Fatal Instinct

Five

After the meeting broke up, Alan Rychman asked Jessica Coran into the adjacent office, which Eldritch had designated as his. Once they were alone, he said, “I didn't appreciate your little masquerade in there, Dr. Coran.”

“ I was informed that you were told of my-”

“ I'd say it's fairly apparent that I was unaware that you'd arrived. How long have you been in the city?”

“ I arrived late yesterday, took the evening to familiarize myself with the case-as much as possible, given the lack of information. I had a meeting with Commissioner Eldritch and was asked to be here this morning. No one notified me about last night's homicide.”

Rychman followed her speech with a series of “I sees.”

“ In the future, I'd like to be on the call list,” she added.

“ Whatever you say, Doctor.”

“ I'm anxious to help in whatever way possible.”

“ I guess you've seen this kind of thing before.”

“ A killer whose teeth imprints were lifted from the intestines of one of his victims? Not quite, but you might say I've seen enough ghouls so that I won't swoon.”

She had a tough line, he thought, appraising her. She was a stunning woman, even with the distraction of the cane. “Matisak's victims surely suffered longer, and Gerald Ray Sims may've been sicker than this freak we've got on our hands. Doctor, but the way this bastard operates, the way he leaves their bodies… it may even shock you.”

“ What's that supposed to mean, Captain? That my reputation has preceded me? That I'm unshakable? That you'd like to see me shake?”

She'd read a complete file on Rychman, who was bom in 1948 to working-class parents, the third of five children. He attended New York City schools, spent two years at John Jay College, dropped out for a stint in Vietnam and entered the Police Academy in 1973 on his return. He'd quickly risen through the ranks from patrolman to detective after a series of dazzling arrests. He moved from Vice to Homicide in '79 and had remained a homicide detective since. In 1989 he was named captain of the 31st Precinct, a precinct considered the worst in the city until he turned it around, making it immune to corruption and internal problems. Now the 31 st had one of the highest arrest rates in the city. He'd done so well with the 31st that he had since been moved to two other “dirty” precincts to clean them up, and he had succeeded admirably. She understood that his successes were due to his unrelenting na-ture and a hands-on style of management. He was called “the Boot” by men who served under him because he had given so many burned-out cops a kick in the ass.

He'd also been decorated for bravery under fire in two wars, Nam and New York. In some ways he reminded her of Otto Boutine; the two would have been either extremely close friends or archenemies, butting heads like a pair of rams, she decided.

“ Where're you staying?” he asked.

“ Marriott.”

“ Downtown? Nice if you can get it. Close, should a call come in.”

“ I hope that's not an indication of how vigorously you intend to pursue this case, Captain.”

He looked askance at her, confused. “What?”

“ By waiting for a call.” She picked up her cane and her bag, making for the door.

He thought of pursuing her, setting her straight, but tossed a disdainful wave in her direction instead, letting her go. But then she stuck her head back inside.

“ Yes?”

“ I'll want a copy of the forensics report on the sixth victim. Can you direct me?”

“ I'll see you get a copy. It'll be on my desk sometime today.”

“ Is Archer or Darius the M.E. on the case?”

“ Fellow name of Perkins.”

“ Hmmmm, I see. New?”

“ Not exactly, but first time he's done a Claw crime scene. Seems Archer was occupied elsewhere and Darius… well, he's been under the weather lately.”

“ There's been no continuity.”

“ You might say that, yes.”

“ The only constant at all the scenes has been the killer. The M.E.'s office has been playing musical chairs.”

He frowned, pursed his lips and apologetically said, “We do the best we can with what we got, Dr. Coran.”

“ Unfortunately, that's not always good enough.”

“ We've got the best man in the country here and the men under him are equally good, Doctor. You go second-guessing a man of Dr. Darius' reputation and you might get burned.”

“ I don't want this to be an adversarial relationship, Captain.”

“ You could've fooled me.”

She managed a smile, something he hadn't seen until now. It warmed the room, he thought. “If we're going to stop this madman, we've got to do as you preach-cooperate with one another. That means your crime lab has to cooperate with mine.”

“ And I have to cooperate with you.”

“ Couldn't hurt.”

Despite her rough-and-tumble verbal display and the rigid exterior, the cane and limp, something about her eyes marked her as soft, caring and warm. But this was gone in a second, retracted in what might be an unconscious and automatic response to his stare. He was smiling but hers had faded. She had stood up to him; it had been a long time since last he met a woman capable of that.

