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  Jessica finished taking her samples, dropping each into a fixative formula in various small jars beside the autopsy table. Dr. Darius buzzed for a pair of attendants to replace the Olin cadaver with the elderly Mrs. Phillips now.

  The Phillips autopsy was as painstaking as the previous one, for once again the missing organs, as noted at the crime scene, caused untold problems. Some of the organs removed from Miss Olin had been those of a much older person, and now some of Mrs. Phillips' parts were proving to be too young for her; even so, not all of Miss Olin's parts could be accounted for. Despite the monster's ugly idea of hide-and-seek, he'd obviously been tempted and had either eaten or carried off some of his carrion with him.

  With his every word being recorded, Dr. Darius said, “Whoever our maniac is, he bloody well knows his anatomy. He's extracted every major organ. No small task in and of... What the hell?” He paused, his gloved fingers probing Mrs. Phillips' chest cavity. “There's something odd here.”

  Jessica was instantly curious. “What is it, Doctor?”

  Something foreign materialized in Darius' hand and even the magician was startled at his trick. It appeared to be a small patch of cloth or square of cardboard covered in dark blood. “My God, what've we here?” he asked.

  She reached out for it with a pair of forceps, gingerly taking it between the prongs. “We've got to rush this to your photo-document section, Doctor.”

  “My thinking, precisely. I'll alert Lathrope of your coming.”

  “It could prove very valuable.”

  Darius' eyes spoke of his disbelief. Finally he said, “You don't suppose...”

  “What?”

  “That there might've been something like this in other victims? Say, the Olin woman? The Hamner woman?”

  “Recall them,” she replied. “Thoroughly search any of the victims you haven't released for burial.”

  He nodded, obviously shaken. She asked, “Are you all right, Doctor?”

  He nodded again, sweat beading his brow. “I've got a grip on it. Go now; go quickly.” But she hesitated. He looked pale. “Get some rest before you do anything else, Doctor, and wait for Archer, okay?”

  “Perhaps you're right. Go now! I'm fine, really, I am.”

  As he began dialing the head of his photo-document section, Jessica grabbed her cane from where it was propped against a lab table and started through the door. She bumped into Dr. Archer, who stared at the odd item between the bloody forceps she was holding before her. A dark fluid dripped from the matted paper camouflaged by the soupy blood and bile it had been fished from.

  “What the hell's this?” asked Archer, curious.

  “No time to explain, Doctor.” She rushed past him for the stairwell and the floor below.

  Archer looked across the room at Darius, who beamed at him, saying, “I think we may have finally gotten a break in the case of the Claw, Simon. And now I will need your help. We have to reopen the Olin and the Hamner cadavers.”

  “What for? What's going on?” asked the confused Archer.

  “Hurry, come with me, and I'll explain everything,” said Darius, who went for the freezer compartments. He had composed himself and was anxious now to get on with the work at hand.

  Fourteen

  Jessica couldn't help thinking that she held between the pincers of the forceps a clue that might break the case wide open. It had to be something left by the killer, intentionally. Her heart was beating so fast and her hands shaking so much that she feared she'd drop the paper before she got to the door marked “Documents.” People in the hallway watched her as she rushed by, curious and wondering. At the end of the hall, she saw the reporter that had confronted her in the garage two days before, and for a moment their eyes met, telling him she had something important dangling at the end of the forceps and dripping a string of gruel.

  She rushed through the door, her cane batting out her arrival. She didn't have to shout for help; everyone was surrounding her. The document guys were all aflutter, anxious to be involved in such a high-level case.

  “Walter Lathrope,” the head of the department said, cursorily introducing himself. “And you must be Dr. Coran.”

  After his initial, cursory inspection of the bloodied paper, Dr. Lathrope assured Jessica that his lab could free the message, but that it would take some time. And it did.

