Jessica, fatigued and more confused than ever about what kind of basket case she sat across from, wanted to conclude the interview, but something in Leon's eye held her a moment longer. “What is it, Leon?”
“ You got to promise to keep him away from me, please.”
Gerald Ray Sims had made the same plea regarding Stainlype.
“ By all means, Mr. Helfer, we will do so, by all means,” she replied with clenched hands, knowing they'd been unable to do so in Sims' case.
At the door, she turned and asked him, “Leon, why did you let this other man do this to you? Why did you allow him to bully you and turn you into a killer and a cannibal?”
“ I ain't no cannibal, not really. He is… He's crazy for the organs. I… me, I mostly just bit and chewed a little… not much. It was him that did the real damage.”
“ Where did you bite the women, what parts of the body, Leon?”
“ Just the… the behinds…”
“ Come on. Where else?”
“ Throat sometimes when the Claw told me, but mostly the sex parts. I only swallowed flesh maybe twice and that was just so the Claw wouldn't get angry with me.”
“ But why… why'd you let him lead you to this?”
“ I was so…” He began to shiver and rattle in his chains. “I still am afraid. He could get me even here. He even came to me last night, appeared right outside my cell. He… he terrifies me.”
Unable to take any more of this little man, Jessica left with many, many questions still unresolved.
She returned to the NYPD headquarters to continue the search for the elusive Claw, because she still refused to believe that Leon Helfer, by himself, was capable of carrying out the various atrocities inflicted on the Claw's victims. She made her position clear to Alan, whom she forced to sit to listen to her.
“ I've heard all this,” Alan complained, “and Ames has interpreted his remarks as just the opposite-”
She pointed out Helfer's responses on the deaths of his dentist and his boss, and that Helfer's mother had been under medical care at a Bronx clinic known as Street Hospital.
He slapped down several files before her.
“ What're these?”
“ Didn't take much digging, once we hit on this angle, to learn that all the women were ill, some terminally so.”
“ That means you've discovered the first true link between the victims,” she said. “That's great.”
“ With the exception of Mrs. Phillips, they were all traveling far from their homes to that same clinic Helfer mentioned. Storefront operation, low overhead, cheap medicine, pro bono stuff, lots of starry-eyed interns doing their bit for the homeless and indigent.”
“ So who's on staff there regularly?”
“ No one who looks suspicious, but the average stay for a doctor is brief, and there's one, a Dr. Casadessus, who interests me.”
“ Have you talked to him?”
“ No, unable to locate. All information on him at the clinic was falsified.”
“ It's him. I know it. I can feel it. They must have some record of who's practicing-”
“ Hey, from the look of the place, they're just happy to have someone who can hold a scalpel right-end up.” She breathed deeply. “But you're not letting go?”
“ No, not at all. I don't like blatant coincidence in a murder investigation.”
“ Then it is a continuing investigation?”
“ Only so far as you and I know. The C.P. ordered it a closed case yesterday.”
“ Alan, it can't be mere coincidence alone that all these victims were getting their health care at the same place.”
“ Agreed,” he replied. “Now what about Simon Archer? How does he feel about your staying on, I mean?”
“ He isn't completely thrilled with the idea.”
“ Sounds good.” Alan's sarcasm made her frown.
They then kissed and parted, telling one another to be careful, Alan taking Lou Pierce with him to make additional discreet inquiries at the free clinic.
Jessica returned to the laboratories where she had worked alongside Darius. From time to time she saw Archer look up from his own work, his eyes penetrating the glass partitions between them, his reflection caught by a myriad of glass panes, making it appear as if he were on all sides of her. She continued to work through the forensic materials that had been placed at her disposal by the acknowledged new chief coroner of the city, Simon Archer.
While she worked over the leather glove claw, Jessica was haunted by the image of another deadly weapon. All during the chase for Matthew Matisak they'd had so much difficulty determining the exact nature of the weapon used by the killer. It had finally come down to a bastardized form of the trache-otomy tube through which the vampiristic Matisak drained the blood of his victims into canning jars which he put up for his leisure-time activities.
The Claw's terrible weapon, which Jessica now held in her hands, was weighty, the prongs trying to pull themselves from her grasp, until she pulled it over her gloved hand and tied off the thong that held it cinched to her, making her think of a falconer's harness for an osprey, a coverlet to protect the trainer's flesh from the bird's talons.
There was blood on the casing and thongs, Emmons' blood. But when they picked up the weaselly little man who had supposedly overpowered Emmons, his clothes were free of blood, as were his hands. In fact, not so much as a fiber of Emmons' hair had been found on the man's clothing. Fur-thermore, Emmons had not suffered a hammer blow to the skull.
Jessica had now to slit open the coverlet of the weapon in order to run the MAGNA brush over the interior for any telltale prints the killer might have left inside the glove. The sable-hair brush was used to lift the grease stain for a print, but there was nothing here. Could Leon Helfer have been so methodical as to wear a glove beneath the gloved weapon?
Not the Leon Helfer she had met and spoken with. To be so precise and careful and organized in his thinking while he hacked away at the life of his victims… not Helfer. There had to be another Claw. Leon simply could not have been so methodical.
Proving it would be quite another matter, however, and she knew she'd get no help from Archer, who kept his own secrets now.
She certainly hadn't time for Archer's well-hidden pettiness, not now; not if she wanted to lash out at Leon's still-unknown accomplice. The real Claw was still at large. She wanted to shake this creature to his core, to make him feel fear, fear that his carefully constructed walls would come crumbling down like brittle parchment.
He surely must believe, as did the papers and everyone else in the city, that the police were satisfied with Leon Helfer's life. Leon was fattened and ready to die for his master. She believed that the dominant half of the killing duo had set up the weaker half to take the fall, so that the Claw someday might again take up where he left off, perhaps in another city in another state, perhaps next month, perhaps next year, perhaps ten years hence.
Twenty-four
At his pretrial hearing a week later, Leon Helfer presented a pitiful sight, a man that had sunk so low as to become a cannibal, a true human monster whom the press painted in as lurid a color as possible and then some. He argued at the beginning that he had not killed alone, that there was an accomplice, and that the other was the real Claw; he argued that he had just been the Claw's dupe, his procurer, his Igor.
The few inclined to believe Helfer's side of things, anyone with doubts about the Claw's being in custody, quickly lost that position when Leon began calling himself Ovid in open court. Then Ovid was questioned on the stand by Dr. Richard Ames, who had been appointed by the court to determine if Leon Helfer was criminally insane.
Ames found himself in a quandary. He believed Helfer was not criminally insane by the strict letter of the law, but that he was clinically insane. Ames drew out the second personality even further. Ovid did not do as expected on the stand; rather than accuse Leon of the murder spree, he accused a third party, someone Ovid knew only as the Claw, someone Leon had met in some mystical interlude at a darkened funeral home where his mother's body lay in waiting.