She and Rychman said their goodbyes and were soon making their way to see Dr. Richard Ames, the police psychiatrist. Not knowing anything about Ames, she faxed a copy to Quantico for O'Rourke to turn over to a psychological profiling team there.
Rychman had no objections. “We need all the help we can get with this Claw or Claws.”
Dr. Richard Ames was a very tall, broad-shouldered, handsome black man with fine features and huge hands, which appeared both gentle and dexterous. Jessica judged him a basketball star in college, and a number of plaques and trophies behind his desk corroborated her guess. Ames got up from behind the desk and offered them comfortable, large leather chairs that fronted a window overlooking the Avenue of the Americas in lower Manhattan. He enjoyed a private practice here and charitably gave sixteen hours a week, at ninety dollars an hour, to the NYPD. His credentials were impressive and he had worked extensively with psychotics, sociopaths and serial killers.
Rychman had informed Jessica that Ames had been instrumental in the Handyman case some years before in Chicago. The maniacal killer in that case had only indirectly murdered his victims. They had died of shock after coming out of a hypnotic state induced by the charming murderer, who had left them intact, except for their hands. When the man was finally caught, he had a collection of human hands the likes of which could not be comprehended.
After introductions, Dr. Ames was anxious to get to work.
“ I understand you have a written statement from this madman the papers are calling the Claw. I am anxious to examine it. How did it arrive? Did he contact a reporter, a TV personality?”
“ None of the above,” said Rychman.
“ Oh?”
Jessica explained how they had come by the communique.
“ It's not your usual method, to say the least,” replied Ames, biting the inside of his cheek nervously, as if recalling something disturbing. “It's almost as if the sender were afraid of his own message. As if he largely wished it not to be found, and yet was compelled to… forward it.”
“ It's not your usual evil-killer communique, either,” she said. “A bit literary for a killer, in fact.”
“ Literary? In the Jack the Ripper school of letters, you mean?”
“ The Ripper was fond of rhyming.”
“ Rhymes? Really? I'm surprised you didn't send it to a cryptologist.”
“ Don't worry,” she assured him, “we have. They're working on it in Virginia as we speak.”
“ I see. How daunting, then, that you should bring it to me. Well, let's have a look.”
She handed a copy to him in a manila envelope. He took it to his desk and lay it out before him, scanning it quickly, almost instantly saying, “This fellow is very disturbed.”
“ We know that much, Doctor,” said Rychman.
“ Captain, I may need to keep this for a while.”
“ It can't go beyond this office. The papers don't have this, and we want to keep it that way, understood?”
“ Yes, of course. I haven't a problem with that, but I would like to be free to take it back and forth with me.”
“ Of course,” he said. “But time is important here. The fiend killed two women last night, and he's going to go right on killing until he's stopped.”
“ I heard,” said Ames. He paced a moment before going to his intercom and speaking with his secretary. They were engaged in an argument when he shouted, “Priscilla, you'll just have to arrange it. I've got to take the afternoon. It's police business that won't wait. Now, please, no more argument.” He clicked off a bit disdainfully and looked up at the two law enforcement officials. “I'll make it my only priority this afternoon,” he said.
“ My task force is meeting at six tomorrow morning,” said Rychman tentatively. “I don't suppose…”
“ Police Plaza One? I'll be there. Give you what I've got.”
“ That's very generous of you,” said Jessica.
“ With a madman like this, we all must do what we can.”?
Fifteen
When he was alone, Dr. Ames immediately started to analyze the poem. It was literate, which told him something about the killer. It was forced, however, and not what one might call good poetry by any standard, including that strange, bizarre and measured poetry he had seen written under the classification of horror. And yet, knowing of its discovery, hidden in the corpse of the victim as it was, and going on the assumption that the Claw himself had penned the work, gave it all of the horrific overtones required to make the thing chilling in its every aspect.
Still, he knew he must remain objective to look at the words in the context of psychiatry.
He knew it would take some time. He buzzed his secretary and asked that she send in some sandwiches, a cola and a large Snickers bar. He'd need sustenance, he told himself, and a little sugar kick to get finished by 6 A.M. tomorrow.
He then turned back to the words before him. One phrase seemed to leap out at him, as if it were underlined, and yet it wasn't. “Your sins will be eaten away.” He read it aloud, and then he scanned down to find its sister line: “By eating away your sin…”
Instantly Ames realized the author of the piece was the worst kind of sociopath, the sort that was truly deranged, following the urgings of a voice or voices in his head, not unlike the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz. Berkowitz had claimed that Satan had come to him using the name of Sam and had convinced Berkowitz that he was in fact his true father, having used his mother in some unholy fashion to conceive him. Satan's instructions were to go about the city with a. 44-caliber handgun and blow away couples parked in cars. It seemed obvious to Ames as he considered the latent meaning in the phrase “eating away your sin” that the Claw felt he had been selected or chosen by a higher power to do so.
Following the instructions of Satan or some other such evil father figure, he was doing his victims a favor, sending them on to a new and better life without the excess baggage of their inherent sins. If the poetry could be believed, these sins were being taken on by the killer, ingested with each swallowed bite of the victim. By extension, the more sins ingested by the Claw, the more evil and powerful he became.
One sick son of a bitch, Ames moaned inwardly. He had kept up with the Claw in the news and had even read many of the police reports on the victims. He had asked for and gotten placement on the task force as a special consultant. He knew it was an important case, but more important to him than the political clout breaking such a case would give him within the community, he honestly wished to put an end to the madman's reign of terror. No one looking at the photos of the victims could want anything else.
It was now almost 3 A.M.; he had only a few hours to dictate his notes and prepare some graphics that might assist him in explaining to Rychman precisely what he had. Priscilla, asleep on the couch beside him, would have to be awakened shortly.
He rushed on through the poem again, reading it once more in its entirety.
He realized there was something that didn't ring true with the rest of the poem. It was the fifth line, ending with him instead of me. The entire poem was cast in the first person, as though the author was speaking of himself and his own inhuman accomplishments. But suddenly, in the middle, he called himself him.
He read it aloud. “The Claw is no name for him.”
He considered it the other way with the personal pronoun. “The Claw is no name for me.”
He thought and stared at the line for some time. “Is it him or is it meT he asked the empty room. “He just needed the him to sorta rhyme with sin?” he asked himself.
He stared longer. It was my teeth, my rabid, hungry sin-feast, and all so as to give you eternal peace without your sins following you to the grave, if / hadn't come along and saved you from yourself. At the bottom the “I” was proclaimed in the signature as Ovid, Divine Protector. In the reference to di-vine protector, it was all too evident that this guy had honed a helpful rationalization for his cannibalism, that he felt it was a benevolent cannibalism. The third person encroached almost like a Freudian slip. The Claw is no name for him… who gives you eternal life…
