Stone Shadow dje-3

by Rex Miller

  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 wo
rked 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.