Robert Walker - Fatal Instinct

“ To what end? And at what emotional cost to yourself? Do you think Darius or your father-”

“ I've got a room upstairs to investigate,” she said, storming away from him.

He shook his head and watched her as she went, the cane lightly tapping out her anthem.

Archer said to him, “She's quite a strong-willed woman.”

“ You could say so.”

“ An exceptional woman, I think.”

Rychman stared at Archer. “So I've noticed.” Archer, too, was watching her disappear into the hospital as the siren blared its warning, the ambulance pulling off with Darius' body, taking him to what had been his morgue for the last forty-two years.

“ What sent him here, to the hospital?” Jessica asked Archer, who had followed her to the room Darius had leapt from.

“ He apparently had some sort of fall. He was working himself extremely hard… going back over the Hamner cadaver and all our earlier findings… all for you, Dr. Coran.” Archer supplied her with what few details he knew, ending with, “And he suffered a concussion where his head had struck the locker.”

“ All that about his drinking and his despair… all true?”

Archer frowned. “Life gets the best of the best of us. I'm sorry.” She went to the IV bottle, the loose tubing dangling, the contents spilled across the floor. Other tubing, connected to a heart regulator, lay on the soiled bedclothes. The window had been smashed, presumably with the chair that had lain alongside the body downstairs.

“ It must've happened all in a matter of seconds after he pulled the plug on his heart regulator,” she said. “The nurse told me that the buzz was loud enough to wake the dead when he snatched the electrodes off his chest.”

“ That's how I pictured it,” agreed Archer.

“ Then you've already examined the room?”

“ I have, yes.”

“ Everything points to suicide, but I just didn't figure Darius for the kind of man who-”

“ The kind of man… There is no suicide type, Dr. Coran. Suicide comes when there is a breakdown in brain stimulants and proper judgment is impaired when connections and cause and effect cannot be put together by the struggling, desperate mind. No, I'm afraid our dear friend simply felt he must end his despair.”

She swallowed hard, watching the dark shadow cast against the wall. It was part her shadow, part Dr. Archer's. “I suppose he gave in to his shadow” she mumbled.

“ Pardon?”

She took a deep, long breath and said, “Nothing… nothing.” With this she rushed from the room where Darius had spent his last hours in desperation and loneliness while she was making love to Alan Rychman and had, for the first time since Boutine's death, felt whole again.

Jessica Coran had to get away. She needed time alone to mull over the situation and the emotions the death of Dr. Darius had sent surging up to the surface. She was angry with Darius for committing suicide, especially after all that he had said to her about wishing to end his career with a solution to the grandest and most gruesome case he had ever witnessed firsthand, the case of the Claw.

She had returned to the place on the harbor where she and Darius had breakfasted together, where they'd watched the ships in the channel. Alone now, she watched the sea gulls overhead. She recalled Darius' inner strength, his vibrant and tenacious will-which could not be overcome, she had thought, and yet he had given in.

Why? Why had he jumped from that window?

Was it the grueling hours he had put in both at the scene of the Olin murder in Scarsdale and later at the laboratory performing autopsies on two victims? Even with her and Archer's assistance, the amount of work might simply have been too much of a strain.

He'd come back to the M.E.'s office against doctor's orders, at the behest of Mayor Halle and Commissioner Eldritch, or so Alan had confided, saying, “Perhaps we were all expecting too damned much of Darius.”

In a sense, the deadly Claw had claimed yet another victim, but the sun rose over New York Harbor just the same, setting the Statue of Liberty ablaze in a red-orange hue, while all around her city sounds from tugboats to fire trucks signaled that New York was clamoring for this new day like none before. The sun-dappled water reflected back the tall skyscrapers, turning their shapes into living, moving images. Nothing in this city was as it seemed, and everyone held secrets, her included. The only truth to be found was below a microscope, and even then the truth mocked her, proving her wrong, showing in no uncertain terms that the killer was one man and not two. On several of the victims she had taken her own findings and had personally overseen to their dispensation-she had thought: the samples sent to the FBI labs at Quantico to be examined by the best in the business. There seemed no way that the evidence could have been tampered with unless… She ruminated further, allowing herself the ugly thought. Only a man of Luther Darius' caliber could send a lab technician away from his duties of processing and properly packaging such evidentiary items for shipment. Might he have dared to open her samples to replace them with others? Nothing… no one is completely as he seems, she told herself again. It was a terrifying, fluttering, wild bird of a thought, trapped in the building of her head, screeching, flapping, not wanting to be there. It was the kind of thought Jessica wished she might banish the moment it entered her consciousness, because it felt evil even in its instinctive conception. Could it be that Darius, unhappy at her coming in on the case, had used his charm and flattery to beguile her in an elaborate ruse to gain her confidence? Perhaps he had wanted to retire in a blaze of glory, reason number one for coming back onto the case after his serious bout with illness. Perhaps he didn't in fact want her arriving at the same Sherlockian presumptions about the Claw as he had won through his hard work and determination? By now she couldn't recall which of them had arrived at the two-killer theory first, but even if Matisak had arrived at this same conclusion from his asylum, it hardly seemed improbable for Luther Darius to do the same from a hospital bed where he may've spawned a plan to “unveil” the true nature of the Claw in the grand style for which he had, over the years, become famous.

The sun shined now like a giant fiery fingernail over the horizon beyond the great harbor where the Statue of Liberty stood. Jessica gazed at the sun as it rose in increments, turning from a fingertip to a crescent and soon to a huge, blood-red orb in the sky, the eye of God, she thought. Nothing was as it seemed, and yet how could she refute the microscopic evidence that proved her wrong, the teeth marks sent to J.T. She had taken the samples herself. They had been in no one else's hands save Dr. Darius' when he had sent them to Quantico.

The terrifying unwanted thought fluttered back into her brain.

It was the kind of thought Jessica Coran wished on no one: Darius perhaps had not actually been happy with her coming on to the case his flattery about her father was all a ruse; he had not wanted her to come to the exact same theory he had of two killers instead of one, because it was a notion he had had long before her, one that he had been carefully nurturing along; he was secretly upset with her. Darker thought still: Darius was in a position to do something about how he secretly felt.

He always stood in a position to subvert her forensics work on the case, especially after lulling her into thinking him a worthy associate. But worthy associates didn't commit suicide…

Darius was also in a unique position to divert or sabotage the work of his other colleagues, Simon Archer and Perkins before her. Even from a hospital bed, a man of his reputation could see to it that the wrong files were sent to the wrong locations. In an M.E.'s office such mix-ups were common enough without someone deliberately destroying or withholding evidence.