“ 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.”
Six
The night had passed without incident related to the Claw, the poised city like a bride relieved to have been stood up. Getting in early to his new office, Rychman felt, would give him time to get organized, to prepare for the day, gird up for the inevitable surprises. He'd gotten Dr. Archer's less than helpful forensics report on the Hamner woman, had sat up with it, searching for something-anything-that might lead to a breakthrough or at least a direction they might take. But there was nothing new, beyond the beheading. Why'd the creep add that?
He'd avoided reporters by driving straight into the underground garage, where he now had a parking slot. He had purposefully avoided reading the morning news, knowing it would be filled with a lot of trash about the case and the department, none of which helped. Why didn't they print the facts? Literally thousands of suspects had been hauled into custody, questioned and released; more man-hours had gone to the case prior to the formation of a task force than any in the history of the department. The cops were doing their job. Maybe the formation of the special task force to which he was assigned would get the press off their backs, at least for a time, but he doubted it.
He'd successfully led task forces before and was responsible for the white-collar crimes of Charles Dean Ilandfeldt coming to light. He had routed the Lords of Satan biker gang before that, infiltrating as a fence for automatic weapons. They had so come to trust him that they'd allowed him to film a bit of “biker justice” from inside the walls of the L.S. hideout. He'd never witnessed such cruelty before, but the work of the Claw made the L.S. guys look like a Girl Scout troop.
As for his new duties, Rychman didn't mind an interesting change, but Police Plaza One-and his new, upscale office- were going to take some getting used to.
He tried to get comfortable in his new, temporary office, switching on the soft-rock channel, playing now a Gordon Lightfoot medley which ended with his favorite, “If You Could Read My Mind.” It made him wish that he could read the Claw's mind, and the mind of Dr. Jessica Coran, for that matter. Did she really think she could see into the killer's mind? Perhaps she'd just gotten lucky in the Mad Matisak case in Chicago; coincidence and luck often played a large part in detection and police work, after all. “Son of Sam” Berkowitz was caught because some beat cop wrote him a ticket for illegally parking, a stroke of dumb luck. Then again, Rychman believed that when coincidence struck, most people failed to recognize it for what it was, because most were not tuned in, were not observant, especially of the commonplace and everyday. Perhaps this female M.E. Coran was tuned in. She certainly seemed observant.
He thought for a moment about how pretty she was, the radio now blaring out the traffic report, promising the news soon. He'd begun to take a cursory look at his correspondence and several files that cluttered his desk when Lou Pierce came in, an odd look on his face. Rychman and Lou had been together now for nearly seven years, and he knew when Lou had to shake off to the can and when he had a toothache, and when he had bad news.
“ Something in the Times you ought to see, Captain.”
“ Not so sure I want to see anything in the Times, Lou. Not yet, anyway.”
“ This won't wait, Captain. C.P.'s on his way, and the mayor's been up all night.”
“ That bad, huh?”
Lou slumped down in the chair across from him and dropped the paper in front of his captain all in one languid movement. He seemed to be melting into his chair, shutting his eyes, feigning sleep. “Been reading up on self-hypnosis techniques, Captain,” Lou said. “Everywhere you look, everybody's saying how important relaxing is-to the health, the body, the soul, I mean…”
Lou kept his eyes closed tight as he spoke and as Rychman scanned the story on page one. The byline was that of a now familiar reporter, Jim Drake III.
The headline was scorching: “6th Claw Mutilation Murder-Police Without a Suspect, Leads or Clues.”
“ Just heard it on a talk show the other day, 'Donahue.' Had a lot of doctors on and they all stressed the same thing, about learning how to relax,” Lou prattled on. “Say if you can't relax, you'll wind up with bleeding ulcers, a heart condition or in a mental ward, or all three.”
Rychman wasn't relaxing as he read down the column, his anger rising with each printed word. He was now at the center of the story where he was, named as a questionable selection to head the special task force put together by the city to end the terror.
And the bastard actually brought up a bar fight that was sixteen years old, along with Rychman's controversial and nasty divorce.
“ Christ,” he muttered, “Jesus Christ.” He imagined Dr. Jessica Coran in her hotel room reading the story over her coffee.
“ Consider the source,” said Lou cautiously.
Rychman stood up, knocking over his coffee, cursing and slapping the paper down so hard that papers flew in all directions. “Lou, I'd like to consider the source. I'd like to hang the goddamned source. I want a fucking gag order on this whole damn building, you got that, Lou?” And as he spoke, the door burst open and in walked the mayor, his Commissioner, Eldritch, and Dr. Jessica Coran.
So she's an early riser, too, he thought as he stared across the disheveled desk at them, Lou trying desperately to pick up the loose papers and dry up the still-dripping coffee.
Rychman made no attempt to hide his anger. Everyone must know that the press seemed to be stalking Alan Rychman. But he calmed long enough to say, “I guess you've seen the papers.”
“ Making us look like idiots, this bastard,” said Commissioner Eldritch.
His Honor the mayor, Dan Halle, came right to the point, his style, which Rychman liked. Halle was concerned about the image of his office and the police department, but he seemed also genuinely concerned about the realities of the situation. Alan Rychman had learned on earlier occasions that His Honor had studied the facts and details of the Claw slayings. He knew what they were up against. “Alan, I'm very concerned that we make some kind of break in this bloody case. We've got to show some progress. That's why we called in the FBI, and that's why they sent Dr. Coran, here.”