Slice dje-5

by Rex Miller

  “—Were cut off. Listen, did you get that about a mutilation homicide?"

  “No, what?"

  “Can you hear me?"

  “YES I CAN FUCKING HEAR. What about a mutilation homicide, Jimmie?"

  “This side of Chattanooga, man. I-Seventy-five. A motel. Scene straight out of hell. The maid goes in to clean and runs out into the street screaming. Young girl in there ripped in half. Bed is covered in blood. Sliced open and gutted. Heart removed. Sealed up.” There was a noise like he was coughing. “Heart sealed up inside a little plastic bag and put back in the chest cavity. You still there?"

  “Yeah. I'm here."

  “Medical examiner thinks a baby was removed from the womb of the girl."

  “ID?"

  “Not yet."

  “Let's have the rest of it."

  “Yeah. You sittin’ down?"

  “Yeah."

  “Okay. The plastic bag in the chest cavity with the heart cut loose and—you know—sealed up in it. The killer printed your name on it. There was a long pause. Same MO as Bunkowski in Chicago."

  “That doesn't mean shit. He could be a copycat, you know that. Let's not get crazy here."

  “I thought you oughta know. I mean, the description of the dude matches the guy there. Big, massive Cauc. ‘Course that don't mean anything. All you white guys look alike anyway,” he said, trying feebly.

  “Right."

  “Hang tough. I'll have the results datafaxed right to you soon as we get. And call. Perp left prints ALL over the scene. We'll have something from docs on the plastic bag printing. Get it right to you."

  “Yeah.” Eichord took a deep breath and let it out slowly as if he had a lungful of smoke. “Other than THAT, how's everything."

  “Samey same, papa-san."

  “Wonderful."

  “I just thought,” Lee paused. He was acting like he didn't want to hang up yet. “Uh, you know, if it IS anything, the fucker was in Chattanooga this morning. Sort of on the way here, you know?"

  “Yeah. I know. Lemme hear what you get.” The connection was broken.

  And as he broke the connection he could only think of one thing: a phone call to a Virginia pay phone compliments of his old colleague Sonny Shoenburgen, a career colonel in the intelligence racket who had managed to survive the purges and climb into the senior strata of clandestine spookery. The call had been to an anonymous spook chief who had told him next to nothing about the man he'd been hunting in a notorious serial-murder case. A conversation pried loose through the sticky need-to-know tape that seals the doings of the folks who come out of various compounds and complexes and camps and forts with that special and unique attitude that is part mean and part tradecraft.

  “This bridge is burnt. No matter what,” he'd said. It was after he'd told him about their “experiment with mercenaries in Southeast Asia,” and about this self-taught genius of assassination who had developed a taste for raw, fresh, human heart.

  “What makes him kill?” Jack had asked. He'd never forget the sound of those three words down the long, hollow umbilical to spookland.

  “He likes it,” the man had said.

  Even though Eichord was not prepared to believe it was happening, he was galvanized into an orgy of action. Each phone call, each successive interview, every new fact that emerged, each word down the task-force line brought the distant image into sharper focus. Try as he might to build air castles of theory about copycat killers and this and that and the other, he was beginning to see the shape of the shadow that was blocking the other end of the tunnel. And it made him shudder with the icy reality of this terrible thing that could not now be denied.

  I-75 EAST OF WINDER

  “White-Merrimen,” the operator said crisply.

  “Good morning,” the deep voice rumbled resonantly into the phone, eighteen-wheelers whizzing by not far away. “I need some information related to newborn infants for a piece we're doing for the Buckhead Advertising Guide, a new newspaper. Could I ask you just a couple of brief questions?"

  “One moment please.” A busy receptionist passing the buck to somebody. A pause and then, “Yes? May I help you?"

  “Yes, ma'am, we're doing a piece for a new newspaper here, and I just wanted to get a couple of answers about newborn infant care. Okay? I'll be real fast—know you're busy."

  “Sure. Okay. Who's this now?"

  “It's called the Buckhead Ad Guide. It won't be out for a couple of weeks but it will have a lot of information for newly marrieds, people moving to the community, that sort of thing. We won't quote you unless you want us to, okay?"

