Iceman (5 page)

The flashlight blinks off and the room is bathed in electric light. The interior of a mobile home. Yet not ordinary at first glance. The initial impression of something extraordinary is enhanced by the smell. The stench of the abbatoir. The hideous, nauseating stink of the killing fields. The foul and lingering odor of the hasty burial ground. It attacks the nostrils in a merciless wave of stinging horror that hammers the olfactory sense.

Cyclops watches over this hellish place. 1458-1/2 (Space G) South Utica.

The first thing Jack Eichord sees are the serving trays, but for that first moment the monumental horror of it seizes his thought processes and he cannot focus in on any of it. He looks but he does not see.

Then the wave of shock recedes enough that his mind begins to register.

Cyclops is the first thing he will see and perhaps the last thing he will remember in his nightmares.

Atop a pile of bloody human intestine is perched a single eyeball.

And then he sees the rest of it and his heart cries.

L
ong before Tina Hoyt had been abducted and killed, there'd been another sensational case. A much-publicized pair of mutilation sex-murders with clues leading nowhere, apparently. Eichord flown in by the Major Crimes Task Force, MCTF—pronounced MacTuff—and inserted into a confusing jurisdictional labyrinth. Horror of Blytheville was the headline, and that didn't begin to cover it.

He'd gone in. Done his thing. Looked over the cold killing ground. Sniffed around the suspects. Sifted through the mountains of strange paperwork. And the thing was, he always knew the old guy was right for it, but there was no motive. No proof. Nothing a self-respecting judge or prosecutor would hold still for. Not even the Arkansas people had strong feelings about it.

Eichord backed off the case eventually. Returned to Buckhead and filed the thing as an open investigation under Headless Girls.

A couple of months later the locals nailed the old man. An eight-year-old boy. A nine-year-old girl. An eleven-year-old boy. Poor Pam Bailey, the sullen kid who tried to tell everybody this was going to happen. A girl who had done everything but scream at the top of her lungs and gone ignored. A twenty-two-year-old man. All dead. Mutilated. Tortured first in the most unspeakable ways, then used and dismembered in one of the most hideous, bizarre, inhuman, mass-mutilation-slayings that
any
law-enforcement officer could remember.

Eichord was back on the night plane and into the bloody jaws of a crime scene that made Hieronymus Bosch's hellscapes look like Bugs Bunny cels.

The bodies
SERVED UP
on various tables and sideboards inside this mobile home. The parts
ARRANGED
... Jesus! God! He couldn't let it destroy his mind, but for days every time he'd begun to relive it, to think about it again, he had the sensation of not being able to breathe. The weight of guilt that he'd let this thing happen by not being competent enough came crushing down on him.

His every movement had become languorous in the grip of a debilitating lethargy that appeared to possess him. A long lingering malaise had induced an unconquerable lassitude, which had been followed by deep depression, crushing despair, abject defeat, and a suicidal self-pity that eventually numbed him out completely. The body chemistry took over then and a state of paralyzed senses had evolved into immobility as stupor became torpor. He'd managed to shake loose from that, but the days and weeks of lethargic inactivity had left him sluggish, adrift in the wake of the emotional doldrums.

He'd gone to the dentist to get a wisdom tooth filled, but when the doc had gone in for a look-see, he'd found a pocket of trouble.

“Phew! There's no mistaking THAT smell,” he said to his dental hygienist.

“Hmm umm. Sure isn't,” she said. The two of them had a total of four hands in his mouth. “Doin’ okay, Jack?” she said and he replied, “nnnnn,” as best he could. He could feel his tongue flopping around inside his deadened mouth and he closed his eyes as he heard the whine of a drill.

“I COULD put a filling over that. But what the hell's the point?” The dentist shook his head. “First time that infection builds up in that pocket...” he trailed off. “I HATE to pull ‘er,” he said.

“Yank it,” Jack said bravely. “Might as well.” It was just a shell, and the shell had broken. When the dentist was sectioning it to get it out, he saw he'd have to dig on Eichord for another hour to get the roots out and so he left the spurs in.

“They'll work their way out in a year or so,” he said. “You'll come back. I'll take ‘em out. Bim, bam, boom. Nothin’ to it."

