Ovid set up a small flashlight fished from his tool chest. “How's that?”
“ Better.”
He saw the Claw extend his shiny, metallic, scissorslike right hand. It was a devastating weapon, sparkling in the weak light, the ice-pick ends seemingly hungry for flesh. The Claw extended the razor-sharp, three-pronged piece of metal over the woman's body, and with a mere swipe, cut open the fabric of her cotton print dress. Then her bra and panties were cut. Next came the skin, the blood bubbling up. But this was just the Claw at foreplay.
Ovid swallowed hard, watching the claw pendulum back and forth slowly over the helpless victim.
“ You want to take a bite out of her?” the Claw asked him.
“ Yeah, can hardly wait,” lied Ovid, who knew he could wait.
“ Do it… Do it now!”
He clamped down on her throat, and with his teeth he drew back blood and tissue. At almost the same instant, the Claw dug deep into her chest and jaggedly pulled down and down and down. The woman's scream was lost with her vocal cords, which Ovid ripped out with his teeth.
The Claw now bit at her lower parts, tearing away chunks of her flesh, rolling it around in his mouth, spitting some out, swallowing other pieces.
The Claw went into a frenzy over the still-kicking, nerve-rippling corpse, digging again into her and ripping away. He then did it a third time. When he finished, he asked for the eyes. These were cut away, handed to him, and he fed on them.
Spent, lying against the dead woman, the Claw dug out her insides, carefully placing the intestines alongside the body before looping them in a winding, circular pattern about the limbs. He then went back inside her for the heart and kidneys. They both became perturbed at finding only one kidney.
“ Take what we have,” said the Claw.
He found the plastic bags in the tool chest. The heart was severed and put away first. Then the left kidney was bagged.
“ We'll finish the liver here,” the Claw told him.
“ All right, all right.”
“ I want the head,” said the Claw.
“ What? Whataya mean?”
“ The head.”
“ You want to take her head with us?”
“ Yes, dammit.”
“ What for?”
“ For later.”
“ All right, all right.” With a carpenter's knife used for cutting linoleum, he began an effective slice all around the throat. He could feel the head coming, held now only by the cervical vertebra. The linoleum cutter soon severed this last connection. The head tumbled from the body as if scurrying off. He grabbed it and instantly the Claw snatched it from him. It dangled at the end of the claw.
The eyeless face was further disfigured by the Claw while Ovid went for the raw liver, but there was a noise outside.
“ The light!”
Ovid shut it down. Someone was coming down the stone steps, was just outside the door. Whoever it was saw the broken lock and had seen the strange glow inside; whoever it was dropped what he or she was carrying and rushed away.
“ Tools, collect up everything, everything!” cried the Claw.
Ovid did so as quickly and as carefully as he could, and when Ovid turned around, he found himself alone with the decapitated, mutilated corpse. The Claw had left empty-handed. He'd have to leave the head, and hope that he could get away with his tools and the two organs in his toolbox.
He rushed out into the dark. No sign of the Claw.
The rookie cop that Tyler Davis was training told him they'd gotten a call over the radio while Davis was inside getting coffee. “What kind of call?”
“ Routine 10–22, Sergeant Davis.”
Tyler had been a training sergeant for eleven years, and rookies never ceased to amaze him. “Nothing routine about a 10–22. You go answering a 10–22 thinking the way you're thinking, Officer Chase, just go right ahead and get your friggin' brains blown out for ringing on a doorbell. Seen it happen.”
“ Well, I figure it's maybe a prowler,” said Bryan Chase to his training sergeant, shrugging it off.
“ Call like that's the trickiest kind. Let's roll, you got the address?”
Chase hit the siren and peeled out the moment Davis' hefty behind was on the seat, spilling the man's coffee in the bargain, further aggravating him. After the cursing stopped, Tyler Davis cleaned himself off with a handkerchief. He then slowly spoke to Chase in calm, even tones. “You get a 10–30, you know what's going down. You get a 10–11, you pretty much know what's waiting at the end of the ride. This shit… could be a burglary in progress, sure. Could be a break-in for any number of reasons. Jealous boyfriend or husband hitting on his wife. Could be a man with a gun.”
