Copyright ©1989 by Rex Miller

Buckhead Station

Jack Eichord looked like shit. He was drinking too much. He wasn't getting enough sleep. He was irritable and apprehensive about nothing and just generally felt awful. He was getting his own diagnosis confirmed by one Detective Sergeant James Lee, who was breathing toxic fumes on him and berating his condition and attitude as they sat side by side in the cramped and filthy detective squad room in the basement of Buckhead Station.

“You don't seem to give a shit anymore, like I said."

“It isn't that—"

“Don't tell me it isn't that. I know when you're giving a shit and when you ain't, Kemo Sabe, and you don't act like you care. You been just walking through it. I been knowin’ you too long, man. I know when you're here and when you are out to lunch, dig?"

Eichord just shook his head at the Oriental cop whom he'd worked with for so many years.

“You got an attitude all of a sudden, that's another thing. When Jack fuckin’ EICHORD, straight-arrow crime-crusher and Mr. Never-give-up gets an attitude on the job it's something a friend notices, believe me."

“Make sense, for Chrissakes,” Jack said, smilingly, but feeling sour.

“You walked through this Cassarelli thing like you weren't here. Like you didn't give a rat fuck. Just because it wasn't some big mass homicide with three hundred dead people in a locked room, and Jack haffin’ to fly in and figure out who put the cyanide in the fucking Kool-Aid—I mean, you're still on the job, my man. And since when don't you give a hundred fucking percent. Eh?"

“Gimme a break."

“Huh?"

“Cassarelli was a piece of shit. Another tap dance. What's to have an attitude about? I'm just tired of going through the motions for looks. You knew the perp was gonna end up walking. I knew he was gonna walk. HE knew he was gonna walk. His fucking lawyer knew. His honor the nitwit judge knew the fucking captain knew my dead Aunt Sarah knew. Everybody knew. So what's to get an attitude about?"

“That's what I mean, right there. Since when do I hear that kind of shit outta your mouth?"

“I'm just tired, I guess,” Eichord admitted. “I need to back off it for a while. Take another vacation or something."

“Bullshit. You just came back from fucking vacation two, what was it—three months ago. You said it bored the stones offa ya."

“Well—"

“You look like shit. You're drinking too much. You don't get enough sleep. You're hanging around here night and day and you got the social life of a monk with herpes."

“A monk with herpes? What the hell does that mean?"

“You're drinking again, my man. And it worries me."

“I'm not drinking one fucking bit more than I always drink."

“You are half-blitzed on the job, kiddo. Don't bullshit a bullshitter. You stink like a fuckin’ brewery half the time."

“Christ.” Eichord fought back a smile.

“I'm not jokin’ with ya, man. And everybody's saying stuff about it. I mean the captain—on the Cassarelli thing—he was talkin’ to me one day and you'd been in his face and he goes"—Jimmy Lee fanned a hand over his face—"tell the bartender to cut back on the vermouth, this gin tastes funny.” They both chuckled. “And you know that bar rag, shit Jackson, he's never seen the noon hour without at least two coffee cups of Gordon's under his king-size 56. So when that son of a bitch says you stink of booze you gotta smell like a broken bottle of Fuzzy Navel."

“I hope I didn't stink as bad as you do right now, you smell like you're wet and on fire.” Eichord turned to fan a hand over his face.

“I hope this pungent cigarette is not the object of your scorn. This doesn't bother you, does it?” Lee said, blowing a huge cloud of poisonous smoke directly at Jack.

“Come on, man,” Eichord said, fanning furiously. “I mean, if you wanna get cancer, that's fine, but don't—"

“This is the smoking section of the room, my man.” James Lee pointed at the crudely lettered sign that hung next to one with the printed legend A-1 DETECTIVE AGENCY, NO JOB TOO SMALL. Someone had penciled out “job” and written “dick.” And someone else had written “eat me.” And another shaky hand had Eichord's cop mind instinctively matching the “eat me” with the printed urinal art in the upstairs men's room, “Want to see a joke, look in your hand,” under which somebody else had scrawled, “Look in BOTH HANDS, you mean.” What flakes.

“You're telling me it is,” Eichord said, feeling sicker by the second. “And if you do that again, I'm gonna puke all over that shitty-looking suit."

“That is a $350 mohair, Special Agent Eichord, courtesy of Bon Tons. I just flogged it. You like?” He shot his cuffs.

“Wonderful. Too bad they didn't have your size."

“I got a special deal.” Lee smiled inscrutably.

“Yeah, you boosted the fucker. I don't wanna hear about it."

“You gotta take something. Buddy Lintz gets pissed. He thinks you don't like him you don't take some threads."

“Oh, I'm sure Buddy just loves to have coppers flog $350 suits off him. Must make his day."

“Make my day, mother-fuckers,” a huge man boomed from the stairway. It was fat Dana Tuny, called “Chunk” Tuny throughout Buckhead Station, and the longtime partner of James Lee—known as the legendary homicide team of Chink and Chunk.

“Hay-ZOOS! It stinks like a mother-grabber down here. I gotta get a straight goin’ to cut the smell.” The big detective grabbed a cancer stick out of his partner's pack and lit it with a gold Dunhill, letting out a huge plume of foul carcinogens.

“Morning, asshole,” Lee said to him. “I was just telling Eichord he looked like shit."

Eichord nodded hello.

“That's no lie, Jack. You look like fuckin’ walking death, man, whatsa matter witcha—you on the sauce again?"

Eichord laughed. “Real subtle, Dana."

“I just got done tellin’ him, man. He better cut back a couple of quarts a day."

“Well, girls,” Tuny said, shifting his poundage from his partner's back, “I'm goin’ across the street. You guys want some doughnut holes?"

When he'd gone back up the stairs, Lee said softly to Eichord, “All the ha-ha aside, you do look bad and you are drinking too much, and if I know YOU gotta know, not being the type who kids himself."

“You can't imagine how much these free consultations help me, Doctor. How long have you practiced? Not counting today.” But underneath the bantering Eichord was well aware of what his longtime friend and colleague was trying to say so subtly: he did look like shit and he wasn't getting enough sleep and he was crankier than he had any reason to be, and the thing was, he was drinking too much and he could feel himself slipping into the big black hole again. Its power was sucking at him, pulling him mercilessly down into the viscid swamp that all alcoholics got to know so well. It was like a club where you had an honorary lifelong membership.

Cassarelli was just a name on a stiff's corpse—the shop name for a case that had ended like so many others, with what Eichord thought of as a tap dance. In this case, a legal tap dance where the victim fed the worms and the bad guys walked. Of course it was never that simple. Nothing was ever simple, clear-cut, open and shut, black and white, dead-bang. Everything had to be a big, complicated, unresolved, dragged-out, mishmash where lawyers and judges grew wealthy on the mind-battering, maddening opaqueness and inequities of turnstile justice.

He had thought more than once that he'd put “tap dancer” on his next 1040 form. Let the fucking IRS chew on that one. That's the way he thought of himself. Tagged as a quasi “serial murder expert,” a misnomer that the press resurrected from time to time whenever media could stir up some numbers with a good, juicy crime story, he was perceived in-house as the ultimate tap dancer. A glorified PR man who could present a public face to media that offered a bit of both worlds, the public-relations stroke job in tandem with a credible body that was actually out there in the trenches.

They used him and he supposed he used the limelight himself, if not for the ego nurturing for the perks of the job that came from the added clout. Grease that could lubricate implacable, rusty cogs of bureaucracy and business. Muscle to open or close doors, wedges, chisels, tools to break loose long-submerged facts in the information log jam. A high profile to draw out a certain kind of potential informant who would be pulled to the aura of celebrity like moths to the candle.

But at what point do you expose so much of yourself to media that your life begins to be a kind of comic book? His endless stories about Dr. Demented, the whacko dentist whom he'd nailed because of a sick junkie informant, and the big case that had taken him from Buckhead Station north to Chicago, the Lonely Hearts murders, he'd talked about all these ancient crimes so often the memories had become illusory and unreal. Had they occurred at all?

“You don't seem to give a shit anymore,” Lee said. You change so much with the years. With the job. His achievements had been talked about so much they'd become little more than blurry postcards, sent back from weird pit stops on his trip through the heart of darkness. Lee was dead wrong. He thought to himself, Shit is all I give, pal.

And it was dragging him down into the depths just like his drowning dream.

“Come on,” he would hear the two boys shout. Even recalling their names from childhood. The Demented Dentist he couldn't recall, but Whortley Williams and Cabrey Brown he remembered forty years later. Go figure it

“Come on, ya sissy."

“I ain't no sissy."

“Jack's a sissy. A mama's boy!"

“Yeah, he's too chicken shit to swim out this far. Sissy boy!"

And in his frightening dream Jack would swim out past the pier pilings where his folks had told him never to swim, out there in the water so deep no one had ever touched bottom, out over the black hole that was measured in measureless fathoms, out where little boys had no business.

“What a sissy. Can't even swim underwater,” Cabrey Brown taunted him.

“Can so."

“Prove it."

“Huh?"

“Let's see ya swim underwater. Swim over here to us. It's only about fifteen or twenty feet. I'll bet you're chicken shit."

“Yeah,” Whortley Williams, the other bully, dared him. “Too chicken shit to swim underwater. Chicken shit mama's boy."

“Hell I am,” Jack said as he took a huge breath, filling his lungs with lake air and diving down into the inky black, strong arms pulling, legs scissoring as he swam toward the boys, hard breaststrokes underwater, eyes squinted tight in the cold, muddy lake water, and oh God suddenly something has him caught like a vise the boys are holding him as he tries to thrash out with his arms and legs twisting pulling, no good can't pull free they are bigger and stronger and the two of them have got him and they're holding him under the water and he's fighting to break free and he can't and in the thrashing, heart-pounding panic he tries to scream and swallows about three gallons of foul lake water choking drowning all his air gone screaming without a voice, crying fainting blacking out into death and suddenly waking up bathed in cold sleep sweat and sheet-soaked terror knowing the hangover isn't as bad as it could be. Just grateful now to be awake on the edge of the dream and not dead at the bottom of Sugar Lake. Grateful he can swing his legs out of bed in a minute and that it isn't one of those real ass-kicker headaches that start way behind the eyes somewhere, drilling through the brain, making waking up such a challenge that you keep your eyes closed and the covers over your head, the alky's wake-up call.

But the dream and the fuzzy head combined make it a bad beginning and even then in that jarring self-realization, in those few seconds when you're still honest with yourself, you know you won't be able to get through the day without some medicine. And you wake up anticipating the astringent mouthwash gargle, the taste of the toothpaste, and that first eye-opener. And you light up like the glowing tubes inside an old-time console radio at the thought of that first taste and you know it's starting to take you back down again.

Jack's regimen would be to aim for that kitchen. Get his big coffeecup and fill it full of ice cubes. Splash in four or five ounces of Daniel's. Run a tablespoon or two of tap water across the top and suck some of the medicine right down. Ummmmm. Shudder. Damn. Yes oh Cheerist yes. Ummm. All gone. Jackie drank his medicine down like a good boy. Let's do it again. Shit. This day looks a lot better already. And he'd fill that big cup again and never mind the tap water this time. The ice is starting to melt. The glow permeates. That's how it starts.

He could feel it dragging him down just the way it had before. It had started for him so many years ago. It started way back when he knew there weren't going to be any more heroes. (Of all the ridiculous damn excuses!) Stop and think—from the time the big mushroom cloud billowed below the bomb bay of the Enola Gay we hadn't had too many heroic images. The post—Jack Armstrong years of atomic comic television had seen the last of the heroes.

Even real heroes and media darlings like the vegetable hero Chavez, or the fire hero Adair, they'd never been elevated to the status of the heroic personas we once believed in as a nation. Remember the old war heroes like Stillwell and Chennault and Audie Murphy? Imagine a heroic image coming out of the steaming jungles of Southeast Asia. We wouldn't be checking out any movies called Huey Doorgunner over Ben Hoa or Danang Diary. The closest we could get was Stallone or Norris in some Mittyesque/Revenge/Guilt-for-the-MIAs scenario. Good night, Chesty.

Why was it so all-fired important that the heroes had vanished? The astronauts, the last legitimate hero personas, they seemed to evanesce in the dissipation of Skylab jokes. Who did kids look up to—some faggot rock star with about a gram of snort shoved up each nostril? A pro athlete with one hand on his scrapbook and the other on his $497,000 contract? The heroes had vaporized in the shock waves. And Eichord's core, filled with the detritus of midlife, covered with the eluvium from the Force 17 hurricane of time and technology, fought for air and went down for the third time.

“Just because it wasn't some big mass homicide with three hundred dead people in a locked room ... “Lee had chastized him, “You're still on the job. And since when don't you give a hundred fucking percent?"

I got news, Jimmy old darlin'. Check it out. A hundred fucking percent of zero is zero. Besides that, you wily little Oriental son of a bitch, you scrutable old bastard, you shouldn't hang around me if you can't take a joke, Eichord thought, and reached for the comfort of the half-pint of black Jack he now carried with him. It'll all work out, he thought. Or it won't.

Dallas

Only one of the first three got a look at him. Yolanda de la Cruz never saw him. She was worrying about her long black, shiny hair looking terrible and windblown when he took her out. She was twenty-two. Formerly Miss Watermelon of Dilly, Texas, where watermelons are no joking matter, and by any standards quite gorgeous. Schlepping her books around the agencies in the Dallas area, getting a good deal of midrange work. Modeling Conventions. The usual stuff. This could be good. It was a call from MG GRAPHICS. Mark Gold to do this print thing for Patio Foods. It was one of Mark's three biggest accounts and she had her fingers crossed as always. This could be the biggie.

“Do we gotta have the window shot, honey?"

“We gotta have the window shot,” he assured her, climbing out the window and his assistant uncoiling cable and handing him the camera carefully as he squatted down on the hot rooftop. “Anything for the Patio account. Now, gimme the face, please, angel."

She stuck her kisser out the window, at which point the wind blew a hunk of the long mane into her mouth as she said, “Maaaaarrrrrrrk! AAAAHHHH. SPAAAAAWWWW.” Spitting hair out and Mark fighting back a laugh as the young assistant left the corridor heading for the rest room, and the spitting sound the last audible noise Yolanda de la Cruz—workname Yolie Dale—would make prior to the moment of her neck being snapped. She was thinking a thought, cursing cocky little Mark Gold and his queen assistant and trying to spit the hair out of her lovely mouth when she felt herself unhinged. Yes. Unhinged. Dislocated. And suddenly her brain was feeding the oddest signals to her body, and her eyes were seeing from the strangest perspective as she blacked out and the killer picked her up as if she weighed five pounds instead of ninety-five and hurled her through the open window, which is all Mark Gold saw—a blur of woman flying out at him like Supergirl—and he was going out of control hitting the guardrail and both of them going out in space as he grabbed for something, screaming, and his scream as they plummeted off the roof what the assistant heard and moments later he came running out of the rest room and, Where was everybody, and he stuck his blow-dried head out the window and screamed, “Hey!” just as the killer flung him across the roof like a sack of potatoes and he glimpsed the face of the man as he flipped over the guardrail ass over pudding pot, arms flailing, a scream trapped in his throat as his heart gave up the ghost and he cashed in as it were in midflight.

The jogger out by the lake north of Dallas, Linda Wilson, twenty, a pre-med honey going to Baylor—she was number four and she never got a glimpse of the man as he came out from behind the bushes like a snake, soundlessly and smoothly, gliding in behind her panting, hard-breathing footfalls, and instantly blinded her with shock waves of pain and flung her off the edge of the cliffs that were so conveniently near the jogging pathway. The killer loved the feel of throwing someone from a height, the power of seeing them plunge to their death. So reassuring.

The MG GRAPHICS tragedy was assumed to be an awful accident. Everybody knows how these photographers take such chances. It was just terrible, though, the three of them all falling off that roof like that. And there was no reason to ever autopsy Linda Wilson. It was a case of a foolhardy and adventuresome girl who was far too daring for her own good. Everybody said so. And she just got too near the edge. Wrong to be out jogging alone like that anyway. Her body was found crushed on the stones below, but no reason to suspect anything since there was no visible sign of assault or molestation. Just a bad, awfully tragic accident. Pure coincidence that two of the victims had been young and pretty females. Just the breaks.

But the rest of the seventeen random kills and twenty-two assorted missing-persons cases appeared to be without logical connectives. The number—thirty-nine—had a terrible feel to it.

Buckhead Station

The flaky homicide detectives started doing schtick immediately upon encountering one another in the precinct house, Jimmy Lee saying to Dana Tuny, “Eichord downstairs?"

“Hey, do I look like Mr. Keen? The fuck should I know?"

“No. You look like an elephant wearing a man's shirt, but if you see Jack down there, tell him line four."

“Some get a kick from co-caaaaaaayyyyyyyne,” the fat cop sang as he clomped down into the squad room. “But I know that if I would eat me some quiff it would bore me terriff-ically tooooooo. Hey! Eichord. Pick up four."

“Homicide."

“'Zis Jack Eichord?"

“Speaking."

“Jack, this is Wally Michaels. You remember me?"

“Oh—sure,” Eichord said unconvincingly.

“I met you in D.C. a couple years ago, remember? I was in the class you lectured at Quantico."

“Oh, yeah. Sure! Hey, Wally. How's it goin'?"

“Goin’ great. Still with Dallas PD. I hear about you all the time, of course. MacTuff went and made you a star, man.” They laughed. “Jack, I'm asking for your help through channels. The chief is calling your honcho or maybe has already this morning. We need ya to get down to big D ... Are you tied up with anything right now?"

“Not anything I can't shake loose of, far as I know. What's cookin'?"

“We got a serial murder. Thing's really hot. Weird M.O. Whacko time. Nearly forty possibles. Random kills. Killed at least seventeen people already around the Dallas—Fort Worth area. Other than a family of migrant workers they appear to all be unrelated.” Wally began running the case down to Eichord, who sensed something pulling at him the way all the big ones seemed to do. Giving him that first taste. The first little frisson of beckoning excitement, the first shudder of fear that came from knowing an unknown killer was out there somewhere.

The Major Crimes Task Force was a federally funded unit for which Eichord worked as a sometimes agent-at-large. He would work out of a local police force or whatever, nominally under the ranking officer, but often working independently from whatever official investigation might already be under way. His title, that of special investigator, told you nothing. In truth he was that rara avis of coppers. He answered to no one.

Eichord thought of his boss as the Captain, if you'd ask him, the honcho of his detective bureau at home, but captain was merely the bottom rung in a lofty ladder of command. The captain of Buckhead Station just happened to be the lifer who handed Eichord his ticket to ride when MCTF reached out for him.

When Eichord wasn't involved in a task-force-sanctioned investigation, he was just another city flatfoot. But everyone from the newest patrolmen on up knew that he was only there to await the bidding of a higher master. Because of his low-profile demeanor and self-effacing nature, the unique status accorded him had never become the personnel problem that it might have had Jack's ego been less healthy. But he saw himself as just another hardworking, dedicated cop. Period.

The limelight that plagued him so in recent years had been a real two-edged sword. His success track record, real or hype job, allowed him to come and go as he liked. Disappear, in fact, for weeks on end. Report or not report—with paychecks mailed by the Treasury Department to a box number. He was as close as it really gets to having a license to kill. All he needed was a black mask and a faithful Indian friend. He unholstered his Smith that night as he began packing for Dallas, and—sure enough—he had plenty of silver bullets.

Love Field

The pretty stewardess was telling him something, smiling like the idea of serving booze to a low-rent cop on the shadowy side of middle age was precisely what she wanted to be doing with her life on a pretty day like this. How many of the little bottles of airplane booze had he consumed? He also had a silver flask he'd worked on pretty good back in the john. He was flying, all right.

The thing didn't seem like it would be much more than a two-way round-trip tourist ticket. After all, they thought they had the perp. Probably be another Bundy deal. Come in and make nice with this Hackabee character and pry the whole picture loose grave by grave.

According to what Wally Michaels had told him, some wino was going through some empty cardboard boxes, and he opens one and there's a naked woman in there. He thinks she's dead and runs screaming to the coppers. Only thing is, she's still alive. This being the woman Donna Something—he fumbled for his notebook—Canofpeas? He squinted and read the name Scannapieco. Irish broad, he thought, feeling very tight.

So Donna Can-of-peas, age thirty-something, naked as a jaybird, crammed inside an appliance box and about two steps short of coming unwrapped altogether, she tells ‘em in the ER that she was pulling into a parking lot at this shopping mall when a dude puts a gun in the window, tells her to move over. He starts the car up and takes her into a nearby alley where he stuffs Donna in the trunk. A half-hour later he's got her chained to the bed in the basement of this old house. Says she's his “sex slave” from now on, and if she wants food and drink she can put out for it; if not, she dies. She tells of rape and torture, and finally, a month or so of this, she sees her chance and manages to escape. Ends up downtown, still naked, and covered in filth, hiding in a refrigerator box where she passes out and the wino finds her.

Thing is, all during the weeks of captivity, he's bragging to her about how he likes to take folks off. He's the number-one killer of the century, he tells her, and brags about the “hundreds of human bodies” he's buried all over the Southwest. He's so specific that she manages to remember some of it. The cops figure it's bullshit.

She's a little on the hard side, Donna is. They see that once she gets cleaned up, she likes to load up with the old makeup, lots of eye shadow, flashy wardrobe, a low-cut this, a tight that, show a little leg. They kind of figure she may have asked for it. Maybe she didn't even mind it all that much—the sex-slave part. Maybe she even got off on it. And Donna is on the theatrical side. Very dramatic. Poses a lot and talks like she thinks maybe somebody should be shooting all this with a camera. It just doesn't sit right.

And there's always the remote possibility you got an irate lover who wants to punish somebody and embarrass them real bad. Maybe a jilted mistress who wants to put her married sugar daddy through some changes at the expense of the Dallas cop shop. It wouldn't be the first time. So there is natural suspicion.

But one of the coppers happens to see the Identikit drawing they do of Donna's abductor, and son of a bitchin’ don't that beat all, that's that crazy fucker Ukie Hackabee. Whoa, shit. Ukie, as in Ukelele, is what they call a police character in Dallas. You've got to realize, pardner, this is Big Dee, where Jack Ruby was only rated a “buff” status. So if you're a genuine “character,” that means you've done messed in a few mess kits and got caught at it. Eichord had checked the MCTF computer-think on the man and he had a thick package as a KSP (known sexual pervert), with the impression of being a very small-time nickel-dime con man.

Within forty-eight hours the state rods picked him up. And as it happened, they nailed him while he was digging out behind a private estate where the wealthy owner had friendly troopers make the occasional drive-by. On closer inspection, what Ukie was poking around in happened to be the fresh grave of a young Jane Doe. Ukie looked awfully good for about thirty-nine homicides all of a sudden.

And all of a sudden there were city, state, and fed-level shields digging everywhere Donna Scannapieco said to dig. And many of the areas where Ukie had bragged to her about burying people revealed human remains. They were onto what might become one of the most notorious mass murders ever. Ukie had told Donna about “hundreds of bodies.” What if his brags were factual? What had Ukie Hackabee gone and done?

In his maximum-security cell Ukie (William) Hackabee not only confessed that he was the guilty party, but guys, hey, you don't know the half of it. I've killed whole rooms of people—buildings full of assholes. You ain't just messing with some small potatoes punk. I've taken down HUNDREDS of mother-fuckers all over this part of the country.

And all of this was sloshing around with the airplane booze when Eichord got his final smiles from the stews, deplaning at the huge piece of tarmac that had disappointed so many visitors to Dallas—finding out that Love Field was only the name of an airport. And he shook his head to clear out the cobwebs, sucked in a lungful of that warm, dry Dallas air, and moved with the mob, spotting a familiar face who said, “Hey, over here."

“Whatdya say, Wally."

“Great to see you, Jack."

“Good to see you again. You've gotten fat, eh?” Wally Michaels might have weighed all of 160 soaking wet.

“Yeah. I'm eatin’ good. You look great."

“I look a little drunk, I'll bet. All that booze on the plane—man, I'm swacked.” They laughed.

“I hear you, sir. I get that way everytime I get in a plane."

“Anything new?"

“Huh?"

“On your perp?"

“Oh, not much. The woman's starting to get a little hazy on the specifics. But she's batting a thousand with us. She's tryin’ hard. Very forthcoming. Offered to let us have her hypnotized and that kind of thing but we've got to be awfully careful with this. Don't want to blow it."

“Playing it by the book with the perp?"

“Absolutely. All the way, Jack. They Mirandized him six ways from Sunday. He got so many Mirandas read to him he had it memorized.” Jack smiled. “We're really taking it slow ‘n’ easy with Ukie."

“What the hell kind of name is that anyway?"

“Ukie was sort of a half-assed entertainer at one time here. He worked a couple of the strip joints as an MC or something. Got up and strummed his ukelele and sang dirty songs or whatever. We've known him for years. Had him in over and over for a couple aggravated sexual assaults, wienie-wagging, bunch of times on suspicion-jerkin’ him around a little. Vag. He's a fuckin’ moke."

“I saw the package. But you know what doesn't feel right?"

“This is the car—'scuse me. Go ahead,” Michaels interrupted as he started to open the door of an unmarked Plymouth.

“I got some luggage."

“The airport guy's getting it. Get in. You've got the VIP treatment this time, Jack.” They got in the car and Wally popped the trunk release.

“So, you were saying something wasn't right?"

“It just doesn't fall together for me yet. I can't see a dude like this offing all those people. I mean you're talking some kinda body count already. What is it?"

“Thirty-nine or forty-three depending on whose vibes you go with—whether you wanna believe Ukie or forensics. You know how some of these perps are. He wants credit for every murder one on the books now. Like I say, we've gotta walk on eggs."

“I dunno.” Eichord shook his head. “It doesn't come together so far for me. Like this thing about you all tryin’ to get him to explain why and he said, what, that it was a jigsaw puzzle for the cops to solve. He wouldn't explain it. Or he couldn't. If he did all those people—and I'll admit so far it looks dead-bang—why did he leave seventeen to be found and supposedly bury hundreds, or let's say even bury dozens of victims? Why go to that much trouble and then leave seventeen? And why does a known dong-dangler who picks up a woman and forces her to have sex with him—why does a sex offender leave his sexiest victims unmolested? Huh-uh. Two, three different MOs going here. You got no semen residue, no sexual penetration, no freak stuff. Just whacks ‘em and either leaves ‘em or buries the corpse. Doesn't make a shred of sense at all. I mean, there's a million unexplained pieces to this, right?"

“That's why—” But Jack was still going on with it.

“Why does a guy who wants the coppers to play guessing games with him, a guy who is calculating enough to construct a mystery of this complexity, with the balls to carry out the killings—why would somebody like that be stupid enough to brag openly about the location of buried corpses to Donna Scanty-panties-whateverhernameis? See?"

“Yeah. But—"

“Bragging about buried bodies, Wally. I mean, if he buried some and leaves some, the ones he buried were buried for a reason. He didn't want us to find ‘em. So why brag—"

“But if he thought he was going to silence her, doesn't it fit the profile of a hey-look-at-me kind of psychotic?"

“Maybe and maybe not. But even so, I dunno—"

“All right. Wait, Jack, suppose that some of these victims he's put in the ground turn out to have been molested."

“Yeah?"

“You grant the possibility?"

“Right."

“Right. Now, if he only has sex with some of his victims and then buries those AFTER he offs ‘em ... Get it?"

“Huh?"

“If he was going to bury Donna Scannapieco when he was through with her, what did he care whether or not she knew?"

“Oh, yeah, I get that, but my point is we've got conflicting MOs at work here. Different patterns of behavior, it seems to me. That kind of a dude. He's not going to take those kind of unnecessary risks, is he? What sense does it make? He's already got the woman. Why tell her anything she doesn't need to know?"

“To convince her."

“Well..."

“Big-time killer. He wants her to know it so she'll be scared. You know how some of those freaks are. Scary sex is the only sex. Boo, shit. Let's fuck. Those guys."

“Yeah."

“That's what."

“But take a look at this guy's package. There's nothing here to indicate the sort of physical thing you got goin’ with the seventeen he's left aboveground. No muscle here in the package. No heavyweight stuff at all. When did he move from bein’ a dude in a trench coat in the back row of the Sperm Theater and start getting a taste for the heavy stuff?"

“Point is, you're here to help us find out. What is the obvious possibility? If Ukie Hackabee is for real. If all this time when he was dangling his dipstick at the gals in the supermarket, he was also getting into bigger and bloodier games, and if there's a trail of dead bodies like we're afraid we may find on this one, well...” Michaels trailed off and it was suddenly unnaturally silent in the closed vehicle. And in that moment of absolute quiet the airport man slammed the trunk shut and it sounded like a cannon going off.

Eichord damn near jumped out of his skin. “Jeezus,” he muttered, shuddering involuntarily, feeling his heart thumping, as Wally Michaels turned the key in the ignition and they drove out into the wake of the Texas traffic, Eichord still shocked by the sudden noise, discomposed from the flight, turbid from the airplane liquor, and neutered by the obvious inconsistencies of the Dallas grave-digger.

Dallas

Miss Scannapieco was a letdown. If Eichord had been expecting a brassy blond bombshell oozing raw sexuality and flirting with every male in sight, he got a big surprise. Physically, at least, there was nothing out of the ordinary about her appearance or her actions. She appeared to be a rather average-looking, moderately attractive, somewhat hard-looking woman in her early thirties. She had come in the next morning around ten o'clock and Eichord's first look at Ukie Hackabee's only living victim was through the one-way observation glass of Room 601. She was talking with a detective from the intelligence squad named Duncan, and he popped the speaker sound off, watched her a bit longer, and seeing nothing instructive, went in and introductions were made.

“I guess you're getting pretty tired of talking about this by now,” he said to her with a smile.

“I'll talk about it all night if it will help nail the dirty bastard. Whatever it takes.” There was something about her, sitting across from her at a table, that didn't communicate itself through the looking glass on the wall. You couldn't even see it coming in the room. Only when she turned those eyes on you did the frankness of her open sexuality hit you. Immediately, no further dialogue between them being necessary, they each read the other like an open book, and both of them looked away, neither of them liking what they saw.

“Well,” Eichord stalled, “how about starting at the beginning for me and tell me about it one more time. You were in the parking lot..."

“I'd just pulled in to go to the mall,” she said without hesitation, “and this man comes up to the car and I had just tapped the car in back of me very, very gently on the bumper when I parked and I didn't know who he was I just assumed maybe he was going to be saying something about me hitting the car, like he was going to, you know, claim I knocked a dent in his bumper, which I know I didn't because I barely touched the car, and he goes, ‘If you'll look in my hand you'll see I'm holding a pistol and ... ‘"

As she talked, Eichord's mind wandered and he listened to the word patterns as much as he did the words. Listening for the subtle changes in the rhythms as he always did. Listening for the gray areas that lay hidden in between the blacks and whites of fact, opinion, conjecture. Trying to piece together an after-the-fact reality from as many sources as would offer input.

Eichord was a by-the-book detective when he had to be. And nobody could touch him when it was time to cogitate, seriate, extrapolate, and excavate the buried chunks of seemingly irrelevant and disconnected datums. They came from nowhere. Apparently meaningless nuances. Trivia. Minutiae. Nonfacts. Suggestions. Rhythms. Patterns. Nudges. But Jack Eichord was no Sherlock. (Those were the ashes of a Trichinopoli cigar in his cuff, Watson.) Eduction/deduction came in many packages. He was a visceral, gut-instinct, vibes man at heart.

He knew the overlong frankness of eyeball stares calculated to instill trust, the hesitation in midphrase that sometimes red-flagged deceit, the too-perfect arrangement of “clues,” the patterns of occurrence that signaled a suspicious structuring of events supervenient to a homicide. He listened for dissonance, sniffed for secret blood trails, watched for the dodgy maneuvering of the evasive broken-field runner. What he called the footprints in the cottage cheese.

“...clothing, and they wanted to know whether I was wearing provocative clothing at the time of,” he heard her say with heavy sarcasm, but what he watched was the way she widened her eyes on the word “provocative.” It was this signal that he would find so typical of Donna Scannapieco's demeanor, the widening of the eyes, the frankness of the sensual animal in her reflected in those dark irises, an unabashedly sexy communication that was so off-putting to him, the continuous statement she made about herself to anyone with whom she had close contact. The truth is that she was one of those victims it is rather difficult to pity.

“Tell me about the place he kept you in, Donna."

“I'll never forget that place. It was just a room. About twelve feet wide"—she motioned with her hands—"and about fourteen feet long. The walls looked like maybe cedar, I'm not good at that, but they were covered in pictures and stuff. He had mostly pictures from dirty magazines. Women doing things, you know. And some newspaper clippings."

“Tell me about the clippings."

“There was the one about the slain college girl. That was the first one I told you guys about that led to them believing me, I guess. And then I remember the clipping about the boy who had suddenly disappeared, and that was the one where he first started bragging about how he was able to do anything he wanted and get away with it. And that he made hundreds of people disappear all over the Southwest. He'd just drive from city to city and whenever he felt like it he said he'd just kill somebody and put them in the ground or dump them in the river or whatever.” She had begun speaking very rapidly, and as her speech cadence changed, her breathing accelerated, but the focus of the eyes that mirrored the inner direction had never wavered. His initial reaction was, whatever else Donna Scannapieco might be, he thought she was probably telling the truth.

“Donna, did you ever wonder or even think to ask him why he was telling you about these killings?"

“He probably figured he'd kill me too when he got tired of me. I mean, what did he have to fear from me? When he still had me chained up I guess he knew there was no way I could get loose."

“How did you finally get loose exactly?"

Unlike so many similarly besieged victims she did not seem to grow physically tired from the long interrogation that ran through the lunch hour. Eichord's initial Q-and-A session with Miss Scannapieco had produced the curious effect of making him very weary, but she wasn't tired in the least when they broke for lunch. Two hours and forty-five minutes of relentless probing, taking her over that painful time, making her search the corners of her memory, had left her fresh as a daisy. Her resolve had kept her alert and keen. It was almost as if she'd enjoyed it. Every surfacing fact putting Ukie Hackabee closer to death row. He hoped she'd stay this way. She was one helluva witness.

But while the questioning hadn't drained her energies, what it had done was start the two of them off on some uneven footing. He could tell by the way she'd begin her answers to some of his questions that she thought Jack Eichord was a real horse's butt, and she was letting him know. Telling him what he could do with his judgmental, chauvinist, redneck ass as far as she was concerned, or so Eichord imagined by the way she'd frame up her answers. And when he packed it in around one that afternoon he was getting prickly and paranoid about her tone of implicit condemnation and reproach that he was reading in her responses. He was also aware that this could hinder the shit out of an investigation.

He decided he'd put his feelings back in cold storage where they belonged and start fresh with her again tomorrow. Let go of it for now. Regroup and come in with a new attitude next time. Try to like Donna a little more, be less of a judge and more of an impartial listener. Go in there and really make some decent use of this potential gold mine of information about what could be one of the worst mass murderers ever apprehended.

“He was making me do things to him, and I was able to convince him that if he took the chain off I could, you know, be better."

“Be better?"

“He was having me do it, uh, turned with my back to him"—her eyes cast downward—"dog-style, he called it"—her voice caught a little—"and it hurt a lot to do it anyway. And he had this leather thing like a wide belt on me that I had worn ever since he took me"—her eyes opened wide again and she grinned savagely—"and that's how I first started getting him to unchain me. This big old heavy chain was fixed to a steel ring on the belt, which was held together with padlock. And I had gotten real chafed and raw from under the belt deal, and I started acting like the chain was so heavy I couldn't stay in position to do what he wanted, and I got him to unlock it and so, you know, I could be better at it,” she was sneering. “And I'd been watching how he'd stopped locking the door upstairs. If I hadn't talked him into letting me out of the belt I'd be dead now.” She seethed with hatred and Eichord could see her fighting to keep under control and taking deep breaths. It was the closest she'd come to showing the least sign of what he considered vulnerability.

He took her back over the old ground again. Getting her to remember everything she could about the details of the room. Precisely which pictures were on the walls? What sort of magazines had they come from? Were there any captions? Did the newspaper clippings indicate which paper or papers? Dates? What were the exact headlines that she could remember? Were they comments he had made about other victims when he was doing his bragging? Had he had sex with them before he killed them? Was he explicit about those activities? What had he said to her about his motives? Why did he kill? And on they tromped over the fading and bitter memories.

Something nagged at him about Donna Scannapieco and her face, that irritating smile kept gnawing at him, not wanting to let go. She was one of those persons who seem at first to have about ten too many teeth in their mouth. In her case, imagine the older Mary Tyler Moore with her mouth full of Chiclets. Mary takes off her necklace of beads, puts them in her mouth, and smiles and—voila!—Donna. One of those mouths that always look like they should be chewing gum.

Then he knew what it was in the toothy smile, so ready to flash at you under the long mane of dark hair, he knew what it was that bothered him: Miss Scannapieco was an older, more shopworn, less attractive model of Joanie, the wealthy preppie he'd married about 140 years ago back when both of them were too young to know better. Joanie had seen his job, perhaps rightfully, as the other woman in his life, and their days had been an endless cycle of marital battles, a war of attrition that called a truce each night as the two sides made rough-and-tumble peace overtures between the sheets. Some people build a life together on a hell of a lot less but eventually it just came apart at the seams. Too many years ago to seem real, but sexy Joanie's mouth had come back to chew on him a little more.

When he finally put a handle on what had been nudging him it took some of the pressure off and he felt like it would be easier for him to make a fresh start with Donna. His intuition told him that even second hand from her lips, the bragging he'd done in front of his captive audience might prove to be a lot more important to the case than what Ukie would say himself. Little did he know how right he would be.

Because if he had not expected Donna Scannapieco to be what she turned out to be, rather than the image evoked by her cop-shop reputation, he would find himself totally unprepared for the reality of William “Ukie” Hackabee, whom the Dallas papers were now referring to as the Grave-digger.

