“Jack, this is Wally Michaels. You remember me?"
“Oh—sure,” Eichord said unconvincingly.
“I met you in D.C. a couple years ago, remember? I was in the class you lectured at Quantico."
“Oh, yeah. Sure! Hey, Wally. How's it goin'?"
“Goin’ great. Still with Dallas PD. I hear about you all the time, of course. MacTuff went and made you a star, man.” They laughed. “Jack, I'm asking for your help through channels. The chief is calling your honcho or maybe has already this morning. We need ya to get down to big D ... Are you tied up with anything right now?"
“Not anything I can't shake loose of, far as I know. What's cookin'?"
“We got a serial murder. Thing's really hot. Weird M.O. Whacko time. Nearly forty possibles. Random kills. Killed at least seventeen people already around the Dallas—Fort Worth area. Other than a family of migrant workers they appear to all be unrelated.” Wally began running the case down to Eichord, who sensed something pulling at him the way all the big ones seemed to do. Giving him that first taste. The first little frisson of beckoning excitement, the first shudder of fear that came from knowing an unknown killer was out there somewhere.
The Major Crimes Task Force was a federally funded unit for which Eichord worked as a sometimes agent-at-large. He would work out of a local police force or whatever, nominally under the ranking officer, but often working independently from whatever official investigation might already be under way. His title, that of special investigator, told you nothing. In truth he was that rara avis of coppers. He answered to no one.
Eichord thought of his boss as the Captain, if you'd ask him, the honcho of his detective bureau at home, but captain was merely the bottom rung in a lofty ladder of command. The captain of Buckhead Station just happened to be the lifer who handed Eichord his ticket to ride when MCTF reached out for him.
When Eichord wasn't involved in a task-force-sanctioned investigation, he was just another city flatfoot. But everyone from the newest patrolmen on up knew that he was only there to await the bidding of a higher master. Because of his low-profile demeanor and self-effacing nature, the unique status accorded him had never become the personnel problem that it might have had Jack's ego been less healthy. But he saw himself as just another hardworking, dedicated cop. Period.
The limelight that plagued him so in recent years had been a real two-edged sword. His success track record, real or hype job, allowed him to come and go as he liked. Disappear, in fact, for weeks on end. Report or not report—with paychecks mailed by the Treasury Department to a box number. He was as close as it really gets to having a license to kill. All he needed was a black mask and a faithful Indian friend. He unholstered his Smith that night as he began packing for Dallas, and—sure enough—he had plenty of silver bullets.
Love Field
The pretty stewardess was telling him something, smiling like the idea of serving booze to a low-rent cop on the shadowy side of middle age was precisely what she wanted to be doing with her life on a pretty day like this. How many of the little bottles of airplane booze had he consumed? He also had a silver flask he'd worked on pretty good back in the john. He was flying, all right.
The thing didn't seem like it would be much more than a two-way round-trip tourist ticket. After all, they thought they had the perp. Probably be another Bundy deal. Come in and make nice with this Hackabee character and pry the whole picture loose grave by grave.
According to what Wally Michaels had told him, some wino was going through some empty cardboard boxes, and he opens one and there's a naked woman in there. He thinks she's dead and runs screaming to the coppers. Only thing is, she's still alive. This being the woman Donna Something—he fumbled for his notebook—Canofpeas? He squinted and read the name Scannapieco. Irish broad, he thought, feeling very tight.
So Donna Can-of-peas, age thirty-something, naked as a jaybird, crammed inside an appliance box and about two steps short of coming unwrapped altogether, she tells ‘em in the ER that she was pulling into a parking lot at this shopping mall when a dude puts a gun in the window, tells her to move over. He starts the car up and takes her into a nearby alley where he stuffs Donna in the trunk. A half-hour later he's got her chained to the bed in the basement of this old house. Says she's his “sex slave” from now on, and if she wants food and drink she can put out for it; if not, she dies. She tells of rape and torture, and finally, a month or so of this, she sees her chance and manages to escape. Ends up downtown, still naked, and covered in filth, hiding in a refrigerator box where she passes out and the wino finds her.
Thing is, all during the weeks of captivity, he's bragging to her about how he likes to take folks off. He's the number-one killer of the century, he tells her, and brags about the “hundreds of human bodies” he's buried all over the Southwest. He's so specific that she manages to remember some of it. The cops figure it's bullshit.
She's a little on the hard side, Donna is. They see that once she gets cleaned up, she likes to load up with the old makeup, lots of eye shadow, flashy wardrobe, a low-cut this, a tight that, show a little leg. They kind of figure she may have asked for it. Maybe she didn't even mind it all that much—the sex-slave part. Maybe she even got off on it. And Donna is on the theatrical side. Very dramatic. Poses a lot and talks like she thinks maybe somebody should be shooting all this with a camera. It just doesn't sit right.
And there's always the remote possibility you got an irate lover who wants to punish somebody and embarrass them real bad. Maybe a jilted mistress who wants to put her married sugar daddy through some changes at the expense of the Dallas cop shop. It wouldn't be the first time. So there is natural suspicion.
But one of the coppers happens to see the Identikit drawing they do of Donna's abductor, and son of a bitchin’ don't that beat all, that's that crazy fucker Ukie Hackabee. Whoa, shit. Ukie, as in Ukelele, is what they call a police character in Dallas. You've got to realize, pardner, this is Big Dee, where Jack Ruby was only rated a “buff” status. So if you're a genuine “character,” that means you've done messed in a few mess kits and got caught at it. Eichord had checked the MCTF computer-think on the man and he had a thick package as a KSP (known sexual pervert), with the impression of being a very small-time nickel-dime con man.
Within forty-eight hours the state rods picked him up. And as it happened, they nailed him while he was digging out behind a private estate where the wealthy owner had friendly troopers make the occasional drive-by. On closer inspection, what Ukie was poking around in happened to be the fresh grave of a young Jane Doe. Ukie looked awfully good for about thirty-nine homicides all of a sudden.
And all of a sudden there were city, state, and fed-level shields digging everywhere Donna Scannapieco said to dig. And many of the areas where Ukie had bragged to her about burying people revealed human remains. They were onto what might become one of the most notorious mass murders ever. Ukie had told Donna about “hundreds of bodies.” What if his brags were factual? What had Ukie Hackabee gone and done?
In his maximum-security cell Ukie (William) Hackabee not only confessed that he was the guilty party, but guys, hey, you don't know the half of it. I've killed whole rooms of people—buildings full of assholes. You ain't just messing with some small potatoes punk. I've taken down HUNDREDS of mother-fuckers all over this part of the country.
And all of this was sloshing around with the airplane booze when Eichord got his final smiles from the stews, deplaning at the huge piece of tarmac that had disappointed so many visitors to Dallas—finding out that Love Field was only the name of an airport. And he shook his head to clear out the cobwebs, sucked in a lungful of that warm, dry Dallas air, and moved with the mob, spotting a familiar face who said, “Hey, over here."