Rychman learned that every detective in the city had a “favorite” killer who was, in his or her mind, the Claw.
He'd simply told his detectives in strict confidence that “in order for us to work with the press off our backs, we gotta put somebody in the lockup, then we dummy up on this guy, make 'em think we've got someone hot. So I want our hottest guy, and only you people can tell me who that is.”
It had started a bidding war of sorts, each detective fighting for his choice, his favored Claw. They all sounded like good, likely candidates.
“ Cameron Reeves, a real mixed-up wacko,” said one detective. “I've been after his ass for years. He fits the profile and has a long list of prior sex offenses.”
“ That'd make good copy for the press,” Rychman said, as if now enjoying the idea of screwing the press.
“ I got a better guy,” suggested another detective, a gruff, big-shouldered, wide fellow called Marty. “A guy named Lamb, Earl T. Lamb.”
“ What's his story?”
“ Climbs trees.”
“ Climbs trees?”
“ But he don't just stay in the tree. He jumps down on women who happen by.”
“ Christ.” A mutter went around the room.
“ Does he have a rap sheet?”
“ Does a shark shit in the ocean?”
“ Does he use a weapon?”
“ A lead pipe.”
“ Sounds like we ought to pay Earl the Claw a visit.”
“ We have.”
“ And?”
“ Loony tunes.”
“ So he's out on the street?”
“ Lives with Momma, aged forty-three. She says he's harmless, so long as he takes his psychoactive drugs.”
“ And so long as he's kept out of trees?” asked Rychman.
“ I got to admit, Lamb would serve up well to the papers. “The Claw is a Lamb,' all that,” said a female detective, flipping open a pocket-sized notebook. “But I got a creep that makes Lamb sound like a Boy Scout.”
“ You're Emmons, right?” asked Rychman.
“ Yes, sir.”
“ What a ya got?”
She took a moment to review her notes. “We got a call at the 54th desk one night about this guy. Seems he lurks around back alleys, breaks into basement windows, rapes women after he knocks them out.”
“ How? How does he overpower his victims?”
“ Renders them unconscious with a hammerblow.”
“ He's done time?”
“ Fourteen years, Rockaway.”
“ Released?”
“ Six months ago.”
“ About the time the Claw came on the scene,” said Emmons' partner, Dave Turner. “We think-”
Rychman put up a hand and said, “How old is this man?”
Louise Emmons checked her notes. “Thirty… thirty… thirty something… thirty-four.”
“ Been incarcerated most of his adult life,” said Rychman, looking to see everyone's reaction. “Got to be a lot of anger and hostility toward society in this guy. Is he white, black, Hispanic, what?”
“ Caucasian,” said Emmons.
“ Lives with a common-law wife,” added Turner. “They live very close to the bone.”
Some of the others began to heckle, calling on Rychman to reconsider their choices. Rychman banged his fist on the podium. “Call this bastard's parole officer. See how many of his terms he's already violated… see if any of those terms prohibit him from work using anything like a hammer. Let's see just how lucky we can get here. Also see what came of the call that had him lurking in that alleyway. Did he talk his way free, or did he go before a judge?”
Emmons had taken to jotting down his requests, but she stopped now to say, “He was just rousted. Cops found him roosting between some trash cans, like he was just waiting for a victim to come along.”
“ What's his name?”
“ Conrad Shaw.”
“ Shaw… claw,” said one of the other detectives. “Least it rhymes.”
“ Press'11 like that.”
“ Let's drag his ass in, put the screws to him,” suggested another.
“ Check it out, like I said, and if we learn any more, we'll go for it. But so far, my vote goes with Shaw.” Rychman settled in.
He glanced over his shoulder at Lou, whose nod seemed to place a final stamp of approval on the discussion.
“ Now, as for you other stiffs who have favorites. Don't abandon them. In fact, pursue them like before, even more relentlessly. If you think you can do something to strike this guy or that off your list, if you can make him show his true colors, do so. We've got to work fast and carefully at the same time.”
He turned to the map of the city behind him and told them the red pins represented the areas in the city where the maniac had struck. Thus far, they had no witnesses and every victim was dead. No one escaped this guy.
