Slob (3 page)

He had what even the worst cops had to admit was a basic good Cop Attitude. He never saw himself as a white knight or a big-shot crime crusher. There was no elitist attitude, even after Jack got tagged for the elite squad McTuff, and he actually didn't feel that he was any better a cop than his co-workers so they all got along okay. That kind of an ego thing can be sensed intuitively by even the most desensitized and stupid police officer. And it wasn't there. He was just interested in getting the job done. He loved solving murders.

McTuff, as it was pronounced, was the force's work name for the commissioner's Major Crimes Task Force, MCTF, which had been formed to handle unusual major crimes of violence. The unit had special funding that took the whole thing somewhat out of the realm of local law enforcement, plugging the machine into a small but highly sophisticated network of similarly focused agencies around the nation. McTuff as symbolized by their version of the take-a-bite-out-of-crime dog in the trenchcoat, was partly theatrics, part image tap dance, and part computerized anticrime think tank. It would let somebody in, say Pittsburgh, tap in to areas like Threat Assessment and Counterterrorism, formerly sole domain of the feds, or plug the boys in Oklahoma City directly into the latest serial murders in Los Angeles. And all of these capabilities gave the unit at least the surface trappings of an elite squad.

But Eichord was no elitist. He was just another cop. He saw himself as one more cog in the big machine. And he lived for the work. He had an ego like anybody else, and a healthy ego is mandatory in The Job, but it got its strokes from accomplishment as opposed to accolades or honors. He could have cared less what somebody else thought about him. He wanted to be liked to a certain extent, but beyond an ordinary human desire to have his fellow man think well of him, he was into the work for its own rewards. And that made him something of an overachiever, when coupled with its proclivity for six-teen-hour workdays.

McTuff and its counterparts on the West Coast, out east, and across the country, had no century-old traditions of police work to enrich its heritage. Serial murders had seemed to spring out of the sixties like some kind of wartime anomaly or mutation caused by the poisonous karma of the Vietnam era. The Zodiac killings, the Manson Family kills; like all fads, the serial murders had swept the country from California eastward, leaving a wake of characters whose names would soon be a part of legend. Twenty-six bodies in Florida. Thirty-five more in Chicago. Two hundred here. Three to four hundred there. The serial murders got more and more bizarre. And the more raw, new data emerged, the greater the horror stories. Like the specter of terrorism itself, the concept of mass murderers was taking on a kind of spiritual glow. And we tried to understand the horrors of "Reverend" Jones and his mass suicide, and a clown killer of boys whose first two names were John Wayne. The whole thing was beginning to blur.

Cops around the country were staying up late burning lots of midnight and three A.M. oil trying to plug into it all. Working with the shrinks and the self-styled prognostics, fakes, clairvoyants, psychics, frauds, show-biz folk, anybody who might help them get a handle on this strange phenomenon that had the whole country terrorized. Was there a profile of a serial murderer? Who was he? Where did he come from? How could he be spotted early on? Computers whirred, and clicked, and billions of facts and opinions were stored, retrieved, and stored again. It was out of this milieu that Jack Eichord, professional crime solver, emerged as something of a new eighties celebrity. A genuine, dyed-in-the-wool semi-expert on that scary, hairy thing called the serial murderer.

It would be inaccurate to say that relatively few murders are solved. Relatively few
difficult
murders are solved. A surprisingly large number of killings go into the files to remain theoretically "open" but with the assailants running high-and-dry free. Most or at least many of the tough crimes go unsolved. Ma stabs Pa in the neighborhood bar fight. That one gets wrapped real fast. Bubba shoots Tyrone in front of eight witnesses. That one's off the books lickety-split. The unknown John Doe in the trunk of the abandoned car over on South Twenty-eighth—that one may end up in the files to gather cobwebs. Whatever else you want to say about a cop's balls, they're not crystal. And the old "run those fingerprints down to the lab" bit works on TV but not often in real life.

