Stone Shadow (3 page)

O
nly one of the first three got a look at him. Yolanda de la Cruz never saw him. She was worrying about her long black, shiny hair looking terrible and windblown when he took her out. She was twenty-two. Formerly Miss Watermelon of Dilly, Texas, where watermelons are no joking matter, and by any standards quite gorgeous. Schlepping her books around the agencies in the Dallas area, getting a good deal of midrange work. Modeling Conventions. The usual stuff. This could be good. It was a call from MG GRAPHICS. Mark Gold to do this print thing for Patio Foods. It was one of Mark's three biggest accounts and she had her fingers crossed as always. This could be the biggie.

“Do we gotta have the window shot, honey?"

“We gotta have the window shot,” he assured her, climbing out the window and his assistant uncoiling cable and handing him the camera carefully as he squatted down on the hot rooftop. “Anything for the Patio account. Now, gimme the face, please, angel."

She stuck her kisser out the window, at which point the wind blew a hunk of the long mane into her mouth as she said, “Maaaaarrrrrrrk! AAAAHHHH. SPAAAAAWWWW.” Spitting hair out and Mark fighting back a laugh as the young assistant left the corridor heading for the rest room, and the spitting sound the last audible noise Yolanda de la Cruz—workname Yolie Dale—would make prior to the moment of her neck being snapped. She was thinking a thought, cursing cocky little Mark Gold and his queen assistant and trying to spit the hair out of her lovely mouth when she felt herself unhinged. Yes. Unhinged. Dislocated. And suddenly her brain was feeding the oddest signals to her body, and her eyes were seeing from the strangest perspective as she blacked out and the killer picked her up as if she weighed five pounds instead of ninety-five and hurled her through the open window, which is all Mark Gold saw—a blur of woman flying out at him like Supergirl—and he was going out of control hitting the guardrail and both of them going out in space as he grabbed for something, screaming, and his scream as they plummeted off the roof what the assistant heard and moments later he came running out of the rest room and, Where was everybody, and he stuck his blow-dried head out the window and screamed, “Hey!” just as the killer flung him across the roof like a sack of potatoes and he glimpsed the face of the man as he flipped over the guardrail ass over pudding pot, arms flailing, a scream trapped in his throat as his heart gave up the ghost and he cashed in as it were in midflight.

The jogger out by the lake north of Dallas, Linda Wilson, twenty, a pre-med honey going to Baylor—she was number four and she never got a glimpse of the man as he came out from behind the bushes like a snake, soundlessly and smoothly, gliding in behind her panting, hard-breathing footfalls, and instantly blinded her with shock waves of pain and flung her off the edge of the cliffs that were so conveniently near the jogging pathway. The killer loved the feel of throwing someone from a height, the power of seeing them plunge to their death. So reassuring.

The MG GRAPHICS tragedy was assumed to be an awful accident. Everybody knows how these photographers take such chances. It was just terrible, though, the three of them all falling off that roof like that. And there was no reason to ever autopsy Linda Wilson. It was a case of a foolhardy and adventuresome girl who was far too daring for her own good. Everybody said so. And she just got too near the edge. Wrong to be out jogging alone like that anyway. Her body was found crushed on the stones below, but no reason to suspect anything since there was no visible sign of assault or molestation. Just a bad, awfully tragic accident. Pure coincidence that two of the victims had been young and pretty females. Just the breaks.

But the rest of the seventeen random kills and twenty-two assorted missing-persons cases appeared to be without logical connectives. The number—thirty-nine—had a terrible feel to it.

T
he flaky homicide detectives started doing schtick immediately upon encountering one another in the precinct house, Jimmy Lee saying to Dana Tuny, “Eichord downstairs?"

“Hey, do I look like Mr. Keen? The fuck should I know?"

“No. You look like an elephant wearing a man's shirt, but if you see Jack down there, tell him line four."

“Some get a kick from co-caaaaaaayyyyyyyne,” the fat cop sang as he clomped down into the squad room. “But I know that if I would eat me some quiff it would bore me terriff-ically tooooooo. Hey! Eichord. Pick up four."

“Homicide."

“'Zis Jack Eichord?"

“Speaking."

“Jack, this is Wally Michaels. You remember me?"