“ Geographically we have no pattern. The only pattern we have,” said Rychman, “is the M.O., how this pervert operates. So we'll be examining this from every angle very closely, and we will be examining the forensics evidence thoroughly. I've already got some ideas along those lines. As for now, we have a cannibal on our streets, a human predator, and he will… eat again.” He came from behind the podium.
“ That's all for this morning,” Rychman said. “Remember, every day, here nine and six, no matter your shift or other duties. The task force is cleared as your number-one priority.”
People began to file out. It was ten-twenty A.M.
It was late in the day, nearly five, and dark clouds had converged over the city, turning the sky and the area all around Police Plaza One into a grim, dismal, charcoal painting. Rain threatened and in the distance the rumble of thunder gave everyone a catlike sixth sense of impending danger while radio and TV announcers called for a besotted and blackened city. Everyone paused over their work, some staring out at the coming storm.
Rychman was going between offices when he saw Jessica Coran coming down the hall. He went to greet her.
“ All finished for the day?” he asked.
“ Pretty much, yeah. I was about to call a cab, try to beat the storm.”
“ Don't. I'll have Lou send a radio car around for you. You know your way to the garage?”
“ I passed a sign for it, yeah.”
“ So what do you think of Luther Darius' operation?”
“ Excellent lab, terrified people.”
“ Terrified?”
“ Nervous, let's say. Course I haven't met Darius himself yet.”
“ Yeah, I understand he's under doctor's care.”
“ A euphemism for what?” she asked pointedly.
Rychman shrugged, his eyes alert. “Just talk… Some say he has Parkinson's, others say it's cancer. Some say he has both.”
“ Poor man. I didn't know.” She thought momentarily of the debilitating disease that had claimed her father, made him a prisoner within his own body. “Think I'd rather go quickly and cleanly.”
“ Agreed. Luther's lab people are extremely loyal to him,” he confided. “They weren't likely to discuss his condition, I'm sure, but his problems have had an ill effect on the lab. Reports aren't as timely or complete as they once were, mistakes have been made with the handling of evidence. You know how that looks. I don't suppose his people would have revealed a thing about that, either, so… Oh, and here's the report on the Hamner woman.”
“ So my dealings will almost certainly be with Dr. Archer,” she replied, taking the report and watching for his reaction.
“ You could do worse,” he said. “Perkins, for instance.”
“ Yeah, I heard about Perkins quitting.”
“ Quitting? He actually quit?”
“ I thought you were about to tell me!”
“ I was just going to tell you he was an asshole.”
“ From what I've heard of him, I'd have to agree. Lou tells me you slammed him into a wall at the crime scene? Sounds like clever crime scene tactics, a boys' fight over the corpse? Really… I'm sure the integrity of the evidence-gathering wasn't compromised.”
“ You certainly have a way with sarcasm, Doctor.”
“ I was reared on it, sorry. Well, I'd best run. I didn't bring an umbrella.”
“ Lou,” he shouted suddenly, spying Pierce. “See to it someone gets Dr. Coran back to where she's staying.”
Pierce shouted back, “You got it. Captain.”
“ Just wander down to the garage. Someone'11 be along in a moment.”
People with papers in their hands were streaming by them in the hallway, some trying to get his attention. He continued to stare at her until he said, “Your examination of the Hamner woman? Did it tell you anything I should know?”
“ Nothing new, no… sorry.”
“ Well… keep me informed.”
“ What about an arrest? Has your task force come up with any suggestions?”
“ Several, but we took the mayor's advice and arrested only one. Shaw the Claw, they're calling him. Detaining him on charges other than murder at this point, but letting it be known that he is suspected of the killings. Press is doing as expected, eating it up.”
“ That should cool the brew a bit. Later, then, Captain.”
“ Right, later.”
He turned and hurried fullback fashion to the confines of his new office, Jessica staring after, watching him go and wondering what had changed their relationship so drastically. Had it to do with her being on his side against the C.P. and the mayor? Adversity made for strange bedfellows. As for her, when she had read about his troubled divorce, she'd come to realize why he posed as such a hard-ass. She sensed that deep below the surface he was repressing a great deal of pain and grief.
