Stone Shadow (27 page)

“Ukie you mean?"

“Yeah."

“I don't know."

“If he can take Ukie on this neural thing, can he pick his brain? Can he ask him about what he's told you? Will he have a way to probe and find out about the narcoanalysis session?"

“We have to assume he already knows. Yes."

“Can he force Ukie onto the neural pathway anytime he wants?"

“Who knows? It seems that he can."

“Could he force him to commit suicide?"

“Huh uh. I don't think so. I don't think he can force so much as emphasize and suggest. He can put ideas in Ukie's head the same way posthypnotic suggestion operates. He can underscore. Reinforce something that Ukie already thinks or something where he may be vulnerable or highly susceptible or easily influenced. I have trouble buying the mind-over-matter aspect. I just don't know. You can't rule anything out here, We're dealing with a unique and brand-new situation virtually without precedent,” he said as they went in the room and Eichord headed for his telephone.

Jack started to dial then stopped for a second and looked at Mandel and said, “Thing I don't get is the MO. A genius IQ. A man from a horror-filled background of molestation that somehow turned him into a mass murderer. The possibility of a birth disorder of some kind such as ... One suggestion was anoxia. Something goes wrong and creates a kind of conscienceless monster. His rage can be slaked only by taking lives. He hates his twin, whom he's always been able to influence, so he goes through disguises and all that rigmarole to create an airtight, elaborate frame that puts the abduction, rape, and conning of Donna Scannapieco into motion. But his next actions ... That's where I get fuzzy."

“How so?"

“He calls US, putting HIMSELF in the picture. Why the hell do that? He could have stayed in Houston. Gone to Cleveland on vacation. You name it. Why insert yourself into the thing when you KNOW you'd become a number-one suspect because of your tie to the primary suspect in custody, Ukie?"

“Whom he knew he could control as he always had. He was on top of it all the way. Even staying in the shadows of his twin's mind. Convincing Ukie that the buried bodies were the work of a taller man, tall as a basketball player. Making himself even more inhuman and invulnerable by the absence of an identity in Ukie's head."

“Yeah, but why put yourself into it at all unnecessarily and THEN on top of everything go to one of the best law firms in the state and latch on to the top defense lawyer? Why give your object of the frame that much of a shot at getting off scot-free? Makes no sense."

“Sure it does,” the doctor said. “What would be the quickest way to divert suspicion from yourself? Come from the most positive point on the compass. A model of cooperation. The devoted brother who wants the finest legal representation money can buy. It was the smartest thing he could have done. I'm sure he convinced himself of that when he was envisioning the way the headlines would look. What I want to know is how did he manipulate Ukie, to the point of digging a grave?"

“Right,” Eichord said, dialing a number.

“That's where this thing loses me. It's hard enough to come to grips with the phenomenon of thought manipulation and telepathy on this kind of a scale, but when you change a
physical
situation—when you actually put the shovel in Ukie's hands—then you start to lose me."

“Go,” Eichord said into the phone and hung up. Dialing again. Saying to Mandel, “Maybe Ukie was telling us the truth. He wanted to see if the thoughts he was getting in his nightmares were for real.” He began talking on the phone, “Wally. We've got everything we need so far as sufficient cause to protect Noel Collier's life. Dr. Mandel's drug-induced session with Ukie Hackabee indicates both he and Joseph Hackabee were sexually molested children. It's...” There was a pause as Michaels spoke, interrupting him, and Jack replied, “Yes. Circumstantial. But that's still sufficient that we have to move. I mean it meets the life-threatening criteria, He's going to know by now. She's in grave peril. We've got to find her and isolate them, he's certain to be close to her. And we have to do it without tipping him off.” A pause. “No, that's out. Too much chance he'd find out. I need you to personally shepherd this thing through Jones-Seleska. Try to find out where they've gone. The thing we need to do is isolate them wherever they are or get her to return home long enough that we can protect her.” Pause. “Right. I've just put them in place.

“Okay. I'm going to go through the motions of trying to contact Hackabee, and we'll play it by ear from there. I'm going on into the house immediately and hope they'll have some reason to come back. Maybe Noel will come in to get some clothes or something."