Dallas Lockup

Inside his head there is the feeling and it soaks him in terror. Before he can resist he is there. He hates himself for his weakness but the second he feels the chill of the cold place a whimpered “PLEASE” escapes involuntarily.

So still and cold and his voice is loud inside his head. The place always frightens him so terribly. Corridors of stone. Gray stone. Featureless.

The tall shadow beckons him forward and he knows better than to resist.

He knows as he moves into the depths of the dark and merciless place that he will be forced to look and he tries to steel himself but there is never time and he always forgets that he has no secrets now and this time it is one of the worst yet and he screams, seeing it, and the tall shadowy figure laughs.

Dallas

Guy builds up a few priors for flashing folks, shooting his dingus out ladies in the drugstore, you get an image of a fellow—you just can't help it. Weird-looking, wimpy dude with zits and glasses. Sort of gray-complected and vaguely moist, the kind of guy you'd never want to touch in a million years. Then you take a dude gets his rocks off burying corpses, you expect to see those buggy Manson eyes staring out at you going boogah-boogah. Even Eichord, who had seen enough of these folks to know you can't judge a book by its cover, had his preconceptions when he walked into the room where Ukie Hackabee was being interrogated. Those preconceptions were immediately shattered.

First off, when you imagine someone named Ukie Hackabee who kills people, you picture a toothpick in the mouth, a rough-and-ready “good ole boy,” or at least Eichord had. Ukie Hackabee was six-foot-one or -two, with styled hair, a Cary Grant chin, and only about twenty pounds on the heavy side of being able to pose for Jockey shorts ads. Ukie was a good-looking dude. And he looked up with a big preconception-shattering, sardonic smile and said, “Oh, goodie. You must be the GOOD cop. Because that gentleman"—he nodded toward the policeman shoveling papers back into a valise, who looked up to catch Ukie mouthing “asshole” to Eichord—"is most assuredly the BAD cop.” He broke himself up and laughed in a pleasantly loopy tenor giggle. This was a mass murderer and a pecker-shaker?

“He's all yours,” the other cop murmured, shaking his head in exasperation as he left.

“Come back and see us—hear?” Ukie called to his back, flipping him a bird. “What an asshole. Get that on the tape okay?” He spoke to the ceiling lights. “Do you need a level? Are you getting this okay?"

Eichord laughed easily and said, “Boy, we're not going to put anything over on you, are we? You got the good-cop/bad-cop ploy down cold. You even know where the mikes are. You and I must have seen the same movies."

“Yeah.” Ukie laughed, a flicker of recognition in his eyes. “You're the good cop. I can see that. Well, hell's bells, why not stay with whatever works? I mean take TV. Did you ever just sit and listen to those laugh tracks they put behind the shows? Even the funny shows that don't need it. They say they do it because it works, meaning the shows won't get as high ratings if they don't play the electronic laughs. Those same laughs were taped back when the first studio audiences were listening and watching Amos ‘n’ Andy, f'r heaven's sake. That was, what—forty years ago? And the laughs are so phony. You can hear the way they just roll in the ha-ha-has on every would-be joke line. The laughs have an electronic sound that isn't quite the same as a real crowd laughing. You listen some time.” He was very animated and enthusiastic.

Eichord had the feeling that if he hadn't been cuffed to the steel table he'd be up and pacing back and forth, gesturing wildly as he talked.

“But they're pigs. They being the network assholes. They're greedy. They want ALL the lines to be funny. The worst show I think I ever saw was that old show with Ozzie and Harriet. Ricky would come in and say, ‘Hi, Mom,’ and the laugh track would explode, and the screen door would slam and the laugh track would get hysterical. I saw where that kid Ricky died not long ago. He seemed like a nice young man. I remember pictures of Ozzie and Harriet back when I was a kid. My mom and pop—foster parents but I called ‘em Mom and Pop—they thought Harriet was so beautiful. She was cool-looking back in the thirties. I saw a—"

“Mr. Hackabee?"

“—picture of her. Gee, must have been when she was in her twenties. Absolute knockout. Huh?"

“I wonder if we could just—"

“If only I had my uke in here. Man, I could play some good old jam, you know?"

“Mister Hackabee?"

“Mister Hackabee,” Ukie parroted, saying the words as Eichord said them.

“You mind if we talk a little about the—"

“little about the—"

“case?"

“—case,” he said brightly.

And Eichord just looked at him with a big smile. Letting the man see he was enjoying it too. “Very good."

“Very good,” Ukie repeated, exactly with Jack's words.

Eichord laughed and Hackabee just watched him to see if he had zinged him a little. He decided he hadn't and took a breath and relaxed. “Ukie, my name's Jack Eichord, and I'd like to—"

“EICHORD Wow!” Hackabee appeared genuinely animated by the information. “The cat in MODERN CRIMINOLOGY. We've got a celebrity cop. That was a marvelous spread on you. Simply mah-velous. I was impressed. Really. I've read about you in the papers too. You solved that Demented Dentist thing and the one with the huge killer—what was his name—Cosnowski? Something like that? The Lonely Hearts murders? That was bigger than the Boston Strangler. You know one that always fascinated me was the Zodiac thing. They never got me, you know. Oh, woopsy-daisy. That was just a Freudian slip. I meant they never got HIM. But that was out in San Francisco or somewhere. I love the town. Everyone there is so happy and gay. Laugh it up, these are the jokes, folks. Eichord. Are you Jewish by any chance? No, of course not. German, I'll bet. Achtung. I used to like to eat in this restaurant that was half-German-half-Chinese. They had great food but an hour later you were hungry for power. BaROOOM-boom. Little rim job. Er-rim shot. Anyway, I saw the big story on you and really scoped up on that investigative genius. How come they brought you in to this? There's nothing left to solve. I've told them everything. I was the second gun at Dealey Plaza. I was the guy shot McKinley. I go way back. I'm so old I was a waiter at the Last Supper.” He took a breath and Jack spoke in the pause.

“Is this for the mikes, Ukie, or do you just like an audience or what?” Ukie's eyebrows raised in question. “All the commentary. I mean, it's very interesting but what's the point?"

“Point? Oh, I get it. This is going to be a thing where you challenge me on everything I say so that I have to say everything two different ways and in the dual narrative so to speak you hope to compromise me, catch me in falsehoods, trip me up in the fallacies and dialectic pitfalls of the Socratic dialogue, the snares laid by Platonic logic, the mental mine fields of Hegelian conceptualization, the technique of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, speaking of which—"

“Whoa. Please. Ukie. Give it a rest a minute.” Jack's brain was beginning to feel like it had been lying in the sun too long. His mouth had that dry, cottony feeling. “Are you laying groundwork for an insanity plea, because it's wasted on me, Ukie. Can we just talk in the normal way? Please?” Eichord staring at the enigmatic grin, speaking very softly. Calmly.

“I don't think so, Special Investigator Eichord of Modern Criminology Magazine and late of Chicago Sunrise, The American, and the New York Daily News. I think I prefer good-cop/bad-cop. One to threaten and berate. One to coax, cajole, flatter. One to pontificate and command. One to offer blandishments and hope of official friendship. Have I just about got that one down right? An investigative laugh track. Speaking of laugh tracks, did you know that in—"

“Hold it. HEY! Ukie"—the dark eyes leveled on him—"tell me this. Why would a nice-looking fellow like yourself have to get his rocks off by wagging his wienie at little girls from his car? I mean, that's something a slime-ball degenerate might have to do. But why would a good-lookin’ chap like you have to lower himself to that level of behavior? I'd really like to know."

“Bullshit. That is pure BULLSHIT. I know that's in my file and it is absolute garbage. I don't have to whip my dingus out to get a broad to look at me. Ask little innocent Miss Donna, doubtless waiting in the wings. Ask that cunt. I only wish I'd reached the pulverizing stage with that nubile ex-flight-attendant, ex-semi-pro, ex-cocktail-hostess, and I mean with the emphasis on COCK, dig, the emPHASis on the foist si-LAB-bull but ... Look, hey! Let me tell you about that dumb twat.

“I walked by her in a shopping center and the chick is undressing me with her eyes and I smile over at her and she wolf-whistles like some hard-hat hard-on and so I rub my stuff and I go, ‘Li'l girl, wanna go for a ride?’ And five minutes later she's in my car and I've got my hand in between those hot legs. Little innocent Miss Donna.

“I called her ‘hothead’ because of her ability to go down on Sly here, as I told Dr. Roberts when he interviewed me about it, she was really ORAL, Roberts, and I liked to read awful gothic romances peddled by fag agents to her aloud while she sucked me off, and then I'd twist Miss Donna's hothead hair into a handle like so, and force her hot wet mouth back and forth on me. And I indoctrinated her into the pleasure-pain of boiling water.

“Get Miss Innocence to tell you how she liked to suck me with her mouth on fire from boiling water and how she'd cry with pleasure when I shot my hot load of spermaroony between those cum-soaked whore lips of hers. That fucking round-heeled tramp. I don't give a fat rat's cootie what it says in that lying pile of palomino poop, if I want a broad I TAKE ‘EM. Period."

“What about all the killings?” Eichord asked. “Why would a sharp guy like Ukie Hackabee bother with it? What's the point?"

“Ah, ah,” shaking his finger at Eichord.

“Huh?"

Ukie laughed as he tilted his head a little and said, “Now, now. Naughty boy. Mustn't ask about such things until you've read me my rights. Under the United States Supreme Court ruling in U.S. vs. Miranda, a U.S. citizen has the right to remain silent during any Carmen Miranda movie in which there is a bananarama scene. If you cannot afford a hat with fruit on it one will be purchased for you. Anything you say can and will be used in Joe E. Brown's comedy act."

“The guy talking to me now, this smart gentleman named Hackabee. This guy's no killer. Come on, man. Tell all."

“Very effective. That's a good number the way you lower your voice in that conspiratorial hush. Almost a whisper. I like that. Very nice. Oh, yes. Jack, I'm afraid you're destined to play the good cop forever."

“You said it, old boy. You're afraid."

“Do which?"

“What are you so scared of? It's not like you could pay the death penalty more than once, is it?"

“Exactly my sentiments. So what do I have to gain by helping you with your little puzzle. Look, Jack—if I may be informal? Intimate with you, so to speak. Try to think of this as a theoretical whodunit. These are the clues, Mr. Serial Murder Expert. Read my lips. CLUUUUUUUU ZZZZ. You should be able to really sink your teeth into this thing. Try and think of everything I say as a clue. Where do you keep your clues? I keep mine in the clues’ closet at home. But say we had two sets of clues. Parallel hieroglyphs: one demotic, one noncolloquial not unlike the Rosetta Stone or the menu at Uncle Nick Zorba's Grecian Spoon. Now picture the thing nonisoscelean: the hypotenuse of each triangular shape tangential in such a manner that the sum of each is equidistant within the peripheral closed curve of an ellipse that encloses them, bend the outer curve like so"—he tried to gesture earnestly—"and you have a figure-eight infinity symbol which, when studied with the other clues, will divulge a secret more diabolical than the rumored Satanic preachment in the Stones’ album covers—"

“Ukie—"

“—the alleged subliminal symbolism within Procter and Gamble's corporate logo, the double entendre of the Beatles’ music from the Helter Skelter period, and at the perigee of our bent orbs, when the theme song from that television milestone, touchstone, and kidney stone Mister Ed is played backward ‘someone sung the song for Satan’ and ‘the source is Satan’ can clearly be heard, much the same way ‘Paul is dead’ supposedly follows in the end grooves of Strawberry Fields, or ‘fuck your girl all kinds of ways’ was rumored to allegedly grace the lyrical beauty of Louie, Lou-eye, or—"

“Ukie, we sure are wasting valuable time here,” Jack said with a smile. “How come you didn't mess with those pretty girls you took down? Weren't they your type?"

“I'd have thought you'd been more interested in how I zapped that whole family of citrus-pickers. Three of them. That was a real challenge. Don't you want to know how I put ole Hay-zoos away?"

Eichord widened his eyes but said nothing. Not wanting to interrupt the first piece of information that had any reality attached to it.

“Don't you want to know about that one?"

“Sure I do."

“No. You say you want to know but soon as I'd start explaining it, running it down for you, pulling your coat to it, you'd tune out on me. And that's a shame because I can see that raw intellect oozing out of every pore. No lie, you're the only cop I've met since this like, you know, came to a head who has even a prayer of understanding what they've got hold of."

“I'd like to try to understand."

“You sure?"

“As long as it doesn't have anything to do with TV laugh tracks I'll listen.” Ukie giggled. “Give it my best shot, anyway."

“You know we're part of history now, right?"

Eichord raised his eyebrows and tried to smile.

“I mean, if you knew where all the bodies were buried, Jack, you wouldn't believe it. But before we talk about all the skeletons in my closet, you have to understand my—what do you guys say—modus operandi?"

“Right."

“Let's talk about God and icons, okay? You believe in God, right?"

Eichord nodded.

“Okay. Are you familiar with the doctrine of pantheism? Sacerdotalism? The paradox of syncretism? Palingenetic phylogeny? A simple yes or no will do."

“Yes or no."

Which broke Ukie up. There was a lot more. Just as Hackabee said, he tuned it out, somewhere between “cranial suture” and “chthonic and telluric ritual” he glanced at his watch and tried to swallow. It hadn't been an entire waste. Also, back when Ukie had wished his relationship with Donna Scannapieco had been at “the pulverizing stage” something had lit up for a second. A thing that was icy and nameless and invisible had touched him just for that quick passing moment. Blown across him like a cold wind.

But even in the face of Ukie's babbled confession, nothing about this mess was right. Nothing.

Dallas Lockup

It comes in a nightmare, death masked as an artist, coming paint his mind's portrait in shadows and blood, and it will call him Still Life with Frame and hang it face to the wall and before he can beg it has taken him there and the stone corridors of the dark pathway are empty.

“CLETUS!” A blood-chilling scream from the deep blackness.

He feels the penetration like his mind was a veil splattered in scarlet PLEASE NO DON'T but its fury takes him and the fall is like diving down into burning liquid crystal and the silken whisper from inside this darkened mirror is the scream of madness, “C L E T U S!” An exploding, blazing mirror in black, angel on fire, the scream boiling out of his deepest fears.

PLEASE, OH GOD, he begs and the thing in deep shadow, tall and fierce, catches his mind praying and hurts him making him scream again, laughing, forcing him to quote the bible but twisting it, making him blaspheme, and he feels the words: “And again I lifted my eyes and saw, and behold, four chariots came out from between the mountains; and the mountains were mountains of bronze,” the words of ZECHARIAH 6:1, but what he hears himself say is, “And again I lifted my eyes and saw, and behold, four corpses came out from between two graves; and the crimes were crimes of bronze."

Now, it thinks to him, gaze down into the graves and taste it. Taste the raw power of blood sacrifice.

It laughs again, satiated for the moment, and allows him to jerk his mind free, sobbing, gasping for air, fighting his way out of the nightmare and hearing the scream of his own voice as he comes awake, hearing that the shattering scream is only the whisper of black silk.

Dallas

Eichord had a bad night. He was staying at a place way out the expressway from downtown, nice enough as motels go but the people next door were partying it sounded like, and he lay there half-clothed, listening to the noisy voices through the wall in back of the headboard, finally switching on his own TV to drown it out. He had not had a drink in two days. Not abstaining consciously, just busy. Now he became aware of it.

The noise was still bothersome and he turned up the volume on the battered RCA set, some mindless talk show blathering away, and suddenly there's no noise next door so he figures it must have been a television set or somebody left, but door slams sound like howitzers usually and he hadn't heard anything. Whatever. At least the noise abated. He went over and turned his own set off and killed the lights. Threw his pants over the back of a chair and crashed. He was tired but he still couldn't sleep. The case was bothering him a lot. It was rife with inconsistencies and craziness. He had no handle on Ukie Hackabee whatsoever.

It seemed like two hours before he finally dropped off. Lying there with those eyes open in the darkness, trying to reach back through all of the gobbledegook and the posing and the mind-fucking, reaching for kernels of fact, nuggets of insight, little fragments of ore glittering in the cow plop. He didn't buy it and that was too bad because the facts were incontrovertible. William Hackabee had told a woman whom he'd abducted where lots of bodies had been buried. Freshly buried. It looked like old Ukie was it. But with the exception of a moment or two, the “pulverizing” bit had been so real he was beginning to think he'd hallucinated Ukie saying it, Ukie was just jerking everybody's chain.

He'd seen a hundred guys like Hackabee over the years. They seemed to be hothouse flowers that only grew in certain types of soil. The dirty funky ground of sex perversion was fertile for them. Sprinkle that with the moisture of attention and celebrity and their tales of bizarre sex crimes would suddenly grow into larger-than-life comic-strip adventures. They were rather pathetic and Mittyesque under-achievers, mostly, who would confess to almost anything to get attention. One more way to say, “Hey—look at me!"

Then there was the nature of these killings. They weren't the crimes of a sex offender. These were the crimes of an extreme sociopathic persona who was flipping the bird with one hand and waving for help with the other. The lack of apparent connectives, the absence of motive, the diversity of kill modes, and the unlikeliness of the would-be perpetrator were more than Eichord could reconcile.

So two hours later, two long Dallas hours of staring into the empty and unrewarding darkness of his room, “the pulverizing stage” taking on the rhythm of a personal mantra, exhausted and disturbed and alone, Jack Eichord gave himself over to sleep. And approximately nine minutes later a horrible hammering jerked him awake, propelling him onto his feet, reaching for his pants and untangling blankets as he shouted through his cotton-filled mouth, “Just a minute,” and lurched over to open the door and find nobody there. No movement outside. All the rooms quiet and dark. He took a last look up and down the row of accommodations, let out a lungful of air, and closed the door on it. Some nightmare.

He was almost back inside the folds of sleep when the banging hit again—a loud hammering, wham wham wham three times on the door—and this time he was there quicker but still not quickly enough because the gremlin was gone. I mean, nobody. He slipped on his shoes, no socks, eased his Smith out, and shut the door, standing quietly and waiting.

The guy had a neat sense of timing. It was all of ten minutes before he came back. Two minutes more and even Jack would have given up and gone back to bed but he had hung in there and he was there with his hand on the door by the second bang and the door was open in a half second and SHIT missed him again what the hell but then he just caught the door to the left closing silently and he kept the Smith in his pocket and walked over and banged on the door with a back fist like a sledgehammer, and he kept it up until the door finally opened.

It was a pitiful, wimpy little dude of approximately Eichord's age. About five-foot-seven. Balding. A gut on him. Watery eyes and a big red proboscis.

“Hi,” the man said sweetly. “Want to come to a party?” He was holding a nearly empty water glass of booze. “Care for one?"

“I think I'll pass, but thanks. Question, though. How did you get back inside your room so fast?"

“That's a secret,” he hissed with a smile. “I'll tell you if you come over and have a drink with me.” He had a slight lisp.

“Yes. And you'll tell me if I don't come over and have a drink with you, too"—Jack showed him a glimpse of gold shield—"or the night will end badly for you."

Then the man got all blubbery, he thought he was about to fall on a vice bust again, and Jack had to straighten that out, and then he was so pitiful Eichord decided what the hell and he did go over and they had a drink, two old drunks in a lonely Dallas motel, and even the man's whiskey was pitiful.

His name was Phil Something from a state that began with a vowel, some tale about being in aches, Eichord thought he'd said, finally figured out he'd told him, “I'm in eggs,” and was in the wholesale food business, nowhere guy with a bad marriage, a job that hated him, a boss that hated him, a wife that hated him, not really gay just a sad and lonely old coot. How depressing.

But when you're in the murder business every nasty cloud may have a revealing lining. He'd banged on the door with a long stick. So simple. Right under Eichord's nose, so to speak. And it reminded him of one of the forgotten basics: the easiest way to hide something is to leave it right out in the open. Sometimes nobody thinks to look there. He wasn't sure if it applied to the Hackabee thing but it was worth filing away. He finally got some sleep about three in the morning. He went to sleep thinking how he and old Phil next door had a lot in common. Both of them in aches, that was for sure.

There was screaming coming from the plush conference room on the richly appointed second floor of the building that Fidelity Mutual shared with Jones, Seleska, Foy, Biegelman, and Guthrie, known in the Texas legal profession as Jones-Seleska. The screaming was coming from a breathtakingly beautiful woman who was bent over a very expensive conference table. She was finally able to stop screaming with laughter and when she came up for air the somber-looking man sitting across the table from her, the one who had been responsible for her current agonies, said, “You gotta learn to lighten up a little, you take things too seriously,” at which she doubled over again.

“Not again with screaming. They'll think you're raping me in here,” he told her and she pounded on the table.

“Please ... no...” She gasped. “Please ... stop."

“You knucklehead. Get outta here,” he said, which sent her off again. Finally when she composed herself enough—the laughter diminished to the point where she could hear him—he said, “Do you know the official Jewish stand on abortion?"

“Ohhhh,” she groaned as she held herself in mock pain.

“It's still a fetus until it graduates from Harvard Law.” She giggled, grateful that it hadn't been another killer.

Her secretary opened the door. “It's that policeman again, Miss Collier. Second time he's called. Mister"—she glanced at the pink slip—"Icort, about the Hackabee case, I believe."

Still chuckling, the beautiful woman gestured no with her hand. “I'm not in.” And let herself slide back in the chair with a groan.

Dallas

“—and I'd gone in to buy some things, like I said, South Oak Cliff Shopping Center,” she said with a sigh, for maybe the hundredth time, “and no I don't believe I'd been followed, and I was on my way in to go shopping, Sanger Harris, various stops I wanted to make, and I pulled in to the mall and just barely tapped the car in back of me on the bumper, but, you know, you always feel scared if that happens, and I was relieved when I looked up in the rearview mirror and didn't see anybody in the car because, you know, you're embarrassed when that happens. And I guess that's why it scared me so much when this man sticks his head in the window and pokes a gun at me—"

Eichord was listening and watching carefully, “Excuse me. Don't lose your train of thought but you said, ‘sticks his head in the window.’ Was your window rolled down?"

“Huh?"

“How did he stick his head in the window of the car if the window was up?"

“Sure, the window was up. I meant he came over and suddenly there's this face in my window and I go, OH, and about jumped out of my skin. I was so surprised. And he was talking and I thought it was the guy's car that I'd tapped on the bumper and like I rolled the window down. Oh, I remember. I had to turn the motor off or on, I mean to roll it down—power window deals, and—"

“Tell me everything you remember about that moment. How did you feel when you saw him? What was the weather like that day? What did you have on? What—"

“Did you know the intelligence people had me act all that out? Don Duncan went out there and had me dress in the exact clothing I had on that day and he followed me all the way from the house. I mean, it isn't that far, six-seven minutes or whatever, but he had me go through all the motions when they were trying to find where he took me."

She had never been able to give them the house where she'd been held prisoner. It had just been blocked out completely. She couldn't remember anything about how she got from the room in the house to the police station. Not even the part where the wino found her in the refrigerator box, hiding behind a discarded stove in back of a store downtown. Nude. Bloody. Out of it.

“Donna. What I'm wanting to hear is your description as much as the facts themselves. You may give me something that will help without meaning to, just in the way you tell about it all. Understand?” As always speaking so softly.

“Aaaaaaahhhhhh,” sighing, looking not at all fresh as a daisy today.

Jack getting her after a rigorous bit of playacting with intelligence and then, last night, a brain-battering session in which Donna Scannapieco had allowed herself to be put in a deep trance by a clinical hypnotist. Still, there'd been nothing forthcoming about the location of her makeshift prison.

“Okay,” she said with a shrug. “Let's see. I was wearing the jeans, stacked heels, blouse under the grape sweater, earrings, purse, no extra jewelry, had makeup on, wearing my hair long like I have it today, it was an ordinary day, cool, I just don't remember anything about it all that I haven't said a million times. And he stuck his head in the window and said, ‘If you'll look in my hand you'll see I'm holding a pistol.’ I was scared but mainly I was like, you know, sort of in shock. I didn't want to get shot. I did what he said, and—"

“Donna, did it ever strike you as odd that when he threatened you there in the shopping center that was the only time in the four weeks he had you that he'd ever made any kind of specific threat with a weapon?"

“I don't get what you mean."

“Even when he was telling you about all the people he had buried around the state. Did you once ever hear him say anything about I shot this one with a pistol? Or I stabbed this one with a knife? Or I hit this one over the head with a club?” She shook her head no. “See what I'm saying here? He threatened you with a gun in the mall when he took you. But how come he never waved a gun around or talked about any specific act of violence all the time he had you?"

“He talked about acts of violence all the time,” she said, making a face at the stupidity of what he'd said. “He was always going to kick my ass for this or whip the shit out of me for that. And what do you call the fact that he claimed to have killed HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE. Is that enough violence for you?"

“No. You're not getting my point. If he threatened to beat you or hurt you physically, sure, I agree that is definitely violence. But did he ever pull a knife or gun on you? A blackjack? Anything?"

“Well—"

“When he was talking about the crimes he'd committed, was he ever specific with respect to using a weapon? How did he get those people dead? Run over them in a car? Drop a bomb on them? Poison them? Strangle them? What?"

“I don't know.” She shrugged. “He just talked about killing different ones and I don't recall anything about whether he said he shot ‘em or stabbed ‘em and I don't see what the hell difference it could possibly make. Also, you say did he threaten me with a gun? I was CHAINED by a leather thing this big"—she gestured impatiently—"all he had to do was grab me or slap me or kick me or whatever he wanted I didn't threaten him in any way. Why would he need a knife or gun? I was chained to the wall."

“Good point. Tell me about the trip to the place he took you. What kinds of noises did you hear? How many times did he stop? How long did it take?” And on and on over the same stuff, listening to the different way she'd describe the same experiences, looking for the telltale elephant footprints in the cottage cheese. It occurred to him as he listened, watching her, it wasn't just the eyes. The sexual statements were transmitted by the clothing.

There was something about the clothing she wore. It wasn't all tight sweaters and low-cut dresses or the obvious things like that. It was that her clothing was just ... He couldn't quite describe it or categorize it even to himself. Somehow Donna's clothing never quite seemed to be appropriate. Ridiculous, but there it is. Take today. She'd been drug over the coals by a therapist or whatever, the intel and homicide boys had been at her, Eichord again, and what does she show up in that morning? Some kind of strange, great, voluminous and flowery dress and big, gold hoop earrings, playing the Gypsy Queen today. What was it with this woman?

“Do you have a boyfriend or steady, uh, relationship?” he heard himself asking her.

“I had somebody I was seeing a lot before this but...” She trailed off and shook her head. “It was hard for him to deal with and it looks like it has ended. Why?"

Why, indeed. “I was wondering if this had harmed you in your personal life. Very often a terrible thing like this reaches out and hurts those close to the victim. Family, friends, a husband or boyfriend. They have their own feelings of confusion, and anger, and the utter helplessness of thinking about someone they care for put in the kind of a situation you were subjected to ... and it's tough to handle."

“Yeah,” she said wryly, “that's life, eh?” He nodded as she said, “Has this hurt me in my personal life? What personal life? Between the press and you cops and a shrink—that's it."

“When you were first chained up, you told earlier that you'd had a blindfold on, and when you felt the thing being fastened to you and then when he removed the blindfold and you first saw the room, what did you think? Try to remember your reactions to what you saw and what he said to you at that time."

“Horror. Incredible horror. I knew from the pictures he hadn't brought me there for a Sunday picnic. All I could think of was I wished I had screamed back when I had the chance or just fallen down on the floor of the car and hoped he couldn't shoot through the windshield, a dozen different things I thought of after it was too late. And there was just the awful horror of it. I figured I was in deep trouble. And he didn't say much. I started pleading with him to please let me go, that I wouldn't say anything about it and stuff and he just said, ‘Shut up’ and called me a name. And he said I had one chance. Put out when he wanted some, do what he said and be a good sex slave, and he wouldn't kill me."

He could feel he was not getting through to Donna Scannapieco the way he often was able to. Eichord was usually good with people. His innate kindness and caring would communicate itself. Everything was screwed up lately. Even his ability to convey a sense of understanding to a crime victim. He knew just how much this barrier between himself and the woman could hinder the progress of the investigation, yet he felt himself powerless to remove it. He could sense, or thought he could sense in her the intuitive ability to pick up on his bad vibes and it was absurd that he couldn't do anything about it.

Inside the swamp of Donna Scannapieco's head there was only icy resolve. She thought nothing of Jack Eichord the cop. Just another face in the crowd. Her inner being was too full of cold, unyielding hatred for the dirty, no good son of a bitch who had taken her and ruined her life, and for the unfairness of a world in which an awful thing like this could happen. She hadn't done anything to deserve such a fate. And now she wanted only vengeance, and the bitter taste of it was filling her with alienation and lonely isolation and it was draining her of the warmth and softness and femininity and decency that had given her life meaning and value. And, like Eichord, she felt herself powerless in the awesome ebb and flow of forces much stronger than her own sense of self.

Eichord tried to phone the lawyer again. Wally Michaels had told him there were some negotiations going on between a prestigious Texas law firm and Mr. Hackabee. There was something off-key about it. Hackabee was apparently being offered representation by the famous Noel Collier, arguably the most famous woman defense counsel in the country and second only to Racehorse in the ranks of famed Texas criminal lawyers. Jack had been trying to get hold of her for two days and she hadn't returned his calls. He finally got her on the line and made an appointment to come see her. One of Eichord's techniques involved catering to egos, and clearly Ms. Collier would be a formidable challenge in that department. He hoped to do a little homework on her today with Hackabee. What would anybody that big hope to gain from defending a dead-bang murder one headed for death row? It would be different if she'd been some court-appointed pee-dee, but this was THE Noel Collier of Jones-Seleska. Why would they touch a loser like Ukie?

There was a lot of ink flowing over this, on the other hand. Every paper had Grave-digger headlines. Was a movie deal in the works? Had Swifty called with a book offer? There had to be something sweet and Jack would check it out. Meanwhile he'd go around with Ukie again. He took a couple of aspirin and wished for something to wash them down but he decided he'd better settle for that clear stuff that you get out of a water fountain. He took another deep breath, tried to shake the cobwebs loose, and opened the door that led to interrogation.

Dallas

Martin Scorsese it ain't, but each tape begins with a pro slate like a TV commercial or something. And this one says:

Garland

He had his own official loaner and he almost took it but he was into something, his mind on oily lock and load, and he just couldn't face the Big D traffic, the meet with the illustrious female counselor, and all the little furry things scampering around the dark, cobwebbed recesses of his mind, so he let Wally Michaels VIP him again with a driver, and he sat on the passenger side with a notepad, doodling, working on a headache.

This was one of his crossword-type doodles he'd been working on for an hour or so back in the squad room and he was still chewing on the words. Tuning out everything, letting his mind slip and slide, float free as he doodled out the puzzle or anagram or acrostic or whateverinhell it would prove to be.

At the lower left there was the neatly printed list of homicide victims. Just names on corpses to him. He would start with just the positives. The victims who were tied together in the jumble of mixed MOs, tied only in death, by circumstance, time lines, geographical linkages, forensics, perhaps entrance wounds made by plunging steel from the same knife blade. Joined in death by the random madness of Mr. Hackabee and/or perpetrators unknown.

It began with a vertical HAMMONTREEE, FLIPPO coming across from the left horizontally and the Os overlapping. BECK sharing the final E. The name COPELAND dropping down from the C in BECK. SCHUMACHER interlocking with the E. COY and VACCA vertically off it down to the bottom of the page. There had been a SMITH and he added it in above.

All polygraphs on Ukie totally inconclusive. Par for the pollies. All psych testing inconclusive. All everything inconclusive.

Jack was grateful when they pulled up in front of the financial institution in which Jones-Seleska was ensconced.

Eichord looked at the gorgeous countenance of a blond, blue-eyed receptionist who was everyone's cheerleader fantasy, eyes and mouth that promised 1001 ecstatic nights, lips made to drive a man insane with lust and longing, a pair of legs designed to make feeble octogenarians throw away their crutches, a pair of mammary glands drawn by Ward, face by Moran, neck courtesy of Modigliani, and he knew instantly that these people were his kind of people.

“Hi,” she breathed, and she really meant it. Not just a hello. Huh UH. This was HI. She was serious about it.

“Hi,” he said with his usual flair for repartee.

“Can I help you?” she breathed, washing the Jones-Seleska lobby in some sort of fragrance that cannot be bottled and sold over the counter. It has been ruled illegal in all fifty states and in Puerto Rico. It is called Oil of Sub Rosa and it is used in clinical experiments by mad scientists who are working on ways to give erections to the elderly.

“Uh,” he said with that suavity that was always there at his fingertips whenever he needed it. “Yeah. Uh, I have an appointment with Miss Collier.” Jeez, he thought instantly, I shoulda said MIZZ Collier.

“And your name, sir?” And what she meant was, “Would you care to spread my legs and take me right here at the desk?” That's the TONE, you understand, even though she said, “And your name, sir,” it was a definite invitation, Eichord felt. And he told her his name in response and she said the sexiest thing he'd ever heard. She told him to “Please take a seat.” Well, my God in heaven, he surely would. How about HERS? And he'd barely had time to drool over these possibilities when Mizzzzz Collier's secretary came out to greet him with the most erotic smile he'd ever been given by a stranger and this woman, SHE made the receptionist look like a GUY. Jeezus! He'd never seen anything like it in his life. He was going to love Dallas, no question about it. This secretary looked like a movie star. We're talking Holly-wild, folks. Blond, blue-eyed cheerleader beautiful again. The finished, polished version of the one sitting at the switchboard. Just insanity. She was moving toward him and he tried to stand.

“Mr. Eichord?” she said in such a voice that angels would be jealous, and a finger of desire traced a hot, burning line across his groin.

“Yes, I have an appointment with Ms. Collier."

“Hi"—what a smile—"I'm Noel,” the vision said, taking his limp hand in hers for a second, sending shock waves through his libido. “Let's go in my office,” she said as she ended the perfunctory handshake, turning and letting him have a good look at the rest of the package as she strode down a plushly carpeted corridor with Eichord hot, so to speak, on her heels.

He knew now what Jones-Sexy-leska had done. They had taken the senior partners of the law firm to a Dallas Cowboys game and the guys had seen the cheerleaders and they'd gone a little bonkers. So they'd hired away a few of the sexiest ones, given them low-cut tops and short skirts, and had them act as receptionists and secretaries. Then they'd taken the sexiest one, put her in expensive, tailored suits, and $300 heels, and told her to pretend that she was a lawyer named Noel Collier. They had tried to call her Noel Coward but they figured that was going a little too far, so they settled.

This was the ULTIMATE cheerleader fantasy. Oh, Lord. Ohmigoodness, yes. Eichord loved everything about women. Their minds, mostly. Yes, he loved the way their minds worked. When others drooled over big boobs or long legs encased in wispy hosiery or bedroom eyes or Lorenesque mouths, he was into minds. He genuinely adored women and the mysterious and loverly way their minds worked.

But—yes, sports fans—next to that he loved the part of the anatomy one sits upon. He was what you call your basic ass-man, or as the feminists would say, your basic ass. He loved the special look and feel of a tight, high, perfect, female derriere. A great-looking ass could, as the expression has it, turn him around.

So by the time Noel Collier had reached the end of the corridor, rounding third and sliding into home, and he'd experienced the profoundly moving experience of following those two little possums wiggling in a gunnysack, he was completely ready to drop to his knees there on her office broadloom and propose marriage right then and there. Seriously, that is. And marriage is the least of it. He was ready to propose a whole lot more.

And when she sat that mouth-watering feast down in her chair and turned her gaze on him again, she was somewhat shocked to see the whole catalog of perversions etched in this cop's face and there was something so ludicrous about it rather than get angry she almost broke up and it was all she could do not to laugh in his face. Eichord was badly shook up by her and he showed it, his face reddening as he introduced himself, “I'm investigating the murders here and since you, that is we'd heard you might be talking to, or that is, uh, you'd been talking with Mr. Hackabee with respect to the possibility—” He kept fumfering around and trying to breathe and think at the same time as he looked at her. Her eyes were so sexy. So hypnotically sexy. He'd never seen any woman quite like her before, even the time he'd worked on a case out in Southern California. Never.

He could not hear what he was saying to her. Only that a babble of words was coming out and that he was not saying to her what he wanted to say. His mind was totally off the case and the business at hand and he was WRECKED by the gorgeous looks of this woman and his immediate, instant, and panting desire for her. The humor of the situation had reached her.

And she was just sitting there watching him make an idiot out of himself as he said, “I was wondering since that's the case if it might not be, uh, possible to go out, and that we could, uh, you know, talk about the thing, the Hackabee situation, and, uh—"

The response was a blink of the eyes. A blink. One, single, enormous, feathery, loud, crashing, slapping, echoing blink of the long and beautiful lashes that protected her movie-star blues.

And he kept talking, “You know, I just thought that...” He trailed off. JEEEzus. What is WRONG with me? Have I gone insane? Have I pickled my damn brains? What is happening to me? He tried to shake himself out of it and he felt like he was so dry he could barely speak, so hot he could scarcely move, and the look of her had taken his breath away, hitting him HARD like a heavyweight's jab to the solar plexus, ooooof!

“I was hoping, uh, that we could, you know...” Yes—she knows what you were hoping, you lummox. She knows all too well what you were hoping. Are you a detective or a sex fiend? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? Did they bring you down to Dallas to work on an investigation or to get laid? He tried biting the inside of his lip and pinching his fingers: anything to take his mind off the single train of thought that was inexplicably and suddenly blocking out all images of crime and violence and murder and business and motive and the curious anomalies of the Hackabee case that had brought him out to meet the famous Noel Collier.

The pull had been instant. Chemical. Electrical. Mysterious. Explosive. Unmistakable. And completely one-sided. It was just one of those things. And that's with or without the fucking gossamer wings. Whatever makes things like this happen had Eichord in the palm of its hot wet hand and it was squeezing, slowly, relentlessly, inexorably, and Jack was loving it and letting it do whatever it wanted as long as he could be on the receiving end of it.

