She sees none of this as she turns the corner, breathing more normally as the weighty presence of dread lifts from her like an invisible stone, and she puts the menacing weirdness of The Manhole Man out of her mind. She has much more interesting and rewarding things to concentrate on as she wonders if Jack will call her late tonight as they discussed, and when they will see each other again. But at 222030 Eichord's thoughts are far from romantic. He is all cop, standing with other men at the scene of an arrest. They have taken a suspect into custody and the air is electric with the possibility of these men having caught the Lonely Hearts killer.
"So what's the problem, Jack?" one of them is asking Eichord.
"It just isn't that tight."
"Wrong-oh."
"Say?"
"Shit, man, it's absolutely dead bang. What more do you want here? We've got that sonofabitch."
"I don't think so."
"It's dead bang, Jack," another cop says.
"No. I don't believe it's dead-bang sure at all."
"We've got an eyeball witness. We've got a perp with a psycho package. We've got a blade man. A resisting arrest. We got a body. We got blades. He fits the whole MO. We got opportunity. We got motive. Dead-bang solid."
"No." Eichord shakes his head.
"Come on."
"Huh-uh. He's not our man."
"Eye-fuckin'-witness, Pops."
"That's the dead boy. Okay. That's what we've got. He did the boy all right. But as far as Sylvia Kasikoff I gotta' tell you guys, I just don't like him for it at all."
"Talk," Arlen says.
"You're gonna find out that it isn't the same blade. He took the heart out with a scalpel. A little—what the hell was it?—a Benson and Hedges—uh, some name like that—the little blade?"
"Brookstone and Jensen surgeon's scalpel."
"Right. He did the boy with it, bet money."
"So he used a scalpel this time. We've got the big hunting knife that he used on all the others. Maybe it was getting dull. Whatever. So he used a scalpel. Same difference."
"When the lab tells us the hunting knife was the blade, then it's dead bang. No. I don't think we got the main heart man here at all. I think we got a copycat."
"Jack."
"Lou?"
"What throws you off on this guy . . . I mean, how come you don't like a guy who takes a heart for Sylvia Kasikoff all of a sudden?"
"The burns. I dunno. Something about the fact that he tortured the boy. It's like he was playing with him and then did the heart number to throw us off the other. Make it into a Lonely Hearts. And he just cut the heart out of the chest cavity and pitched it. The other times somebody took the heart and did something with it, disposed of it elsewhere or used it someway, like in a ritual thing—whatever. I just don't think we've got him at all." But it wasn't the burns. It wasn't that at all.
"Jack. I think you're going to be very, very surprised with the lab work on this. That hunting knife has got a big blade. I think we'll make it for the others. You want to put a big steak dinner on it?"
"You got it." Eichord laughed. "And let's pray you're right."
The cops are in a good mood in spite of Jack's dissenting opinions, and everybody is heading for the cop bar and a big celebration. Eichord is going too, never a wave maker, letting the comaraderie and self-congratulatory fever take him against his better judgment.
It is 222600 and against his better judgment Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski decides to ignore the woman who saw him and, tired and ravenous, has gone down into his nightworld. At 222600 he is nineteen feet south of Chicago Submain K-138C-10, in a tiny submerged room that hangs beneath the manhole next to K-138C-10's valve-box cover, where he sits quietly, staring into the shadows of a lantern, oblivious to the overpowering stench as he consumes forty-dollars' worth of cold egg rolls, and thinks about his dark future.
As his conscious mind thinks his horrifying and disgusting Chaingang thoughts of rape and murder and mutilation, on another level his subconscious registers the recent events in his computer and a tiny voice whispers to him, "Well, you've done it again. You've made another mistake." And subliminally he feels himself sinking deeper into the quicksand of retribution that continues to tug at his massive body so relentlessly.
He mashes another cold egg roll into the sweet-and-sour sauce and inhales it in a gulp, staring into the black shadows with tiny eyes like hard, dark marbles set in a face of dough. The coal-black pig eyes of sudden death. Evil . . . safe now, down in the sewers.
And Edie Emaline Lynch is rolling northbound. Her vector has crossed that of the monster. She is humming along with a love song on the radio, thinking about an almost-stranger she is nuts about, this Jack Eichord, who is at this moment laughing on the outside, gritting his teeth on the inside, and about to succumb to his personal demons.
Eichord in the spotlight
"What?"
W H A T ?
The word explodes into the stillness of the room, shocking him awake like a pitcher of ice water thrown on the naked body of a sleeping human. He is jarred awake physically but remains deep inside the clinging and impenetrable covers of one of those unbearably realistic-to-the-last-detail nightmares that some people seem to visit in lieu of confessionals.
Jack Eichord was an ardent and longtime fan of the movie genre known as film noir; dated, dark, night time guided tours of forties and fifties urban underworlds. He loved the old black-and-white late-show procedurals, full of seedy PIs in search of elusive Maltese falcons. One of the early ones was a thing with Victor Mature and Betty Grable called I Wake Up Screaming and he thought the title to himself as he woke up screaming the word what.
W H A T ?
He is screaming the world WHAT? at the top of his brain's lungs, just as the room explodes in noise and he penetrates the curtain of the bad dream enough to snatch the ringing telephone off the cradle and whisper through a sleep-parched mouth the hoarse, cracked greeting:
"Wha'?"
"Jack? Are you awake?" she asked.
"Huh?"
"Is this Jack?"
"Huh? Yeah. Yeah. Edie?"
"Were you still asleep? It's after ten. I'm sorry. You got in late, I shouldn't have called. I'm sorry."
"'S okay."
"Jack! Congratulations!"
"Huh?" What, he thinks, I wonder what time it is? He is totally befuddled.
"It's all over the television and newspapers this morning. You're a celebrity. Except the one paper got your name as John Eichord instead of Jack, but on TV they didn't have your name on the one channel; they referred to you as 'the famous expert on serial murders' or something like that and— "
"What?"
"Huh? Pardon?"
"Edie, can you hear me all right?"
"Yes, honey. You sound like you've got a cold or something. Have you got a bad connection? Can you hear me?"
"Yes, I think so. Listen, what are you talking about? What's in the papers and on TV? What are you saying?"
"You, my darling. You're a big cop star now." She laughed happily. "Oh, Jack, was he the one,"—her voice took on a cold edge—"you know, responsible for Ed? Or is it too soon to know that yet?"
"Edie, I just don't have the faintest notion of what you're talking about. Start from the beginning."
"Are you serious?"
"Yeah. What is it?"
"You solved the Lonely Hearts killings."
"I'm not believing this. What in the hell are you talking about?"