The pain had been bad. About the second night his jaw felt like he'd been struck in the face with a leaded Louisville slugger. A stab of pain would hit him every ten minutes or so in between bouts of tolerable agony. He'd be suffering along, hoping his medication would kick in, and suddenly pain would stab through the jaw like a B-40 stabbing through a foot of solid, tempered steel. The kind of hot, awful, lethal pain that made grown men scream, or double over like they'd been shot in the gut. Bim bam boom.

“I'm going to the drugstore to get something for this jaw,” he said to Donna. She was afraid he was going to start drinking, he imagined, and he listened for her reply as it came in a tiny, faint voice.

“Okay.” Oooooh-Kaaaaaaaay.

H
e was draft-exempt, he felt sure, but he was reaching that age when you started worrying about the future. He could make a lot of money. He didn't need some bullshit Uncle Sam coming along and pissing all over his plans. Ruining his career before he got started. He had learned from another boy how you could fuck with the draft-board jerks. He could show them his scars and tell how he'd been hurt when he was a little kid and how it made him crazy so he had to quit school and that. He laughed to think about it.

He had his stepsister facedown in the sweet-smelling grass in back of the old Colman house. Nobody could hear her if she decided to let out a scream before he could clamp a hand over her mouth. He could never understand why she got him so excited. She was ugly in the face and her body wasn't anything too great. Hell, he'd had her a hundred times. Yet every time was a turn-on.

“I love to fuck you, you ugly cunt,” he told her. She was motionless under him. Trying to freeze her mind until the ordeal was over. “I'm talking to you, bitch,” he said, yanking her short hair and twisting her head cruelly. “Answer me, goddamn you."

“Ouch,” she said in reply when he pulled her head back. “Please—"

“Yeah, beg me real good. I'll show you some mercy.” But she said nothing more. He had her milk bottle from school and shook out some milk on his hand, rubbing the warm milk on his erect penis. Then he poured some over her rectum and pushed against her until he could enter. “Howzzat feel, cunt?” He rammed it in his stepsister's butt, but he was so excited he couldn't hold back and shot his wad after what seemed like only a couple of minutes. He rolled off her and lay back in the grass, spent, and she pulled her clothes up silently and walked away, like always, head down, saying nothing.

He loved being mean to her as much as the actual sex. Fucking with her mind. Teasing and bullying and torturing her, making her life a nightmare with no escape. He laughed to himself as he dropped off the stone wall in back of the Colman place, moving through the overgrown weeds running as fast as his strong legs would take him, running down Fifteenth and cutting up Pierce, four blocks out of the way, running at breakneck speed so that he could be hiding in wait for his unwary stepsister as she neared the house.

He was out of breath, gulping for oxygen, as he ran up the front steps of their home and hid behind a large bush. Just in time as she turned the corner, moping along, her head down, walking slowly toward the house. Just as she came up the steps, he lunged at her from behind the bush screaming at the top of his lungs and pushing her into the grass again, “GOTCHA!” He screamed, mauling her, but his screamed word and laughter were drowned out by her ear-splitting screams of terror as something snapped inside the girl.

A
few years ago Eichord had become embroiled in “the worst mass-murder case in history,” as the, papers called it, and a newborn baby boy had been the survivor of a horrible confrontation. The child was the result of a mating between a human monster and a young woman he'd then murdered. Jack had felt an intense desire to shelter and care for this abandoned infant, and Donna Eichord, unable to bear a child herself, had encouraged their working to adopt this little boy.

But there had been signs of problems from the very first. The harder he tried not to think in clichés, the more he'd find himself embarrassed by phrases like “spawn of evil” that would irritatingly sneak in and out of his subconscious thoughts. Eichord realized he was overreacting to a healthy child's tantrums, but the darker thoughts continued to intrude.

There was always a real truth, wasn't there? And the REAL truth, as opposed to the superficial one, was that deep inside he was constantly watching their adopted son to show any sign of genetic influence, watching him “like a cop instead of a father,” according to Donna in an argument they'd had on the subject. She had her opinion and Jack had his. He saw her as far too lenient with the child.

