Iceman (2 page)

“Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.” He walked among the congregation without fear. A righteous man of the gospel.

“Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them.” His voice grew louder.

“For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

“For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions, for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.

“And in the same way,” he said, his voice hard with unshaking conviction, “also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons
the due penalty
of their error. Well, my children, we all know what that is now, don't we?” He was very close to them. Close to their faces.

“The Epistle of Paul to the Romans! Yes. The gospel spells out this thing that the sinners call AIDS. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer. God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper.

“You know,” he said, feeling himself radiating the power of the Holy Spirit, “just a hundred years ago, a mere heartbeat of history, the big cities of the world were bastions of Christianity. New York. London. Paris. But in the year 2000, the largest cities of the world will be seething hotbeds of the anti-Christ.

“And in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Bombay, millions of sinners will be born, live, and die without ever hearing the word of the gospel. Unrighteousness wickedness, greed, malice, envy, murder, strife, and deceit are a way of life to these heathen. Poverty and prostitution, immorality and malnutrition, these things corrupt and degrade the peoples of the vast, anti-Christian nations.” He had them now. He could sense his congregation inching closer to him, and it filled his heart with courage.

“And they're moving to the west. These haters of God and inventors of evil. Foreign anti-Christs buying up our property, spoiling our culture, slithering into the foundations of our morality with their depraved ways.” One of his congregation touched him as he started walking again. He felt the touch against his boot as he stepped down onto the next massive slab of rock.

“We must CRUSH these nonbelievers,” he shouted, reaching for a member of his congregation.

They called him The Baptist, some of the ones who churched with him. He was something of a legend among them, but those who practiced the forbidden ways kept to themselves. They were not talkers.

He was an old man with an ordinary appearance, wearing faded blue coveralls, tan work shirt, and scuffed boots. Standing alone on the side of a sunny cliff, holding a large, writhing rattler a few inches from his face, as if daring it to strike him.

The slabs and buttresses around him were covered with coiled snakes. The Baptist and his congregation.

D
addy hated the sound of baby crying, so he began punishing baby in unusual ways. He liked using the youngster's bottom as an ashtray, for example.

The sadism would have accelerated and the boy would have been a poor candidate for survival, but fate intervened. A kindly neighbor called the police one time too often and investigating officers found the little boy alone, in a shit-filled cage, and he was rescued from Dad's loving care in time.

His foster mommy, on the other hand, adored her new baby boy. It was her habit to cover the child's rear, a scarred lunar landscape of cicatrices from cigarette burns, with loving kisses.

Soon the kisses took another turn and she found other ways of showing this strange child her deep adoration in these frequent moments of intimacy. But if the only parental contact you have known was a Camel to the buttocks, you can put these things in perspective.

So, baby boy was content, and inside the scarred and twisted soul of the child a dark, bitter seed of evil took root, and was nurtured by Mommy's attentions, and by the cruel pinpricks of his flowering destiny. And puberty came early, and found the boy waiting.

“
S
pecial Agent Eichord?"

“Yes, sir."

“Bob Mott. I'm the chief of police."

The men shook hands.

“Good to meet you. Chief Mott. Appreciate this, and very sorry I had to drag you back to work."

“No problem, Jack—if you don't mind first names? Call me Bob, please."

“Thanks.” Eichord knew Chief Robert Mott's background from the task-force file. A top drawer career man with an ultra-clean professional history, running a big-city-style police department in a relatively small town. out the ears. Enviable arrest record. He'd cleared some bad homicides.

“Just for the record, I was very relieved when I got the Fax from the Major Crimes Task Force replying to my rocket. And when I heard
you
were coming, I started counting the hours.” He was nodding as he spoke in a soft and serious voice. Eichord could tell the man was sincere.

“That's very kind of you. But—"

“No stroke job. Jack. I've followed your work since you cleared the ‘Doctor Demented’ thing, and your track record is incredible. I need somebody with your kind of experience on this one."

