Suicides were treated as homicides until murder was completely ruled out, and that was how the NYPD was working the death of Dr. Luther Darius. The story of one of the foremost authorities in forensic science who, facing cancer and despair, took his own life would be splashed across newspa-pers all over America.
And yet it didn't fit him, didn't stand to reason. The man Jessica had breakfasted with the previous morning hadn't appeared in the least suicidal. But appearances were often a masquerade.
Stories about Dr. Darius began to circulate, about his problem with drink, about his growing morbidity. People who worked in close association with him had known for some time now of his despair over his inability to perform at peak performance.
Dr. Simon Archer was on hand at the hospital to tell Rychman word for word the dire and prophetic last conversation he had had with Dr. Darius only hours before in the autopsy room.
“ Then you have it on tape?” asked Jessica.
“ Matter of fact,” Archer replied thoughtfully, “I do believe the tape was still on at that time. I'll… I'll fetch it for your investigation, Captain.”
“ Good, good… If it's as bleak as you say, then I guess we can assume the worst here.”
Darius' body had been scooped from the pavement, eleven stories down. Blood still pooled about the spot where the police chalk outlined the man's small form.
“ I'd like to know if there was anything in his system to indicate-” began Rychman. “I'd like to assist in the autopsy. Dr. Archer,” Jessica interrupted.
“ You sure that's wise, Jess… ah, Dr. Coran?” asked Rychman.
“ Dr. Archer?”
Archer nodded like a grieving pallbearer. “Certainly, certainly.”
Rychman took her aside. “Don't you think you'd be better served by concentrating on the case you were sent here to work on?”
“ Dr. Darius was a friend of my father's, Alan. I owe him this much.”
“ To what end? And at what emotional cost to yourself? Do you think Darius or your father-”
“ I've got a room upstairs to investigate,” she said, storming away from him.
He shook his head and watched her as she went, the cane lightly tapping out her anthem.
Archer said to him, “She's quite a strong-willed woman.”
“ You could say so.”
“ An exceptional woman, I think.”
Rychman stared at Archer. “So I've noticed.” Archer, too, was watching her disappear into the hospital as the siren blared its warning, the ambulance pulling off with Darius' body, taking him to what had been his morgue for the last forty-two years.
“ What sent him here, to the hospital?” Jessica asked Archer, who had followed her to the room Darius had leapt from.
“ He apparently had some sort of fall. He was working himself extremely hard… going back over the Hamner cadaver and all our earlier findings… all for you, Dr. Coran.” Archer supplied her with what few details he knew, ending with, “And he suffered a concussion where his head had struck the locker.”
“ All that about his drinking and his despair… all true?”
Archer frowned. “Life gets the best of the best of us. I'm sorry.” She went to the IV bottle, the loose tubing dangling, the contents spilled across the floor. Other tubing, connected to a heart regulator, lay on the soiled bedclothes. The window had been smashed, presumably with the chair that had lain alongside the body downstairs.
“ It must've happened all in a matter of seconds after he pulled the plug on his heart regulator,” she said. “The nurse told me that the buzz was loud enough to wake the dead when he snatched the electrodes off his chest.”
“ That's how I pictured it,” agreed Archer.
“ Then you've already examined the room?”
“ I have, yes.”
“ Everything points to suicide, but I just didn't figure Darius for the kind of man who-”
“ The kind of man… There is no suicide type, Dr. Coran. Suicide comes when there is a breakdown in brain stimulants and proper judgment is impaired when connections and cause and effect cannot be put together by the struggling, desperate mind. No, I'm afraid our dear friend simply felt he must end his despair.”
She swallowed hard, watching the dark shadow cast against the wall. It was part her shadow, part Dr. Archer's. “I suppose he gave in to his shadow” she mumbled.
“ Pardon?”
She took a deep, long breath and said, “Nothing… nothing.” With this she rushed from the room where Darius had spent his last hours in desperation and loneliness while she was making love to Alan Rychman and had, for the first time since Boutine's death, felt whole again.
Jessica Coran had to get away. She needed time alone to mull over the situation and the emotions the death of Dr. Darius had sent surging up to the surface. She was angry with Darius for committing suicide, especially after all that he had said to her about wishing to end his career with a solution to the grandest and most gruesome case he had ever witnessed firsthand, the case of the Claw.
She had returned to the place on the harbor where she and Darius had breakfasted together, where they'd watched the ships in the channel. Alone now, she watched the sea gulls overhead. She recalled Darius' inner strength, his vibrant and tenacious will-which could not be overcome, she had thought, and yet he had given in.
Why? Why had he jumped from that window?
Was it the grueling hours he had put in both at the scene of the Olin murder in Scarsdale and later at the laboratory performing autopsies on two victims? Even with her and Archer's assistance, the amount of work might simply have been too much of a strain.
