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 cannibals 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