“Well.” Eichord never knew what to say when they were serious about it and not just shining him on. “Hope I don't disappoint. I notice in the files—I was reading about your fine work here on the way—you had fifteen years in CID before you took this job?"

“Yeah. I made chief in ‘eighty-six. I have a little over nineteen and a half years on the job. Less than a year to go and I pull the pin.” Eichord was confused. Mott wasn't old enough to have put in fifteen years as a CID guy and nearly twenty here. The jet lag cleared a bit and he patted his pockets like somebody looking for cigarettes.

“Was that CID in the military here?"

“No. We've got our own CID as part of the force here, and Oseola's set up the same way. You know, within the departments?” Eichord had that feeling you sometimes get when you can't remember what state you're in.

“Oh. Gotcha.” He pulled out a folded sheaf of notes, doodles, afterthoughts, sketches, and assorted airplane graffiti.

“Both Blytheville and Oseola have CIDs running their homicide investigations when they take place within corporate limits, but we work closely with county when we..."

Eichord was nodding, fighting to concentrate, but he felt awful. His head was stuffy, like he was coming down with a cold or about to get a severe sinus headache. His mouth was killing him. His gums were swollen and he needed to get to a dentist. A tooth with a bad cavity was starting to pound away. His sinus cavities hurt. He could feel himself draining as they stood there. A couple of years back and he would have been reaching for the sauce. But that was then. There were no more quick fixes. He pulled his mind back to the jurisdictional intricacies.

“...pretty much had the ball in our court the whole time. And it didn't do a bit of good."

“Yeah. Okay. How's about just running down the whole thing again for me—from when you got the word on the kids being missing? That was the mother, right?"

“Yeah. Juanita Alvarez. Forty-three. Divorced. Model citizen. Hard worker. Bringing up two little girls. Lived here all her life. Father lives up north. Been divorced six years. No boyfriends. Good kids. One day they go out on their bikes. Come back. She's doing housework. Comes out, finds the bikes back in the yard. Kids have left again. She figures they went to the store. Hours go by. She panics. Runs all over the neighborhood. Zip. She calls us.

“Twenty-four hours later it's a missing-persons case going. Angela and Maria Alvarez. Best guess: they were on the bike and the perp sees ‘em—maybe somebody they know. Perpetrator gets ‘em to leave the bikes and get in the car or van or whatever, and"—the chief shook his head—"nobody sees a thing.

“Two days later we got officers cruising the projects in a scout car: Larry Phillips and B.J. Bahn. Four-to-midnight tour. We get the anonymous phone tip. On the tape if you wanna hear it. Dead body in a field off Clearlake.

“Officers respond. Not one d.b. but two. The most awful sight anybody ever saw. Two mutilated torsos. Females. A pair of little headless girls.” Bob Mott took a deep breath.

Eichord's bad tooth throbbed.

“Again. Nobody saw shit. We never nailed down the caller. Probably just a kid going through the field. Next day we found the kill site. An abandoned two-story house near the projects on Clearlake Avenue. Blood like a slaughterhouse, but none of the missing parts of the cadavers."

“No heads?"

“Not so far. So, Juanita Alvarez has to ID the bodies. What a thing that was! We go over the killing room and the dump ground and get all the stuff for the lab, dust and all that, and really do a scavenger hunt for the burial spots.” He shook his head again, squinting like his eyes were tired from looking. “Whatever he did with the missing parts of the kids, we haven't turned anything.

“Way we dope it out is this—he, she, they—pick up the kids on South Utica or nearby. They get in a vehicle. Perp moves them somehow to the old house on Clearlake. They're probably already bound and gagged by the time they're moved inside the abandoned house. We got line. Tape. Blood and gore.

“Inside the old house he has a go at the girls. Sex and torture. Everything you can think of this guy or these guys do to the kids. Then kills ‘em. Cuts off their heads. Drains the torsos, washes them, and takes them out in the field. Why? Nobody can figure that one."