Her ankles throbbed and twitched, a nervous reaction that she'd come to know as a sign that she'd been standing too damned long. She found the police garage where a young, aggressive reporter had somehow penetrated the barricades, and now rushed up to her and said, “You're with the FBI, aren't you?”
“ And who are you?”
“ I'm with the Times, and I'm just interested in you. I understand you're the agent who ended the career of that crazy guy in Chicago who thought he was a vampire?”
“ I was one of a team, Mr. ahh…”
“ Drake, Jim Drake.”
She recognized his name from the byline accompanying the twisted-knife story on Rychman. “I'd like you to stand away from me,” she said firmly.
“ You're a hero-heroine-what you did in Chicago.” He glanced at the cane, his eyes glued there long enough to embarrass her. “You're big news, and now you're here to help the NYPD find the Claw, aren't you? Aren't you?”
A uniformed police guard rushed over to them just as her car pulled up. The driver was Lou Pierce, who got out and joined the other uniformed man to help usher the reporter out of the restricted area, shouts filling the basement garage.
She got into the car, kicked off her shoes and massaged her ankles.
Lou returned and settled into the driver's seat, a broad smile, sandy-brown hair and blue eyes forming a pleasant demeanor. “We drew straws who'd get you, and I won,” he said triumphantly as he put the car in gear and started from the garage, the car tilting almost straight up on the exit ramp.
It was overcast out and there was a picket line in front of the precinct. The picketers carried signs, denouncing the police as fools, and they chanted, “The Claw controls the city… the Claw controls the city…” They had no idea just how true the slogan was.
Just as the car was turning out, a camera was all but slammed against the back window and Jessica saw a flash, realizing that Jim Drake had gotten his photographer to capture her before she could get away.
“ Damn, damn,” she muttered.
Lou was cursing under his breath, too. “Bloody reporters can be like camel shit on your shoe, Dr. Coran.”
“ How's that, Lou?”
“ Ever try to kick camel shit off your shoe, ma'am?”
She laughed for the first time that day.
“ You sure got one beautiful smile, Dr. Coran,” he said.
She smiled wider. “Thanks, I'm glad you won the draw.”
“ Oh, there was no question of it, ma'am.”
“ No?”
“ I cheated, ma'am. Had to pull this duty. You know, a lot of us guys see a pretty woman, and we just can't help ourselves.”
“ You're very flattering, Lou… Thanks.” Something had told her there'd been no drawing.
“ Some of us think a lot of what you did in Chicago, ma'am… really. That took some guts.”
She dropped her head, her eyes pinned on her sore ankles, her mind returning to that awful room where Matisak had begun to drain her of her blood, where Otto Boutine had come crashing through a window to her rescue, getting himself killed for her. “I lost my partner in Chicago,” she said.
“ Yes, ma'am… I know, ma'am.”
The rain started, slowly at first, like fairies appearing from nowhere on the windshield and the windows, and then suddenly the fairies were deluged by a thick, heavy, angry downpour as if the powers of heaven meant to destroy their own. Sometimes nature was as much at war with itself, she felt, as was the human psyche, filled with rage, chaos, violence, deposited there by some unseen and unknowable force. The human propensity for murder seemed to her quite closely akin to the universe's propensity to create black holes and violent, explosive stars. The dark New York landscape, sheathed in a slick downpour, made her cold inside, despite how warm and dry it was in the radio car. There was a steady, unending stream of human outbursts, turmoil and entanglements being reported over the police band. Not even nature's storm could quell the human fury of the large metropolis.
“ Have you home in a second, Dr. Coran.”
She missed her apartment home in Quantico, a refuge.
“ Honestly, Doctor,” Lou continued as he weaved expertly through traffic. “There wasn't any drawing to see who gets to drive you home, but that's only because I didn't give the others a chance.”
She smiled again. “I like honesty, Lou.”
“ Then you'll like New York and New Yorkers. They're… painfully honest, ma'am.”
