Iceman (22 page)

She went into him naked but for a pair of heels, standing and posing for him naturally, a beautiful woman in profile, as he played his ricky-tick music, “Thang hugh Norma-enema. Anna loog whoze here now, itsa Myron Florn-enema, to play his latest tits for us. Let it all hang out, Myron-enema."

“Every chance I get, baby."

“Did you call Bonnie like I wanted you to do, enema?"

“I will. Promise,” she said sweetly, still coming to him, but he turned away from her and said in a cold icebox voice, “Go do it."

“Doctor Lishness, I don't understand why you're being so unresponsive to me,” Eichord said, working to keep control of his temper. They had finally located Schumway's psychotherapist.

“I'm not being unresponsive."

“What would you call it, then?"

“What?” Unruffled. One of those icicle types. A face that reminded you of the younger Teddy in his senatorial bifocals. Was it a poseur's face?

“What would you call failing to respond to an official inquiry in a Homicide investigation?"

“I would call your manner irresponsible, for starters."

“Irresponsible. Do you realize this crazy son of a bitch has killed eight or ten victims—just that we KNOW about? Driven his own sister insane? Do you—"

“I've just told you that I cannot violate my code of ethics. The relationship one has with one's patients—and you should certainly be aware of this—is a highly confidential and privileged one. Unless people can rely on that total confidentiality, the system of health care collapses. Trust is an inviolable aspect of our ethical standards,” the psychotherapist said imperiously.

Eichord wanted to throttle him.

It had been a long day for Eichord. Yesterday's rocket from the deputy director of MCTF's crime lab on the DNA-matchup with the sperm traces from Heather Lennon had, in effect, cleared both Dennen-mueller and Freidrichs.

Jack was crushed by the circuit attorney's reluctance to immediately indict Alan Schumway, but the man had told him, “You don't understand the law, here. Look: the complexities of our statutes are unique to the state and, in fact, are in the process of being revised as we speak. But this is a new technology, and until it has survived some court battles, somebody's refusal to comply with a test doesn't begin to provide us with sufficient grounds to indict."

“So we'll trick our suspect. There are a dozen ways we could get blood, saliva, tissue—"

“Jesus! Jack, that's the last thing you want to do. Hey. Put a solid, concrete case against the scumwad together and lock down all the edges. That's what you need to do. Don't be counting on some lab magic to nail him. Not under these circumstances, with the current statutes and a relatively revolutionary—for us—technological breakthrough."

“The data I've seen on it is rock-solid. It's widely accepted by people in law enforcement, MIT, the—"

“You're in Buckhead County, Jack. Forget about what some egghead at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology says. Make a solid case against your man. You get some iffy DNA shit to go to trial with and the case stands a real fat chance of getting thrown out of court. Then you really will have messed in your mess kit, eh?"

Keeeerist, Eichord thought, forcing himself to breathe deeply. “Iffy DNA shit?” He thanked the C.A., por nada, and put his nose back to the grindstone.

The following day started out even worse. The composite of the suspects’ mug shots had drawn a total blank in Nevada. And Eichord had his morning ruined by a call from the Amarillo PD. They'd run the sheet by the old gentleman in Vega, and “he just couldn't be sure.” Did he even seem halfway about it? “Waffled” was the word they used in response. He waffled.

It was one of those times when as a law-enforcement peon you felt so much frustration. Schumway looked so good for it. Any why was he having so much trouble getting this Nicki Dodd interviewed? He had full-time surveillance on the house in North Buckhead and she hadn't come in or out for three days, for sure. Unless that prick Schumway had him some kind of secret tunnel. He wouldn't discount anything. One of the guys thought they might have seen a shadow at the window. Not sure.

If the woman was hiding in there, he had to find out. First—why? He could eliminate a lot of possibles with a face-to-face. He had to interview her and get it done NOW. Probable cause was the first thing. He didn't really have much, but he could throw something together, put her in a lineup, jack her around a little. See what fell into place. Main thing—he needed the house empty. He wanted in there when the place was empty. He'd get a search warrant first. No. He'd, uh, wing it.

