He set his mental clock for six hours’ sleep and was snoring peacefully within sixty seconds.
“Wake up,” he told her. He had slept for five hours and fifty-four minutes. He went into the bathroom and when he came out she was still lying there unmoving.
“What's the matter?” he asked.
“I think it's getting to that time."
“You hurting?"
“Not exactly.” She was feeling contractions of her uterus. Daniel had her walk around a little. It didn't make any difference. He carried the desk chair into the bathroom, ran hot water into the bathtub, and had Sissy sit in the chair with her feet in the hot water.
“You feeling good enough to travel?” he asked after a few minutes.
“Sure” she said, rather unconvincingly. “I guess so."
They got back in the car, heading in the direction of Chattanooga, the next stop on the route that made a slow, curving arrow pointed at the heart of one Jack Eichord.
HUBBARD CITY
“Yes, sir,” the cop was saying to him, “that's really all we can give you at this point.” At least he hadn't been one of those people who would genuflect, then take it out on Eichord that he'd been made into a star; or an autograph hound; or somebody who wanted to know what Dr. Demented was really like. This was a dude trying to do his job, and for that Jack was grateful.
“Okay. Appreciate your help. I'm gonna get going."
“Okay. Good luck with it."
“Thanks.” He shook hands with the local guys and went outside where the chopper was waiting for him. That was the thing about the task force, there was no scrimping. They went first-class. They got you in “yesterday” and sliced down through all the layers of red tape like a hot knife into the lard of bureaucratic paperwork. They got things done.
Eichord had been sitting at his desk in Buckhead Station one minute and was literally in a vehicle heading for the airport the next, summoned with an emergency forthwith by the Major Crimes Task Force. MacTuff, as the acronym was pronounced, wanted him in Stobaugh County, Illinois, and yesterday. And when they reached out for you like that, you just relaxed and went with it.
It seemed to take longer to get to the crime scene than it had to fly in from Buckhead. He choppered from Hubbard City, which was in southern Stobaugh County, down to an impromptu landing zone at a place called Bayou Landing, where he was met by a pair of feds, one of whom he already knew.
“Hi, Tom,” he said as they shook hands quickly, shielding their faces as the helicopter lifted in the invariably threatening windstorm.
“Jack. Come on,” Tom said loudly over the noise, and they ran for the waiting car.
“Jack, this is Walter Belcher,” he said. “Jack Eichord.” Tom D'Amico and Jack had worked together on a couple of things in the past, if only nominally. D'Amico was a competent, career-type federal agent. Eichord didn't know him well, nor did he feel like there was a lot to know. Just somebody he'd seen around on task-force assignments.
“Where do you want to start?” he asked Eichord as soon as the vehicle was moving.
“I'd like to see the bridge, then go look at the bodies. You still getting corpses out of there?"
“Negative. I think we may have ‘em all. Fourteen bodies. That includes the trucker."
“How'd the other pictures turn out?"
“Okay, considering.” The first batch of stuff they'd taken underwater had been ruined in developing. “Here's some of the new ones.” He reached back across the front seat and handed Eichord a thick manila envelope. There was a smaller white envelope inside that, and Jack looked at the shots.
“Christ,” he said softly. You really couldn't see much in the shots. A couple of the underwater shots showed the cars pretty clearly, and one in particular with a corpse's face in a window would make for some interesting new nightmares for everybody who looked at it.
The shots of the cars pulled out of the water were so bizarre and terrifying that they almost had a fake look about them, as if a Hollywood schlock producer had decided to film Demolition Derby of the Undead and this was the big chase scene, featuring rust buckets full of cadavers in various states of bloated decomposition. He'd seen enough for the time being and handed the envelope back to D'Amico.
“We'll have big blowups by tomorrow. Better resolution and whatnot. The diagrams are here"—he handed Eichord a thick dossier—"with everything we've got so far. Which isn't much."
“Jack,” the other agent said, “five of them were locals, did you notice?"
“Any theories on that, Walter?” he asked the man sitting beside him.
“Nah.” He shook his head. “We may have an ID on this one.” Belcher leaned over and pointed at one of the Jane Doe descriptions. “We're waiting to get the word on this one right now, but barring a surprise, I think this will be Rosa Lotti. Housewife married to a sheet-metal worker in Varney. Been missing a couple weeks. We know this is a farmer, name of Perce F. Shaunessy. Farms some ground not too far from where these two lived. Hora and his common-law wife. They haven't been in the water too long from the looks of ‘em."
“The one named Lee Moore is a friend of Shaunessy's,” Tom D'Amico said. “There's no connection between the Horas and Moore and Shaunessy other than geography, so far as we know. Shaunessy is believed to have known who Hora was. He's the one that wholesaled to nurseries, landscapers, gardeners, and so forth. Moore worked in some blue-collar job. It's there. I forget."
“A karate instructor?” Eichord read. “Sophomore in high school? Jeezus, these people look like they gotta be random kills."
“It really looks that way,” Belcher said.
“Couldn't be some kinda drug thing?” No comment. “You know—a mob thing maybe. They want to do a copycat number. Make it look like the Chicago killings."
“I don't much think so. Shit, the dopers around here all grow their own out in the back yard. There hasn't been much. They busted a pretty good-sized operation up in Centerburg a few months ago. But God, nothing like, you know, these mutilations and so on."
“Cubans, maybe? One of the new Latin gangs? Vengeance killings?” The shrugs were almost audible.
“Well, surely do have a bunch of John Does here. Could be anything. Any damn thing at all."
One phrase kept leaping out at him off the page, and it made him feel sick and he stopped reading and leaned back in the seat and said. “Tom. If you don't mind. Run it down for me again, wouldja? Right from the point the sheriff gets into it?"
“Last night,” D'Amico said, turning in the front seat beside the uniformed driver, “Sheriff Bob Andersen gets a call about this tractor trailer going off the Iron Bridge—that's what they used to call the bridge, it's in the folder as the Wooden Bridge, same difference. Anyway, driver was looped and thought he was taking a shortcut and goes right off this old bridge. I mean, you'd have to be totally out of it not to see there wasn't anything there, but if you were tired, and drunk, and it was the darkest night of the year ... Anyway he didn't see the barricades and just blasted through the steel cable and chains and whatnot and—wham!—sixty feet straight down into the muddy water. Couple people came along, God knows what they were doing out here at three a.m.—making out I suppose. They see the truck in the water down there, the mess all over where it crashed through, they call for an ambulance, the ambulance guys call the sheriff."