He knew about faces. On the surface this was as beautiful a face as he'd seen. Dazzling and heart-troubling beauty. WHAM! It is something you see and you swallow hard and try to recover from. About as close to a religious experience as erotica gets, especially when coupled with hot lust. But Eichord also knew a lot about what Camus calls "le face." About the masks that all of us wear. And he saw exactly what he wanted to see under this woman's perfect mask that was registering only a bemused and chilly disinterest. And so of course.... And so ... And so he asked her out. With no preamble. Not a hint of interest on her part. Never a situation that begged more for rejection, a cop and a famous defense lawyer—for one thing the adversarial position so strong as to professionally prohibit a relationship even if there'd been the basis for one—and he asks her out. He couldn't help himself. The devil made him do it. Whatever.

To her credit she did not say, “No, you jerk,” or “I don't even know you, you presumptuous, repulsive schmuck,” or any of the hundred other rejoinders he supplied for her when he ran the painful humiliation of his astonishingly incompetent and puerile confrontation with her through his mind over and over. But that would be much later. Amazingly, for the longest time, he would not admit the scene of rejection. He simply refused to let it exist. He asked her out and she had neither accepted nor refused.

He would not examine it the way it actually took place. He would not see that she had quickly smiled, almost a laugh, widened her glorious eyes, and just cocked that beautiful head to the side, an eyebrow curving up slightly as more smile lines crinkled, a rejection so absolute and devastating he could not recognize that it really happened. Because her turndown had been as unilaterally absolute as had been his turn-on. And much the same way he wouldn't allow himself to believe he'd been rejected, she wouldn't believe he'd had the balls to ask. Her body language was a point-blank, three-word, candid-gram: “Are ... you ... real?"

Dreamland

He couldn't make himself turn around and leave. He couldn't walk out of her office yet. Her face and fragrance and promise and the whole cheerleader fantasy had him nailed to the spot, riveted in place, and he forced himself to ask questions which she may or may not have answered. It was the weirdest and most uncharacteristic of situations for him. Eichord the cop had taken a cab. It was Jack Eichord, horny citizen, standing there having an audience with her majesty Noel Collier. The famous, the accomplished, the impossibly beautiful Noel Collier.

And beautiful she was indeed. He had only seen three or four breathtakingly ravishing beauties in his life. About one every ten years was the average, he thought. When he, was in the service a quarter-century ago, stationed in Europe, he'd seen Liz. He would never forget it. It was on a public beach in the South of France, and she had come out of the water like whatshername in the Greek legends, running by where he'd been sprawled out on a big beach towel. And she'd been like a vision, running by him suddenly, running and laughing, running toward somebody he never turned to see because the moment he saw the black hair and face he knew it was Elizabeth Taylor, and then, closer, he saw those eyes.

The eyes. The young Elizabeth—somewhere in between National Velvet and the Burton years. A face of such exquisite beauty even the medium of film, with a vast and sparkling screen blowing that perfection up ten thousand times larger than life, could not amplify the stunning, hammering effect of the eyes. So violet. So uniquely captivating a hue. Almost inhuman in their effect on the viewer. So unmistakably memorable an experience that once, years later, on Catalina, he'd seen a young girt in a bikini the color of those violet eyes and he'd chased her for an hour on principle. The eyes of Liz.

A few years back there'd been the showgirl on her way to the Coast. He'd seen her in an airport. A heart-stopper. Then, during her television reign as Wonder Woman, he'd been working in California and his path had crossed that of Lynda Carter. The legs, the upper chest, the carriage—just beyond anything he'd ever experienced. Only a fuzzy and vague distortion of that look ever found its way onto the small TV screens. But to see her up close, in person, the body of that woman was like a sunset or a perfect landscape. It was a thing to be painted, captured, hung in the Louvre or the Prado for all to admire. Proof that humanity could look that good.

Now this blonde. His pubescent Dallas Cowgirls fantasy vivified, animated, switched on, keyed to his frequency and harmonics, made real by some mad Dr. Frankensex. All just a wet dream. All of Dallas but a dream designed to frame the Noel Collier sex fantasy. And the experience was a heady, blurring, brain-smashing intoxication more disorienting and traumatizing than the worst binge he could remember. It was a slick, dangerous slide and when he grabbed for a railing to keep from going over the high side he dreamed he missed the rail and caught the brass ring instead.

Later when he would be cursed with total retentivity of the dream he could redden over and over again at the detail of the imagined dialogue. Jeeeezzzzus, was there going to be no mercy? he would think. But that would come much later. The fantasy would come first. In two parts. First would come the seduction and the sex. Every detail from the spaghetti to the drive out to her palatial home in Highland Park, which he'd read about in a local newspaper profile, to the humiliating dream of the morning after when he confessed about his love for TV dinners, it would be crystal-clear.

“Do you like spaghetti?” she asked, lighting two white candles on the table.

“Wonderful.” He could not begin to tell her the wonderfulness of spaghetti. He was no longer able to answer in complete sentences.

“Good,” she said, “because that's dinner. Just good old spaghetti and a green salad. Is that okay?"

“Sounds great,” he intoned.

She poured something into a glass and handed it to him. “And chilled red wine. You like?"

“I like,” he breathed as their fingers touched and the hot flames danced between them and he took a sip of the something and tasted only his desire and said, “Yeah. I do like.” And they smiled at each other. He was gone. Over the edge.

She was rich, he supposed. She lived in North Dallas. A place in Highland Park. She had told him she owned it, or her corporation did ... something. He couldn't remember. There had been jokes about the ritzy residential section. He had told her some old stale gag about how he'd been given to understand that the Highland Park area was so exclusive that the fire department had an unlisted number, and she roared with a warmth and lack of restraint that he dreamed would be typical of all her actions.

He dreamed ultra-realistically. Imagining conversation. He made obligatory probes about how she happened to get involved in the defense; she parried gently, telling him less than nothing, inferring that nothing was solidified at all. Still a good possibility they wouldn't get together. He hoped she wouldn't she semiagreed but it was her job after all. Eichord dreamed that she told him, “I'm a defense attorney, Jack. That's what I do. I provide half of the necessary counsel to make our adversary system of justice work. I have to defend people accused of heinous crimes. And this individual, like any other, irrespective of the horror of the crimes he might be accused of, deserves and will get that same measure of fair representation under the law."

“I agree. I just hate to see you be the one that's having to be anywhere near something like this. This has a very bad feel."

“I'm not a virgin,” she had told him. It was not a flirtatious or sexy statement. She meant it as a declaration.

They talked about her career a bit. Noel Collier wasn't as driven as he thought she might be. She had other goals.

Unblushingly, he dreamed that she said, “Sometime. I don't know how far down the road. But someday I hope I'll find a good guy and I'll probably opt to stay home a few years and make babies. Right now that seems far away but nobody knows what the future holds. I just know I'm not going to be centered on my career as the be-all end-all of my life. I'm a family lady. I want all the goodies—the hearthside, the guy, the kids."

“It sounds nice. I hope you get it all.” There was a time when he had wanted all these things too. It was so long ago and far, now.

Dinner was a lingering and long affair. The red wine and the candles had produced a glow that he couldn't remember feeling. There was an intensity and a magnitude of desire that was overwhelming both of them, coming out of nowhere as it had, and under such improbable circumstances, and they were on the sofa, primly side by side, each smiling at nothing, not talking, and then his little finger brushed against hers. He was holding her hand gently, letting his fingers caress hers very lightly, barely touching, just the slightest imperceptible movement, looking at the fineness of her glowing skin and the almost invisible trace of hairs on her arm, everything about her fine and delicate and feminine.

“What?” she said, quizzically, when he gazed steadily into her eyes, saying nothing. And he smiled and they each drew closer until their mouths were almost touching and he breathed in essence of woman and his other hand touched the back of her lovely head and she relaxed, letting herself lay back slightly, her head leaning back into his cupped hand, neither of them kissing but their mouths still very close and her lips full and parted and both of them savoring the moment.

She smelled so clean so...

He couldn't name it. He told her, “I'm good at colognes, perfumes, fragrances"—his voice coming out a little hoarse unexpectedly as he whispered to her mouth, still locked on those gorgeous eyes—"and I'm trying to isolate the scent. It's not Chanel. It's not newly mown springtime Bermuda. It's not fresh bread. It's not Obsession. It's not musk—"

She laughed.

“It's not Anais Anais, either.” Her dialogue was so real to him.

“Well, I should say not.” Their mouths so close. “I ain't wearin’ nothin, mister.” Nothin’ on but the radio. Marilyn revisited.

“I thought as much all along. Essence of girl."

“Pure eau de Noel,” she tried to say but during the long o sound of Noel their hungry mouths finally met and the tongues lashed out in an explosion of liquid fire and it was a long time before they came up for air, strands of her hair plastered across his face, her arms on him, his hands caressing her, breathing in her soft warmth and the femininity of her, both of them breathing hard against each other and their mouths coming together again his fingers moving seeking zippers and both of them knowing then that there would be only one way to put out this fire that was consuming them.

There are ice-cream concoctions so sweetly delicious that you know you will regret eating them, the hot-fudge cherry-topped decadence of the Supreme Banana Split Special with the ice cream that has the unpronounceable name being so good that all ice-cream dishes will forever taste flat and mediocre by comparison. Furs exist so sexually and viscerally exciting that to touch one against the cheek is to be ruined for the affordable and the mundane. But sometimes the lure of the forbidden sweetness and the invitation of the rich and inaccessible are so strong they cannot be denied and you feast and touch and savor, the tactile senses taking over where reason and logic are abandoned. And the touch is a touch you feel deep within your soul and the taste is so hot and indescribable and satisfying that you abandon all caution and eat as if there will be no tomorrow.

Eichord was not an inexperienced man. He had dreamed many times before. He had dreamed of hot and fantastic sex. But he had never dreamed like this. His climax was not the end. There would be no end for this dream. He would waken and then later, when he surrendered to sleep once more, he would be welcomed back into the unending humiliation that his subconscious had constructed for him, to help him atone for his sins.

The Pathway

The pathway is very dark but not so dark you are unable to see. You can see shapes there along the pathway. It would appear differently to each person. To the frightened man it exists in his mind as a literal path that becomes a room (it is often seen as a dark room by those who can see it), and the room becomes a series of rooms like a maze, with the rooms interlocked by an illogical but nevertheless real-appearing set of circular corridors. All of the walls are of gray stone and the floors and ceilings are cold and featureless concrete. The light comes from bare bulbs which hang from the concrete ceilings every fifty yards or so. In between the bulbs the ever-curving corridors of stone are mostly in black shadow.

It is cold and still along the pathway and the man is so afraid of what he knows is coming that he must suddenly urinate and his bladder and prostate problems cause a spreading wetness even as he is unzipping his trousers as quickly as he can, and he cannot get it out in time and soaks the front of his pants as he feels a not-unpleasant warmth drench his front, and finally he finishes urinating along the wall of the corridor, pissing in the darkest part so nobody will see it, and he goes ahead moving down the ever-curving concrete pathway under the glare of the raw light, moving through pools of strong, harsh light and puddles of scary darkness, moving closer to the thing that he knows is coming for him.

When he awakens it is deep in trauma and shock and in a netherworld of terror-stricken, paralyzing fear as the shadow behind him moves, releasing him.

The sense of coming to is not the same as waking or regaining consciousness after blacking out, or of feeling the effects of anesthesia wear off. It is more a sense of being able to shift one's thought again, an awareness of control returning.

And the frightened man moves carefully, moving back around the awful curve of the stone and concrete chamber, and as he turns in his mind it is the same as if you had backed out of a darkened tunnel and as you turned you were out in bright sunlight and fresh air again and his face is wet with streaming tears of gratitude and relief at being alive and he winces at the residue of real pain as he unbuckles his pants, still soaked in urine, pitching them as far from him as the cell will allow.

Soon, he thinks, his breath coming in big gulps. His hands are shaking badly. Very soon now. And William “Ukie” Hackabee, as he is known, will do what he must. And pray that it will allow him to survive. Because when you get down to the basics nothing else matters. Survival is everything.

Dallas

The morning started off badly. Eichord awoke with a killer headache, the kind he used to get after a night and a full day of constant and progressively heavy boozing. The thing is, with the exception of imaginary wine, he hadn't had a taste of anything stronger than coffee in the last forty-eight hours. It was a hangover without the fun the night before.

When he finally made it back downtown in one piece, compliments of the friendly folks out there on the Central Expressway, the Dallas cop shop looked like somebody had declared martial law. He asked Wally Michaels, “Wally, what the hell's going on this morning? They find some more graves?"

“Yesterday. Yeah. No, this is from the shooting thing."

“Something on the Grave-digger?"

“No. Unrelated. You didn't hear about the old man?"

“I just got here."

“Obviously you haven't heard or seen any local news this morning."

“Not a drop."

“Okay. Old guy got iced out in Singing Hills. There's a little subdivision out there with a public golf course. Black man was a sort of combination janitor, assistant greens-keeper. Lived in a little house on the course next to the pro shop. Anyway there was a car answered a disturbance call and one thing leads to another, the patrolmen tried to bring him in—he was fried, had a piece waving it around and shouting and what-not. He points and each popped a couple of caps at him. DOA and on the books as ‘mortally wounded while resisting arrest.’ But big problems."

“Not righteous?"

“No, IAD's shooting team said it looked copacetic, but the old gent was fuckin’ eighty-two years old."

“It's a shame, but it happens. So what's the furor?"

“No"—Wally shook his head like he had a bug in his ear—"you don't know the situation here. We've been up to our ass in crocodiles ever since the Jackson case. Young black. Witnesses say it was a murder. The patrolman is being investigated. Currently suspended. Then an eighty-year-old black lady got shot trying to keep a cop from arresting her grandson on a dope bust. We've got another potential Watts here. Last night on one of the local radio talk shows it was like listening to the militant ethnic stations back when King got shot. Very bad vibes. Lots of inflammatory rhetoric on both sides. So we're kind of all on-hold this morning. Just waiting to see where it goes from here. And there's more."

“What?"

“Your new best friend Noel Collier was on the news this morning. Jones-Seleska made it official. They are the attorneys of record for William Hackabee, suspect in"—he looked at the front page on the desk—"the Dallas Gravedigger Murders, according to sources, yatta, yatta, yatta, represented by defense counsel Noel Collier of the Garland law firm of blah blah and so on.” He tossed the paper on his desk and Jack picked it up with a shrug.

“No big surprise, I guess.” He pointed at the phone. “Can I use it?” And at Michaels’ nod he picked up the handset and dialed Jones-Seleska. He had to hold for a minute or so but she finally came on the line and that angelic voice told him it was “Noel Collier."

“Jack Eichord.” A beat. Nothing. “You missed a good spaghetti dinner,” he just couldn't resist it.

“Mmm.” It sounded like she murmured. “Kind of running today, Mr. Eichord. Can we do something for you in particular?” Voice hardening like a tempered blade.

“Congratulations on your new client,” he said.

“Um hmm. Thank you."

“Wish you had told me when I was in your office."

“How's that?"

“I mean, that is the case we were talking about. I don't recall you saying your firm would be representing Mr. Hackabee. But I see it's in the papers today."

“Mr. Eichord"—the tone a little irritated now—"I think we need to clarify a couple of things here to avoid future misunderstandings between your offices and ours. First off, that decision was only finalized late yesterday, and the papers were notified by someone else here in the office. I am unaware of any agreement that was made to notify you. Second. The basic purpose of a defense attorney is to defend the accused and so that presupposes that there is a basic conflict of interest between that person and the police and DA or whoever prosecutes. It's a bad-guy-good-guy situation depending on your perspective and it was meant to be that way. The adversarial position is what makes the system cook. You agree?"

“Certainly. But could an official adversary ask a question or two of an investigation-related nature?"

“Shoot."

“Did you come to Ukie or did he call you?"

“Pardon me?"

“Who came to whom first? About representing him? Did your office approach him or did he seek you out? I'm curious for a reason."

“Neither, actually. His brother called us from Houston. He's quite concerned about him, naturally, and Ukie had never so much as contacted him about all this. He read about it in the papers. Called the homicide squad here, got a lot of generalities that he thought were highly suspect considering that he gave them a reference in the Houston PD to check him out with. Anyway—to cut through—he was upset and his contact with the police worried him as much as the headlines had, and he called around and one of the firms in Houston put him in touch with us."

“Ukie's brother have that kind of money he can afford you folks?” Eichord kept a smile in his voice.

“As a matter of fact I don't think our fee is going to be a severe problem for Mr. Hackabee. He has a big, direct-mail firm. Far from indigent. Anything else?"

“I guess we can assume there's a book and movie, after all,” Eichord said, hoping she wouldn't slam down the phone.

“WHAT? Aren't you familiar with the Son of Sam law, Mr. Eichord?” She sounded exasperated at his ignorance.

“Uh,” he stalled, “well—"

“The legislature wrote it out East in response to the outraged public response to a killer making a profit off a work related to his or her commission of homicides. The Son of Sam law makes it impossible for a perpetrator to benefit financially from such a work. All proceeds must accrue to the relatives of the victims. Surely you must have heard of this?"

He could feel himself sinking again. Glad he was on the telephone so she wouldn't see his crimson blush as she began taking him through the intricacies of the law and talking about what legislatures around the country had done and one thing and another. He forced himself to listen. He could hear the disdain in her voice. Noel of his dreams. She obviously wasn't too impressed with the fuzz to begin with but, if THIS was Dallas’ idea of a serial murder expert—he sunk further as he mentally lashed himself.

“The one thing I still don't understand is why would someone of your fame be willing to take such a case? Mind commenting on that?"

“Someone of my fame? What does that have to do with anything?"

“Why would you wish to lend your well-known name and image to an individual who is a self-confessed mass slayer? Someone with a situation as cut-and-dried as this one is."

“First off, I'd disagree that it's all that cut-and-dried. Second, I've been drawn to the case since I first saw a story about it on the evening newscast. I'm fascinated and repelled naturally at the same time. Fascinated by certain legal aspects."

“But Ukie has given us dozens of bodies. What sort of a defense is even worth considering? I mean, I'm not asking you if you're going to plead him insane but—"

“Now we're getting back to that adversarial position,” she said.

“And certainly that has to be respected but in a GENERAL way."

“In a general way I say there is an outside chance he's not guilty. Did you ever th—"

“Oh, come on, Miss Collier, gimme a break. How can you even say he might not be the killer?"

“Not to try the case over the phone,” she sighed and didn't try to cover it, “but how much have you really investigated all the possibilities of accomplices?"

“We're looking into that all the time."

“You may be looking into it all the time but how MUCH time or manpower can you people devote to those avenues? There are only so many pieces in a pie. My point is, you have—oh, for example—this incontrovertible evidence. So circumstantial it's pathetic. A witness whom I could DESTROY on the stand—just to give you random examples. You've got a crime profile we can have a field day with in any court in the land.

“The bodies of victims. That's what you have and they are irrefutable, sure, and no question he knew WHERE they were but who says he put them there? Who's to say he's the one who killed them? What if—"

“All that's well and good but what is the attraction to you personally? Why would you want to get involved in something like this?"

“I'm just drawn to it, Mr. Eichord. Professionally there's something compelling about the case. It is just the way it all fell together. Almost nothing to do with the suspect you have in custody. Nothing fits. Nothing's right."

“I can't argue that."

“Also, what if William Hackabee is insane?"

“He should still suck gas—he's a mass killer. Or let's abolish capital offenses for capital crimes."

“Just to save some time let's leave it like I said before—let's not try the case on the telephone."

“Just to save us some time—you're going to plead him insane, right? I mean, that's the reason for the verbal smoke screens and all the goofy word games. He's just messing with everybody's head—right?—laying foundation for you, eh?"

“Come on.” She laughed. “You could say that about the whole legal system.” A B-I-G sigh again. Almost a moan.

“Huh?"

“Sure. The whole game. It's all a headfuck if you want to look at it like that."

He couldn't believe she'd said the word. “A headfuck,” he repeated with a sigh.

“That's the name of the game. Sorry, got another call.” And the line to Jones, Seleska, Beagle, Legal, and Eagle went dead as last New Year's bubbly. She'd named the tunes, all right. This whole enchilada had turned out to be a total, class-A mind-raper from the git-go.

Jack hung up the chunk of plastic he was clinging to and looked over at Wally Michaels, who raised his eyebrows in question.

“Batshit, catshit, ratshit."

Wally Michaels looked at him sympathetically. It was good to see the kid, which is still how Jack thought of him. He'd been one of those at Quantico that were a little more than just nameless young faces. He was one who'd shown a talent for it. Jack had no sense of being part of the Big D Police Department in the way he had in other cities. He'd been injected into a case that already appeared solved. And a PD under siege is like nothing else.

Ever since the world had watched Jack Ruby, the perennial “buff” of cop buffs, waltz up to the world's most infamous murder suspect and gun him down in front of all the shields and scribes and cameras that could be crammed into a hallway, the cop shop had tightened its belt in the security department. And this racial flare-up and the problems with community relations in general had only made a bad situation worse. Jack assumed it was akin to the situation in Atlanta, although MCTF had never reached out for him on that one. You had a scared community, polarized and angered by a parallel sequence of unrelated events, and a kind of dingy rep that still lingered from the 60s. Add it all up and it made a volatile, unfriendly mix.

“Check it out,” Michaels said and laid a file story in front of him. It was a pictorial piece on Noel Collier's spa. It had a waterfall in it. “Pro bonos didn't pay for that baby.” They talked about bad lawyers. About the public-defender system. They talked about good lawyers. There were good, young moral attorneys out there. Some. A few.

It made Eichord think about what he'd said to Noel.

“I asked her what sort of a defense would be worth considering, it being so apparently dead-bang. Nothing but guilty. But she shot that right down. Like pleading insanity might not be the route she'd go, which frankly surprised the hell out of me. I thought we had everything but the smoking gun—I mean, wow, that's a lot of info about bodies."

“Accessory to murder. Sure. Have to be. But if she could insert the element of doubt into a jury's collective head about Ukie doing those people. And the probabilities of one or more accomplices. Or if she can prove him to be insane at the time of the crimes and so-called confessions. Or if she could show that—"

“His rights were violated,” Jack offered.

“Uh huh. Or if she could show that the surrounding counties were so prejudiced against Ukie because of all the hoopla in the press that Mr. Hackabee could no longer get a fair trial.... Okay, here's the scenario, Noel is the attorney of record, she files a motion for a change of venue, the court says no and denies the motion and she goes, ‘Gotcha’ and laughs quietly ‘cause she knows that she wins either way. She goes to trial. If a jury finds Ukie guilty beyond a reasonable doubt she files for a mistrial for the motion of change of venue being denied. If she wins she wins. It's no gamble."

“Heads I win, tails Ukie gets another shot and so does Ms. Collier."

“Exactly. That's just one possible deal of the cards. Let's say—and I don't know the statutes for sure and I don't know the law that well—but let's say a judge gets a wild hair and issues a denial of her motion, and she slaps a supersedeas I think it's called on the court so that it stops the execution of the denial—some kind of goofy writ bullshit—and then blah-blah-blah, and there's a fucking mistrial. Or she loses and appeals endlessly. Or she gets a jury that loves beautiful women. I mean the scenarios are endless."

“You're saying a lawyer has a shot with the most improbable clients, that the facts of a murder case don't matter?"

“In a way I think that is precisely what I'm saying. Want some proof? Would you have bet money that the most famous lawyer in the country would have taken the case of a man who murdered the most famous assassin since John Wilkes Booth, and correct me if I'm wrong but didn't he shoot the fellow on TELEVISION? I mean, we are talking about the most flamboyant and publicized defense lawyer living and he JUMPED at the case. And if I remember right he won the sucker. I think he got a reversal and people were going, ‘If you want to prove it rolls uphill call HIM,’ and he was Mr. Magic. That's got to be a heady magnet for these big-star lawyers. Look at the size of the egos involved."

“Yeah. I know. But Noel Collier didn't seem ... Aw, hell, I dunno. I just didn't read her that way. I could be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time. It's just hard to see her in that kind of situation. She's so pulled together from my impression.” He wasn't saying half of what he really felt.

“I don't know, Jack. You remember that kid that shot the old woman in the store? The boy named—what was it—uh, Ivey-yeah. The Ivey kid. Noel Collier took that and won it. Jones-Seleska couldn't have made five dollars off it. But that's the case that really put her name out front. And, like we were saying, may be these rich lawyers just say to themselves once in a while, ‘It's the right thing to do. We owe the public this one.’”

“Maybe so."

The phone rang and Wally Michaels reached over and answered it, “Michaels.... Okay. Right now? ... ‘Kay, I'll tell the man.... No, he's right here.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Ukie Hackabee's hollerin’ for Jack Eichord. Says it's real important. Want to see him now?"

“Sure,” Eichord said and gestured with a shrug. “Why not? Can't dance."

Eichord felt like he looked, and he looked like week-old tacos. He remembered his old pard Jimmie Lee telling him how he resembled the ole nasty brown stuff and how he was boozing too hard. How he wasn't getting enough sleep. How he was irritable and apprehensive about nothing and just generally felt and looked awful. Thing is, he hadn't been boozing lately and he still looked like shit and be thought he felt worse. He still wasn't sleeping. He was still irritable and apprehensive about nothing and he felt worse than ever.

And his cheerleader fantasy wouldn't let go of him. He refused to see it for what it was. One of those no-way-Jose deals that he couldn't face. Noel Collier was his housewife fantasy, his movie-star fantasy, his nun fantasy, his teenybopper fantasy, and his—to use her sophisticated word for it—headfuck all wrapped up in one strong, overachieving, Dallas-dyno-mite knockout of a lady.

Most really choice women—the top-of-the-line beauties—they have something, some small flaw you can concentrate on that helps take the sting out of the fact you'll never possess them for your own. You see the obvious cap job, or they wear a mask of makeup that stops at the throat giving them that orange-and-white look, or their limbs are too thin—to the point of anorexia—or they're stupid when they speak, or the voice grates, or the lips are not quite right, or ... You can find something.

Not Noel Collier. Lady was A-1 USDA prime from top to bottom, he thought, and I do mean bottom. She was what they call out on the Coast your real QUIM. This was Nastassia Kinski, full-lipped, hi-hipped, leggy, juggy, double-bongo super-zongo finger-lickin’ good Dallas quim, and quim just flat don't get no better.

He still saw her as a possible. And tonight, when he slipped back into his bathrobe of humiliation and fell asleep in front of a flickering, bolted-down TV set in the Lido, he would show her what a man she was missing.

But he was getting too old for these hot, steamy love affairs. You can take that shit when you're a kid but when you get a few gray hairs up there you don't need all the fast elevator rides up and down and the general Chinese fire-drill effect of going nuts over somebody. And then, on the other hand, he thought as he smiled to himself, who can say where this might lead? Anything is possible, right?

What a mood he was in. If Ukie started that double-talk shit today he was afraid he'd haul off and let him have one right in the old turquoise turnips. Perhaps already in the back of his aging mind somewhere he was trying to prepare himself for the moment when he might have to deal with the baseball-bat-to-the-skull embarrassment of the dreams and the imaginary spaghetti and the, yes, dammit, the headfucking and the fact that he'd convinced himself he was a candidate for a “hot steamy affair” with Noel Collier. Maybe he already sensed the kind of dues he'd have to pay.

Eichord sighed, rubbed his face vigorously, ran a hand over his head to make sure it was still attached to his neck, and went in the room where they had Hackabee waiting. Only it didn't look like the same Ukie. This looked like Ukie after the Cowboys had used him for a tackling dummy for a couple of days.

Dallas

The effect is misleading. The optical illusion typical of the surveillance cameras. Ukie appears to be sitting at the end of a long hallway. Eichord thinks how bad he looks when they play the tape back, as if Ukie had been pressed by a steamroller and slid under the door. He looked worse than Eichord, which surprised Jack.

“Ukie."

“I gotta get outta here."

“Hmmm?"

“You gotta get me outta here.” The face was drawn. The voice flat, none of the usual animation. He was slumped over. Dejected and drawn in the face as if he'd been crying. His eyes were reddened and lacked the usual nutsy sparkle.

“How do you propose we accomplish that, Ukie?” Jack had made up his mind that if he started up with the neohermetic regenerations and the post-Pythagorean regurgitations he was just getting up. Not getting mad. Just getting up. Leaving. Smack it.

“I didn't do it."

“Uh—huh."

“I know you know."

“I know you know what,” Eichord said calmly, waiting for the punch line to fall like the other shoe.

“You know I didn't off those mother-fuckers. I could see it in your face, man. You never believed I killed those people from day one. Right?"

“Ukie, what the hell are you talking about?"

“You gotta get me out of this.” The voice was so flat. Accentless. He sounded like he'd been tossed around by a front-loader and the rinse cycle had been a bitch. “I didn't do it."

Eichord sat still and waited. “Eh?"

“I...” Ukie let out a long stream of air. “I was bullshitting. It was all crap. That crap I laid on the cunt. I never killed a goddamn dog in my life. I mighta hit a few birds with my car. I ran over a possum on the road one night. Shit, I didn't do those murders, man, and you KNOW YOU KNOW I AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH.” He started bawling like a baby, first just going, Wahhhwahhh-wahhh, and then a fast screaming-hyena thing he did a couple of times too often.

Eichord shouted at him, "SHUT UP, DAMN IT.” And that did the trick temporarily, and he started talking through a stream of tears.

“Shit, I don't know why I did it I just went with it I know it was fucking crazy but goddamn mother-fucking shit cunt she was ... Oh, I don't know. I wanted to scare that stupid whore bitch and I had been seeing those bodies and had ‘em in a cigar box and I just put some up on the wall with naked centerfolds and shit. I mean, you can look in the box I must of had twenty more I never got around to putting up because I ran out of tape. It's the box of Tampa Nuggets on the bureau in my living room.” And he gave Eichord the house number where he'd had Donna Scannapieco like it was nothing.

Jack knew he'd be watching this over and over when they played the videocassette back and he straightened up and he could feel his concentration go into overdrive and he could hear the words and see the man across from him and he wondered what part Ukie's new lawyer played in this lame scheme, but the funny thing was he didn't really think it was a scheme at all. He thought it was real as fucking cancer.

“What do you mean you'd been seeing those bodies?” Jack was making himself speak as slowly as he could, feeling the excitement building as he looked into the expressionless eyes of the man across from him, “And you had them in a cigar box?"

“The clippings,” he replied with a sigh. Ukie looked too drained to even put down Eichord for being slow to pick up on his discursive narrative. “When I saw clippings about, you know, the ones, I'd cut ‘em out of the papers and—"

“Ukie, I'm having a lot of problems with this. What do you mean the ones? The people who were killed?"

“Of course, what the hell are we talking about, for God's sake? Jesus, you got to get me OUT of this. I didn't touch a hair on their fucking HEADS."

“You weren't involved in the killings yet you know where all the bodies are?"

“Yes."

“How do you know?"

“How do I know what? That I wasn't involved in the killings or where the bodies are?” He was glassy-eyed. Whipped.

“Where the bodies are,” Eichord said with all the patience he could muster.

“Because I saw him bury them."

“Saw what?"

“I saw where the killer buried the bodies."

“You're just wasting my time, Ukie. Sorry. Not goin’ to wash at all. The insanity thing ain't makin’ it—” He began to push back from the metal table.

“Wait a FUCKING MINUTE WAIT, I'M TELLING THE TRUTH. I didn't kill them. I'm not insane. I'm not trying to fake anybody out. I swear to God."

Eichord was leaving.

“WAIT GODDAMN YOU I SWEAR I'LL TAKE A POLYGRAPH OR SIGN ANYTHING I PROMISE I WON'T LET THE BITCH PLEAD ME INSANE. I DIDN'T FUCKING DO IT."

“You'll sign a waiver to that effect?” Eichord had no idea what he was talking about but he wanted the reaction.

“Yes. Right now. Or whenever you say. I may be stupid but crazy I'm not. Listen to me, he came and showed where he was burying them. That's how I knew about the murders in the first place. He comes and shows me."

“I don't have the remotest clue as to what you're talking about so you'd better start making some sense, and NOW."

“It was sort of like headaches and nightmares combined. How the hell do I know how to explain it? It's a thing some people have. Like a way to communicate thought. I've always had it I guess but this ... He comes and gets in there and shows me the dead bodies and shit."

“Shows ... you ... HOW? Where do you see them?"

“INSIDE MY FUCKING HEAD I keep telling you."

“You see people killed in your head?"

“I see people BURIED in there. Yeah. He shows me how he gets rid of the bodies. I never see the killing part. The ones are already dead and he takes me there and tells me about the dead ones sometimes. Or he just shows me where it hides the bodies. Whatever."

“This is the killer you're talking about?"

“Yep."

“Who is he?"

“I—I don't know, man. I know how that sounds so please don't ask me about that part because YOU WON'T FUCKING BELIEVE ME that was I mean that's oh shit that was where I made my big see what I thought I could do was just get the attention I just did it to get people to shit I never could make anything happen for me and I came so close so many times I tried to work as a performer and I'd get up in these fuckin’ strip joints and the drunks would be so loud I couldn't even hear my own material and I have a 146 IQ. I'm no damn dummy, and great retentivity and I can remember what I read and I just never had the breaks, or the timing was wrong and I'd come so close and then the cocksuckers would take it away from me and people with ONE TENTH THE GODDAMN TALENT I HAD ONE FUCKING TENTH would become stars and big important sons of bitches and everybody I knew was successful and rich except me old goofy Ukie Hackabee and I was a smart, good-looking, some girls said I was sexy, sharp kind of uptown guy and nothing ever worked and I couldn't hold a job and I was always trying some scam and that wouldn't work and then this damn thing you fucking cops picked me up for the least little complaint shit if some flasher had his dick out to take a piss I'd get hauled in on some bogus bullshit and when the thing started showing me what it was doing on the new row or pathway,” Eichord had thought he was saying, “I just decided I'd make the most of it I mean what could I lose—right? He's showing me all this shit I, might as well make the most of it I mean I'd had these fantasies where I get a job as a spy or a hit man like some slick smooth paid assassin who works for the Cosa Nostra, all cool and collected, and I'm an actor so I figure I'll milk this for all it's worth and people who thought I was some wimpy zero some weak loser some nothing cipher they're going to get shaken right out of their fucking shoes, ya know?” He paused for air.

“What's the new row or pathway?"

“What?"

“You mentioned that the killer was showing you what he was doing on the new row or the pathway. What was that all about?"

“Now it's my turn to not know what YOU, ... Oh, neural pathway, I said,” he muttered, seeing Eichord still didn't have it. “NEURAL, you know, like up here—NEURAL PATHWAY. Jesus! Take your gun and blow the wax outtayafuckingEARS. Hey, I'm only kidding barrrrOOOM-boom.” The old Ukie Hackabee trying to get up for it but just trailing off like a sick tomcat. The eyes wide, glassy, empty of anything beyond pain and disease.

“The neural pathway. The place where he kills?"

“No, Christ. No...” An expulsion of air and mouthwash, “Not where he kills where he takes me. It's a mental thing. You see it, well first you see nothing and then you like go into this room or corridor in your head and it's a bare stone wall and a concrete floor and the place is like a tunnel under a river or something, big thick walls that are wet and clammy to the touch, and it's all shadowy and gray and cold and that's where he comes and gets me and—oh, shit, man.” And Ukie is forcing the tears back, blowing his nose loudly and breaking himself up.

Wrapped very tight, Jack can see him starting to really shake.

“He showed me a dude in Plano. He followed him and zapped him and takes him to this ditch.” And he began telling Eichord and the monitoring eyes and ears how to find a new, watery grave in Plano, Texas. “Oh, shit, man, there's other dead people in there."

“Where?” Softly, a trickle of fear sweat chilling on him.

“In the WATER. He showed me under the water. These big trees right by the bank and you drive over this steep levee and right at the bottom of the blacktop part it turns to a gravel run and the road goes right. There's hardly any ditch bank at all. Looks like maybe four or five feet and the water is up real high near the road. It's a kind of bayou thing back along in there just as you come over the levee. And stop right there by the clump of tall trees and shit."

“Old dude in there already. Looked to be about seventy-five, eighty, shit I dunno how old, but he's been in the water for a while. And there's a big chain around him and he's bloated up and shit. And see, he's chained to these tree roots and"—he sniffles—"there's others chained up, another guy wired down in there and they're all kind of anchored in there together."

“Who is the killer, Ukie?"

“I don't fucking KNOW I SWEAR TO GOD I ... Oh, man, I don't know. I'll take a lie detector. Anything. Shit. I don't know.” He sobbed again and Eichord just sat there watching him blubber. Tears running down the face, down the Cary Grant chin.

“He never lets himself be seen. He stays back. In the shadows.” Ukie's body shook with an involuntary shudder. “You can see he's tall from the shadows. Tall like a professional basketball nigger. He likes to hurt me. He feeds on the pain. Takes reassurance from that feeling of awesome an deadly and terrorizing power the POWER you can't believe the power that he has to intrude upon your mind anytime he wants to and he gets right into the middle of your thoughts and you have no control of what you have in your head all of a sudden and, oh, my Christ, don't ask me.” Sobs and shaking spasms again but on his own snapping right out of it, wanting to spit the words out, “Don't ask me to explain who he is instead let me try to tell you what I'm not. Don't you know I've played this out in my head a hundred times acting out how I'd tell the cops when it was time and how I'd make fools of everybody oh Jesus sweet Jesus in heaven please don't let me die for the stupidity of what I've done I never meant to hurt anybody you can ask even that bitch Donna the most I ever did maybe twist the cunt's hair a little and make her dog-fuck me and shit she LIKED THAT it wasn't—a few slaps—I never hurt anybody—I'm no KILLER please please I didn't—"

“Okay, now.” Eichord sat back down. “Describe what you see on the, uh, pathway in your head."