The radio car stopped in front of an old brownstone where three people-a crowd for this time of night in this area-had gathered. The strobe beacon on the radio car drew more on lookers and curious kids. The superintendent of the building told them that he called when one of his tenants had run to his door with a report of something awful going on in the basement laundry room. The super led the way.
The rear basement door stood open, the black interior staring back like a gaping dungeon. Davis had brought along his flashlight, and now he cut the darkness with a thin line of light, shouting, “Come on out of there, all of you! This is the police. Step out with your hands up in front of you!”
There was no response.
“ There a light switch inside there?” he asked the super.
“ Sure, center of the room on a chain.”
The flash reflected back off the dull finish of an ill-matched washer and dryer. “Calcutta in there,” muttered Davis. “And something smells wrong.”
“ I don't smell anything,” replied Bryan Chase.
Davis had been a medic in Vietnam. “Smells like blood, man. Anybody in there? Anybody hurt? I don't think nobody's here.”
“ I'll get the light switch,” said Bryan, going for the center of the room, his gun pulled and poised. Suddenly the rookie tripped, his firearm discharging, Davis cursing, asking what happened.
“ Fell over something… something big.”
Tyler Davis was trying to help Chase to his feet when his beam picked up the unmistakable form of a corpse-the something Bryan had tripped over. A decapitated head was still skittering around like a spinning bottle where the kid had kicked it with his boot. Davis' light watched it until it slowed, revealing the destroyed features of the dead woman.
Chase scrambled to his feet, his clothes wet and clinging. Cursing, he slipped a second time on the pool of blood and juices he found himself in, saying, “Jesus Christ! God, oh, my God, Sergeant!”
“ Get on your feet and back out to the radio, kid,” shouted Davis. “Call it in! Get everybody down here-everybody!”
A yapping dog on the scent raced into the dungeon, going for the body, rooting around in the spilled fluids. People had pushed forward and were staring like so many ghouls. Davis kicked out at the dog to get it from the body. The crime scene had already been contaminated enough by him and Chase. “Christ, get this mutt out of here or I swear I'm gonna blow him away!”
His boot now caught the dog in the ribs, sending it flying toward the door. It yelped and ran out, but the motion required on Davis' part had sent him onto his butt, his elbow landing in the grisly open torso.
Just outside he heard some woman moaning about the mistreatment of her dog. The moment Bryan Chase returned, Tyler Davis ordered him to clear people from the area and get it cordoned off. Davis had seen mutilated bodies by the truck-load in Cambodia and Vietnam, yet he wasn't hardened to the corpse at his feet tonight. Still he knew from training how to conduct himself calmly and what must be done. This had to be the work of the creep the papers had been calling the Claw. It wouldn't be long before every brass ass on the force was down on him. He had to do everything by the book.
He returned to the door, seeing that young Chase wasn't getting the job done outside. He knew how to clear out a crime scene fast.
>
“ People! Folks, now listen.” Once he'd gotten their attention, he continued. “Now, folks, in a matter of minutes every cop in New York's gonna be here, and the first things they'll want to know is how much you saw, or heard, or thought you heard and where you were standing when you saw or heard it. Now, it's true, there's a dead lady inside there. What the police detectives is going to want to know is this: where were you when the woman was getting herself murdered?”
This had the immediate and desired effect Davis was going for. The gawkers began to disappear.
Chase, some vomit residue on his lips, looked at his duty sergeant with newfound respect. “You sure are cool about all this, Sergeant.”
Tyler Davis nodded and stood silent sentinel at the door, awaiting superiors who'd have to turn that light on inside; people who would have to flash an intense light on the ugliness Chase and he had merely to glance over. “You don't tell anyone you were all over the corpse, Bryan,” he said, and when the kid hesitated, “You got that?”
“ Yes, sir, if you say so, sir.”
“ I say so.”
He knew the routine.
