she watched Laurie Marks approaching.
“ Dr. Coran, have you seen this?” asked Laurie, her eyes wide.
“ What is it?”
Splashed across the front page was Ovid's poem.
“ Christ, how'd the papers get hold of it? Damn!”
She began scanning for the informant, but beneath Jim Drake's byline and all through the rutting piece, she saw only references to “sources” close to the investigation.
“ All hell's going to break loose,” said Laurie. “I hear Captain Rychman didn't tell the mayor's office or the C. R about the poem, and they just got it by the papers, and Rychman's on the warpath for whoever leaked it to the press.”
Jessica's mind flashed on the image of Rychman choking Dr. Ames to death in his office. “I've got to find Rychman,” she said. But she first went back to her computer and pressed for the file menu, storing her information under a code known only to her. Impatiently waiting for the computer to run through its final program, she asked Laurie a few questions about Dr. Archer, about how he seemed around the office and the labs, especially lately.
“ Nervous, kinda touchy if you ask me, but who wouldn't be? I mean with this kind of an investigation going on, with Dr. Darius killing himself, and with the possibility of his having to take on-”
“ Has he ever asked you to do anything… questionable or anything that you've wondered about?”
She hesitated. “Once…”
The computer whine turned into a click, telling her that storage was complete and that she could now pop the disk and take it to Rychman. But now Laurie had her undivided attention.
“ Please, Laurie, it could be important.”
“ Well, once… maybe it was an accident… we were working late-”
“ Yes?”
“ And he… his hand just kinda grazed my… my breast… I… I don't think he meant anything by it, but maybe he did, but he… he just isn't my type.”
Jessica's disappointment was painted in broad strokes across her face. “I'm off to locate Rychman.”
“ You… you won't tell him I said anything about… will you?”
She shook her head, grabbed the computer disk, the autopsy tape and her cane before she rushed out. Laurie Marks frowned as she watched Dr. Coran march away, wondering to herself if the sometimes clumsy, sometimes callous Dr. Archer had hit on the FBI woman. Then she thought of some of the strange stories she'd heard about Archer, stories she'd never repeat to anyone-the kind of sick tales told about a lot of people in their profession.
Nineteen
Leon Helfer was hungry and tired; his head ached, his sinuses were clogged and he feared that soon the Claw would know what he had done. If his poem was discovered, and surely it would be, and if the news leaked out, the Claw would know. Even if the news didn't leak out, the Claw would know. Somehow he'd pluck it from Ovid's brain.
Leon had just finished work for the day. His job was a boring one, filled as it was, from hour to hour, with the same mechanical process. And him like a robot for the duration of time he was in the factory. But it was a living, and it kept his mind off the Claw and off killing, off what he had become.
It was his job to inspect pipe. The company made every kind of pipe known, from plumbing pipe to irrigation and city lines, some of the pipe large enough to walk through. The Claw might need to lower his head, but the average man could stand fully upright inside the largest concrete pipe the company made.
Once the pipe was inspected for safety and quality-control purposes, it was loaded onto trucks and sent out into the world. Sometimes Leon felt that his work here was important, but the Claw made it clear that there was only one important task in Leon's life…
Machine noises at the factory were deafening, so much so that Leon could talk at the top of his lungs to himself about the Claw and no one could hear. Sometimes he caught his coworkers staring, but he'd gotten used to that, and they'd gotten used to his talking to himself. Or so it seemed.
Then suddenly today Mr. Malthuesen called him into his office and told him that he needn't come back; he said the company was facing hard economic times, and that layoffs were necessary. He said that he was sorry, and that he'd write him a letter to help him find another job, but that he could do no more.
Leon thought it strange that only he was being laid off, especially since there were any number of men who had come to work for the company after he had, people he had seniority over. He guessed it was due to his behavior since his mother's death… since the Claw had come.
Maybe the Claw had arranged for him to be fired.
The Claw wanted all of his time… wanted him all to himself, wanted Leon to become Ovid twenty-four hours a day.
That seemed quite possible. He would not put it past the Claw to visit Malthuesen in the night to convince him to fire Leon, so that Leon could devote himself completely to being Ovid.
It made sense… made perfect sense…
Now, home alone except for the dead remains surrounding him in every cupboard and cabinet, Leon awaited with mounting apprehension the Claw's certain arrival. He waited hour on hour for him to come, knowing that in having killed two victims the night before last, the Claw would be craving even more, and tonight he'd want to attack and take apart three, and maybe four victims next. This certainly seemed logical to him.
The Claw would come when Leon least expected it.
He'd better be prepared… better be a good Ovid.
Better pray that the Claw was in a merciful mood.
God help him if he had angered the Claw too greatly by planting the poem.
The light-emitting diode of a digital clock began to get on Leon's nerves. He wondered what he'd do now without a job. He knew that if the Claw could get him fired from one job, it'd be a simple matter to keep him from getting another.
The Claw most likely wanted Leon to use his days to increase the number of victims they could take. The Claw wanted the city to run with blood… wanted the skies to rain blood.
And if Leon was not a good provider… a good Ovid, he'd become a good victim.
As the night stretched on, Leon Helfer waited in dread anticipation of his master, his fears colliding with one another to form a knot of anxiety he thought would burst his brain, until late evening turned into morning, and he came to realize that the Claw wasn't coming.
Going with only haphazard sleep where he sat with his knees to his chin in a corner of his living room, thinking about poor Mrs. Phillips, the only victim he had known. Leon realized just how cruel the Claw could be. He had taken old Mrs. Phillips for only one reason, knowing Leon would be devastated by his having to eat from her entrails, to take on the old woman's sins, as the Claw had taught him. Mrs. Phillips had always had a kind word for Leon, always with a smile on her lips. She had seemed innocent of any sins, and yet the Claw had, by virtue of having dispatched her, claimed that her body was riddled with the maggots of sin upon which they must feed.
And so the Claw had fed like a voracious animal over her.
Then the Claw, as if it were just an afterthought, had begun to replace one victim's organs with another's, taking some from the jars he had brought with them, refilling these with the younger organs of the Olin woman.
It was then that Ovid, taking a moment when the Claw was not looking, impetuously shoved the wadded-up poem into Mrs. Phillips' body.
He had felt compelled to communicate with someone outside himself, as compelled as he had been the night Leon had telephoned the all-night radio talk show. He had had to blame it on Leon because this action had made the Claw grow large with anger and strike Ovid with the deadly claw, a razor-sharp series of talons fastened to the Claw's right arm. It was in sharp contrast to the human hand that dangled at the end of his left forearm. The claw itself was made up of three fingerlike extensions, ice-pick sharp, tapered, with cold-steel edges, extending from