“It's not the pathway in my head, man, you make it sound like I'm lying or some jive shit about a yellow brick road this is a fucking REAL PATHWAY it's a level of communication where he can REACH me. He takes me there instantly. What I see? I see the gray stone. The beads of moisture on the walls. I have to piss bad. I take a leak. I splash around. I want old Sly back in my pants before he comes along but see you always have a warning, not right before. He likes to surprise you but you know within a few minutes because you feel so ... dirty."

“Let me make sure I comprehend all this. You're saying you don't know who he is. But it's a man who stands in the shadows. But you can tell he's tall. He feeds on pain. And after he hurts you for a while he shows you where bodies of victims are buried. Is that pretty much it?"

“Yeah.” Subdued now.

“How does he hurt you?"

“In my mind somehow. I dunno. It's like he pulls the pain out of you. It's terrible. You think you're gonna die."

“I'm sure. Hey, listen, Ukie, what am I going to tell you. It's the Way of the Viper all over again. It's every bad horror movie cliché. It's some kid writers out in Hollyweird. They snorted too much blow and they're gonna write about this dude who clouds men's minds. But they'll call him Lamont Cranberry so we don't know they stole it from The Shadow. It's just crap, Ukie. Nobody's going to buy it. Nobody's going to buy it as a foundation for a nutsy number either.” Eichord shook his head and smiled. They just looked at each other.

“No, man,” Ukie whispered. “No. NOOOOOOOOOOO, this is no goddamn shuck I'm not nuts why would I try to—look, you already told me no no man, please, I don't—he takes me with the power of his mind,” crying now softly.

“On a secret neural pathway?"

“Yes."

Eichord sat unmoving. Watching. “Uh huh."

“You wouldn't be so fucking smug if you'd seen some of the ones he put down. This bitch with her whatchacallit carotid artery fucking severed and stuffed in this thing and one you still haven't found on top of a computer center and the ones he's thrown off of buildings and shit.” Lots of tears now.

Eichord couldn't resist. “I gotta ask you one more question, Ukie."

Hackabee took a deep breath and waited.

“Does this have anything at all to do with the katachthonian subworld's revenge?” he asked innocently. When Jack closed the door Ukie's parting “FUCK YOU” was still echoing from the institutional walls.

Either way he was going out the door and heading for the nearest bar. I'll fix this shit, he thought, licking his lips at the thought of the liquid remedy.

Dallas

Another day another time with the vibes a little different he wouldn't have been back behind a desk doodling in the middle of the afternoon. He'd have been out at the house waiting for the evidence techs to finish but he'd come back to the cop shop half-blitzed and he just wasn't up for it. It was something he wanted to do alone the first time, go in the house where Spooky Ukie, which is what he thought of him now, had taken Donna and kept her chained like an animal. Using her for sex. Showing her dirty pictures and dirtier news stories. It always broke him up how they ran sex and violence together—the media people and the morally outraged. They shouldn't be tied together at all. Nothing more pornographic than some front pages and TV newscasts. Nothing more obscene than raw violence.

He was doodling, half in the bag, drawing guns and glue bottles and trees and doors and beehives. He was doing his free-association doodle which he used to remember conversations. Eichord was not the believer in electronic gadgetry that so many of the younger cops were today. He seldom went into a situation wired. He liked to keep everything as organic as possible. Even now, waiting to shake off his half-bagged stupor before he viewed the videocassette again, he thought how little he cared for the new technologies. The computers, that was a little different. But he knew about masks and how easily the very clever and sociopathic perpetrator could fool you.

The biggest lie imaginable, right up there with “The check is in the mail” and “I promise not to cum in your mouth” was, “You can't fool the camera lens.” Bull. You could fool the living SHIT out of the camera lens, the microphone, the polygraph. There were in fact whole books on the subject and the books weren't really all that valuable either. When you were combining the uniqueness of people and the mechanical and programmable elements of high technology you ended up with a quasi-art form if not an enormously imperfect science. Even in his bagged fog he could envision himself watching Ukie say, “I never touched a hair on their fucking HEADS." Knowing that the combination of fear, malevolence, and sincere pleading he'd felt in the room and seen in the eyes would be flattened and distorted by the video surveillance tape.

He thought about what he was going to do as he doodled. He'd go out to the old dark house alone. A part of him couldn't help but momentarily wallow in the what Lee Marvin once referred to as “the vicaries,” even more of a buzz to the guys out there in the trenches, because they knew what it was to walk along the edge of the precipice. He would go in alone, his concentration on full beam, but subconsciously programmed by four decades of life that included The Bat Whispers, and all those sliding-bookcase movies of the 1930s and ‘40s.

He'd be touching ordinary wood but he'd be programmed for ornate wainscoting and spiral staircases, sniffing the traces of fear and Jade East and his own Caswell & Massey, but knowing the air was electric with voltage from The Lost City and every mad scientist's sparking tesla coils. He'd be brushing against surfaces covered with dirt but these were the hands that gripped the armrests of the Orpheum as the skeleton reached out and touched Mantan Moreland. He knew the truth. No matter what he found, a part of him would be getting off on it. His comic book was getting more and more real. Any day now he'd find himself starting his own cigar box of press clippings.

He thought what he'd do, his wandering mind staggering all over the place as he doodled away: he'd get his shit together and go watch the latest couple of Ukie tapes. See if he could feel any splinters on the banister. Look for the big paw prints in the container of Dairy Farm.

Tomorrow maybe he'd check out the house when nobody was there. He wanted to go back with Donna Scannapieco. See what might shake loose when she saw the place where Hackabee had kept her and put her through the weeks of slavery and horror. What would she think when she saw the awful place where she'd been repeatedly assaulted? What would anybody think?

When the awful anger welled up would anything else float to the top? Would she see something that triggered a forgotten terror, a clue to the odd and oddly impenetrable man who claimed to be “the world's greatest mass murderer” and then recanted? Who was six feet one or two of good-looking guy yet had to wag his wiener at strangers or kidnap and force a victim to get up for it. Would she be able to point Eichord onto the trail of anything that might lead to a clear picture of this character? Was there even a remote chance that he'd seen those bodies buried the way he claimed?

Among other calls made were those to a clinical psych he'd worked with before, currently in Boston, to somebody in Prescott, Arizona, to the MCTF chain of command for access to an on-line terminal. This and that. He thought about calling Donna Scannapieco and asking her about a point they'd missed in her latest debriefing, but he let it go.

He looked at the legal page covered in doodles: a large number one. A picture of a gun. The gun shooting a target with the word “FLIPPO” printed in the bull's-eye.

Two ... A drawing of a glue bottle spilling out a lake of glue and a HAMMONTREE growing out of the glue pond.

He could run nearly sixty numbers and names through his mental data processor that way, and the association would stay with him for as long as he needed it. Each of the symbols was a memory key and he preferred this to working with a recorder and mike, which he would sometimes use in a vehicle, but they came in handy at other times. Not just doodles or games or free association.

They were for those moments when he was analyzing the cadences or the silences of a conversation, the times when the trivia and the subtle changes and the nuances were nudging him. This is the way he'd school himself to remember the “throwaways.” The images would stick.

Three ... Idly, he doodled three interlinked Os.

This time he crumpled the doodle into a ball and round-filed it, tried to make a couple of more calls, and then went in to watch the Ukie tapes over again. He saw nothing. Just a frustrated, strange man doing his thing. It told him nothing. When he heard Ukie say the “neural pathway” nothing signaled him. No neon signs lit up for him. No light bulb came on above Ukie's cartoon head. It was just a waste of time. He felt drowsy. Boozy. Old. He was hungry. He said, “Chuck it, fuck,” and left. Nobody knew he was gone and nobody would have cared if they'd known.

Out by the Lido he went in this place and bought a small smoked ham, a fresh loaf of pumpernickel that smelled so good he wanted to eat it right there, and a jar of sweet mustard that cost nearly three dollars. He couldn't believe it. He asked the clerk to make sure and she double-checked and by God that was how much it cost. He'd been wanting some of it since Chink and Chunk had hipped him to it. It was made someplace called Wolf Island, Missouri, and he'd been told, “Once you try it you'll kill for it."

He put money in a pay phone and started to dial Jones-Seleska on a whim and checked himself. He just couldn't handle one more rejection. He went into his motel room, threw his sport coat over a chair, and took his knife and cut a slice of the ham about an inch thick. He spread pumpernickel with the Wolf Island mustard and took such a huge bite he nearly bit into his thumb. He hadn't realized how hungry he was till he had taken the food back to the loaner and when he got into the car with that fresh pumpernickel smell he noticed he was salivating like a madman. He swallowed and hurried. This had been worth it, definitely. Oh, yeah. This WAS three-dollar mustard. He couldn't remember a ham sandwich ever tasting so good. He sat there drinking a semicold Michelob and eating ham and fantasizing about Noel's pad. He was sitting on a motel bed with his sock feet up on a nineteen-dollar sling chair. Boy. I guess they know how to live—them rich folks.

Funny thing about all that is, he thought, no matter if you go to Neiman's for the clothes, and you go to Gucci's for the leather, and send to France for the china, and you don't have to worry whether you can afford three-dollar mustard or not, and you have a fridge full of dreamripened manzanilla olives ... hey, even if you've got five hundred dollars’ worth of beluga on the side, a ham sandwhich still is pretty much just a ham sandwich. Why sell your life down the tubes for it? You still gotta pull on the pants one leg at a time. You still get into traffic snarls whether you're sniffing leather in a Rolls or vinyl inside a Ford. Like a friend of his was fond of saying, “End's what counts, baby, and in the end it all comes out dead."

He took some trash out later because he didn't want it stinking up the room overnight, and out by the dumpster he saw a hungry, collarless dog of indeterminate breed sitting there. It cocked its head warily at Eichord, who said, “Hey, boy, come here.” He squatted down but the dog didn't budge. “Come here, buddy. I won't hurt you."

It just watched him.

What kind of pup are you anyway?” He could see it was a male and very thin. He said, “Okay, boy, we're gonna give you a feast. How does that sound?” The dog hadn't even blinked. Eichord started to move but the dog took off and ran behind the dumpster. It was a street dog who was wary of the apparently kind stranger, and it was trying to survive.

Eichord talked to it in his gentlest tones, “Yeah. I understand. But don't go ‘way, see. You stay right where you are. I'll be back.” He hurried back to the room.

In a couple of minutes he came back with a tin dish something had come in that he'd fished out of the wastebasket, and a sack. Inside the sack was the leftover ham, which he'd sliced into little chunks. He took a newspaper out and folded it down on the pavement and spread the ham in a pile and sat the tin water dish beside it.

“Dig in, pal,” he said, and walked away.

He walked down the concrete drive and out through the motel entrance, going up on a little hilly piece of ground that ran in back of the motel rooms on his side. He approached the back of the motel from up on the hillside and when he got to the end he stopped. He could see the dog gobbling up all the ham. He laid the sack down on the ground and sat on it, watching the dog finish and then drink the water.

It drank for a long time and licked its chops and went over and sat down behind the dumpster.

“Hey,” Eichord said, and the dog wagged its tail and ran over to where he was sitting, but kept its distance.

“That's a good idea,” he told the dog. “You need to trust a few people sometimes, though. Come here.” He patted his leg.

The dog walked over to him, very alert, sniffing the outstretched hand. “No. I don't have any more food. But I'll bring you some more tomorrow, huh?” He was whispering softly. “Meanwhile, how's about us bein’ pals? Huh?” The dog came closer and he gently scratched it behind the ears. “Yeah. That's a boy.” He gave it a few pats and then he slowly got up.

“Well, it's been a long day, pal. I'll see ya tomorrow, huh?” He walked down off the slope and threw the sack into the dumpster, then went back to his room, the dog still sitting on the hillside. He went in and took off his shoes again and began laying out his things for tomorrow. He took the paper over by the open window and glanced out and the dog was out in front of the motel room, looking up at the window. Waiting for more. Too much of a good thing is never enough.

Dallas Lockup

Gray and cold.

Stone corridor.

Absolute stillness.

Harsh light far in the distance.

A chilling, enveloping shadow.

He stands on the dark pathway, waiting.

Dallas

The day would prove to be one of the longest in his career. It would unwind like a broken clock spring and he would watch—helpless.

The morning drive southward into downtown was familiar enough now that Eichord flipped on an all-talk radio station and heard the following:

It was January 13. The president was still treading water in the Iranscam caper. In New York, Messrs. Corallo, Persico, and Salerno each drew one-hundred-year sentences for racketeering. In Houston, two guards with the Rockets tested positive for coke and were suspended. It was two days before the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., and there was widespread racial violence throughout parts of the country, particularly in some southern cities.

The Metroplex had its share, and between the pro-and-con King sentiment, and the recent cop-versus-blacks trouble, the angry rhetoric was reaching the boiling point. The talk station aired phone conversations between citizens via a seven-second-delay device, and Eichord listened to the calls as the level of bitter oratory built in intensity.

“We were fine here,” a man was complaining, “and then the blamed CORE or NAACP war treasury paid for a colored family to put a down payment on a house down the block and the property values—"

A black-sounding gentleman cut him off with, “Yeah, YOU were fine but what about the colored, before there was an N double A er-ah C P do you know the colored didn't have—"

And he was in turn interrupted by the white-sounding man who said, “Sure, never mind what happened to OUR family it's just the COLORED that count, well I'm SICK of hearing about the COLORED and..."

Eichord had the oddest feeling he was stuck back in the mid-60s. He'd heard so many similar exchanges. To Jack it was just the same old broken record. It was a day like all days except he was there.

And when he walked inside, sitting there at the front desk, pretty as you please in a blazer, charcoal flannel slacks, blue-and-white polka-dot tie, $250 shoes, blue silk shirt, was none other than a calm, clean-shaven Ukie Hackabee.

“What the—” It came out before he could catch himself and the clean-cut Ukie smiled his big Cary Grant grin and said in a rumbling, beautiful baritone, “Don't suppose you'd be Mr. Eichord?” and offered his hand.

Jack took it, nodding as if in a fog.

“I'm Joe Hackabee. Good to meet you, sir.” Firm shake.

“Joe,” he said, catching his breath, “I, uh—"

“Right.” The man smiled easily. It was a warm, genuine smile. Not a sleazy, sardonic grin. Not a snickering, mean sneer. This was the smile of somebody who sincerely liked people. He'd never seen Ukie smile this way before.

“I-I'm just, you know."

“Right.” He talked quickly, softly, in the reassuring, measured tones. “I know"—a little smile in the voice—"I'm used to it, believe me. We had a lot of years of people doing a double take."

“Yes. It's quite amazing."

“Identical twins, as you can see. I'm probably a little tanner than Ukie, Bill to me, I guess I'm the only person who still calls him Bill. And our personalities are completely different. Other than that we're a matching set. Kind of hits you if you're not prepared for it, eh?"

“Nobody said. I mean, I knew Ukie's brother was going to be coming in but I hadn't heard you were twins. It just surprised me. I thought it was him sitting here.” Cops would walk past and do a double take, Eichord noticed, even in their brief exchange. Joseph Hackabee was drawing a crowd inside the station.

“I spoke with Miss Collier and she said you were leading the investigation into the, uh, tragic situation here. I was hoping we could talk if your time permits."

“Sure. Come on. Let's get a cup of coffee and ... Right in here, please."

“No coffee, thanks. Don't use it."

“Have a seat,” He ushered him into a vacant cubicle in the homicide division.

“Thanks."

“Have you spoken to your brother at all since the murders took place?"

“I haven't spoken to my brother in ... Oh, I guess four and a half years. Over four years. We were very close but like people always say, we just grew apart. I'd almost lost track of him completely, which I deeply regret,” he sighed, “but these things happen. Anyway, I didn't even know if he was still in the Dallas area until I saw something about his having been arrested as a suspect in connection with the killings.” He shook his head. “Absolutely beyond anything believable."

“Can you give us anything that might shed some light on all of this? On the murders?"

“I don't know a thing about this. Nothing beyond what I've heard on the tube and read in the papers. And of course what I've heard from his lawyers. As I said I did talk to Miss Collier. She suggested we get together as soon as you had time."

“I was going to arrange to see you as soon as you got in. I had some men who were going to advise me when your plane got in but as you can see that clearly must have been one of those best-laid plans you're always hearing about going astray. I didn't even know you were here in Dallas."

“Sure. Well, the reason why you didn't hear was I didn't fly in to the airport. I came straight here from my home in Houston. Flew here in my own craft. I can land anywhere."

“Oh, I see. You're a pilot, are you?"

“Ultra-light.” He nodded.

“Yeah? I've always wondered about those. You flew all the way from Houston in an ULTRA-LIGHT?"

“Yep.” He laughed a deep and natural laugh. He had a great laugh. Eichord liked him on the spot just as he'd disliked Ukie, the other Ukie, on the spot the second he met him. “I had to touch down a few times but she's easy to gas up. Right back in the air.” He made it sound like parallel parking.

“I'd be scared to death to get in one of those. Aren't they made out of steel tubes or something?"

“Aluminum"—he laughed again—"and Dacron—you know, the sailcloth-type covering. They're pretty safe.” His smile changed. “Mr. Eichord—"

“Jack, please."

But Hackabee was immersed in thought and repeated, “Mr. Eichord, what about Ukie? I know there's absolutely no way he could have done the awful things I've heard about."

“Well"—Eichord gestured with the palms up, hands spread, laid his arms back to rest on the desk—"he did bad things to the Scannapieco woman"—Joe Hackabee looked down and nodded assent—"and bragged to her about the bodies."

“That's Bill. I, uh, look, you know he's had a mental history. He's had problems. Sex offenses as I'm sure you know. But the bragging. That's just his big mouth. He'd never be able to actually do anything. He was always like that. All talk. All mouth."

“More than mouth this time, I'm afraid. He knew where the graves were. Even if he could prove he hadn't killed the victims he'd be an accessory. We're talking as many as a hundred victims now. Maybe more. It's one of the worst mass-murder sprees ever and the facts are—much as I hate to say it—your brother is involved. Deeply."

“I just can't believe it. No way. He's a little nuts, sure. Has the sex thing. Shows himself. Harmless stuff. Even taking the woman like that. I don't know how it ever happened. It's just not the guy I know. I don't think he could harm a fly."

“He abducted, repeatedly raped, and savagely brutalized Donna Scannapieco. Held her captive for a month. This fits the profile of a man who has very little regard for the lives or the welfare of other human beings. I have to tell you that your brother is in a world of trouble on this."

“But Jones-Seleska says he's claiming that he didn't really commit those murders, he only knew where the bodies had been, you know, hidden. He says someone else did the crimes and told him where they were."

“Someone else."

“Right."

“Someone killed them and then told Ukie."

“So he'd take the blame."

“I think at the very least he'll be proven an accomplice to murder one on a minimum of seventy-five or eighty counts, and then only if he gives up the person or persons who were involved with him, which so far he has refused to do."

Eventually the conversational ball just rolled into the corner and stopped and Eichord told Hackabee to meet him this afternoon if he could and they'd have time for a longer exchange. What Eichord wanted was to start going off Ukie's background, from childhood on. Find out, if he could, just where the desire to punish and destroy first took root. Trace the twisted thing that had manifested itself in degenerate sexual behavior. Try to get a picture of the real William Hackabee. Look inside the dark shadows where Ukie the murderer lived.

He was blown away by Joseph Hackabee. Nobody in the cockamamy case, from the perp to the defense counsel to the rape victim to the brother of the killer, was what he would have expected. Ukie having a twin was so dumbfounding. Then he got another surprise.

A secretary told him two guys from the AG's office were here, and he went out front totally perplexed to find a pair of shoe flies in from Austin. They sat with Eichord at another borrowed desk wanting to know what about leads. Was Mr. Hackabee part of a “salt-andpepper team” (which Eichord had to have explained to him)? Were any of the victims black? (Say WHAT?) The guys from the state AG's office were such a drag Jack was almost relieved when he went in to confront Ukie again.

“Let's talk."

“Yeah. Okay. What?"

“Your serve. Whatever you want to talk about."

“Let's talk about me getting outta here, howzzat?"

“Ukie, come on. You're not seriously expecting anybody to turn you loose after everything that's gone down, are you?"

“Please, man. I've told you. I didn't do it. I saw the bodies being buried and I made a mistake in judgment. I thought I could fake my way into headlines, be a big star for the week or two, just enough I could maybe get some kinda half-assed shot. Clubs or whatever. Wail with all the publicity. I knew I could act real crazy and carry it off. The thing with the cu—with the woman, I just, you know, let her go, man. I LET her escape. Just like I gave you the graves. Ask yourself this, if I was really the killer why would I want to admit it? Why give myself up?"

“You didn't give yourself up. You got caught putting one of the bodies in the ground."

“BullSHIT. I didn't ... I wasn't burying anybody. I was digging to see if there really was a body in there. The thing had been coming and putting all this shit inside my head and I had to see, man. I wanted to know if I was going nuts or if it was for real."

“Would you want to tell me a little more about the Way of the Viper? That was my favorite so far."

“Hey. Come on.” He was very quiet and the usual animation seemed to have been drained from him.

“Or the paradox of syncretism. I'd like to kick that one back and forth a little more."

“You having fun?"

“I'm having a pretty good time. Yeah. Matter of fact. How about you? You having a pretty fun time, too?"

No comment.

“Or here's one you might like. Try this one on, Ukie. Just for grins. Let's say there was this real sharp fellow, loaded with talent, smart as a whip, one heckuva guy. He just never made it big. And so he goes off the deep end. Whackaroony time. He starts taking lives out of plain old mean, no-good, nutty-as-a-fruitcake craziness. Just to get even with the world let's say.” Ukie sighed in disgust. I'm just talking theory now. So this sharp guy he says to himself, ‘Self, let's really yank everybody's chain. Let's waste as many of these folks as we can and if we get caught'—and here's the real good part—'we'll ADMIT to all the killings. Give them even more than they know about. Act real goofy too. Talk in parables, metaphors, free association, all that good stuff. Ramble. Be incoherent. Memorize a bunch of looney-tunes stuff to mess their minds up with.’ Then, when you've got ‘em going real good, recant. Tell how this guy really didn't do it he saw it inside his mind on a strange pathway. Then, bring in a heavy-duty legal firm and plead your ass insane as a bedbug. How's that sound just for a random scenario?"

“It sucks."

“Uh huh. Oh, hey, guess you're really excited your brother came in to see you, huh?"

“Yeah. That's all I need. THAT asshole."

“What's the matter? Don't you two get along?"

“You might say that."

“Looks like he must think a lot about you to drop everything and come here to see what he can do to help."

“That may be the way it looks to you but that know-it-all, serf-righteous fuck has come to gloat. Not help, GLOAT. Hey, I love Joseph, and I can't do anything about that. He's my brother. You love your own brother regardless of what kind of a first-rate asshole he is. But I couldn't even get him on the phone when I needed help before. When I asked him for a few dollars a couple of times the dirty son of a bitch lied and jerked me back and forth and let me hang out there on a line to dry. He's got a mail-order business raking the bucks in and he couldn't give a couple hundred measly dollars to pull my ass out of the frying pan. His idea of help was to send me a note reprimanding me for my ways, a fucking twenty-dollar check and a lecture. So don't tell me he's suddenly all interested in helping his poor, dear brother now.” Ukie's eyes blazed with fury.

“Don't hold back, Ukie. Do you like your brother—yes or no?"

“Fuck you very much, Officer Krupke."

And a thing he couldn't name began then and there to reach for his clothing, a sleeve or a pant leg, anything it could get its claws on, a thing that caught hold of fabric then the limb inside, and as it caught hold it began getting a firmer grip on Jack Eichord the man, not so much the cop but the human being, and the claws sunk into the flesh and started taking him somewhere he had no business going. But all he felt now was that first, light touch when the razor-sharp claws first caught on the cloth of his trouser leg. Just a little, harmless tug.

And the afternoon was like the morning but more of the same and squared and then magnified. Something so unsettling about meeting Joseph Hackabee and having that gut-wrenching feeling of seeing Ukie walk in free as a bird, sans cuffs or restraints of any kind, smiling, speaking in that warm baritone of his. And Eichord found out that:

1. Joe Hackabee was well-to-do. “Comfortable,” he said.

2. Joe was single, never married, straight.

3. Joe liked Noel Collier a lot. He also thought she was pretty sensational-looking. Jack had to listen to a good bit on that subject. He also thought, from his lunch with the counselor, that she was going to provide his brother with “a vigorous defense."

4. Joe had a direct-mail marketing firm in Houston. He had learned his trade in professional fund-raising for charitable organizations. He sold mailing lists to companies—was what the thing sounded like to Eichord. He computerized lists of names and addresses and sold them to other mail-order houses. He told Jack he could sell him “a thousand males working in law enforcement, aged twenty-one to thirty-four, sorted by Zip/income/credit rating, and merge-purged with Jack's existing mailing list.” X dollars for a thousand preaddressed stick-on labels and onetime usage rights.

5. Joe liked his brother more than Ukie liked him. He told about all the times he'd tried to help him. Followed behind him paying his brother's debts, cleaning up after him, mending fences. But he didn't feel bitter or angry. “I just finally gave up.” Ukie had never had the breaks he'd had, he said. He thought that “Bill could have been anything he wanted. He had a fine mind. He just couldn't control himself, is what it boils down as, a lack of control. But not so out of control he'd ever kill anybody. He just isn't capable of that sort of violence."

Jack ran a couple of verbal-response tests by Joe as was his usual style and came up with nothing. Example:

“Joe,” he'd said, “I noticed you said when you were describing looking like Ukie, uh, or Bill, you said you probably were a little tanner than he was. If you hadn't seen him in four years"—he allowed his voice to take a bit of an edge to it—"how could you know that?"

“I saw that awful picture in the paper. Jeez, he was so pale-looking.” It was a sadly smiled throwaway without the slightest hint of resentment or con in it. All the litmus tests ran that way. Eichord asked questions like that in the standard cop interrogation manner, not so much listening to WHAT you said but the rapidity with which the words came back in return, the tone of the answer, the emphasis of the words. Interrogation as an art form was a kind of mental tennis match. And the best interrogations were those in which an unspoken thread of something could be seen weaving itself through the texture of the Q-and-A give-and-take.

In that way a copper was like a trial lawyer. It wasn't like on Perry Mason. You didn't often catch the man or woman in the lie, if you were a prosecutor, show them the picture taken by the hidden surveillance camera ("Isn't this YOU we see holding the smoking gun?"), at which point the person on the stand collapses in tears. Today, first of all, nearly everyone has become so damn smooth at stonewalling, and the criminal justice system has become so overloaded in the favor of the accused criminal (thanks to some DANDY Supreme Court rulings), that they could simply look at the photo, smile, and if their lawyer didn't object to the introduction of inadmissible evidence, shake their head politely and say, “Nope. Sorry. Looks a little like me, all right. But it's not me."

Two of the most famous trials of the last quarter-century had involved photographic evidence of “smoking guns,” and the two perpetrators, both of whom had been SEEN, caught in the act by national network television, seen in the commission of the crimes, walked. Both trials had resulted in the defendants’ respective acquittals.

As Eichord led Joseph Hackabee through the step-by-step progression of orphanage, foster-parent, high-school, puberty memories, he began to taste that next drink the way he had when he was at his lowest ebb—a decade ago. It was all he could do at one point not to conclude the meeting so he could go get a couple of real stiff ones. It took a supreme effort of will on his part to concentrate on the exchange of words.

Joe genuinely thought Ukie was innocent. It was sufficiently clear and sincere that Eichord was sure of it. There's no faking a certain type of sincerity. But the Hackabee brothers were not easy to question. In Joe's case he had a way of turning all the questions back in your court. Not in evasion. He'd answer what you said but point the responses back, often as not, toward you. He'd compliment Eichord, in the way he answered, for his masterful intuition or whatever, and do it in such a way that it kept a soft, fuzzy-sided interrogation, the overall effect being a lulling, soporific one on Jack. When the afternoon reached its shank Jack Eichord had learned nothing, was exhausted, wanted a drink, and couldn't wait to get to a telephone.

He struck out at Jones-Seleska. He didn't just want to hear his dream girl breathe into the phone at him. He wanted to hear somebody else's reaction, other than a cop's, to the shock of gentleman Joe Hackabee. But Noel Collier was not to be found.

Cops don't talk much about paperwork but it is the ultimate bugaboo. The voluminous pile of paper trails that had been stacking up in the wake of the homicides now accumulating as the caseload even the cops called Grave-digger threatened to mire Eichord in pulp. Lab reports and forensics on so many bodies eventually take on a life of their own. Identifications made, confirmed, disputed, denied, changed, revised. Notifications. Probes. Summaries. False leads. It all took time, talent, manpower, hours and space and patience and wear-and-tear on the collective cop psyche. The legal aspects alone were becoming a nightmare. The case had attracted international attention.

The problem with pontificating to people about your abilities and your work and your life was that sometimes you ended up ruining things for yourself. Putting your mouth all over your own self-esteem didn't do much for positive thinking. His comments of late to the guys in Buckhead had returned to haunt him. For the rest of the day he sat there, alternately clock-watching and sorting through Grave-digger nastiness, remembering things said and thought that would have been better left untouched. A hundred percent of zero is zero, was one that came back around again on him.

When you were deep into a murder case as sordid and confusing as this one it dirtied you, if you had much humanity about you at all. It took real compartmentalization of one's life not to let the personal life and the pro life intermix and commingle to the point where you could never completely shake loose from the dark shadows. That was one of the things that made it so easy for cops to reach for crutches like booze. One of the reasons why so many copper marriages went down the pipes.

The desktop was strewn with crime-scene photos and nothing could be more depressing than shots of lifeless murdered humans such as these. Only the starving skeletons of the camps could compete as a visual downer. Some were mutilation murders, others—like the old lady—were even more horrible. The random, wasteful, mean, sad evil of acts like these. How could someone do this?

He couldn't take his eyes off the old woman. What was her age? He had the data somewhere on the desk. She was somebody's mother. Grandma to a couple of kids, no doubt. And Ukie and his accomplice or Ukie alone had clubbed her to death for no reason. Maybe because like the mountain—because she was there. How? WHY would you take lives like that? Madness. Insane horror without purpose.

Sorry, lady, he thought, looking at the woman sprawled like a rag doll tossed into a corner, skirt hiked up indecorously in death. Talk to me, Mom. Who did it? How many were they? What is the secret? And he went back to where the beginning was, where he was sure it had already begun, the random killing, and he concentrated with all his might on the names, life-styles, demographics, biographical commonalities.

And he squinted his eyes and tried to see a pattern somewhere. But look as hard as he might he saw only dead bodies. Corpses without connectives that could link them in death to perp-or-perps-unknown. He saw no telltale footprints in the cottage cheese. Only mystery and the aftermath of madness and murder.

Come on, Grandma. Show me something I've overlooked? Tell me why they did it. Was it the Way of the Viper? Some mystical Oriental thing? Some secret of the Five Triads? Hypno-assassins sent to do the bidding of Dr. Fu? Lobotomized Dacoits on a mission of vengeance? I've seen this movie, he thought, and I walked out on it.

“The most secret of all the combat ryus...” And an all-vanquishing force...” He knew Ukie's mumbo-jumbo could be largely discounted. But still there might be something. Ukie might even believe some of that garbage himself, he bore that sort of a psychogenic profile—at least superficially. The congenital liar who has created so many lies to becloud his real activities, nature, motivation, purpose, past, the haze of pseudepigrapha becoming murky pseudoreality. Ukie might not be able to differentiate between the imagined and the real.

But Jack knew enough not to discount the possibility of otherworldly forces, whether or not they might be connected to the martial arts and sciences. He would never NEVER forget the lesson learned from seeing the man in Kowloon. He had witnessed something, no matter how much he'd like to erase it, that would stay forever pressed between the crevices of the brain. The man in Kowloon had been a practitioner of what might be called a ninjitsu life. Jack could still see his image as vividly as if he carried the man's photo in his wallet.

His philosophical antecedents included such luminaries as Sun-tse, Sun Yatsen, Chiang Kai-shek, with a little help from their friends at Run-Run's fantasy factory. But this was a serious oh mighty Buddha yes serious student and disciple. Eichord would never forget the way he was able to brain-freeze himself into a frightening autohypnotic state as he snapped through a fierce dance of the final forms, psyching himself up to the point where you can drive needles through the skin or sledgehammer blocks on the forehead. But those are tricks and the man in Kowloon was no trickster.

And for reasons that were explained to him but his Western mind could never grasp, the man took a very sharp-edged ceremonial sword, and in a chanting, shouting throng of Triad brethren he took his hand like so—the fingers forming a claw—to snag the wet and slippery tongue in his mouth and pulling it out to its fullest extension the man from Kowloon proceded to ... Oh, Jesus, he could see it even now, the sawing action of the blade, the tongue bloodying as the sword bit in but no leverage and it seemed impossible to sever completely and yet the man's whole life was resting on this his life of dedication his stature not on earth not in the secret brotherhood but the honor or lack of it that would go with him to the grave and beyond and so it was that with the fiercest human determination Eichord had ever seen the man's adrenals sluicing out the hyped adrenaline, sending the signal to SAW HARDER to his tunnel-visioned brain cells, he was able to saw through the thick blood-squirting pinkness and sever his own oh God even now he tried to wrench his mind off it and look at the old woman with her sad and sullied whiteness exposed to the black, unforgiving lens of a crime photographer's soulless camera all he could see was the man in Kowloon.

All the more horrific afterward as he stood there so stony, resolute, squinting, focused, shaking with concentration and energy and power and will, a proud and unblinking conqueror, oblivious to any loss or a mouth filling with blood, single-minded beyond any worldly suffering of wounds or tombs, eyes seeing beyond reality, penetrating through to his acutely personal mental vision, some ethereal discernment, some perspicacious vista of Bushido-samurai-kamikaze-ninja heaven where only the relentlessly tough will go.

And Eichord thought how easy it would be, with a mixture of irritation and wistfulness, how easy it would be to drink away the remainder of the day. Hum away the rest of the afternoon and evening. He'd hummed more than his share. He'd had plenty of hummers. How nice it would be to just fold his tents now and succumb to the lure of the bottle's promise and just slip right on in there with the melting cubes. Grab all the gusto you can get because too much of a good thing ... And he got through the day but it was close. It was waiting. Hovering. Waiting to take him down.

Driving back to the motel that night he learned it was getting closer to King's birthday and in Texas it looked like it might be a biggie. A thirty-five-year-old maintenance man was charged with ninety-six counts of murder in the terrible Puerto Rican hotel fire. A woman in Ft. Worth had thrown her infant son out of a fourth-floor window because voices had kept whispering in her ear to do it. Back in the shop two state guys from the attorney general's office were trying to turn the Grave-digger case into a racially related series of crimes. By tomorrow they'd be color-coding graphics for a presentation. Somebody somewhere was working up a monograph filled with facts like both the names Lee Harvey Oswald and William Hackabee each contain fifteen letters—that kind of goofy shit.

Jack switched the radio off and tried to get into his ultimate cheerleader fantasy. He pictured Noel down in her spa and she calls to him and he goes downstairs and there she is standing with her back to him, wearing a little short skirt and cowgirl boots, and slowly she eases the skirt up on those great legs and ... “Mister,” she tells him, “I ain't wearin’ nothin'."

But he couldn't get into it at all. January 13 had been that kind of a bad mammer-jammer.

Garland

“You know,” Noel Collier told Ukie's brother rather breathlessly, “I was so surprised. I probably acted like an imbecile.” He shook his head no, smiling warmly, and she had the oddest feeling—as if he was understanding and anticipating everything she said, not just being polite. “I guess you're used to that."

“Sure. Over the years. Twins do get special attention. And when we were growing up it was a bonding thing. It's just only in these later years after we quote matured unquote that we started—what else can I call it? Growing apart. Falling apart.” He gestured sadly. “I lost him years ago, I suppose."

“It happens."

“I tried for years to hang in there through his unpaid bills, the messes he'd make, the jams he'd get into. I'd try to follow around behind him with a broom sweeping up as much as I could. But then his behavior became so ... God, what do you say? Outrageous? Sick! He needed help and he wouldn't hear of it. He had the sexual problems—which I would try to talk about and couldn't understand.” He shook his head again. “I mean he's not that ugly he couldn't have women—"

“He's a good-looking man,” she said before she realized that she had just told him she thought he was good-looking too, and she blushed bright crimson, from surprise more than from the frankness of her admission.

But he didn't appear to pick up on it and said, “He wanted to be an entertainer for a while and he tried a fling at that. That was really the downfall. He was working these awful strip clubs and topless places and I caught his act—if you can call it that—a time or two and the crowds were a bunch of drunks waiting to see naked girls and they wouldn't listen to him, and he wasn't funny. And the odd thing is, he used to be a kind of charming guy and funny in conversation, you know, and he sort of went off the deep end. He just fell apart.

“And you know how it is—when it's someone you care for. I don't know if you've ever been around when somebody you really cared about just began to disintegrate before your eyes but it's a paralyzing experience. You want to help but you can't, you know?"

“I do, I think. I watched a marriage partner with the same kind of a perspective. Someone I had cared a lot about in the beginning...” Before she knew it she was telling him all about herself. It was the oddest sensation, Noel the defense lawyer putting herself on hold, so drawn to this man just as she was his brother. Wanting them to know each other well. To understand the shared secrets. To be able to help in a meaningful way.

And they talked on and on, both of them pouring themselves out to the other. Learning they'd each grown up in the homes of foster parents, Noel and her brother close to theirs, calling them and thinking of them as Mom and Dad. Neither at the poverty level but none of the lot ever having much materially. Each of them totally at home in their respective skins. Comfortable with life and sharing that marvelous gift with their sibling brother, in each case.

He wanted to know, “Noel, do you think that Bill—and I'm asking this in confidence of course—I don't even admit the possibility to anyone else—but do you think that he could have become so mentally unstable that he actually might have committed those terrible crimes they say he did?"

“The burden of proof will be on them, the prosecution, to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that he in fact so did. But because he told the Scannapieco woman he did or at least had buried them, perhaps speaking figuratively, the fact that he's an accessory in a mass-murder case leaves us very few viable options."