“ What a goddamned mess. Why'n hell can't we get those lights up? This going to take all bloody night? Like I don't have anything better to do?” Dr. Kevin Perkins was young, disgruntled, loud, rude and obnoxious. He disliked the profession he found himself in, and he had an abiding dislike for cops, which was never more apparent than tonight.
Capt. Alan Rychman watched the younger, educated man verbally assault those around him. A field generator was droning on, but the juice was intermittent, the equipment faulty. The guy who had brought it was taking a lot of flak from Dr. Perkins, whose white lab coat was smeared with an obscene array of dark, viscous fluids.
Alan Rychman had driven at top speed to get here, having been routed from a party where the mayor and the commissioner of police had just told everyone that the Claw was a matter of history, that he was now believed to be locked up in an asylum somewhere.
It appeared such talk was over.
“ You're right, Perkins,” he said to the younger man, “the light in here really sucks.”
“ Damned inconvenient. Been waiting for your photographers to get in and finish, waiting for your guy with the generator over there! It's crazy, like a Mack Sennett film. You got any idea what this is like on my homelife? Maybe you don't have a homelife, but I do.”
Rychman nodded at the young doctor, who had obviously been roused from his bed and now had a gut-wrenching, tedious task ahead of him. “Still,” Rychman said, “you're pulling down good money on the rotation.” As an associate M.E. with the city, he was on call, making many times over Rychman's salary.
“ Good money, hell. In private practice, I could make six, seven times as much.”
“ Then maybe you'd better go into private practice, Doctor-after tonight, that is.”
Perkins' eyes fixed Rychman's but they did not lock for long. Rychman valued forensic information, but he didn't care to work with the disenchanted Perkins and he'd told Darius that, but Darius had become ill, and so it had fallen to Perkins to investigate an important killing, to gather evidence and arrange for an autopsy, to do the necessary paperwork declaring the victim dead and to give “reason” of death.
“ Cause of death is fairly obvious, wouldn't you say, Doctor?” Rychman said, his eyes staring in sad disbelief at what one human being was capable of doing to another.
“ It would appear so,” Perkins managed as he worked to scrape a few fine, blond hairs off the body, putting them neatly into a plastic envelope. Perkins had seen only one other victim of the Claw, but that had been at the morgue on a gleaming steel table, by then the wounds cleaned, the body made as presentable as possible for burial. His hands now shook as he worked, a bad sign for an M.E., Rychman thought.
“ The beheading's something new.”
“ Yeah, a new twist, you might say,” muttered Perkins in a rare bit of gallows humor.
Rychman moved with measured step about the body and crime scene. Cops in plain clothes and uniform had been coming in and out all night, most simply to have a look.
“ Something else not quite to pattern here, either, Doc,” added Rychman in. a conspiratorial whisper.
“ Oh? And what's that, Captain?”
“ Not like this guy to hide his handiwork away like this. This guy likes to leave his victims out in the open, Times Square if he could manage it.”
“ Maybe he'll provide you with an exhibition later.”
“ Meaning?”
“ Meaning he either ate or took with him some of her parts.”
“ What parts?”
“ You name it: heart, kidneys…”
Rychman ground his teeth together. “Anything else?” Perkins pointed with a pen to a few brown, lumpy portions of what appeared to be dog droppings amid blood splatters. “Most of her liver was eaten here on the spot.”
“ What about the brain?”
“ Intact.”
“ Can't figure the decapitation.”
“ The killer was surprised in the act. I think he meant to take the head away with him.”
Rychman nodded. “Yeah, quite possibly, but it may also be that some joker's trying his hand at playing the Claw.”
“ A copycat to throw the police off? So far, Captain, everything marks this corpse as just another hapless victim of the same brutal predator.”
“ Has your office come up with anything on the kind of cutting weapon he's using, Doctor?”
“ No, no, we haven't. Sorry, but there you have it.”
“ Sorry?” Rychman sensed that Perkins had for some time now been coming unglued. He had noticed it on an earlier case which dealt with a younger, attractive woman named Laura Schindler. “We need to know what kind of murder weapon he's using. If we knew that-”
“ Sorry, we've come up with a big zero!” shouted Perkins, his eyes shading over in a zestful anger.
