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  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.

  In the end, she had called his bluff and stepped through the door without another word, infuriating him. She failed to report his request for information on the case of the Claw. So far as she was concerned, and from what Dr. Arnold had told her of his behavior and remarks upon Sims' suicide, Matisak was having too damned much fun yanking everyone's chain when by rights he ought to have been gassed or electrocuted for his crimes, but the sovereign State of Illinois hadn't been a death-sentence state.

  Sims was a pitiable creature by comparison to Matisak, though his crimes had been even more ghastly and hideous in the public mind than those of the vampire. Cannibals killed quickly, vampires with slow deliberation. Matisak drained his victim's blood slowly, in torturous fashion, with the use of a tracheotomy tube. His bloodletting was called in FBI terms the ninth level of torture. Sims was a meat-eater, a cannibal, and his crime in FBI parlance fell at the sixth level of torture, or Tort 6. After having incapacitated his victims, he subjected their bodies to indignities unimaginable to the average citizen, but their suffering was ended relatively quickly. On the FBI torture scale, the scale was tipped by the number of hours a victim actually suffered.

  There weren't a lot of blood-drinkers or canni
bals in captivity, and so each one, from the sometime cannibal to the full-blown, such as Jeffrey Dahmer, was seen as an important source of information regarding the darkest and most depraved of human desires. From a psychiatric point of view these rare species were priceless. And so people like Arnold and O'Rourke treated them like celebrities.

  But what had they learned from Sims, whose own character was so weak as to be dominated by a shadowy second self, a delusionary double that he claimed to be a woman named Stainlype who was the meat-eater, not him? Jessica wondered which one, Sims or Stainlype, would pay for his sins in the hereafter. As with Sims, her Matisak talks had located a number of otherwise lost bodies, and this was the only reason she'd agreed to return to the asylum penitentiary.

  Nodding off in the peace and serenity brought on by air flight, Jessica felt for a time safe and untouchable when she heard Matisak's grating voice, saying, “The Claw... the Claw... the Claw...”

  Jessica jerked awake and found Dorrington shouting at the flight attendant, who'd handed him chicken instead of the club sandwich. He was repeatedly saying, “The club... the club.”

  “And anything for you, miss?” asked the attendant.

  “Just coffee, please, black,” she said over the noise in the plane. Once she'd gotten her coffee stabilized, she went back to the case file in her lap.

  The New York City police were baffled by a vicious, sadistic woman-hater brutalizing, maiming and cannibalizing victims across a wide area. The handiwork of the so-called Claw was so awful that it went beyond anything Jessica had seen in or out of an autopsy room.

  An NYPD captain of detectives named Alan Rychman had placed multiple information checks through VICAP—the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program at the National Crime Information Center, Washington, D.C. Rychman was asking for cooperation on a nationwide scale by utilizing the FBI computer where all information on violent crimes was pooled and screened for pattern crimes and similarities. NYPD had been unable to obtain anything in the way of evidence on the killer's identity, or identities. Enough damage had been done on the victims to warrant the possibility that the Claw was more than one assailant. Along with Rychman, the renowned New York City chief medical examiner, Dr. Luther Darius, was asking for limited assistance through his contacts in the FBI medical community.

  Jessica knew of Darius' reputation, and if he was asking for help, then things had gone badly in New York. As it was, five known victims of the maniac were spread across several boroughs, further complicating matters, as this involved various police jurisdictions and pathology labs. The killings had recently ceased, but fear ran high that the ugly mutilation murders and cannibalized corpses would return.

  She found it of great interest that the killer had chosen to play games early on with the police, intentionally placing the bodies in high-visibility locations. The killer wanted the bodies found either because he felt some remorse and wanted his victims to be given a decent burial or—and much more likely given the severity of the attacks—he took great delight in showing off his carving talents and enjoyed frightening and disgusting the public, the authorities or both.

  The fifth victim was found after a phone caller to an all-night radio talk show told authorities where to look; the caller had timidly identified himself as Ovid. A trace on the call turned up an empty phone booth in Manhattan, but Ovid's voiceprint was on record.

  A search of the area where Ovid told police to look revealed a woman gutted, her entrails gone, presumably eaten, since the cannibalistic nature of the monster had already been established forensically, making the Claw the most notorious serial killer in the city since the Son of Sam.

  The bastard hasn't been very selective, Jessica thought. His victims ranged from age seventeen to seventy-one, from blondes to gray-haired grandmas, leaving the NYPD without an apparent victim type, further limiting knowledge of the kind of killer they were dealing with. The only common de-nominator was that the victims were female, leading to speculation that this ripper killed out of a deep-seated hatred of women, which was no big deduction at this point.

  NYPD hadn't any fingerprints, hair samples, or fibers of any significance, and with no one in custody whose teeth impressions matched the bites left in the flesh of the victims, and no other leads, neither Forensics nor Captain Rychman was holding out for any miracles. The killer was meticulous about not leaving any trace of himself behind, giving Jessica to believe that he was what the Bureau called a highly organized killer.