She wanted to ask him twenty questions about Alan Rychman after his assurance of honesty. She wondered if she dared.
“ You and Captain Rychman seem close-for subordinate and superior, I mean.”
“ Hell, ma'am, I owe the captain my life.”
“ How's that?”
“ He saved my life, Doctor.”
“ Really?”
“ All in the line of duty, he'd say, but he put himself between me and danger, and I can never forget a thing like that, Doctor.”
“ Nor should you.” Her thoughts returned to the night Otto Boutine had done as much for her, except that Otto had not lived to reap the benefit of her undying gratitude.
“ Hell, I didn't even hardly know Rychman at the time, ma'am. He'd just taken over the 31st and was cleaning house good, and even me-a clean cop-was worried about 'the Boot.' That's what we called him back then-'bout nine, maybe ten years now. Been with him as his aide for seven. Anyway, back then, I was a real gung-ho fool and I charged into this crack house ahead of the others. The captain, he could've just parked it outside, but not Rychman. He wanted in on the action from the start, same as I did that night.
“ Anyway, if he hadn't come storming through the back when he did, I'd be in a box in Green lawn instead of telling you all this.”
They were at the hotel and she hurried from the car, wind rippling and beating at her clothes. Inside the lobby, Lou caught up with her and asked if she needed anything else.
“ You didn't have to leave your unit, Sergeant,” she told him.
“ Rychman told me to see you safely inside, ma'am.”
“ Well, you've done that.”
“ You've got carte blanche in this town, Dr. Coran, just remember, no cabs for you. You just call the squad room.”
“ Thank you, Sergeant.”
“ Oh, it isn't my doing, Doctor.” On that note he rushed back out into the stormy night.
Ovid was worried.
He had become progressively more brutal with each murder, as if he were working up to some sort of bizarre final brutality.
So had the Claw.
The Claw taught him everything.
But he didn't know that much, really. He didn't know where the Claw lived, for instance. Once, he started to follow him, and the Claw turned as if he felt him near. He had stared so long at the place where Ovid hid in the brush in Central Park that Ovid had almost begun to believe the Claw had cat's eyes, and could see him there. It so unnerved Ovid that he never dared to follow the Claw again.
He always feared that one day the Claw would turn on him, make a meal of him.
He knew he walked a thin, dangerous line. But it was the most thrilling thing that had happened in an otherwise dull and empty existence.
He even had a new name to proclaim his rebirth: Ovid. He'd wondered why “Ovid,” wondered if it held some special significance to the Claw, and so he had gone to the library and found a book on names. Opening it to the O's and trailing his finger along the column, he found Ovid there. It was strange and obscure and filled with ancient meaning, his new name. “Ovid” was Latin for “divine protector.” And in a sense, he did help and protect the Claw, who came to him in the night, needing him, needing his assistance. It was the first time anyone had ever needed him.
He located the history of the ancient poet Ovid, and began to feel some connection with him. He took out translations of Ovid's work along with the Latin subtext, and slowly he began to teach himself some Latin words and phrases.
The Claw had opened up a whole new world to him, and he began to wonder if he could, like his namesake, write poetry.
That was what he was doing now, writing a poem, a poem he intended to send to the New York Times, knowing somehow that they'd print it, if it was good enough and graphic enough.
But he worried about sending his poem to the newspaper. What would the Claw do to him? How would he react? Still, the poem proclaimed the inevitable power of the Claw over everyone in this life; it also spoke of disease and aging and death. It told the world that the Claw was good, not evil; that he ended suffering. He didn't create it. He ended it.
Still, Ovid hesitated sending his words without talking it over with the Claw first. Perhaps if he read it to the Claw, he'd have to see the importance of it, that it was preordained, and that Ovid was important to the cause, too. Maybe he'd see it that way…
The Claw had contacted him in the usual eerie manner last night, leaving a note under his pillow like a goddamned visiting ghost, a night creature, a bloody, dark tooth fairy. How he came and went, how he got in, leaving everything intact, Ovid hadn't a clue. He seemed capable of walking through walls, walking on air… and maybe water. Maybe he was the Antichrist, a god in his own right, a dark angel.
