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  The second time was like the first time, a repeat performance of their first ersatz lovemaking. He caught himself thinking a lot of thoughts that he really wasn't that crazy about but what the hell. He was nuts about this woman. Eichord wasn't used to it all anyway. The fervor and the damn consuming passion of a love affair were so alien to him. He saw himself as an old middle-aged man and the pounding of the old valentine was something he couldn't get used to. Christ, he thought, am I falling for this old girl? Old girl is what he said as he looked at her smile lines and tiny wrinkles and the dishwater hands, kicking himself even as he thought the disparaging thoughts.

  He made himself concentrate on the tiny lines of aging, and the creases and the imperfections. Think about the wrinkles and don't let yourself get swept up in the mass of long, silky hair or those gorgeous knockout eyes or those legs that just seemed to keep going. Don't look at all that stuff. Don't, whatever you do, don't dare look at that mouth. No. That would be a serious mistake. Not if you want to shake this fever and get well. Shake this Saturday-night fever of yours, old man.

  So he concentrated on her hands, and it was all he could do to keep his lips and tongue and teeth off those wrinkled hands of hers, those sweet fingers of a slim, good-looking, vibrant adult woman who had done her share of work. Pulled her part of the load and then some. Washed some dishes and diapers. Those hands that were now doing something that he couldn't get used to.

  He was no cocksman. No way. But his women were of a kind. He was used to women wanting him and telling him that. Saying "I want you." And "I want you inside me." Variations on that theme. She didn't want that. Not yet, she said, it just wasn't right, and he tried valiantly to understand, and the electricity kept on surging between them, unmistakable and definitely high voltage, but still she kept a grip on the situation, kept it in hand.

  It was certainly not that Edie found the act repulsive or even mildly repugnant. No. The thought of sex with this man was exciting and something she would eventually learn to anticipate the way a foodaholic looks forward to the next banana split. But it was just the inappropriateness of it, somehow, of what she still thought of quaintly as going all the way. To do it now, with this newfound lover, this new friend, so soon after their meeting, it was—well, it would be rushing that final stage of intimacy. Yet for all of her ambivalence she wanted it, needed the closeness, and knew he did too. She wanted and needed to solidify this thing that was zigzagging through the ether between them like tiny lightning bolts, this hot, new electric charge of desire and mutual attraction. And so for the time being this would do.

  She knew about men. She knew she could make it do for him too, at least for whatever time she had to wait before she gave more of herself to this man. It made no sense, whatsoever, she fully realized. But somehow in the confusion and the befuddlement of her upside-down life that was slowly coming back up to sail on an even keel again, she saw this as something they could both live with. She knew this man wanted her very fully, and also she sensed that Jack Eichord would do nothing to chance losing what they both had found and were finding with each other every day. There were no ultimatums that would come from Jack. And just the knowledge of that did much to relax her and help her begin to drop the barriers that so far had kept their sexual touching an adolescent thing.

  And so it went. And when her arm started getting tired she did what all women do, she came up with a much better idea. Edie went out and got an old pair of panty hose and cut the foot out of it, don't laugh now dammit, and smeared Vaseline (the widow lady's K-Y Jelly) all over it and really went to town. Wow. Some widow lady.

  And the next night after that they were together again and she got him off with a Baggie, and by the end of the week she'd gone down to the neighborhood shopping center and bought a box of nylon socks, breaking up when the clerk asked her what size. Very small, she told Jack later. Well, even when it ain't too good it's great. And this was fine and sure as hell better than no sex life at all.

  And it meant a lot to Jack on the friendship level, as well, since he felt like it was so important to her to obtain his physical wellbeing and comfort. Having lost a husband as she had, he sometimes wondered just how distasteful the act was to her. He knew she was not of the bisexual persuasion. She liked herself, as all of us do, and then, he felt, men would be a natural second.

