twenty-eight times in two years, reading it night after night, reading paragraphs at a time, sight-reading great chunks of it over and over, letting it mold him, shape his self-image.
He was raised in the shadow of the Invincible Nord-Americano, the legend of the White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Male Hero. The elitist spear-carrier; the warrior responsibilities of middle-class noblesse oblige shaping him into the only acceptable professions of career military man, policeman or fireman, paramedic, whatever. He had to be at least symbolically in uniform, and out there on the cutting edge.
And then something went wrong. And the weight of all the input and the information mixed with the liquid realities, and it all combined to take him under like an anchor, and he dropped into the impenetrable depths of Jack Daniels' Lake, sinking down to the cold, muddy bottom, another victim of the Black Water Fever. Another muddy thinker trapped in a hero's rusting, one-man sub down in the Land of Lost Souls. A booze-battered casualty of the heroic era.
So now, Eichord thought, here I am next to the soft and warm lady of my choosing, on exquisite sheets in a room of erotic mirrors and sexy lighting, basking in adoration and tenderness, drenched in musky aromas, hearing the soft, whispered phrases of love, and all I can think about are two ugly cops and their bad jokes, and all I can feel is the chill of the land of the lost.
And underneath all that, hiding down there in the dark substrata, I sense the foul presence of a human thing who kills for pleasure, taking hearts for God only knows what reasons. Ripping bloody hearts out of freshly killed corpses. And this thing is still out there, no matter what the newspapers would have you believe. And the cloud of menace hangs over the bed like a frightening shadow and I detumesce without dying the little demise, Jack thinks.
But Edie is here and the nearness now is what matters. So he opens his eyes and ignores the mirrors, and blocks out the thoughts of blond silicone twins and French maids and all the other silly, childish fantasy stuff that goes with a bed like this, and he relaxes and breathes her in. And in his new state of grace he feels his humanity slowly ebbing, then shifting current and flowing back into him, and the softly fluttering eyelashes, and the hot fingertips begin to work their electric magic on him again.
And his hands catch in that dark pillow of long hair and he pulls her near so that he can see nothing but the closeness of her, a mesh of flesh and bone and warmth and delightful mewings, and mouths and limbs and organs and souls rock and explode together and they go down into that hot pit of flame again, and let go in an achingly sweet and perfect, bubbling, delicious honey pot. And not caring then.
Now he only wants this moment to freeze. This second. This timeless, detumesce, textbook-perfect, classic, heartthrobbing, madly exhilarating love explosion between them. Suddenly this is the only thing, the only important thing, the only thing that matters to him, and he prays that he can make the world stop and hold on to this, this joyous, shouting, lovely, love-drenched instant of full-tilt, kissy-face, huggy-bear, jailhouse tango blues.
Ted Volker was one of those fortunate people who had a great mother-in-law, a pleasant woman who was close to her daughter and son-in-law, whom she treated like her own son, and especially her grandson, and who visited them almost every day. It was she who found the family the next day. And it completely destroyed her mind.
A mail carrier was first to hear the screams but thought it was coming from the television set. A delivery man was probably the second to hear her and phoned the Chicago police emergency number. After several minutes the call-in was routed to the dispatcher, and a few minutes later a two-man car responded. What they found was a scene straight out of hell.
They heard the awful, tortured, animal screams before they reached the door of the Volker household and the men looked at each other and one whispered:
'Holy Jesus,' and they entered carefully, with their pieces drawn. The blinds were all shut and the small amount of available sunlight barely penetrated the gloom. A woman could be heard literally screaming her lungs out back in the family room and when they came around the corner the overpowering stench caused them both to gag.
Sudden, unexpected, surprising, overpowering, and terrorizing shock affects each individual differently. It all depends on the circumstances, the state of preparedness, the individual's predisposition to trauma, personal physiological thresholds; the thousand and one factors that either soften or amplify those shocks that human flesh is heir to.
There were three bodies on the couch, taped nude to the sofa and each other with silver duct tape like plumbers use, and each with the eyelids taped open—the silver tape pulled grotesquely over the hair and the faces, the eyes of the dead rolled up in unseeing sockets which gaped like holes in a silver death mask.
The standing woman continued to scream until just before the doctor started to sedate her when she passed out from exhaustion. She had lost her mind, and would never make another sound beyond those final anguished screams. Parenthetically, the police had no way of knowing, but her hair, gray before, had bleached absolutely white during the dehumanizing hours of unrelieved horror.
The living room, the dying room that is, was covered in what had been a lake of human blood. The blood had coagulated and congealed into a hideous crust of insect-covered filth and drying slime and the smell was the smell of the busiest killing room of a nineteenth-century stockyards slaughterhouse. The cops had never smelled anything like the smell of that room in the Volker house.
The beast that had done this thing had tromped through the grisly blood-pond leaving brazen, red 15EEEEE pawprints of massive, naked feet as he walked to the bathroom at the end of his work. Tromp, tromp, clomping along down the hall that still echoed with the awful silence after a family's muffled screams. The creature hearing nothing, feeling nothing beyond simple pleasure at the destruction process, a postcoital kind of feeling as he clomped along leaving big, nasty, sticky stains on the lime-colored shag. Huge, scarlet paw marks where his weight smashed down on those size fifteen flat, splayed feet.
He had clomped into the master bedroom, turning the shower on, urinating for some reason into the sink at some point, then taking a hot shower. He had masturbated again after the shower, while standing there with the water drying on his enormous body, this having been determined by semen residue found in the tub trap, then he dried off on a missing towel which he presumably used to wipe off all the hand-touched knobs and other printable surfaces. They picked up a fairly good left thumb off a mirror that it seemed he might have touched before he put his gloves on. They had run it out to the feds along with the other forensics. It didn't happen much but you never knew when you'd get lucky.
A mail carrier leaving a priority first-class package in the lobby of the division out of which Jack Eichord was working added his set of prints to the case. The other prints were also postal employees. The label on the package was hand addressed by someone who had used a felt-tipped pen, writing with hard, firm, angry lines that mushed the tip down, making broad and precisely squared-off letters as he carefully printed out JACK ICORD [sic] which he had heard over the television set while in the Volker house.
He had then wrapped the items in three individual plastic bags, then put those bags inside another container which he sealed using a heat-seal cooking device he'd found in the Volker kitchen. Seal-A-Meal had been the brand name.
When he had sealed up his items he'd wiped the outside of the plastic again, wiped off the heat-sealer, and put everything in the sack with the towel he'd used to clean up with, along with other miscellaneous things he wanted to dispose of. But there was a marked difference in his attitude and comportment. He was hanging. He was no longer as concerned with perfection or professionalism. He was well aware that as he cleaned up after himself he was going through the motions. That extreme teeth-gritting focus of concentration had lightened up. It was beyond his ability to analyze. Perhaps he was going into some sort of an I-Want-to-Be-Punished phase, he thought to himself. No. But what? What indeed.
The swaggering, cranked little man was five feet, three inches tall and he was extremely tough. He had