Eichord knew how you solved murders. Tough, long, boring hours of leg-work and homework. A web of carefully cultivated, secret informants. Logic. The willingness to put in an eight-hour day. Take twenty minutes for a hamburger and coffee and back for the rest of the night. Waiting. Waiting by telephones that never rang or never stopped ringing. Waiting in cold, lonely plants, eyes burning from smoke or lack of sleep, trying to concentrate and not miss the subject under surveillance. Questions. A thousand questions asked over and over and over to 999 people who either didn't know, thought they knew and didn't, or knew and were stonewalling. And then maybe—just maybe—you got lucky at a quarter to ten and one of the questions got answered and put you back on the path. Homicide.

It clearly wasn't for everybody. But Jack Eichord thrived on good, solid detective work. He loved it. It filled all the empty places inside him and he let it engulf him in the job and he breathed it and lived it every waking hour. He'd been in clothes for nine years. Half of that on the McTuff thing. He'd caught a homicide of a teenage girl a few years back and run with it. It was the third death in a run of what could be serial murders. He wallowed in it. Got down in the filth of it. Let it take him down. And when the next body was found he'd already exhausted a few of his theories and he was right on top of it. He got lucky. He was there in the office when the special phone number rang and it was a sick junkie informant looking to get well. He knew not to call with garbage. He had something. He'd worked to get something. He gave Eichord the killer.

It was a big thing locally. The murderer was a dentist. Young, good-looking guy. Turned out to be bisexual and into the leather scene. A real sicko who liked to hurt the girls when he took them off. It got miles of ink, Dr. Demented Captured!—film at eleven. Jack Eichord found out that he didn't like being a celebrity. He wouldn't give interviews. An absolute clam. That made it worse. You don't tell the press no on a hot story. They'll just make stuff up and you end up looking even weirder. They're
still
trying to interview Garbo for heaven's sake. He learned about the press the hard way.

The Lonely Hearts Murders in Chicago came to him because of all that undue ink and media spoonfeed. Chicago came reaching out for him through the McTuff chain of command, and one day his chief sent him packing off to the Windy, his old stamping grounds, My Kinda Town, Chicago Is. He felt like an idiot, winging in on a first class ticket from the CPD as Mr. Crime Crusher to the rescue. Too ridiculous. He was just another flatfoot. Why me, Lord, he asked silently, as the big jet dropped down over the luckless folks who had bought real estate dead bang in the O'Hare flight path.

Chicago, in the hands of a lesser cop, could have been a horror story all its own. In the hands, that is to say, of a less-controlled ego the first day on could have been a disaster of a downhill slide. He came in the way he always did, all self-effacing and colorless, just friendly enough and sincere enough to win over the ones that hadn't decided, and oblivious enough to the others that his coming was an easy transition. Inside the first week they were asking him to their homes for dinner and the honcho in charge of the Lonely Hearts cop shop had Jack calling him by his nickname "Lou."

Eichord was on the street most of the time. Renewing old acquaintances, making new ones everywhere he went, asking questions, and listening hard to those answers. He was a helluva listener. All the time letting Chicagoland come back to him like a lake where you swam as a youngster. Letting the current move him like the wind on the lakefront. Listening. Moving into the guts of the city. Getting to know her again. Hearing her pulse beat. Waiting.

D
oes it matter a whit how a person dies? Do you care whether you die in bed asleep, dreaming of verdant fields in Scotland, or plunged deep into the wetness of hot, full-tilt sex? If the coronary is relatively painless, what does it matter? Death takes you and you are a memory. Death has a way of sandpapering the circumstances of the death and the status of the decedent. If you die by being shot by an unknown perp who takes your heart there in a dark alley near West Erie and leaves your blood-drenched, mutilated corpse for the snapshot scrap-book of a crime photographer, is that somehow a worse death than a president succumbing to gunshot wounds while comatose on a blood-soaked emergency-ward gurney? The only difference is the latter pictures may get a wider circulation.

And what of the assassin or assassins unknown? You are scoped, with a Mannlicher-Carcano, a ridiculous mail-order carbine, a piece of dreck, and—just for argument's sake, let's say a second weapon. Cross fire. You're a dead man. Is this appropriately presidential, somehow, as opposed to the decedent with the missing organ? Probably not. We die a death. It doesn't seem to matter much how, or what, or why, or where—or even who. You can hope for a minimum of pain, a modicum of dignity, a maximum of privacy, and that's about the best you can do.

