Stone Shadow (20 page)

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.