as it was a medical plate, signifying the owner was a doctor.
Maybe she had the wrong garage, she thought. It made no sense.
She dared not open a door or the trunk, not without the warrant. Where was Turner! Had he stopped for a burger? Her light then found the creep's trash cans against the fence in the alleyway.
“ Public domain,” she whispered to herself, and smiled. She didn't need a warrant to go through the trash and there was no telling what she might unearth there.
She dragged out a Hefty bag and carried it behind the garage, where she dumped it. She was immediately assailed by the bizarre odor that had hit her full force when she was standing at Leon's front door earlier that day. “Christ, what's this guy been eating?” she muttered, and then thought of the cannibal called the Claw. With the only light a streetlamp some distance from her, her flash seemed the only warm thing in the alley. She wished that Turner were with her. She squeezed her gun back into its holster, glad for the feel of its protection. She silently told herself the same words that were the last she'd said to Turner. “I was born careful.”
Soon Emmons' hands were filthy with tomatoes, with little somethings that looked like raisins buried in wet coffee grounds, with oatmeal and she didn't want to know what else. Had she gotten into the wrong trash can, as she had the wrong garage? Not a chance. That unholy odor that rose above the rank decay of vegetable matter was the same as in the strange house. She had flung aside several balled-up newspapers, one with headlines about the Claw staring her in the face. Maybe she was way off base, she told herself after a time.
What had she expected to find, she asked herself now, an ugly pair of collapsed Ping-Pong balls that turned out to be decaying eyeballs? Maybe it was time for a reality check, maybe a shot of Jim Beam. But if she could find something-anything-to implicate this creep in the death of the Phillips woman, she would thereby implicate him in the Olin woman's death, too, and if he wasn't the freaking Claw, he damned well knew who was.
Turner was right about Helfer's puny appearance. She had imagined the Claw would be a masterful man with hypnotic eyes like those of Bela Lugosi in Dracula. It was hard to believe that any woman worth her salt could be overpowered by such a loser as this shrimpy Lee Harvey Oswald look-alike. Then again, most of the serial killers on the books were small in stature, from Manson to the skinny Richard Speck, most with acne problems like they were stuck in puberty, and all of them with serious sexual dysfunctions of one sort or another. And if Leon was one of two men involved in this killing ram-page, as Dr. Coran believed, Leon certainly could fill the bill for the dominated half of the duo. Still, his trash, although malodorous, wasn't filled with human organs or tissues.
She thought of what she knew of the victims, how they had died: first with a hammer blow to the head, rendering them unconscious. Totally in keeping with a little creep like Helfer. She wished only that she could get one chance at him. If anyone like him came at her with a hammer, she wouldn't hesitate to blow his fucking face away.
Then she thought of the awful damage that the killer's blades had done to the women, and this, with the lingering odors around her, conspired to make her want to puke. She'd deliberately stayed away from the morgue after seeing the first set of pictures on the first victim, well aware that to see them in real time would be too much for her. Turner had been more than sympathetic and helpful in keeping her secret. Turner hadn't razzed her about it, either. In fact, he stood in every time for her, making sure there was nothing in the reports that indicated she hadn't been involved one hundred percent.
Maybe that's why she felt compelled to work harder on the case than all the others combined, she told herself now. Maybe that's why she was getting so good at sniffing these low-life sons of bitches out, like Shaw and now Leon Helfer. Regardless of what anyone else said, Shaw, even if he wasn't the Claw, shouldn't be on the streets. Leon was cut of the same cloth; she just knew it.
Continuing to sift through his garbage, she imagined a scenario in which Leon, learning of Shaw's arrest, had deliberately gone out and committed the horrid double murder in order to make Shaw appear innocent and thus gain his freedom back, because maybe Leon felt like only half a man without Shaw. But nothing she could uncover showed any connection between Shaw and Leon. Although the idea was in keeping, the shoe didn't quite fit.
