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Patterns. Nudges. But Jack Eichord was no Sherlock. (Those were the ashes of a Trichinopoli cigar in his cuff, Watson.) Eduction/deduction came in many packages. He was a visceral, gut-instinct, vibes man at heart.
    He knew the overlong frankness of eyeball stares calculated to instill trust, the hesitation in midphrase that sometimes red-flagged deceit, the too-perfect arrangement of “clues,” the patterns of occurrence that signaled a suspicious structuring of events supervenient to a homicide. He listened for dissonance, sniffed for secret blood trails, watched for the dodgy maneuvering of the evasive broken-field runner. What he called the footprints in the cottage cheese.
    “...clothing, and they wanted to know whether I was wearing provocative clothing at the time of,” he heard her say with heavy sarcasm, but what he watched was the way she widened her eyes on the word “provocative.” It was this signal that he would find so typical of Donna Scannapieco's demeanor, the widening of the eyes, the frankness of the sensual animal in her reflected in those dark irises, an unabashedly sexy communication that was so off-putting to him, the continuous statement she made about herself to anyone with whom she had close contact. The truth is that she was one of those victims it is rather difficult to pity.
    “Tell me about the place he kept you in, Donna."
    “I'll never forget that place. It was just a room. About twelve feet wide"—she motioned with her hands—"and about fourteen feet long. The walls looked like maybe cedar, I'm not good at that, but they were covered in pictures and stuff. He had mostly pictures from dirty magazines. Women doing things, you know. And some newspaper clippings."
    “Tell me about the clippings."
    “There was the one about the slain college girl. That was the first one I told you guys about that led to them believing me, I guess. And then I remember the clipping about the boy who had suddenly disappeared, and that was the one where he first started bragging about how he was able to do anything he wanted and get away with it. And that he made hundreds of people disappear all over the Southwest. He'd just drive from city to city and whenever he felt like it he said he'd just kill somebody and put them in the ground or dump them in the river or whatever.” She had begun speaking very rapidly, and as her speech cadence changed, her breathing accelerated, but the focus of the eyes that mirrored the inner direction had never wavered. His initial reaction was, whatever else Donna Scannapieco might be, he thought she was probably telling the truth.
    “Donna, did you ever wonder or even think to ask him why he was telling you about these killings?"
    “He probably figured he'd kill me too when he got tired of me. I mean, what did he have to fear from me? When he still had me chained up I guess he knew there was no way I could get loose."
    “How did you finally get loose exactly?"
    Unlike so many similarly besieged victims she did not seem to grow physically tired from the long interrogation that ran through the lunch hour. Eichord's initial Q-and-A session with Miss Scannapieco had produced the curious effect of making him very weary, but she wasn't tired in the least when they broke for lunch. Two hours and forty-five minutes of relentless probing, taking her over that painful time, making her search the corners of her memory, had left her fresh as a daisy. Her resolve had kept her alert and keen. It was almost as if she'd enjoyed it. Every surfacing fact putting Ukie Hackabee closer to death row. He hoped she'd stay this way. She was one helluva witness.
    But while the questioning hadn't drained her energies, what it had done was start the two of them off on some uneven footing. He could tell by the way she'd begin her answers to some of his questions that she thought Jack Eichord was a real horse's butt, and she was letting him know. Telling him what he could do with his judgmental,