“Those being?"

“Those being that we can either plead him insane at the time of the homicides in the hopes of averting a death sentence, which is obviously the mandatory sentencing if there's a finding of guilty on even one count, or we can try the case—pleading him not guilty—and attempt to convince a jury that sufficient doubt exists as to your brother's guilt.

“Wouldn't that be all but impossible?” He leaned forward, his scent reached her and it was like a fine wine to her.

She suddenly caught herself and yanked her mind back into gear. “It probably seems that way, Joseph, but the great thing about the fairness and equity of our system of jurisprudence in this country is that the prosecuting attorney must prove the accused is guilty, as I said, beyond a REASONABLE doubt. What is a reasonable doubt? Even you and I, privy to as much inside case data as we are, we aren't sure of either his guilt or innocence, are we? Not really a hundred percent SURE. I don't happen to think he did the crimes. I think he's innocent. You THINK he's innocent but absolute certainty—that requires a lot of faith, information, and unswerving confidence in your own beliefs. One of my jobs in the courtroom is to create an atmosphere where that degree of faith takes more than a little effort. I do that in many ways, from the manner in which we select our jurors to the way in which..."

And as he gazed into Noel Collier's beautiful, soulful eyes, hearing the words and feeling the sincerity and sensing the intelligence she brought to bear as she began to lay the case out for him, Joe Hackabee began to think for the first time that the case against his brother might not be so open and shut after all.

They decided they'd have dinner together and continue their meeting, and she said he should plan on a grueling, late-night session, to which he agreed without a hint of guile. On her part she was having to fight to deal with the alien sensation of wanting a stranger. The soft speech patterns. The smooth sophistication of this suave man was getting to her. For one thing she'd been so unprepared for an identical twin, but to have him look and act as if he'd just stepped off the cover of Gentleman's Quarterly—the feelings were bubbling inside her.

He looked like the kind of executive who you'd expect to see getting out of the elevator on the fortieth floor of the Southland Center looking rich, Powerful, impeccably groomed. So self-possessed there is no doubt he has the gifts of success. Noel was attracted to soft-spoken, talented, super-powerful men, often older than she. She liked super-achievers. Joe Hackabee was a type she understood. One of the urbane-but-warm Houston Rich.

She should have spent the mealtime poring over Ukie's life. Picking Joe's brain of every relevant detail and scrap of memorabilia, but what she did was talk about herself And for some reason it was suddenly vital that this stranger know every fact about her failed marriage.

“Bill was my husband's name. Bill Chase. Bill Chase gave his name to a naive young gal named Noel Collier Chase in a picturesque and glorious church called Centenary Francis Street Methodist. It was Easter week. A small but memorable event. Small in that there were only three of us there for the tying of the knot. Minister John Jamison Kisner, an old puppy dog of a guy I still recall wit affection, William Chase, and little moi.

“No witnesses. Like a good hit-and-run. A marriage like an accident. My foster parents were dead and his folks weren't having any of it. Great and auspicious start. Memorable in that Bill'd been so nervous he'd perspired roughly three pints of white, Anglo-Saxon, Princetonian, Protestant perspiration.

“Very upper-class guy. Lots of money. Honey, I'm talkin’ OLD money and BUCKETS of the stuff. He fell in love with the face and the bod and unfortunately nothing else. But he was so sex-mad hot for me he told his mammy and pappy to jam it, and first thing you know we were down on our knees in front of my minister, all alone in front of that pulpit, and both of us scared witless and the descending wrath of his parents that seemed to loom over the wedding. But we got hitched anyway. Bill and his little white-trash snip of a wife, I'm sure they thought.

“The honeymoon lasted two years. Not the trip to the islands but the romance of it. You know that courtship period you always hope will stay hot for thirty years?"

“Yep,” he said, tilting his head, “remember it well, had one myself once."

“Okay. So about two years and we just woke up one morning and the whole thing was over. We decided we liked each other a lot and in the way of couples everywhere we stayed together—but married in name only.” She grimaced.

“Bill had become ... Why am I telling you all this, Doctor? Oh, well. He'd become silly. His affectation for the British behavioral modes no longer seemed classy and elegant. His affected British wardrobe just seemed tiresome and he was becoming a ludicrous figure to me in some ways, no matter what I did to try and avert those sorts of feelings. It was like we were trying to make each other despise the other. I was a sort of outrageous chick, I guess, although you'd never believe such a thing of me now.” She smiled ironically at Joe, a quick little zinger as she looked up and saw that great smile.” And my penchant for the let's call it Bedroom Adventure had become somewhat disgusting to Bill I later learned. We'd begun to grow apart. Sex had become a rather habitual kind of thing, and that's what the relationship had really been based on.

“As I said, he came from these real monied people up in Wisconsin, a family that had what he always called a cheese empire. And I had started teasing him about being Mr. Cheese, and the disdain I'd always felt for his snobby, elitist relatives I was now starting to feel for my husband. And of course each of us could sense the marriage going. And we just fell apart slowly.

“We became so different at the end. He like restrained statements of stylish sex, not tight trousers and Fredericks of Hollywood nighties. I liked real men, not poseurs in leather-elbowed smoking jackets with pipes they never lit, talking about Newport or some new island watering hole with a bunch of stuck-up old rich assholes. I hated all his friends and he hated mine. And then my career went wild, and I started getting so much press and all, and that was the end. Kind of soured me on the marriage thing for a while. But that's all old news now.” She sighed and started to apologize for monopolizing the conversation. But she realized, that she'd told Joseph Hackabee more about herself than she'd told some guys she'd slept with.

She couldn't believe she'd confessed to having a penchant for Bedroom Adventure, and done everything but hang a sign out advertising her marriageability.

Suddenly the awareness of her total turn-on had her blushing prettily right down to her shoes and she looked up to see Hackabee take a sip of water, then lean over close to her ear and say, “Well, I guess this means my favorite leather-elbowed smoking jacket goes to Goodwill.” And he smiled his gorgeous smile into her eyes, and it was a beginning.

Highland Park

She'd never felt like this before. Never so totally open to anyone. Something magical, corny-sounding or not, was flowing between them. They had lingered over dinner as much as they dared, but the serious nature of Ukie's plight had cast a dark shadow over the conviviality that would otherwise have captured the remainder of the evening.

The drive out to Highland Park seemed to take forever. He was following her in a rented car. She'd offered to chauffeur him of course, but he wouldn't hear of it. She could tell he was delighted by her house, which pleased her.

“Gee,” he said jokingly, shaking his head as he took in the vast expanse of rooms, white walls, paintings, sculpture, objets d'art, and eclectics. It was breathtaking. “Maybe someday you'll be able to afford something nice,” in this cute, soft voice. It hit her just right.

“I know,” she confided back to him, “this squalor can really get depressing."

“So empty of objects. Is it always this bleak or did you just move and you haven't unpacked yet?” There was something everywhere you looked. A visual barrage of antiques and Deco and Nouveau and classical and impressionist and neorealist and minimalist all assaulting the eyes in a strangely pleasing hodgepodge that was so unexpected. The overall effect dazzling yet comfortable.

“No. It wouldn't be this bleak but I have a lady who comes in once a week and bleaks it for me."

“Yes.” He made a tsk-tsk sound. “Well, save your pennies. It won't always be this bad."

“That's a comfort.” She laughed. “Seriously,” she asked in a soft, smiling voice, “think it's too ostentatious?” She realized his answer was rather important to her.

“Matter of fact, what I think is"—he moved close to her—"that what you have is one helluva house. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

And he was speaking very low and she felt like he was talking about her, not the house, and she felt like an absolute, utter idiot when he didn't kiss her right then and there, but turned and just walked around admiring things, and she stood there trembling, waiting for him to take her in his arms and knowing that he wanted her too.

It was with the greatest effort of will that she wrenched her mind back to business, after all the man's brother was a mass-murder suspect, and she began going over Ukie's childhood.

When he talked about the closeness of their early years, before they'd started to draw apart, he could sense how special the conversation was to her. She seemed to be identifying so strongly with everything he told her. It was almost as if it was making her high. She was positively owing. Her eyes sparkling. Bright, like a cocaine edge. Switched on.

“Joe,” she told him finally, “I'm so bowled over by all of this."

“Not hard to understand. Twins have that effect on a lot of pe—"

“No. Not that. I mean, I've always felt like something was pulling me to this case but I haven't been able to verbalize my feelings. There was something acting like a magnet for me. I don't know how to say it. I'm a great believer in fate."

He wondered if she might have done some lines, she was so intense. “You believe in God, right?” he asked. She nodded. “Call it, God. A force. Kate. It doesn't matter, I suppose. Whatever guides our destiny—” He shrugged slowly. “I believe in fate too.” And he looked at her so deeply that it spoke volumes. “And I think this was all preordained somehow."

“I want to tell you"—she felt so corny but she had to say it—"that I know your brother is innocent. And I'll help both of you in every way that I can."

He smiled ingenuously, with the easy grace of the very handsome.

Dallas

Jack came in to work badly hung over and with a guilt about his self-indulgent dream fantasies and a paranoia about his sloppy policework of late. The water he'd remembered to put in the bowl outside was still there but the dog food he'd managed to set out was gone. That was the bright spot of the day.

When he got to work, made even more paranoid by the attempted sniping of a Dallas cop car in one of the predominantly black balkanized sectors which had dominated the morning news, the damn guys from the AG's office were all over him like white on rice and he was maneuvered into a room and found himself even before he'd had his morning coffee watching Ukie on videotape:

“Okay. Start it.” To Eichord with a self satisfied, smiling we-told-you-so-but-you-wouldn't-listen type of nod. “Watch this."

“He never lets himself be seen. He stays back. In the shadows. You can see he's tall from the shadows. Tall like a professional basketball nigger. He likes to hur—"

“Stop it. There! See that! Go back,” the one named Sawyer told the man standing by the video playback.

“What?"

“Rewind. Go back.” He was excited, turning to Jack. “Eichord. I want you to watch this. Did you catch it? Go on. Play it."

The other man pressed the play switch and Ukie said, “In the WATER. He showed me under the water. These big—"

“No. Shit. You went too far. Go forward just one second. Okay—STOP. All right. Now.” He pressed play again.

“—don't know.” Ukie was crying and Eichord remembered the incongruousness of the moment, and then Ukie composed himself a bit and continued, “He never lets himself be seen. He stays back. In the shadows.” Eichord watched the very convincing way that Ukie shuddered in fear. “You can see he's tall from the shadows. Tall like a professional basketball nigger.” And they stopped it again.

Eichord thought he knew what they were going for. The shuddering or trembling was a possible tip-off. Either Ukie was one consummate actor or he believed what he was saying.

Sawyer flipped a fluorescent light above them and Eichord, badly hung over, was blinded by it and was blinking like a bat coming out of a dark cave into a flashlight beam as the man excitedly demanded of him, “Well, what about THAT shit?"

“Yeah. It's pretty effective-looking trembling, I'll admit. Hard to know if it's an acting job or not."

“Trembling?” Eichord nodded. “What the hell are you talking about—TREMBLING?” He acted as if Jack had been speaking Swahili.

And Eichord answered like Hackabee, “Trembling, Trepidant. Timorous. Timid ... tremulant?"

“What the shit?"

“You played the video where he shakes. A little dramatic shudder while he tells me he never sees the guy. Pretty good. Method acting, for all I know."

“I don't understand what the fuck this man is talking about,” he said to Wally Michaels, who fought a smile back and gestured innocently as if to say keep me out of this.

“What in the jolly fuck are you talking here, mister? I just showed you where your murder suspect implicates a fucking NIGGER in the fucking surveillance tape and you sit there with some trembling shit that doesn't make a lick of sense. And by the way you've got a piece of fucking TOILET PAPER stuck to your cheek.” The other man snickered under his breath as the AG's man shook his head in disgust.

“Oh,” Eichord mumbled. “I forgot.” He reached and felt the impromptu coagulant on his face. “I cut myself shaving, he mumbled. No shit.

“He never lets himself be seen. He stays back. In the shadows. You can see he's tall from the sh—” The man stopped it with a vengeance and turned to Eichord, who felt himself coming apart. “Pay attention. Listen, goddammit.” Click.

“—dows. Tall like a professional basketball nigger."

“JEEZUS! He's fucking TELLING you the killer is a tall nigger That's your own goddamn interrogation and you missed it."

Eichord wanted a drink. No. First what he wanted to do was reach over and grab this moron by the shirt collar and tie, grab evening and just twist until the idiot was right there in his face and then put his lights out for him. No. Grab the lapels of the cheap suit in a cross-X grab and put a reverse chicken choke on the ignorant son of a bitch. Put him in a ball right here on the floor. THEN go out and get the drink. But what he did was take a very deep breath and begin slowly tap-dancing, fine-tooth comb in hand, patience ebbing but under control, as he took the two shoe flies step by step, fact by fact, through the long parade of deaths that were currently attributable to the Grave-digger perp or perps unknown, dancing all the while not unlike Gene Kelly in the rain-filled gutter, dancing through the modus operandi, the opportunity patterns, the random factoring, the lack of commonality, the day danced away, Eichord shuffle-kicking through a shit clog of red tape trying to convince these characters that “tall like a basketball nigger” was just a nigger of speech.

The tap dance was fairly effective but they weren't buying it without music so Eichord ended up having to get on the horn and have the ballet orchestrated by McTuff, and finally he got them pulled out of his thinning hair, if not clean back to Austin, and by midafternoon, when he had an appointment with a psychiatrist named Sue Mandel, they'd left. He figured Sue to be a tough old gal in her fifties, hair pulled back into a bun, about five feet tall, Dr. Ruth only more severe-looking.

He was tired and muttering under his breath about the “scum-wad bureaucrats” and the time-wasters and the fumblers and bumblers and depradations and degradations and the furriers and scurriers, and the rest of them nasty folks, when he walked in and old Sue slapped him on the back with a hand like a catcher's mitt.

“Jack?” Sue said with a big smile, in a voice an octave deeper than his own. Sue was a guy.

“You're Sue Mandel?"

“One and the same, pally. Pull up a toadstool.” The shrink was six feet tall, went about 210, and had a blue beard. But truthfully Eichord scarcely blinked an eye at it. By now he was used to the constant confusion of this ever-changing and unpredictable murder case. It was a case where he'd met the most beautiful woman he'd ever made fantasized love to and she spelled her first name like a man's, Noel as in Coward, so why not a shrink named Sue?

“You're a big name around here, bub. I've been reading up on your activities since the Lonely Hearts case. Proud to meet you."

“That's good of you,” Jack said. He liked the guy. The guy had taste even if he did have a shitty name.

“I'm sure you want to know about our friend"—he vaguely gestured in the direction of where Ukie was kept under lock and key—"right?"

“Sure do."

“Nobody would love to tell you more than yours truly. Problem is I can't be sure. We've talked a lot. He has deep-seated problems. He has the self-esteem of about the level one might expect in light of his record as a KSP, but the big question—are the intense anxieties and frustrations enough to trigger the mass murders? No way to know. The results of the tests are inconclusive. The polygraphs are too inconclusive to base any judgments on himself is a skizzy kind of character who does a lot of role-playing, but he's a terrorized and subjugated personality the nightmares—let's call them—the thing that shows him the graves—that figure is very real to Ukie. He believes that someone is capable of controlling his mind and whatever it is must be very powerful."

“Just for the sake of argument, Dr. Mandel, could such a thing as a neural pathway exist?"

“Sure it exists.” He smiled. “But let's define what a neural pathway is. It's not a concrete tunnel that a brain railroad runs on, where your thought goes at 2:55 every afternoon to catch the train home. Forget pathway. Call it a thought plateau where certain types of empathic rapport transcend ordinary understanding. You stand there and the back of your neck gets a signal from your brain and the hairs bristle and when you turn around somebody is watching you. Coincidence. Maybe. Or maybe instead of a sixth sense or eyes in the back of your head we say your brain went into a higher thought plateau. A place it normally doesn't function in. And the supernormal thought level allowed you to make a supernormal appraisal of a situation—based on an assessment of probabilities or circumstances or situations that normally would not occur to you."

“Could a subject, say under hypnosis, be placed on that level of understanding by another person's will? That is to say could another individual implant the proper suggestions so that at given times, in response to whatever stimuli had been programmed, that other person could cause you to think on that plateau?"

“It's not likely but it is within the realm of possibility. If two persons were very closely attuned—and I mean to the extent that, they sometimes felt they could ‘read the other one's mind’ as the saying goes-and one of these parties is strongly dominant to the other, there's a very real possibility that someone who was highly susceptible to that sort of thought manipulation would be placed in a position where they would subconsciously allow the subjugation of their own will and the implementation of thought by the other party. I know of few documented examples of it in anything resembling clinical studies, but I wouldn't rule it out."

“What about his description of the tall man who stands in the shadows? Is this a real person?"

“I'd say the person is very real to Ukie. He could be real. And if a closely attuned person was capable of the kind of thought-image projection we're talking about, it might be that he or she could project a shared reality rather than an imagined projection.

“My feeling, however, is that it could be what we could term, an extremely heightened reality. If I was capable of manipulating your thoughts on that sort of level—let's say that I could force you to picture me standing on this desk and flapping my arms like wings and jumping off the desk. Admittedly a ludicrous image. But what would the heightened reality appear to be in the mind of the recipient? Would it be possible for me to coerce you into thinking you visualized me flying from the desk? Truthfully, I'm not sure. But my sense of the thought manipulation thing is one of sharing a mental picture of a heightened reality."

“But I thought—I mean, this is just layman language and I may have it all wrong—but I thought like a person couldn't be hypnotized against their will or made to do something bad that they wouldn't have found morally acceptable. I realize all this is oversimplification but isn't thought manipulation the same thing essentially as hypnosis?"

“No, that's not precisely right. But first off here, I think we're getting a little cumbersome with the plateau as a metaphor. In the broadest sense we're talking about superimposed personalities-where one is extremely dominant and one equally subservient. If the dominant of the two is supremely aggressive, sociopathic, antisocial, angry ... If he has the desire to punish ... If you counterpoint this with an individual who has a desire, suppressed or not, to be punished, you have a formidable scenario potentially. The dominant one can be enormously fearsome and consciously abominated by the passive one, but beneath that layer the passive individual in fact welcomes the aggression, you see."

“Can you point me toward a clinical book to help me understand this phenomenon?"

“Not offhand. The problem is it isn't a scientifically suitable subject. An intangible field like that—and one where there is so little hard evidence of its real existence—is not one to draw a multitude of clinicians. There just isn't much reliable information or research that has been documented. You could research the psychiatric abstracts that would be a way to get some reference material. There's an enormous amount of interest in it, obviously. I seem to recall, oh, maybe fifteen years ago reading about some covert research project into the subject of thought manipulation by one of the hush-hush government agencies, but I don't think much came of it."

Dallas

The other one is thinking and feeling. I see what you're going at of course but, no, I'm not sure that would hold water."

“Why not?"

“It's somewhat farfetched. Not impossible, but we could create ANY sort of hypothetical. Example: Ukie. Highly intelligent. Very bright. Fails repeatedly in his efforts to, as he says, ‘become a star.’ Craves adoration. Respect. Wants attention. Needs it to placate his forever-wounded sense of self. Hey, folks, look at me. Admire ME. The folks don't give him the attention or the admiration he needs. They rebuke and criticize him by making him FAIL. They withhold his precious stardom from him. He lashes out in anger. First by forcing his sexual attentions on strangers. Rubbing up against women in the public conveyance. Showing himself in the crowded store. Picking up a woman and raping her. Who's to say if Miss Scannapieco was the first or the twenty-first? Lots of rapists don't get talked about until they get caught. Lots of victims don't come forth."

“Yeah."

“So now we have a possible profile of a guy who is getting away with murder. That's what he says to himself. He's raped X numbers of women, forced his ATTENTIONS on them, paid them back for not giving him the respect and adulation he needed. He's getting away with murder. He can do anything. If I can rape and get away with it, why not do whatever I want? I'm smarter than your average bear. Fiendishly clever in fact. I'll show ‘em. I'll start killing them and burying the bodies. Then they'll be sorry they didn't treat me like a star."

“So it sounds like you're saying—"

“I'm just saying Ukie could be guilty of murder. COULD be. I'm saying he's clever and antisocial enough to have killed, and disturbed enough in theory that he could in effect convince himself of a mythologized tormentor so that he could fool us. It's not a wholly unlikely scenario. Playing the devil's advocate."

“I'm confused again,” Eichord said, and Sue Mandel puffed up his cheeks in an enigmatic smile and flipped the end of his tie like in the Laurel and Hardy movies. “Another fine mess, huh?"

“I dunno.” Jack shook his head at the futility of it.

“For openers, let me lay all this on you.” He shoved a stack of papers in Jack's direction.” Herrrre's Ukie. In all his laid-back hyper, I-did-it, I-didn't-do-it glory. These are test results, Observations. They're not quite the same as test scores. You passed. You didn't pass. The Rorschach. Gestalt. Ways of measuring the things that have pulled Ukie's behavior off the pattern of the norm. Ways of seeing how he looks at life. How he projects himself onto his happenings. If he knows right from wrong. Values his own life or yours—that sort of thing. Best I can say overall is, the results are still inconclusive. You can take a look. Feed it into the meat grinder and see what kind of hamburger you get."

“Okay."

“Okay."

It was a long drive back to the motel and Jack found a station playing big bands and that made it a little less Painful. Basie, some ancient Woody, a band that sounded like Tadd Dameron or one of those cats from the Birdland years and a drummer who seemed to be banging on a table with a ruler, a bittersweet swig-era, punctuation mark as he drove, and he stopped and bought a fifth and picked up a bucket of ice on the way to his room.

He opened a can of the dog food and took it outside and gave it to dog and ran a fresh bowl of water. And of course the fucking dog was nowhere in sight. He should have known the beast wouldn't be sitting there waiting for a loser like him. He slammed the door on the day, poured a full glass over a couple of rocks, killed it in four five sips. Built another, sat on the bed, kicked off his shoes. Said aloud to the empty room as he reached for the glass, “Well, shit. Let's get drunk and be somebody,” downing the Daniel's and melting ice and tasting something else, a nagging and nameless uncertainty.

Highland Park

They began in the living room, papers strewn around her, both of them formal and businesslike. Each working hard to cover any base that might help Ukie's seemingly disastrous legal position. Covering all the trivial tidbits of fife that make up one's past. The modest surroundings of orphanage and foster home had given both of the twins the desire if not the will to achieve. But there the identical biochemistry somehow lost its ability to influence and shape their lives.

“I wonder,” she thought aloud, “how is it that two identical twins, each with the same potential gifts, can end up so differently. Where did you two first start differing in your achievements?"

“Ooooooeeece,” he sighed quietly, “that's going to have to go so far back into our childhood."

As he started to talk she was aware that she was wondering if Laurindo, over their softly strumming his unamplified, open-string Spanish guitar in the background, was the right music. My God, the RIGHT music. She's working with an accused murderer's brother and selecting music like she'd brought a date home. And this hunk sitting there in his tailored shirt and slacks that looked like they'd been painted on, why couldn't he be wearing a baggy old suit, cuffed trousers showing an inch of white skin above short socks? Why couldn't he be another Ukie and be sitting here in his cranberry double-knits and white belt? But Joe Hackabee was something else again. She blinked and took a deep breath and shook off this thing she was feeling.

'—having to work and I'd been luckier and found something at Holman's Ice Cream, and it was manna from heaven—you see you made minimum wage but you got all this precious OVERTIME every third week and you saved a lot of money because the ice cream was tree.” She smiled. “So to a kid—you know, this was a kid job, a bunch of little squirts working under some teenage tyrant they'd found as the kid version of a shop steward—anyway, it was such a great job to find. All the kids we knew wanted to get a job at Holman's. And of course I got Bill a job there. They were always losing kids, having to fire them or whatever, and I probably wasn't, there a week before somebody quit or was let go, and I naturally spoke up. They'd ask you—now this is serious business and we don't want you bringing somebody in here who steals or is lazy or treats the customers poorly, and I promised that Bill was great, and they said okay they'd give it a try and they liked me so they took him too."

“What happened?"

“You asked how twins can end up differently and I don't know. We were alike in so many physical ways but INSIDE we always seemed to be at odds. He wanted it handed to him and I knew you had to work for it. They said he stole. Holman's. And it was like a little trial. I recall one Saturday morning. Funny. I still remember this so vividly. The boss kid called us all in"—he smiled wistfully—"and he said it was about Bill. He'd been accused of taking some money. ‘I don't remember how much—it couldn't have been anything—maybe the till was a dollar short but that was a major offense. And he said we were to tell him if Bill had taken it. Passing little scraps of paper around like secret ballots to vote on his guilt. A little jury. If only we'd had you there to defend him, huh?"

“Yeah.” She was hanging on every word.

“And of course, needless to say, a little boy jury of his peers found him guilty as hell."

“Kangaroo court."

“Probably not even that. We didn't get to examine the ballots so the boss kid could have dumped on him. He was out. But we were still close as you'd expect identicals to be. I told them to jam the job"—he shook his head disgustedly—"left a perfectly neat job at Holman's Ice Cream to go out and look for work with Bill. And we found the next job together. Vorchardski's Nursery, I'll never forget. It was poor money and they worked you like a slave but we thought it was great because you got to work outside.

“We both envisioned being these all-star twin jocks one day, at the time we both loved baseball and we were extremely conscious of working hard to get in shape. But it's one thing to fantasize about working hard and another to actually do it."

“Was U—Bill a lazy boy?"

“Ummm. Not lazy precisely. He just had his head on a little tilted if you know what I mean. He'd stay up all night scheming or working on some way to scam somebody but as far as out there in the hot sun with a trowel and a handful of peat moss, huh-uh. He'd bitch to me about how crummy the wages were or whatever and I'd be out there enjoying it, working away, and I guess one of the bosses saw what he was like and they axed him immediately. I don't think he lasted ten days. That was the beginning of our problems. Right there at Vorchardski's. I wouldn't quit this time. I needed the money and I didn't particularly love the place but I couldn't see quitting. The was furious with me. I was disloyal. I was the cause of all his problems."

“Did he get another job?"

“Not for a long time. He fell in with a pack of street kids but that didn't work out either.” He chuckled at the memory. “We weren't very tough. Neither of us. We always talked our way out of fights. And I guess the gang found him out soon enough. But I think he got tired trying to find empty redeemable bottles to sell to the drugstore, and he got some terrible job. He wiped off cars for a used-car dealer. I remember the rags had some sort of chemical on them and he would break out. His skin was broken out all the time. Anyway"—he laughed his mellow laugh—they found him in the backseat of an old car reading comic books and fired him."

“Oh, no."

“Yes. And it was a succession of jobs. He'd GET these great jobs. You know, it's like he could convince the personnel people to hire him, and he had some great jobs for a kid—one he got with a tablet company I remember he was bragging about the wages it was really impressive. And he'd keep the jobs a week, two weeks, he just couldn't “hang in there."

“Were you still close?"

“Sure. But looking back I think that was the beginning of the real resentment. I can recall to this day how irritated and disappointed he was with me because I didn't quit out at the nursery to be out of work with him again. I think that incident cut him pretty deeply. I'm not sure Bill ever forgave me for it."

He kept telling her about Ukie's young life. About the girls they both took out. And as he talked Noel began to get an impression of sibling rivalry that was nurtured and reinforced by Ukie's failures to overachieve as Joseph had, and a pattern of compensation in erratic and antisocial behavior. As Joe talked she began questioning the possibility of whether or not Ukie might indeed have been the one who had committed those murders. But the pattern she was seeing was something else. It was one of hostility and frustration, but it seemed to her that it would be insufficient as a foundation to spawn a mass murderer.

They eventually moved into the patio, a closed-in, glass-walled solarium and dining area on the side of the house, and he raved about her home while she served coffee to herself, Perrier to Joe.

“I've never seen a home more beautiful, Noel."

“I'm glad you like it."

“This is just great. And all this ground—what a layout."

“It's nice to have a little room."

“You call this a little room; in Houston we call this an estate."

“Hey, wait now. I've seen how you guys live in Baghdad-on-the-Bayou. I know. This is only five acres of ground but it's plenty I think.” She got up and switched on the exterior floodlights.

“My God, you've got a fabulous yard."

She laughed. They started talking about other things and she asked him about his flying.

He quickly warmed to the subject of the Ultra-light and told her, “I can fly right hi here, land right down there, in your yard.” He pointed. “Perfect landing field."

“You can't fly right in HERE,” she said quickly.

“Oh, it doesn't harm your ground, Noel."

“I don't mean that, I meant I'd be frightened half to death to see you land that thing in my yard."

“Naw. It's totally safe. And even if you have, uh, let's say a little problem, it's no big deal."

“Crashing is no problem?"

“Well"—he laughed—"crash is a kind of strong word. I've crashed it a couple of times I guess you might say. But you know, it's no big deal, you walk away from it."

“I'd walk away from it all right. I'd set fire to it first and THEN I'd walk away from it."

“Oh, come on."

“I'm serious, Joe. It sounds so damn dangerous."

“It's nowhere near as dangerous as, oh, say, hang-gliding. It's very safe, really. Usually."

“Hang-gliding.” She sighed. “I suppose you do that too, right?"

“Umm,” he admitted. “It's not that hairy if you use your head. But I want you to see my baby. You'd enjoy it I'll bet."

“You're not getting me up there in that thing."

“No.” He smiled. “It's a single seater. It'll take four to five hundred pounds, though. And still get airborne. I want to come out here and show her to you. I can come right in there, all the room in the world.” He gestured over at the corner of her property, his hand sweeping across the glass in front of them. “Taxi along that little stretch of ground right there. You'd get a kick out of it."

“God, don't you dare,” she said but her eyes were sparkling and he could tell the idea of the little aircraft excited her. Everybody loved to watch him fly her.

“It's totally safe—truly. Unless you do something goofy. I used to stunt-fly, and that's kind of dumb to do aerobatics and such, but I don't do that anymore."

He was being very serious, gentle, she could tell he was wanting to convince her, as if she needed much prodding from him. She smiled inwardly at the word “prodding,” poking, get your mind off it girl, she chastized herself.

“I don't want to watch your third crash in my backyard."

“Piece of cake, really. I could even take ‘er in right under that power line. You've got fifteen, twenty feet clearance there and I only need about twelve feet or so. That's not necessary though."

“You bet it's not,” she roared and he couldn't help but laugh with her.

“Just wait till you see that baby. It's beautiful to watch. And I'll just drop her nose down and sit down pretty as you please right here. What do you say?"

She shook her head no, slowly, and both of them knew it meant yes as she smiled, purring inside at the prospect of seeing Joe again. And again.

Dallas

It was another in the world series of bad mornings. Eichord got up with a blazing screaming pulsating killer hangover pounding behind the eyeballs. Forced himself to get through his morning ablutions, put fresh water in the dog's container, which he now kept surreptitiously (by bribing the maids) beside the motel door, and made it to the cop shop downtown in more or less one piece. The traffic seemed particularly vicious this morning, and the mouthwash and toothpaste had done nothing to rid his tongue of the thick, stale, woolen sleeve it was wearing. At 7:50 A.M. he was already thinking about how good the first triple would taste over the rocks.

The headache was reaching nightmare proportions and he popped a couple of Darvon when he finally realized the pills weren't going to get the job done today. The sound of a blaring newscast was more than he could handle. He couldn't find the big bands this morning. All the stations appeared to have been programmed by complete maniacs or the tone-deaf. He finally dial-twisted around and found an oldies station. They seemed to program only songs that were played before the last dance at old-time proms and sock hops, and it was somewhat bizarre driving to work while the station played “Teach Me Tonight,” “I Only Have Eyes for You,” and “Red Sails in the Sunset"—All before eight in the morning. But he left it on and drove, mind disengaged, through musical memory lane. He pulled up at headquarters in the middle of “Blue Velvet,” depressed all the way down to the soles of his flat copper feet.

He went in and had to fight with himself not to try phoning Noel Collier, who still hadn't returned his LAST call, then he finally reached the number in Scottsdale he'd been phoning for two days, not in, secretary, left word, got a cup of hideous coffee-colored semiliquid stuff, and decided to read the paper in atonement for missing the morning news.

A seventy-seven-year-old woman had been crushed to death under the wheels of a bus. A commuter plane in its landing pattern and a private plane in the midst of takeoff smacked into each other over the Salt Lake Valley in Utah. Early estimates said twenty-two dead. A cerebral-palsy victim who was described as “one of the most courageous men imaginable,” who'd established a successful aluminum can-recycling business in spite of severely impaired motor skills, was in his apartment when somebody broke in and attacked him, leaving him badly beaten and traumatized. A nine-year-old girl disappeared off the streets. It was believed that a four-year-old boy had died in a fire because the building's landlord had refused to install smoke alarms. The man who played the Lone Ranger on TV years ago was checking his baggage through a ticket counter at the Houston airport and someone stole his six-guns and silver bullets. It looked like everyone was going to survive the fifty-eighth anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther King. A day like all days. The Grave-digger was still out there somewhere, or right under their noses in maximum security lockup ... or C: None of these.

Jack could imagine how good that first one would taste. He knew just one would completely cut through all the fog and wipe that woolen sleeve right off his tongue and totally lose that dull headache, all in the first swallow. How could anything that therapeutic possibly be bad for you? He could just have ONE, he assured what was left of his conscience and common sense. Just one, come back to work, it would all be more better, brudda.

He tried another call. Another nobody home. He'd reached the point that was so familiar and dreaded to Jack, a hollow and unfunny phone paranoia, the end result of too many recorded messages, too long spent on hold, too many rate increases, too many “I'm sorry she's not in"s AFTER the secretary gets your name.

So when his line rang and he depressed the lit trunk line and said, “Eichord,” and the thing went “MMMMMMMRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRFFFFFFFFFFFF” real loud in his ear ... Jeezus. It was all he could do not to throw the piece of shit through the nearest wall. What a fucked-up week. He hung up the receiver and sat there for nearly a minute looking at the phone. Tasting something awful and sour in his mouth. Staring at his desk. Eventually the extension on his borrowed desk made its looney trilling sound and he snatched it off the cradle and snarled, “Eichord?"

“Long distance calling Jack Eichord"—from Mars it sound like.

“This is he, operator."

“One moment please, for Dr. Geary's office."

Ohhhh, shit. Can't believe it. Finally.

“Thanks,” he said, listening to long-line harmonics, the hammering in his temple having reached disco proportions. He noticed his right eye was trying to close. Just a little tic. Nothing serious.

“Jack?” the familiar voice.

“Hello."

“Jack—Doug Geary."

“Doctor, thanks for getting back to me. I need to pick your brain again.” Geary had helped him on the Demented case years ago. “I was wondering if the Arizona papers have been carrying anything on the Grave-digger stories."

“Yes. I take it you're on the case."

“I'm in Dallas now. Yes."

“The guy, what's his name—your primary suspect—Ukelele Ike?"

Jack laughed. “You're close—Ukie Hackabee."

“Yeah. So what can I tell you? Don't know much, but shoot."

“The subject in question is quite intelligent. But with a record of minor sexual offenses. He abducted a woman here in Dallas and held her captive for several weeks, This was the first time we know of that he raped. Prior to that it was public-nuisance stuff. All during the time he had her he was bragging about all these bodies he'd buried. Convinced her be was a killer. When she got loose she gave us enough information where some of the graves were located and they picked him up. He's open about it. Admits the killings, even give us more graves. Real antisocial type.

“But then he takes it all back. Says he didn't do the killings, he saw them happen in his head. Has this farfetched story about a place where he can go inside his head that's like a concrete tunnel, and a thing he calls a neural pathway where this man hurts him, then he shows him where various corpses are, but he never gets a look at the guy doing the killings, he always stays in the shadows. The suspect has the impression the man is tall, but he claims he knows nothing else about the buried bodies, only their locations."

“My God, that's wild."

“Yeah, I know. He sounds nuttier ‘n a fruitcake. Thing is, he's very smart. Real bright guy. A ne'er-do-well kind of schlub in one sense—had a background of failure in the workplace—an abortive career as a local MC in some of the sleazy strip clubs—a package as a small-time nothing con man.

“First, there's a strong possibility he's trying to build up an image so he can cop to an insanity plea. Second, the obvious possibility that he's crazy. Third-and here's what I want to know, here's where I'm really needing your help—how much of an outside chance is there that he's telling the truth? He goes on about this neural plateau in his head where the killer tortures him a little, shows him the bodies. Sounds on the surface like some whackaroony on a guilt trip the way I'm telling it, but this guy doesn't have a killer's profile at all.

“I think the Grave-digger thing has brought him to the point where he finally got the guts to abduct a woman and rape her. But the rest of it doesn't feel right at all. I don't doubt for a second he was an accomplice, or a hanger-on, had some part in the killings-perhaps in helping to select the victims or whatever. But I can t see this guy getting up for the muscle. Wet work would scare him silly, I'd guess. Part of a team is the way I see him. He's covering for somebody maybe. Someone who's bad enough to have Ukie very scared."

“Hmmm. Interesting possibilities. First—and I know you already know this but just to run over the old basics, don't ever disregard anything when it comes to the cry for-help department."

“Right,” Jack said.

“We've talked a lot about that, I know. But in the past we've both seen an awful lot of seemingly bizarre behavior that boiled down to being nothing more than an individual going down for the third time and crying out to the authorities as a father figure, ‘Help me.’ The classic cry, ‘Stop me before I kill again'. But some of the ways they do that don't look anything like a cry for help, they look like anything but."

“I know. And Ukie is very frightened. But having recanted—"

“Also, Jack, someone disturbed enough to be part of mass murder, however passive the role, out of sheer hatred or mental imbalance or whatever, let's say, but bright enough and imaginative enough to have created a make-believe world where someone shows them pictures of graves inside a concrete tunnel—that is going to be one complex individual. He will probably sense he is deeply disturbed if his dementia allows rational introspection. Thus you have the cry."

“But what if it's for real?"