A curious man going by the alley entranceway glanced toward her, no doubt thinking her mad. Another man came around a corner, shocking her, and she fully expected it to be Helfer coming for her, but it was a tall man in a black overcoat and he asked, “You're Emmons, aren't you?”
“ Yes, that's me. Who're you?”
“ Perkins, M.E.'s office,” the stranger flashed his M.E.'s badge. “Got a call to be here from… from, ahh… HQ, that there was going to be a search and seizure?”
“ Paperwork's rolling on it, yeah.”
“ Oh, good… then I'm not too late. How long you think it'll be? I got kids at home and one of 'em's in recital tonight.”
She smiled at this and relaxed, taking her hands out of the garbage, grabbing up some of the newspapers and wiping with them when she noticed the gruesome stains on the paper and again that odd, disturbing odor. Suddenly she realized that it was the kind of preservative they used on cadavers at the morgue. Then she remembered the medical plate on the car in Helfer's garage. But it was too late.
The man lifted his black valise in one surgically gloved hand and for a moment dangled it before her eyes, when a sudden swipe of icy steel and wind tore across her eyes, shredding them. He was laughing as if it were all a magic trick. She blindly stumbled away, trying to pull her gun while he said, “Meet the real Claw.”
As she reached for the gun in her shoulder holster, the claw crashed into her with light reflecting from somewhere, and the flash of light lobbed off her right hand, the severed limb thudding against her shoe, making her shriek and pull away, backing deeper into the garage, blood spurting from her wrist, pumping like a geyser and making her light-headed. Blood streamed down her face from her wounded eyes. She reached wildly at her gun with her one good hand, fumbling and finally getting the weapon into her grasp when she felt the powerful claw clap around her neck, severing arteries and cutting off her choked, gurgling scream, pinning her against the car. Unable to turn, she clung tightly to the gun held now at her midriff, waiting for him to turn her over and drive the damnable claw into her breasts and drag it jaggedly to her navel, as she had seen in countless horrible photographs.
She was the ninth victim.
She tried to feel the gun in her hand but everything had gone numb. She could feel consciousness evaporating, knowing that if she could not remain conscious, she was certainly dead, and yet, to remain conscious meant excruciating pain if he got at her again with the claw. Already she had lost a limb, already her neck was showered in her own blood.
He turned her around and saw the gun clenched in her fist and he fully expected to be shot to death on seeing it gripped so, but then he realized that she was too weak to lift it, too weak to pull the trigger, and this brought a smile to his lips as he raised the claw over his head and brought it down in one powerful dig, feeling it take root in her where the ice pick ends jaggedly made their way through her, making her twist and squeal again.
He had gotten lucky seeing Emmons from the house going through Leon's trash. She must also have seen his car. He tore from her the little notepad she carried. He'd destroy it later.
He had never expected to enjoy the killing as an explosive orgiastic experience, but that's precisely what it had become, and in the sheer pleasure of brutally taking life, he had found that brute part of himself he called Casadessus who had been locked away just below the surface his entire life; that part of him that had hated all the constraints, all the nagging, needling commandments, all the pressure to conform, all the voices telling him his entire life what to do; that part of him that secretly murdered his father and mother once a night every night during his years under their roof; that part of him that had been restrained from hanging his sister; that part of him that had hung her dog instead; that part of him that fought his entire life to be unleashed and unfettered. Now he had given over to that side, and yet he was well adjusted enough to do so in careful increments, and to do so with a master plan in mind.
While at the same time that he could watch women squirm beneath the impaling claw before he completely gutted them, he could also be comforted in the thought that he could never be caught-ever. He had Leon to assure this, and he had Dr. Simon Archer to assure it as well. Leon, his Ovid, was the perfect dupe, a perfect victim in his own right. Dr. Simon Archer had learned all about poor Leon from his dying mother at the hospital where Archer did his pro bono work. Archer knew precisely the state of mind her death would leave the weak-minded Leon in, and that he would be helpful to Casadessus, the real Claw. Leon was so impressionable, like a child, so easily molded.
But apparently Leon had some ideas of his own. The poem had come as a shock, but a bigger shock was
