But one-on-one with no spotlight on the conversation he would invariably tell it as it was he was no brilliantly gifted crime-crusher sent by the gods to stalk serial murderers.
“The publicity is just a way we keep media contained, Donna. It's not a question of my being humble or pawing the ground with my shoe and going, Oh, shucks,” when she'd asked him about “all the murder cases he'd solved."
“I've had to learn to handle media myself,” she told him, “or at least take a beginner's course in the subject. I've got a lot to learn. So far my way is just say, No comment, and try to get away from them or hang up the telephone or don't answer the mail. But a few of the reporters have really been obnoxious."
“Some of them look at it differently than others. Vulture journalism. The microphone in the face of the lady whose husband was just shot ‘how do you feel'—that kind of thing. And a case like this one that has national attention, you got all the locals vying with the stringers for the big slick magazines and papers, you have all the television crews, it can be a mess if it gets out of hand.
“That's how this thing got started as far as my name went. I'd gotten lucky a time or two and they could use the name for ‘public relations,’ I'd guess you would have to call it. I could be a plausible tool to tone down certain elements of the coverage of a story or to help minimize the terrorizing of a city that can take place when you're dealing with multiple homicides."
He told her about Atlanta, about Boston, and about San Francisco and the horror stories those great cities had become, once upon a time, when the phenomenal terror of a serial killer had held each of them in its immobilizing and frightening claws.
It seemed like a long drive before they reached the house but he felt like perhaps some of the ice between them had thawed. When they pulled up to the house, a rickety-looking, old frame house on South Mission, she looked at him and said, “Is this the one?” in a quiet voice.
“Yes.” He looked at her for a moment. “You okay?"
“Yeah.” She didn't look okay at all. Her face was very pale even through the rather heavy makeup.
“You know, this doesn't have to be done today,” he said, a question in his voice.
“Yes it does,” she whispered and opened the door for herself, so he quickly got out and came around the vehicle in time to close the door.
He had parked in back of a marked car so he knew the crime-scene-unit guys would be inside. They went in and said hello and they headed directly for the basement, Eichord holding her elbow but she went down first, slowly, holding on to the banister. It was smelly the way an old, closed-up home will get, and cold. He was right behind her, concentrating on the back of her Jacket and the ‘jeans’ and heels and the arm outstretched, very close in back of her in case she suddenly wilted as they sometimes did.
And then in a couple of seconds they were standing together in the room that had been her prison for over a month, and the look of the room hit her as hard as if she'd been slapped across the face, and she stood there clinging to the banister at the bottom of the stairs, breathing very deeply, and Jack wanted to touch her but knew he'd better not, and so he just let her stand there without speaking.
The frame house with its air of stale decay, the moist, overpowering decadence of the basement room papered in those torn, sad, airbrushed photos from sleaze mags, Spooky Ukie's clippings, all of it gave off a palpable dungeon effect, magnified by the chain-and-belt thing attached to one of the walls.
The house itself was something Eichord had been working on since Ukie had given it up to them. He claimed and all evidence backed him up—that someone had laid it on him as a gift. He'd been living in a fleabag downtown and he was broke. A typed note had been forwarded to him by one of the clubs where he had once appeared. The envelope contained a personal note to Ukie. On opening it a key and a fifty-dollar bill and a typed scrap of paper fell out. It said, so Ukie claimed, “Caught your act once and you were great! You deserve to change your luck. Paid six months rent in advance call it a loan.” And the address on South Mission. Ukie said he'd thought it was some kind of gag but for the real fifty.
He took a cab to the house. The key fit. He moved in immediately. The landlady still had the note to her in which Ukie had presumably rented the home by mad. The six months including a two-month deposit had been sent, she said, in cash, together with instructions where to mail the key (a Bellaire box number which a young boy had taken out in the name W. Hackabee). The bank where the money order had been paid for kept their own video surveillance tapes and Eichord saw the man who bought it. He was, although so far there was no proof either way, just somebody who'd been paid to buy the money order. The question was not so much was all of this a setup, but whose? Ukie's or somebody else's?
Meanwhile, in the basement of the house, Eichord still stood near Donna Scannapieco. Loud silence echoed in the basement. Soft, filtered conversations could be imagined from upstairs, but with the doors shut he doubted if even the loudest screams could penetrate inside the old stone walls. The house had been carefully selected, he felt. But again—by whom? Who had physically searched through a realtor's multiple listings, obtained a key, come down into the basement looking for a suitable torture chamber—Ukie? Then did he remove his disguise (he wouldn't have been dumb enough to chance a realtor identifying his mug shot) and pay people to rent a box and buy a money order and get a key, all the while wearing yet another disguise? Or was this a frame? If it was a frame why would anybody that clever (his frequent rule of thumb) construct a frame so easy to penetrate? Because that individual wanted it to look like it had been Ukie trying to make them believe it was a frame? Eichord didn't discount either possibility, as he'd seen enough homicides and complex dope burns where the patsy or the mule was tricked up “inside out” to prepare for the contingency of police intervention.
Donna stood there and in her head she saw her own torture and abuse and ruination, and she heard the echoes of her own screams, sobbing, begging him for mercy, please, oh, please don't, she could fear it amplified inside her head full. of pain and anger and hatred and she began crying soundlessly, shoulders going up and down like silent cartoon animation, rubber-limbed Minnie Mouse going up and down, heaving, soundless sobs, and Eichord couldn't stop himself and he reached out and touched her gently and she began turning just as she collapsed, collapsing on him and sobbing, tears streaming onto his shoulder, the cries flowing from her in a torrent, all the filth and menace and frustration and loathing breaking loose in a flood of cathartic, convulsive weeping. Ana then hyperventilating as he held her in his and gently tried to reassure her, and slowly, some of the anger draining, the tears of pain abating, her breathing returning to normal, they each felt it.
Something so subtle had changed between them. It was no longer the cop and the rape victim standing there. In the gentle warmth and comfort of Jack Eichord's protective arms Donna Scannapieco, had for the first time looked at him as a human being and instinctively she relaxed and to Eichord it appeared she had let her body snuggle closer and of course he was stroking the back of a silken warm-up jacket, and holding a soft and very sexual woman, and nature began to slowly take its course.
At first neither of them admitted it to themselves. The horror of the surroundings, the inappropriateness in fact ridiculousness of it, the embarrassingly sophomoric out of-control biochemistry of this unlikely thing ... But nature is not to be ignored. And very, VERY circumspectly Jack was gathering her in closer to him and now the pressure of those large full breasts mashing up against his own chest, and suddenly it was all he could do not to move his hand around and cup one of those big womanly breasts and tilt that face back and see what she'd be like to kiss, and although he made no move she felt the threat of it communicated to her in just the subtle imperceptible increase of pressure against her and she recognized something—not desire, certainly—but something warm and affectionate in her and she recoiled from his half-imagined advances and the spell was broken.