  “What did you want to know?"

  “What do you recommend for the feeding of a newborn child? Let's assume the mother doesn't breast-feed for whatever reason, and...” Chaingang in his three-piece suit, looking extremely large but quite proper, talking into a pay telephone within .22 range of the southeast lane of I-75, talking his line of con into a phone, looking into the window of a used maroon Sedan DeVille, amazingly legal, at the tiny, wrinkled monkey packed into a soft nest of covers.

  “Yes,” he said, “uh-huh,” as he milked the woman for all the information necessary for the proper care and feeding of the newborn monkey.

  “Thanks,” he told her. He hung up the phone and got back into the car. “Now, little monkey,” he said in soft tones, “we'll get you some goodies.” The child was fast asleep, and he slept through the closing of the car door and the starting of the engine.

  Bunkowski drove to a nearby shopping area and was soon back in the car with formula, appropriate containers, bottles, boxes of diapers, and piles of things that he stacked methodically across the back seat. He pulled the car over into a shady area behind a building and told his son, “You're such a fine monkey. Monkey doesn't hardly cry at all,” and beaming with pleasure and amazement he gently lowered a nippled bottle of formula toward the wrinkled monkey, who gratefully began to feed. Daniel remembered something about how you were supposed to test the formula first by shaking some out onto your wrist to see if it was too hot. It made his smile even wider—the thought of putting formula on that huge, steel-hard wrist. Life was actually rather amazing.

  “Good monkey, atta boy,” he said paternally. The monkey fed. Slept again. Daniel knew he must find a safe place for the baby. A nice, quiet motel where he could care for the baby while he marshaled his forces. There was a way he might even pay someone to rent him a small, secluded home or apartment for temporary quarters. He drove around the corner and paid for a newspaper. He would see what his options were.

  He was scanning the paper as he always did, speed-reading blocks of words, his eidetic memory sorting chaff and wheat and saving only the survivalist data of possible importance to him. He saw the headline buried on page six: Bridge (contin.—Page 2)” and the words “southern Stobaugh County,” and he thumbed back to the second page and saw the big headline and the picture of the semi being hauled out of the water. There was a photo of the buried vehicle graveyard in a long shot from the road, a crowd of people milling around. The headline being 14 Bodies Found After Truck Drives into Creek, and he read:

  Stobaugh County sheriff's deputies, aided by emergency workers and agents of the Major Crimes Task Force, pulled four vehicles containing bodies from the shallow waters of the New Cairo Creek, following an accident Wednesday morning in which a tractor-trailer rig was driven off a closed, abandoned bridge.

  The tractor-trailer rig's driver, whose name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin, plunged from the long-abandoned bridge into the creek sixty feet below, instantly killing him. Passers-by noticed the truck in the water and notified authorities, who found the vehicles containing the other bodies while searching for additional passengers who might have been thrown clear of the truck.

  “Some of the bodies have been identified but their identities are being withheld,” Stobaugh County Sheriff Bob Anderson said. Anderson would not speculate as to the cause of death of the thirteen other individu
als whose bodies were found in abandoned cars and trucks that had apparently been placed in the creek over a period of many months.

  “It is a scene out of hell,” one unnamed worker told reporters, “and I hope I never see anything like this again as long as I live.” Divers and emergency personnel were still looking for bodies as late as nine hours following the removal of the tractor-trailer rig from the creek. “In the first place, it was extremely dangerous to leave a bridge like that. Even with it closed on each side, there was always the chance somebody might have an accident here at night,” the worker said. “Nobody knows where these others came from."

  The bridge is situated southeast of Mount Vernon, about twelve miles south of Hubbard City, Illinois. The Stobaugh County Army Corps of Engineers issued a brief statement blaming “insufficient funds” for the fact that the bridge over the New Cairo Creek had never been rebuilt.

  The designer of the original bridge, which was built over forty years ago, said that flash flooding had originally been the cause of the erosion of the bridge supports which led to the bridge's collapse nine years ago. “I've built over six hundred bridges in my time,” B. L. Drake told one reporter, “and I never had any problems with any of the others.” Drake was head of the United Engineering Design Corporation of Chicago, the firm that built the iron bridge in the late 1940s. “It was extremely irresponsible not to rebuild the bridge,” he said.

