It was the one thing he never let himself think about. He wouldn't even admit it existed. It was too painful to remember the call from the nice chief down in Blytheville, telling him about the “scrapbook” they'd found when the particle-board flooring rotted out.
Hidden down under the flooring of the unmobile home was Mr. Owen Hillfloen's diary of blood. Explaining the crimes in twisted, meticulously printed phrases taken from the Scriptures.
Try as he might, he could not jerk his thoughts from the page where the old man detailed his punishment of the children, and Eichord visualized their last hours of torture. It was the page that explained why he'd taken their heads. What he'd done to them with the snakes before he killed and dismembered them.
Then he fell asleep. And in his dream he touches the filthy doorknob, turns, pushes, flashes the light around, finds the switch, hits it, sees the eyeball first as the stench overpowers him.
Some things never go away.
Buckhead Station
Jack Eichord woke up hurting all over. He felt as if he might have had 3 1/2 hours’ sleep, and his neck hurt the way he imagined it would if someone had taken a ball bat to him. He'd awoken scrunched up against the headboard, head at an impossibly weird angle, and he tried unsuccessfully to pop his second vertebra. Two aspirin hadn't helped. His throat, and nose, and sinus cavities felt the way they use to feel after fourteen hours behind the wheel of a car, back in the days when he still boozed and set fire to three packs of Winstons a day. His tongue was thick and coated with something that proved impervious to toothpaste, mouthwash, and coffee. He went in and found Donna's Darvon and popped one, and stood still and rotated his head back and forth.
They'd violated one of their own iron-clad rules. They'd gone to bed mad. Always before, when there was a problem between them, they'd talk it out, but they'd got into it over the boy again last night and each had said things they shouldn't have said, the way you sometimes will in a fight. Jack was downright mean to Jonathan. Donna was unwilling to sit on the kid. Each agreed the other was a shitty parent. Nobody won, and this morning it was still a draw. Nobody felt like hugging and kissing and Eichord ended up leaving the house in a silent, sullen cloud of frustration and fear and anger. Another first.
It had started when he came home and she hit him with the housework bit again; she had busted her back all day, she was through with the kid, “it's your turn."
He'd gone in to a screaming, defiant Jonathan and worked to calm him down. Let's play blocks, he said. They played blocks. Jack took a block just slightly below his left eye, thrown hard. For a two-year-old, he had to give him credit. The kid had an arm on him. Now if he could work on a slider and his change-up...
Did she fully realize the implications, he wondered, of a child like this, who felt such bitter hatred at two? The corny phrase “SPAWN OF EVIL” always managed to type itself on his mind screen when he had such thoughts. Jesus Christ! The child's murdered father had BLINDED A MAN when he was—what?—eight or nine years old! Again he allowed himself the guilty quasi-pleasure of regretting having fought for the kid's survival. Maybe it would be better for all concerned if he would ... And he let the thought die out. That kind of thinking was just jacking yourself off. It might feel good for the moment, but it's better when you grow out of it.
By the time he got to work he could feel his paranoia quotient building like Dana's high blood pressure, and the morning had barely started.
“Eichord,” he grumbled into the telephone mouthpiece.
“Jack?” It was the C.A.
“Listen,” the man said, and Jack duly listened, the phone cradled between his sore shoulder and neck and his throbbing head, words crackling meaninglessly as he jotted notes on legal pad paper. The call ended and another phone rang beside him, and he listened to Peletier get invited to a customs seminar in New Orleans, or so it sounded from his eavesdropped side of the call. What the fuck would a Homicide copper be doing at a ... Ah, fuck it. Little did he realize the telephone was about to strike him like a lightning bolt.
He shuffled papers and tried to attack his mountain of paperwork with little success. He read a memo rerouted to him via MacTuff, from a weapons consultant who suggested a new slant on the Tina Hoyt case. His thesis was that the killings were acts of political terrorism, and he had some fifty-six pages of documentation available on the use of a sharpened bicycle spoke as an assassination weapon. The killer, he proposed, was a hit man for the Ton Ton Macoute. Eichord, who never ruled anything out at first glance, filed the memo in the Graham file and flashed on the tire track cast. Shit, why not? But it didn't help his neck or headache any.
Now he'd misplaced the notes from the C.A.'s call, and as he shuffled papers, he found a crude drawing of three stick figures beside a doctor's name.
This was Jack's doodled shorthand reminder to buy dolls. The bottom line from a phone call to a woman psychologist recommended to him by Doug Geary. She'd offered a pleasant and logically reasoned suggestion about Jonathan.
Jack had told her he understood about the Terrible Twos, but this wasn't just a kid slamming doors, or breaking something, or throwing a tantrum. He was extremely concerned about the boy. He told her about the biological father—a monstrous mass murderer, the incarnation of evil. A tortured child who had grown up to become a cold killer, who had later acted as midwife to the birth of the infant son, literally ripping the child from his mother's womb at the moment of birth. Could such a thing have caused some kind of awful traumatic damage to Jonathan? When the Twos become SO terrible that it might be beyond the stage of such a child's expected development, how much more is okay before it's abnormal? How much of this was Jack overreacting?
She told him about dolls. Buy this little house. Dolls. Play a game with the child. It was all about association and role models and things that Eichord thought made perfect sense, and he vowed to buy them today. Tonight he would show Jonathan that he, Daddy, and Mommy loved their son. And that son would love Daddy and Mommy in return. And they'd all live happily forever after. Unless something else happened and one of them slipped and fell in the shark tank, eh?
He found the notes he was looking for. They read, burden of proof ... beyond reasonable doubt ... prosecutorial stance ... a lot of bullshit, he thought, and round-filed it.
The telephone on his desk rang and he picked it up. “Homicide. Eichord."
“This is Bonnie Johnson. I had a message you tried to get in touch with me."
“Hi, Bonnie. Thanks for returning my call. I had some information here on Mizz—” He fumbled around on his desk, turning pages, trying to find the dossier.
“Diane Taluvera. Yes, sir?"
“You still haven't heard from her?"
“No, sir. Just that postcard."
“Has anybody received any sort of direct communication from Ms Taluvera? A phone call—something like that?"
“Not a word."
“Do you think something has happened to her, Bonnie?” He tried to use an individual's first name whenever he could, but he had caught himself saying Mister Schumway a whole lot.
“Yes.” He could hear the catch in her voice. “I'm afraid for her. It's not like her to run away like that."
“You think this person that she was seeing, the man she referred to as Al, might have abducted her?"
“I did until last night, but now I don't know what to think. His secretary called me and they all want to come talk with me about Diane. He is as worried as I am. It's the car dealer Al Schumway. And he said he got a postcard from Diane too. He wanted to know what was going on. If I had got a call from her. He can't understand why she hasn't phoned him."