shrink, and to bring her up-to-date on the most recent advice in dealing with killer couples. She knew that reading had lately become a way to avoid thinking about her continuing insomnia and what amounted to fear.
She concentrated on the cold, explicit, factual report in her lap, desperately trying to stay on her train of thought. It was well known in violent crime cases that there was often a dominant-subservient partnership involved, in which two killers formed a symbiotic bond of need and lust that led to mutual gratification through torture and murder. Killer couples weren't always a man/man team; quite often it was two women, and much more often, a man and a woman. Often one was so infatuated with the other that he felt a “spell” had been cast over him.
It wasn't a new notion; in fact, there were many such case histories available at the FBI Academy. She had read many of them while researching killer couples for a paper that had won her high marks. There were instances throughout history in which one person was so dominated by another that he or she would act out any unlawful or immoral act put to him or her.
The brutal Jack the Ripper murders in London in the fall of 1888 might have been the work of more than one man. In the early part of the twentieth century there were Leopold and Loeb, and since then there had been multiple examples of killer couples, making them almost commonplace. There were Bywaters and Thompson, Snyder and Gray, Brady and Hindley, Bonnie and Clyde, Fernandez and Beck. Killer couples, as in the Aileen Wournos lesbian killer case, were not as common as the lone-wolf serial-killer type, however they were on the rise along with cult murders.
If her time in the FBI had taught her anything, it was that a man and a woman, teamed for the murder of a third person, were one of the deadliest combinations known. Between them they had a powerful arsenal to bring to bear against their intended prey: cunning, deceit, sex appeal, physical strength, boldness, resolve and amorality. Few victims of such teams survived such an unholy assault.
Usually, such teams were only caught as the result of a sure erosion of trust between the two murderers, the erosion beginning after the first murder, because each partner was by then the sole witness to the other's crime. The relationship steadily crumbled under the weight of such responsibility. They would begin to suspect each other, begin to doubt and question every move, and would soon be unable to live from moment to moment without fearing one another.
“ You're afraid of your own shadow by now, aren't you? Aren't you?” she asked the empty room, trying to imagine the state of mind of the killer or killers at this time. Even if the Claw was an individual, she reasoned, he would eventually begin to fear himself as he might an accomplice, the way that Gerald Ray Sims feared his shadow self, Stainlype.
She had come to believe, since the death of Otto Boutine, with whom she'd shared so many intimacies, that everyone, herself included, had dark second selves within, doubles or dopplegangers, as the Germans called them. The trauma she had gone through had revealed to her the dangerous double held in check at all times by her more dominant personality. The dark double was a frightful being, a creature that truly disturbed its owner to her core, one that rattled sabers that turned into snakes that fed on the good and wishing-to-be-good self.
Jessica believed meeting the shadow within-not just glimpsing it from a distance-could cause a person either to become whole by facing down the murderous impulses that raged below the still volcano, or to become fragmented, as in the case of Gerald Ray Sims, and quite possibly Matthew Matisak. She had long been accustomed to the power of the dark side in killers, but had always denied it in herself, until she had been maimed by Matisak, until she had wanted vengeance against the maniac. She knew about her undesirable other self now, her less than pretty side, the shadow within. At times she now experienced something that felt like her two selves crossing, and it frightened her. The dark brute was, in its way, so much more powerful, as if negative energy drained off positive impulses at every turn.
It was what the shrinks called an intrapsychic “problem” that could evolve into a “conflict” if she didn't get control of it. It was one of the scars left her by Matisak, part of a legacy of fear and self-doubt created in her by the vampiristic madman. It was worse than any nightmare or replay of the events that brought her near death at his hands, because this creature was like Matisak, and yet it was her.
Her lady shrink, Dr. Lemonte, had told her it was dangerous, at this point, to ignore her “shadow” shelf.
“ Or to fear one's own shadow?” she had replied. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“ Face it… recognize it for what it is.”
“ And what is that?”
“ Another and legitimate aspect of your self. The self that as a child you allowed vent to, that escaped when you picked up an object and hurled it across a room.”
She thought of Rychman hurling objects about his office and wondered if he ever had any shadow fears. Perhaps her psychiatrist was right.
“ How do I let it out safely?” she had asked.
“ Play with it.”
“ Play with it? I don't want to play with it. I'm afraid of it.”
“ Play out harmless aspects of your rejected self-”
She was shaking. “Suppose it, this rejected self, takes hold. Hell, it already has begun to!”
“ You're intelligent, levelheaded, and from what I've read of your record, Jessica, you're a very brave woman. All you need do is face this as you would one of your cases. Investigate intelligently.”
“ But this isn't a case; this is me… me.”
Donna Lemonte had then leaned forward, uncharacteristically took Jessica's hands into her own and stared hard into her eyes. “You can beat this thing; you can shake it, Jess, but in order to heal the split between what you've come to know and accept as your true persona and your shadow persona, you must face the shadow, recognize it for what it is and put it back in its place.”
Ten
After Alan Rychman had dropped Jessica at her hotel, he checked in at headquarters long enough to see that the order he had reluctantly given to arrest Shaw had been carried out. The interrogations had already begun and it looked like Conrad Shaw was going to be so cooperative that he'd confess to anything put to him. He stayed long enough to be certain that proper procedures were being followed. Since his detectives had the situation well in hand, he made the long drive to New Jersey, where his brother Sam lived.
He'd called ahead to his brother, a computer consultant for Pioneer, who owned a roomy home. The phone number was a secret to all but Lou Pierce. Surrounded by gates, bars, and a fail-safe, state-of-the-art security system, “Samhaven”-as Alan jokingly called the place-afforded him the ultimate hideout whenever pressures became unbearable in the big city. Sam didn't mind, because it was the only time he ever saw big brother Alan anymore.
Now Alan was propped up in bed in his perennial guest room. It was near midnight, and Sam and his family of four were fast asleep while he second-guessed the bogus direction the Claw case was taking with the indictment of Conrad Shaw, ideal as he was as a press scapegoat. Rychman's only comfort in the nasty affair was that Jessica Coran had felt as he had about Shaw's then impending arrest. Sharp lady, he told himself, with great instincts of her own, instincts that put her squarely on the plane of the killer. Not to mention her good instincts about men.
He'd hoped she might change her mind when they'd arrived at her hotel, invite him up to her room for a drink and talk. They'd been getting along well before he had clumsily pushed himself on her. He cursed himself as the vivid memory returned.
He pictured her again at the shooting range with him. She had been extremely good with her weapon. She held it as if it were an extension of herself, part of her flesh, and God save the man who tried to take it from her. Tough, dangerous, yes, she was… but there was also something else, something he sensed when his lips had touched hers for that fleeting moment, a certain vulnerability born of pain perhaps? He could not be sure. Something deep within her beautiful eyes told of a well of sadness; yet, she was so alive.
He thought for a moment of the cane, her limp, the doing of that bastard Matisak.
He tried to imagine what she had gone through, the pain and suffering, the loss of her superior and friend, the well-respected Boutine. He could imagine the loss of a partner in the line of duty. He'd had this happen to himself more times than he cared to recall, but he couldn't imagine being at the mercy of a vicious killer like the