  Federal authorities on the scene would not speculate as to the nature of the—” Chaingang glanced over at the photo again, captioned with the bold title, “Bizarre Underwater Graveyard Holds 13 More Bodies,” and crumpled the paper savagely.

  “This changes lots of things, little monkey,” he told the newborn infant. “We'll adapt accordingly,” he said, starting up the car and driving toward Buckhead. “We'll pay a little courtesy call on our good friend Mr. Eichord and then we'll find us a nice, temporary shelter. How does that sound, little monkey?"

  As if in reply, the newborn baby did its best to smile and made a kind of contented gurgling noise.

  “Monkey is a GOOD baby,” the huge man rumbled, thinking how much pleasure it would give him deep inside to rip the arrogant cop into shreds of bloody payback, how good the anticipation felt, how wonderfully his new life had come together, how bright the prospects were, how enjoyable it was to be alive and invulnerable.

  BUCKHEAD SPRINGS

  “Oh!” Donna Eichord was surprised by the little kitten, who had stood up on his hind legs sinking his tiny front claws into her leg. “Ouch! Don't!” she said, disengaging the cat from her flesh. “That hurts, you little stinkpot. You're so quiet. You nearly scared me to death, sneaking up on me.” She was cleaning a chicken and she put the naked fowl down, washed her hands, then picked the kitten up and carried him into the living room, sitting him down on the floor and dropping down beside him.

  “Wanna play?” she said, and the cat meowed loudly. “Okay, come on.” And she tossed one of his toys. “Come on. You wanna play, let's play then. Chase it, Tuffkins.” She threw the fake mouse across the room. The cat cocked his head at her and let out a meow of disinterest. “Not into that, eh?” He yawned. “You sleepy? You couldn't be sleepy, little guy, you've been asleep half the day. You want your dinner?” The cat cried and she got up with a sigh and looked at the clock. “Okay. Dinner coming up."

  She took the can opener and opened some cat food. Tuffy sniffed it a couple of times, then walked to the back door.

  “Okay. I give up. I'm going to let you out but only on one condition: you have to promise you'll come in when I call you. No making me come chase you down like last time, okay?"

  The cat blinked, or so she imagined, meaning, yes, I promise, and she said, “All right. Just remember, pal, a deal is a deal.” She opened the door with a flourish. “And it's little Tuff coming out of chute number one. Wheeee!” The small ball of gray flew past her into the freedom and excitement of the yard and the big, wild, outdoor world.

  BUCKHEAD STATION

  “Still no answer in Room 117?” James Lee asked the switchboard operator.

  “No, sir. I'm sorry. I let it ring twenty-five times like you said."

  “And the messages I left with the desk. No chance he could have come in and picked them up?"

  “No way. Everybody knows it concerns official police business, and he hasn't come back here today as far as we know. I had a maid go down and unlock the door just to make sure he hadn't come back without any of us knowing it, and he's not in the room."

  “Yeah. Okay."

  “Sorry, sir. We'll notify him as soon as he comes in this evening."

  “Yeah. Yeah. Good. Right. Thanks a lot.” Lee hung up and called the sheriff's number.

  A man answered. “Yes. Is this the same gentleman I spoke with about half an hour ago? This is Lee out of Buckhead Station."

  “No, sir. You're the one trying to reach Special Agent Eichord?"

  “Correct."

  “We have been unable to reach them since your call earlier. However, Tom D'Amico was with him just a little while ago. Would you like to speak with him?"

  “Please."

  A pause.

  “Sgt. Lee? Tom D'Amico."

  “Hi. Listen, you have any idea where the hell Eichord went to today?"

  “We were together some of the day. I haven't seen him for the last couple of hours. They said he isn't responding to the radio, so wherever he went with the driver they've left the car. I imagine he'll be calling in anytime now."

  “It's imperative I get in touch with Jack right away. Life and death, my man. Can you help?"

  “Best I could do is take your message. Either give it to Jack when they call back in or have him call you right away. I guess you tried the motel, right?"

