Iceman

Buckhead Station

The next morning Eichord did paperwork and made phone calls. He stared at the bulletin board notes, out of boredom. Looked at a photograph of a notorious fruit hustler and a missing teenager. An interdepartmental memorandum on subject matter his eyes refused to focus on. His list:

ADAMS, Hayden

BOLEN, Willard (check)

BRITTEN, Morris

CARTER, Jerry (struck out)

CUNNINGHAM, Harold

DENNENMUELLER, Mike (check)

FREIDRICHS, Keith (check)

GIBBAR, Robert

GILLESPIE, Jeff

HOWARD, Edwin

JAMES, Felix

JONES, Mark

MULLINS, Craig

NAGEL, Sam (struck out)

ROSE, Louis (struck out)

SCHUMWAY, Alan (check)

SCHWAB, David

SMITH, Rick

TREPASSO,Phil

WHITE. Blake (struck out)

WISEMAN, Eben

ZOFUTTO, Mario

Schumway's name, minus diacritics, with a recently added check mark, gave Eichord four semisuspects. Four impossible-possibles whom he'd drawn lines through. And while he was looking at the semiprobables he decided. No way, Bolen was out. Good on motive, opportunity, and personality assessment, but too far afield from the physical parameters. He whited out his check mark by BOLEN, Willard.

Chuckling with disdain at any inference of such a thing as incipient farsightedness, but pushing his legal pad away from him a few inches so he could see better, he began working on a tantalizingly insoluble premise—solution by doodle.

By the time he quit for the day, he'd filed away, in his special round file, crumpled balls of pale-yellow lined paper that carried such slam-dunked declarations as i roamed under it as a tired, nude maori.

name no one man. i maim nine moro men in miami. name no one man.

draw putrid dirt upward.

mirror, mirror on the wall. who's the weirdest cop of all?

But on the drive through afternoon traffic to Buckhead Springs a few loose thoughts rattled around in his noggin like pebbles in a pan. And as Eichord looked back on his face-to-face conversations with Messrs. Dennenmueller, Freidrichs, and Schumway, there was a curiosity that bugged him anew, each time he recalled their respective reactions.

None of the three seemed surprised or even mildly alarmed, hell, even QUESTIONING that he was suddenly talking to a cop about a homicide. Like this was the most normal thing in the world to happen in the course of their daily routine. Wouldn't any normal person, that word again, register a degree of consternation, confusion, something, at being involved in a murder case, however peripherally? The usual reaction was, Why me?

But these jokers had hardened facades, almost like the wise guys, shells that let the questions bounce off. Yet another bothersome detail in the daily grind, a homicide copper sniffing around. No sense of outrage, or irritation, or of being taken aback a bit. Just a shrug and Ask me whatever you wanna and then get outta my face. Strange, it was. But when Eichord tried to mine the pebbles for gold, all he got was a panful of dust.