would be back.

He realized as if coming from out of a deep cave and into the light that all around him was the smell of death and the evidence to convict him. It had been the Claw's plan all along… not to destroy others, but to destroy Leon “Ovid” Helfer.

And the plan had begun when Ovid telephoned the radio talk show; the plan had been solidified when he wrote his poem. Finally the Claw's plan for Ovid and Leon was acted on after Leon had planted his poem inside that corpse. The Claw knew. He knew, and his anger could not be quenched until Ovid and Leon were destroyed.

For a time, Leon had begun to believe that the Claw was one with him; that by virtue of what they shared, the flesh and the sins of their victims, they were in some cosmic way united, that in fact the Claw was Ovid and Ovid was Leon and, by extension, Leon was the Claw. But no more. He knew he could not knowingly destroy himself this way, that it was out of the question, that the Claw was a second person, a second entity, and not a second personality somehow projected by Leon's brain like some goddamned unholy hologram he interacted with.

He must do something about the evidence, the jars filled with human organs in formaldehyde which lined his kitchen cabinets. He must transport everything to someplace where it could never be traced back to him. He must air out the place, remove all signs of Ovid and the Claw. He must think clearly and not overlook a single item that might be a clue to his part in the mutilation and cannibalism of those women. And he must begin now.

He shook with the fear now pervading his mind. The Claw wanted him to be caught, wanted to see him suffer for the deaths of all those women, be shot down by police like a sniveling dog. Having digested so many sins of the victims, Leon would go to Hell, where the Claw could control him further. Was that it? Was that what this was all about?

Leon thought of how the monster had come to him in his lowest moment of weakness, when he was most vulnerable, at the side of his mother's coffin; how it had materialized out of nowhere to make promises to him, to befriend and console him. There had been no one else.

But it had all been a lie… a lie leading to this… And the reason was simple. The Claw was no angel; the Claw was an agent of Satan that'd been lurking about the funeral parlor for years, no doubt, just waiting for someone like him-the perfect victim-to come along*

And now this devil had led him to his own end.

“ I won't let him get away with it! No!” shouted Leon, rushing to the kitchen, tearing open cabinets, locating every horrible, disgusting object that he and the Claw had ever collected. In the basement, he searched for and found several crates and boxes, and in a black corner of the room he thought he saw the specter of the Claw staring at him.

Snatching on the light, he saw that it was just an old coat-rack that'd been here for years, and yet, moments before, he would have sworn it was the Claw come for him.

Shaken, he dragged the crates upstairs, where, in the brightly lit kitchen, he began to pack them with the awful remains, each jar sloshing with his excited hands. There weren't enough crates. He'd have to return to the basement for a box. He did so cautiously, this time taking a flash with him and turning on the light before he dared look again at the coat rack. It was still a coat rack.

He snatched up the sturdiest-looking box, flicking away at a cockroach that scurried along its flap. He then returned quickly to the work remaining in the kitchen.

Finally it was all packed, and he stood wondering how he could get each crate and box outside without drawing attention to himself. Then he flushed red with heat, wondering if the cops were having the place watched. If he stepped outside with a single crate, they'd snatch him up, the evidence on his person. All they'd have to say is that he was acting in a suspicious manner.

He went from window to window, his paranoia rising. Every car on the street looked like an unmarked squad car or surveillance vehicle. He had to calm himself, maybe wait until nightfall. But by nightfall, they could be back with a search warrant. He must dispose of the bloody evidence and he hadn't the time or stomach to ingest it all at once.

He had been such a fool…

He froze where he stood because the deathly silence of his house was whispering to him in the voice of the Claw, asking, “Where're you going, Ovid? Whhhherrrrrr're yoooou goooo-ing? O-vid… O-vid?”

A strange wind was sweeping up from the open basement door that looked now like the throat of Hell, ready to swallow him whole.

The telephone rang shrilly and the whirr and whisper within the whirr was suddenly gone, the house raging with silence again, save for the intermittent, insistent ring of the phone.