“Oh—sure,” Eichord said unconvincingly.

“I met you in D.C. a couple years ago, remember? I was in the class you lectured at Quantico."

“Oh, yeah. Sure! Hey, Wally. How's it goin'?"

“Goin’ great. Still with Dallas PD. I hear about you all the time, of course. MacTuff went and made you a star, man.” They laughed. “Jack, I'm asking for your help through channels. The chief is calling your honcho or maybe has already this morning. We need ya to get down to big D ... Are you tied up with anything right now?"

“Not anything I can't shake loose of, far as I know. What's cookin'?"

“We got a serial murder. Thing's really hot. Weird M.O. Whacko time. Nearly forty possibles. Random kills. Killed at least seventeen people already around the Dallas—Fort Worth area. Other than a family of migrant workers they appear to all be unrelated.” Wally began running the case down to Eichord, who sensed something pulling at him the way all the big ones seemed to do. Giving him that first taste. The first little frisson of beckoning excitement, the first shudder of fear that came from knowing an unknown killer was out there somewhere.

The Major Crimes Task Force was a federally funded unit for which Eichord worked as a sometimes agent-at-large. He would work out of a local police force or whatever, nominally under the ranking officer, but often working independently from whatever official investigation might already be under way. His title, that of special investigator, told you nothing. In truth he was that rara avis of coppers. He answered to no one.

Eichord thought of his boss as the Captain, if you'd ask him, the honcho of his detective bureau at home, but captain was merely the bottom rung in a lofty ladder of command. The captain of Buckhead Station just happened to be the lifer who handed Eichord his ticket to ride when MCTF reached out for him.

When Eichord wasn't involved in a task-force-sanctioned investigation, he was just another city flatfoot. But everyone from the newest patrolmen on up knew that he was only there to await the bidding of a higher master. Because of his low-profile demeanor and self-effacing nature, the unique status accorded him had never become the personnel problem that it might have had Jack's ego been less healthy. But he saw himself as just another hardworking, dedicated cop. Period.

The limelight that plagued him so in recent years had been a real two-edged sword. His success track record, real or hype job, allowed him to come and go as he liked. Disappear, in fact, for weeks on end. Report or not report—with paychecks mailed by the Treasury Department to a box number. He was as close as it really gets to having a license to kill. All he needed was a black mask and a faithful Indian friend. He unholstered his Smith that night as he began packing for Dallas, and—sure enough—he had plenty of silver bullets.

T
he pretty stewardess was telling him something, smiling like the idea of serving booze to a low-rent cop on the shadowy side of middle age was precisely what she wanted to be doing with her life on a pretty day like this. How many of the little bottles of airplane booze had he consumed? He also had a silver flask he'd worked on pretty good back in the john. He was flying, all right.

The thing didn't seem like it would be much more than a two-way round-trip tourist ticket. After all, they thought they had the perp. Probably be another Bundy deal. Come in and make nice with this Hackabee character and pry the whole picture loose grave by grave.

According to what Wally Michaels had told him, some wino was going through some empty cardboard boxes, and he opens one and there's a naked woman in there. He thinks she's dead and runs screaming to the coppers. Only thing is, she's still alive. This being the woman Donna Something—he fumbled for his notebook—Canofpeas? He squinted and read the name Scannapieco. Irish broad, he thought, feeling very tight.

So Donna Can-of-peas, age thirty-something, naked as a jaybird, crammed inside an appliance box and about two steps short of coming unwrapped altogether, she tells ‘em in the ER that she was pulling into a parking lot at this shopping mall when a dude puts a gun in the window, tells her to move over. He starts the car up and takes her into a nearby alley where he stuffs Donna in the trunk. A half-hour later he's got her chained to the bed in the basement of this old house. Says she's his “sex slave” from now on, and if she wants food and drink she can put out for it; if not, she dies. She tells of rape and torture, and finally, a month or so of this, she sees her chance and manages to escape. Ends up downtown, still naked, and covered in filth, hiding in a refrigerator box where she passes out and the wino finds her.

Thing is, all during the weeks of captivity, he's bragging to her about how he likes to take folks off. He's the number-one killer of the century, he tells her, and brags about the “hundreds of human bodies” he's buried all over the Southwest. He's so specific that she manages to remember some of it. The cops figure it's bullshit.

