Iceman

Buckhead

Long before Tina Hoyt had been abducted and killed, there'd been another sensational case. A much-publicized pair of mutilation sex-murders with clues leading nowhere, apparently. Eichord flown in by the Major Crimes Task Force, MCTF—pronounced MacTuff—and inserted into a confusing jurisdictional labyrinth. Horror of Blytheville was the headline, and that didn't begin to cover it.

He'd gone in. Done his thing. Looked over the cold killing ground. Sniffed around the suspects. Sifted through the mountains of strange paperwork. And the thing was, he always knew the old guy was right for it, but there was no motive. No proof. Nothing a self-respecting judge or prosecutor would hold still for. Not even the Arkansas people had strong feelings about it.

Eichord backed off the case eventually. Returned to Buckhead and filed the thing as an open investigation under Headless Girls.

A couple of months later the locals nailed the old man. An eight-year-old boy. A nine-year-old girl. An eleven-year-old boy. Poor Pam Bailey, the sullen kid who tried to tell everybody this was going to happen. A girl who had done everything but scream at the top of her lungs and gone ignored. A twenty-two-year-old man. All dead. Mutilated. Tortured first in the most unspeakable ways, then used and dismembered in one of the most hideous, bizarre, inhuman, mass-mutilation-slayings that any law-enforcement officer could remember.

Eichord was back on the night plane and into the bloody jaws of a crime scene that made Hieronymus Bosch's hellscapes look like Bugs Bunny cels.

The bodies SERVED UP on various tables and sideboards inside this mobile home. The parts ARRANGED ... Jesus! God! He couldn't let it destroy his mind, but for days every time he'd begun to relive it, to think about it again, he had the sensation of not being able to breathe. The weight of guilt that he'd let this thing happen by not being competent enough came crushing down on him.

His every movement had become languorous in the grip of a debilitating lethargy that appeared to possess him. A long lingering malaise had induced an unconquerable lassitude, which had been followed by deep depression, crushing despair, abject defeat, and a suicidal self-pity that eventually numbed him out completely. The body chemistry took over then and a state of paralyzed senses had evolved into immobility as stupor became torpor. He'd managed to shake loose from that, but the days and weeks of lethargic inactivity had left him sluggish, adrift in the wake of the emotional doldrums.

He'd gone to the dentist to get a wisdom tooth filled, but when the doc had gone in for a look-see, he'd found a pocket of trouble.

“Phew! There's no mistaking THAT smell,” he said to his dental hygienist.

“Hmm umm. Sure isn't,” she said. The two of them had a total of four hands in his mouth. “Doin’ okay, Jack?” she said and he replied, “nnnnn,” as best he could. He could feel his tongue flopping around inside his deadened mouth and he closed his eyes as he heard the whine of a drill.

“I COULD put a filling over that. But what the hell's the point?” The dentist shook his head. “First time that infection builds up in that pocket...” he trailed off. “I HATE to pull ‘er,” he said.

“Yank it,” Jack said bravely. “Might as well.” It was just a shell, and the shell had broken. When the dentist was sectioning it to get it out, he saw he'd have to dig on Eichord for another hour to get the roots out and so he left the spurs in.

“They'll work their way out in a year or so,” he said. “You'll come back. I'll take ‘em out. Bim, bam, boom. Nothin’ to it."

The pain had been bad. About the second night his jaw felt like he'd been struck in the face with a leaded Louisville slugger. A stab of pain would hit him every ten minutes or so in between bouts of tolerable agony. He'd be suffering along, hoping his medication would kick in, and suddenly pain would stab through the jaw like a B-40 stabbing through a foot of solid, tempered steel. The kind of hot, awful, lethal pain that made grown men scream, or double over like they'd been shot in the gut. Bim bam boom.

“I'm going to the drugstore to get something for this jaw,” he said to Donna. She was afraid he was going to start drinking, he imagined, and he listened for her reply as it came in a tiny, faint voice.

“Okay.” Oooooh-Kaaaaaaaay.