  Dr. Luther Darius had recently requested and received useful crime-fighting software from the FBI which might pinpoint the size, style and type of the weapon being used on the Claw's victims. Jessica Coran had had a hand in developing and refining the software, a dream that had begun with the now retired Dr. Holecraft. He'd been one of Jessica's instructors in the crime lab. Darius could get no better computer-assisted aid than the FBI Evidence TACH Program. This evidence technician software would save Darius weeks, perhaps months, of painstaking evidence-gathering and measurements.

  With this thought, Jessica closed her eyes once again, drifting off toward sleep. All information regarding the NYPD troubles seemed now to be floating like the debris of a sunken ship atop mounting waves, flotsam in her mind, unrelated, disjointed and disorganized. Her mind fought to put it away, to find rest, and she did so for a brief time until the floating debris coalesced into one disturbing, familiar form— the face of Gerald Ray Sims. Was the Claw cut of the same cloth? She might warily assume so on the basis of their mutual taste for human flesh, that they were both Tort 6 killers.

  Then she watched as Sims' face darkened and shape-changed into a bestial monster, Stainlype; then Stainlype was Matthew Matisak, his eyes glaring out at her from the window of his glass-encased cell.

  Matisak's form suddenly rises up in her dream, moving toward her at a threatening pace, stepping to and through the glass that separates them, a supernatural being unhampered and unimpaired by the glass. His hands extend ten feet before him, poised to grab her. She quickly reaches down to the gun she has smuggled into the jail, raises it and fires, blowing half of Matisak's face away. But he keeps coming, one eye dangling, the other eerily focused on her.

  She gasps when he grabs her and wakes with a start to find the plane descending toward La Guardia.

  Three

  New York City, July 3, 1993

  “What do you think, Ovid?”

  The Claw insisted on calling him Ovid. He didn't know what it signified, but the Claw told him that he renamed all of his followers.

  “She'll do...”

  “You sure, now? Don't wanna rush you into anything.”

  “Let's do it, Claw.”

  “You got the hammer?”

  “Got it.”

  “You worked out the place?”

  “Quit worrying.”

  “Time to feast?”

  “Time to feast.”

  Sometimes Ovid thought it was like talking to himself, and sometimes it was like talking to an entirely different person.

  But when the Claw was stalking a victim, they were of the same mind.

  She was about thirty yards away. She had come out of a grocery store, her arm wrapped around a bag. She looked troubled, preoccupied. She didn't notice his approach. She took exactly the right course, toward the area he had planned to drag her after hitting her with the hammer. Once she was unconscious, he would have his way with her, and so would the Claw.

  He knew the Claw liked to rip women open. He knew the Claw liked to bite and tear with his teeth, too, and eat some of the parts. The Claw was a real animal.

  He, too, liked some of it. He liked using his teeth on her. At first, though, when he tried tasting what the Claw tasted, it made him vomit. He had become more accustomed to it now, and he no longer threw up, but he still didn't much like it.

  He lessened the distance between himself and his victim, feeling the hefty hammer in his hand beneath the coat. He had slit the pocket to accommodate both hand and hammer. All th
e other tools he required were in the safe place.

  She looked over her shoulder, saw him and quickened her pace. He sensed her fear. He liked the feeling it made in the pit of his stomach. He took longer strides toward her. She would reach the alleyway entrance in a moment. He must be quick.

  She looked around again, half stumbled on seeing him so near, and she let out a scream just as the hammer came down. Her groceries spilled and he dragged her limp form down the darkened alley, out of the streetlights that cast his shadow in the horrible shape of a hunchback. But the hunchback's shadow was due to the cumbersome woman he had slung over his shoulder.

  He passed a house where some lights had come on, pressed himself and his victim against the fence and held his breath. The people inside had heard the scream that had been curtailed by the blow to her head. She was bleeding. He could smell it. He reached up to her scalp to touch the warm spot, getting his fingers sticky with it. The Claw would be pleased.

  He made his way toward his destination with his burden, wishing the Claw would be of more assistance during this stage of preparation, but the Claw said it was a way to show faith in him, and that it would be wrong of the Claw to assist in this part of the ritual.

  He and the Claw swore never to be weak ever again, never to go hungry or without power. They took power when they took life, the Claw said. They took sustenance when they took life. They had every right to what they could take.

  He dragged her into the blackness of a city basement at sublevel. Earlier he had snapped the lock and placed his toolbox inside. He expected the Claw to enter behind him, knowing the Claw was nearby, watching out there in the night.

  The woman moaned. Heat rose off her as if she had a fever. He guessed her to be in her late twenties. She was rather thick with a pleasant, plump face, her hair left to fall straight to each side. She hadn't taken very good care of herself, he thought. She reminded him of his mother.