Final Victim

Chapter 24

After the deafening sound of the explosion, the swamp went dead silent. Thousands of keening insects paused to listen as pieces of Leonard Land's house rained down on the wet ground or splashed into the swamp water hundreds of yards from where the house had been.

Lockwood was already back up and moving before the last pieces hit the ground. He could see Karen and Malavida not far away and he ran toward them. A huge piece of tin roof fell not three feet from him and stuck, edge down, into the wet ground, quivering like a thrown knife. The air was pungent with the smell of dust and cordite. By the time he got to them he could see that Malavida Chacone was critically, if not fatally, injured. He was bleeding from half a dozen serious wounds, but the thing that worried Lockwood most was the weirdly unnatural position of his broken body. Wide-eyed, Karen was staring down at Malavida when Lockwood arrived. Her eyes had the glassy look of desperation. "Oh, my God… I think he's dead," she said, her voice eerie as it pierced the unnatural silence.

"Go see if that truck over there has a key in it," he commanded. "If not, check under the bumpers for a hide-a-key box." He knew he could hot-wire it if necessary, but he wanted to get her in motion. If there was a chance to save Malavida, he'd need her help.

"We can't move him," she said, her voice shrill. "He could have spinal injuries… He could have internal bleeding. It could kill him."

"He's gonna be dead if we don't." He took a breath and talked to her in a calm voice. "There's nothing here we can use to help him. He's gonna pump himself dry if we don't move him. Do what I said. The truck will get us to a hospital faster than that boat. We move him or lose him."

She hesitated for a moment and then got up off her hands and knees and ran, stumbling toward the vehicle that was parked in the yard. The pickup was sprinkled with dirt and small chunks of the house. She opened the door and looked in at the ignition. There were no keys. Then, as Lockwood had instructed, she climbed under the bumper. Sliding on her back she felt around, looking for a hide-a-key box… and under the back bumper, she found one. Karen squirmed out with the box in hand, removed the ignition key, and started the engine.

Lockwood pulled Malavida's light windbreaker off to get a better look at his wounds. He was having trouble finding Malavida's pulse. He put his fingers on the carotid artery in his neck but could feel nothing. Lockwood's hands were shaking so he couldn't be absolutely sure.

He put his ear to Malavida's chest. He thought he could hear a heartbeat, faint and thready. Then he felt light, raspy breathing on the side of his face. He looked up as Karen pulled the old pickup in beside them. "Be tough," he said softly to Malavida. Then he scooped his arms under the Chicano cracker and, using all of his strength, he struggled to his knees, then finally stood and moved on unsteady legs to the truck. He knew that if there was a serious spinal injury he could be dooming Malavida to a life of paralysis, but he had done a few field triages at accident scenes, both in the Marines and early in his government career when he was in uniform and working Customs sheds at the border. He had pried people off their steering columns and out from under dashboards. He knew that Chacone was in the red zone where survival odds were meaningless. His will to live was the only cord that held him.

As Lockwood lifted him onto the truck bed, he heard something in Malavida's body snap. Lockwood cursed under his breath, then jumped in and pulled Malavida by his shoulders toward the front so his feet were clear. Then he scrambled back and pulled up the tailgate. He saw Karen staring back through the window of the cab, a bloodless look on her face. He grabbed a broken brick which had fallen into the bed of the truck. "Watch out," he yelled. "Turn around and cover your eyes."

She did, and he slammed the brick into the rear glass window of the cab. It shattered, spilling shards onto the seat, but clearing the opening so he could talk to her.

"Let's go. Get moving. I'll stay back here with him."

"How're we gonna find Tampa? That road could lead anywhere."

"I don't know," he said. "Let's go, we'll do the best we can."

Karen Dawson had driven in two NASCAR. stock car races. She was a natural hot shoe with a God-given gift for driving. She slammed her foot down. Mud shot into the air. The truck leaped toward the shell road at the low end of the yard. By the time she got to it she was totally focused, her hands on the wheel at ten past ten. Her vision was searching the road just beyond the headlights, where she could occasionally see the startled eyes of swamp creatures reflected in the yellow light, just before they scurried away to escape the churning tires.

In the back of the truck, Lockwood hung on desperately, trying to support Malavida while they jounced along the uneven road. He managed to remove his jacket and put it under Malavida's head.

They had traveled half a mile when Karen hit the first deep and unavoidable pothole. In the back of the truck, Malavida and Lockwood bounced hard. When he landed, Malavida groaned, opened his eyes, and looked up at Lockwood. He said nothing, but his dark eyes pleaded. Lockwood reached over, found his hand, and grasped it. Malavida held on to it in desperation as the truck rattled and banged down the rain-rutted road.