He'd come back to the M.E.'s office against doctor's orders, at the behest of Mayor Halle and Commissioner Eldritch, or so Alan had confided, saying, “Perhaps we were all expecting too damned much of Darius.”
In a sense, the deadly Claw had claimed yet another victim, but the sun rose over New York Harbor just the same, setting the Statue of Liberty ablaze in a red-orange hue, while all around her city sounds from tugboats to fire trucks signaled that New York was clamoring for this new day like none before. The sun-dappled water reflected back the tall skyscrapers, turning their shapes into living, moving images. Nothing in this city was as it seemed, and everyone held secrets, her included. The only truth to be found was below a microscope, and even then the truth mocked her, proving her wrong, showing in no uncertain terms that the killer was one man and not two. On several of the victims she had taken her own findings and had personally overseen to their dispensation-she had thought: the samples sent to the FBI labs at Quantico to be examined by the best in the business. There seemed no way that the evidence could have been tampered with unless… She ruminated further, allowing herself the ugly thought. Only a man of Luther Darius' caliber could send a lab technician away from his duties of processing and properly packaging such evidentiary items for shipment. Might he have dared to open her samples to replace them with others? Nothing… no one is completely as he seems, she told herself again. It was a terrifying, fluttering, wild bird of a thought, trapped in the building of her head, screeching, flapping, not wanting to be there. It was the kind of thought Jessica wished she might banish the moment it entered her consciousness, because it felt evil even in its instinctive conception. Could it be that Darius, unhappy at her coming in on the case, had used his charm and flattery to beguile her in an elaborate ruse to gain her confidence? Perhaps he had wanted to retire in a blaze of glory, reason number one for coming back onto the case after his serious bout with illness. Perhaps he didn't in fact want her arriving at the same Sherlockian presumptions about the Claw as he had won through his hard work and determination? By now she couldn't recall which of them had arrived at the two-killer theory first, but even if Matisak had arrived at this same conclusion from his asylum, it hardly seemed improbable for Luther Darius to do the same from a hospital bed where he may've spawned a plan to “unveil” the true nature of the Claw in the grand style for which he had, over the years, become famous.
The sun shined now like a giant fiery fingernail over the horizon beyond the great harbor where the Statue of Liberty stood. Jessica gazed at the sun as it rose in increments, turning from a fingertip to a crescent and soon to a huge, blood-red orb in the sky, the eye of God, she thought. Nothing was as it seemed, and yet how could she refute the microscopic evidence that proved her wrong, the teeth marks sent to J.T. She had taken the samples herself. They had been in no one else's hands save Dr. Darius' when he had sent them to Quantico.
The terrifying unwanted thought fluttered back into her brain.
It was the kind of thought Jessica Coran wished on no one: Darius perhaps had not actually been happy with her coming on to the case his flattery about her father was all a ruse; he had not wanted her to come to the exact same theory he had of two killers instead of one, because it was a notion he had had long before her, one that he had been carefully nurturing along; he was secretly upset with her. Darker thought still: Darius was in a position to do something about how he secretly felt.
He always stood in a position to subvert her forensics work on the case, especially after lulling her into thinking him a worthy associate. But worthy associates didn't commit suicide…
Darius was also in a unique position to divert or sabotage the work of his other colleagues, Simon Archer and Perkins before her. Even from a hospital bed, a man of his reputation could see to it that the wrong files were sent to the wrong locations. In an M.E.'s office such mix-ups were common enough without someone deliberately destroying or withholding evidence.
She recalled the doctor's reluctance when she had wanted to take the additional bite mark cuttings from the throat, and how he had kept the head covered, and how she had placed the materials to go out to J.T. into his hands.
But why? she asked herself several times. Why would the old man sabotage her work? In an attempt to regain his former stature within the medicolegal community as something of an amazing guru? It seemed almost too farfetched, but recently farfetched was the rule of the day.
No! no! she told herself, not wishing to hear it. Then she wondered if Darius had been pursued to come back on the case initially, or if he had put the idea into Eldritch's mind. According to Dr. Darius' own statements, they were actively seeking a replacement for him. Was he hoping to so dazzle them with the Claw case that they'd ask him to stay on permanently?
There were not too many men who, after so long a service, could gracefully walk away from such an all-encompassing career as that of Dr. Luther Darius.
But then why kill himself? If he thought to make a comeback of a spectacular nature, to crack the biggest case in New York City… why? Archer had said that the old man had fallen in the locker room outside the autopsy theater, and when he awoke, he must have found himself alone in that hospital room, his body connected to an IV, machines registering his heartbeat, blood pressure and breathing. It was perhaps too much for him to bear, this enormous setback.