  The paper was ordinary 8 Vi” by 11” copy paper, 20-pound weight, grain long, color white. It had been tightly folded, and the document experts were opening it slowly so they wouldn't tear the wet, spoiled paper, trying desperately to keep it all in one piece. It was placed in an air-drying compartment with bubble gloves at each end. The experts had their hands in the gloves and were manipulating the paper with the pincherlike fingers on the ends. The gloves made her wonder about the Claw's awful, flesh-rending weapon or tool. Under the force of the drying air in the compartment, the paper began slowly to regain its shape and bond, but it took another twenty minutes for it to be unfolded completely. There were words on one side, but blood and bile had been absorbed by the fiber, obstructing most of them.

  “It's some kind of message, all right,” said Lathrope.

  Jessica had been pacing, drinking coffee, and she had telephoned for Rychman to join her here, just in case.

  The handwriting was large, childish and done in green ink. She saw loops and swirls like a roller coaster, but much of the writing was covered by stains that ran the entire length of what looked like a child's poem. Her heart sank. Maybe it wasn't something from the killer, after all; maybe it was something picked up in Olin's house, a note from a niece of nephew, that the sadistic killer had simply crushed into her gaping body as some kind of final, sick prank.

  “Can you clean it up?” she asked, staring.

  “I believe we can,” said Lathrope, who disappeared with his assistant into a darkened room, Jessica following. He placed the piece of paper below a Tensor lamp, on a table encircled by enormous magnifying glasses on robotic swivel arms, and the two men continued their painstaking work.

  They began the slow, careful removal of the dried blood and other matter clinging to the paper, concentrating on the areas where they could see green ink.

  “Green,” she said aloud. “Why green?”

  “The color of hope,” said Lathrope with a twinkle in his eye. Lathrope was a head taller than she, with large glasses and an elongated face. He looked the quintessence of the scientist. His partner, by comparison, was a short, balding man with round shoulders that looked perpetually hunched over.

  “Can you make out any of the words?” she asked just as Alan Rychman joined them.

  “Understand you have something important here?”

  “Maybe... maybe,” she cautioned.

  Lathrope studied a line of the green-lettered verse, the first to be completely cleared of the obstructing grunge. “It is some sort of poem...”

  “Poem?” Rychman almost shouted.

  Lathrope began reading aloud. “My... my teeth will have your eyes... And feed on your... banal cries.”

  “Doesn't sound like a child writing to his aunt,” she said.

  “What?” asked Rychman.

  “Never mind. Dr. Lathrope, how long before you can extricate the entire message?”

  “Give us another thirty minutes; we'll go to a dissolving solution.”

  “Good... good...” Jessica replied.

  Rychman escorted her out, asking, “What's this all about?”

  “We found what appears to be a message from the killer lodged into the Phillips body, Alan.”

  “A poem? Now our creep is writing poetry to us? Left inside the victim? Christ, I want to fry this bastard.”

  “I think it's a new ripple. I think he wants to talk, to communicate.”

  “Talk, communicate... sounds familiar. What is it makes these lunatics want to buddy up and talk, like maybe it'd be nice to have a beer with the sonofa—”

  Rychman stopped in midsentence, seeing Jim Drake at the other end of
the hall on a telephone. “That creep gets ahold of this, it'll be in the evening paper, you know that?”

  “I haven't spoken to him.”

  “You don't have to speak to him. He's got rabbit ears.”

  “Come on. Let's get a bite at the machines downstairs.”

  “Where'd you and Darius disappear to this morning, if you don't mind my asking?”

  “Not at all.” She launched into a description of the best time she'd had in New York since her arrival.

  “Hmmmm,” replied Rychman as they entered the elevator, “better than the fun we had at the shooting range?”

  “Let's just say I didn't feel any tension with the good doctor, no expectations, no games.”

  “And you do with me?”

  “Some, yes, especially the last time I entered an elevator with you.”

  “Hey, I'm sorry 'bout that, really. I... It was the wine and... and you... being alone with you.”

  “I'll try to take that as a compliment.”

  “You should.”

  Dr. Lathrope's secretary, Marilyn Khoen, whispered into the telephone receiver. “That's all I know. No, don't push me on this, not unless you can guarantee... No, no way. I'm not going to do that.”