“Is your sense of Ukie that he's being influenced or manipulated by an accomplice? How do you clock him? And what does the testing show? Pollies and all."

“Polygraphs haven't shown diddly. Just too conflicting and inconclusive. I think my sense of it is that not only is Ukie capable of BEING influenced, I think somebody has been terrorizing him. It's hard for me to buy any part of the thought-manipulation in a brain pathway, but I don't think he's faking the scared part. He may even believe all this stuff—who knows? Another thing I wonder. Could he have killed all these people, through anger or whatever, then blocked it all out, and is using this as the way of taking it all back inside his head?"

“Mmm. I suppose it would be remotely possible, but if he is an extremely tormented individual who finally went all the way ‘round the bend and began murdering random victims, it's rather unlikely when he abducted a woman and raped her that he'd let her live for days, much less weeks. That kind of a criminal psychotic would be much more likely to rape and kill her at the moment of ejaculation or soon after. Or, like a friend of ours from the past, kill the girl and THEN rape her. You're dealing with massive amounts of rage and hostility."

“What's your feeling about the theoretical possibility of a neural pathway, and the likelihood that a stronger, dominant person could somehow cause you to think or visualize things on that level whenever they wanted?"

“You mean by hypnosis or sheer will or whatever?"

“Right.” Eichord could hear the doctor let out a deep breath as he framed his reply.

“Wish I could recall those findings on telepathic manipulation. Years ago some institution—Duke University perhaps, I just don't remember-Aid a major study. Check the psych abstracts."

“Somebody else told me to do that. What are they exactly?"

“Okay. You're in Dallas, right?"

“Right."

“Great—” And he began telling him where he could go and how to use the psychiatric abstracts, and how to look up the subject matter and the date, and as he was explaining how to use the catalogued data Eichord said, “You mean just look up the general heading first, like ‘TWINS,’ and then—” “Whoa. Shit, Jack. Did I read somewhere the suspect had a twin sibling?"

“Yeah. Twin brother."

“Whooooooaaaaaabhhhhh. Hold it, hold it, hold it. Whoa, horse."

“Huh?"

“You didn't say anything about a twin. Ukie is a twin!"

“Right. Yeah. Sorry. I just hadn't got around to it yet."

“Oh, well, WELL now. That could change everything. Let me think now, just a second.” He paused and Eichord said before he forgot to ask, “Let me say one thing while you're thinking. Would you be so kind as to let me ship these surveillance tapes to you? I know it's one hell of an imposition, but would you have time to take a look at them? I'd just send one or two to give you a feel of the man. I'd be so grateful if you would have time to—"

“Send ‘em soon as you can. Glad to do it. Now listen. You're talking about identical twins?"

“Yep. I met the brother. Ukie in appearance. Deeper voice or more mellow in his speaking voice. Dresses better. Seems mannerly. Speaks in a very soft-spoken, not exactly deferential way but just a very pleasant way. Nice dude, Seems awfully, genuinely personable. Totally unlike Ukie or at least that's what you get right under the facade. Same exterior, totally different interior is the impression. Clean background. Ultra-successful businessman in Houston. Doesn't seem bitter in any way toward his brother. Acts convinced that Ukie is innocent."

“The twin thing..."

“Yeah?"

“That changes everything, though, Jack. It adds another dimension. If our Ukie is a same-twin you've immediately got a whole new set of possibilities, see? And they're diametrically divergent. You know the fantasy of having a twin is that it's another you but it doesn't work that way. You think you're going to have a best friend who looks like and thinks just the way you do. It's like a kid having a pet but better because it talks. But the twinning reality is often quite different. Largely negative relationships can develop. One can be super-critical or jealous of the other, If Ukie was hostile toward his twin, and bright, this could be an extremely intricate piece of invention to put a frame around his brother's successful neck, right? Conversely his brother-okay, this gets very iffy—but suppose Ukie's twin could manipulate him in some way, the way the frame might work in reverse. Both theoreticals are too far out for me, I'm just shooting from the hip. But the twin thing. Ahhhh, now that's a rich area."

Eichord made a pained noise like a “hmmmmmmm” and the man said, “Jack, I think you might want to look closely at the twin brother's relationship to our suspect."

“Oh, Doctor, I don't really feel like there could be much there. I'm checking it out but aside from a bit of resentment on Ukie's part for what he imagines as disloyalty—you'll see that in the interrogations I'll send you—I don't think there's too much happening there. Joseph Hackabee, the twin brother, he came in on his own when he saw the story in the newspapers in Houston. I doubt if we'd ever found out about him or reached for him had he not shown up wanting to help his brother. They had falling-out several years ago and hadn't kept in touch over this last four or five years ... Eichord trailed off.

“Twins is something, though, Jack. There's a wealth of potential for a uniquely complex relationship and this series of crimes—wow. I mean, do you still use the rule of thumb that anything beyond four killings qualifies?"

“Yes. That's pretty much the official line. Once the tally goes past four it's a serial-murder case and I get notified. Of course you can have ten or twenty deaths in an isolated shooting and not have a serial killer. I get tapped when there are more than four different homicides within a geographic area or a proximate occurrence pattern timewise. Unofficially the definition is simpler. If it makes headlines."

“If it's serial murder when it's four, what is it when it's—"

“A hundred and four?"

“Yeah.” He laughed without humor.

“It's bloody mass murder is what it is. And we're looking for light at the end of the tunnel."

“I hear that. What you need to do is contact Randy Vincent. He's at CMH Sacramento. Let me give you his number. Find my Rolodex here in all these papers—"

“Where is he? What were those letters?"

“CMH, California Mental Hospital. Here it is. Nine-one-six ... three-six-six—Wait. No. This is the one on Stockton. No. Here's the number you want. The administrative offices. Call this number and ask for Doctor Vincent.” He gave him the number. “He worked in the federal system. He was the one they called in when they were testing Gacey at the mental-health facility in Illinois. He goes around to all the lockups where they have the max-security psychos. He's got a deep background in sexually disturbed psychopathia and he's going to know everything there is to know on the phenomenon of twinning That's his primary area of expertise. Tell him we talked. He's a good guy. He'll be perfect to give you some good info on the twins thing, not to mention the criminal psych angle. Okay?"

“I really appreciate it, again."

“Shoot me those tapes too, and I'll get right back to you."

Jack thanked him and hung up, called and requested dubs of four of the surveillance videos, and called the hospital administration out in California.

“Is Doctor Vincent there?"

“Doctor Vincent? Randy Vincent?"

“Randy? We have a Vincent Johnson in Personnel."

“Don't you have a physician there named Dr. Randy Vincent?” A pause and then.

“Hold on, please.” Probably somebody who just started working there. A long ... deadly ... pause.

Minutes slowly ebb and flow. A syrupy tide measured by seconds that echo the heartbeat hammer of a headache briefly dormant, now thrumming below the surface as the seconds drag by on hold, receiver changed to the other ear.

The.... (tick).... long ... (throb).... deadly.... (tick).... pregnant.... (throb).... pause. Christ! He looks up at the clock and after four minutes he clicks the line. Gets a dial tone. Dials the number again. Same woman's voice.

“Yes"—an edge of steel hardens his voice—"this is the same long-distance party that was waiting on hold for Randy Vincent. This call is police business and I was disconnected while I was on hold.” He lies.

“One moment, ple-uhz, sorry we disconnected you.” Click. (Tick) ... (throb).... (tick).... (throb).

“Personnel?"

“Yes."

Good Christ above. “My name is Eichord, I'm with the Major Crimes Task Force and we're involved in an investigation of a Murder case.” Really laying it on. “It is vitally important that I reach Doctor Randy Vincent."

“One moment please.” (throb).... And, mercifully, a click and a woman's voice says, “Hi. Are you trying to reach Doctor Vincent?"

“Yes, I am. Is he there?"

“No. He hasn't been here for over a year. I'm not sure where he can be reached. Would you want me to check to see if we have forwarding information on him?"

“Yes, please. But wouldn't someone there know where he is? I mean, he's a nationally known physician.” Eichord was beyond any compunction. Just get it done somehow.

“It's the fact we're so big. This is a very large facility and so many people are new here. I remembered the name from an old personnel roster. If you'll hang on for half a minute I can check."

“Please. It's quite important.” Half a minute, he thought as the phone banged in his ear. At least she gave him an ETA. That was golden as far as he was concerned.

“Hello."

“Yes,” he said, holding his breath.

“I can't find any forwarding address.” (Siiiiiiiiiggghhhhh.) “But I've got a phone number. Would that help?"

He took the number and hung up, dialing with fingers mentally crossed.

“Hello,” a woman's voice on the seventh ring, a slightly foreign-sounding accent he couldn't place.

“I trying to reach Doctor Vincent. This is long distance.

“I'm berry chorry, he not here."

“May I ask with whom I am speaking?"

“Eh?"

“Who are you, please?"

“Dis is de maid. You call later, okay?"

“No, wait, DON'T HANG UP YET,” he yelled before he could catch himself. “Listen. This is very urgent. WHERE ... IS ... THE ... DOCTOR? WHAT HOSPITAL IS HE AT?"’ Throb.

“I teek he at the BA."

The VA hospital. Ah-ha. “What city is this I'm calling?"

“Eh?"

“This is long distance. I called area code six—” Click. “Oh, don't hang up, goddammit,” he swore at a dead phone. There was a long period of dialing, the woman again, United Nations-style translation ... tick ... throb ... Finally he had the city. Bonita, California. He dialed directory assistance. Got the offices of the VA hospital.

“Hello—Veteran's Administration.” They'd given him the wrong number. Back through the operators, obbing, ticking, the romance and excitement of policework, throb, tick, another switchboard, a VA hospital in California and a woman telling him, “No, I'm sorry, there's no Doctor Randy Vincent here to the best of my knowledge. Wait a second. Just, uh, hold on a second,” she promised him one second and she kept it quick, clicking back on crisply, saying, “Here's someone who can help you. I'm connecting you."

“Thanks.” THROB....

“Yes?"

“I'm trying to find a doctor named Randy Vincent. An idea where I can lo—?"

“Oh!” The woman laughed into the phone. “He has his own consultancy now, I believe. I think you can reach him this week at—you want to write this number down?"

“Yes, go ahead please."

“Country Code Forty-one. City Code Twenty-one.” She gave him a long and strange-sounding number which included an extension.

“Do you happen to know what this is?"

“I believe it's a clinic."

“No. I mean what country this is, what city?"

“That's Lausanne, Switzerland."

Fucking wonderful. He dialed direct. At least he wouldn't have it on his motel bill and have to use one of those cards he was always misplacing. The line rang fifteen times. He had the operator place it again.

“What time is it there, miss?” It finally occurred to him that it was after office hours.

“It is seven-forty-six there, now."

“Thanks. Cancel please. I'll replace the call tomorrow."

T H R O B.... T I C K. Lunchtime: 12:46. He'd have a little lunch and be all n’ lit in no time. This afternoon, one more call—Donna Scannapieco. Line her up for the house. He wasn't particularly looking forward to having to drag her through the experience but you never knew what it might shake loose from the trees.

Come back. Make one more call. Shuffle a few papers around. Go back to the motel and play with his mangy mutt. Or something.

Highland Park

The session had begun at one in the afternoon in the Jones-Seleska law offices in Garland. They had left about three-thirty at Noel's request (No, you won't be imposing) so that she could get this hunk out to her house again. How she managed to keep her hands off him she'd never understand, but so far it had been all business. Still. She could read his desire in those beautiful eyes.

Out in her house in North Dallas she kept up the questions for a while and kept it strictly business, and he kept the answers short and sweet, taking Ukie through the stages of his young life.

Noel wanted all kinds of documentation. She told him what she'd been able to obtain from the cops and from prosecution under “discovery” and what was missing. How it could help Bill if she could find even something—some vestige of the orphanage records.

“They were lost in the big fire, as Bill told you, I guess,” he said, softly.

“Yes. How about the foster parents who raised you? When did they pass away?"

And he took her step by step through all of that again, patiently, the when and how and who of it, and the fact of no neighbors, no next of kin, no relatives of the foster family surviving, and then the odd coincidence that all of the personnel at the now-defunct social-service agency in Branson were either deceased or they could not be located by trace. It was, as Noel told him, quite unfortunate.

“It's almost as if your personal histories had vanished off the face of the earth."

“I know,” he commiserated. “I don't know if you can understand the loneliness and feeling of alienation you suffer when you lose all your roots the way we have. I know it's just a series of coincidences, but even though we didn't have this big circle of close kinfolk the way most people do, you sure do get a sense of loss. A sense of losing whatever ties to a family you might have had. And I guess if you lost a real close relative, you know you'll never see that loved one again and..."

As he spoke to her she felt herself being drawn to him again. Falling under some wonderful spell created by his sensitivity and soft tones, that warm and gentle voice, that sexy voice of his lulling her, promising so much tenderness and loving, and she had to work to keep her mind on business.

She found him acutely interested in the way she'd be handling his brother's case, not just superficially but in the legal intricacies, and at one point she jokingly asked him if he'd read for the law at one time. He had a way of coming around the corner and blind-siding her with these very pointed questions that made her glad she knew her stuff as a lawyer. Joseph was a bright and well-read man. He began probing into the possibilities related to an insanity plea, to which she responded:

“This is an area where even the police have a lot of misinformation. It's quite complex as an issue with respect to Ukie. It's not necessarily true, you see, that a person adjudged insane is legally without culpability or responsibility. When you try a case like this one—just to look at one avenue of the thing, the jury is going to be asked to make a decision based on criminal INTENT. Did that individual entertain a criminal intent at the time of the alleged offenses? You, the defense, you get your psychiatric depositions and your witnesses lined up in a row, and you have to prove to those men and women of the jury that your defendant's insanity is the LEGAL definition of insanity, not the MEDICAL one. They aren't the same, and most people don't..."

And he was touching her. She flinched. If he'd been slow to make a move, when he finally got around to it there was no preamble at all. He made his move without need of flirtation, without a look into hot eyes, without so much as a word or gesture, just the way she dipped her head, averted her eyes suddenly, turned a little into profile, and made herself so openly ready and vulnerable, and he let the vulnerability excite him as he concentrated on the things that pleased him as he moved over beside her and it seemed to her the most natural thing in the world to have this warm and lovely stranger slowly slide his hand up her leg inching it up exposing the golden tan sleekness of the long and perfect legs, now flirting a little when she looked into his serious hot eyes and she can feel him doing something and her twin spheres are exposed and the nipples want to feel his warm caress and they wait, erect, but he cups her breasts instead and without even a first kiss he lowers his head to her and kisses down her chest, the hot tip of his long tongue flicking out and searing her nipples, around them and down to the small, tantalizingly sculpted downiness between her gently curving Y and she says something but neither of them is sure what and he takes the thing out of his pants and as he kisses his way back up her, lets go and wets himself and lubricates her moistness with his hand, and then she feels the large maleness of him fill her and his handsome face is against hers and he is in the hollow of her throat and they are moving and oh my God she tells him she wants him deeper and there is a rock hard chorus and an implosion in the hot tight wetness of their relentless, wild passion.

That voice all the while that has the resonance of some thrilling church organ my God ORGAN oh yes rumbling and whispering and telling her the things he wants them to do, the sweetness of his compliments, she catches a phrase about her “egalitarian elegance” and he tells her he could hardly stand not touching her the last time they were together, the way the slippery sliding slickness of those beautiful long endless legs and kissable curvaceous thighs blowing him kisses as she walked near him, the communication breakthrough he called it, a hearing and sensory innovation, for the first time, he said, “a woman's legs spoke aloud,” and he translated the word to her. The word spoken in leg. She knows the word. It is common in English-language usage. An invitation to dine. Her legs whispered EAT, he says. And because she is his regal queen bestowing a favor on her court jester, he must do as she commands.

And this is the way Noel and Joseph spent the afternoon. On the living-room floor of the Collier home. Pure, raw, funky, wonderful, animal sex. And then he takes her in his arms and kisses her and then this breathtakingly good-looking man enters her again and the both of them give themselves to it with equal abandon. And afterward spent and wasted, flat on his back with the once-tumescent and blue-veined pink engine of destruction flaccid and flopped over dead atop his right leg, the woman beside him snuggled close breathing slowly and with her mouth open, a pair of horses after a long run, sweat drying on them, satisfied, content beyond description, unashamed and together, they cuddled for a moment and decided what to do about it all. They wrestled with the weighty problem for a good four or perhaps five seconds before each of them fell asleep. Asleep with their arms around each other, cuddled together in the gathering darkness in exhausted dreamless slumber.

South Dallas

Donna Scannapieco met Eichord downtown at the prearranged time and he tried to break the ice with her as they walked to the car.

“It's been rough, hasn't it?"

“Yeah.” She nodded, bitterly.

“I've got to tell you, you've been wonderful through all of the questioning."

“Thanks. You guys have your job to do. It can't be pleasant. Dealing with dirt like him."

“Well. The work is like anything else. It has its rewards just like it has a downside. The job has a way of sort of taking over your life, Donna."

“I can see how it would be hard not to take it home with you if you were conscientious. Sort of like, what do they call those welfare people—case-workers? You'd see thing you'd want to do something about."

“Yes. There are some parallels between our work and persons in the social services.” He sounded like he'd been stuffing cotton in his cheeks, pedantic, stupid almost. He had a rather benign hangover this morning—it was more of a. lethargy, mental doldrums that had taken over. Why did he have so much trouble relating to this gal?

Donna was quite presentable today. French jeans, high-heeled boots, a silk warm-up jacket with the number 34 (closest she could find to half of 69?) which he put her down for, then instantly chastized himself for his unfairness. Perfect, appropriate attire for visiting the horrible site of your abduction, torment, and repeated rape at the hands of Spookie Ukie. All the way to the house location they talked. It felt like a somewhat stilted exchange of dialogue, unnatural, artificial, as if each party was thrust into an uncomfortable closeness and talking to lighten the tension. Not the most conducive atmosphere for a meaningful conversation, but they both hung in there.

Donna asked him a lot of questions about the job, and he was getting that feeling you get when the questions become too one-sided, an off-key thing that creates the impression you're being interviewed rather than talked to. He supposed it was the combination of her wanting Ukie nailed so badly, a thing of making sure the cops with whom she had contact were capable of prosecuting and maximizing the leads she was supplying, and then there was the old bugaboo of his dubious celebrity.

He had no great problem with the need for the way in which his own people used him. The brass all the way up the ladder had made it patently clear that it was as important in the execution of his job as the expertise he brought to bear on a given murder case. A lesser man or a shakier ego, or it could be argued, a more resolutely ethical soldier would have rebelled. But he had the magic that works for media. He could get ink like a bandit Never mind that the numbers-oriented “journalists” tended to see his accomplishments in the acceptable and understandable molds of Sherlock, or Rocky Balboa, or some larger-than-life battler of evil.

Eichord knew that the Demented and Hearts cases had been flukes. Media didn't want to know about all the ones where he had no vibes at all. Nobody would be doing any monographs on the ones he missed, the serial killings in his own home town that he'd never got to first base with, the missed calls, the times he'd shot blanks. The hierarchy didn't publicize those. And they made sure his personal methodology was kept secret. He worked like any other ordinary cop. It was all long, boring, often-wasted hours of drudgery. Ninety-nine-percent perspiration and one-half of one percent inspiration mixed with a soupcan of luck.

But one-on-one with no spotlight on the conversation he would invariably tell it as it was he was no brilliantly gifted crime-crusher sent by the gods to stalk serial murderers.

“The publicity is just a way we keep media contained, Donna. It's not a question of my being humble or pawing the ground with my shoe and going, Oh, shucks,” when she'd asked him about “all the murder cases he'd solved."

“I've had to learn to handle media myself,” she told him, “or at least take a beginner's course in the subject. I've got a lot to learn. So far my way is just say, No comment, and try to get away from them or hang up the telephone or don't answer the mail. But a few of the reporters have really been obnoxious."

“Some of them look at it differently than others. Vulture journalism. The microphone in the face of the lady whose husband was just shot ‘how do you feel'—that kind of thing. And a case like this one that has national attention, you got all the locals vying with the stringers for the big slick magazines and papers, you have all the television crews, it can be a mess if it gets out of hand.

“That's how this thing got started as far as my name went. I'd gotten lucky a time or two and they could use the name for ‘public relations,’ I'd guess you would have to call it. I could be a plausible tool to tone down certain elements of the coverage of a story or to help minimize the terrorizing of a city that can take place when you're dealing with multiple homicides."

He told her about Atlanta, about Boston, and about San Francisco and the horror stories those great cities had become, once upon a time, when the phenomenal terror of a serial killer had held each of them in its immobilizing and frightening claws.

It seemed like a long drive before they reached the house but he felt like perhaps some of the ice between them had thawed. When they pulled up to the house, a rickety-looking, old frame house on South Mission, she looked at him and said, “Is this the one?” in a quiet voice.

“Yes.” He looked at her for a moment. “You okay?"

“Yeah.” She didn't look okay at all. Her face was very pale even through the rather heavy makeup.

“You know, this doesn't have to be done today,” he said, a question in his voice.

“Yes it does,” she whispered and opened the door for herself, so he quickly got out and came around the vehicle in time to close the door.

He had parked in back of a marked car so he knew the crime-scene-unit guys would be inside. They went in and said hello and they headed directly for the basement, Eichord holding her elbow but she went down first, slowly, holding on to the banister. It was smelly the way an old, closed-up home will get, and cold. He was right behind her, concentrating on the back of her Jacket and the ‘jeans’ and heels and the arm outstretched, very close in back of her in case she suddenly wilted as they sometimes did.

And then in a couple of seconds they were standing together in the room that had been her prison for over a month, and the look of the room hit her as hard as if she'd been slapped across the face, and she stood there clinging to the banister at the bottom of the stairs, breathing very deeply, and Jack wanted to touch her but knew he'd better not, and so he just let her stand there without speaking.

The frame house with its air of stale decay, the moist, overpowering decadence of the basement room papered in those torn, sad, airbrushed photos from sleaze mags, Spooky Ukie's clippings, all of it gave off a palpable dungeon effect, magnified by the chain-and-belt thing attached to one of the walls.

The house itself was something Eichord had been working on since Ukie had given it up to them. He claimed and all evidence backed him up—that someone had laid it on him as a gift. He'd been living in a fleabag downtown and he was broke. A typed note had been forwarded to him by one of the clubs where he had once appeared. The envelope contained a personal note to Ukie. On opening it a key and a fifty-dollar bill and a typed scrap of paper fell out. It said, so Ukie claimed, “Caught your act once and you were great! You deserve to change your luck. Paid six months rent in advance call it a loan.” And the address on South Mission. Ukie said he'd thought it was some kind of gag but for the real fifty.

He took a cab to the house. The key fit. He moved in immediately. The landlady still had the note to her in which Ukie had presumably rented the home by mad. The six months including a two-month deposit had been sent, she said, in cash, together with instructions where to mail the key (a Bellaire box number which a young boy had taken out in the name W. Hackabee). The bank where the money order had been paid for kept their own video surveillance tapes and Eichord saw the man who bought it. He was, although so far there was no proof either way, just somebody who'd been paid to buy the money order. The question was not so much was all of this a setup, but whose? Ukie's or somebody else's?

Meanwhile, in the basement of the house, Eichord still stood near Donna Scannapieco. Loud silence echoed in the basement. Soft, filtered conversations could be imagined from upstairs, but with the doors shut he doubted if even the loudest screams could penetrate inside the old stone walls. The house had been carefully selected, he felt. But again—by whom? Who had physically searched through a realtor's multiple listings, obtained a key, come down into the basement looking for a suitable torture chamber—Ukie? Then did he remove his disguise (he wouldn't have been dumb enough to chance a realtor identifying his mug shot) and pay people to rent a box and buy a money order and get a key, all the while wearing yet another disguise? Or was this a frame? If it was a frame why would anybody that clever (his frequent rule of thumb) construct a frame so easy to penetrate? Because that individual wanted it to look like it had been Ukie trying to make them believe it was a frame? Eichord didn't discount either possibility, as he'd seen enough homicides and complex dope burns where the patsy or the mule was tricked up “inside out” to prepare for the contingency of police intervention.

Donna stood there and in her head she saw her own torture and abuse and ruination, and she heard the echoes of her own screams, sobbing, begging him for mercy, please, oh, please don't, she could fear it amplified inside her head full. of pain and anger and hatred and she began crying soundlessly, shoulders going up and down like silent cartoon animation, rubber-limbed Minnie Mouse going up and down, heaving, soundless sobs, and Eichord couldn't stop himself and he reached out and touched her gently and she began turning just as she collapsed, collapsing on him and sobbing, tears streaming onto his shoulder, the cries flowing from her in a torrent, all the filth and menace and frustration and loathing breaking loose in a flood of cathartic, convulsive weeping. Ana then hyperventilating as he held her in his and gently tried to reassure her, and slowly, some of the anger draining, the tears of pain abating, her breathing returning to normal, they each felt it.

Something so subtle had changed between them. It was no longer the cop and the rape victim standing there. In the gentle warmth and comfort of Jack Eichord's protective arms Donna Scannapieco, had for the first time looked at him as a human being and instinctively she relaxed and to Eichord it appeared she had let her body snuggle closer and of course he was stroking the back of a silken warm-up jacket, and holding a soft and very sexual woman, and nature began to slowly take its course.

At first neither of them admitted it to themselves. The horror of the surroundings, the inappropriateness in fact ridiculousness of it, the embarrassingly sophomoric out of-control biochemistry of this unlikely thing ... But nature is not to be ignored. And very, VERY circumspectly Jack was gathering her in closer to him and now the pressure of those large full breasts mashing up against his own chest, and suddenly it was all he could do not to move his hand around and cup one of those big womanly breasts and tilt that face back and see what she'd be like to kiss, and although he made no move she felt the threat of it communicated to her in just the subtle imperceptible increase of pressure against her and she recognized something—not desire, certainly—but something warm and affectionate in her and she recoiled from his half-imagined advances and the spell was broken.

The rest of the time between them was a mixture of business-as-usual debriefing and a suffered, mutual embarrassment of long silences. So much for shared intimacy with this little snow queen, he thought. In truth, however, he saw himself as absurdly out of control. It was an alien experience for him and it added nothing to his mounting discombobulation.

If the ride out had seemed long, the ride back had been a mini-eternity, but both of them had the consolation of their thoughts. The irony was that as Jack and Donna sat there on the bench seat while their wheeled enclosure made its way through the Big D traffic, they were subtly aware of the man or the woman sitting nearby, where before the relationship had been different. And if not consciously each of them now wondered about the other, and the age-old curiosity was there, subliminally, and it had changed everything, or perhaps nothing.

And nothing was what Eichord had come away from the day with, a stack of nothing notes, nothing observations, nothing scraps of random nothings, nothing non sequiturs, nothing squared and nothing microscoped. He bought a fifth and some dog food (what did the clerk think?) and finally made his way back to the motel room. The dog was excited at seeing him. That was something, anyway, and he gave it a pat on its scruffy head as it walked close beside him, shooting into the room as he unlocked it and leaping up into the sling chair by the door.

Jack had taken to letting him, Dog, come in the room against both the motel strictures and his own good judgment. And they'd become fast pals, thanks to Eichord now feeding him. Jack was oblivious to the dog's presence as he hung up his coat, put his piece away, and was now scattering scraps of paper and copious notes all over the bedspread. Jeez, he thought, looking at the yellow-lined sheets of scrawled, sometimes indecipherable shorthand, matchbooks, cocktail napkins, Kleenex, note pads, balls of equate cryptography, all of which would doubtless vagarious, capricions to the sum of the nothing day—I gotta get organized! Crumpled balls? You bet.

Jack sat on the edge of the bed, “his” dog curled up on the floor near the door, kicked off his shoes and started putting his random notes in some kind of order.

Little scraps of paper pulled from eight, ten different pockets and notebooks. Graffiti: the back of a receipt with the word “illusory” but no other comment. Something had struck him but he hadn't had time to finish the note. He wadded it up and filed it. A matchbook with a doctor's home phone number in Chester, Illinois. He transferred it to his telephone book. Graffiti half of a torn Kleenex tissue, the words OZ/Wizard in cryptic blue ballpoint. He thought of the death of Ray Bolger at first then remembered that he'd scrawled on the Kleenex to remind himself to look into something.

Legible and surprisingly coherent, he found the following memory of a viewed surveillance video:

WALLY SAYS DON DUNCAN SAW SURV OF TWINS. REUNION JOE/U. LOOKING AT EACH OTHER. NO AUDIO. JOE LAUGHS. DUNCAN SAYS “MIRTHLESSILY” AS IF F.U., BOTHER SLIDES CHAIR BACK, LEAVES, NO GOOD-BYE. And a the tape and even on the giant monitor the shot was not sufficiently close-up to reveal any details, only the noted silence and the abrupt bark of laughter. He made a note in a dossier and threw the other note in the round file.

Eichord found a crumpled scrap with the words “WHO SAYS?” which didn't ring any bells. He let the note sit beside him on the bedspread while he poured four fingers of Daniel's into a coffeecup full of ice and took a sip.

“What's to it, pal?” he asked the dog.

The dog flipped its tail a couple of times in response.

On a single piece of paper were abbreviations and numbers and letters which comprised Eichord's shorthand code summarizing the rigorous testing of Ukie Hackabee with respect to disorientation, perception of respiratory, circulatory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, neuromuscular, and genitourinary functions and dysfunctions. Illusions, distorted perceptions, hallucinations. Taste, smell, auditory, sight, and tactile sensory systems. The range and depth of moods: rage, fear, jealousy, paranoia. The extent of Ukie's emotional control or the lack of it, his subconscious and expressed anxieties, the kinesiological match-ups.

Was he impulsive, sulk evasive, hyper, belligerent, pugnacious, self-pitying, obstreperous, unpredictable, incoherent? (He had told Wally Michaels he was “tired. tuckerd out, fucked over and worthless as a Chinese private in the Peoples’ Army two days before payday.” Mandel he expressed the worry that his “red corpse-suckles” were devouring his “white cop-suckles” faster than he could manufacture their replacements. All of this in jest, but reflective of the new Ukie.) He was being clocked for nail-biting, speech defects, swings of self-effacing fake humility or wild brags, shyness and boisterousness, placidity, and hyperactivity.

His every move, mood, motion, mannerism, was scrutinized. His constant pleas, posturing, negativism, suggestibility, resistance to authority—every sign of perspiration, irritation, indignation, was sought observed, labeled, filed, catalogued, measured, reviewed, assessed, and collated.

Ukie got the Babinski plantar test and Hoffman finger test, the Bender-Gestalt. A Rorschach. A Szondi test. Ideational concept tests and a Thematic Apperception—and it was all poured into the big blender at MCTF.

Tomorrow or the next day, soon as he could, he'd see if the guy named Sue was willing to commit himself professionally—or even off the record—to some sort of premature findings. Insofar as the “new Ukie” went Mandel's only comment about the tests was inconclusive. He'd even like some inconclusive conclusions, he thought, and took a very large swallow of straight Jack, holding it in his mouth and feeling the minute slivers in it, the melting fragments of ice, and looking at the micomprehensible page of shorthand as he swallowed the whole mouthful.

He glanced at some stuff on twins that he'd photocopied. He started to read it and later he would wish he had. But he kept hitting words like “follicle” and “ova” and polyovular’ and ‘homologous” and he scanned a page or two of it, half-assed speed-reading it, until the phrase “Multiple pregnancy monstrosities” hooked him for a secon. He read:

“Double-ovum twins are biologically not twins at all” (Noel would be crushed to hear it) “but are due to the fertilization of two ova in a single period of ovulation. Single-ovum twins represent twinning in the precise definition of the word, dividing an individual into two. This twinning can also be produced experimentally in animals and fish, but is fundamentally associated with the production of monstrosities, these being imperfect forms of the divisional process.” Eichord had no way of knowing that the book he had photocopied had been written years before the famous experimentation that resulted in the cloning breakthroughs.

He continued to read about the births of double-headed and four-legged monsters, and then he started hitting those words again: “teratomas” and “blastoderms” an-"placentation.” When he got to “fission of the bilateral halves of a single embryonic axis” he let tile paper slide to the floor where Dog sniffed over it for a moment and also found it of no interest.

The next page had the goodies on it but he hit the word “telegony” and let it slip through his fingers. The next page caught his eye and for a moment he read about how the pair of Siamese twins, born with a single vagina but separate uteri and cervices, had given birth to a child. It boggled his mind so badly that he just sat there trying to recreate the possible relationship out of which the event had occurred, but he made himself snap out of it, turned the page, and then poured another glass of the golden glow juice.

He read and drank and read some more. Found the page where he'd marked a yellow fluorescent hi-liner rectangle around a paragraph explaining that twins may find themselves “in aggressive or hostile situations in which sibling rivalry, jealousy, and the desire to dominate may be strongly manifested, and, the necessity to coexist causes each partnership to adjust to the separate personality traits of the other, in this way the two beings interlock in the closes bond that can exist between two persons. In extreme cases this bond can become pathological and destructive.” The word “pathway” came and superimposed itself on “pathological."

And Jack kept reading and drinking finally he fell asleep snoring like a dockhand of what it would be like to bed down with. Identical twins. Knockouts like the two on TV—in his dream he couldn't recall their names, but he dressed them up like cheerleaders. It was his “I know you can see my panties when I jump up, that's why they match my skirt” fantasy. And the girls were warm. And wonderful. And when he woke up in the morning, head full of pounding drums and ocean's roar, he is fully dressed, on the bedspread of the bed in the motel, his arms around an extremely contented dog, and he knows that—at the very least—he has fleas. Fleas will be the least of it, he thinks, shaking his head in disgust, which he immediately regrets.

Now if only my heart will start again, he thinks, throwing open the door and evicting his sleeping partner.

Downtown Dallas and Highland Park

Eichord hated the telephone yet he recognized that it was one of the great tools in his profession, like the MCTF computers, and he made as much use of it as he could in spite of his loathing for the hunk of plastic. It was funny about “solving” homicides. You could cover the streets with a phalangeal army of detectives, bring in the feds and the technicians with their sophisticated gear, keep a half-dozen lab people up all night working with the most expensive equipment money could buy, and end up pulling the case out of the ashes with a hype who couldn't remember how old he was or by lucking out with that loathsome piece of plastic.

“I gotta pull my chestnuts outta the fire,” he said for no particular reason as Wally Michaels walked past his desk.

“Damn straight, sir. Nobody wants to burn their nuts.” I'll drink to that, Jack thought. And he got up and went in the men's room and took a big pull off the pocket flask he was now carrying with him. He shuddered it down, loving the way it burned inside him. In his pants pocket he'd taken to carrying a tiny tinfoil square with a bit of toothpaste in it. He opened the foil and put the toothpaste in his mouth, rinsing it around with tap water. He smiled at the thought of someone coming in and seeing him dab around in the little piece of Reynolds Wrap with his finger, see a bit of something white, and figure him for doing toot on the job. Same difference, he’ supposed, returning to the desk without a trace of guilt. That'll clear your fucking sinuses. He glanced at the stack of abstracts.

He was doodling an elaborate thing around the word “symbiosis” which was followed by the printed definition “the living together more or less intimate association or close union of two dissimilar organisms.” He capped his felt-tipped pen, reached over and dialed a familiar number.

“Public safety,” a bored woman's voice intoned.

“Police department, please,” Eichord said. He waited for a good sixty seconds while the ancient switchboard system rerouted his long-distance call.

“—lice department,” a male officer answered.

“Homicide, please.” Another long wait. He wondered how many times some poor slob being threatened, some wife about to be murdered, some terrorized kid, whatever, had phoned the police and waited two minutes to have the call put through.

“Homicide."

“Is James Lee there please?"

“Nope, this is Brown. C'n I help ya?

“Bob, Jack Eichord. Who's in the squad room?"

“Hey, Jack. Ummmm. Me, Herriman, Tuny, that's it. Where are ya?"

“Dallas. Put Tuny on, will ya?"

“CHUNKY!” he could hear him scream through the hand over the mouthpiece.

“Yeah."

“YEAH? What the hell kind of way is that to answer the phone?"

“Eichord?"

“In the flesh."

“You bum. Where the fuck are ya, fuckin’ Hawaii on the taxpayers’ buck?” “I wish. Big D. Hey, do me a favor. You know that phone book of Lee's that he keeps in his desk? The one with the loose pages with phone numbers in the back?"

“Unngg."

“Do me a favor, Dana. Look up Ozzie Barnes’ number and gimme the address too, if it's in there."

“Who?"

“last name: B-A-R-N-E-S. The first name will be listed as either Oz, O-Z, or Ozzie. Okay?"

“What, do I look like a fuckin’ telephone directory?"

“You look like somebody swallowed four basketballs, but how's about lookin’ it up anyway, big boy?"

“You got it, sahib, hang on to yourself.” A short pause and he heard fat Dana grab the phone again, “Kay, you got somethin’ to write with—a pencil or like that?"

“Yep."

“Okay get the lead out and write this down. Oz Barnes, Area Code eight-one-eight...” And he gave him the number, asked him if he'd drunk the Rio Grande or the Trinity or whatever caca river dry yet, and they exchanged a few insults and Eichord dialed again.

“Yeah."

“Ozzie?"

“Hey."

“Jack. Eichord.” “Oh, Jack. Nice surprise. Where are you?” He told him. “What can I do for ya?"

“Oz, this is kinda up your alley. Real far-out stuff.” He told him a little about the Grave-digger case. “I wondered if you had run across any weird stuff that might relate."

“In what way?"

“Oh, any of that goofy R-and-D shit the intelligence community is ranking out. Mind-control crap. LSD in the oatmeal. Any of that stuff?"

And for the next twelve minutes the Wiz of Ozzie took him through the whole nine yards of mushrooms and mind-blowers, peyote and pain generators, lasers and leutenizers, tone-harmonic phone numbers, and Mach 4 Finjets, helium-neon beams and stun batons and poison ring and the whole barren wasteland of horrors those CBW dickheads, were cooking up. Dick Calkins in his worst fucking nightmare never envisioned the dark truth of twentieth-century reality. High-tech hell.