“And not a single witness sees or hears any of this?"

“Not a peep."

“Take me through the gathering of the evidence. Securing the crime scene. The whole schmear."

The chief ran it all down for Eichord. Half an hour later he had five pages of notes. He knew where they kept the barrier tape, who dusts for prints, how the photographs got developed, where the interrogation “routes” were for the nonwitnesses that failed to materialize, what they did with the orifice swabs, hair and fiber samples, nail scrapings, dirt tests, autopsy prep sheets—everything.

The State Crime Lab in Little Rock performed the autopsies on the torsos. The swabs, H & F, scrapings, and all the rest of it went to the lab in D.C.

Eichord had maps, more doodles, and the keys to an unmarked BPD leaner.

Mott drove over to the abandoned house near the projects, Eichord following him, and broke the seal on the crime scene. Electricity had been temporarily restored to the house's interior, and police floodlight illuminating the killing site, they spent an hour or so going over the place again. It was pretty much what Eichord expected, and he told the chief as much.

“I'll poke around here a little more,” he said, “but it's just the way you painted it.” He meant both figuratively, alluding to the written and narrative précis, and literally, since much of the blood-stained crime scene wore a coat of the red dye the techs had used in their search for latent prints.

“Jack, I hope you will find something we've missed. It feels like a bloody hopeless mess so far."

“I know the feeling. And I promise you I've seen too many just like it."

“Like I said,” Bob Mott replied, “I just want to hang in a few more months and—ping! I'm letting the spoon fly."

“You got something lined up or are you just gonna kick back?"

“I got a buddy saving something for me at Fed-Ex. Nice money. Great benefits. And the customers never shoot at you."

“I'll admit, that doesn't sound too bad."

“We'll have the girl for you in the morning. Nine o'clock?” He referred to the fourteen-year-old girl who was the closest thing they had to a live lead.

“That's fine."

“Like I told ya, she's got an ax to grind against their neighbor there in the mobile-home park. We checked it all out and he's clean as a whistle—but at least you'll have a starting point."

“Right. And I'll call Mrs. Alvarez and see if I can catch her on the way to work. In fact, if you don't mind, you might give her a call and let her know I'll be around in the morning?"

“No problem. I'll go set it up. Tell her you'll give her a ring or you just want to drop by?"

“Tell her I'll drop by early. I'll phone first and see what time's good. Seven, seven-thirty."

“I'll do ‘er."

“And then I'll go see the girl and our friend, the neighbor who doesn't like dogs. Probably drop in and see you around midmorning if that's all right?"

“That'll be great. We'll sit down and see if we can brainstorm something new. Right now it's a dead end."

“Oh. You mentioned the fourteen-year-old—were you going to bring her in or what?"

“Either way. Whichever. You wanna just have her brought to the station early?"

“Yeah, I think so. I mean since the man"—he glanced at his scrawls—"Mr. Hillman or whatever his name is, lives next door to her. Let's see if we can get her in without any fuss, either have her folks drive her or pick her up in an unmarked car. I'll be there by nine or so."

“Sounds good, and thanks again, Jack.” They shook hands. “See you in the morning."

“See you then."

“Okay. Bob, appreciate all your help. Catch you in the morning.” The door closed and Eichord was left alone with emptiness, distant traffic noise, night sounds, and silent screams.

He tried to put himself in the killer's mind and walked through “
scenario number one,
” with the children bound and gagged and in a vehicle parked as close to the back door as it could get.

Carrying them in. Dragging the bodies. Rolling them. Trying to transport the kids’ weight every way he could think of. Looking for sign and finding none.

Thinking about the torture that had come before the killing and the mutilation. Letting himself sink down into it. Watching the agony in their eyes. Hearing their muffled screams as the blood flew. This part would be very close to the way it went down up until the end: the autopsies and the kill site yielded up most of that gruesome story.