  At the other end of the line, James W. Drake III was making promises the reporter wasn't sure he could keep, but if he could show a break in the Claw case, he believed he could write his own ticket. Hell, he could practically guarantee Marilyn a job with the Times, maybe as his assistant... but it all depended on the nature of the contents of the piece of paper fished from the body of one of the victims. He needed details, facts only Marilyn could secure for him. He knew it was asking a lot, but it could also mean a great deal. Everything was riding on what the Claw did these days.

  He realized that the deadly Claw had, in effect, the power to make or break any number of careers in the city, from lowly reporter to mayor to commissioner of police. He wondered how it would work out for Alan Rychman, whom he didn't particularly like, anyway.

  “Marilyn, sweetheart, it's for me, for Jimmy, huh?”

  He waited for her reply. When it didn't come, he urged her on. “Whataya say? Come on, you can trust me.”

  “You're making me feel like... like a damned whore, Jimmy, and I deserve better from you!”

  “No, no, baby, I'd never do that. I love you, and I want to make things right between us, the way they used to be, remember? Remember when we took the boat out on the harbor? Remember how it was, doing it at sea? Remember the salt air and, and—”

  “What're you saying? That we can get back together if—”

  “I'm saying I'll be eternally grateful, babe, eternally.”

  “Is that like a marriage proposal?”

  “I'll get you a good job at the paper.”

  “I... I don't know.”

  He was about to slam the phone down in frustration, but he held onto it and calmed himself instead. “You'd be doing the city a favor. When they hide all the facts about this maniac running around the city . . . Marilyn, a killer that feeds on women like you, babe, slices and dices and actually eats their flesh... I'm telling you, honey, the public's got a right to know, to protect themselves, to be on the lookout, and you... you're in a unique position to help see that happens. You might even save a life.”

  “I... I don't know.”

  But he could tell by the change in her tone that she did know. And he knew that he had her where he wanted her, hooked on the idea.

  “Just start keeping notes. Anything you overhear, anything relating to what Dr. Coran is working on, okay?”

  “I like Dr. Lathrope. It's just these all-nighters and you never know when you're on call.”

  “Baby, you think I don't know that? It's got to be grueling for you... grueling. With me, it'd be strictly nine to five.” What was one more lie? he told himself.

  When Jessica and Alan Rychman returned to the documents division, they were hopeful that something useful might await them. Lathrope was staring at the supposed words of the killer, a scowl disfiguring his horse-sized face, his glasses perched at the end of his nose as he crinkled it in consternation.

  “Makes no damned sense, Rychman. See for yourselves.”

  Rychman and Jessica read from the sheet of paper, now safely under a blue light that illuminated bloodstains, separating the messy stains from the ink lettering and the plethora of fingerprints that lay beneath. The words were bizarre. She began to read them aloud, trying to pick up on the meter.

  “My teeth will have your eyes

  And feed on your banal cries . . .

  Your sins will be eaten away

  That you might live another day . . .

  The Claw is no name for him

  Who gives you eternal life

  By eating away your sin . . .

  My rabid, hungry sin-feast

  Will out in the end

  To give you eternal peace.”

  It was signed “Ovid, Divine Protector.”

  “Christ, what're we supposed to surmise from this?” asked Rychman. “That it's the work of one guy, or a collaborative effort?”

  He could not hide his disappointment.

  “There's more here than meets the eye. We need to get a shrink's advice, but I'd be willing to bet there're some clues to this guy's head in all this,” Jessica said.

  “We got a guy named Ames, fresh from the Chicago Police Department,” said Rychman. “Supposed to be a helluva head man. Let's get a few copies of this made,” Rychman replied.

  Lathrope called his secretary in and handed her the poem in its glass case, carefully holding it by its sides. “Careful with this, Marilyn. Make a few copies for Captain Rychman.”

  “This stays in-house, people,” Rychman told Lathrope and his assistant. “Who else knows about this?” he asked Jessica.

