“I'd just pulled in to go to the mall,” she said without hesitation, “and this man comes up to the car and I had just tapped the car in back of me very, very gently on the bumper when I parked and I didn't know who he was I just assumed maybe he was going to be saying something about me hitting the car, like he was going to, you know, claim I knocked a dent in his bumper, which I know I didn't because I barely touched the car, and he goes, ‘If you'll look in my hand you'll see I'm holding a pistol and ... ‘"
As she talked, Eichord's mind wandered and he listened to the word patterns as much as he did the words. Listening for the subtle changes in the rhythms as he always did. Listening for the gray areas that lay hidden in between the blacks and whites of fact, opinion, conjecture. Trying to piece together an after-the-fact reality from as many sources as would offer input.
Eichord was a by-the-book detective when he had to be. And nobody could touch him when it was time to cogitate, seriate, extrapolate, and excavate the buried chunks of seemingly irrelevant and disconnected datums. They came from nowhere. Apparently meaningless nuances. Trivia. Minutiae. Nonfacts. Suggestions. Rhythms. Patterns. Nudges. But Jack Eichord was no Sherlock. (Those were the ashes of a Trichinopoli cigar in his cuff, Watson.) Eduction/deduction came in many packages. He was a visceral, gut-instinct, vibes man at heart.
He knew the overlong frankness of eyeball stares calculated to instill trust, the hesitation in midphrase that sometimes red-flagged deceit, the too-perfect arrangement of “clues,” the patterns of occurrence that signaled a suspicious structuring of events supervenient to a homicide. He listened for dissonance, sniffed for secret blood trails, watched for the dodgy maneuvering of the evasive broken-field runner. What he called the footprints in the cottage cheese.
“...clothing, and they wanted to know whether I was wearing provocative clothing at the time of,” he heard her say with heavy sarcasm, but what he watched was the way she widened her eyes on the word “provocative.” It was this signal that he would find so typical of Donna Scannapieco's demeanor, the widening of the eyes, the frankness of the sensual animal in her reflected in those dark irises, an unabashedly sexy communication that was so off-putting to him, the continuous statement she made about herself to anyone with whom she had close contact. The truth is that she was one of those victims it is rather difficult to pity.
“Tell me about the place he kept you in, Donna."
“I'll never forget that place. It was just a room. About twelve feet wide"—she motioned with her hands—"and about fourteen feet long. The walls looked like maybe cedar, I'm not good at that, but they were covered in pictures and stuff. He had mostly pictures from dirty magazines. Women doing things, you know. And some newspaper clippings."
“Tell me about the clippings."
“There was the one about the slain college girl. That was the first one I told you guys about that led to them believing me, I guess. And then I remember the clipping about the boy who had suddenly disappeared, and that was the one where he first started bragging about how he was able to do anything he wanted and get away with it. And that he made hundreds of people disappear all over the Southwest. He'd just drive from city to city and whenever he felt like it he said he'd just kill somebody and put them in the ground or dump them in the river or whatever.” She had begun speaking very rapidly, and as her speech cadence changed, her breathing accelerated, but the focus of the eyes that mirrored the inner direction had never wavered. His initial reaction was, whatever else Donna Scannapieco might be, he thought she was probably telling the truth.
“Donna, did you ever wonder or even think to ask him why he was telling you about these killings?"
“He probably figured he'd kill me too when he got tired of me. I mean, what did he have to fear from me? When he still had me chained up I guess he knew there was no way I could get loose."
“How did you finally get loose exactly?"
Unlike so many similarly besieged victims she did not seem to grow physically tired from the long interrogation that ran through the lunch hour. Eichord's initial Q-and-A session with Miss Scannapieco had produced the curious effect of making him very weary, but she wasn't tired in the least when they broke for lunch. Two hours and forty-five minutes of relentless probing, taking her over that painful time, making her search the corners of her memory, had left her fresh as a daisy. Her resolve had kept her alert and keen. It was almost as if she'd enjoyed it. Every surfacing fact putting Ukie Hackabee closer to death row. He hoped she'd stay this way. She was one helluva witness.
But while the questioning hadn't drained her energies, what it had done was start the two of them off on some uneven footing. He could tell by the way she'd begin her answers to some of his questions that she thought Jack Eichord was a real horse's butt, and she was letting him know. Telling him what he could do with his judgmental, chauvinist, redneck ass as far as she was concerned, or so Eichord imagined by the way she'd frame up her answers. And when he packed it in around one that afternoon he was getting prickly and paranoid about her tone of implicit condemnation and reproach that he was reading in her responses. He was also aware that this could hinder the shit out of an investigation.
He decided he'd put his feelings back in cold storage where they belonged and start fresh with her again tomorrow. Let go of it for now. Regroup and come in with a new attitude next time. Try to like Donna a little more, be less of a judge and more of an impartial listener. Go in there and really make some decent use of this potential gold mine of information about what could be one of the worst mass murderers ever apprehended.
“He was making me do things to him, and I was able to convince him that if he took the chain off I could, you know, be better."
“Be better?"
“He was having me do it, uh, turned with my back to him"—her eyes cast downward—"dog-style, he called it"—her voice caught a little—"and it hurt a lot to do it anyway. And he had this leather thing like a wide belt on me that I had worn ever since he took me"—her eyes opened wide again and she grinned savagely—"and that's how I first started getting him to unchain me. This big old heavy chain was fixed to a steel ring on the belt, which was held together with padlock. And I had gotten real chafed and raw from under the belt deal, and I started acting like the chain was so heavy I couldn't stay in position to do what he wanted, and I got him to unlock it and so, you know, I could be better at it,” she was sneering. “And I'd been watching how he'd stopped locking the door upstairs. If I hadn't talked him into letting me out of the belt I'd be dead now.” She seethed with hatred and Eichord could see her fighting to keep under control and taking deep breaths. It was the closest she'd come to showing the least sign of what he considered vulnerability.
He took her back over the old ground again. Getting her to remember everything she could about the details of the room. Precisely which pictures were on the walls? What sort of magazines had they come from? Were there any captions? Did the newspaper clippings indicate which paper or papers? Dates? What were the exact headlines that she could remember? Were they comments he had made about other victims when he was doing his bragging? Had he had sex with them before he killed them? Was he explicit about those activities? What had he said to her about his motives? Why did he kill? And on they tromped over the fading and bitter memories.
Something nagged at him about Donna Scannapieco and her face, that irritating smile kept gnawing at him, not wanting to let go. She was one of those persons who seem at first to have about ten too many teeth in their mouth. In her case, imagine the older Mary Tyler Moore with her mouth full of Chiclets. Mary takes off her necklace of beads, puts them in her mouth, and smiles and—voila!—Donna. One of those mouths that always look like they should be chewing gum.