1. Joe Hackabee was well-to-do. “Comfortable,” he said.
2. Joe was single, never married, straight.
3. Joe liked Noel Collier a lot. He also thought she was pretty sensational-looking. Jack had to listen to a good bit on that subject. He also thought, from his lunch with the counselor, that she was going to provide his brother with “a vigorous defense."
4. Joe had a direct-mail marketing firm in Houston. He had learned his trade in professional fund-raising for charitable organizations. He sold mailing lists to companies—was what the thing sounded like to Eichord. He computerized lists of names and addresses and sold them to other mail-order houses. He told Jack he could sell him “a thousand males working in law enforcement, aged twenty-one to thirty-four, sorted by Zip/income/credit rating, and merge-purged with Jack's existing mailing list.” X dollars for a thousand preaddressed stick-on labels and onetime usage rights.
5. Joe liked his brother more than Ukie liked him. He told about all the times he'd tried to help him. Followed behind him paying his brother's debts, cleaning up after him, mending fences. But he didn't feel bitter or angry. “I just finally gave up.” Ukie had never had the breaks he'd had, he said. He thought that “Bill could have been anything he wanted. He had a fine mind. He just couldn't control himself, is what it boils down as, a lack of control. But not so out of control he'd ever kill anybody. He just isn't capable of that sort of violence."
Jack ran a couple of verbal-response tests by Joe as was his usual style and came up with nothing. Example:
“Joe,” he'd said, “I noticed you said when you were describing looking like Ukie, uh, or Bill, you said you probably were a little tanner than he was. If you hadn't seen him in four years"—he allowed his voice to take a bit of an edge to it—"how could you know that?"
“I saw that awful picture in the paper. Jeez, he was so pale-looking.” It was a sadly smiled throwaway without the slightest hint of resentment or con in it. All the litmus tests ran that way. Eichord asked questions like that in the standard cop interrogation manner, not so much listening to WHAT you said but the rapidity with which the words came back in return, the tone of the answer, the emphasis of the words. Interrogation as an art form was a kind of mental tennis match. And the best interrogations were those in which an unspoken thread of something could be seen weaving itself through the texture of the Q-and-A give-and-take.
In that way a copper was like a trial lawyer. It wasn't like on Perry Mason. You didn't often catch the man or woman in the lie, if you were a prosecutor, show them the picture taken by the hidden surveillance camera ("Isn't this YOU we see holding the smoking gun?"), at which point the person on the stand collapses in tears. Today, first of all, nearly everyone has become so damn smooth at stonewalling, and the criminal justice system has become so overloaded in the favor of the accused criminal (thanks to some DANDY Supreme Court rulings), that they could simply look at the photo, smile, and if their lawyer didn't object to the introduction of inadmissible evidence, shake their head politely and say, “Nope. Sorry. Looks a little like me, all right. But it's not me."
Two of the most famous trials of the last quarter-century had involved photographic evidence of “smoking guns,” and the two perpetrators, both of whom had been SEEN, caught in the act by national network television, seen in the commission of the crimes, walked. Both trials had resulted in the defendants’ respective acquittals.
As Eichord led Joseph Hackabee through the step-by-step progression of orphanage, foster-parent, high-school, puberty memories, he began to taste that next drink the way he had when he was at his lowest ebb—a decade ago. It was all he could do at one point not to conclude the meeting so he could go get a couple of real stiff ones. It took a supreme effort of will on his part to concentrate on the exchange of words.
Joe genuinely thought Ukie was innocent. It was sufficiently clear and sincere that Eichord was sure of it. There's no faking a certain type of sincerity. But the Hackabee brothers were not easy to question. In Joe's case he had a way of turning all the questions back in your court. Not in evasion. He'd answer what you said but point the responses back, often as not, toward you. He'd compliment Eichord, in the way he answered, for his masterful intuition or whatever, and do it in such a way that it kept a soft, fuzzy-sided interrogation, the overall effect being a lulling, soporific one on Jack. When the afternoon reached its shank Jack Eichord had learned nothing, was exhausted, wanted a drink, and couldn't wait to get to a telephone.
He struck out at Jones-Seleska. He didn't just want to hear his dream girl breathe into the phone at him. He wanted to hear somebody else's reaction, other than a cop's, to the shock of gentleman Joe Hackabee. But Noel Collier was not to be found.
Cops don't talk much about paperwork but it is the ultimate bugaboo. The voluminous pile of paper trails that had been stacking up in the wake of the homicides now accumulating as the caseload even the cops called Grave-digger threatened to mire Eichord in pulp. Lab reports and forensics on so many bodies eventually take on a life of their own. Identifications made, confirmed, disputed, denied, changed, revised. Notifications. Probes. Summaries. False leads. It all took time, talent, manpower, hours and space and patience and wear-and-tear on the collective cop psyche. The legal aspects alone were becoming a nightmare. The case had attracted international attention.
The problem with pontificating to people about your abilities and your work and your life was that sometimes you ended up ruining things for yourself. Putting your mouth all over your own self-esteem didn't do much for positive thinking. His comments of late to the guys in Buckhead had returned to haunt him. For the rest of the day he sat there, alternately clock-watching and sorting through Grave-digger nastiness, remembering things said and thought that would have been better left untouched. A hundred percent of zero is zero, was one that came back around again on him.
When you were deep into a murder case as sordid and confusing as this one it dirtied you, if you had much humanity about you at all. It took real compartmentalization of one's life not to let the personal life and the pro life intermix and commingle to the point where you could never completely shake loose from the dark shadows. That was one of the things that made it so easy for cops to reach for crutches like booze. One of the reasons why so many copper marriages went down the pipes.
The desktop was strewn with crime-scene photos and nothing could be more depressing than shots of lifeless murdered humans such as these. Only the starving skeletons of the camps could compete as a visual downer. Some were mutilation murders, others—like the old lady—were even more horrible. The random, wasteful, mean, sad evil of acts like these. How could someone do this?
He couldn't take his eyes off the old woman. What was her age? He had the data somewhere on the desk. She was somebody's mother. Grandma to a couple of kids, no doubt. And Ukie and his accomplice or Ukie alone had clubbed her to death for no reason. Maybe because like the mountain—because she was there. How? WHY would you take lives like that? Madness. Insane horror without purpose.
Sorry, lady, he thought, looking at the woman sprawled like a rag doll tossed into a corner, skirt hiked up indecorously in death. Talk to me, Mom. Who did it? How many were they? What is the secret? And he went back to where the beginning was, where he was sure it had already begun, the random killing, and he concentrated with all his might on the names, life-styles, demographics, biographical commonalities.
And he squinted his eyes and tried to see a pattern somewhere. But look as hard as he might he saw only dead bodies. Corpses without connectives that could link them in death to perp-or-perps-unknown. He saw no telltale footprints in the cottage cheese. Only mystery and the aftermath of madness and murder.