Robert Walker - Fatal Instinct

Jim Drake's star was rising at the Times and he owed it entirely to the Claw, not that he had ever dreamed that such evil could be a meal ticket. It just happened, he kept telling himself; it didn't mean he was a bad person. If he didn't write the stories, someone else would, and someone else would get the prestige, money and power coming to him nowadays. He also knew that he owed much of his success to Archer. If Dr. Archer weren't as concerned a citizen as he was, Drake's information trail might've shriveled away long before, but Archer was what he was, a real concerned citizen who for reasons of his own-ambitious ones-leaked useful information to Drake.

Now there was heat being put on the good doctor, or so Archer thought; maybe the man was just feeling paranoid, and little wonder with that FBI lady watching his every move, not to mention Rychman, who was enough to frighten a sumo wrestler.

A dampness made the dark air all around feel like a shroud, and once again Drake cursed Archer for picking such a deserted area to meet. An occasional car fired by the open alleyway, and earlier someone had parked a car in the dark recesses of the shadows here. Now that his eyes were accus-tomed to the dark, Drake thought the car in the alley might be Dr. Archer's BMW. He went nearer, scanning for any sign of anyone at the wheel or nearby, but he saw no one. The alley was a complicated one with a Y-fork, one branch dead-ending at the back of a factory.

A step closer and he thought he saw a shrouded form at the wheel, but it was so still, it didn't look human. Suddenly the engine kicked into life and the car came at Drake, tires smoking. Drake ran for the Y-fork, pretending at first to go toward the dead end, but at the last moment he dove the other way. The car shot by uncontrollably, and Drake got to his feet, racing for the exit and the street for his own car, his mind trying to fathom the reason for the attack, but for now he must think of one thing and one thing alone: survival.

He was out in the open, running toward his car, which was parked halfway down the street, when the BMW tore into view behind him. It was coming down on him at sixty, seventy, eighty. Drake prepared to swerve at the last moment, but the killing machine anticipated him, driving his body into a parked car, driving the blood from within him to all the orifices. He was literally squashed between the metal of the two vehicles.

As he drove off, Archer glanced into his rearview mirror. Drake wouldn't be talking to Coran or Rychman. One less worry in Archer's life.

Detective Emmons pulled her unmarked car into view of the building where Helfer resided alone. There were several lights on, but she saw no movement or shadow. She feared he had already fled. She would like nothing better than to get inside the little prick's place for a look. She cautiously slipped out and walked through a gangway to the rear alley that would lead her to Helfer's backyard.

She could still smell the strange odor that earlier emanated from the house; it was a stench she would not soon forget. As she rounded the garage at the back she found it standing open, the black interior a gaping maw, and to her surprise the little weasel had a silvery BMW nosed squarely at the front of the open garage. The fool was asking for it to be ripped off or stolen. She wondered how he could possibly afford it, but she gave more thought to how pleased she was to find him in. A cursory search of the car with her flashlight turned up the fact it had recently been in an accident that had damaged the front grillework and fender. She started for the license when a sudden noise startled her, making her whip around and draw down on a black cat that spit at her and showed two venomous shining eyes. She breathed deeper and took down the license plate, noting that it could not be Helfer's, 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.