“Right,” Eichord said, dialing a number.
“That's where this thing loses me. It's hard enough to come to grips with the phenomenon of thought manipulation and telepathy on this kind of a scale, but when you change a
“Go,” Eichord said into the phone and hung up. Dialing again. Saying to Mandel, “Maybe Ukie was telling us the truth. He wanted to see if the thoughts he was getting in his nightmares were for real.” He began talking on the phone, “Wally. We've got everything we need so far as sufficient cause to protect Noel Collier's life. Dr. Mandel's drug-induced session with Ukie Hackabee indicates both he and Joseph Hackabee were sexually molested children. It's...” There was a pause as Michaels spoke, interrupting him, and Jack replied, “Yes. Circumstantial. But that's still sufficient that we have to move. I mean it meets the life-threatening criteria, He's going to know by now. She's in grave peril. We've got to find her and isolate them, he's certain to be close to her. And we have to do it without tipping him off.” A pause. “No, that's out. Too much chance he'd find out. I need you to personally shepherd this thing through Jones-Seleska. Try to find out where they've gone. The thing we need to do is isolate them wherever they are or get her to return home long enough that we can protect her.” Pause. “Right. I've just put them in place.
“Okay. I'm going to go through the motions of trying to contact Hackabee, and we'll play it by ear from there. I'm going on into the house immediately and hope they'll have some reason to come back. Maybe Noel will come in to get some clothes or something.'
Joe would be weaving his spell now. Moving in on her in some secluded location under the guise of the two of them escaping from the glare of the notoriety attending the case. He'd have to act fast. Today or tomorrow at the latest. She'd be wanting to contact Ukie again soon and he'd only be able to keep her out of circulation for a few hours.
Jack phoned Hackabee and wasn't surprised he had checked out of the Mansion, leaving his California forwarding address, and that he could be contacted during the interim through Jones-Seleska. The legal firm had instructions to hold all communications official or not. Only one other person besides Noel knew where the safe house was and he was out of the country and unreachable.
There was no more time. Jack gathered up his emergency kit such as it was and walked to the door, glanced around the room a final time, shrugged, and headed for his unmarked car and a lonely ride.
Time did what it always does so well. It ticked away.
0817: Eichord is driving. The level of paranoia begins to rise in the nocuous flood of changing events and swiftly moving data stream. The car, heading on a more or less septentrional course, goes with the flow, Highland Parkbound, Jack Eichord powerless in the whirlpool of occurrences.
He is suddenly quite afraid, and thankful there are task-force personnel on the scene. It could be lots worse. He could be on the job alone, heading for a house where a killer might be inside and waiting for him.
0851: The first of eleven phone calls is placed to Eichord at the Dallas cop shop. Michaels fields the calls as agreed. He will not relay the contents of any of the phone conversations so it will be much later, and of little significance, when it becomes commonly shared knowledge that
A. The Branson hospital records, like so much else in this case, turn out to have mysteriously disappeared. It was as if the Houtcheson family had vanished from the face of the planet. And that itself is but one alarming, isolated scrap in a shadowy paper trail of dark coincidental death and disappearance.
B. 1500: Midafternoon, the most important of the calls coming in to Jack, nominally, is from a Wyckerly Asylum. An employee matching the shot of the twins’ image had disappeared subsequent to a rash of unexplained deaths of patient/inmates. The man's references, primarily a recommendation by the chief of staff of another mental hospital, turned out to be spurious. “Jon Hinderman” a/k/a half of the Houtcheson-Hackabee siblings, was only a hazy memory. All trace of him obliterated.
Eichord would learn none of this, severed as he was from the mother task force by all but a slim, invisible umbilical of a two-way transmitter-receiver to the cops out beyond the perimeter of the trap. But the transceiver was an emergency unit only. The rule will be absolute radio silence. There will be no eyeball surveillance extrinsic to the Collier home. Hackabee is too devious and bright. The house must look squeaky clean.