He went to the phone hesitantly but once there he grabbed it up, saying, “Hel-hello?”

“ We're going, Ovid.” It was him, the Claw, on the line. He'd never telephoned him before.

“ Going?” He tried to swallow but his mouth was dry and cottony. In the background, he could hear the sounds of rushing traffic, suggesting a phone booth or perhaps a car phone. “Where?”

“ We'll disappear… go elsewhere… where they can't find us. Just wait for me there.”

He was momentarily confused. Could he trust the Claw? “For how long?”

“ For as long as it takes.”

“ I thought when you didn't come last night… and the cops came this morning…”

“ Cops?”

“ Police were here, asking questions.”

“ Yes, I see they've fixed on locating Leon. That's why we must disappear.”

“ Another country, another city, where?”

“ You will know in time.”

“ I don't have any time. They're bound to come back.” Leave them to me.”

“ All right… all right, I will.”

The Claw hung up. Ovid knew now that the Claw was not an imagined creature of the dark or some other facet of Leon's own personality. The phone call had been real. This, along with the fact that the Claw hadn't abandoned him, after all, went a long way to quell Leon's frazzled nerves. As much as he feared the Claw, he realized, he needed him; that, in a sense, the Claw was him.

Still, he must dispense with the incriminating evidence he had so foolishly allowed to accumulate all around him. He must give some thought to the boxes. While he sat there, staring at them, his eyes wandered into the living room, where an old carpet reminded him of the blood-soaked Oriental rug still in the trunk of his car. He remembered, too, that his tools had been used in every killing.

There was so much to think of, so much to do. He returned to the windows, going about the house, staring out. He saw no strange cars now. Every car on the block could be accounted for; he had stared down this length of asphalt for years, so he was sure. He saw a few people milling about, but he saw no one that looked out of place.

He went to the rear of his house and gazed for a long time before he decided that the alleyway was at peace with itself, and that there weren't a thousand cops hiding behind trash cans, garage doors, telephone poles and bushes. He had to traverse his backyard to the garage, where his little car was kept. He had a good notion of what he wanted to do with all the evidence, although he wasn't sure he could get away with it.

For now, relatively sure of his safety, he began to make trips to the car and back, carrying one crate at a time, carefully placing them into the trunk atop the soiled, bloodied rug that had been Mrs. Phillips' shroud only two nights before. Leon was cautious with each crate, but when he lifted one of the less sturdy boxes, the bottom gave way and he went to his knees in an attempt to keep the jars from hitting the kitchen floor. But one containing a victim's heart shattered, sending a slick of formaldehyde out from his knees. Through this the organ slid across the floor, slapped against the first rung of the basement steps and then flip-flopped down and down, leaving a thin liquid trail of gruel in its wake.

“ Damn, damn,” Leon cursed at the delay. It meant more cleanup, more wasted time. He went down into the basement, fetched the now soiled heart and brought it back up to the kitchen. He found tape, reinforced the box that had come loose and jammed the dirty heart down into the box between the other jars.

He then looked down at the broken jar and the mess created by the formaldehyde. He had always detested the odor, but it had never bothered the Claw. It was, however, sure to go rank if he did not clean it up quickly. He grabbed a kitchen towel, but knew this would not be enough. He needed newspapers, lots of them.

He found a stack in the corner in the living room and threw them about the kitchen floor, stomping over them in a wild dance. He saw the headlines about the Claw and knew he must destroy the papers, too.

“ That'll do it,” he promised himself.

In five minutes he had the problem soaked up, and with a damp mop and Cheer he cleaned the linoleum, much pleased with his progress. But he knew that the heat outside was not doing the other organs much good in the trunk of his car.

He now crushed all the newspapers into a Hefty bag and tied it off. This he took outside to the trash cans and shoved it all into a can belonging to him. This done, he retrieved the now well-taped box, returned to the garage and grabbed his toolbox. He put the last box and his tools on the backseat of the car and in a moment was cautiously making his way out of the area.

