The obvious goal to Dr. Archer's scheme was the moment when he, and he alone, would unveil telling evidence that would lead directly to the Claw. It had been Archer who was in control of all the chips. All this hidden beneath a veneer of the reticent, self-effacing, loyal and trusted assistant. It almost ranked with the nightmare of the Claw himself.
Bastard, she thought. Or was it bitch? Had she been turned into a suspicious bitch by the years, by the terrible convolutions of the plots she had unraveled? By virtue of having seen so much mendacity, was she overly suspicious?
Still, even if he hadn't actually physically pushed Luther Darius through that window, Archer may well have driven his superior to jump.
This made her wonder anew about Darius' fall in the dressing area. Might they have had an argument? Might Archer have shoved Dr. Darius?
It was all too perfect and all too mad. Darius' return marked a move back down the ladder for Simon Archer, just when Archer felt secure in the position he had yearned for, for so many years.
The computer had become insistent, flashing a single graphic on and off at her, as if the machine were daring her to turn and look at it.
She did so and came face-to-face with the actual claw used by the killer. It was a deadly, three-pronged prostheticlike attachment or glove that fit over the human hand. The killer had fashioned his own cougarlike claw, his own killing machine. Rychman had to see this.
But Jessica was almost afraid to tell him her theory about Archer. He might think she was mad, especially since she'd already accused Darius of tampering with his own “sacrosanct” evidence for personal and professional gain. It had been Archer all along, but she'd been blind, or rather he had been invisible. Either way, she had no proof, only the gut-wrenching certainty of her intuition, and that wouldn't cut any ice with Rychman any longer.
She got on the phone to Quantico and caught J.T. in the lab there. She asked twenty questions about how he had received the forensic materials from the NYPD, what kind of postal service was used, how it was boxed, how it was labeled and how many actual samples were forwarded to him.
It all checked out. Archer had covered himself well. She began to feel like a drowning victim gasping for air. She started to hang up but stopped to make another request. “Oh, J.T., see what you can find out for me about a Dr. Simon Archer. You know, what schools he attended, where he worked before here, that sort of thing.”
“ Sure, Jess.” He knew her well enough not to ask why. When she wanted to tell him she would, but not before.
“ Call me when you've got it.”
He hung up, and she was sure that she had thoroughly confused him.
She dialed Rychman, who was out. She left a message for him to see her at the lab the moment he returned. Alone, she turned to stare at the computer replica of the deadly weapon used on the eight victims of the Claw.
Somehow, she sensed that the body count was going to escalate, largely because police were being stymied by their own forensics people. As before, despite the so-called evidence, despite Dr. Ames' assessment of the killer's mind, she continued to believe there were two monsters at work in all this, and she felt it strangely scary that only she and, of course, the killers knew the truth about the Claw. One of the lab assistants was coming, a cup of coffee in one hand, the daily paper in another. Jessica shut off the monitor with the graphic detail of the claw as she watched Laurie Marks approaching.
“ Dr. Coran, have you seen this?” asked Laurie, her eyes wide.
“ What is it?”
Splashed across the front page was Ovid's poem.
“ Christ, how'd the papers get hold of it? Damn!”
She began scanning for the informant, but beneath Jim Drake's byline and all through the rutting piece, she saw only references to “sources” close to the investigation.
“ All hell's going to break loose,” said Laurie. “I hear Captain Rychman didn't tell the mayor's office or the C. R about the poem, and they just got it by the papers, and Rychman's on the warpath for whoever leaked it to the press.”
Jessica's mind flashed on the image of Rychman choking Dr. Ames to death in his office. “I've got to find Rychman,” she said. But she first went back to her computer and pressed for the file menu, storing her information under a code known only to her. Impatiently waiting for the computer to run through its final program, she asked Laurie a few questions about Dr. Archer, about how he seemed around the office and the labs, especially lately.
“ Nervous, kinda touchy if you ask me, but who wouldn't be? I mean with this kind of an investigation going on, with Dr. Darius killing himself, and with the possibility of his having to take on-”
“ Has he ever asked you to do anything… questionable or anything that you've wondered about?”
She hesitated. “Once…”
The computer whine turned into a click, telling her that storage was complete and that she could now pop the disk and take it to Rychman. But now Laurie had her undivided attention.
“ Please, Laurie, it could be important.”
“ Well, once… maybe it was an accident… we were working late-”
“ Yes?”
“ And he… his hand just kinda grazed my… my breast… I… I don't think he meant anything by it, but maybe he did, but he… he just isn't my type.”
Jessica's disappointment was painted in broad strokes across her face. “I'm off to locate Rychman.”
“ You… you won't tell him I said anything about… will you?”
She shook her head, grabbed the computer disk, the autopsy tape and her cane before she rushed out. Laurie Marks frowned as she watched Dr. Coran march away, wondering to herself if the sometimes clumsy, sometimes callous Dr. Archer had hit on the FBI woman. Then she thought of some of the strange stories she'd heard about Archer, stories she'd never repeat to anyone-the kind of sick tales told about a lot of people in their profession.
Nineteen
Leon Helfer was hungry and tired; his head ached, his sinuses were clogged and he feared that soon the Claw would know what he had done. If his poem was discovered, and surely it would be, and if the news leaked out, the Claw would know. Even if the news didn't leak out, the Claw would know. Somehow he'd pluck it from Ovid's brain.
Leon had just finished work for the day. His job was a boring one, filled as it was, from hour to hour, with the same mechanical process. And him like a robot for the duration of time he was in the factory. But it was a living, and it kept his mind off the Claw and off killing, off what he had become.
It was his job to inspect pipe. The company made every kind of pipe known, from plumbing pipe to irrigation and city lines, some of the pipe large enough to walk through. The Claw might need to lower his head, but the average man could stand fully upright inside the largest concrete pipe the company made.
Once the pipe was inspected for safety and quality-control purposes, it was loaded onto trucks and sent out into the world. Sometimes Leon felt that his work here was important, but the Claw made it clear that there was only one important task in Leon's life…
Machine noises at the factory were deafening, so much so that Leon could talk at the top of his lungs to himself about the Claw and no one could hear. Sometimes he caught his coworkers staring, but he'd gotten used to that, and they'd gotten used to his talking to himself. Or so it seemed.