“No fucking way. No, Daddy. That's a serious mistake. You should never have any contact with Bonnie at all. She doesn't know you. You're clear of it."
“Yeah. But dig it, YOU could get her for us."
“No, don't make me do it. I don't like it. It's risky."
“There, there, now,” he said, a hand closing on one of her breasts, “we'll work it out all neat. Don't worry your sweet tits about it.” He pulled her to him.
Buckhead Station
The morning was another pisser. The rain stopped around ten a.m. and Eichord didn't see anybody scrambling for their cars. The sky was slate-colored, with swollen, gunmetal clouds looking ready to open up again any minute. Everybody in the squad room was knee-deep in paperwork, and in truth, by the end of the second day Hoyt-Graham, the Iceman dossier, was citywide, then countrywide, and had mushroomed from three to some eighteen pages.
Eichord had the Ps. Palmer Med, Peek Equipment, Inc., Pioneer Home Care, Poole-Weintraub Associates, Puritan Hospital Consultants, Inc., and he added a possible from his homemade list, Parker's Pharmacy. It was times like this detectives felt the sting of cutbacks in the force, and what the reality of limited budgets meant when you had to hit the streets.
Hoyt-Graham was becoming a massive compilation of possibles, data-processors spewing out guys in their early forties, with some record of wheelchair usage, living within a 50 mile radius of the area served by the greater Buckhead Cross Index. The drawing had been a total strikeout. Eichord slid his chair back with a screech, murmured good-bye forever, and forced himself out into the wet streets.
Ten days later it had all added up to a mountain of maybes and nothing much solid. A week and a half of pounding pavement and making phone calls. Jack Eichord had learned more about wheelchair life than he'd really wanted to know: from the chair models that had the best riggings to the problems of decubitus to the unique environment of the chairbound individual; a world of disabled parking spaces and shopping-mall ramps and extrawide, elongated commode stalls that your average shuffler took for granted.
“Whatta we got, guys?"
“I got a woody,” Dana offered.
“Another first. What we got is about twenty-two men who look if not good at least possible."
“Bullshit,” fat Dana whined.
“Nu? Speak?"
“We got Jumping Jack shit and you know it."
“Possibles, he said, Moby, clean out cher blowhole,” Monroe Tucker suggested halfheartedly.
“Blow this."
“But there's a solid and I think rich area,” Eichord went on, unperturbed. “And that's in the parallel search. Let's keep combing the pawn shops, office-supply companies, schools who purchased new or used equipment recently, the local buy-sell-rent-trade ads for typewriters, newspaper classifieds, radio/bulletin-board sales, neighborhood word-of-mouth among the garage-sale addicts—let's see who our friend with the ‘hand of Christ’ turns out to be."
“You said it was garbage. You didn't like the one who typed the letter. How come you like it now?"
“Can't a girl change her mind, fer crissakes? Anyway, let's find the sucker. See who typed it. I mean, at least it would be a positive lead. Let him prove to us he or she IS a crank."
But what Jack believed in his secret heart was that the more he looked at the list of impossible-possibles, the three-foot-tall bilateral amputees and embittered (rightfully) Nam vets who couldn't get the government to pay for a chair it had caused them to be put into, the less faith he had in the Hoyt-Graham data.
The work was piling up in an intimidating paper mountain, and the more Jack looked at it, the more he liked the concept of an extremely intelligent killer who could set up a carefully concocted series of crimes that would APPEAR to look like copy-cat kills. And then, when the cops looked at the murders, the case would peel away like an onion, layer after layer, and suddenly the inside would be hollow. Hello? Surprise—nobody home.
Two weeks and change. The twenty-two name list had yielded little gold. Eichord hadn't a vibe worth reflecting on. He'd just finished with Sam Nagel, a pitiful old gent who broke his heart for half an hour, the oldest forty-two-year-old he'd ever met.
“Thanks again,” Jack said, trying to take his leave.
“It wasn't any bother. I was glad to talk to you."
“Okay. Well, take care” Eichord said, starting to turn.
“I don't mind helping out the police. You know, you all is about all there is that stands between us and the bad people. And we should support our law-enforcement officers."
“Right. Appreciate it."
“I see it all around. The collapse of the old moral codes. The old values are gone. The respect for law and order. Take your kids today: some of them don't seem to have any respect for anybody else's rights. And you know what I say? I say if you don't respect yourself first, you aren't going to be able to respect anybody else either."
“That's right,” Jack said.
The man was so lonely for somebody to talk to. They made some more conversation and finally Eichord was able to make a friendly, graceful exit and wave farewell to the oldest forty-two-year-old man on Planet Earth, and he had to fight not to cross his name off. There were three names that he'd made check marks by:
ADAMS, Hayden
BOLEN, Willard (check)
BRITTEN, Morris
CARTER, Jerry
CUNNINGHAM, Harold
DENNENMUELLER, Mike (check)
FREIDRICHS, Keith (check)
GIBBAR, Robert
GILLESPIE, Jeff
HOWARD, Edwin
JAMES, Felix
JONES, Mark
MULLINS, Craig
NAGEL, Sam
ROSE, Louis
SCHUMWAY, Alan
SCHWAB, David
SMITH, Rick
TREPASSO, Phil
WHITE, Blake
WISEMAN, Eben
ZOFUTTO, Mario
Willard Bolen was a veteran who had an ax to grind against the United States government, Society in General, and the World. He had become embroiled in a wheelchair dispute that had never been totally resolved, beginning when he attempted to get Uncle Sam to pay for a fancier-model chair than was permitted, and snowballing into other areas. The odds that he was Spoda were so great as to be astronomical, but he got a check mark for murderous rage.
Mike Dennenmueller had records to prove he was a diabetic, and the fact that he was an amputee would have made him an impossible but there was no paper trail on him for fifteen of the last eighteen years. You could follow him back in time about three years and then he appeared to go up in smoke. If Dennenmueller was Spoda, was it possible he'd figured out a way to kill from the chair? Eichord filed it under science fiction, but he kept the check mark by his name. He also had mannerisms that bothered Jack. He wore his hostility carefully disguised under a mask of banter, but there was a lot more to him than met the eye.
If Eichord had to say, One guy looks good if not to be Spoda, then to be capable of homicide, he would have said Freidrichs was the man. He had total paralysis of his lower body and as vicious a personality as Jack could remember having encountered. The man was a seething, boiling volcano of potential violence. An attractive man of forty-one, Keith Freidrichs had a badly retarded brother and he ran a downtown arcade from his chair. It struck Eichord that if someone could manage to get hold of a badly retarded individual who could not be easily traced, they might make an impenetrable cover.