Jessica Coran was learning the labyrinth of Police Plaza One and adjacent buildings by trying to follow directions given her by Sgt. Lou Pierce as to how to get to the crime lab. She'd been told that Dr. Luther Darius, world-renowned for his advancements in the field-his two textbooks were required reading at the FBI Academy-was not available. From the way Lou Pierce had mumbled it, she assumed the seventy-year-old forensics genius was bedridden. With most of the work going on at his lab now being performed by younger men and women, Darius spent his working hours grooming interns as they came through the co-op program associated with New York University, John Jay and other col-leges in the vicinity. However, inside information or careless hearsay had it that the old man was at least partially responsible for careless oversights made in the past year or so, resulting in lawsuits and settlements against the city. If Darius had lost his edge, perhaps he ought not to be handling what precious little medicolegal evidence there was on the Claw. But how do you unseat a Milton Helpern or a Luther Darius?

One step at a time, she thought. First she wanted to see the remains of the Claw's latest victim. She could do so, Pierce informed her, by locating Dr. Simon Archer, Darius' second-in-command.

She now found the lab and adjacent autopsy rooms and freezer compartments. A helpful young technician pointed out Dr. Archer, a tall, good-looking and muscular man with a firm bearing and large brown eyes so intense they seemed to see through her as she introduced herself.

“ Ahh, yes, the task force and you're Dr. Coran. I got a call from the C. P Welcome aboard and let me be the first to congratulate you on surviving the Matisak affair.”

“ Yes, well, if I could have a surgical gown, I'd really like to see the Claw's latest victim.”

“ Of course. You'll find what you need through here and the body'11 be waiting on the other side.”

He held the door, stared at her cane, making her feel uncomfortable about her limp. Inside she suited up in surgeon's gown, mask and gloves while Dr. Archer put his people in motion to retrieve the body from a freezer compartment and have it waiting in the inner room. She found Dr. Archer also waiting, standing alongside the body like a mortician fishing for praise over his handiwork.

“ Did the autopsy myself,” he muttered. “Understandably nervous, having you look Mrs. Hamner over, what with your reputation. What is it the papers call you?”

“ There's no need for nervousness, Doctor.”

“ Scavenger, isn't it?”

“ I'm called that, but only affectionately.” She smiled below the mask, trying to get him to loosen up.

“ Do you mind my hovering?”

“ Truthfully, you're making me nervous, Doctor.”

“ Oh, I don't mean to. It's just that since 1 did the autopsy… Well, if I've missed anything, I'd like to be the first to know. I took the case out of Dr. Perkins' hands for… well, personal reasons.”

“ Personal reasons? Did you know the victim?”

“ No, no, no! You misunderstand. Dr. Perkins… well, he hasn't really been on the beam, so to speak. In fact, he walked out during the autopsy. So I… I took over, and given the kind of night we had… well, I did my best.”

She seemed to be hearing that phrase a lot around here.

“ I've been up all night, spent nine hours with Mrs. Hamner.”

She liked the fact he used the woman's name instead of calling her a body, corpse, cadaver, victim, subject or stiff. He seemed a sensitive man. “Nine hours is a lot of time.” He knew that she understood how grueling the hours spent over a murder victim, especially one so disfigured and dismembered, could be. Her eyes, the only visible feature left unmasked, met his again.

“ There was nothing easy about it, I can tell you,” he replied.

“ Let me have a look,” she said, snatching away the sheet that covered Mrs. Hamner's remains.

The sheet flew and curled away, sliding to the floor and beneath the table. She found that Mrs. Hamner had been reassembled with sutures across chest and abdomen and encircling the neck. The sutures and the cleaning could not hide the hideous original slashes to the woman's torso, three parallel but jagged rupture lines from breastbone to navel. The murder weapon was as crude as garden shears and as delicate as a surgeon's scalpel all at once, she instantly thought. This meant that it had more than one edge. She imagined a weapon that was double-edged, perhaps serrated, but how, then, the three perfectly formed zigzags at what appeared the same depth? Had the killer performed a kind of ritual pattern drawing across the skin, a New Age swastika?

“ The decapitation?” she asked.

“ After death.”

She nodded, saying, “Small comfort.”

Her eyes had at first avoided the ghastly, nauseating sight of the destroyed facial features. She examined them now, the wounds cleaned with an alcohol-based solution, the skin and puckering scars arid, barren of moist suppleness.

There were no eyes, only empty sockets, like all the other victims. It was surmised the cannibal thought the eyes a delicacy.

“ Initial blow to the head was not sufficient to kill?”

“ 'Fraid not; that would've been merciful. Just a skull fracture, caused by a blunt instrument, the shape confirming our suspicion of a hammer.”

“ Round-headed?”

“ Ball peen, yes. But she was alive when he tore into her torso.”

“ Splayed her open like she was a marlin,” she muttered, feeling sick at heart.