And having learned nothing he thanked the Bionic One profusely and glanced at the doodle he'd made on autopilot while his mind freely associated:

1. A gun firing

2. A gluepond

3. 000, the Os interlinked.

And beside them, nothing. Not an image had been retained.

So by late afternoon Eichord was planted down the block from the Collier house in a different unmarked vehicle when Noel pulled into her driveway in the Rolls. In the seat beside him was a cooler full of ice and about three-quarters of a quart of black Jack Daniel's. If he was going to have to sit out here like an idiot he was going to do so with a modicum of the creature comforts.

He had the car radio and the scanner and two-way all on, and he sat there sipping from a coffeecup full of good cheer, listening to a surreal mix of dispatcher crosstalk and that ass-kissing save-the-last-dance-for-me music his favorite station played. It was kind of freaky sitting there in the gathering shadows, thinking about the case and about sexy Noel, listening to coppers respond to calls dispatched to the strains of “Stardust” and “Moonglow."

They had the confrontation about six-thirty, when a strange car pulled up behind Noel's and Eichord saw Joseph Hackabee get out and approach the house. He seemed to be expected and he was inside immediately, with Jack close behind and breathing hard.

“Yes?” She was startled to see him there when she opened to his insistent cop knock.

“You okay, Miss Collier?"

“Of course I'm okay. What in God's name?"

“May I come in?” he said, all but jamming a shoe in the door, feeling so suave and in control, and she didn't say yes or no but she stepped back, luckily, as he blundered through the door, tripping and going on his face but for the steadying arm of Noel's new protector, who said to him in a deep voice, “That was very deft,” as he saved him from falling, which only served to make it worse.

“Make yourself at home,” she told him icily as he barged past her. He could feel the booze warming him, pretty far along at that point.

“Mr. Hackabee,” Jack said somewhat expansively, “what's going on?"

The man had his arm in back of Noel proprietarily. “I don't think there's much point in offering you a drink, mmm?"

“I think he's already had a few,” she said, frowning. “Isn't that right, Mr.—uh, I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name."

“Eichord, MIZZ Collier,” he said to the room. It looked like a fucking, art museum. “Just checking to see how you're keeping.

“Uh huh.” She glared at him with eyes like dagger points.

Even whacked to the gills and falling-down drunk he could still admire her for what she was. The most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, in his life. The white dress was sufficiently décolleté that he looked up from it, back into the daggers, and she said, “I think you'd better leave. And if you bother us again,” she started talking about some kind of restraining-order deal.

He was fogged up so badly he couldn't think. The booze and his slick moves had left him paralyzed. He'd been unprepared and unprofessional. He could not remember a time before, even at the worst of his drinking problem when he'd had no idea what to do in the execution of his job. He just stood there looking at this untouchable, inaccessible object of his unrequited admiration and then at Hackabee, rich and elegant and unruffled and suave, standing in his own potent swirl of bourbon fumes trying to defog enough to know what to do next.

“Anything else? We're late for dinner."

“Guess not,” he mumbled, and forced himself to walk steadily as he shame facedly made his way out of the door and down the steps, negotiating his way carefully back to the car. He got in and turned all the radios off and just sat there, shivering a little for no particular reason. In a few minutes he saw them go out and get in Hackabee's rented car and he scrunched down a little hoping he wouldn't be seen.

But Hackabee began backing up until the cars were even and Noel had rolled down her passenger-side window and was saying something to him, a hostile look on her beautiful face. He rolled his window down.

“What?"

“I said we're going to the Mansion. It's on Turtle Creek. I don't advise you try to follow in your condition. You might want to radio for another surveillance car to pick us up when we leave there, but I don't suggest you do that. If I catch them watching I'll have you all surgically removed tomorrow and I promise you you won't like it."

“Hey, Eichord,” Joe Hackabee said, laughing openly and shaking his head as if he couldn't believe this idiotic drunk. “Spooky. REAL spooky.” And they drove off on that note, devoted defense counsel and grieving brother of the accused.

Somehow Jack made it back to the motel but he could not remember anything except a telephone conversation between the time he left the Collier house and the time he woke up, throat raw, stinking like a broken booze bottle, head pounding, shaking, disoriented, and for some reason frightened. No dog in sight. No wonder—he'd forgotten to set either food or water out. The dog was a survivor and he probably recognized a basket case when he saw one.

The worst of it was the fear and paranoia that seized him from the second he woke up. He shrugged it off, hoping against hope that he'd hallucinated the embarrassment at Noel Collier's house and that he hadn't really (sigh) phoned Donna Scannapieco in the middle of the night, drunk as a judge, totally wiped, calling up to ask for a date. No fucking mercy.

He went in and looked at the bleary-eyed mess staring back at him from the mirror and muttered an appropriate response to the looking glass. It summed up the tortuous, winding anfractuosity of his own neural pathway this morning. It summed up the entire Grave-digger case. It summed up the whole Dallas experience. An aphorism worthy of the world-class phrase-makers. Orwellian. Aristotelian.

“Shit, fuck. Piss on a duck,” he said.

Dallas

The day began bad and progressively worsened. The waves of trouble came in the wake of a couple of bitter, threatening, and abrasive calls from one of the senior partners at Jones-Seleska, and from Ms. Collier in person, one to Michaels, one to Michaels’ superior, one threatening to bring some serious pressures from the hierarchy above, one in which a lot of words like “alcoholism,” “injunction,” “harassment” (mispronounced as usual), and “court order” were thrown back and forth like flattened Ping-Pong balls, crazed and erratic, impossible to return, the overall effect on Eichord a jangling, disconcerting one.

In the course of talking with Wally he finally put it all together. He was so smashed when he left Noel's house he'd forgotten to pull the Highland Park guys off her, and they were slowly rolling by eyeballing the residence late last night when Collier saw them out in front. Needless to say, there was no more surveillance.

Jack sensed that his booze problem had grown to a greater proportion than he was able to subjectively appreciate. But that's the thing about alcoholism, it's so easy to crawl inside the bottle and hide. And even with the bottle rolling off the table and breaking, you can stay in there and peer through the jagged edges of your life, looking out through the conchoidal spider tracks in the breakage—hiding from the critical world inside your shattered amber womb of glass.

It had been an uncomfortable moment, especially for Michaels, who clearly was an Eichord fan, when Wally had to mention the dread word “alcoholism” in his summary of the complaints from Noel's law firm. It made him vulnerable to attack that was all but indefensible, made it more difficult for him to function as an investigator, and made Wally Michaels look like a dumb so-and-so for bringing him in on the case to begin with. His way of handling it was to get out of the cop shop as soon as he could and find a nice, salty, dark tavern.

This time of the day the bartenders seldom screwed around with you. Little ma-and-pa tavern. They're not fucking over the booze usually—not your first one this early in the day. Save that shit for the lunch bunch. You go in like Eichord did and you get a nod and a howdy and if you don't respond to the “how y'all doin'?” with anything more than a nod and a “Daniel's rocks,” pause, money coming out on the counter, well hell's bells the ice is already meltin’ before you can get that motha up to your lips and over the gums.

The glow never disappoints. Never. Shit. THAT's what I like about the South. That Tennessee sippin’ delight ALWAYS hits. Pow. The fire never fails to light. Yes. YES GODDAMMIT YES. “Do it again.” All he could do not to smack his lips. The cozy amber womb. The dark morning bar with the salty boozer's smell thicker than the shafts of sunlight. Three solitary drinkers and a sleepy bartender who hadn't been open for an hour or two maybe tops—polishing, emptying, getting it ready for the lunch-hour crowd. Blue-collar drinkers. No conversation. You get a serious damn drinker in there this time of the day. Comin’ in for “triple vodka rocks,” black Jack, straight Scotch drinkers, guys wantin’ a double I. W. Harper with a beer back. People in there to get blitzed and feel it NOW. You got one thing this time of the day, you got bar rags.

Midway through his second one Jack got his shit pulled together to the extent his professional nature managed to swim to the surface for a minute and he recalled a piece of paper floating to the floor, and a phone rang and nudged an overlooked clue in his mind, and because Jack Eichord was one hellacious cop drunk sober or in between, he sees the words “WHO SAYS?” and it comes back in a flood of memory that washes through the booze-befuddled brain wrinkles. He remembers asking Ukie how come he hadn't talked to his brother that day as he saw in his mind's eye the monitor screen and the twins saying nothing. Staring at each other through the thick layers of glass and HOW COME you didn't speak to each other? and WHO SAYS WE DIDN'T? coming back and then the fist hits him in the heart. IN THE HEART and the recognition and pain and fear make him wince as he thinks his first solid thought about the perpetrator. Before there were suspicions but the bourbon and the rest of it contrived to keep it all liquid. No longer.

He knows now. Not all the whys and the wherefores. It is a horror so mysterious and so deep and so convoluted he may never be able to sort it all out. Not what the reporters call “deep background.” He'll just pray that he's right and that he can bring it all to a stop before there is more killing. And inside his head in a deathly whisper he speaks. He says, I haven't a shred of a hard clue. Not a fragment of worthwhile evidence that would hold up in any court. But I know now who and what you are. And you are MINE. And you're gonna fall. I promise. And—yes. What if.

And he picks up the phone and sets a plan in motion. Slo mo. Slooooooooow motion. Working carefully. Circumspectly. Walking softly. Carrying a BIG mother-fucker of a stick.

You are one of a kind. I don't know what made you this way but you are coming to a stop. This devious scheme! You have so much going for you, and why the hell you'd throw all that away for the fleeting, dangerous, hell-bound moments—the kill moments. Why? I can't imagine. Why put so much in jeopardy to hurt innocent, random human beings who'd done nothing to hurt you? Who offered you not one iota of personal gain by their deaths? WHY, you evil piece of human shit?

The thing was exploding. Even through the juice he could feel it coming down on him. Soon. Tomorrow. Tonight. This crazy mother was going to blow like a powder keg and, Noel, darlin', you don't want to be anywhere around when it does. You're treading in shark water, beautiful, and this piece of work doesn't feed he fucking CONSUMES. And now Eichord KNOWS—and it fills his blood with ice.

Even at this stage, far from the resolution of the case or so it appeared, the Grave-digger on the loose or in custody or perhaps BOTH ... he would leave nothing to chance.

Experts were reached out for through the tentacles of the task force. A guy who had a strange specialty: he hid things. Camouflage. He'd written books on how to find dope stashes. He'd helped secrete entire families away from the KGB, inside hollow walls and rooms within rooms. Hidden people from the Vopos at Checkpoint Charlie. They called him the Magician, because he could walk into a room and literally disappear. He was just one of the special team Jack had on the way to Dallas.

He would plan and scheme and lay his traps. But the truth was that Eichord had faith in only one crime-stopper. The big dark-haired flatfoot with the large shoulders and the broken nose. The one with all the scars. The one who looked “like a cop,” people told him. He looked at people a certain way. Wore his suits a little too long. That's the guy Eichord relied on when it came right down to it.

And the guy he trusted most didn't carry a Mach 4 Finjet blowgun-and-stun-wand, He didn't use porto-pak pain-field generators. He put his pain machine in a little holster. It was a steel thing patented by a couple of dudes named Smith and Wesson. It had a cylinder that revolved when you pulled the trigger and it made a very loud noise. Six times it did that. And if the projectiles found their mark you had yourself one hell of a little hand-held, portable, bite-your-lip-get-up-and-dance mother of a pain generator.

Because inside this soggy mesomorph was a soul. And a mind. Booze-battered, but still thinking. And the thoughts it thought were of another era and of another sensibility.

Jack belonged to soft hats in big, round Bond boxes and All Star Bond Rallies to aid the Sixth War Loan. He belonged to “Blue Tango” and Bix, Bud and Bird and Babe and “Begin the Beguine.” The Black Commando, the Black Widow, and Bob Steele and Bob Feller and Bowery Blitzkrieg and guys named Buck and Buzz and Brick Bradford, and boxtops to Battle Creek, and bad guys who made some fucking SENSE. The kind of warped, demoniacal monstrosity who could go and waste a hundred random lives was a thing out of the fucking comic books.

Eichord fished out more change. The plastic was beginning to hurt his ear. He gritted his teeth and dialed.

“Jones-Seleska, one moment please.” Buzzing of killer bees.

“Thank you,” after a pause. “May I help you please?"

“Noel Collier, please."

“One moment, please."

“Mizz Collier's office, Anna Stevenson, may I help you?"

“Noel Collier, please, this is urgent police business."

“Right. Okay. Just one moment please.” She didn't ask who it was. A few seconds and he heard Noel's voice on the line.

“This is Noel Collier."

“Don't hang up yet. I know you're angry and you have every right to be. Just give me thirty seconds.” He paused, waiting for her to say, “Fuck you, eat shit and die, your job is hanging by a thread, I'm putting a contract on your life,” or more likely the cold electronic click that signaled a dead phone line. Nothing. Not even a deep sigh.

“I won't keep you or even to try to apologize. I know that you see me as somebody who got out of line and that's true enough. In that spirit,” he lied, “I guarantee that I will NEVER bother you again ... NEVER surveil Joe Hackabee in any manner ... never tail, monitor, or in any way, shape, or form, bother either of you—"

She interrupted him. “Mr. Eichord, I'm afraid you have a serious problem and I'm sorry that—"

“No, I do,” he interjected quickly before he could get pissed and blow it. “No question. I'm not only aware of it I've resolved to take care of it and something IS being done about it and I mean NOW. I only want one thing and I'll leave you be. Very simple. I'm a cop first and last—okay?"

“So?"

“All I ask is to keep you, to keep my bosses, to keep us all smilin’ and laughin’ and scratchin'—I stay away from both of you—all I ask is IF you ever feel you're in danger in any way, I hope you will forget about my behavior and incompetence and not let it influence you against calling us for some help. Fair enough?"

“Fair enough,” she said, totally unconvinced, “and now I do have your assurance that—"

“AbsoLUTELY you have that assurance. You'll never hear from me or see me—guaranteed."

She said, “All right,” and the connection was severed. And he had accomplished what he wanted to do. Eichord wasn't too good to kiss some ass when necessary. And when it looked as good as hers did ... But it went against his grain all the same.

He would like to have been able to tell the truth to this cold lady and watch her face while he told her. See what her reaction would be. But he'd forgo that luxury. Still, he'd just about had it with the telephones. One more call and he'd have to get away from the telephone before he barfed into the hunk of plastic. He had managed to embarrass himself so badly at every turn on this damn case.

He wanted to go back and lose himself at the bar, but he forced his fingers to move toward the coin slot of the pay phone and he inserted money and dialed.

“Hello."

“Donna?"

“Yeah.” A big sigh. Oh, Christ in his mercy.

“I'm so sorry.” The opening of every alcoholic since the beginning of time.

“'S awright. No problem."

“Tell me I didn't call you and make a horse's ass out of myself last night."

“You didn't call me and make a horse's ass et cetera."

“I did, didn't I?"

“You don't remember, right?"

“I'd had a few drinks."

“You can say that again, oh...” A loud noise. “Hang on a minute.” She went to turn her boiling kettle off and banged the phone down giving Eichord a nice little shot in the ear as she did so. Oh, blessed art thou. She thought about this man as she turned the flame off. The horrible thing that had overturned her life had left only tatters of the former woman. She could not dredge up any interest in this man as a partner. Someone to be with. But she could see he was interested and in her mind many emotions tried to spark. There were misfires. One or two flashed enough for her to identify what was in her head.

Donna was not a woman to play games. The role of bitch goddess was not one she found acceptable, despite her love for melodrama. She had some character, whether or not her own personal standards of what might constitute sexual misconduct were the average woman's. She lived by her own code, which she had always thought of as—before all else—humanistic. She was an honest person and she knew what drew men was the open free-spirited display of awareness. She could look at a guy, as—they most women can, and tell him everything she wanted him to know in that one frank glance. But she had that gift in even the most asexual encounters, and anyone who spent time close to her felt the visceral quality and realness.

Yet the horrors of her abduction had changed her. She no longer felt in touch with herself, no longer trusted, no longer wanted to be liked. She hated cold people and was both mad and sad about her own growing coldness. Donna did not want to end up alone, closed, pointing inward with her focus, living only for self as she saw so many do. She wanted her life to be full of others, and for her that meant men and that meant sex.

And all of this filled her with mixed emotions and a disconsolate awareness of how badly the status of victim had mangled both her own esteem and her life's longitudinal axis. And she saw, for reasons that were unknown if not unimportant to her, a good man who appeared to be crumbling at a dangerous time, and he had reached out to her as a fellow human being for companionship and she'd cut him off at the pass. In that moment's pause as she turned the flame off and walked back to the telephone she shrugged to herself and the decision she made in those few seconds saved both of them.

“You still there?” she said, making herself sound like she cared.

“Still here. Am I calling at a bad time?"

“No.” She laughed. “But funny you should mention it.” He winced. “I guess you don't remember calling me in the middle of the night asking for a date?"

“I don't suppose I can convince you that was somebody impersonating me."

“Oh, you mean you DON'T want me to go out with you?"

“No! I mean ... Yes, I do. Of course. I meant—"

“I know. Forget it,” she said. She knew if she didn't plunge on ahead that would be it. Now or never. Do it. “You still want to ask me out?"

“Sure,” he said, waiting for the put down.

“How about six-thirty, seven ... something like that? We can go to a show or something.” There.

“Fine. Wonderful. Sure. Six-thirty tonight?"

“Yeah. One thing. I don't like guys to get drunk. I mean, I'm not a what-do-you-call-it, I don't care what somebody else does. But I don't like—TEMPERANCE, that's it, I'm not into that. I just don't like somebody that I'm with that way."

“My word of honor—” He started to do a tap dance.

“That's okay. I just wanted you to know. Okay?"

“Sure. Okay."

He wasn't used to people being so direct. The women in Dallas came on so forthright. He liked it, you understand, he just wasn't used to it. He fumbled around and told her he'd pick her up and thanked her, a little more enthusiastically than either of them liked, and that was that.

Donna Scannapieco puffed up her cheeks and blew out a big stream of air as if she'd inhaled a third of a cigarette, shaking her head at her own moves as if to say, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” And then she just sort of sighed and collapsed on a couch and stared out the window at nothing. What the hell is the difference? she thought. What can it hurt?

For his part it changed everything. He straightened up to his full height, put his shoulders back, and walked out to the car. Mostly what he wanted to do was make it all right. Back to square one.

He sensed or he knew what she was doing. This was a rape victim, somebody to whom the idea of a date—not to mention a date with a booze-hound of a cop—a chauvinistic, booze-hound cop at that—had to be at the bottom of her wish list. Yet she felt enough of his need that she was making one super effort in his behalf and that effort, which some men might have found demeaning or patronizingly insulting, it turned him on as nothing else could have. He loved, treasured honesty in a person insofar as personal relationships went, and she was giving him a priceless gift. Her no-strings-attached forgiveness. And it gave him the necessary shot of strength to get through the day.

Eichord was a full-steam-ahead kind of guy. All or nothing. And there was no thought of failing again. He was back on course as he hadn't been in months. He stopped and bought some dog food in a convenience store, walking past the package goods as if the liquor wasn't there. The last thing he craved was a drink. He craved a toothbrush. He wanted to go home and brush his teeth. But he didn't. He bought a toothbrush and toothpaste and went back to work.

He spent an hour and a half in the cop shop, taking care of some details that had been floating submerged beneath the layer of alcohol. He called someone who's name he obtained from the MCTF computers. The man was very elderly and Eichord pondered whether or not to handle it on the phone or call someone up in the Midwest to send a detective out and question him. He decided he'd gamble first and dialed the man direct, expecting a forgetful old codger who could barely hear, and he was in for a nice surprise.

“Hello, Mr. Lloyman?"

“One and the same. What can I do for you, sir?” Chipper voice.

“My name's Jack Eichord, sir, and I'm with the police department in Dallas, Texas. We're investigating a number of homicides and I need to ask you a few questions please."

“Ah. Okay. All right. Fire away, Mr. Eichord."

“According to some records we've come across you were with the Branson Social Services Agency for many years."

“Yes, sir, I ran that agency for nearly thirty years."

“Do you remember ... Let me ask this, it's a kind of personal question but the records say you're ninety-one. Is your memory such that you can still recall individual cases that you were involved in? Forgive the question."

“No. That's all right. I must say my memory isn't what it once was. I used to have a fine memory. But I notice this last five or six years it's not what it was when I was in my sixties or seventies, say. I'm awfully lucky, though. I know most ninety-one-year-old men aren't out painting their houses each year like I have for the past fifty-eight years. My health is wonderful for my age. Legs are starting to go, but, well, you asked about memory. Go ahead. Maybe I can remember the case."

“Great.” Eichord loved the guy. “There were twins. They were placed by your agency into a foster-home situation.” He mentioned the year.

“Oh, boy. That's so long ago now. I was about to be forced to retire then but I sort of remember some twins placed with a couple. I couldn't tell you the name."

“Hackabee."

“Hmm? Speak up please?"

“HACK-A-BEE.” He spelled it for the man.

“No. Nope, I don't know that name at all. There was a Hackaberry here in Topeka some years ago, but no. I don't recall a family by that name in Branson."

“The records show they died many years ago but they were apparently the adoptive parents of these twins. We can't find anyone who remembers the twins, which seems unusual. But the records being no longer available and you are the only living survivor of the agency—"

“No! You mean something happened—a fire or something?"

“Not that I know of, sir. I see in the records here"—Eichord turned a page of notes—"that all of the other people who might have worked for the agency back in that time period seem to have pre"—he caught himself before he said predeceased—"passed away or cannot be located."

“Well, my stars. I can't hardly understand that. Some of those people like Marty Burrows and the little Morton girl, what was her name, Ruella Morton—you mean they're all dead now?"

“According to these records, yes, sir, they are."

“See, I moved away, moved out of state in the, oh, guess when I hit sixty-seven, sixty-eight. Opal and I went to Alaska. It was wonderful up there. I had always wanted to go up there. We had a son working up there and so we moved up there. Beautiful country. Anyway, she took sick a few years after that and when she passed away, oh, let's see, I guess after I lost her it was two years before I moved back to the Midwest. We had a little piece of ground we'd bought in Kansas years ago—"

“Mr. Lloyman, the individuals we're investigating. One of them, the twins, is a suspect being held in connection with multiple homicides so it's very important we are able to trace their background. They claim the orphanage there in Branson burned down and the state does not have records on them and the Hackabee family didn't have surviving relatives. Wouldn't it seem odd to you that you don't remember twins with a name like Hackabee?"

“It certainly would. I placed a few twins over the years. But I could swear up and down there wasn't any foster family named Hackabee. I just never recall hearing that name before."

“Did you place any twins in foster homes—identical male twins—during that time period—any instances occur to you that you might think back on as unusual—anything out of the ordinary?” He waited while the man thought.

“Ummm ... No. Can't say as I can think of anything out of the ordinary. Identical male twins ... Didn't place too many. I remember one set we placed with a couple—the Houtchesons was the name of the family they just loved getting those kids so much. I often wondered what happened to them—the boys I mean. They were so cute and smart. Poor little devils. We'd got ‘em from a lady rescued them from an awful situation back in the woods. Rumors of them being tormented and such. Some no-good hillbillies back in a hollow there had ‘em. Poor little tykes. This schoolteacher gal got ‘em somehow and she came to us with the thing. I believe they were there in the hospital for medical attention for a time so you should be able to get their medical records if that would help?"

“Oh.” Eichord was excitedly making notes. “I'll say it would. Do you recall any more details? About the hillbillies that had them or who the schoolteacher was—her name? Anything?"

“No. Nope. Surely don't. So many years ago. ‘Course now you should go to Helen Houtcheson. Or the husband. Let's see what was his name ... I just don't. Richard. Robert. I—uh, it just doesn't come to me. I'll think of it though. ROY! Roy Houtcheson—that was their name."

“Great. This is really a big help.” He thanked the man, extracting a promise he'd allow Eichord to phone back for a follow-up if necessary and giving him the Dallas number and extension in case he'd think of any more details. He was still dialing Branson families with the last name Houtcheson when one of the other phones rang for him.

“Jack,” the voice said, “Doug Geary."

“Hey, Doc. D'jou get the tapes yet?"

“Yes. That was fast. I don't have anything on them myself, but a guy was watching them with me, that is in the lab where the machine is, and he made a comment, I have no idea whether this is worth even passing along. He's a sharp fellow. Was in commercial broadcasting for a number of years and he knows all about voices and accents and such. He made the suggestion to me that y'r buddy Ukie is not speaking in his real voice. I asked him what the hell he was talking about and it turns out that he gets the impression that Ukie is pitching his voice up higher than he normally would. It was such a crazy thing—I mean, what would be the point?—but something you said lit up TILT inside my noggin when he told me that.

“You remember you said something about how they looked just alike but one dresses sloppy and doesn't have as deep or mellow a voice? Wouldn't those be characteristics you could easily change? Get me? If you were a twin and wanted to try and put as much distance between your own appearance and your same image, you could dress differently, walk funny, talk in a different pitch of voice—things like that."

“Interesting.” Eichord couldn't think of anything else to say. “I appreciate anything like this that might come to you. Please."

“No problem. I realize it wasn't earthshaking but I thought you'd want me to call you on it. I'll let you know if I find anything after I've had time to really give them some thought. So far it just looks like I'm watching a man who is scared half out of his gourd."

“Well, I do appreciate the other information. Please lemme know soon as possible—whatever you think might help.” He told him how grateful he was and they hung up. A couple of calls had grown into an hour and. a half and nothing much. He put the Houtcheson thing in the hands of MCTF and walked away from it for the rest of the day—or so he hoped. He had a lot of soul-searching to do. He needed to get his head screwed on right, first of all. And the second he had the thought he burst out laughing at his choice of phrase but it was nonetheless true. He wasn't a tap dancer, he said to himself, he was a cop. Start behaving like one.

He wondered about Joseph Hackabee. Oh, yes. Nothing was right about any of it but his vibes counted and at this particular moment his vibes were shouting to him. He wanted to unfog so he could hear what they were saying. He let himself momentarily visualize them together, Joe and Noel. He had a phrase from one of the task-force background checks that bounced back via Houston PD, “surfer, ultra-light-aircraft pilot, hang-glider, subject is athletic and extremely competitive...” In shape. He and Noel would be a handsome couple. He envisioned her posing in the string bikini. Letting Joseph Hackabee see the little spur of bone at the base of her spine, letting him have a little vestigial tail. A little piece of tail. And that was the last time he would ever think of Noel in a sexual context. He shut her out with the booze.

Right now he was grateful more than anything else. Gratitude was his single overriding emotion. He was grateful to God for letting him come through this somehow. And he thought as he drove, God, just let me nail this one, and Lord, I'll never touch another drop of that stuff. Never. Strike me dead if I'm lyin'. And then he caught himself immediately as he framed the thought and apologized to the Lord. God. Forgive me, Heavenly Father, Blessed Heavenly Father. Forgive me for trying to make a deal with you. Thank you, Lord. Just thanks, is all.

He was grateful, too, that he had Donna to look forward to. He wanted to be with her and it amused him that he could think of her now so ... How did he think of her? As such a warm, attractive person, just because she took pity on him? No. She was a good woman. She was decent. He liked her a lot. And they'd both been through similar if totally different ordeals. It seemed to Eichord as if they both had a lot of memories they'd just as soon forget.

This was the same Donna he'd sized up as a hardboiled, invulnerable toughie that it was hard to feel any sympathy for. This was the same Donna whose book he'd judged by its cover, so to speak, without the slightest regard for the content. And this is the Donna who has enough compassion to forgive a copper in whom she couldn't have less interest or for whom she couldn't feel less attracted.

But that I can work on, he thought. And he wondered how some pretty flowers would do for openers. Would she be a flower lady, with a home full of plants and ferny things and a garden and stuff growing everywhere? Would Donna be a flower child?

The Ozarks

The tar-paper shanty stands on an unfarmable piece of ground called Deadman's Cut. Inside two little boys, eyes tearing, noses running, filthy, hear Mah-maw scream again and one reaches out to take the other's hand and they wait behind the feed sacks. They know he will come soon. It is only a matter of time.

The woman, their biological mother, is at the end of her third trimester. It is bad this time.

“CLETUS,” she shrieks again.

The two children shudder and wait. They are just little boys. Extraordinary, to be sure. But nevertheless little boys like any other. Yet in this brutal and depraved environment, in this primitive and evil world of horror, they are treated as freaks.

Because they are identical. Eyes, nose, mouth, even ears. Perfectly formed from the convexities to the concavities, twins so startlingly, shockingly alike their appearance staggers the viewer. But they are just little children. Molested. Tortured. Abused. Their twin lives an unending nightmare of depravity. They wait silently, waiting for the next pain or degradation or moment of terror.

In a world like this, where endogamy is the norm, these twin children are a trick played by the dark forces of nature, a unique gift with endless possibilities for the cruel and perverted mind to explore.

The little boys jump as they hear the familiar slam of the door. It is the sound that means the man has shut the door of his mud-encrusted pickup and soon he will come in the shanty.

The screen door bangs like a gunshot as he stomps in bellowing “Sister—"

“Eh?” A young, heavyset woman sits sprawled on a rump-sprung, worn sofa.

“Git over here, you-uns,” he says, roughly pulling his sister by the hair, and she yelps in pain, making him bark out a laugh as he pushes the shoulder straps of his filthy overalls off, letting it drop around his ankles as he pulls her mouth on to him.

The woman begins to suck on the huge penis that her brother has jammed into her mouth but a paroxysm of pain stabs her swollen belly and she jerks away with a scream of anguish.

“What ‘n Hades wrong with ya now, ya’ bitch sow?"

“UUUhhhhh,” she moans, “it's a comin', Cletus. Do sump'n. AAAAAHHHHHHH!"

“Ah'll do somp’ by dog-swallers,” he says and kicks her viciously in the abdomen. She screams and he laughs raucously, yanking her back on him and ejaculating into her screaming mouth and across her face.

The sister/wife writhes on the floor. It is a size-14 Ozark Workboot abortion. The fetus will be fed to the dogs outside as the twins watch. They will be nurtured in this hellish caldron of incest, madness, and murder.

South Oak Cliff

Eichord had a yellow legal pad in the seat beside him as he drove toward Donna's residence, and he popped the cap off a felt-tipped pen with his teeth, driving with one hand and trying to print with the other.

When he got to a stop sign he looked to see if he could read what he'd been writing on the pad and he saw:

Dallas

He did not remember driving in from the Lido, only parking his vehicle, so absorbed was he in the planning process of the minutes and hours to come. He did his mental homework with the same meticulous concern for detail that he'd exercise the moment when it all started coming down around their ears. Pure copper now, cold and objective. The thing beginning to collapse like so many of the big ones did, as much from the weight of the paperwork as from the skein of unraveling events. Getting very close. And this crazy mother had taken off more people than a plane crash and there were lots more lives at stake. And that's when you sometimes have to take chances and play a little fast and loose.

And Jack moved into high gear, the day sliding along slicker'n possum fat, greased by MCTF and the fates, Eichord playing out his hand with a cop-friendly judge as if it were high-stakes poker. Letting it slide into place with the judge's reticence sending phrases like probable cause and reasonable doubt and civil libertarians flowing along the phone lines like honey. And by noon he had the court order and several other things as well.

There was some trouble about the home entry. The friendly judge wasn't quite all that friendly. There were statutes here and Supreme Court rulings over there and violations of privacy somewhere else, and he'd already gone out on one helluva limb with the drugged-hypnosis thing, so Eichord tap-danced off it and went on to other things.

And he got MacTuff to reach out for him and games were played and probable cause got found, and it's like corruption, it's just part of the Big Picture we're always hearing about, but when you're laying a trap inside the famous Noel goddamn COLLIER residence, ole buddy, you better flat make sure there are some deep dip probables to get you through that door.

“Hello.” Or wait outside in the tall weeds like they do on TV.

“Doc?” And one other thing.

“Yo.” You better make it WORK.

“It's me."

“Right."

“I talked to the judge this morning."

“His honor was cooperative?” he asked hopefully.

“Sure—to a point."

“You and I being friends of the court and all."

“Uh-huh."

“So nu?"

“Let's do it."

“Uh, yes. But you don't sound terribly gung ho about the thing. You fear repercussions? Because if that's it I told you I'd take full—"

“No, no. Not really."

“No?"

“Well. He laid it out for me pretty clear. If it goes badly it doesn't matter one hoot in hell that Ukie gave permission. We're laying the foundation for a nice mistrial."

“I see. And your concern is—as we talked and as I mention in my memo to you on the thing I want to try with Ukie—if he's a party to the murders, as we both believe he could easily be, you could still end up with half a mass-murder team cut loose and on the street.” “It's our only game. Let's go for it."

They wished each other luck and Eichord took an incoming phone call on the next line.

“Mr. Eichord?"

“Yes?"

“Randy Vinson."

“Who?"

“Randy Vinson. I understand you've been trying to reach me."

“Oh, boy. Have I ever. Did you say your name was Vinsa?"

“Vinson.” He spelled it for him.

“That explains some of my problem in finding you. I had been given your name over the phone by Dr. Douglas Geary in Scottsdale, Arizona."

“Oh, yes!” He lit up at Doug's name.

“I worked with Dr. Geary on a murder case a number of years back and he was kind enough to try to help me examine some theoretical possibles that I ran by him. I assume you know about the Grave-digger murders in Dallas?"

“No, sorry, I haven't seen a television set in weeks. I'm doing some research work here in Switzerland and I don't know what's going on back in the States.” Eichord took him through a précis of the Hackabee case. When he hit the word “twins” it was like he'd stepped on a trip wire, and Dr. Vinson began speaking very rapidly, machine-gun fast and in a precise monotone of words Eichord didn't know. “Are these monozygotic or dizygotic,” it sounded like he was saying, and there was a long question in which the only word longer than two syllables that Jack recognized was “monovular.” Slowly, he had Vinson take him back through it and was able to answer the question. The twins were maternal twins. From a single egg. Clinical definition: monozygotic. Identical twins.

“What do you want to know?” the doctor asked.

“Lots. For example, what about a possibility of a neural pathway or plateau that would link the two twins?” He doodled Os.

“Not a possibility. It's a certainty. Absolutely."

“Just so I'll understand. How do you know?” OOO interlinked.

“The information is just coming out now. The results of years and years of research and careful testing. We're just releasing the findings. And I must tell you the findings about twins and crime are VERY spooky.” The first O becomes a P. S-POO-KY

“Did you say SPOOKY?” He remembers both Ukie and Joe saying it.

“'Fraid I did. No other word for it. Were the Hackabee twins raised apart?"

“First of all I'm not sure. I only have their word so far. The, one who is in custody claims they were together through their formative years but has been rather vague about the point where they went their separate ways. I'm not certain offhand what the other twin says. There may be a secret background of molestation. So far we can't be certain of their background. There's obvious animosity."

“Well. That doesn't necessarily mean much. Our studies showed that the environment was vital in the twins’ personality structuring, perhaps more than that of the same environment on a non-twin, but until you have third-person source corroboration there's no point in basing anything on your data. Twins scheme. They lie. Contrive. Criminal twins have a profile that is complex and interlocking beyond anything we've imagined."

“Is this telepathy thing in twins for real or is it somebody's fantasy theory or what?"

“Is there hard evidence to substantiate that there is a telepathic element stronger in single-egg twins or twins in general, than in non-twins? Monos, absolutely. You have the identical internal structure. I mean barring some birth accident, you're talking about the exact same chromosomes, genes, and the,—-” Another sentence came out that has to be translated. It was almost a parallel of listening to Ukie. Something, something, zygomorphic, bilaterally symmetrical something. RNA. Recombinant something. And Jack had made the mistake of asking him to explain one of the words and he almost choked in the deluge of chromatinic, polymerized nucleic this, and the basophilic bodies of the cell that, and the protamine or histone the other thing. Finally, Jack thought he had the beginnings of a grasp.

“How real is the ability to manipulate telepathically?"

“For a one-ovum twin it is as real as real can be. Remember, even without an aggression/passivity syndrome going you have that perfectly matched structure. The minds think alike. Work alike. Even in cases of identicals raised apart they'll choose the same color schemes, name their kitty cats the same names, everything is similar. The neural thing—the pathway you ask about—anybody has this. The problem is we can only seem to utilize it when strong, dominant, negative happenings trigger the avenue of thought. Illness. Pain. Imminent danger. Death. Think of the occasions where you've heard of or experienced something approximating the transmission or reception of so-called telepathic communication. It's been where threat, or illness, or pain, or death has been involved."

“That's true. Especially death or danger to a loved one."

“So with monozygotics imagine that you took one person and sawed them in two. A copy. Identical from face to fingerprint patterns to footprint similarities. Now stir in something negative.

“If you had the neural structure we're talking about with monozygotic twins, the chromosomes, the RNA, everything is dictating identical forensics, barring as I said birth accident, and the environmental influences, you have the perfect background for a telepathic potential to exist."

“How does one manipulate over the other?"

“That's the part nobody can really define. Through charisma, strength, that quirk that makes one's desire to dominate more emphasized, through whatever channel of energy the one-half of the same-egg twin can quite literally influence the thought patterns of the other, weaker half. It's a forcing-through of information. Very rare and as I told you one of the spooky things we've learned about the identical criminally psychotic twins. But the interaction is there. It's fact, not fancy."

“You said a birth accident. What would that do? Give me a scenario where the birth accident or the environmental situation might create a mass murderer."

“There's a thousand ways. A very plausible one would be anoxia. If one of the single-ovum identicals had a very brief cutoff, not long enough for complete brain impairment, but for just that split second necessary to accomplish it, the one might be missing something that he or she would have had with the proper oxygen supply to the brain—and just that moment's damage wiped it out."

“What would that something be?"

“A conscience,” he said quietly—the line perfect all the way from Switzerland to Dallas, not a whisper of noise.