Joe would be weaving his spell now. Moving in on her in some secluded location under the guise of the two of them escaping from the glare of the notoriety attending the case. He'd have to act fast. Today or tomorrow at the latest. She'd be wanting to contact Ukie again soon and he'd only be able to keep her out of circulation for a few hours.

Jack phoned Hackabee and wasn't surprised he had checked out of the Mansion, leaving his California forwarding address, and that he could be contacted during the interim through Jones-Seleska. The legal firm had instructions to hold all communications official or not. Only one other person besides Noel knew where the safe house was and he was out of the country and unreachable.

There was no more time. Jack gathered up his emergency kit such as it was and walked to the door, glanced around the room a final time, shrugged, and headed for his unmarked car and a lonely ride.

Time did what it always does so well. It ticked away.

0817: Eichord is driving. The level of paranoia begins to rise in the nocuous flood of changing events and swiftly moving data stream. The car, heading on a more or less septentrional course, goes with the flow, Highland Parkbound, Jack Eichord powerless in the whirlpool of occurrences.

He is suddenly quite afraid, and thankful there are task-force personnel on the scene. It could be lots worse. He could be on the job alone, heading for a house where a killer might be inside and waiting for him.

0851: The first of eleven phone calls is placed to Eichord at the Dallas cop shop. Michaels fields the calls as agreed. He will not relay the contents of any of the phone conversations so it will be much later, and of little significance, when it becomes commonly shared knowledge that

A. The Branson hospital records, like so much else in this case, turn out to have mysteriously disappeared. It was as if the Houtcheson family had vanished from the face of the planet. And that itself is but one alarming, isolated scrap in a shadowy paper trail of dark coincidental death and disappearance.

B. 1500: Midafternoon, the most important of the calls coming in to Jack, nominally, is from a Wyckerly Asylum. An employee matching the shot of the twins’ image had disappeared subsequent to a rash of unexplained deaths of patient/inmates. The man's references, primarily a recommendation by the chief of staff of another mental hospital, turned out to be spurious. “Jon Hinderman” a/k/a half of the Houtcheson-Hackabee siblings, was only a hazy memory. All trace of him obliterated.

Eichord would learn none of this, severed as he was from the mother task force by all but a slim, invisible umbilical of a two-way transmitter-receiver to the cops out beyond the perimeter of the trap. But the transceiver was an emergency unit only. The rule will be absolute radio silence. There will be no eyeball surveillance extrinsic to the Collier home. Hackabee is too devious and bright. The house must look squeaky clean.

1930: Eichord waits quietly. Prone. Behind the sofa. Relaxed as much as conditions permit. Not bored. Not scared but it's getting a little hairy now. He really thought that Noel would show before now, It's one thing to wait in an empty house alone, waiting in the sun-streaked shadows of a late afternoon. But it's quite another to wait in an envelope of darkness for hours on end. The smallest creaks sound like footsteps. The floor lamps begin to resemble the silhouettes of gunmen. He will wait, according to plan, until 2400. If she has not made an appearance he will change places with Don Duncan, who is in a surveillance van two blocks away.

But they are not coming. Not yet. Joseph Hackabee, in the hopes of averting another session of lovemaking, has set the woman on a course of conversation about Ukie and the legal battle she plans to wage in his behalf. Two hours of this have passed and Joseph is so bored by it that he opts for a sexual intermission as the lesser of evils. At 2110 he has had his fill of the woman had he decides enough is enough. He will put her under now.

The home has a large Olympic-type pool and tennis court. There are two nicely appointed poolside cabanas, and in one of them he has ripped up the floor of the utility area off the laundry room and painstakingly created a shallow but adequate coffin to house the 112-pound corpse of Ms. Noel, adequately covered in a shroud of lye. He enjoys the tingling appropriateness of interring her within the Jones-Seleska safe house. Noel is standing beside him in a white bikini with matching heels and he says, “Darling, I'm so famished. I've got to have some nourishment before I can go on,” whispering to her in that gentle, teasing tone, and she leans up on tiptoe flicking a long wet tongue into his mouth.

“You want something good and nourishing ... to eat?” she teases him back as she kisses him.

“Yeah, darlin',” he breathes in a husky approximation of faked desire.

“I'd have thought you would have eaten your fill.” She slurps his mouth again.