“ So far your people've got no semen, no bodily fluids, no prints. What have you got? A few fibers, hairs and teeth marks, all useless without a match.”
“ The goddamned teeth marks have been placed in a computer and sent to every major police information system in the country and abroad.”
“ Yeah, I know, because I pressed you guys into doing just that.”
Rychman started away but suddenly felt Perkins grip his arm. He spun on his heels to face the other man, who was now shouting in his face. “Why haven't your people found this animal?”
“ What do you think we're-”
“ The bastard's got to stick out!” Perkins continued. “He must be covered in blood after he does a thing like this. He must be a madman, a raving lunatic, one of your bloody MDSOs! Don't come down on our office when you guys haven't done a fucking thing to stop this kind of bloodletting!” He finished by pointing to the mutilated woman.
Rychman grabbed Perkins by the shirt and shoved him against the washer-dryer unit, causing a metal boom that alerted everyone to stand clear.
“ First of all, sonny, we're investigating every one of the 6,092 mentally disturbed sex offenders in our computer, and secondly, we've logged 110,000 man-hours on this son of a bitch, so don't hand me any more shit, okay? Okay!”
Rychman was a tall and intimidating man, and under his grip, Perkins felt totally powerless. For a moment, he read in Rychman's eyes the instinctive animal drive to kill. Perkins had covered his face with his bony arms, expecting the blow to come, but Rychman was pulled away by several other cops. Having cooled, the big captain left with a final word for Perkins. “See that my office gets a full report first thing in the morning, Perkins. You got that?”
Shaken, Perkins was actually glad to be feeling something. Earlier, his senses had completely shut down. His mind had been assailed by the sight, smell and feel of the cannibalized victim. He allowed Rychman a chance to get past the door before he shouted a response. “You'll get the damned report as soon as it's available.”
> As Rychman stormed away, Perkins thought him a force not unlike the Claw, a man interested in power and control and humiliating others. Only in Rychman's case, he carried a badge.?
Four
Capt. Alan Rychman arrived at Police Plaza One the following morning with raw nerves only to find an army of reporters camped on his doorstep. The battery of questions was like a rapid-fire automatic. He waved his hands for the assembled members of the press to quiet down and he pushed more than one microphone out of his face. “We're doing everything humanly possible-”
A gang groan rose from the press people and several shouted questions that amounted to What've you done for me lately? One reporter that Rychman knew as Jim Drake, an up-and-coming with the New York Times, pointedly asked, “How do you expect people to believe you're doing all you can? Vacations, black-tie parties, and it's become obvious you're running for C. P”
“ Nobody's declared on that score, but if I do, Drake, you'll be the first to know.”
“ Do you think as commissioner of police you could more effectively handle cases such as the Claw?”
“ I'm not about to be sucked into that… issue,” he told Drake, his steely eyes fixed on the reporter for the first time. “Now, I assure you, ladies, gentlemen, we're moving on this case.”
Rychman's aide, a large, round uniformed sergeant named Lou Pierce, tried to run interference for his boss, but he may as well have been trying to hold back jackals from a carcass.
“ What about the C.P.'s office? What about the mayor's office?” shouted Drake as Rychman pushed his way forward.
“ Everybody's moving, Jim, Andy, Martha.” His attempt to reassure the press fell flat. His polite police PR. tone wasn't enough to cut it anymore with these guys and he knew it. “Speculation has it that the Claw is a medical man of some sort. Any foundation in that, Captain Rychman?” pursued Drake.
“ No foundation in fact, but it hasn't been ruled out.”
“ Has there been a sixth and a seventh victim, Captain?”
Rychman had heard about the so-called seventh victim, a housewife who'd been mutilated early that morning by her husband, who was in custody. The husband thought he could get away with the killing if he made it look like the work of the Claw, but his work couldn't stand the close scrutiny of the chief assistant M.E., Luther Darius' right-hand man, Dr. Simon Archer, who had called Rychman, telling him what they had over on the Lower East Side.
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