  Eichord was convinced she was neither daughter of Lesbos, celibate, nor neuter. He teased her that she was like Erma Bombeck—a trisexual—only able to resist his advances because she' had attained some strange plateau of sexual weirdness as a result of watching too much "Donahue." She was multi-valent, omni-directional, and despite her obvious unwillingness to get it on with Jack in the normal way, she was sending out these potent and charged signals that ranged the continuum from onanistic to downright orgiastic.

  "You know me," he had said to her, only half jokingly, "your friendly neighborhood pervert." He nudged himself at his willingness to pick up anything that looked like kiss-me vibes from this lady. Fires simmered within her, he assured himself continually. Then with a dollop of guilt adding to himself that such a response was typical to all of us macho-type clods. We're ready to think that of anybody with female plumbing, be she diesel dyke, nympho, fridge, or mud-wrestling kinkorama queen from the planet Uranus.

  Eichord pondered the meaning of it all, his lonesome semen continued to solidify into cementitious mucilage in the toes of discarded socks, grossing him out not a little, and doing zip for the old demon ego as he felt himself falling deeper and deeper into some kind of a pit with high, slippery walls. It bothered him. Not enough to stop, you understand, but guilt can be a weird thing.

  He was on his way north from Chicago, nine hours of very boring and fruitless paperwork behind him, and he'd been down at work since dawn. It was late afternoon and the day, and the job, and the strange new love affair, and the serial killings—the whole schmear just collapsed in on him as he drove, and when he found an open, overgrown field he pulled his car off onto the somewhat muddy shoulder and got out, mindful of a new pair of shoes, and started aimlessly down the pathway that bordered the field, taking in the air in big, deep lungfuls.

  It took him almost ten minutes to amble across to the end of the field, but he was in no hurry. He wanted to think, to air out the cobwebs a little. He had never felt so many things going down at the same time, important things, that is, and he knew that even as he walked, somewhere out there a mad serial killer was about to take another life. That was on one level. On another level he couldn't stop thinking about this Edie. What a woman. He was falling in love with her. And he didn't care about the other stuff right now.

  He felt better and was walking back to the vehicle when something nudged at him the way things often did to Jack. Something he'd seen. A loose, out-of-place detail, some fact that sat up and waved a red flag at his subconscious and said, hey . . . look over this way. It was a small thing. The cardinal shrub that he'd seen there by the overgrown field. A small piece of paper, burned to black ash, caught up in the branches of the shrub. It was black, roughly the size of a softball but a strange irregular shape that nagged at him. One of those things you see and it suggests something like a psychiatrist's inkblot test. What did it remind him of?

  He was in the front seat and putting his key into the ignition when it hit him and the realization washed over his soul like an icy wave. The shape of the ash, just a fragment of paper from someone's burnt trash floating across a field to catch and hang suspended in some branches, the fragment was the shape of that Buddhist's heart in Saigon, the one who had set himself on fire. They had saved the heart, a charred cinder about the size of a baseball, a hard, black reminder of cruelty and injustice. And the words banged around in his mind just as he pulled back out into traffic—self-immolation.

  But that night was the night it finally came together for them and that was their first night from then on. It began as it usually began, with Jack holding Edie and feeling that soft, lovely and pliant body mold
into him, and laying her gently back against the bed and kissing and feeling that same kind of surprising rush whenever their bodies pressed together, and running his fingers into her long hair, and feeling her touch him first on his rib cage, and then up and around, but then instead of him rolling over beside her she was helping him pull her closer, pulling him into her and before he knew what they were doing he was inside Edie and they were lovers for the first time and it was like being burnt by a flicker that suddenly caught fire and threatened to engulf them.

  She went wild and surprising both of them equally it was genuine fire. He tried to kiss her and she tried to kiss him, really kiss him, and it was like for the first time. Everything was the first time and as they came closer together with the hard, rocking movement their lips barely brushed and the fire was so hot, real fire that it scorched each of them with its astonishing, delicious heat and they cried out and whimpered from the flame of it, and he was shooting, spent so quickly it was an embarrassment or it would have been but even as he was shrinking inside her she whimpered—ungh—un—no—oh—no—please, with such urgency and held on so tightly starting again in a kind of gently insane frenzy, beginning, moving and quivering with those little, mewing, whimpering, soft animal sounds and her breathing all over him and her hands moving against him, fluttering over him, clutching him, and the close, sweet hotness of that soft bush, and her wetness and that sexy voice whispering and whimpering and my God the fire it was so hot.

