common bungee thing he'd bought at a K-Mart for sixty-nine cents—and what started life as a tie-down strap ended up as a sophisticated autopilot. He was always inventing things. It was second nature for him.
He had an automatic starter but he preferred to “prop” her by hand, enjoying the added intimacy as he held the wooden propeller running his fingers over the beautifully formed surfaces, sliding his hand down along her and remembering the time she'd playfully bitten him. An oafish mechanic was in her bucket and she had chastized him for letting a stranger touch her like that, when he'd made contact—just as he'd propped her, the idiot had shifted his weight momentarily, lifting his butt from the bucket, and she'd angrily nosed forward two inches, biting him deeply on a finger, her wooden tooth sinking down to the bone to let him know she did not approve.
He got back into her, buckled the belt across him, and sorted through a large container of maps in the leather pouch fastened beside him; Farmer's Branch, Carrolton, Richardson, Mesquite, he found the one he was looking for and put it in place by the control surface, fastening it there with alligator clips. He knew he'd find the woman's home from the air as easily as you'd find it in your car. He prided himself on the unerring accuracy of his personal gyro. He pulled the ski mask back on, making a mental note to remove it and put it away BEFORE he landed. No point in suggesting any sinister images.
He touched a few controls, changed the mixture, choked her slightly then ran her all the way up to her roaring, wide-open maximum. He had changed her from a 40 to a 60 horse when he first bought her, and added various refinements, and within a couple of seconds he had her already trying to get her sleek nose up and then— zzzzoooooommmmmm—he let her loose and she lifted up, clearing the tree line and the power lines easily, and his foot moved slightly and she changed her course and soon the open fields gave way to suburbs and tract home rooftops and then to the subtle and then not so subtle look of North Dallas, and Highland Park, and sculptured, huge lawns, and, reminding him of River Oaks, a plethora of blue concrete in the backyards-pools, every size and shape —and then before long banking over some homes where he imagined the woman lived and flying in a low strafe over the big houses, and her little stick figure visible below as she came outside, running slowly from the house and waving at him, and he put on his public face and gritted his teeth for another confrontation and dropped down over the lines and into her yard, almost instantly killing the power as he rolled to a noisy stop a few feet from her.
“Hi,” he could hear her say, and he smiled as he unbuckled and ducked under the low wing.
“Did I scare you?” She was visibly shaken.
“Yeah—a little,” she lied. “My God, I thought you were going to hit me, I mean you know, you were coming right at me—'
That's kind of an optical illusion. No. I wasn't anywhere near you, actually. It's sort of like parking a car, it's rather intimidating but once you get the feel et cetera. No big deal. So. Isn't she pretty?” He looked at her as he gestured to the plane, implying that he thought she was pretty or so she wanted to believe.
Joe had moved out of the hotel on Turtle Creek, moving near the woman. Allowing her to think it was her idea, letting her find him a suitable rental, taking it through another name for security they agreed and that being done through a blind corporation title sometimes utilized for such purposes by Jones-Seleska. He had shown her how they might carefully make their way to the new “hideaway” and enjoy each other's company free from the prying, inquisitive eyes of media and police.
He cannot take much more of this woman, although she is physically attractive. He functions heterosexually by evoking certain images, but there is no great thrill for him, for example, in the magic erogenous zone of fatty tissue on the female pubic symphysis. He is excited by darker lusts.
In his mind he belongs to another time. He often fantasizes about ancient times. When inventive people killed by means of a strappado machine. He vows that he will one day do likewise as time and circumstances permit. His joys are in the suffering and extinguishing of human lives. He luxuriates in the anguish of others.
He dreamed last night of a variant of the strappado and he willed himself to remember the design upon awakening. During the dream he considered “picturing,” which is what he calls the process by which he takes his weak and cringing brother to the neural pathway for a bit of mental-torture fun and games. He loves to hear his brother's pathetic scream. He always has. But for the time being he must exercise a degree of restraint.
