Slob

This was the morning the papers would go back to when the Lonely Hearts killings became a new headline in the tabloids. This would be the day Eichord would remember for a long time to come, and a day that would keep him awake at night goading him, stabbing at him with the little ice picks of fear each time he thought about the package and what it meant. This would be the day that put him to bed more naked than he could ever remember being; more vulnerable to evil, his outer covering of hard cop removed, decorticated by the awfulness of it, stripped bare like a tree with the bark peeled away.

This would be the day the papers began calling the sensational case the Jack-of-Hearts Murders.

Need to know

What they could have done, what they normally do, is throw the shredded paper mass into the incinerators and erase the computer memories and a thing simply ceases to exist. They are the people who first used stonewall as a transitive verb. When they chose to forget something or somebody, that thing or that person never existed. But because of the time and the pressures and the sensitivities and the climate, something still lived on to tell of the beast's existence. And it couldn't have been more telltale if it had in fact been a bloody smear right there on the printout.

'Extension 2228,' Eichord said, waiting as the line hissed all the way to Washington. Had they simply shit- canned it, what the administrators would normally do, that would have been the end of it. But some dim-witted, superbureaucratic type at a desk decided to classify the prints, blood group, and the related ident of those individuals involved in what had once been our military/clandestine intelligence shop's most secret experiment— once called Special Action Unit/Covert Operations Group, pronounced 'saw-cog,' a euphemistic acronym meaning assassination squad.

And so instead of 'No Response' or 'Insufficient Data' or whatever, instead of the normal absence of data the feds kicked it right back with an 'Officially Deleted,' which lit up the printout like a neon sign.

Eichord had been on the telephone for over two hours and his arm was so numb he thought for a second he might be having a small heart attack. And then the phrase heart attack slapped his brain around a bit; as a crisp, female voice snapped him out of it:

'Twenty-two, twenty-eight?'

'Sonny Shoenburgen, please,' he told her.

'One moment please,' she said, pleasantly putting him on hold.

'Thank you,' he told a hissing Ma Bell, AT and fucking T, Western Electric, and God only knows what other congloms all seething in their postdivestiture irritation, all hissing at him from within the sanitized, swept, shielded, sound-secure landlines of one of the largest spook complexes west of the Atlantic.

Finally, after what seemed like a month or so, a different voice comes back on the lines, this one male, not quite so pleasant or friendly saying:

'May I help you?'

'Sonny?'

'I'm sorry but we have no one here by that name.'

'Listen, I'm with Justice and this is an emergency so cut the crap and put Sonny Shoenburgen on, please.'

'Sorry, but he's tied up in a meeting,' the voice said after a very brief hesitation. 'May I tell Colonel Shoenburgen who's calling, sir?'

'Tell Sonny it's Jack Eichord, E-I-C-H-O-R-D, and I need to talk to him very briefly but I need it to be now.

'Right.' Another hesitation. 'And you're with whom, did you say?'

'Justice department,' he lied smoothly.

'Yes, sir, one moment please.' The lines hissed and booed again. One moment could be anything. He had once waited one moment for Federal Express on a weekend call that had run twenty-five minutes of the most tortured Muzak to which he'd ever been subjected. Twenty-five ear splitting minutes of some of the most wonderful ass-kissing ricky-tick numbers imaginable. A moment in D.C. time could be fucking anything. He was reaching his telephone tolerance for the day. It was a thing that had crept up his left arm, then his right arm, into both ears, and was now drilling inward, inward toward the soft core of the brain.

'Yeah?' the voice said, quietly.

'Hello?' He had been on the line for some time, picking up his phone without a discernible click. Some cordless, shapeless thing that you never touched, Jack supposed. A telephone that was formed like a microorganism and surgically implanted, perhaps. These bastards had everything.

'Sonny, it's Jack Eichord.'

'Agh, you worthless heap of dog shit whatcha' up to?'

'Up to no good. I—'

'You here?'

'Huh?'

'You here in D.C.?'

'No. Chicago. Chicago PD at the moment on a homicide case.'

'Jesus H. S. Christ, Junior. Whenja' move to Chi-town?'

'Well, I didn't move here exactly. I'm on loan to 'm for a serial-murder thing. Through Major Crimes. I'm in some deep damn puppy poop too. I wanna' tell ya'.'

'I don't doubt that for a damn second.' The colonel laughed.

'I need some— '

'Hey! Since when are you with Justice, asshole.'

'What time is it now? How many victims. He's a real maniac. Cuts their hearts out. Leaves whole families mutilated. It's one of the worst serial-murder cases ever. We gotta' run this down.'

'Okay. But nobody puts 'Officially deleted' on filed fingerprints. Certainly nobody here. Nobody at the Company. The Bureau. I never heard of an agency doin' it. If you see deleted in a sanitized or declassified document that's being downgraded after so many years, just as an example, like something the agency has to make available under the Freedom of Information Act, you know damn well it's nothing very sensitive to begin with or it'd never got a new rubber stamp. That's the nature of restricted material. This is an error. Some tired clerk who— '

'No, hold it. We assumed that too. But I had our chief out here run that aspect down himself through the Bureau and it isn't a clerical mistake. That is some kind of maximum security deletion. Somebody with heavy-duty clout pulled a curtain down on that person; the error was that they shouldn't have identified the deletion, But what was apparently somebody's in-house response to an inquiry went public in the bureaucratic computer shuffle. I gotta cut through this, Sonny. Please, man, you need to help me on this one.'

'Official channels, pal, that's the way to move. I couldn't do it any faster than the Major Crimes Task Force, fer' Chrissakes. Just put an urgent/special-priority request trace in motion through your chief of police or whatever and— '

'Will you listen, man? I've already gone that route. I've already banged up against all those walls. Hey. We gotta PC out here with ties to plans at CIA. Big personal pal of the former deputy director, okay? He called himself. They say it's out of their hands. Deleted at the highest levels of government. That's gotta be one of your people or a cabinet secretary, or somebody swimmin' around at the presidential level. I gotta have serious help on this one, Sonny. And I don't wanna say you owe me but You Owe Me.'

'All I can do is check it out, Jack. What's your number?' Twenty-five minutes later Colonel Sonny Shoenburgen was on the line telling him the same crap he already knew.

'Jack, your partial print check was run through McTuff, and NCIC, all the usual, and it got kicked out. Printout flags an official deletion and nobody can go behind that. Someone very senior has put the identity of the subject under a tight national security lid. Best I could do was run it back to the input point which appears to have been