“ Not necessarily,” he countered. “Not if only one of them does the biting. I think we have to concentrate on hair, fiber and particle samples, Jessica.”
“ And what about the weapon? What kind of a… an instrument could possibly cause the rents opening the body?”
“ The answer to that eventually leads to the killer.”
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.
