The heavyset man in the seat beside her kept staring, and his eyes played over Dr. Jessica Coran's inconvenient, pearl-handled cane. It was a gift from those who knew that her long recovery had been filled with anguish and that, at least physically, she meant to overcome the most awful mistake and setback of her life.
She wrestled the cane back from below the seat where it rested no better than in her lap, now finding a place alongside her. The Boeing 707 was a lumbering pachyderm here on the taxi strip, and she still hadn't gotten her seat belt fastened. A wary flight attendant prompted her now to do so, and she tried to return the plastic smile.
It would be a long short flight from D.C. to New York City. The big man beside her initiated a prolonged smoker's cough and afterward began pontificating on the “unconstitutionality of nonsmoking rules aboard aircraft.”
She hated flying commercial and especially coach, even more so when she was working, preferring instead a military transport with seats as hard as a '57 Chevy's. Despite the so-called bennies of a modern jet-plush seats, films. Bach at fifty thousand feet and a cuisine slightly less appetizing than a Big Mac and fries-she'd take the gutted F-14 on the runway at Quantico any day. Any day it was available, that is.
She did her level best not to meet the eyes of the stranger beside her or to encourage his smoking speech, tearing open her briefcase as a clear sign that she was occupied.
The evening before, Chief Theresa O'Rourke had handed her everything the FBI had on the maniac who was now terrorizing New York, a horrid case of serial murder and cannibalism. The unknown predator stalking the city was, like Gerald Ray Sims, a flesh-eater, the kind of killer whose mind-set and M.O. were startlingly similar to Sims'. She ought to know. She had logged hour upon hour with Sims at his cell in Philadelphia, taping his various confessions, and in a rare instance or two, catching Stainlype's voice on the tape as well.
She had become something of an expert on madness. It had become her metier, along with her expertise as a medical examiner for the FBI.
“ How'd it happen?” asked the man in the seat beside her.
She pretended that she was engrossed in the file into which she had buried her face.
“ How'd you bum out your leg?” he persisted, a Rolex on his wrist above an ancient burn scar. “Pretty thing like you? Skiing accident, right? Must've been some sorta sport, huh?”
She kept her eyes down. “Yeah, skiing accident,” she lied, wondering if she shouldn't have bummed him out with the truth-maimed by a madman who was trying to drink blood from my throat at the time. Whether he believed it or not, it would put him off the air-travel cordiality he was going for. But suppose he then wanted to hear all the details? Risky, she thought.
“ Don't ski myself. Don't get a chance to do much of anything that calls for muscle these days. Make my living in computers,” he said with a gingery laugh. “Work out of D.C. with H and P, you know, the Pack?”
“ I'm sorry, but-”
“ Hewlett-Packard! I do-”
“ Please, Mr. ahhh…”
“ Dorrington. Jack, my friends call me.”
“ Mr. Dorrington, I've got tons of work to do, so if you don't mind?”
There was a moment's pause and the jet went airborne, and this was followed by an enormous sigh out of Jack Dorrington of the Pack, who, without any more talk, began to fan through the in-flight magazine, leaving Jessica to herself.
Jessica knew that she drew attention wherever she went. A strikingly tall woman with the good looks of her parents, and now the damned limp and cane. Mad Matisak had changed her appearance, altered the way others saw her, dealt with her, judged her, and ultimately how she judged herself.
The plane ascended through the rain, rising on the air above the clouds and into sunlight denied the Virginia and D.C. area for several days now. The brilliance of the sun was a balm to her soul.
Beside her, Dorrington said, “Do you mind closing the window shield? The sun's glare… making it hard to read.”
She gave a few more moments to the sun before quietly closing the shield and delving back into the dark business at hand. Moments before leaving her Quantico pathology lab, she had gotten word that Gerald Ray Sims had literally crushed his own skull in an attempt to rid his mind of Stainlype at last. Perhaps in death he'd find peace but she rather doubted it.
Now the information on the New York City killer, dubbed “the Claw” by press media, was staring her in the face. Closing her eyes, she began to lightly doze with the hum of the plane.
When she'd first gone to the prison in the City of Brotherly Love to seek additional information from Matisak, who was “ready to cooperate with federal authorities,” it was for the express purpose of learning as much as she could about both him and his victims, many of whom remained unaccounted for. It was also important to learn what she might of his motivations, the methods employed to lure his victims, the reasons he selected the women and men he chose to kill.
Matisak was one of the hundreds of serial killers now being interviewed by the FBI, the information correlated and fed into computers in an attempt to better understand how such social monsters came into being and how best to safeguard against them in the future.
Matisak was bored. All of his nutritional and medical needs were being taken care of by the U.S. Government. But his mind, he told them, was not being nourished. He started to barter and he wanted files and information on Gerald Ray Sims, a.k.a. Stainlype, saying that he wanted to help in under-standing a man who enjoyed flesh over Matisak's own preference, blood. Jessica had not wanted to indulge Matisak in what was obviously an aberrant game. She saw his interest in a fellow madman as sick curiosity, while Matisak called it training for more important and ongoing cases! He said he wanted recognition as a consultant for the FBI.
Jessica's superiors wanted her to go along with Matisak, who refused to deal with anyone but her, the agent who had placed him behind bars. They had seen this as a chance to glean more information out of Matisak, particularly to leam the whereabouts of a large number of bodies still unaccounted for, moldering in shallow graves all across the Midwest.
Feeding Matisak's prurient interest in Sims meant she must play to the crazed killer's ego trip, but on her last visit, Teach Matisak refused any more “trash” on Sims; he now wanted information on the lurid Claw case, the very case she had been assigned to, somehow knowing that it would fall into her hands even before she did.
“ You can go straight to hell, Matisak,” she'd told him.
“ Don't be a fool, Jessica.” His iron blue eyes held her prisoner for a moment. She knew what he was picturing in his mind, the moment when she was completely under his control. His hideous grin revealed his jaundiced gums.
She'd gotten up, prepared to leave.
“ I can give you Tracy Torres… Ana Pelligrino… a list of others,” he'd teased.
“ I won't be returning.”
“ Check an area called the Old Downs Glen section southwest of Lexington, Kentucky, a broad field surrounded by trees, a winding, unpaved road with a ranch house on one side and a lake on the other. Dredge the lake.” He spoke coldly, smugly, in that tone he used when he had whispered in her ear that he was going to drain her of all her blood, the night he'd killed Otto Boutine, her mentor and lover.
Sometimes his information unearthed a body. Sometimes not. She had shut down her recorder, but someone watching on the TV monitors might have heard the “latest Matisak revelation.” She'd wanted to push through the door and not look back, but she couldn't. When Matisak had stood trial the pre-vious year, the number of blood-drained bodies attributed to him stood at twenty-four, but it had now risen to twice that and counting.
The FBI liked closing cases, liked being able to write up a tidy ending to a missing person's case. It was great P.R. and great press when a victim's family could finally recover remains and put them in a sacred place. It all made good sense to deal with the devil for such results, but it turned her stomach even to look at Matisak.