Thinking he could no longer cut it…
Alan Rychman had called the lab and everywhere else he could think of in his attempt to locate Jessica, but no one seemed to know where she was, and she wasn't answering her phone at the Marriott. Then he recalled how she and Darius had disappeared the previous day. He went searching for her himself and found her strolling a harbor sidewalk, stopping to stare off into the bay, occasionally reaching up to gulls that hovered nearby. From a distance she looked to be in conversation with the birds, who were simply fooled into believing she had something for them in her hand.
Rychman beat a path over the aged, discolored wharf, straight for her.
“ Talking to the birds?” he shouted as he approached.
“ To myself, actually.”
“ Come up with any solutions?” He slipped an arm over her shoulder and she leaned into him.
“ Why is it always that beauty… integrity… honor… all fine things in this city of yours come wrapped in such ugly packages?”
“ What's that supposed to mean?”
“ I mean that Darius was all those things, at least outwardly… beautiful in his soul, and yet he was also deceptive and dangerous at the same time… cloaking his own personal mystery and pain so well, working in the lab at the same time.”
“ A man's got a right to a few secrets, Jess. Hell, without them, we're all… well, naked and at the mercy of others who aren't often kind.”
She said no more. It seemed strange how the city had come to life around her, but in her state of mind she hadn't before noticed the melee of activity and bustle from cars and buses to pedestrians. He looked into her shimmering eyes. “I tried reaching you at your hotel… then thought of here. Listen, Jess, I'm… I couldn't be sorrier about Luther. He was a hell of a doctor and a fine man.”
“ I only knew him for a short time.” She sniffled and dabbed her eye with a handkerchief. “Foolish, I guess, standing out here crying over him. Fearful for his memory.”
“ Nothing foolish in it at all,” he countered. “Might do us all some good. As to fearful… well, no one can hurt him now. Hell, no one would want to, Jess.”
“ Yeah, I guess Archer and the rest of the people in the lab have to be feeling pretty low over it. I should get back, do what I can to… to straighten out a few things.”
He was confused and curious at once. “Straighten out what?”
“ I think maybe Dr. Darius had more reason than alcoholism or depression to take that jump. He… he had to, and perhaps…”
“ You're getting me confused, Jess. Perhaps what?”
“ You had a high opinion of Dr. Darius.”
“ Of course.”
“ Everyone did, right?”
“ Right. So?” Rychman held her to a dead stop.
“ He was above reproach, above question. His reputation alone-”
“ What's this all about, Jess?”
“ The first coroner worked for the king as a watchdog, overseeing suspicious deaths in the kingdom, Alan. Mostly the king wanted someone to represent his interests, so that he got his due on the death of a subject-taxes, lands, whatever. Nowadays things have changed, sure, but just like the king, you and others in government have to rely on the coroner to tell you the truth. In other words, the king may have a man watching out for his own interests, but who's going to question the king's man?”
Rychman didn't understand what she was driving at. He looked deep and questioningly into her eyes. “Jess, I don't do riddles. What're you saying?” You up for some coffee? Let's get some.”
Over coffee she confided her dark suspicions of Dr. Luther Darius. Rychman listened with quiet reserve the entire time, flinching only once, at the idea that Darius would sabotage his own investigation.
“ To heighten the payoff,” she suggested. “At the end he would pull the rabbit out of the hat. He'd thought he could do that when he discovered some small clue that the Claw was two men instead of one.”
“ So he withheld information on the bite marks?”
“ I think so.”
“ And he diverted some of the tissue samples you sent to Quantico?”
“ I know it sounds crazy, but-”
“ It sounds crazy, all right.”
“- but, Alan, it also makes crazy sense. He was the first besides me to suggest that the Claw was two men.”
“ It's so unbelievable. Darius?”
She was quickly angered by his coolness to the idea. “I know I'm right.”
“ Now you sound like Luther.”
She relented. “You knew him a lot better than I did. But all the time you knew him, Alan, he was in good health and mentally capable. Perhaps, with his failing health-”
“ He was a fighter, Jess.”
“ So, dammit, what made him go through that window?”
“ You tell me. I'm going to make a phone call.” Alan was upset with what he saw as her wild suspicions.
Alan returned and sat down heavily, his brow creased.
“ What is it?” she asked.
“ I've just talked with Archer… Blood tests show no drags, nothing foreign in Luther's system, and nothing to indicate anything other than a jump from the window.”
She breathed in a deep gulp of air, filling her lungs and releasing it in exasperation.
“ I think our next step is to talk with Archer, find out if he thinks Dr. Darius was acting strangely, and if he thinks anything strange was going on with respect to the forensics evidence in the case.”
“ A careful accounting will show you're wrong, Jess,” he said. “You've got to be.”
She nodded. “I've been wrong before, and this time I also hope I am…”