  “Only Dr. Darius and Archer. Archer saw me with it when I left the lab, and I assume Dr. Darius told him about it.”

  “Good, let's see it stays that way, everyone.”

  “You got it, Captain,” said Lathrope.

  Marilyn returned with several copies and Rychman quickly confiscated them.

  “We'll get what we can from the original,” said Lathrope. “See if these prints can be matched.”

  “Thanks for dropping everything for me, Dr. Lathrope,” said Jessica, shaking his hand.

  “Not to give it a second thought. A most interesting challenge, actually.”

  His assistant piped in from the other room where he had started back to work on another project, saying, “It's a wonder Darius fished it from the dead woman's insides at all, from what I saw down there in Scarsdale.”

  “Yes, it was quite a surprise for him; something of a shock,” Jessica answered.

  She and Rychman said their goodbyes and were soon making their way to see Dr. Richard Ames, the police psychiatrist. Not knowing anything about Ames, she faxed a copy to Quantico for O'Rourke to turn over to a psychological profiling team there.

  Rychman had no objections. “We need all the help we can get with this Claw or Claws.”

  Dr. Richard Ames was a very tall, broad-shouldered, handsome black man with fine features and huge hands, which appeared both gentle and dexterous. Jessica judged him a basketball star in college, and a number of plaques and trophies behind his desk corroborated her guess. Ames got up from behind the desk and offered them comfortable, large leather chairs that fronted a window overlooking the Avenue of the Americas in lower Manhattan. He enjoyed a private practice here and charitably gave sixteen hours a week, at ninety dollars an hour, to the NYPD. His credentials were impressive and he had worked extensively with psychotics, sociopaths and serial killers.

  Rychman had informed Jessica that Ames had been instrumental in the Handyman case some years before in Chicago. The maniacal killer in that case had only indirectly murdered his victims. They had died of shock after coming out of a hypnotic state induced by the charming murderer, who had left them intact, except for their ha
nds. When the man was finally caught, he had a collection of human hands the likes of which could not be comprehended.

  After introductions, Dr. Ames was anxious to get to work.

  “I understand you have a written statement from this madman the papers are calling the Claw. I am anxious to examine it. How did it arrive? Did he contact a reporter, a TV personality?”

  “None of the above,” said Rychman.

  “Oh?”

  Jessica explained how they had come by the communique.

  “It's not your usual method, to say the least,” replied Ames, biting the inside of his cheek nervously, as if recalling something disturbing. “It's almost as if the sender were afraid of his own message. As if he largely wished it not to be found, and yet was compelled to... forward it.”

  “It's not your usual evil-killer communique, either,” she said. “A bit literary for a killer, in fact.”

  “Literary? In the Jack the Ripper school of letters, you mean?”

  “The Ripper was fond of rhyming.”

  “Rhymes? Really? I'm surprised you didn't send it to a cryptologist.”

  “Don't worry,” she assured him, “we have. They're working on it in Virginia as we speak.”

  “I see. How daunting, then, that you should bring it to me. Well, let's have a look.”

  She handed a copy to him in a manila envelope. He took it to his desk and lay it out before him, scanning it quickly, almost instantly saying, “This fellow is very disturbed.”

  “We know that much, Doctor,” said Rychman.

  “Captain, I may need to keep this for a while.”

  “It can't go beyond this office. The papers don't have this, and we want to keep it that way, understood?”

  “Yes, of course. I haven't a problem with that, but I would like to be free to take it back and forth with me.”

  “Of course,” he said. “But time is important here. The fiend killed two women last night, and he's going to go right on killing until he's stopped.”

  “I heard,” said Ames. He paced a moment before going to his intercom and speaking with his secretary. They were engaged in an argument when he shouted, “Priscilla, you'll just have to arrange it. I've got to take the afternoon. It's police business that won't wait. Now, please, no more argument.” He clicked off a bit disdainfully and looked up at the two law enforcement officials. “I'll make it my only priority this afternoon,” he said.