Karen knew she had to keep the truck from bouncing. A short distance in front of her, the headlights were swallowed by the swamp's hollow darkness. She was trying to spot the potholes in the shell road before she hit them, maneuvering and down-shifting to get around them without losing time. After ten minutes, she came to the first fork in the road. She wasn't sure where she was or even what direction she was heading. She slowed and stopped. "Go right," Lockwood said. But Karen ignored him and jumped out of the cab to look up at the stars. "What're you doing?" he yelled as she scanned the starlit horizon. It was a clear night, and the starscape glittered like pinholes shot through black velvet.

"Goddamn it, he's dying! Let's go, whatta you doing?" Lockwood shouted.

"Looking for the Orion constellation."

"Get the fuck out of here," he said, amazed. "This isn't a Girl Scout camping trip. Get in! Go right!"

Karen spun on him and glowered. "You heard that guy back at the dock. These shell roads could go anywhere. This one's been wandering right and left. I don't even know which way I'm going. I want to go west, that's where Tampa is. Orion is at nearly zero declination. It rises to the southeast. The coordinates on the celestial sphere are analogous to latitude and longitude on the earth." He was looking at her with flat-faced wonder, but she missed the expression because she was again looking up at the sky. "I'll find it for you, and you keep pointing me in the right direction. I won't be able to see it from the cab, it'll be too high overhead." Then she pointed up in the sky. "Okay, see that line of stars? Right there," she continued, "those three little stars? They're called Orion's Belt. The nebula is below them. The kinda reddish one, not as bright, it's called the Jewel of the Sword. You see it?"

He looked up at the sky, trying to find the stars she was pointing at, feeling utterly ridiculous.

"I… I'm not…"

"Find the North Star. It's at the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. You know that one? Go forty-five degrees right and across, the first one you come to."

"Okay… yeah, I guess…"

"That's the Jewel. It's due west. Keep pointing me that way." She jumped back into the cab and turned left on the shell road, heading in the general direction of the nebula.

"Celestial navigation," Lockwood muttered under his breath. "Gimme a fucking break."

Each time they came to a fork in the road, he looked for the constellation, tried to spot the tiny star in Orion's Sword, and then yelled to her which way to go. At least, he finally admitted to himself, it was giving them a consistent course. He hoped they didn't end up in the middle of a Florida swamp. Fifteen minutes later, they hit a paved road with a sign that said TAMPA.

Karen found Interstate 75 and headed north. The first hospital sign they saw was for the University Community Hospital, on South Hillsborough Road.

Karen pulled the truck up to the emergency entrance and Lockwood leapt out of the back. He banged through the double doors and grabbed a trauma nurse in the ER. "I've got a Code Blue out here!" he said, pulling the startled woman toward the truck.

Lockwood and two ER nurses loaded Malavida onto a gurney. There was a moment before they wheeled him inside when Lockwood was looking down at the badly wounded Chicano… then Malavida opened his eyes. "It's on you now, Hoss," Lockwood said softly. "We got you here, now paddle. Catch a ride, we'll be on the beach waiting." Karen moved up and looked down at Malavida. Their eyes held each other. She was still looking at him when they wheeled Malavida inside.

Karen had removed the vehicle registration from the glove compartment. She handed it to Lockwood and he pulled the registration slip out of its yellow, faded plastic holder.

"Leonard Land, Twenty-two Hundred Little Manatee Road, near Tampa," he read. "This guy is going down," he promised softly.

Tampa Detective Grady Raynor had a complexion like lunar lava. His pockmarked face and close-set, steel-gray eyes accurately forecast a cold, uneven personality. He entered the hospital cafeteria with Dr. Susan McCaffrey from the trauma ward. She pointed out Karen Dawson and John Lockwood to him. They were just throwing away coffee cups and moving toward the door. Grady blocked their exit and held up his badge in its leather case.

"Grady Raynor, detective, Tampa Major Crimes. You brought in the Mexican kid who got caught in the explosion?"

"He's not a kid," Karen said.

Lockwood caught her protective tone, but went on, "We called you an hour and a half ago… where you been?"

"You ain't the only clambake on the beach, Buckwheat. Let's go somewhere a little more private."

He led them out into the corridor… Dr. McCaffrey took them down to the Doctors' Lounge and opened the door, but remained outside as they entered.

"Okay, let's have a little ID, folks," Raynor said as soon as they were in the colorless lounge. Karen pulled out her Customs ID and handed it to him.

"Doctor of Criminal Profiling, U. S. Customs. What's that mean, exactly?" he said, his gray eyes crawling over her like sewer bugs.

"What it means, Detective, is I do criminal profiles for U. S. Customs… just like it says."

"And you, Mr. Lockwood… whatta you do?"

"I'm the food critic for the Tampa News."

"This kid you brought in is critical. Somebody blew him open like a can a'corn. Now, you can stand there and crack wise with me, or you can come to the dance. I don't fuckin' care. Get cute and I'm gonna hang you by your thumbs until you start makin' kissin' sounds. Now this kid has prn art on him. He's done time in somebody's brickhouse. So either I print all a you an' waste a few hours of everybody's time, or you* can bring me up to date now, an' save us all a lotta grief an' pain."

