Stone Shadow

by Rex Miller

  “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 th
ought 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 open
ed 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.)