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physical thing you got goin’ with the seventeen he's left aboveground. No muscle here in the package. No heavyweight stuff at all. When did he move from bein’ a dude in a trench coat in the back row of the Sperm Theater and start getting a taste for the heavy stuff?"
    “Point is, you're here to help us find out. What is the obvious possibility? If Ukie Hackabee is for real. If all this time when he was dangling his dipstick at the gals in the supermarket, he was also getting into bigger and bloodier games, and if there's a trail of dead bodies like we're afraid we may find on this one, well...” Michaels trailed off and it was suddenly unnaturally silent in the closed vehicle. And in that moment of absolute quiet the airport man slammed the trunk shut and it sounded like a cannon going off.
    Eichord damn near jumped out of his skin. “Jeezus,” he muttered, shuddering involuntarily, feeling his heart thumping, as Wally Michaels turned the key in the ignition and they drove out into the wake of the Texas traffic, Eichord still shocked by the sudden noise, discomposed from the flight, turbid from the airplane liquor, and neutered by the obvious inconsistencies of the Dallas grave-digger.

Dallas
    M iss Scannapieco was a letdown. If Eichord had been expecting a brassy blond bombshell oozing raw sexuality and flirting with every male in sight, he got a big surprise. Physically, at least, there was nothing out of the ordinary about her appearance or her actions. She appeared to be a rather average-looking, moderately attractive, somewhat hard-looking woman in her early thirties. She had come in the next morning around ten o'clock and Eichord's first look at Ukie Hackabee's only living victim was through the one-way observation glass of Room 601. She was talking with a detective from the intelligence squad named Duncan, and he popped the speaker sound off, watched her a bit longer, and seeing nothing instructive, went in and introductions were made.
    “I guess you're getting pretty tired of talking about this by now,” he said to her with a smile.
    “I'll talk about it all night if it will help nail the dirty bastard. Whatever it takes.” There was something about her, sitting across from her at a table, that didn't communicate itself through the looking glass on the wall. You couldn't even see it coming in the room. Only when she turned those eyes on you did the frankness of her open sexuality hit you. Immediately, no further dialogue between them being necessary, they each read the other like an open book, and both of them looked away, neither of them liking what they saw.
    “Well,” Eichord stalled, “how about starting at the beginning for me and tell me about it one more time. You were in the parking lot..."
    “I'd just pulled in to go to the mall,” she said without hesitation, “and this man comes up to the car and I had just tapped the car in back of me very, very gently on the bumper when I parked and I didn't know who he was I just assumed maybe he was going to be saying something about me hitting the car, like he was going to, you know, claim I knocked a dent in his bumper, which I know I didn't because I barely touched the car, and he goes, ‘If you'll look in my hand you'll see I'm holding a pistol and ... ‘"
    As she talked, Eichord's mind wandered and he listened to the word patterns as much as he did the words. Listening for the subtle changes in the rhythms as he always did. Listening for the gray areas that lay hidden in between the blacks and whites of fact, opinion, conjecture. Trying to piece together an after-the-fact reality from as many sources as would offer input.
    Eichord was a by-the-book detective when he had to be. And nobody could touch him when it was time to cogitate, seriate, extrapolate, and excavate the buried chunks of seemingly irrelevant and disconnected datums. They came from nowhere. Apparently meaningless nuances. Trivia. Minutiae. Nonfacts. Suggestions. Rhythms.