Schumway as Spoda. It sure looked good. Especially the tie-in to Diane Taluvera in the Moss Grove bank. To reach out for somebody on probable cause was one thing; to apply for an arrest warrant from the circuit attorney's office, and to be able to give them an indictable package for trial—that was another smoke. This legal genius, Eichord, he knew all about such shit. He fumed, driving back to the station.

He'd go home and read his old depositions. Listen to the kid scream—the cartoons had stopped working, for no apparent reason. Just so he didn't dream about the trailer in Blytheville, Arkansas, and the silver platter of mean cuisine.

The night went just about the same way the day had. He went home and tried to work, trying to decide what to do, wondering which was the angle he'd missed, which was the one that was going to come back to haunt him, and all of this in one of Jonathan's loudest, ongoing tantrums. Then he and Donna got pissed with each other and he went to bed with that terrible sinking feeling in his chest, that sinking feeling that something was going to fuck him up once again, and then he'd see another page of
The Journal of Retribution.

It was the one thing he never let himself think about. He wouldn't even admit it existed. It was too painful to remember the call from the nice chief down in Blytheville, telling him about the “scrapbook” they'd found when the particle-board flooring rotted out.

Hidden down under the flooring of the unmobile home was Mr. Owen Hillfloen's diary of blood. Explaining the crimes in twisted, meticulously printed phrases taken from the Scriptures.

Try as he might, he could not jerk his thoughts from the page where the old man detailed his punishment of the children, and Eichord visualized their last hours of torture. It was the page that explained why he'd taken their heads. What he'd done to them with the snakes before he killed and dismembered them.

Then he fell asleep. And in his dream he touches the filthy doorknob, turns, pushes, flashes the light around, finds the switch, hits it, sees the eyeball first as the stench overpowers him.

Some things never go away.

J
ack Eichord woke up hurting all over. He felt as if he might have had 3 1/2 hours’ sleep, and his neck hurt the way he imagined it would if someone had taken a ball bat to him. He'd awoken scrunched up against the headboard, head at an impossibly weird angle, and he tried unsuccessfully to pop his second vertebra. Two aspirin hadn't helped. His throat, and nose, and sinus cavities felt the way they use to feel after fourteen hours behind the wheel of a car, back in the days when he still boozed and set fire to three packs of Winstons a day. His tongue was thick and coated with something that proved impervious to toothpaste, mouthwash, and coffee. He went in and found Donna's Darvon and popped one, and stood still and rotated his head back and forth.

They'd violated one of their own iron-clad rules. They'd gone to bed mad. Always before, when there was a problem between them, they'd talk it out, but they'd got into it over the boy again last night and each had said things they shouldn't have said, the way you sometimes will in a fight. Jack was downright mean to Jonathan. Donna was unwilling to sit on the kid. Each agreed the other was a shitty parent. Nobody won, and this morning it was still a draw. Nobody felt like hugging and kissing and Eichord ended up leaving the house in a silent, sullen cloud of frustration and fear and anger. Another first.

It had started when he came home and she hit him with the housework bit again; she had busted her back all day, she was through with the kid, “it's your turn."

He'd gone in to a screaming, defiant Jonathan and worked to calm him down. Let's play blocks, he said. They played blocks. Jack took a block just slightly below his left eye, thrown hard. For a two-year-old, he had to give him credit. The kid had an arm on him. Now if he could work on a slider and his change-up...

Did she fully realize the implications, he wondered, of a child like this, who felt such bitter hatred at two? The corny phrase “SPAWN OF EVIL” always managed to type itself on his mind screen when he had such thoughts. Jesus Christ! The child's murdered father had BLINDED A MAN when he was—what?—eight or nine years old! Again he allowed himself the guilty quasi-pleasure of regretting having fought for the kid's survival. Maybe it would be better for all concerned if he would ... And he let the thought die out. That kind of thinking was just jacking yourself off. It might feel good for the moment, but it's better when you grow out of it.

By the time he got to work he could feel his paranoia quotient building like Dana's high blood pressure, and the morning had barely started.

“Eichord,” he grumbled into the telephone mouthpiece.

“Jack?” It was the C.A.

