Slob

cruel, yet somehow childish, jowly face that confronted her. Even the two photographs, harsh and grainy and devoid of all attempt at reproducing the look of a naturally posed human being, even these identity mug shots from Marion Federal Prison failed to convey any instant sense of menace.

It was the childishness of the man's face, the dimpled baby-fat face that made him look so unthreatening. She felt a cold tremor as she realized this was the thing that had . . . killed and mutilated Ed. And then it had killed again and kept killing, taking more lives without rhyme or reason.

'Jack?' She started to say something and he was taking the photograph out of her shaking hands as the torrent of stinging tears began to flow from her eyes and she collapsed in her lover's arms and he held her for what seemed to be a long time as she shook with violent, bitter sobs of loss and anger. And as he held her whatever thought she had been thinking left her like a wispy, blackened, and charred fragment of a half-remembered dream.

'Come here.'

'Nnnnnn.' It was a keening, a pitiful, wordless cry. But she'd cried enough now, and he led her over to a chair.

'Come on, hon. Sit down.'

'Huuunnnnggg, hunnnnngggghhhh,' a sound like she was still trying to make tears come but the well was dry. He sat her down at the kitchen table and stared at the dossier, not so much reading as remembering word groups, and then busied himself finding the bottle that he knew she had in the kitchen someplace. He found it up in one of the cabinets with the crackers and breakfast cereal, a nearly full fifth of Seagram's, and he sloshed a little into a coffee cup, pleased that it wasn't for him but sorry for this sweet lady of his. He ran some tap water in over the booze.

'Take a little sip.' He put it in front of her. It was all she could do to get the cup up with both hands and she tried a bird swallow and went 'Wwwwaaaaauuuu-gh,' shuddering and pushing it away from her as she shook her head and he took it from her shaking hands and emptied the contents into the sink. And he took the dossier again and with eyes unfocused let the phrases and word blocks commingle in his mind, staring at the face that perhaps not even a mother could completely love, a smile like the grillwork of a 1949 Roadmaster, teeth meant to tear meat, huge, misshapen teeth—never a cavity in the strange head—perfect, perfectly awful teeth rendered obsolete by civilized society, teeth meant to wrest the crimped top from bottles now made to unscrew. A human shark's teeth. All business.

A face like piles of dough, massive and oddly featureless. A soft face dimpled like a fat baby's butt, repulsive and kissable at the same time, free from facial hair or scars of combat. But there were scars and then there were scars. And Eichord knew that some people wore their scars the way Yakuza wear their dragons, discreetly. His scars, aside from broken belly veins that encircled his girth like pregnancy stretch marks, his scars would be borne like ostracized triad tattoos, old and fading pachuco gang cruciforms, worn secretly and surreptitiously. Socially unacceptable stains on civilized skin, his worst marks deeply subcutaneous—living reminders of unforgettable nightmares, burned down into the core of his twisted soul with the torturer's cruel branding iron. Twenty-year-old scars that would rankle and hurt like half-forgotten shrapnel working its way to the surface of this uniquely malevolent human being.

There was something here, though, and he stared at the word groups and data patterns, letting the mass of fact and surmise free-associate and interconnect. Letting the life and times of Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski lap against his brain, sometimes not touching, sometimes in actual contact, contiguous and sequential and chronological, and sometimes without propinquity or connective. And he knew it was no good trying to force it and he closed the dossier not long afterward, going to her again and taking her in his arms.

He told her for the first time that he loved her without speaking the words, making his first commitment to her and to the little child that now ran across the next-door neighbor's backyard, pulling a kite against the light breeze as a young, female hunting dog of dubious lineage bayed excitedly at her heels, committing himself to them wholeheartedly now. Wanting 'to dump his love inner,' he thought, smiling, to himself.

So close. Forty-seven minutes away, driving the speed limit and hitting all the lights just right, only forty- seven minutes away by vehicle, sitting in a cramped framework of two-bys some nine feet below the city streets, the killer sat watching them. Looking at Jack and Edie. Then dropping remnants of a beef-and-cheese burrito onto their likeness in the grainy photograph as he continued to scan the somewhat lurid, breathless, and largely inaccurate account of the special homicide investigator and the widow of one of the first victims of the Lonely Hearts killings.

The name Edith E. Lynch and her suburban Chicago address typed themselves on his mental word processor and filed themselves neatly away for retrieval. And each word of the report and every word spoken by the arrogant cop on the television program struck at Daniel like the sharp stings of a rattler, taunting him, biting at him until he stomped down on the filthy paper with a vicious, 15EEEEE heel obliterating the images that enraged him. And he imagined he could hear the cry of the snake man again. It was taking him around the bend. The kind of purple, swollen rage that made him do the awful thing to the Volkers that day. It was going to make him take the cop and the cop's bitch and create a special and mouth-watering feast.

And just at that moment, when the killer's grotesquely brilliant mind began to get the first glimmer of his next move, Jack heard the hound baying out in back and an almost-ignored fact popped a red signal up amid the flood of trivia awash in his brain, and he knew then—as he always knew—without a moment's indecision, he knew exactly how he would take this man down.

It was not until the phone call late the following night, Edie calling him at eleven-thirty, after a day that included another long interrogation of the biker punk and a series of fruitless and frustrating attempts to pry more information loose from the people at Marion Fed, Edie calling him just as he was hitting the sack, not until then that the whole thing began to come together and his own plan started to assert itself.

'Hey, babe!'

'Umm, yeah?' A voice like a mouth full of cotton.

'I'm sorry, honey. Had you just fallen asleep?'

'No. Just got back. What's up, love?'

'Ohhhh,' she sighed audibly, breathing into the phone. 'The man. The man's face you showed me last night. I've seen him, I think.'

'Say again?' He was wide awake.

'Jack, I know how this is going to sound but I have to tell you. I don't know—I almost didn't say anything, but—I mean, something was so familiar about that face when I looked at it, but—I just . . .'

'Huh?'

'I just couldn't put it into the right pigeonhole, but then I remembered when I was talking to Sandi about going to the center it came to me where I'd seen him before.'

'You talking about the killer?'

'Yes. The man's photographs you showed me from prison. What's his name?'

'Bunkowski.'

'I think I've seen him. I know that face. I saw him down by the center the other night.'

'What center. What are you talking about?'

'The Crisis Center where I do volunteer work.' She gave him an address in downtown Chicago. 'I saw that face; I know I did.'

'You—uh, you're really sure about this? I mean, look—'

'No, Jack. I know what this must sound like to you, but yes, I think—I am sure. I'd remember that face. I know it looked different, he'd look older now, wouldn't he?' She wasn't asking him. 'But even so, the face is the same. Heavier maybe. I saw him in lots of light. It was a dark night but there was plenty of light to see his face and it scared me. He was huge. I was just getting in my car and I saw this—I saw him going down to work in a manhole. He was dressed like a whadyacallit? A sanitation worker. Those guys who work in manholes?'

'You saw Bunkowski, you think, across from the Crisis Center going down into a manhole?' He was beginning to think he had hallucinated the phone call.

'I swear I'm not kidding, honey. He had on like—this pair of coveralls or something and this big—uh, ladder thing, and a sack. And naturally I just thought it was a workman. And it struck me as kind of odd he'd be going to work down in a manhole that late at night. It was like maybe ten, ten-thirty, something like that. And you know, I