Jim Drake's star was rising at the Times and he owed it entirely to the Claw, not that he had ever dreamed that such evil could be a meal ticket. It just happened, he kept telling himself; it didn't mean he was a bad person. If he didn't write the stories, someone else would, and someone else would get the prestige, money and power coming to him nowadays. He also knew that he owed much of his success to Archer. If Dr. Archer weren't as concerned a citizen as he was, Drake's information trail might've shriveled away long before, but Archer was what he was, a real concerned citizen who for reasons of his own-ambitious ones-leaked useful information to Drake.

Now there was heat being put on the good doctor, or so Archer thought; maybe the man was just feeling paranoid, and little wonder with that FBI lady watching his every move, not to mention Rychman, who was enough to frighten a sumo wrestler.

A dampness made the dark air all around feel like a shroud, and once again Drake cursed Archer for picking such a deserted area to meet. An occasional car fired by the open alleyway, and earlier someone had parked a car in the dark recesses of the shadows here. Now that his eyes were accus-tomed to the dark, Drake thought the car in the alley might be Dr. Archer's BMW. He went nearer, scanning for any sign of anyone at the wheel or nearby, but he saw no one. The alley was a complicated one with a Y-fork, one branch dead-ending at the back of a factory.

A step closer and he thought he saw a shrouded form at the wheel, but it was so still, it didn't look human. Suddenly the engine kicked into life and the car came at Drake, tires smoking. Drake ran for the Y-fork, pretending at first to go toward the dead end, but at the last moment he dove the other way. The car shot by uncontrollably, and Drake got to his feet, racing for the exit and the street for his own car, his mind trying to fathom the reason for the attack, but for now he must think of one thing and one thing alone: survival.

He was out in the open, running toward his car, which was parked halfway down the street, when the BMW tore into view behind him. It was coming down on him at sixty, seventy, eighty. Drake prepared to swerve at the last moment, but the killing machine anticipated him, driving his body into a parked car, driving the blood from within him to all the orifices. He was literally squashed between the metal of the two vehicles.

As he drove off, Archer glanced into his rearview mirror. Drake wouldn't be talking to Coran or Rychman. One less worry in Archer's life.

Detective Emmons pulled her unmarked car into view of the building where Helfer resided alone. There were several lights on, but she saw no movement or shadow. She feared he had already fled. She would like nothing better than to get inside the little prick's place for a look. She cautiously slipped out and walked through a gangway to the rear alley that would lead her to Helfer's backyard.

She could still smell the strange odor that earlier emanated from the house; it was a stench she would not soon forget. As she rounded the garage at the back she found it standing open, the black interior a gaping maw, and to her surprise the little weasel had a silvery BMW nosed squarely at the front of the open garage. The fool was asking for it to be ripped off or stolen. She wondered how he could possibly afford it, but she gave more thought to how pleased she was to find him in. A cursory search of the car with her flashlight turned up the fact it had recently been in an accident that had damaged the front grillework and fender. She started for the license when a sudden noise startled her, making her whip around and draw down on a black cat that spit at her and showed two venomous shining eyes. She breathed deeper and took down the license plate, noting that it could not be Helfer's, as it was a medical plate, signifying the owner was a doctor.

Maybe she had the wrong garage, she thought. It made no sense.

She dared not open a door or the trunk, not without the warrant. Where was Turner! Had he stopped for a burger? Her light then found the creep's trash cans against the fence in the alleyway.

“ Public domain,” she whispered to herself, and smiled. She didn't need a warrant to go through the trash and there was no telling what she might unearth there.

She dragged out a Hefty bag and carried it behind the garage, where she dumped it. She was immediately assailed by the bizarre odor that had hit her full force when she was standing at Leon's front door earlier that day. “Christ, what's this guy been eating?” she muttered, and then thought of the cannibal called the Claw. With the only light a streetlamp some distance from her, her flash seemed the only warm thing in the alley. She wished that Turner were with her. She squeezed her gun back into its holster, glad for the feel of its protection. She silently told herself the same words that were the last she'd said to Turner. “I was born careful.”