"His name is Carlos `Malavida' Chacone. He's a Federal convict who was released from Lompoc prn to work a case," Lockwood said. "Yeah? How does that work?"

"I'm a SAC with U. S. Customs, retired. It's my case. He was released to my custody."

"Retired? You got a badge? Got any prn paperwork on this kid?" "Left it in the boat out in the swamp."

"You wanna show me where that is?"

Lockwood had seen his share of Grady Raynors. They muscled their way through police work, passing out negative attitude like Halloween candy. They were dick-measurers. Police power was their job perk. Lockwood wanted to go back out to the house in the swamp alone and set up his own crime scene investigation, maybe call in a few Miami lab techs he was friendly with to see what they could pull out of the ashes. The truck might still have trace evidence, but he knew they'd contaminated it by using it to bring Malavida here. The main target, however, was the rusting barge: It was the heart of his investigation. He wanted to do a vacuum-bag and forensic sweep of the inside. He had a hunch that locked freezer wasn't going to be full of TV dinners. The computers in the rusting barge needed to be downloaded. If he got lucky, the whole case could be in there.

Lockwood also knew that he was running out of time. Detective Raynor was two phone calls away from finding out that Malavida was an escaped fugitive with a fresh arrest warrant, and that Lockwood was suspended and working off his badge on a homicide he'd been directly ordered to stay away from. Once Customs was alerted, he'd be swept up like broken glass and that would be it. He didn't want a bunch of local smokies wandering through his crime scene, tracking mud and dropping cigarette butts, but he didn't seem to have much choice. His best bet was to try to co-opt the dial-tone standing in front of him… try to control the investigative fallout as best he could.

"Okay, Detective, I think we should go out there together. I think we should also take a crime team with us."

"Yeah? Why is that?"

"That house was rigged to explode by a man we think might be a serial killer… a man who's committed at least three murders we know of and probably more. His name is Leonard Land. I ran him ten minutes ago and came up with nothing, but he lives in the wetlands off the Little Manatee River. There's a garbage barge out there that needs to be gone through by Forensics. There's a freezer in the barge that is locked. I'd like to get a warrant to open it."

"You got a lotta stuff you want. Why don't we just go out there and look 'fore we rile up the whole department?"

"This could be a national murder case and you could be standing on page one with it."

"Would that be page one of the Food Section?" He smirked.

It took them almost an hour to get back out to the house. Karen was in the back of Detective Raynor's car while Lockwood sat up front giving directions.

Raynor got a radio call from Tampa communications. They all listened in stony silence as the dispatcher informed them that Malavida had been medevacked by helicopter to a hospital in Miami where they had a state-of-the-art trauma surgery unit.

They pulled back into the clearing a little past midnight. The headlights illuminated the spot where the blue house had once been. Now all that was left was the foundation and the railingless front porch. Smoke still curled up from hot spots in the rubble-filled basement.

Lockwood got out of the sedan and looked toward the house. Malavida's jacket was gone.

"He's been back here," he said softly. Then he took off, running in the direction of the barge. Karen jumped out and ran after him. They pushed through the brambles at the foot of the property with Raynor a good distance behind.

"Where the hell you goin?" he shouted. "Come back here!" But they moved on. The weeds and thorns tore at them, but Lockwood was moving more carefully than last time, and used his hands to keep the sticker bushes away from both of them.

They finally got to the dock where the huge barge had been tied, but the barge was nowhere in sight. The chains and ropes hung loosely from the pilings, dangling into the water. The ramp that had once led to the high double doors amidships was floating upside down in the brackish water.

Karen was breathing heavily beside him. "He came back and got it," she finally said. "I didn't think it was floating… I thought it was parked on the bottom."

Lockwood nodded but said nothing. He had his hand in his pocket, rubbing the plastic-covered truck registration. His thumb went back and forth over the plastic cover like a scanner looking for clues, as if there was still something more it could tell him.

He thought of Claire, now in her grave. He had missed her funeral in his rush to seek vengeance for her death. He thought of Malavida, fighting for his life in one hospital, Heather in another three thousand miles away. So much human wreckage caused to fulfill one man's twisted fantasy. Never had Lockwood dreamed an investigation could enter his life and cause such darkness. He had told Heather he would catch this monster. But, even with that thought still in his head, the promise felt empty. He could never restore things to the way they were. He remembered a time long ago when he had been just nine or ten years old, and Father McKnight at Materwood Home for Boys had caught him stealing food from the kitchen. "Xou can't unring a bell, John," the old priest had lectured him. "Once something's done, it's part of your history, and it becomes a burden you must always carry with you." Lockwood stood on the wharf and looked at the spot where the barge had once been. He wondered if he was strong enough to carry this burden.