“Would that also explain sexual anomaly such as one finds in an exhibitionist?"

“Not so likely. Perversion, inversion, whatever—it all comes from the pleasure thing. Learned pleasure. It felt good before this way let's do it again. Something learned in childhood. You tried on your mother's dress and loved it. The smell of the perfume. The feel of the silk as you wobbled about in her high heels. Remembered pleasure in tandem with guilt. An extremely intricate interweaving."

“The anoxia thing, or whatever caused one of the two twins to want to dominate over the other, and the reverse ... How would that manifest itself in the individual? Are there signs? Is there a profile of the type of aggressive, strong, criminally psychotic type twin we've been talking about? What can I look for?"

“Obviously you know who he is, the question you've got to resolve is, What he is? Or what SHE is if you have twin sisters. In your case, the Hackabees, you look to the successful, influential brother. If he's a loner, if he was a hyper-type kid, or if you can still see some of those signals, if he's got some unusual pressure valves—"

“Like flying ultra-light planes, hang-gliding, things like that?"

“Sure. Real loner personality. Manipulative. You'll at least know that you're dealing with a very dangerous breed of cat."

“I've gotta ask you one question. What about...” And Jack mentioned the name of an infamous mass killer whom he only knew from print and television.

The doctor laughed wildly and said, “He's exactly where he should be—death row."

“That's what I heard."

“Yeah. That's the most dangerous son of a bitch I've ever come anywhere near. They need to put him to sleep as soon as possible. Like your killer or killers there, not an ounce of conscience in him. Totally without even a flicker of remorse."

Eichord apologized for taking up so much time and then as an afterthought he mentioned a drug and asked him, “Have you heard about this?"

“I guess so"—he chuckled again—"since I was on the team that tested it for the company."

“Sorry. I didn't realize. But please, what's your off-the-record opinion of it insofar as a drug-induced or -supplemented hypnotic situation might be made use of? Any general feelings?"

“Not an easy question. The whole area of narcoanalysis for criminal interrogation is back in another Twilight Zone category. We started out back in the LSD-25, Mescaline years. My feeling is that...” And a tide of words and phrases like “diencephalic and cortical anesthetization” and “id and superego” and “scopolamine hydrobromide” rose, and it kept rising and Jack was dogpaddling for his canoe by the time the conversation drew to an end. And praying it didn't have a hole in the bottom.

Over North Dallas

The fields were barren now and this low he could enjoy them and savor their emptiness. Cattle ranches. Some farmland. Big, open pastures fenced by countless miles of barbed wire. It was cold and he pulled the face mask down at the top so only his eyes were visible. He wore insulated, long underwear tucked into his flying boots, two pairs of thermal socks on his feet. Black leather pants. Woolen turtleneck under his black leather jacket, which he'd had custom made for him without the requisite zillion zippers. Lined gloves. Ski mask. The icy cold still reached through and chilled him and he welcomed it. It kept him alert. Things were so easy for him always. He liked anything that would zing that a bit—challenge him—keep him on edge. He enjoyed the cold.

He always loved her but especially on days like this. She was his woman and he thought of it as feminine. And on days like this; cold, metallic, the white of the clouds so clean, the sky blue-gray like gunmetal, strapped close to her and touching her controls so gently, feeling the source of her power and movement between his legs, feet spread on her pedals, kissed by the unforgiving wind and frigidity, she was thoroughly his lady.

He understood how a city could be your woman. Or how you could love a sailboat. But landlocked “legs” had no idea what a full-blown, true, wild love affair was. They were incomplete. Up here in the arms of your lady—that's where the freedom was. This is what life was all about—up above the dirt and the mundane lives of the prosaic and pitiful pedestrian.

There was a beautiful hawk soaring to the west and he banked gently so he could watch its patterns, and she carried him majestically over the fields and ribbon of highway below, so far above the filth and ordinariness of the homes where people eked out their pathetic existences, and he thought of the two of them as enjoying the freedom of the hawk, an elitist thing, the soaring, unfettered, untouchable open kingdom of flight.

Cold and clean. The cars and houses but passing blights on the landscape. He didn't give his dwindling gas supply a second thought. Took his time enjoying the soaring, spread-winged hawk as it dived above the rodents so far below, thinking how much he had in common with the diurnal predator. He stayed far enough above the bird that it did not immediately seek to escape the larger black dacron thing that soared royally above it.

Soon the hawk's survival instincts kicked in and something, some sixth sense, told the creature that it should flee, pick a more propitious dinner-table field where human eyes were not observing, and it soared then cut back and slid gracefully out of sight and camouflaged itself in the dark stand of tall trees. He understood about camouflage. It was an art and a science to which he was, to understate it, an ardent and lifelong devotee. He admired the way nature had provided a protective escape route for the wonderfully graceful bird.

It was icy cold. Windy. Down below he saw a pond and a collection of ducks seeking shelter from the wind under a bridge, feeding calmly in the midst of a herd of black Angus. As he flew overhead, the ducks wisely waddled toward the bridge's center, instinctively warned of a sudden, approaching danger. He admired the lessons to be learned from hawk and ducks. He felt some affinity for birds, as he did for fish.

He let himself almost play her out of juice and then he headed for an open field near a place he'd seen a ways back. The field was beside a highway that adjoined a county road, and he'd seen the pumps out in front of a small service station. He found the field and it was long and open so he allowed himself the luxury of a gentle and hawklike landing approach, letting the ultra-light ease itself down closer and closer to the soil until finally, bump, the wheels gently touched and he eased her on down, taxiing perfectly across the fairly level ground.

He took a small container and unstrapped himself, extricating his six-feet-plus from the leather bucket seat and killing her engine. He glanced at his watch as he sprinted across the road to the gas station. Helped himself to one of the regular pumps. Exchanged a few faked amenities with some moron who came out to investigate the stranger helping himself to the full-service-aisle gas, paid for his fuel, and was back filling her tank, adding quicksilver, which she preferred to oil, and checking his autopilot.

He had devised the autopilot himself. Sometime, he was concerned, the feelings might hit him while he was aloft. The few times he'd felt anything he'd been able to control it and nothing had ever happened, but he knew how unpredictable and how sudden the feelings could hit. When they came over him he wanted to make sure he would not overcontrol his ultra-light and stall her before he could check himself, and he'd devised an autopilot by utilizing a common bungee thing he'd bought at a K-Mart for sixty-nine cents—and what started life as a tie-down strap ended up as a sophisticated autopilot. He was always inventing things. It was second nature for him.

He had an automatic starter but he preferred to “prop” her by hand, enjoying the added intimacy as he held the wooden propeller running his fingers over the beautifully formed surfaces, sliding his hand down along her and remembering the time she'd playfully bitten him. An oafish mechanic was in her bucket and she had chastized him for letting a stranger touch her like that, when he'd made contact—just as he'd propped her, the idiot had shifted his weight momentarily, lifting his butt from the bucket, and she'd angrily nosed forward two inches, biting him deeply on a finger, her wooden tooth sinking down to the bone to let him know she did not approve.

He got back into her, buckled the belt across him, and sorted through a large container of maps in the leather pouch fastened beside him; Farmer's Branch, Carrolton, Richardson, Mesquite, he found the one he was looking for and put it in place by the control surface, fastening it there with alligator clips. He knew he'd find the woman's home from the air as easily as you'd find it in your car. He prided himself on the unerring accuracy of his personal gyro. He pulled the ski mask back on, making a mental note to remove it and put it away BEFORE he landed. No point in suggesting any sinister images.

He touched a few controls, changed the mixture, choked her slightly then ran her all the way up to her roaring, wide-open maximum. He had changed her from a 40 to a 60 horse when he first bought her, and added various refinements, and within a couple of seconds he had her already trying to get her sleek nose up and then—zzzzoooooommmmmm—he let her loose and she lifted up, clearing the tree line and the power lines easily, and his foot moved slightly and she changed her course and soon the open fields gave way to suburbs and tract home rooftops and then to the subtle and then not so subtle look of North Dallas, and Highland Park, and sculptured, huge lawns, and, reminding him of River Oaks, a plethora of blue concrete in the backyards-pools, every size and shape—and then before long banking over some homes where he imagined the woman lived and flying in a low strafe over the big houses, and her little stick figure visible below as she came outside, running slowly from the house and waving at him, and he put on his public face and gritted his teeth for another confrontation and dropped down over the lines and into her yard, almost instantly killing the power as he rolled to a noisy stop a few feet from her.

“Hi,” he could hear her say, and he smiled as he unbuckled and ducked under the low wing.

“Did I scare you?” She was visibly shaken.

“Yeah—a little,” she lied. “My God, I thought you were going to hit me, I mean you know, you were coming right at me—"

That's kind of an optical illusion. No. I wasn't anywhere near you, actually. It's sort of like parking a car, it's rather intimidating but once you get the feel et cetera. No big deal. So. Isn't she pretty?” He looked at her as he gestured to the plane, implying that he thought she was pretty or so she wanted to believe.

Joe had moved out of the hotel on Turtle Creek, moving near the woman. Allowing her to think it was her idea, letting her find him a suitable rental, taking it through another name for security they agreed and that being done through a blind corporation title sometimes utilized for such purposes by Jones-Seleska. He had shown her how they might carefully make their way to the new “hideaway” and enjoy each other's company free from the prying, inquisitive eyes of media and police.

He cannot take much more of this woman, although she is physically attractive. He functions heterosexually by evoking certain images, but there is no great thrill for him, for example, in the magic erogenous zone of fatty tissue on the female pubic symphysis. He is excited by darker lusts.

In his mind he belongs to another time. He often fantasizes about ancient times. When inventive people killed by means of a strappado machine. He vows that he will one day do likewise as time and circumstances permit. His joys are in the suffering and extinguishing of human lives. He luxuriates in the anguish of others.

He dreamed last night of a variant of the strappado and he willed himself to remember the design upon awakening. During the dream he considered “picturing,” which is what he calls the process by which he takes his weak and cringing brother to the neural pathway for a bit of mental-torture fun and games. He loves to hear his brother's pathetic scream. He always has. But for the time being he must exercise a degree of restraint.

As long as he has memory—age three, he thinks—he has controlled the destiny of his weaker twin. By “picturing,” by allowing his mind to penetrate through to the other half of his being, he is able to send whatever imagery pleases him. He can take control of William Hackabee's mind effortlessly, holding it in his grasp for as long as he chooses, making his sniveling, brother Bill experience the most exquisite tortures and humiliations.

Several years ago Joseph Hackabee let himself experiment with his lifelong fantasy: that of actually taking a human life and getting away with it. For a number of years he killed sparingly. But then the feelings the hot desires the overpowering needs for the act of random murder began to assail him at every turn. He made a plan and began to lay groundwork for a plausible scapegoat: his loathsome and weak sibling.

By surreptitiously inserting himself into the Dallas—Fort Worth area he was able to carefully structure a plan of grave sites and underwater locations where he could hide some of the dozens of victims. Others, he would show in the “picturing,” and then he would create an irresistible scenario into which Bill could then be placed. He knew his other half inside out. Knew that Bill could never extricate himself. And he would find the lure of notoriety impossible to resist.

The plan worked beautifully. It was only because of the intrusion of this—this woman. What a bothersome thing she'd become. She was dangerous. He would have to cause her to disappear. Soon.

They are inside and she is telling him about criminal intent and insanity and his subliminal processes begin winking signs of warning to his survival system. He sees Noel Collier as a stumbling block. She must be eradicated.

But now she moves toward him and he fakes his beautiful smile that so inflames her and the soft whispered endearments and does what he knows he must for the moment, what he has done since his infancy when he learned to please on command, hoping to survive another day of bewildering torture, he forces the thoughts necessary to stimulate his twisted, sick libido and relies on his fine body to come through as it so often does, the testes putting out the testosterone, the system blocking off the cortisol, his inner autopilot keeping him on course as he knows it will always do.

And slowly, subtly, he works to pry, nudge, coax, unbalance, tease, titillate, suggest, hint, infer, soft and gentle cadences making her trust him and like him, the richness of his voice making her want his mouth and the promise of what he says he wishes to do to her, and she melts under his experienced and brilliant touch, and he will have her to. himself soon and then he will make this bitch pay.

Dallas

Dog had spent the night in the sling chair, and as Jack got out of bed to let it outside, he scrawled a note for himself to find a good home for it and brushed against the unread medical abstracts. He glanced at the point where he'd stopped reading, where another logjam of technical mumbo-jumbo had collided with his lack of scientific training, and he'd passed over pages of “chorion” and “placenta” and “intrauterine” and “superfetation” to words and phrases better understood.

The last thing he remembered reading was the part about the physical criteria for determining monovular twins. The part about how their ears and teeth should be alike, that the hair color, texture and thickness be the same, their eyes identical in color, the same skin color and texture (had Joseph gone the Mantan route?), blood typing, et cetera, and he'd left off reading where the words “etiology” and “dichorionic placenta” appeared in the same sentence.

He tried to focus on the paragraph again, and “arteriovenous” and “polycythemic” slammed into his brain and he read “most twins are born prematurely, and maternal complications of pregnancy are more common than with single pregnancies.... Theoretically, the second twin is more subject to anoxia than is the first because of the possibility that...” and as he detuned he remembered something that Dr. Vinson had said about a split-second cutoff. A moment's damage that could wipe out a human conscience. And for the first time he thought there might actually be something in all that hocus-pocus about thought manipulation on a neural pathway.

And frighteningly he recalled the Hackabee story of an orphanage fire, and a pair of foster parents long dead, and the entire alumni of that Branson agency coincidentally deceased—save for the old gentleman who'd fortuitously found his way to Alaska, perhaps just in time, and Eichord felt a cold stab of deep and very real fear. If Joseph Hackabee was the killer, he would be an extremely lethal adversary.

He drove in to work early, stoked on adrenaline rush, fear, and the sense of a mounting climax. Not a nervousness or even a professional apprehension so much as a feeling of icy resolve. It was nearly there. The hard evidence would soon fall into place or there would be none. It was as much in the hands of the team, task-force computers and people now working in faraway cities, the vast resources of MacTuff, as it was his.

An irony was that the racial situation had vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The press were back on the president's case, and with no new corpses, the best that media could do with the Grave-digger was to ponder some conspicuously missing persons in the Plano area. The tabloids had a Jackie-O in Noel Collier, and her beautiful face and flamboyant track record continued to appear whenever the Grave-digger updates got more print space and air time.

As Eichord drove to work he tried to get inside the head of the man in question. He worked to resolve the disparity between Le Face of Joe Hackabee and The Man. The mask he wore was all but impenetrable. For a handsome, talented, brilliant, successful and seemingly well-adjusted citizen to be, in private, a mass murderer—it was a tough sell. True, a couple of the perps who had taken down big numbers of young women had been in fact physically attractive and, at least superficially, “normal’ in their life-styles. But this was something else, this Hackabee thing. The sheer numbers alone made it so difficult for a sane person to fathom.

He'd barely parked his car and walked in the building when Mandel said, “Jack?” The voice had a sharp, serious edge of urgency.

“Oh, hello,” he said to the bulky figure standing in the doorway of the homicide squad room.

“Check it out,” Dr. Mandel said, laying a folder in front of him. He opened the file and saw Ukie's personal bio, titled Minnesota Multi-Phasic Personality Inventory. “Okay,” Mandel said, reading over his shoulder, “skip all this here"—he reached around Eichord and flipped past the lengthy history, past a Stanford-Binet—"here."

Eichord began to read the summary of the drug-induced test on SUBJECT: Mr. William Hackabee. He speedread word blocs about Ukie's very real fantasies. About his lack of a boundary between fantasy and reality. His fragile, schizophrenic personality, his frightening illusions of extreme power and terrorized vulnerability. He read Mandel's conclusions about Ukie's delusions and paranoia, and what he had said under drug-induced hypnosis. It sat him bolt upright in the chair and then he was pushing away from the desk even as he finished the paragraph.

“Where's the vid—” he started to say, but a nodding Dr. Mandel had anticipated him and placed the black cassette box in his hand. They headed for the monitor room, Sue Mandel telling him, “It was chancy, it was a gamble, but damn ... this new stuff is dynamite with pentathol, and it's super-potent. Opens up the old neural doors,” he told Eichord as he looked at him with a meaningful glare. They went in and Jack took out the tape and placed it in the machine, turning the power on and adjusting the controls.

The tape was marked and slated like a real movie, and then there was a period while the camera focused on Ukie, who appeared to be heavy-lidded but awake, and he heard Mandel's voice slightly off-mike saying, “Bill, how do you feel?"

“Fine.” Ukie slurring the word. Fine sounding like “hiiiii."

“Are you comfortable?"

Eichord adjusted the volume up slightly. The doctor spoke to Ukie in quiet, reassuring tones as he began.

“Yes. Fine."

“Just relax, Bill."

“Relax.” (We-laaaahhhh.)

“You know I'm a doctor. And I'm your friend. I'm here to make you feel better.” Mandel's voice getting louder.

“Better."

“You're a little boy, Bill. And we want to know how you feel. Tell the doctor how you feel. Are you sick?” Emphasizing the last three words.

“No."

“You're not sick, are you?” A very loud voice now.

“No. I'm not sick."

“Are you hurt?” Mandel's voice like a steel chisel.

“Yes. Hurt."

“Where do you hurt, Bill?” Insistent.

“Here. Privates."

“Do you hurt in your privates, Bill?"

“Yes."

“Why do you hurt in your privates?"

“They hurt me there."

“Who, Bill?” No answer. “Who hurts you in your privates?"

“They do."

“Who hurts you in your privates, Bill?"

“Ma and Pa hurt us there."

“Ma and Pa hurt who there?"

“Yes.” The jaw fell slack.

“Ma and Pa hurt us there."

“Yes."

“Hurt Bill and ... who else?"

“Hurt Bill and Joe."

“How do they hurt you there?"

“No.” His face was contorted as he spoke. Words slurred.

“If you tell me how Ma and Pa hurt you I can make you feel better."

“Better."

“Yes. Much better. Now tell how Ma and Pa hurt you and Joe in your privates."

“No. Can't tell.” He was starting to move.

“Just relax, Bill."

“Relax."

“How do they hurt Bill and Joe?” Ukie shook his head violently. Mandel stayed with it a little longer but he seemed to be losing Ukie so he got him comfortable, relaxed, quieted down, and said, “Bill, you're a big boy now. All grown up. You feel much better."

Ukie smiled a heavy-lidded smile and nodded, “Yes."

“You feel so much better now."

“Yes."

“Bill, you like the doctor, because you know I'm your friend."

“Friend."

“Bill, I'm here to make you feel better."

“Yes. Better."

“Tell the doctor how you feel.. Are you sick?"

“Siiiiiiiiigh,” it sounded like he said.

"Are ... you ... sick?"

“Mmmmmmmm.” Not a word, more of a moan.

“Tell the doctor, Bill, are ... you ... sick?"

“Nnnn."

"ARE YOU SICK?” Mandel shouting so loudly it scared Eichord.

“Mmm,” grunted out, Ukie's head slumped over. Jaw slack.

“Bill. Talk to me, Bill.” Still in a very loud voice.

“Nnnnnn.” He seemed to be saying no.

“This is a crucial point,” Mandel said to Eichord as he continued to get only minimal and monosyllabic noises from Hackabee. “You have to take the subject just to that point where he can still function and keep him out there on the edge of the razor. When you're dealing with a new drug like this, and someone like Ukie, you have a lot of variables at work. Now he starts to come around a little and I bring him back but of course that's the meat and taters that you just saw.” His voice was loud and persistent as it came from the speaker system, “Tell me, Bill."

“Yeah,” more like a response this time.

“Bill—I'm here to make you feel good."

“Yes. Good."

“Are you sick, Bill?"

“Nnnnnn."

“Tell the doctor. Are you sick now, Bill? You're all grown up now. How do you feel now?” No answer.

“Are ... you ... sick?"

“Sometimes."

“What does sick mean, Bill?"

“Don't feel good."

“When you don't feel good, where do you hurt, Bill?"

“Head. Head hurts."

“Why does your head hurt?"

“Hurts real bad."

“Why does your head hurt, Bill?” Nothing. “You're all grown up, Ukie. Ukie is a man, now."

“Fine.” So the brothers had come from a background of child molestation.

“Ukie, how do you feel?"

“Fine?"

“Are you sick?"

“Yes."

Eichord had been riveted to his chair by the admission of Ukie's.

“Ukie, tell the doctor why you're sick."

“Angioneurotic edema, anaphylaxis, anaphylactoid purpura, treponema pertenue, renal impairment, intestinal amebiasis, systemic lipus erythematosus, chlamydia trachomatis, pericarditis, endocervical—"

“Ukie, tell the doctor where you saw those words."

“Words. On a paper thing."

“Do you like to memorize words?"

“Yes. ‘Member words."

Eichord sat motionless.

“Do you hurt in your head, Ukie?"

“Yes, bad there. Hurt bad."

Jack was still nailed by the admission.

“How do you hurt in your head, Ukie?"

“Comes inside to do things."

Jack almost regarded anything else he'd hear as anticlimactic now. This was hard, clinical evidence. Inadmissible or not, it was sufficient.

“No,” slurring the word, his face a contortion of terror. There was no faking this. Ukie Hackabee was scared shitless.

“Tell me about the thing, Ukie—” And Mandel hung in there for a while but it was taking its toll on Ukie, who appeared to have clammed up for good. By the time the doctor brought the session to an end Hackabee's face was streaked with tears. He appeared to be a genuinely tormented man.

“Jesus.” Eichord felt the cold stab of fear.

“Want me to go back and play the part where he says that about Ma and Pa hurting them?"

“No, thanks. I've seen everything I need for now."

“As soon as he's rested I'm going to take him under again and ask him about the killings. I'll wager he'll say he didn't do them."

“Any chance he could be faking the responses?"

“Almost none. The drug is extremely powerful. When he was regressing, the little boy who had been hurt in his Privates—you're getting the truth as he remembers it. There's an almost nonexistent chance that he could have been preprogrammed to respond in a certain way but the odds would be greatly against it. This is an experimental drug that has been used on so-called brainwashed prisoners and what little evidence is in indicates it's a breakthrough deal. I think we can put stock in the tape."

“The conclusions being that Ukie and his twin were abused or molested children.” It had hit Jack so hard he had to force himself to get up and move.

“Right."

“Okay.” He felt like a crushingly heavy weight had just been placed on him, and he knew then, as he moved into action, how much danger Noel Collier was in.

“If Ukie's thoughts are open to his brother,” he asked the doctor, who was following him as he walked quickly toward the squad room, “I wonder how much danger he's in."

“Ukie you mean?"

“Yeah."

“I don't know."

“If he can take Ukie on this neural thing, can he pick his brain? Can he ask him about what he's told you? Will he have a way to probe and find out about the narcoanalysis session?"

“We have to assume he already knows. Yes."

“Can he force Ukie onto the neural pathway anytime he wants?"

“Who knows? It seems that he can."

“Could he force him to commit suicide?"

“Huh uh. I don't think so. I don't think he can force so much as emphasize and suggest. He can put ideas in Ukie's head the same way posthypnotic suggestion operates. He can underscore. Reinforce something that Ukie already thinks or something where he may be vulnerable or highly susceptible or easily influenced. I have trouble buying the mind-over-matter aspect. I just don't know. You can't rule anything out here, We're dealing with a unique and brand-new situation virtually without precedent,” he said as they went in the room and Eichord headed for his telephone.

Jack started to dial then stopped for a second and looked at Mandel and said, “Thing I don't get is the MO. A genius IQ. A man from a horror-filled background of molestation that somehow turned him into a mass murderer. The possibility of a birth disorder of some kind such as ... One suggestion was anoxia. Something goes wrong and creates a kind of conscienceless monster. His rage can be slaked only by taking lives. He hates his twin, whom he's always been able to influence, so he goes through disguises and all that rigmarole to create an airtight, elaborate frame that puts the abduction, rape, and conning of Donna Scannapieco into motion. But his next actions ... That's where I get fuzzy."

“How so?"

“He calls US, putting HIMSELF in the picture. Why the hell do that? He could have stayed in Houston. Gone to Cleveland on vacation. You name it. Why insert yourself into the thing when you KNOW you'd become a number-one suspect because of your tie to the primary suspect in custody, Ukie?"

“Whom he knew he could control as he always had. He was on top of it all the way. Even staying in the shadows of his twin's mind. Convincing Ukie that the buried bodies were the work of a taller man, tall as a basketball player. Making himself even more inhuman and invulnerable by the absence of an identity in Ukie's head."

“Yeah, but why put yourself into it at all unnecessarily and THEN on top of everything go to one of the best law firms in the state and latch on to the top defense lawyer? Why give your object of the frame that much of a shot at getting off scot-free? Makes no sense."

“Sure it does,” the doctor said. “What would be the quickest way to divert suspicion from yourself? Come from the most positive point on the compass. A model of cooperation. The devoted brother who wants the finest legal representation money can buy. It was the smartest thing he could have done. I'm sure he convinced himself of that when he was envisioning the way the headlines would look. What I want to know is how did he manipulate Ukie, to the point of digging a grave?"

“Right,” Eichord said, dialing a number.

“That's where this thing loses me. It's hard enough to come to grips with the phenomenon of thought manipulation and telepathy on this kind of a scale, but when you change a physical situation—when you actually put the shovel in Ukie's hands—then you start to lose me."

“Go,” Eichord said into the phone and hung up. Dialing again. Saying to Mandel, “Maybe Ukie was telling us the truth. He wanted to see if the thoughts he was getting in his nightmares were for real.” He began talking on the phone, “Wally. We've got everything we need so far as sufficient cause to protect Noel Collier's life. Dr. Mandel's drug-induced session with Ukie Hackabee indicates both he and Joseph Hackabee were sexually molested children. It's...” There was a pause as Michaels spoke, interrupting him, and Jack replied, “Yes. Circumstantial. But that's still sufficient that we have to move. I mean it meets the life-threatening criteria, He's going to know by now. She's in grave peril. We've got to find her and isolate them, he's certain to be close to her. And we have to do it without tipping him off.” A pause. “No, that's out. Too much chance he'd find out. I need you to personally shepherd this thing through Jones-Seleska. Try to find out where they've gone. The thing we need to do is isolate them wherever they are or get her to return home long enough that we can protect her.” Pause. “Right. I've just put them in place.

“Okay. I'm going to go through the motions of trying to contact Hackabee, and we'll play it by ear from there. I'm going on into the house immediately and hope they'll have some reason to come back. Maybe Noel will come in to get some clothes or something."

Joe would be weaving his spell now. Moving in on her in some secluded location under the guise of the two of them escaping from the glare of the notoriety attending the case. He'd have to act fast. Today or tomorrow at the latest. She'd be wanting to contact Ukie again soon and he'd only be able to keep her out of circulation for a few hours.

Jack phoned Hackabee and wasn't surprised he had checked out of the Mansion, leaving his California forwarding address, and that he could be contacted during the interim through Jones-Seleska. The legal firm had instructions to hold all communications official or not. Only one other person besides Noel knew where the safe house was and he was out of the country and unreachable.

There was no more time. Jack gathered up his emergency kit such as it was and walked to the door, glanced around the room a final time, shrugged, and headed for his unmarked car and a lonely ride.

Time did what it always does so well. It ticked away.

0817: Eichord is driving. The level of paranoia begins to rise in the nocuous flood of changing events and swiftly moving data stream. The car, heading on a more or less septentrional course, goes with the flow, Highland Parkbound, Jack Eichord powerless in the whirlpool of occurrences.

He is suddenly quite afraid, and thankful there are task-force personnel on the scene. It could be lots worse. He could be on the job alone, heading for a house where a killer might be inside and waiting for him.

0851: The first of eleven phone calls is placed to Eichord at the Dallas cop shop. Michaels fields the calls as agreed. He will not relay the contents of any of the phone conversations so it will be much later, and of little significance, when it becomes commonly shared knowledge that

A. The Branson hospital records, like so much else in this case, turn out to have mysteriously disappeared. It was as if the Houtcheson family had vanished from the face of the planet. And that itself is but one alarming, isolated scrap in a shadowy paper trail of dark coincidental death and disappearance.

B. 1500: Midafternoon, the most important of the calls coming in to Jack, nominally, is from a Wyckerly Asylum. An employee matching the shot of the twins’ image had disappeared subsequent to a rash of unexplained deaths of patient/inmates. The man's references, primarily a recommendation by the chief of staff of another mental hospital, turned out to be spurious. “Jon Hinderman” a/k/a half of the Houtcheson-Hackabee siblings, was only a hazy memory. All trace of him obliterated.

Eichord would learn none of this, severed as he was from the mother task force by all but a slim, invisible umbilical of a two-way transmitter-receiver to the cops out beyond the perimeter of the trap. But the transceiver was an emergency unit only. The rule will be absolute radio silence. There will be no eyeball surveillance extrinsic to the Collier home. Hackabee is too devious and bright. The house must look squeaky clean.

1930: Eichord waits quietly. Prone. Behind the sofa. Relaxed as much as conditions permit. Not bored. Not scared but it's getting a little hairy now. He really thought that Noel would show before now, It's one thing to wait in an empty house alone, waiting in the sun-streaked shadows of a late afternoon. But it's quite another to wait in an envelope of darkness for hours on end. The smallest creaks sound like footsteps. The floor lamps begin to resemble the silhouettes of gunmen. He will wait, according to plan, until 2400. If she has not made an appearance he will change places with Don Duncan, who is in a surveillance van two blocks away.

But they are not coming. Not yet. Joseph Hackabee, in the hopes of averting another session of lovemaking, has set the woman on a course of conversation about Ukie and the legal battle she plans to wage in his behalf. Two hours of this have passed and Joseph is so bored by it that he opts for a sexual intermission as the lesser of evils. At 2110 he has had his fill of the woman had he decides enough is enough. He will put her under now.

The home has a large Olympic-type pool and tennis court. There are two nicely appointed poolside cabanas, and in one of them he has ripped up the floor of the utility area off the laundry room and painstakingly created a shallow but adequate coffin to house the 112-pound corpse of Ms. Noel, adequately covered in a shroud of lye. He enjoys the tingling appropriateness of interring her within the Jones-Seleska safe house. Noel is standing beside him in a white bikini with matching heels and he says, “Darling, I'm so famished. I've got to have some nourishment before I can go on,” whispering to her in that gentle, teasing tone, and she leans up on tiptoe flicking a long wet tongue into his mouth.

“You want something good and nourishing ... to eat?” she teases him back as she kisses him.

“Yeah, darlin',” he breathes in a husky approximation of faked desire.

“I'd have thought you would have eaten your fill.” She slurps his mouth again.

How tiresome this creature is, he thinks. “To be sure. But right now a sandwich is in order. Must refuel the old tanks.” He takes her head in his strong hands, resisting the temptations that well up within him. “Be a love and go rustle us up some grub. Anything. Meanwhile, I want to try out the wet bar in here. Drinkie sound good?"

“Anything you say, lover.” And she gives him her drink order, another wet kiss, and trots off fetchingly to prepare his feast, the obedient, wiggling, jiggling, bikinied maid. She goes around the pool, casting her tall, curvaceous shadow into the floodlit water. Any other man would have but one thought. Only lust at the sight of her. But Joseph goes into the cabana thinking, I'll have earned this one. He smiles to himself, whistling softly.

He will take her under right there in the Jones-Seleska pool. Watch her fight him as she goes through the ballet of reflexive laughter and disbelief, anger, fear, surprise, panic terror, death awareness. Be watching her fill her lungs with pool water and chlorine as she screams in a shock wave of mindless struggling, her voice muffled by the water, laughing at her as she fights without hope. He will show her the penalty for having forced her foul affections on him. He will show this pretentious female scum the dues to be extracted from one who would interfere with his plans. He will make this bitch pay, he laughs to himself, through the nose so to speak, as she feels every sensation of her impending death.

But she is there watching him prepare a hiding place in the floor, an excavation the size of a body, and she comes within a hair's breadth of speaking, of asking him to explain what it is he's doing making that hole in the nice floor and why the lye sacks but oh my GOD no she knows that she is looking at a burial place even though the signals to her brain have not arrived yet and the overload of information freezes time for her momentarily and she is on Central Standard Opium Time now, time that stops completely. Halts. Ceases ticking. Comes to a dead end. Tick.... Nothing. Then time reverses. Goes backward, rewinding sooooooooo slllloooooowwwwwlllly-kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk-ccccccccccccccccccccc ccccc-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-TTTTTTTTTT! And a foot stops in midstride. She has come in to change her choice of potables, a woman's eternal prerogative: to change her mind. And she comes in soundlessly through recently oiled hinged doors coming in the cabana and in a quick take her mind puts her body on Opium Time and it is in this first microsecond that her time-shifting brain saves her lovely butt because as she opened her mouth to speak Opium Time freezes her face and it would take thirty seconds to say the first word of her soundless query, “W H A T” in real time, so she has plenty of opportunity to stop the movement of the foot in midstride, making that fraction of a second rewind as some miracle of survival instinct warns her and she kicks off her shoes and the former tomboy Noel is backing out, creeping out of the room just the way she came in, afraid even to swallow, time now

starting to

slooooooooooowwwwwwwwwllllllllyyyyyyyyy move

forward again

oh no no NOOOOOOO

don't start moving yet TICK Oh Godddddddddd TICK

TICK TICKTICKTICK moving now and she is running like hell for the car knowing deep inside that for days she has made love to a man who is who is oh oh oh oh ooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhGodnoohno no no no inside her secret heart she knows that she is running from DEATH! Running behind her now she can hear the footfalls thudding behind her and mindless of the pain she runs barefooted across the drive and oh jeez the keys are inside in my purse she thinks and then no she remembers the emergency key in the small metal thing under the bumper and she snatches at the magnetic box and it won't come loose and she feverishly rips it off, ripping her long blood-red nails in the process, and fumbles with the key, lurching in behind the wheel and smashing the door locks down as she grinds the ignition on, his hand grabbing the door just as she locks it, his arm back in a killing mode as she guns the motor, smashing out with a deadly elbow as she tromps the accelerator peeling out in a scrrrrreeeeeeee of smoking tires as, the window beside her spider tracks in a heart-attacking explosion from the thrown elbow strike and he leaps into his own vehicle and grabs the key off the visor but behind the wheel of a car Noel Collier is his equal and the Rolls roars away through the night, the killer close in pursuit.

She will drive to the police station. He won't dare follow her there but she remembers who this man is and he is already closing on her fast. She heads for her own house nearby, operating by reflex now, squealing into the drive with her hand on the automatic door opening a block away and she is running inside and oh my Christ he is in there waiting for her in the darkness and she feels his strong grip knock the automatic from her hand and her heart almost leaps out of her beautiful chest as the voice of the cop Jack Eichord whispers in her ear, “Get down in the spa room."

And she is almost in shock and starts to ask, “What...” the first word only a quarter second from her mouth. “What? W H A...” barely out and another hand clamps her mouth hoarsely saying, “Don't talk. Hurry. Move!” Shoving her rudely toward the desired direction and she stumbles through the door and down the stairs and into the stone room just as the killer slams out of the vehicle and he is so fast and deadly, and he smiles at the sureness of his movements as he moves toward the woman who is in the house.

All of Eichord's concentration now is shifted from a defensive posture to an attack mode. And the thoughts you think at a time like this come in a lightning blur, intensified by the survival instincts and triggered by the clutching talons of danger, Eichord watching both the image recognition pattern of the DEtection MONitor and the doorway to his right knowing the killer is coming and then seeing the conflict and wondering who or what but no time now and in the midst of all this a ridiculous thought.

He thinks, If this was a movie the music would be playing a woodpecker electro-motif. The Wizard of Oz ad told him about it the other day. Something the Soviets had once used on areas of the recalcitrant populace they wanted to punish. Ozzie Barnes had played a few seconds of it over the phone. It was an incessant variant of the Chinese water torture, a note repeated staccato endlessly, the sort of thing that was punishing enough just to hear via a taped shortwave monitor, and it would have made a nice background score for that second in time. That was the absurd thought his mental defense mechanisms evoked as he thumbed back the hammer on the Smith and when the dark form crashed through the door he squeezed one off just a hair below the eye slits. No “Freeze! Police!” Just forearms resting on a chair back, trying not to make any mistakes, no freeze—just a squeeze, and the maggie loud in the house, pyrotechnics momentarily blinding as his bullet smashed out drilling the intruder smack dab between the running lights.

It was never over until you made sure. Making sure was the hardest part, but it was the next step and he slapped the wall a couple of times with his left hand, right hand still in the weapon-up position, not hearing the screams of the terror-stricken woman down in the stone room, hammer thumbed back again, smoking muzzle pointing at the prone man's head, and he stepped over on the muscular wrist as a precaution and reached over to touch the head, instantly realizing it had been a mistake.

Joseph Hackabee a/k/a Joseph Houtcheson was about half empty of gray matter. Eichord's single shot had covered Noel Collier's nice white wall in red, dripping mist and assorted nasties and brain-burger bits, and some of it was on his hand. He fought bile back and wiped it off. Joe had a fourteen-inch Randall-type fighting knife which Eichord picked up and walked out of the open door and into a crowd of police.

“(something).” Michaels was patting him on the back and he caught “IAD” and “shooting team” and he popped his neck and it cracked, and he swallowed, and he could hear a little now, still half-deafened by the gun report after all the silence.

Noel Collier ran up to them and tried to say something to him but he was already moving, and he acted like he hadn't heard her and just kept going.

There were guys everywhere. Three or four cars had their bubble-gum machines on and the light bars were throwing eerie shadows everywhere. A medical dude said his name and he turned and the guy said, “You all right?"

And Eichord said, “Are the Kennedys gun-shy?” And he kept walking in the direction of his unmarked car.

Yeah. Shit. I'm great. Never better. I'm in Dallas fucking Texas and I just shot a man to death. I'm fine. Wonder how late it is anyway? Gotta call a lady about a dog. See if she takes in strays.

Buckhead Station

Postmortem