  Jack knew he was dead. No way could he move. He was drained. Never anything like it in the history of the fucking world. Never. Not with anybody, anywhere, at any moment in time. He was empty. And in sweetest agony he rolled over slightly and looked at her for the first time and she was brand-new and in their intimacy he saw her for the first time then and she was new for him and he looked at that body of hers. Oh, he thought, I'll never doubt you again, oh Heavenly Father. No, Lord. Because you made trees, and flowers, and streams, and rainbows, and snowflakes, and oh, my. You did a job on her too, let me tell you, he thought. What a woman.

  It was a prayer of a kind that he thought as he rolled over and looked at this miracle beside him. Lord, anybody who can turn out one of these can't be all bad. What a lady. He saw those legs for the first time, the dazzling curve that became a flatness of stomach and rolling upward into a magnificently formed chest that met a perfect throat and then she rolled over and moaned and Eichord saw the most beautiful ass he'd ever seen and he thought of himself as a connoisseur of female butts, a heinie epicurean, a derriere gourmet. He told her as much, his voice cracking with the effort of verbalizing speech.

  "You know something?"

  "Hmm?"

  "You've got—the loveliest—oh, yes, the loveliest rear end—in the world. Did you know that?"

  "I'm glad you think so," she whispered back to him. "I guess I never thought about it much."

  "You mean, seriously, guys haven't always told you that you had a fabulous ass," he said, without thinking.

  "Well. No. I mean, I guess I knew I had an okay rear end, but—" she trailed off.

  "Uh-huh. An okay rear end, is that what you think you have?"

  "Yeah. Okay. Nothing special. Nothing to get that excited about. It's just adequate. An okay rear end." She smiled.

  "If that's an okay rear end," he said hoarsely, "the 1959 Eldorado had an okay rear end. I mean we are talkin' Hall of Fame classics here, lady."

  "Oh, sir, you make me blush," she murmured, still on her stomach.

  "Yes. I can definitely see that." He lay there transfixed. "I know where I want to have dinner tonight, beautiful," he said.

  "Where?"

  "Ummmmmmmm," he replied, rolling her over on her back again. And soon she was making those sounds. Doing it again. Making those hot little whimpering noises that turned him on like crazy, and it all caught fire again and the embers that he thought had finally gone out were fanned into a burning flame once more, and he was rock hard and inside and they were both slick with sweat and love juice and bodily fluids in a wild, white-hot heat of the moment.

  Neither of them could quite believe it. He was totally immobilized again. Not just drained. His crank-case was empty, folks. Bone dry. He was exsanguinated. Dead and buried. Motionless as she traced outlines up and down with those hot fingertips and Jack knew Edie was smiling as she ran those fiery fingers across him, playing with him, and it made him laugh and they were in each other's arms and enjoying their discovery so much.

  The humor of it was just ineffable and illogical and they both felt giddy, hysterical, a little confused, mindfucked, spent. They came apart and just looked at each other, sweat drying on their bodies, and just glued themselves to the sheets, too blown to even smoke. And he felt some very weak stirrings again as he ran his hands over those hard nipples and before they knew it they were together once more in a drunken kind of slow, languorous, loving, easy thing. Moving to some unheard reggae beat, some bedsprings ca-chunk, ca-chunk, in a very gentle, soft, concupiscent pushing, his hands on her moving over her in the darkness, exploring hidden treasures in the ruins of the fires, and later he felt her erupt like a volcano, washing him in molten lava, burning him again with the wetness from her loins and he moaned with delight into the sweet candy of his lover's mouth.

