He would bury the jars in a dump heap on the other side of the delapidated buildings. He unscrewed another cap, dumped the contents, screwed the cap back on and placed the empty jar back into its box.
The work was going well when he noticed a police cruiser 222 with its lights out on the overpass that he'd come off of. His heart felt like an enormous stone inside his chest, weighing him down. His hands froze on the jar he held, and he held himself statue-still, his eyes scanning for any movement, his ears pricked, listening. He saw nothing, heard nothing. But what was the meaning of the silent cruiser overhead? Were they laying in wait for him? Had he been spotted coming in? Was a SWAT team on its way to the sight?
He had to rush. He unscrewed all the lids. He began tossing the full jars clattering down the pipe. He knew that closed jars would float on the surface, and he meant to have them sink.
Suddenly flashlight beams hit him from two separate directions and then a third, and men were shouting at him. “Freeze!”
“ Police! Drop what you're doing and lie facedown on the dirt! Now! Now!”
The lights blinded him, but in a panic, he lifted the last of the boxes and began dumping its contents into the pipe. The lights were racing for him, closing the distance, when suddenly Leon felt the powerful boot of one of the men slam into his jaw. The force sent him reeling backward, and he dropped the empty box in his hand. One of the jars had spilled over the side and lay in the sand at his feet. He lurched for it, trying desperately to knock it out of sight just before a nightstick caught him in the temple, bloodying his face, sending him down again, the pain shooting through him as he took another kick, this time to the stomach.
Demons, he thought. They surrounded him, continuing to kick and beat him. They were sent, no doubt, by the Claw himself. He tried to get up and was sent flying into a mound of brick and debris. He felt the nightsticks rain down until he was senseless with the beating.
“ Kill the bastard here and now!” one of them was shouting.
“ We can make our own death penalty for cop killers!” agreed a second.
Leon blubbered and sputtered from a near broken jaw, trying to speak with a mouth full of blood. “I… I'm not the Claw! I didn't do it! He did it!”
He was hit again, so hard he saw only blackness over him. Still he cried out, “He made me do it! The Claw made me do it! I didn't wanna! Didn't wanna!”
Another boot came up, striking Leon in the right eye, breaking off his words and his consciousness.
At the same instant a squad car careened into the yard, kicking up rock and gravel and a fog of sand. The watch sergeant for the area leapt out, tore into the men and pulled them off Helfer. “Get an ambulance for this bastard! This ain't a goddamn kick-fest, and this ain't L.A.”
“ He tried running.”
“ We had to stop him.”
“ Picked up a lead pipe.”
“ Came at Connors.”
Helfer was beaten near to death.
“ Confiscate all this crap of his,” ordered the sergeant.
“ He was dumping jars like this down that hole over there, Sergeant,” said the cop named Connors, holding the single confiscated jar up.
“ Looks like we got the fuckin' Claw, all right.”
Alan Rychman was not blind to the fact that the two M.E. s weren't working well together when he reentered the scene of the mutilation murder. But his men were circling him with the bagged items they'd discovered during their room-to-room search.
“ This freak's collected women's underwear, some still with bloodstains on them. Captain,” said one man.
“ We got lipstick tubes, hair nets, brushes with hair in them.”
“ And a shit load of women's bags, Captain, but none of the missing organs or parts.”
Rychman held up a hand to his excited men and said clearly, “Turn it all over to Lou, and it'll be logged in along with Dr. Archer's and Dr. Coran's findings.”
Rychman neared Emmons' body for the second time, the eyeless face, the blood, and the shredded carcass profoundly disturbing him. It was different when you knew the deceased, when the corpse was more than just a stranger. Emmons' familiar face wasn't so familiar anymore, but her body proportions and her clothing were.
“ I want absolutely nothing left to chance, Doctors,” he told them.
Jessica looked over her shoulder at Rychman, hearing the pain in his voice. He must have known Detective Emmons for several years.
“ Can you verify it as the same work as that of the Claw?” asked Rychman.
“ If you're interested in unsubstantiated guesswork-” she began, but was cut off by Archer's reply.
“ There's no doubt in my mind. It's the work of the same maniac.”
“ That's good,” replied Rychman, “because I've just learned that Helfer's been picked up.”
“ Alive?” asked Jessica.
“ A bit roughed-up, but yeah, very much alive.”
“ Alive and talking, I hope,” she said. “We need him alive. We can learn from him, fill in the information blanks.”
Archer was nodding and saying, “Yes, good. Once he has been questioned, the details can be sorted out.”
Someone was shouting from an upstairs bedroom. It sounded like a major discovery. Rychman raced upstairs, followed by the others. On the second floor, in a back bedroom, lying in a shoe box in the closet, was the claw itself.
A young detective was almost hyperventilating over it. “Captain, it's… it's the damned murder weapon. Has to be! Has to be!”
“ Don't touch it!” shouted Jessica over the men crowding in to see the murderer's weapon of choice.
“ I've got it, Jess,” said Rychman.
“ This is going to nail the bastard six ways to Sunday,” said the young detective who had made the discovery.
“ Can't hurt your career, either, Marty,” said Sergeant Pierce.
Rychman carefully lifted the box out and then placed it on a bureau top. Jessica looked over his shoulder at the awful tool of terror, a thick, three-pronged metal rake with ice-pick ends and razored serrated edges set into a glove that had a thick thong of Velcro.
Rychman used the barrel end of his. 38 Police Special to lift the awful claw from its resting place in the shoe box. The metal, kept meticulously clean by the killer, sparkled and shined in the light, yet microscopic analysis would reveal Emmons' blood and minute particles of flesh clinging like electrified particles to the surface.
Rychman said, “The thing has heft. It's a hand-attachment weapon and it looks extremely close to the computer depiction you created, Jessica.”
Standing just beside and behind Rychman, looking at the chilling thing, she involuntarily shivered. It looked like something a gardener would use for tearing into the soil.
“ How extremely awful,” said Archer.
“ Yeah,” said one of the cops in the room, “ 'magine that going through your gut.”
“ Archer, take this into custody, and I don't want anything-anything-happening to this piece of evidence. It's vital to our nailing this bastard.”
“ Understand, Captain,” replied Archer, who allowed the brawny detective holding the ugly instrument of death to drop it into a large polyethelene bag, which Archer produced like a magician.
“ It looks as though we've finally caught the sicko bastard, men,” said Rychman to the group. “And we're going to see him carefully every step of the way to a lifetime behind bars.”
Someone screamed, a hair-curling, ear-splitting screech from the kitchen. Rychman got to Turner first, ushering him away from the sight of Emmons' body.
Helfer was under twenty-four-hour watch, no chances being taken with his safety; nor was any stone being left unturned in providing every shred of evidence against the man. No missteps or mishaps must be made. The D.A. was personally overseeing the conviction of the Claw, and so he asked Dr. Simon Archer to draw up an airtight medicolegal presentation that would bury Helfer and at the same time be easily understood by a jury. The entire, enormous machinery of City Hall was put into motion against the frail, little man named Leon who had become the city's most notorious serial killer.