Soon Emmons' hands were filthy with tomatoes, with little somethings that looked like raisins buried in wet coffee grounds, with oatmeal and she didn't want to know what else. Had she gotten into the wrong trash can, as she had the wrong garage? Not a chance. That unholy odor that rose above the rank decay of vegetable matter was the same as in the strange house. She had flung aside several balled-up newspapers, one with headlines about the Claw staring her in the face. Maybe she was way off base, she told herself after a time.

What had she expected to find, she asked herself now, an ugly pair of collapsed Ping-Pong balls that turned out to be decaying eyeballs? Maybe it was time for a reality check, maybe a shot of Jim Beam. But if she could find something-anything-to implicate this creep in the death of the Phillips woman, she would thereby implicate him in the Olin woman's death, too, and if he wasn't the freaking Claw, he damned well knew who was.

Turner was right about Helfer's puny appearance. She had imagined the Claw would be a masterful man with hypnotic eyes like those of Bela Lugosi in Dracula. It was hard to believe that any woman worth her salt could be overpowered by such a loser as this shrimpy Lee Harvey Oswald look-alike. Then again, most of the serial killers on the books were small in stature, from Manson to the skinny Richard Speck, most with acne problems like they were stuck in puberty, and all of them with serious sexual dysfunctions of one sort or another. And if Leon was one of two men involved in this killing ram-page, as Dr. Coran believed, Leon certainly could fill the bill for the dominated half of the duo. Still, his trash, although malodorous, wasn't filled with human organs or tissues.

She thought of what she knew of the victims, how they had died: first with a hammer blow to the head, rendering them unconscious. Totally in keeping with a little creep like Helfer. She wished only that she could get one chance at him. If anyone like him came at her with a hammer, she wouldn't hesitate to blow his fucking face away.

Then she thought of the awful damage that the killer's blades had done to the women, and this, with the lingering odors around her, conspired to make her want to puke. She'd deliberately stayed away from the morgue after seeing the first set of pictures on the first victim, well aware that to see them in real time would be too much for her. Turner had been more than sympathetic and helpful in keeping her secret. Turner hadn't razzed her about it, either. In fact, he stood in every time for her, making sure there was nothing in the reports that indicated she hadn't been involved one hundred percent.

Maybe that's why she felt compelled to work harder on the case than all the others combined, she told herself now. Maybe that's why she was getting so good at sniffing these low-life sons of bitches out, like Shaw and now Leon Helfer. Regardless of what anyone else said, Shaw, even if he wasn't the Claw, shouldn't be on the streets. Leon was cut of the same cloth; she just knew it.

Continuing to sift through his garbage, she imagined a scenario in which Leon, learning of Shaw's arrest, had deliberately gone out and committed the horrid double murder in order to make Shaw appear innocent and thus gain his freedom back, because maybe Leon felt like only half a man without Shaw. But nothing she could uncover showed any connection between Shaw and Leon. Although the idea was in keeping, the shoe didn't quite fit.

A curious man going by the alley entranceway glanced toward her, no doubt thinking her mad. Another man came around a corner, shocking her, and she fully expected it to be Helfer coming for her, but it was a tall man in a black overcoat and he asked, “You're Emmons, aren't you?”

“ Yes, that's me. Who're you?”

“ Perkins, M.E.'s office,” the stranger flashed his M.E.'s badge. “Got a call to be here from… from, ahh… HQ, that there was going to be a search and seizure?”

“ Paperwork's rolling on it, yeah.”

“ Oh, good… then I'm not too late. How long you think it'll be? I got kids at home and one of 'em's in recital tonight.”

