Robert Walker - Fatal Instinct

He frowned, pursed his lips and apologetically said, “We do the best we can with what we got, Dr. Coran.”

“ Unfortunately, that's not always good enough.”

“ We've got the best man in the country here and the men under him are equally good, Doctor. You go second-guessing a man of Dr. Darius' reputation and you might get burned.”

“ I don't want this to be an adversarial relationship, Captain.”

“ You could've fooled me.”

She managed a smile, something he hadn't seen until now. It warmed the room, he thought. “If we're going to stop this madman, we've got to do as you preach-cooperate with one another. That means your crime lab has to cooperate with mine.”

“ And I have to cooperate with you.”

“ Couldn't hurt.”

Despite her rough-and-tumble verbal display and the rigid exterior, the cane and limp, something about her eyes marked her as soft, caring and warm. But this was gone in a second, retracted in what might be an unconscious and automatic response to his stare. He was smiling but hers had faded. She had stood up to him; it had been a long time since last he met a woman capable of that.

Jessica Coran was learning the labyrinth of Police Plaza One and adjacent buildings by trying to follow directions given her by Sgt. Lou Pierce as to how to get to the crime lab. She'd been told that Dr. Luther Darius, world-renowned for his advancements in the field-his two textbooks were required reading at the FBI Academy-was not available. From the way Lou Pierce had mumbled it, she assumed the seventy-year-old forensics genius was bedridden. With most of the work going on at his lab now being performed by younger men and women, Darius spent his working hours grooming interns as they came through the co-op program associated with New York University, John Jay and other col-leges in the vicinity. However, inside information or careless hearsay had it that the old man was at least partially responsible for careless oversights made in the past year or so, resulting in lawsuits and settlements against the city. If Darius had lost his edge, perhaps he ought not to be handling what precious little medicolegal evidence there was on the Claw. But how do you unseat a Milton Helpern or a Luther Darius?

One step at a time, she thought. First she wanted to see the remains of the Claw's latest victim. She could do so, Pierce informed her, by locating Dr. Simon Archer, Darius' second-in-command.

She now found the lab and adjacent autopsy rooms and freezer compartments. A helpful young technician pointed out Dr. Archer, a tall, good-looking and muscular man with a firm bearing and large brown eyes so intense they seemed to see through her as she introduced herself.

“ Ahh, yes, the task force and you're Dr. Coran. I got a call from the C. P Welcome aboard and let me be the first to congratulate you on surviving the Matisak affair.”

“ Yes, well, if I could have a surgical gown, I'd really like to see the Claw's latest victim.”

“ Of course. You'll find what you need through here and the body'11 be waiting on the other side.”

He held the door, stared at her cane, making her feel uncomfortable about her limp. Inside she suited up in surgeon's gown, mask and gloves while Dr. Archer put his people in motion to retrieve the body from a freezer compartment and have it waiting in the inner room. She found Dr. Archer also waiting, standing alongside the body like a mortician fishing for praise over his handiwork.

“ Did the autopsy myself,” he muttered. “Understandably nervous, having you look Mrs. Hamner over, what with your reputation. What is it the papers call you?”

“ There's no need for nervousness, Doctor.”

“ Scavenger, isn't it?”

“ I'm called that, but only affectionately.” She smiled below the mask, trying to get him to loosen up.

“ Do you mind my hovering?”

“ Truthfully, you're making me nervous, Doctor.”

“ Oh, I don't mean to. It's just that since 1 did the autopsy… Well, if I've missed anything, I'd like to be the first to know. I took the case out of Dr. Perkins' hands for… well, personal reasons.”

“ Personal reasons? Did you know the victim?”

“ No, no, no! You misunderstand. Dr. Perkins… well, he hasn't really been on the beam, so to speak. In fact, he walked out during the autopsy. So I… I took over, and given the kind of night we had… well, I did my best.”

She seemed to be hearing that phrase a lot around here.

“ I've been up all night, spent nine hours with Mrs. Hamner.”

She liked the fact he used the woman's name instead of calling her a body, corpse, cadaver, victim, subject or stiff. He seemed a sensitive man. “Nine hours is a lot of time.” He knew that she understood how grueling the hours spent over a murder victim, especially one so disfigured and dismembered, could be. Her eyes, the only visible feature left unmasked, met his again.

“ There was nothing easy about it, I can tell you,” he replied.

“ Let me have a look,” she said, snatching away the sheet that covered Mrs. Hamner's remains.

The sheet flew and curled away, sliding to the floor and beneath the table. She found that Mrs. Hamner had been reassembled with sutures across chest and abdomen and encircling the neck. The sutures and the cleaning could not hide the hideous original slashes to the woman's torso, three parallel but jagged rupture lines from breastbone to navel. The murder weapon was as crude as garden shears and as delicate as a surgeon's scalpel all at once, she instantly thought. This meant that it had more than one edge. She imagined a weapon that was double-edged, perhaps serrated, but how, then, the three perfectly formed zigzags at what appeared the same depth? Had the killer performed a kind of ritual pattern drawing across the skin, a New Age swastika?

“ The decapitation?” she asked.

“ After death.”

She nodded, saying, “Small comfort.”

Her eyes had at first avoided the ghastly, nauseating sight of the destroyed facial features. She examined them now, the wounds cleaned with an alcohol-based solution, the skin and puckering scars arid, barren of moist suppleness.

There were no eyes, only empty sockets, like all the other victims. It was surmised the cannibal thought the eyes a delicacy.

“ Initial blow to the head was not sufficient to kill?”

“ 'Fraid not; that would've been merciful. Just a skull fracture, caused by a blunt instrument, the shape confirming our suspicion of a hammer.”

“ Round-headed?”

“ Ball peen, yes. But she was alive when he tore into her torso.”

“ Splayed her open like she was a marlin,” she muttered, feeling sick at heart.

“ Are you all right, Doctor?”

She sighed heavily, pushing back the threatening nausea. “Yes, I'm all right.”

Archer loosened his collar below the gown. “My first Claw victim put me under one hell of a strain, let me tell you. I've seen all six, either as autopsiest or assisting. After that first one, I thought of running out of here, the way Perkins did, but now-”

“ Do you mean Perkins quit?”

“ It appears so, yes.”

“ Then you'll be handling the evidence he gathered at the scene?”

He shrugged. “Me, the tech team here, yes, unless Dr. Darius returns and wants to handle it himself, which is fine with me, but…” His voice trailed off. “Sorry, I'm boring you, I'm sure… talking too much.”

She sensed that loyalty to Darius had made him stop short of another word. “It must've been wonderful to train under a man like Luther Darius.”

“ None like him, and yes, it has been.”

She turned back to the work at hand, her own hands going gently to the wounds and the patchwork of stitches that made Mrs. Hamner look like a Frankenstein monster. In the empty eye sockets lived a deep, disturbing mystery.