Free Iceman by Rex Miller Page B

pantyhosed legs. The hair and the skin-fiber reports. The extra time they'd taken with this one: the fingernails, rectum, under the eyelids, the soil-deposit trace, the forensic analysis, the whole fine nine that Earl Rich at the police lab had summed up in two syllables: “Nada."
    MacTuff's guys in the white coats hadn't been able to add a shred of anything to what Earl's boys and the old redneck Buckhead M.E. had handed him. They did have some lab work on the possible weapon.
    Not necessarily an icepick. PROBABLY an icepick. Could be one of the old, long, wooden-handled type. Could be a sharpened awl or a homemade job: any steel weapon ground down to that particular configuration. A group of examples included various antique and contemporary sword canes and umbrellas. Jack remembered his grandmother had still used an icebox in the late 50s. They'd had to come in and replace it with a fridge while she was asleep. She never did get use to that “'Frigerator” but at least she wouldn't be stabbing herself to death with the mean, needle-sharp pick that she kept stabbed into the butcher's block beside the door.
    Back at the station he picked up the phone, twirling his Rolodex until he saw the number he wanted and began dialing.
    “Yes. Is Letty there, please?” He waited, tapping a felt-tipped pen on the desk.
    “HI! Letty, it's Jack Eichord.” She said something friendly. He smiled, responding, “Do you recall a serial killer you ran a story on some years back? This must date back close to fourteen, fifteen years or more. The Icepick Killer?"
    “My God,” she said, “you sure have some memory there, Jack.” She paused for a second. “No. Not offhand. I don't."
    “It's important, hon. Guy was killing women, and I don't think they ever caught him. The Icepick Murders? Something like that?"
    “Oh, hell. Sure! The Iceman."
    “Yeah."
    “Yeah. That's it, eh? The Iceman. Yeah. Um hmm. I remember the stories vaguely. Whatcha need?"
    “I need every scrap, kid. I would be very grateful if you can dig it all out for me. Every bit you have on it."
    “Okay. We can do."
    “And I need it last week. But if you can't get it here that soon, yesterday will do."

Buckhead Station
    E ichord was reading one thing, hearing another, thinking about yet another. No. That's not quite right. He was hearing one thing, reading another thing, and thinking about two different things—two things, that is to say, that were different than the things he was hearing and more or less reading.
    “In circuit court,” he heard Marv Peletier say. “Yeah. He's a complete and total anus.” As he heard the word “anus,” he READ the word “Venus.” Weird.
    “VENUS WITH THE NAKED EYE,” he read. “According to the United States Naval Observatory, Buckhead residents will see the planet Venus appear to kiss the earth's moon today, in a spectacular astronomical show that should take place shortly before sunset.” It was the third or fourth time he had read the sentence.
    “Yeah. He gave him an affidavit for a wiretap—"
    “With a good pair of binoculars, the planet that appears as a mere white speck to the naked eye will take on a crescent shape.” He thought about the boy. Then about a homicide. And he read “expansion of the nascent cosmos” and realized he had no idea what the hell he was reading and closed the paper.
    Dana lumbered by. “Drunk again,” the fat detective mumbled.
    “You know it."
    “Sit there like that staring off into space or jacking off into space nobody will know it's Fill-’ em-up Marlowe, Supercop."
    “Speaking of jacking off into space, did you know that the surface temperature on Venus is 830 degrees Fahrenheit?"
    “Shit. That ain't nothin',” Tuny said, sorting through a pile of papers strewn across the slum area he called a desk, but his mind wandered before he could finish whatever Danaism he'd been about to impart.
    It had been several days since Eichord had seen the old crime file on the Iceman