  Edie and Daniel

  At some point, or as the Watergate-era co-conspirators would say, at some point in time the lines of lives destined to come together will come so close the interstices narrow to nothingness and the vectors almost cross. It was that way with Edie and a monster, whose lives would nearly touch. And yet, amazingly, neither would realize it. Nor would the cop Jack Eichord, whose own vector had already crossed one of the lives and was reaching toward the other to complete this overlapping triangle as diagrammed by destiny.

  At 151130 Central, Mrs. Edith Lynch was registering a complaint with a rather unresponsive and tired employee of a major department store and was saying: "—that it wouldn't be any problem to return it."

  "It isn't any problem," the woman was saying, "but I have to get the number to put in the computer, and if you put the invoice in with it when you sent it back to the catalog center, then how can I help you?"

  "But I have the number right here, as I just told you, the thing is that the two numbers don't— "

  And at 151130 Central, Daniel Bunkowski was squeezed behind the wheel of a stolen Mercury Cougar, window down on the passenger side, tape deck blasting. He was on the outskirts of Chicago, trying to negotiate the heavy Chicago traffic in the uncomfortable Merc, black vinyl over silver, license X-Ray Tango Romeo-1969 belonging to one Olin Neidorf of Mount Vernon, Illinois, now deceased. Mel Torme was emoting from the car speakers.

  He heard something about writing the words again, as Bunkowski ejected the tape savagely and twisted the radio dial to a teenybopper hard-rock station, blinking his reddened pig eyes and concentrating on his driving. Just an hour or so now and he'd dump this piece of crap.

  And at precisely 151130 Jack Eichord was sitting in the squad room at his borrowed desk doodling on a yellow legal pad. He had just finished a doodle, what looked like a doodle in any event, based on the commonalities of medical records of certain individuals and he was beginning what someone might have termed his E doodle. He sometimes just sat and drew the letter E, never bothering to reason why. He thought and schemed by what might have been called the doodle method, but he had never put a name to it. It was simply part of his process of analyzing data.

  He would sit, sometimes for hours on end, a felt-tipped pen making neat, precise marks on a legal pad or whatever paper was available as he allowed his ability to free-associate time and space to analyze. He would throw his brain into neutral, just sit there doodling, let it all come naturally, thinking quietly and as organically as he could let himself, eliciting all manner of arcane lore, evoking any number of trivial facts, educing commonality and pattern where there often would be none.

  The E doodle had many variations, and was worth zilch as po
lice work goes but for some reason it often preoccupied him during these reflective times and so he invariably gave rein to it. Here was the way his latest E doodle looked on paper:

  E

  SylvEEya (phon.)

  AvEry Johnson

  Kasikoff

  CharlEs Maitland

  Edna Porter GiavinEllo

  VErnon ArlEn

  Edward William Lynch

  Richard SchEigE

  Edie Lynch middle name EmalinE

  Eichord

  Bill JoycE

  LEE AnnE Lynch

  At 175500 Edie was drinking a cup of coffee with her friend Sandi who was saying, "—so glad you are."

  "Me too, you know? I mean even if this doesn't last—"

  "It will; don't say that. Think positive."

  "I can't think at all, that's the problem."

  "Oh, I'd love to feel that way again. It's been so long since I went love crazy." They both giggled.

  "That's what I thought too, but now I'm so head over heels that I— "

  At 175500 Daniel Bunkowski was pulling into the area known as Oldtown, looking at the odd human landscapes of hippies, winos, coke snorters, and antique dealers, and listening to a completely insincere resonance extol the highly dubious virtues of a chain of waterbed stores. He smashed at the radio dial with a vicious backfist. He was ravenously hungry. What do I want? he thought. Chinese, he told himself. A big sack of egg rolls with lots of sweet and sour to go with it. And a quart of Wild Turkey to wash it down. And later maybe play with one of these bums.

  At 175500 Eichord was drinking his ninth cup of cardboard-tasting coffee of the day and block-printing a huge letter U. It was printed or drawn to look like a letter carved out of stone, and it was the last letter of a twelve-letter two-word phrase that it had taken him nearly ten minutes to draw on a sheet of paper. Each large stone letter had its own shadow and he had carefully inked in the black shadows of the words that filled the page.