But then on the other hand, there are some deaths so ignominious and awful that we shudder at the nightmare suggestion of such an end. Some deaths seem designed to kill you again and again, taking you by inches, letting you contemplate the moment when life's flame winks out as you cringe in screaming, fearful terror. The woman in the field was about to die one of those deaths. Not the worst imaginable by any means, but a brutalizing shocker to someone pampered and protected and—like most of us—isolated from the cruelties and depredations of the street life.

At first it appeared that he had no dick, she thought to herself, irrationally, in the frightening perplexity of the moment. She thought "thing" not dick, but all the same. It wasn't enough that she was about to be raped and murdered and perhaps even tortured brutally by this hideous, waddling mastadon of a madman, this fat, stinking horror that had suddenly overturned her life, but to be assaulted by some prickless FREAK only added to her overwhelming nausea, terror, and discombobulation.

The good-looking, youngish, brunette, nude, flat on her back, terrorized to the point of paralysis, stared wide-eyed at the huge, gross figure that hovered above her as she lay there helpless on the rough blanket. He was enormously fat, a moving mound of flesh, and as he stood there slobbering over her, he did indeed appear to have no penis. He was the one they had built that Vietnam spike team around, the one called CHAINGANG.

Actually Daniel Bunkowski's genitalia was normal, perhaps even slightly larger than average, but his sex was covered by cascading rolls of fat that encircled his gut like ugly, rubbery truck tires.

"On your knees," he mumbled as he dug around in the lower of the fat rolls and produced the wet end of a pink cock which he held daintily between two fingers the size of big, steel cigars. "Suck that, bitch," he commanded.

She started to run from him, instinctively, just as she remembered that one of her hands was handcuffed to a device that was wired to a large tree nearby. They were near some farmer's fence row, on an army blanket that he'd thrown over some weeds at the edge of a wooded area near the road where she was now parked. If only she could somehow manage to get loose and make a run for it.

It had all happened in a heartbeat of nightmare reality. She came over the crest of hill on her way home from grocery shopping, doing maybe forty or forty-five in the Datsun, and the man was standing right there in the middle of the road all of a sudden, a great big man waving his arms, and she almost ran him down before she could get her vehicle to brake to a stop.

She smashed one of her expensively shod feet, almost standing on the brake pedal, the Datsun fishtailing along the gravel to a rubber-peeling stop.

She was so angry at first. He hadn't moved except to wave his arms, and she was running late anyway, and he had this look of great concern on his face as he kept yelling something she couldn't hear. Why doesn't he come around to the side? she thought.

"What?" She mouthed through the windshield. He appeared friendly somehow, and certainly not menacing despite his huge, bursiform appearance, and in fact stayed around in front of the vehicle as he continued to yell something to her, doing his usual complete and flawless little mini-job of method acting.

She had the window almost all the way down, still unable to hear what he was saying and she asked him loudly, "What? I still can't hear you."

"I'm sure sorry, ma'am," he was saying politely as he came waddling around by her side of the Datsun, "we've had a problem on down by the [something, it sounded like France Place] there." He spoke quickly, that deceptive took of great concern on his face, talking very fast as he came around the side and leaned down, and she was wondering if that road had washed out again when, as he was laying down his bland camouflage of conversation, speaking some gibberish to her, she felt herself immobilized as this hulking, giant
presence
froze her to the seat, reaching in and taking the ignition keys, switching off the engine as he did so, pressing her back, pulling on the hand brake, opening the door all in a smooth, practiced series of rapid hand movements.

"Listen," he rumbled as he reached for the seat adjustment below. "Listen to me very carefully and you won't be hurt or molested in any way. Listen—now," he admonished in a deep, rumbling, basso profundo, "don't scream or try to attract attention or I will hurt you. I do not wish to harm you or bother you in any way. Do you understand what I'm saying? Nod if you understand me." She nods like a trained Shetland.