“Listen,” the man said, and Jack duly listened, the phone cradled between his sore shoulder and neck and his throbbing head, words crackling meaninglessly as he jotted notes on legal pad paper. The call ended and another phone rang beside him, and he listened to Peletier get invited to a customs seminar in New Orleans, or so it sounded from his eavesdropped side of the call. What the fuck would a Homicide copper be doing at a ... Ah, fuck it. Little did he realize the telephone was about to strike him like a lightning bolt.

He shuffled papers and tried to attack his mountain of paperwork with little success. He read a memo rerouted to him via MacTuff, from a weapons consultant who suggested a new slant on the Tina Hoyt case. His thesis was that the killings were acts of political terrorism, and he had some fifty-six pages of documentation available on the use of a sharpened bicycle spoke as an assassination weapon. The killer, he proposed, was a hit man for the Ton Ton Macoute. Eichord, who never ruled anything out at first glance, filed the memo in the Graham file and flashed on the tire track cast. Shit, why not? But it didn't help his neck or headache any.

Now he'd misplaced the notes from the C.A.'s call, and as he shuffled papers, he found a crude drawing of three stick figures beside a doctor's name.

This was Jack's doodled shorthand reminder to buy dolls. The bottom line from a phone call to a woman psychologist recommended to him by Doug Geary. She'd offered a pleasant and logically reasoned suggestion about Jonathan.

Jack had told her he understood about the Terrible Twos, but this wasn't just a kid slamming doors, or breaking something, or throwing a tantrum. He was extremely concerned about the boy. He told her about the biological father—a monstrous mass murderer, the incarnation of evil. A tortured child who had grown up to become a cold killer, who had later acted as midwife to the birth of the infant son, literally ripping the child from his mother's womb at the moment of birth. Could such a thing have caused some kind of awful traumatic damage to Jonathan? When the Twos become
SO
terrible that it might be beyond the stage of such a child's expected development, how much more is okay before it's abnormal? How much of this was Jack overreacting?

She told him about dolls. Buy this little house. Dolls. Play a game with the child. It was all about association and role models and things that Eichord thought made perfect sense, and he vowed to buy them today. Tonight he would show Jonathan that he, Daddy, and Mommy loved their son. And that son would love Daddy and Mommy in return. And they'd all live happily forever after. Unless something else happened and one of them slipped and fell in the shark tank, eh?

He found the notes he was looking for. They read, burden of proof ... beyond reasonable doubt ... prosecutorial stance ... a lot of bullshit, he thought, and round-filed it.

The telephone on his desk rang and he picked it up. “Homicide. Eichord."

“This is Bonnie Johnson. I had a message you tried to get in touch with me."

“Hi, Bonnie. Thanks for returning my call. I had some information here on Mizz—” He fumbled around on his desk, turning pages, trying to find the dossier.

“Diane Taluvera. Yes, sir?"

“You still haven't heard from her?"

“No, sir. Just that postcard."

“Has anybody received any sort of direct communication from Ms Taluvera? A phone call—something like that?"

“Not a word."

“Do you think something has happened to her, Bonnie?” He tried to use an individual's first name whenever he could, but he had caught himself saying Mister Schumway a whole lot.

“Yes.” He could hear the catch in her voice. “I'm afraid for her. It's not like her to run away like that."

“You think this person that she was seeing, the man she referred to as Al, might have abducted her?"

“I did until last night, but now I don't know what to think. His secretary called me and they all want to come talk with me about Diane. He is as worried as I am. It's the car dealer Al Schumway. And he said he got a postcard from Diane too. He wanted to know what was going on. If I had got a call from her. He can't understand why she hasn't phoned him."

“Alan Schumway called YOU?"

“Well, no. Yeah. His secretary did. And then he got on the line for a minute. We talked. He seemed real concerned. I don't know."

“When was this?"

“Last night. About ten o'clock. He wanted to know if we all could meet and I told him I was too tired last night. And I really was. I was just exhausted. I hadn't slept for the last two days. So I guess I'll get together with them tonight. She's coming over to pick me up after work. I never realized, you know, Diane never said anything about him being in a wheelchair and I—"