1930: Eichord waits quietly. Prone. Behind the sofa. Relaxed as much as conditions permit. Not bored. Not scared but it's getting a little hairy now. He really thought that Noel would show before now, It's one thing to wait in an empty house alone, waiting in the sun-streaked shadows of a late afternoon. But it's quite another to wait in an envelope of darkness for hours on end. The smallest creaks sound like footsteps. The floor lamps begin to resemble the silhouettes of gunmen. He will wait, according to plan, until 2400. If she has not made an appearance he will change places with Don Duncan, who is in a surveillance van two blocks away.
But they are not coming. Not yet. Joseph Hackabee, in the hopes of averting another session of lovemaking, has set the woman on a course of conversation about Ukie and the legal battle she plans to wage in his behalf. Two hours of this have passed and Joseph is so bored by it that he opts for a sexual intermission as the lesser of evils. At 2110 he has had his fill of the woman had he decides enough is enough. He will put her under now.
The home has a large Olympic-type pool and tennis court. There are two nicely appointed poolside cabanas, and in one of them he has ripped up the floor of the utility area off the laundry room and painstakingly created a shallow but adequate coffin to house the 112-pound corpse of Ms. Noel, adequately covered in a shroud of lye. He enjoys the tingling appropriateness of interring her within the Jones-Seleska safe house. Noel is standing beside him in a white bikini with matching heels and he says, “Darling, I'm so famished. I've got to have some nourishment before I can go on,” whispering to her in that gentle, teasing tone, and she leans up on tiptoe flicking a long wet tongue into his mouth.
“You want something good and nourishing ... to eat?” she teases him back as she kisses him.
“Yeah, darlin',” he breathes in a husky approximation of faked desire.
“I'd have thought you would have eaten your fill.” She slurps his mouth again.
How tiresome this creature is, he thinks. “To be sure. But right now a sandwich is in order. Must refuel the old tanks.” He takes her head in his strong hands, resisting the temptations that well up within him. “Be a love and go rustle us up some grub. Anything. Meanwhile, I want to try out the wet bar in here. Drinkie sound good?'
“Anything you say, lover.” And she gives him her drink order, another wet kiss, and trots off fetchingly to prepare his feast, the obedient, wiggling, jiggling, bikinied maid. She goes around the pool, casting her tall, curvaceous shadow into the floodlit water. Any other man would have but one thought. Only lust at the sight of her. But Joseph goes into the cabana thinking, I'll have earned this one. He smiles to himself, whistling softly.
He will take her under right there in the Jones-Seleska pool. Watch her fight him as she goes through the ballet of reflexive laughter and disbelief, anger, fear, surprise, panic terror, death awareness. Be watching her fill her lungs with pool water and chlorine as she screams in a shock wave of mindless struggling, her voice muffled by the water, laughing at her as she fights without hope. He will show her the penalty for having forced her foul affections on him. He will show this pretentious female scum the dues to be extracted from one who would interfere with his plans. He will make this bitch pay, he laughs to himself, through the nose so to speak, as she feels every sensation of her impending death.
But she is there watching him prepare a hiding place in the floor, an excavation the size of a body, and she comes within a hair's breadth of speaking, of asking him to explain what it is he's doing making that hole in the nice floor and why the lye sacks but oh my GOD no she knows that she is looking at a burial place even though the signals to her brain have not arrived yet and the overload of information freezes time for her momentarily and she is on Central Standard Opium Time now, time that stops completely. Halts. Ceases ticking. Comes to a dead end. Tick.... Nothing. Then time reverses. Goes backward, rewinding sooooooooo slllloooooowwwwwlllly- kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk-ccccccccccccccccccccc ccccc-iiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-TTTTTTTTTT! And a foot stops in midstride. She has come in to change her choice of potables, a woman's eternal prerogative: to change her mind. And she comes in soundlessly through recently oiled hinged doors coming in the cabana and in a quick take her mind puts her body on Opium Time and it is in this first microsecond that her time-shifting brain saves her lovely butt because as she opened her mouth to speak Opium Time freezes her face and it would take thirty seconds to say the first word of her soundless query, “W H A T” in real time, so she has plenty of opportunity to stop the movement of the foot in midstride, making that fraction of a second rewind as some miracle of survival instinct warns her and she kicks off her shoes and the former tomboy Noel is backing out, creeping out of the room just the way she came in, afraid even to swallow, time now
starting to