Jonathan had hit the “Terrible Twos” with a vengeance. He had learned his first word:
NO!
A word to be screamed over and over and over at the top of his little lungs. It worried Jack that his wife could let the kid throw a tantrum for half an hour and never even so much as threaten him with a paddling.

“If you don't stand on his head now...” Eichord told her, but he let it trail off unsaid. It was one of those things you didn't want to have to verbalize.

It had worried him to the extent he'd actually spoken to a cop shrink he knew, and come away with some psychobabble and conflicting mumbo-jumbo about how it was perfectly natural for a two-year-old to throw tantrums.

He'd been regaled with “Terrible Twos” stories. Told how the first sign of separation from the maternal figure evoked this sort of classic misbehavior. How the reaction to the tantrums and bad behavior depended on how secure the parent was and lots of other shrinkese that left Eichord uptight, confused, and still wanting to sit on this kid when he screamed for ten minutes.

He understood about the Terrible Twos. But this wasn't just whining, or mere misbehavior, or even screaming tantrums. There was something bad here. And cop or not, Jack was sure he could read something there in the little boy's eyes—a coldness, a thing he'd glimpse at certain moments when the child would appear to recoil and withdraw from him, and the one time he'd tried to talk about it seriously to Donna she'd looked at him like he was nuts.

This time when he walked in the front door of their home he heard not a sound. Donna, sitting in an old wooden rocker beside the sofa, greeted him and got up for a hug and kiss.

“Um,” he said. “Hi."

“Um hi yourself."

“Have a good day?"

“I had a day."

“Oh-oh. One of those."

“Not really. Not so bad.” He put his piece in the closet and divested himself of holster, shield, and ID case, attaché case, billfold, keys, pens, pocket litter. “I've had worse."

“Good.” She handed him a cold glass of something red.

“Umm. Looks good. What is it?” He sipped carefully.

“Veggie juice."

“Not bad.” He was a hair away from making a joke about putting some vodka in it but had the sense to let it drop. He downed the vegetable juice in a gulp and set the chilled glass down on a coaster, flopping down in his favorite armchair.

“Tired?” Donna had on ragged cutoffs and one of his old shirts tied at the midriff and she still looked sexy to him.

“Not that tired,” he said as suggestively as he could, drawing a slight chuckle. “After all, Mrs. Eichord, I feel sure you are pretty much what God had in mind when he designed cutoff jeans.” She turned for him fetchingly. “Oh, yes."

“That's good to hear. I needed that.” She plopped back in the wooden rocking chair.

“'Jew have one of those days, too?"

“Oh, no,” she said, a bit too quickly. “Just a little weirded out, is all."

“Umm. Weirded out."

“Jonathan has been adopted by the black dog out in back. You know that one you fed scraps to that time?"

“Jesus. I hope you didn't let him play with that dog. It could have anything.” He watched her swallow before she spoke.

“Well. Yeah."

“Huh?"

“It's worse than that. It's been, uh, sleeping with him.” She fought back a nervous giggle.

“Donna, are you having me on?"

“No. I'm not having you on. I think I'm having us both on.” She crossed a shapely leg.

“We're talking about that mangy-looking black mongrel covered in fleas and sandburrs—that IS the dog, right?"

“The very same."

“Whatdya mean SLEEPING with him?"

“It's been, you know, in bed with him. He won't let me put it outside. He throws such a fit. You know how he gets. And...” She trailed off sheepishly.

“Are you saying that damn fleabag has been in the HOUSE?"

“In a word,” she said, laughing, “yes."

“My God, woman.” He got up, listening to the quiet. “You mean he has that dog in here?"

“Yeah.” She stood up. “I didn't have the heart to make him get out. Jonathan got so PEACEFUL and so contented-looking—"

“It isn't a question of heart. It's a question of disease. That kid'll have fleas if not worse.” He was walking back toward the bedroom. Still not sure if she was joking with him.

“Well—"

“You're not kidding, are you?"

“No,” she said, smiling. Both of them at the door to the boy's room. Donna quietly turned the knob and opened the door a crack. Eichord peered into the darkness.

He saw the boy and the dog. Jonathan asleep, the dog on top of the covers, cuddled in his arms. He just shook his head and pulled the door shut. It was worth it, he thought, to have the silence. The lovely quiet.