Standing just beside and behind Rychman, looking at the chilling thing, she involuntarily shivered. It looked like something a gardener would use for tearing into the soil.
“ How extremely awful,” said Archer.
“ Yeah,” said one of the cops in the room, “ 'magine that going through your gut.”
“ Archer, take this into custody, and I don't want anything-anything-happening to this piece of evidence. It's vital to our nailing this bastard.”
“ Understand, Captain,” replied Archer, who allowed the brawny detective holding the ugly instrument of death to drop it into a large polyethelene bag, which Archer produced like a magician.
“ It looks as though we've finally caught the sicko bastard, men,” said Rychman to the group. “And we're going to see him carefully every step of the way to a lifetime behind bars.”
Someone screamed, a hair-curling, ear-splitting screech from the kitchen. Rychman got to Turner first, ushering him away from the sight of Emmons' body.
Helfer was under twenty-four-hour watch, no chances being taken with his safety; nor was any stone being left unturned in providing every shred of evidence against the man. No missteps or mishaps must be made. The D.A. was personally overseeing the conviction of the Claw, and so he asked Dr. Simon Archer to draw up an airtight medicolegal presentation that would bury Helfer and at the same time be easily understood by a jury. The entire, enormous machinery of City Hall was put into motion against the frail, little man named Leon who had become the city's most notorious serial killer.
Meanwhile, Jessica received a fax at the crime lab from her headquarters ordering her return. She faxed O'Rourke back that she needed to stay longer, to help build the case against Helfer. When this was granted her, and Archer learned of it, he seemed nervous, ostensibly concerned for her, that she'd been away from her own duties at Quantico far longer than she ought to have been, and that he could manage. Alan Rychman, by comparison, was delighted that she had postponed her leaving.
Jessica took the first opportunity granted her to speak with Helfer; she didn't approach it as an interrogation, knowing that Helfer had been interrogated by everyone else. She wished to put him at ease and had asked beforehand if she could tape their conversation. He had consented.
When Leon entered the interrogation room, he was so manacled she thought the chains must weigh more than the man. He had the bloodshot eyes and emaciated look of a prisoner of war, and his nervous movements, jerking head and distrustful eyes reminded her of a disturbed, caged animal. The small man's eyes were brown, beady, rat like. Every nerve ending appeared delicate, frayed and ready to sputter like a loose wire. Looking at him was like seeing a ghost. It was Gerald Ray Sims all over again, she thought.
He searched the corners and the shadows of the interrogation room before his eyes fell on her. A nervous tick plucked intermittently at his left temple and eye; his lower jaw quivered, indicating the onset of tears was not far off.
Rather than the horror story antagonist, some creature out of a Geoffrey Caine novel, this man was a mewing, simpering mole. She tried to imagine him overpowering his victims, some of whom were heavier and taller than he.
She offered him a cigarette, which he accepted with the caution of a stray cat, his hand reaching out only to be snatched away, afraid that she meant to trick him. She then tossed the pack of cigarettes across to him and loudly introduced herself, trying to break through the altered state of in-sensitivity he had built up around himself.
“ You do remember agreeing to speak with me?”
“ Yeeeah,” he muttered just above a whisper.
“ Leon, do you hear or see things that no one else hears or sees?”
He looked confused. He took a long time to curry her favor with a meaningful reply. “Whataya talking about?”
“ Oh, I don't know. Your mother's voice, for instance, in your head.”
Once more he took his time in replying, weighing the sound and sense of his words. “Sure… sure, I hear… sometimes… something she said all the time, sure, but it's just my memory is all.”
“ What does she say?”
“ Do right. Do the right thing. Listen and obey, that kind of thing.”
“ Anything else?”
“ Nah, she just kept me in line. I never killed nobody when my mother was alive. It started when the Claw came, with him lying to me, saying it was her talking through him. He got me all twisted around and confused.”
“ What about the Claw? His voice like your mom's, in your head? Like maybe a ghost?”
She didn't want to put words in his mouth, but at the rate it was going, she had to coax him along. The tape was running, and he seemed keenly aware of it.
He failed to answer, biting his lip instead.
“ Do you, on occasion, hear voices, Leon?” she persisted.
“ Voices?”
“ Telling you what to do… telling you to murder people?”
“ You mean like voices in my head?”
“ Yes.”
“ No, no voices in my head.”
“ I see.”
He went on. “And I never saw ghosts, not like, you know, my mother's or anything; no, but I saw the Claw all the time, and nobody else has seen him.”
“ Leon, do you think there are people out there who are out to get you?”
“ Damned straight there are.”
“ I mean before you were arrested, Leon, before, were there people out to get you?”
“ My boss, yeah… and my dentist never liked me. Think he thought I was a carrier or something, like I had AIDS maybe, I don't know!”
“ Are you aware that your dentist is dead?”
“ What? No… when?”
“ Seems he fell down an elevator shaft that was being repaired there in his building.”
“ I didn't have nothing to do with that.”
“ And your boss, at the pipe factory, had an unfortunate accident recently.”
Leon looked amazed.
“ Some large pipe fell on him, crushing him.”
Leon shook his head. “I didn't know.”
“ Same day Detective Emmons was killed. Malthuesen's death looked like an accident, but that's rather coincidental, isn't it? I mean you on trial for murder and two people close to you die accidental deaths?”
“ It's the Claw's doing… got to be,” he replied, and fell silent.
She sighed and took in a deep breath, about to go on when he volunteered, “I was nowhere near the pipe factory, and I ain't been back to the dentist in over six months.”
She began asking him some general questions to determine his fund of knowledge. “How much is seven times eight, Leon?”
“ What? Oh, ahh… fifty-six.”
“ Who's the mayor of New York?”
“ Halle, the big guy.”
She nodded. “Who's out in right field for the L.A. Dodgers?”
“ Daryl Strawberry… funny name.”
“ You follow sports?”
“ Not much no more,” he said. “Not lately, not since… since Momma died and the Claw came.” She had already heard the general outline of the story of how he had met the Claw for the first time and that it was at his mother's funeral.
She asked him to repeat the story for her. She found it intriguing.
“ Your mother was ill, then, for some time?”
