Final Victim

818/555-7693

The Rat knew he could easily get the address for this number, so he ended his conversation with Satan and shut off his equipment. Whoever had done this to him was brilliant, but The Rat now knew he was better. He had back-traced the intruder without her ever knowing. He stood up, his white body glistening in the sauna-like heat. The walls seemed to close in on him. He lumbered up the metal ladder, out onto the deck of the rusting garbage barge. The late-afternoon sun had turned the heavy cloud-strewn Florida sky orange. He didn't see its beauty. A horrifying thought had just struck him: Maybe this intrusion was the beginning of the two-thousand-three-hundred-day journey? Maybe his six years of torture had just started? He knew he could never survive it… but could he stop it? Could he close the door of redemptive cleansing once it had been opened? He didn't know the rules. Shirley had taken all the knowledge with her. He didn't have the answers. How could he find out?

He ran across the weeds and brambles in his bare feet and underwear, not even feeling the thorns. His run was always sort of a gallop… They had teased him about it in grade school. He had looked stupid, slow, and uncoordinated on the playground, galloping as he ran. The sun was almost down when he got home. The pale moon was coming up over the swamp. He could hear the night birds flying low, hitting their wings against the swampy water. Insects keened in the humid darkness. When he got to the house, he ran downstairs and crouched in the corner of the basement, out of breath. He huddled there as the sweat cooled on his body. The Rat was vile and wretched, but his mind was clear.

"The cornered Rat will fight," he said, his voice a harsh whisper. He was already in terrible pain and he knew he couldn't stand the agony of the two thousand and three hundred days of redemptive punishment that Shirley had promised him. He knew he had to attack this clever eavesdropper. If he killed him, maybe it would close the door of his eternal cleansing.

When the screen went dark in Claire's den, it took a moment before the three of them said anything. The first to speak was Malavida: "That is one very sick puppy.

"I told you this remailer was a cesspool!" Karen said in triumph.

"It could just be a couple of white squirrels getting off, trying to horrify each other," Lockwood said, not really believing it. The ungodly nature of the messages rang true.

Karen got up from her seat and started pacing around the room. "You don't believe that and neither do I… All that religious stuff, all that ersatz fire and brimstone, that's Grade A sexual repression. 'The wicked do not suffer punishment in the eternal hell and are not destroyed or annihilated in a special mosaic of cleansing.'… That sure ain't 'Onward Christian Soldiers.' "

Karen Dawson impressed Malavida more and more.

"Listen, guys… this is something. I know it," she said. "The Rat sounds like a serial psychopath. According to him, he's on a two-week degenerating cycle. He said the coveting begins much earlier now, and he has to slow it down by mailing totems."

"What's a totem?" Malavida asked.

"It's a trophy," Lockwood said. "A body part… In this case, it sounds like he sent someone a hand."

"Get the fuck outta here," Malavida said in shock.

"Look, we've gotta go cross-check this through the FBI's VICAP serial crime computer in Washington," Karen said. "He said he killed and mutilated somebody in Atlanta. There's got to be a record of that.

Let's get outta here." She moved to the desk and started to help Malavida unhook the modem from the phone and disconnect the monitor from the PC.

"We gotta get Malavida back to Lompoc," Lockwood reminded her. "I gotta drop him at the Burbank sub-station. I've made arrangements with the L. A. Sheriff to transport him up there tonight."

Malavida had been dreading this moment and now he made his play. "You're making a mistake, Jefe," he said. It was one of the few times he looked straight at Lockwood.

"I'm sure I am, but it happens all the time, so I don't let it bother me."

Malavida finished unhooking the computer and they moved the stuff into the living room, where Claire was standing with Heather.

"This guy constructed an invisible chat channel on the Internet," Malavida continued. "You know how hard that is to do? Forget for a moment that he's going around killing people. This guy is a real ace computer hacker. Nobody but me would have ever found that room, let alone gotten in there. He may even know we cracked in." That thought had been bothering Malavida. In his haste, he had not bothered to mask their location. "If he does know we were lurking, he'll be even tougher to find. If you ever want to catch him, you're gonna need me. Nobody else could do it. Certainly not that bunch of middle-lane road dogs you got working for you in Customs. I'll shoot this puke down… You got the Snoopy double-your-money-back guarantee."

"That's great, but I still have to get you back to the Federal pen or take a pile of heat, and I still have to catch the six o'clock flight out of Burbank to make my Internal Affairs hearing Monday morning."

"Take me with you, Karen," Malavida said, his eyes turning soft as a puppy in the pound. "I can help you. Honest, I can. What good am I gonna do you in prn? You'll be wasting a generic resource."

"Wasting a generic resource?" Lockwood said, amazed.

Then Karen nodded her head. "You should've seen him. He went through that computer's security like he had Nintendo magic mushrooms. I can't do what he can. Our only other choice is to just walk away from this, and I think this Wind Minstrel guy, or Rat or whoever he is, is white-hot. He's degenerating. If he's for real, he could kill again in two weeks or less."

"Okay," Lockwood said after almost no thought. "I'm probably gonna get benched by IA tomorrow anyway. I might as well go ahead and clobber my pension while I'm at it."

They loaded the stuff in the trunk of the LeBaron, and Lockwood went back to say good-bye to Heather. Claire was standing by the door with her hands on her hips and watched while he hugged and kissed his daughter. Then he faced Claire. She was so beautiful he was momentarily stopped. The afternoon light played on her face and made his heart ache… How could he have let this divorce happen? He could find no words, so he walked back across the street, but she dogged him. When he turned and faced her, he was looking into ice-cold Nordic blue eyes.

"Thanks for bringing a convict over to meet our daughter, John."

"Claire, he's just a computer hacker. He wouldn't hurt anybody."

"One of these days, you're gonna get a sobering experience. I just hope it grows you up before somebody else gets hurt." Then she turned and walked back across the street and into the house. She never looked back.