“Uh, Daniel,” the girl said in her little soft voice, and he glanced over at her quickly, then back at the busy traffic on Interstate 24, “I'm sick. Could we stop pretty soon?'
He just grunted and nodded and said, in his basso profundo rumble, “Yeah.” Within ten minutes he was registering them into a decent motel. She lay flat on her back, breathing like a beached whale, while he carried in such luggage as they possessed by now, which included a duffel bag most people couldn't even lift off the floor much less carry.
“I hurt,” she told him when he'd come in and closed the door. Her incessant stream of birdlike chatter had slowed to a trickle and then dried up completely during his most recent southeastern journey.
“Spread your legs,” he said.
“I don't feel like doing it,” she said, misunderstanding his intentions.
“SPREAD ‘EM.” She spread her legs and he examined her. Dr. Bunkowski noticed a small “blob of blood” which was the result of the displacement of a mucus plug from the uterine cervix. He told her, “You're all right.” She smiled and rolled over on her side as best she could, propped on a mound of motel pillows, and immediately fell asleep.
He set his mental clock for six hours’ sleep and was snoring peacefully within sixty seconds.
“Wake up,” he told her. He had slept for five hours and fifty-four minutes. He went into the bathroom and when he came out she was still lying there unmoving.
“What's the matter?” he asked.
“I think it's getting to that time.'
“You hurting?'
“Not exactly.” She was feeling contractions of her uterus. Daniel had her walk around a little. It didn't make any difference. He carried the desk chair into the bathroom, ran hot water into the bathtub, and had Sissy sit in the chair with her feet in the hot water.
“You feeling good enough to travel?” he asked after a few minutes.
“Sure” she said, rather unconvincingly. “I guess so.'
They got back in the car, heading in the direction of Chattanooga, the next stop on the route that made a slow, curving arrow pointed at the heart of one Jack Eichord.
“Yes, sir,” the cop was saying to him, “that's really all we can give you at this point.” At least he hadn't been one of those people who would genuflect, then take it out on Eichord that he'd been made into a star; or an autograph hound; or somebody who wanted to know what Dr. Demented was really like. This was a dude trying to do his job, and for that Jack was grateful.
“Okay. Appreciate your help. I'm gonna get going.'
“Okay. Good luck with it.'
“Thanks.” He shook hands with the local guys and went outside where the chopper was waiting for him. That was the thing about the task force, there was no scrimping. They went first-class. They got you in “yesterday” and sliced down through all the layers of red tape like a hot knife into the lard of bureaucratic paperwork. They got things done.
Eichord had been sitting at his desk in Buckhead Station one minute and was literally in a vehicle heading for the airport the next, summoned with an emergency forthwith by the Major Crimes Task Force. MacTuff, as the acronym was pronounced, wanted him in Stobaugh County, Illinois, and yesterday. And when they reached out for you like that, you just relaxed and went with it.
It seemed to take longer to get to the crime scene than it had to fly in from Buckhead. He choppered from Hubbard City, which was in southern Stobaugh County, down to an impromptu landing zone at a place called Bayou Landing, where he was met by a pair of feds, one of whom he already knew.
“Hi, Tom,” he said as they shook hands quickly, shielding their faces as the helicopter lifted in the invariably threatening windstorm.
“Jack. Come on,” Tom said loudly over the noise, and they ran for the waiting car.
“Jack, this is Walter Belcher,” he said. “Jack Eichord.” Tom D'Amico and Jack had worked together on a couple of things in the past, if only nominally. D'Amico was a competent, career-type federal agent. Eichord didn't know him well, nor did he feel like there was a lot to know. Just somebody he'd seen around on task-force assignments.
“Where do you want to start?” he asked Eichord as soon as the vehicle was moving.
“I'd like to see the bridge, then go look at the bodies. You still getting corpses out of there?'
“Negative. I think we may have ‘em all. Fourteen bodies. That includes the trucker.'
“How'd the other pictures turn out?'
“Okay, considering.” The first batch of stuff they'd taken underwater had been ruined in developing. “Here's some of the new ones.” He reached back across the front seat and handed Eichord a thick manila envelope. There was a smaller white envelope inside that, and Jack looked at the shots.
“Christ,” he said softly. You really couldn't see much in the shots. A couple of the underwater shots showed the cars pretty clearly, and one in particular with a corpse's face in a window would make for some interesting new nightmares for everybody who looked at it.
The shots of the cars pulled out of the water were so bizarre and terrifying that they almost had a fake look about them, as if a Hollywood schlock producer had decided to film
“We'll have big blowups by tomorrow. Better resolution and whatnot. The diagrams are here'—he handed Eichord a thick dossier—'with everything we've got so far. Which isn't much.'
“Jack,” the other agent said, “five of them were locals, did you notice?'
“Any theories on that, Walter?” he asked the man sitting beside him.
“Nah.” He shook his head. “We may have an ID on this one.” Belcher leaned over and pointed at one of the Jane Doe descriptions. “We're waiting to get the word on this one right now, but barring a surprise, I think this will be Rosa Lotti. Housewife married to a sheet-metal worker in Varney. Been missing a couple weeks. We know this is a farmer, name of Perce F. Shaunessy. Farms some ground not too far from where these two lived. Hora and his common-law wife. They haven't been in the water too long from the looks of ‘em.'
“The one named Lee Moore is a friend of Shaunessy's,” Tom D'Amico said. “There's no connection between the Horas and Moore and Shaunessy other than geography, so far as we know. Shaunessy is believed to have known who Hora was. He's the one that wholesaled to nurseries, landscapers, gardeners, and so forth. Moore worked in some blue-collar job. It's there. I forget.'
“A karate instructor?” Eichord read. “Sophomore in high school? Jeezus, these people look like they gotta be random kills.'
“It really looks that way,” Belcher said.
“Couldn't be some kinda drug thing?” No comment. “You know—a mob thing maybe. They want to do a copycat number. Make it look like the Chicago killings.'
“I don't much think so. Shit, the dopers around here all grow their own out in the back yard. There hasn't