She smiled at this and relaxed, taking her hands out of the garbage, grabbing up some of the newspapers and wiping with them when she noticed the gruesome stains on the paper and again that odd, disturbing odor. Suddenly she realized that it was the kind of preservative they used on cadavers at the morgue. Then she remembered the medical plate on the car in Helfer's garage. But it was too late.

The man lifted his black valise in one surgically gloved hand and for a moment dangled it before her eyes, when a sudden swipe of icy steel and wind tore across her eyes, shredding them. He was laughing as if it were all a magic trick. She blindly stumbled away, trying to pull her gun while he said, “Meet the real Claw.”

As she reached for the gun in her shoulder holster, the claw crashed into her with light reflecting from somewhere, and the flash of light lobbed off her right hand, the severed limb thudding against her shoe, making her shriek and pull away, backing deeper into the garage, blood spurting from her wrist, pumping like a geyser and making her light-headed. Blood streamed down her face from her wounded eyes. She reached wildly at her gun with her one good hand, fumbling and finally getting the weapon into her grasp when she felt the powerful claw clap around her neck, severing arteries and cutting off her choked, gurgling scream, pinning her against the car. Unable to turn, she clung tightly to the gun held now at her midriff, waiting for him to turn her over and drive the damnable claw into her breasts and drag it jaggedly to her navel, as she had seen in countless horrible photographs.

She was the ninth victim.

She tried to feel the gun in her hand but everything had gone numb. She could feel consciousness evaporating, knowing that if she could not remain conscious, she was certainly dead, and yet, to remain conscious meant excruciating pain if he got at her again with the claw. Already she had lost a limb, already her neck was showered in her own blood.

He turned her around and saw the gun clenched in her fist and he fully expected to be shot to death on seeing it gripped so, but then he realized that she was too weak to lift it, too weak to pull the trigger, and this brought a smile to his lips as he raised the claw over his head and brought it down in one powerful dig, feeling it take root in her where the ice pick ends jaggedly made their way through her, making her twist and squeal again.

He had gotten lucky seeing Emmons from the house going through Leon's trash. She must also have seen his car. He tore from her the little notepad she carried. He'd destroy it later.

He had never expected to enjoy the killing as an explosive orgiastic experience, but that's precisely what it had become, and in the sheer pleasure of brutally taking life, he had found that brute part of himself he called Casadessus who had been locked away just below the surface his entire life; that part of him that had hated all the constraints, all the nagging, needling commandments, all the pressure to conform, all the voices telling him his entire life what to do; that part of him that secretly murdered his father and mother once a night every night during his years under their roof; that part of him that had been restrained from hanging his sister; that part of him that had hung her dog instead; that part of him that fought his entire life to be unleashed and unfettered. Now he had given over to that side, and yet he was well adjusted enough to do so in careful increments, and to do so with a master plan in mind.

While at the same time that he could watch women squirm beneath the impaling claw before he completely gutted them, he could also be comforted in the thought that he could never be caught-ever. He had Leon to assure this, and he had Dr. Simon Archer to assure it as well. Leon, his Ovid, was the perfect dupe, a perfect victim in his own right. Dr. Simon Archer had learned all about poor Leon from his dying mother at the hospital where Archer did his pro bono work. Archer knew precisely the state of mind her death would leave the weak-minded Leon in, and that he would be helpful to Casadessus, the real Claw. Leon was so impressionable, like a child, so easily molded.

But apparently Leon had some ideas of his own. The poem had come as a shock, but a bigger shock was when Dr. Darius told him of its discovery inside the body. Darius had gotten a copy from Lathrope and had shared its content with Archer. Little bastard had disobeyed him, and now Archer's cleverly laid plans were unraveling at the seams, unless he could quickly put everything right.

The first step to putting things right was to rip the flesh of Detective Emmons from top to bottom with the tool that had come from the mind of Casadessus, an idea polished and improved on by Archer. He covered himself in a smock taken from his valise, lifted her sagging form and carried her dying body into Helfer's house.