She's a little on the hard side, Donna is. They see that once she gets cleaned up, she likes to load up with the old makeup, lots of eye shadow, flashy wardrobe, a low-cut this, a tight that, show a little leg. They kind of figure she may have asked for it. Maybe she didn't even mind it all that much—the sex-slave part. Maybe she even got off on it. And Donna is on the theatrical side. Very dramatic. Poses a lot and talks like she thinks maybe somebody should be shooting all this with a camera. It just doesn't sit right.

And there's always the remote possibility you got an irate lover who wants to punish somebody and embarrass them real bad. Maybe a jilted mistress who wants to put her married sugar daddy through some changes at the expense of the Dallas cop shop. It wouldn't be the first time. So there is natural suspicion.

But one of the coppers happens to see the Identikit drawing they do of Donna's abductor, and son of a bitchin’ don't that beat all, that's that crazy fucker Ukie Hackabee. Whoa, shit. Ukie, as in Ukelele, is what they call a police character in Dallas. You've got to realize, pardner, this is Big Dee, where Jack Ruby was only rated a “buff” status. So if you're a genuine “character,” that means you've done messed in a few mess kits and got caught at it. Eichord had checked the MCTF computer-think on the man and he had a thick package as a KSP (known sexual pervert), with the impression of being a very small-time nickel-dime con man.

Within forty-eight hours the state rods picked him up. And as it happened, they nailed him while he was digging out behind a private estate where the wealthy owner had friendly troopers make the occasional drive-by. On closer inspection, what Ukie was poking around in happened to be the fresh grave of a young Jane Doe. Ukie looked awfully good for about thirty-nine homicides all of a sudden.

And all of a sudden there were city, state, and fed-level shields digging everywhere Donna Scannapieco said to dig. And many of the areas where Ukie had bragged to her about burying people revealed human remains. They were onto what might become one of the most notorious mass murders ever. Ukie had told Donna about “hundreds of bodies.” What if his brags were factual? What had Ukie Hackabee gone and done?

In his maximum-security cell Ukie (William) Hackabee not only confessed that he was the guilty party, but guys, hey, you don't know the half of it. I've killed whole rooms of people—buildings full of assholes. You ain't just messing with some small potatoes punk. I've taken down HUNDREDS of mother-fuckers all over this part of the country.

And all of this was sloshing around with the airplane booze when Eichord got his final smiles from the stews, deplaning at the huge piece of tarmac that had disappointed so many visitors to Dallas—finding out that Love Field was only the name of an airport. And he shook his head to clear out the cobwebs, sucked in a lungful of that warm, dry Dallas air, and moved with the mob, spotting a familiar face who said, “Hey, over here."

“Whatdya say, Wally."

“Great to see you, Jack."

“Good to see you again. You've gotten fat, eh?” Wally Michaels might have weighed all of 160 soaking wet.

“Yeah. I'm eatin’ good. You look great."

“I look a little drunk, I'll bet. All that booze on the plane—man, I'm swacked.” They laughed.

“I hear you, sir. I get that way everytime I get in a plane."

“Anything new?"

“Huh?"

“On your perp?"

“Oh, not much. The woman's starting to get a little hazy on the specifics. But she's batting a thousand with us. She's tryin’ hard. Very forthcoming. Offered to let us have her hypnotized and that kind of thing but we've got to be awfully careful with this. Don't want to blow it."

“Playing it by the book with the perp?"

“Absolutely. All the way, Jack. They Mirandized him six ways from Sunday. He got so many Mirandas read to him he had it memorized.” Jack smiled. “We're really taking it slow ‘n’ easy with Ukie."

“What the hell kind of name is that anyway?"

“Ukie was sort of a half-assed entertainer at one time here. He worked a couple of the strip joints as an MC or something. Got up and strummed his ukelele and sang dirty songs or whatever. We've known him for years. Had him in over and over for a couple aggravated sexual assaults, wienie-wagging, bunch of times on suspicion-jerkin’ him around a little. Vag. He's a fuckin’ moke."

“I saw the package. But you know what doesn't feel right?"

“This is the car—'scuse me. Go ahead,” Michaels interrupted as he started to open the door of an unmarked Plymouth.