Iceman

“Doc?'

“Can this be the legendary Jack Eichord?” The man's high, squeaky voice made Jack smile. He considered Doug Geary a good friend.

“'Fraid so, old pal. Me again.” He laughed into the phone. “I didn't know if you'd remember me after all this time.'

“Sure. How are ya? What's up?'

“Fine. Doug, I'm on a case, of course. In Buckhead. But it goes back a number of years to a series of killings that took place in Texas.” Jack told the doctor about the homicides from the crime reports he'd obtained after his reporter friend had sent him the old news clippings. Between MCTF and Amarillo he'd amassed quite a file. “They were called the Iceman Murders by media. Do you recall ever hearing about them?'

“Ummm.” The doctor thought for a moment. “Nope. I don't remember hearing about them.'

“These are homicides from roughly twenty years ago. But I think the recent killing here in Buckhead is the same M.O. I just need a few minutes to get some basics from you. Do you have the time?'

“I'll make time, Jack. Sure. Go ahead.'

“Just the basic stuff. I have so much trouble retaining the psych stuff. Okay. I'm trying to get some background that will help me understand what I'm dealing with.” And he began telling him what little he knew about the Tina Hoyt killing. The oral penetration. Semen trace in the decedent's mouth. The icepicklike weapon— how it had been used. The medical examiner's hypotheses.

“Go over those penetrations again, Jack,” the doctor said. “The old homicides. You said strangulations and then the icepick killings?'

“Right.'

“Precisely where were the entrance wounds made? You said something about the one being stabbed in the eye?'

“Yeah. Right. One in the temple. One in the ear. One in the eye.'

“Have you considered that maybe this perpetrator has bad aim. What if he had been aiming to get the eyes each time, and the victims move or his aim is bad? You see, when you talk about an icepick into the eyeball, you're painting the classic M.O. of somebody who has low self-esteem—such as a badly disfigured person. Somebody who sees himself as ugly to women for whatever reason.'

Dr. Geary began speaking very rapidly without seeming to choose his words. “The personality distortions that all of us have inside are potential explosions and the stress of daily life is the catalyst. Three types of unacceptable social behavior can take place as a result of these explosions: happenstance misbehavior, fleeting or chronic. Let's say you act from the stress of severe economic pressures—what we might categorize as a normal reaction. Or from accidental happenings that place you under unusual momentary stress. These types of reactions differ from the reaction of the chronic misbehaver. This category includes the so-called hair-trigger temper, the individual who has no feeling of belonging to the society with which he must compete, a society that frightens him.'

“Why does such a chronic misbehaver kill? Because he's afraid of those around him and wants to get rid of them?'

“No. It's more complex than that. There are all types of chronic offenders whose distorted personalities lead them to kill, as you're well aware. Hysteroids and epileptoids and schizoids who may kill out of hostility, or fear, or frustration, or disorientation. But the kind of chronic killer you have to deal with as a serial murderer is making statements. He's saying to that frightening society, You don't scare me; I scare YOU. I am more frightening than you are. This is the extreme of disturbed behavior, and obviously that sort of killer can think he has a million different reasons for that action.'

“Can you draw any kind of a general profile of him with respect to the rest of his personality?'

“It's too general a category of disturbance. For instance, that same guy who kills in that reaction mode may only be galvanized to murder when a given stress factor is present and motivates him to reach such a state of emotional duress and psyche distortion. He might, in a very general sense, be the sort of character who normally— at least for him—gets through life by ‘getting over’ on his fellow man. Stealing from him, perhaps by some clever and sophisticated scheming that is acting as his substitutive ego-satisfier. Again, another statement: I am more clever than you, so I do not have to compete within the ordinary social structure.'

“Is this guy, this general-profile fellow, is he going to tend to be very smart or very stupid?'

“No way to say. He could be a genius, although that would be rare indeed. He could certainly be cunning. He could have extremely developed superficial social skills—be an actor, in other words. Or be in between, somebody whose situational awareness is sufficiently acute that they appear normal. They get by and do not appear to become unduly imbalanced by the stress triggers. Or at the other end of the continuum, you could have a mentally deficient, low-IQ offender who is so aggressively hostile, or afraid, or ego-sick that he could fit the same profile. Your classic sadist, for example.'

“He could be anything,” Eichord whispered.

“Absolutely. Schizzy, paranoid, sex psycho, cyclothymic, phobic, an—'

“Whoa. Speak English, Doc.'

“Yeah, okay. Schizoid—remember—the guys who know they're inadequate. They can't cut the mustard physically or mentally or emotionally so they tune out. Become reclusive, turn inward, and build whatever peculiar set of defenses they need to protect themselves from the pain of being self-consciously inadequate. The aggressive ones become paranoid—get the superego working for them. Create a psychotic make-believe world to explain their frustrations or failures or fears. The cyclothymic, he is in perpetual unbalance. Gigantic mood swings. Loves his mother one minute and kills her the next. Ecstatic today, suicidal tomorrow.'

“You said sex psycho. What about the violent sex crime? Where does he fit into the scheme of things?'

“He's usually a guy who's afraid of women for whatever reason and expresses this in sadism, or hostility, or in the most violent psychos—murder. Typically he's schizzy or immature or homosexual, or in the exceptional cases such as you have to deal with, a total psychotic personality. The most dangerous breed: the paranoid- schizophrenic.'

“But if your schizzy dude is a passive-type offender, what pushes him to the point of violence? Any sort of stress?'

“You can't generalize. Too many possibilities. But it might be his inadequacy is manifested in some kind of unacceptable sexual misbehavior—he's a deviate. Or maybe he's simply malicious. He wants to strike out, and when the opportunity and the feeling of inadequacy occur at the same moment, that in itself could precipitate a violent act.'

“All right. Now try this one. A guy is killing women in some psychotic fashion. He forces them to go down on him, and when he ejaculates, WHAM, he stabs them. He leaves his calling card. The old iceman strikes again —'

“And that factor is in fact his signature. He's telling you something about himself. That's why I first asked about the icepick to the eyeball M.O.—it's the classic retaliation of a disfigured man. He's striking out at women who attract him, but whom he knows he repulses—so he'll fix that, he'll put their eyes out. That's a simplification but—'

“You mean I might look for a disfigured killer?'

“Well,” Dr. Geary said in his high screech, “FIGURATIVELY disfigured has a lot of definitions. The disfigurement can be both literal or figurative. Emotional disfigurement, say. He could think he repulsed women, for example, by his infantile penis, or by a SENSE of ugliness, or by an awareness of a sexual equilibrium so out of balance that IT was revolting to the fair sex. You see? Anything that might make him want to symbolically keep them from seeing his true self. In fact, the punishing aspects of this M.O. are so strong. I don't think you can make any definite...” Geary trailed off into space.

Jack thought he sounded older, tireder than he remembered him. We're all older and tireder, he thought.

“So this guy could be ugly, like scarred or deformed, or just emotionally unbalanced and be physically Robert Redford?'

“Of course. You know what mass murderers look like, they're as likely to be movie-actor handsome as hideously ugly. It could be anything. He could be a cripple, or he has an underdeveloped penis, or he's out of whack in some manner, his sexual dysfunction is so severe he must strike out at these women he wants, punish them or