“ Are you all right, Doctor?”

She sighed heavily, pushing back the threatening nausea. “Yes, I'm all right.”

Archer loosened his collar below the gown. “My first Claw victim put me under one hell of a strain, let me tell you. I've seen all six, either as autopsiest or assisting. After that first one, I thought of running out of here, the way Perkins did, but now-”

“ Do you mean Perkins quit?”

“ It appears so, yes.”

“ Then you'll be handling the evidence he gathered at the scene?”

He shrugged. “Me, the tech team here, yes, unless Dr. Darius returns and wants to handle it himself, which is fine with me, but…” His voice trailed off. “Sorry, I'm boring you, I'm sure… talking too much.”

She sensed that loyalty to Darius had made him stop short of another word. “It must've been wonderful to train under a man like Luther Darius.”

“ None like him, and yes, it has been.”

She turned back to the work at hand, her own hands going gently to the wounds and the patchwork of stitches that made Mrs. Hamner look like a Frankenstein monster. In the empty eye sockets lived a deep, disturbing mystery.

“ I would've liked to see her before you put her back together and stitched her up,” she said.

“ I… I had no idea you were going to be here. If I had-”

“ Show me,” she said, “at what areas you found teeth marks.”

“ Several areas, actually, but the best were lifted from the throat, at the voice box. Here.” He pointed with a penlight.

She stared at the animal markings.

“ Where else?”

He pointed to marks on the thighs, rolled the body and pointed to tears in the buttocks. “Only partials lifted here; didn't photograph under the electron microscope too well. Computer enhancement helped little.”

She nodded. The bite marks were discolored abrasions, looking like bruises, easily seen while the blood remained in the body, but not quite so easily seen now, since samples had been carved away for use under the electron scope.

“ The bites,” she began. “Do they come before or after death?”

“ Both. Some showed vital color reaction, others no.”

“ Anything else I should know?”

“ He may've eaten the liver during the attack; chewed fragments were left behind, and he carried the heart and kidney off with him. Police believe he was surprised, left hurriedly.”

“ But still left nothing of himself behind?”

“ Nothing but the teeth imprints. He's cunning.”

“ Anything else?”

“ He may've been shocked to learn she had only one kidney, one of the items he made off with, we theorize.”

“ Only one kidney?”

“ Old suture wounds and her medical history reveal she'd donated her other one to a better cause, donor for her sister.”

“ Did Perkins diagram the crime scene? Where were the disemboweled organs and the head in relation to the body?”

“ Perkins didn't do much of anything, I'm afraid.”

“ That's a crime.”

“ Ought to be punishable, but-”

“ What did his report say about it?”

“ Intestines yanked out, coiled alongside the corpse rather neatly. No, no, that was an earlier victim. Perkins said the intestines were looped about the body and limbs.”

“ Looped.”

“ You know, like rope.”

“ Around the waist, legs, neck?”

“ Head was severed, remember?” A note of annoyance had filtered into his voice. He looked dead tired, up all night.

“ Bites taken out of the intestines again?”

“ Several.”

“ So what have you on the murder weapon?”

“ The twenty-four-thousand-dollar question?”

“ Come on, you've got to have made some conclusions.”

He nodded, stepped away from the body, and she pursued. “I believe it is some sort of serrated scissors or tool. Handheld, honed razor-sharp, to be sure.”

“ A common pair of scissors?”

“ Or something damned close, maybe garden-sized?”

She glanced back at the silent body of evidence which wasn't giving up its secrets. “I've seen enough,” she told Archer, and with her cane she returned to the adjacent room, where she discarded her mask, gloves and gown.

She was feeling a little faint. The emotional response brought on by the sight of Mrs. Hamner's devastated body, like a timed fuse, began to burn down. She rushed into an adjacent washroom, aware that Dr. Archer had entered the area to discard his own surgical garb, and that he was watching her until she closed the door behind her. How much weakness had he seen? she wondered from inside the claustrophobic washroom. She went to the basin and washed cold water over her face, fighting the rising tide of fear and loathing, desperately seeking the control over herself that her shrink had told her she was capable of maintaining.

It was all Matisak's fault, his doing. He had crippled her not only physically but mentally as well, robbing her of something more precious than the easy use of her legs.

And now she was in the city where the Claw lived and preyed on women not unlike her, women who lived with fear every day of their lives. He was not behind an unbreakable wall. He was at large. He had risen from bed this moming and had likely scanned the papers for an account of himself and what he'd done to Mrs. Hamner. He was nearby.

He was the same kind of maniac as Gerald Ray Sims and Matt Matisak, perhaps both of them rolled into one. She stammered to her reflection in the mirror, “Bastard… bastard thing.”