How tiresome this creature is, he thinks. “To be sure. But right now a sandwich is in order. Must refuel the old tanks.” He takes her head in his strong hands, resisting the temptations that well up within him. “Be a love and go rustle us up some grub. Anything. Meanwhile, I want to try out the wet bar in here. Drinkie sound good?"

“Anything you say, lover.” And she gives him her drink order, another wet kiss, and trots off fetchingly to prepare his feast, the obedient, wiggling, jiggling, bikinied maid. She goes around the pool, casting her tall, curvaceous shadow into the floodlit water. Any other man would have but one thought. Only lust at the sight of her. But Joseph goes into the cabana thinking, I'll have earned this one. He smiles to himself, whistling softly.

He will take her under right there in the Jones-Seleska pool. Watch her fight him as she goes through the ballet of reflexive laughter and disbelief, anger, fear, surprise, panic terror, death awareness. Be watching her fill her lungs with pool water and chlorine as she screams in a shock wave of mindless struggling, her voice muffled by the water, laughing at her as she fights without hope. He will show her the penalty for having forced her foul affections on him. He will show this pretentious female scum the dues to be extracted from one who would interfere with his plans. He will make this bitch pay, he laughs to himself, through the nose so to speak, as she feels every sensation of her impending death.

But she is there watching him prepare a hiding place in the floor, an excavation the size of a body, and she comes within a hair's breadth of speaking, of asking him to explain what it is he's doing making that hole in the nice floor and why the lye sacks but oh my GOD no she knows that she is looking at a burial place even though the signals to her brain have not arrived yet and the overload of information freezes time for her momentarily and she is on Central Standard Opium Time now, time that stops completely. Halts. Ceases ticking. Comes to a dead end. Tick.... Nothing. Then time reverses. Goes backward, rewinding sooooooooo slllloooooowwwwwlllly-kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk-ccccccccccccccccccccc ccccc-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-TTTTTTTTTT! And a foot stops in midstride. She has come in to change her choice of potables, a woman's eternal prerogative: to change her mind. And she comes in soundlessly through recently oiled hinged doors coming in the cabana and in a quick take her mind puts her body on Opium Time and it is in this first microsecond that her time-shifting brain saves her lovely butt because as she opened her mouth to speak Opium Time freezes her face and it would take thirty seconds to say the first word of her soundless query, “W H A T” in real time, so she has plenty of opportunity to stop the movement of the foot in midstride, making that fraction of a second rewind as some miracle of survival instinct warns her and she kicks off her shoes and the former tomboy Noel is backing out, creeping out of the room just the way she came in, afraid even to swallow, time now

starting to

slooooooooooowwwwwwwwwllllllllyyyyyyyyy move

forward again

oh no no NOOOOOOO

don't start moving yet
TICK
Oh Godddddddddd
TICK

TICK TICKTICKTICK moving now and she is running like hell for the car knowing deep inside that for days she has made love to a man who is who is oh oh oh oh ooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhGodnoohno no no no inside her secret heart she knows that she is running from DEATH! Running behind her now she can hear the footfalls thudding behind her and mindless of the pain she runs barefooted across the drive and oh jeez the keys are inside in my purse she thinks and then no she remembers the emergency key in the small metal thing under the bumper and she snatches at the magnetic box and it won't come loose and she feverishly rips it off, ripping her long blood-red nails in the process, and fumbles with the key, lurching in behind the wheel and smashing the door locks down as she grinds the ignition on, his hand grabbing the door just as she locks it, his arm back in a killing mode as she guns the motor, smashing out with a deadly elbow as she tromps the accelerator peeling out in a scrrrrreeeeeeee of smoking tires as, the window beside her spider tracks in a heart-attacking explosion from the thrown elbow strike and he leaps into his own vehicle and grabs the key off the visor but behind the wheel of a car Noel Collier is his equal and the Rolls roars away through the night, the killer close in pursuit.

She will drive to the police station. He won't dare follow her there but she remembers who this man is and he is already closing on her fast. She heads for her own house nearby, operating by reflex now, squealing into the drive with her hand on the automatic door opening a block away and she is running inside and oh my Christ he is in there waiting for her in the darkness and she feels his strong grip knock the automatic from her hand and her heart almost leaps out of her beautiful chest as the voice of the cop Jack Eichord whispers in her ear, “Get down in the spa room."