You don't cross a dark angel, he kept telling himself all through breakfast and the writing of the poem, and the rest of the day as he studied and refined and rewrote the poem. It was his day off, so he didn't have to work at the factory, and so he had too much time on his hands to think. The poem, while about the Claw, ironically kept his mind off things he didn't want to think about; kept him busy so time wouldn't weigh heavy, and so he wouldn't be so nervous when the Claw next stepped from a shadow to speak to him and direct him.
It was good to have someone to tell him what to do, when and where and how. He'd missed that since his mother's death. Before he had the Claw in his life, he had Mother. And while Mother wasn't a cannibal, she shared a lot of other characteristics with the Claw.
They would've liked one another, he thought.
Once when Ovid had telephoned a radio talk show, careful to use a pay phone, the Claw was so upset with him that he'd struck him hard across the face several times, and he'd slashed Ovid with his claw for good measure, just to show him that Ovid could easily be another victim, liie Claw had torn his arm badly, but Ovid knew it was all his own fault. He shouldn't've done anything to anger the Claw.
He reviewed the poem once more, made a few more refinements, trying desperately to make it succinct and rhythmic at the same time. He thought it was good, and he toyed with the idea of sending it straight out and telling the Claw about it afterward, but no, he knew better.
He thought of the first time he had met the Claw, and how strange it had been. It was when his mother died. Everyone had gone and he was left alone with his mother's corpse at the funeral home, tearful and resentful that she had left him. He had been afraid to go home alone. He was talking to her as she lay in her coffin, asking her what he was going to do without her.
And then he appeared from nowhere, and it was as if he knew the depth of Ovid's pain and grief. He placed a gentle hand on him. He promised to befriend Ovid and said he'd go home with him for the night, if he was afraid to go into the empty house alone.
Up until that moment, Leon was the name Ovid went by in the neighborhood and at the factory. Leon Helfer. The firm hand of the stranger he later came to know only as the Claw had materialized out of the weave of a heavy, burgundy-red curtain; the spirit had literally pulled its way from the haunted cloth. In a soft whisper he said, “You are Ovid. I know you from the ages. You are not alone; your mother sent me. You're not a factory worker, you're a speaker of divine truth.”
At the time, Ovid had not understood the allusion to his being a speaker of divine truth, but he did understand the remarks about his mother, and the fact that the Claw had been sent by her, that he was there to guide and direct him.
That was enough for Leon Helfer. He liked being Ovid, once he got over his horror and disdain for the blood and the evisceration, and the feeding on flesh.
According to the Claw, in the distant past his family had always eaten flesh, and in time his genetic makeup and inborn need for human flesh would make itself felt. And it did… it did. The Claw, for all his ill temper and tantrums, had never told Ovid a lie. He had that in common with his mother, too.
“ Together, we can work miracles. Will you follow me? Will you do my bidding? Will you accept me as your master?” He could hear the Claw's voice in his head as if it were lodged there, as if it had been implanted that first moment he had been asked these same questions.
He looked down at his poetry and read aloud what he had written:
Eyes no longer see
The power vested in me…
I am the Claw who makes the law…
Those who come to me
Are redeemed in a sea of blood and cleansed of their unholy sins…
It read too much like a catechism, far too Catholic for his needs. He set about the business of rethinking and rewriting.
After a few hours and innumerable drafts, his poem was complete. It read:
My teeth will have your eyes
And feed on your banal cries…
Your sins will be eaten away
That you might live another day…
The Claw is no name for him
Who gives you eternal life
By eating away your sin…
My rabid, hungry sin-feast
Will out in the end
To give you eternal peace.
“ Not bad,” he told himself. Not half-bad for someone who didn't understand the first thing about iambic pentameter, or whatever they called these things, someone who had never written poetry before. The Claw was right. It was in his genes, this desire to destroy and to create, all wrapped up together like two hands clasped.
Still, he dared not send the poem for publication.
He wondered again if the Claw would come to visit tonight.