As long as he has memory—age three, he thinks—he has controlled the destiny of his weaker twin. By “picturing,” by allowing his mind to penetrate through to the other half of his being, he is able to send whatever imagery pleases him. He can take control of William Hackabee's mind effortlessly, holding it in his grasp for as long as he chooses, making his sniveling, brother Bill experience the most exquisite tortures and humiliations.
Several years ago Joseph Hackabee let himself experiment with his lifelong fantasy: that of actually taking a human life and getting away with it. For a number of years he killed sparingly. But then the feelings the hot desires the overpowering needs for the act of random murder began to assail him at every turn. He made a plan and began to lay groundwork for a plausible scapegoat: his loathsome and weak sibling.
By surreptitiously inserting himself into the Dallas—Fort Worth area he was able to carefully structure a plan of grave sites and underwater locations where he could hide some of the dozens of victims. Others, he would show in the “picturing,” and then he would create an irresistible scenario into which Bill could then be placed. He knew his other half inside out. Knew that Bill could never extricate himself. And he would find the lure of notoriety impossible to resist.
The plan worked beautifully. It was only because of the intrusion of this—this woman. What a bothersome thing she'd become. She was dangerous. He would have to cause her to disappear. Soon.
They are inside and she is telling him about criminal intent and insanity and his subliminal processes begin winking signs of warning to his survival system. He sees Noel Collier as a stumbling block. She must be eradicated.
But now she moves toward him and he fakes his beautiful smile that so inflames her and the soft whispered endearments and does what he knows he must for the moment, what he has done since his infancy when he learned to please on command, hoping to survive another day of bewildering torture, he forces the thoughts necessary to stimulate his twisted, sick libido and relies on his fine body to come through as it so often does, the testes putting out the testosterone, the system blocking off the cortisol, his inner autopilot keeping him on course as he knows it will always do.
And slowly, subtly, he works to pry, nudge, coax, unbalance, tease, titillate, suggest, hint, infer, soft and gentle cadences making her trust him and like him, the richness of his voice making her want his mouth and the promise of what he says he wishes to do to her, and she melts under his experienced and brilliant touch, and he will have her to. himself soon and then he will make this bitch pay.
Dog had spent the night in the sling chair, and as Jack got out of bed to let it outside, he scrawled a note for himself to find a good home for it and brushed against the unread medical abstracts. He glanced at the point where he'd stopped reading, where another logjam of technical mumbo-jumbo had collided with his lack of scientific training, and he'd passed over pages of “chorion” and “placenta” and “intrauterine” and “superfetation” to words and phrases better understood.
The last thing he remembered reading was the part about the physical criteria for determining monovular twins. The part about how their ears and teeth should be alike, that the hair color, texture and thickness be the same, their eyes identical in color, the same skin color and texture (had Joseph gone the Mantan route?), blood typing, et cetera, and he'd left off reading where the words “etiology” and “dichorionic placenta” appeared in the same sentence.
He tried to focus on the paragraph again, and “arteriovenous” and “polycythemic” slammed into his brain and he read “most twins are born prematurely, and maternal complications of pregnancy are more common than with single pregnancies.... Theoretically, the second twin is more subject to anoxia than is the first because of the possibility that...” and as he detuned he remembered something that Dr. Vinson had said about a split-second cutoff. A moment's damage that could wipe out a human conscience. And for the first time he thought there might actually be something in all that hocus-pocus about thought manipulation on a neural pathway.
And frighteningly he recalled the Hackabee story of an orphanage fire, and a pair of foster parents long dead, and the entire alumni of that Branson agency coincidentally deceased—save for the old gentleman who'd fortuitously found his way to Alaska, perhaps just in time, and Eichord felt a cold stab of deep and very real fear. If Joseph Hackabee was the killer, he would be an extremely lethal adversary.
He drove in to work early, stoked on adrenaline rush, fear, and the sense of a mounting climax. Not a