  “I've called the Hubbard City Motel five or six times,” Lee said. Six times, D'Amico thought silently, according to our count. But he said, “Well, don't worry, he'll be in touch soon. Do you want me to give him any message or have him call you or what?"

  “Okay, first give him this, then get him to call me right away. If I'm not here I'll leave word with the dispatcher on the phones. Okay. Tell him I want to make sure he's got everything on the Chattanooga killing. Prints has positives on the perpetrator. Daniel Bunkowski is still alive. Tell him that as soon as he calls in or radios in and make sure he phones me right away, okay?"

  “Gotcha. Will do."

  “Thanks a lot."

  “Okay. No problem. Talk to you soon, then."

  “Sure.” Lee hung up. “Shit! Goddammit.” Lee was worried. Mad that he couldn't find Eichord. Where the fuck WAS he? Why didn't the coppers up there know anything? Why didn't Eichord ever have his fucking call-beeper on him? He had to get the word to him. Somebody had to get Donna out of the house, put round-the-clock surveillance on Eichord's place, the station house itself. He tried to remember everything Jack had told him about the Lonely Hearts maniac.

  He had made up his mind about the money that morning and it irritated him further that he couldn't say to Jack, “Hey, pal. You're right. I gotta do the right thing.” He'd figured a way to get it back to the bank without copping to it himself. He'd explain the whole thing to Jack. He knew he could count on Eichord to help him. Reluctantly, he'd already taken the first step. It was one he couldn't take back and already the weight of the guilt had lifted from him like a cross being lifted from his shoulders. He smiled at the thought of the Christian imagery, amused, as he sometimes was, to find that he no longer thought in Chinese.

  “I'm a helluva guy, you know that,” he said to his fat partner sitting at a nearby desk, who blew an enormous raspberry-flavored fart at him without looking. “C'mon, super-pooper, we gotta go take Donna somewhere safe."

  “I'll handle that. I'll take her to a motel."

  “Good idea,” he said. “She would be safe with you in a motel, dinky-dick.” He took the stairs two at a time. “Hey, babe,” Lee said to the girl at the switchboard, who lifted her frizzy head and smiled at him, �
��do me one. Call Peggy and tell her I need her to wait around the house. I'm gonna be bringing Mrs. Eichord over there. Nothing's wrong, I'll explain to her when we get there. Just tell her—ah, just say that, okay?"

  “Sure.” The girl started dialing his number.

  “Peg'll worry now, schmuck,” fat Dana said to him as they went to the car, “all the time till you get there. She'll wonder if Jack and her had a fight or something. What a dummy."

  “Hey. That's show biz,” Lee said, starting the car and roaring out toward Buckhead Springs in the fast lane.

  Twelve minutes later they were pulling into the street leading to the Eichord's subdivision. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski and his newborn son were a half-mile away, driving at the speed limit, and looking for the street in the newspaper piece on which the Eichords lived. Bunkowski had the newspaper that he'd had photocopied by the Buckhead Library spread open in the seat between his massive body and the baby's nest. The microfiche had made grainy but usable copies. He had found the street and now had the chore of spotting the house that matched the one visible behind the smiling couple in the photo.

  He looked at the monkey with the little tiny hands and feet all bundled up in the pile of blankets and thought he could make a perfect and safe bassinet out of his camouflage tarp and the enormous piece of mosquito netting he sometimes used in his night ambushes. He looked back at the houses, driving slowly, and missing nothing, every house automatically checked against the image retained in his mental computer, he concentrated fiercely with the total dedication that marked all his moves in combat situations.

  Bunkowski spotted the house, the name “EICHORD” across the side of the mailbox at street level, and mashed the accelerator a little, heading for the shopping mall he'd seen. All the time the mental computer gears whirred, sorting possibilities, permutations, ways and means, options and escape routes, logistics and countermeasures. Was parking the baby on a darkened side street, hidden on the floor of the DeVille, the best way? The only way? Ample oxygen? Peril assessment? It was the last calculated gamble he'd make with his little monkey. He'd park two blocks from Eichord's. Make the car switch within seconds of the “calling card."