Final Victim

Chapter 13

At seven o'clock Sunday evening, the blue-and-white Citation jet climbed out of a dingy brown smogbank that was choking L. A. and headed east across the San Gabriel Mountains.

Before it was seized by the U. S. Customs, the plane had belonged to a Colombian drug dealer who had outfitted it with a TV, videos, and electronic games. Malavida had found some Nintendo software and hooked it up. He had his feet up on the couch, halfheartedly playing Donkey Kong, gonzoing dinosaurs and collecting massive bunches of electronic bananas, while Karen began to construct a criminal profile of the man they had found on Pennet. She took out a yellow legal pad. Under "The Rat," she wrote: "a. K. A. 'Wind Minstrel'-male, probably Caucasian. Twenty-five to thirty-five, organized, compulsive, bad self-image… nocturnal?"

Across the aisle, Lockwood was on the Airfone trying to hose down an angry Harvey Knox.

"Look, Harvey, I know what you're saying and, believe me, if I could have gotten him back there by Sunday night, I would have. But this thing just started growing on me. I can't let him go back for a couple more days. You gotta call the prn for me, give 'em the big okey-dokey from DOJ."

"John, you kill me. I told you this was in the margin to begin with." Harvey's voice squeaked over the Airfone.

"Yeah, I know, but he's in custody, cuffed to a bed. Wanna talk to him?" He didn't wait for an answer. He put his hand over the receiver. "Hey, Malavida, pause that thing. This is Mr. Harvey Knox… He's your stay-out-of-jail card, so be nice. The answer to any question he asks is: 'Mr. Lockwood told me I can't say anything about that.' "

Malavida paused the Donkey Kong and moved back and took the phone. "This is Malavida Chacone. It's a pleasure to talk to you, Mr. Knox," he said in perfect, unaccented English.

"Where are you guys? You in Lompoc?" Harvey asked.

"Well, sir, Mr. Lockwood said I can't say anything about that." He looked over at Lockwood who raised his eyebrow and nodded approval. "But, sir… I'm being very well guarded, and I promise there will be no problem, and I think I'm really helping the U. S. Prosecutor with this case."

"Who's prosecuting? Who you working with?"

"Mr. Lockwood said I can't say anything about that." Chacone repeated the sentence again as Lockwood smiled, put his feet up on the facing chair, and picked up a newspaper.

"Mr. Chacone, would you be kind enough to put that son-of-abitch Lockwood back on?"

"Yes, sir. And it was a pleasure making your acquaintance."

Malavida handed the phone to Lockwood and went back to Donkey Kong.

It took Lockwood another five minutes to strike the right note with Harvey, who reluctantly agreed to make the call to the prn. The phone connection started to get weak as they passed out of California.

"Where're you calling from? This line sounds funny. You in the air? You're in the air, aren't you, you son-of-a-bitch!"

"I'm on a scrambled line at a protected location, Harvey. You know better than to ask me where I'm interviewing a Federal witness in the protection program. I'm surprised at you. I gotta run. Make that call or we're both toast." And he was off the phone as the static started to sound like bacon frying at a Boy Scout cookout.

Lockwood knew that the small Citation jet didn't have the fuel capacity to fly all the way back to Washington. They would have to make a gas stop somewhere along the way. He felt the plane make a banking turn and glanced up at the "air show" in the cabin that depicted their location. According to the electronic video map, they had just passed over the California/Arizona border. "I'd like to get him to set down in Atlanta…" Lockwood said to Karen, who was still scribbling notes followed by question marks on her yellow pad. "If The Rat killed a girl in Atlanta, it'd be nice to talk to the homicide dicks… maybe take a look at the crime scene."

"Atlanta is a little out of the way, isn't it?"

"Not really," he said earnestly. "Instead of taking the boring, obvious route over Missouri and Kentucky, we'll take the more cultural southern route through the glorious picturesque Panhandle." He realized, as he looked at the video map, that this route would add hundreds of miles to the Journey.

"Red will never go for it," Karen said. "We kept him waiting in Burbank as it was."

Lockwood took a deep breath and lunged out of his chair. "We'll never know if I don't try," he said as he moved up to see his old buddy.

In the cockpit, Lockwood settled into the seat beside Red and looked out the windshield at the clear night and the twinkling lights below. "You ever had Georgia crayfish in Cajun gumbo?" he said, knowing Red's weakness for food. "They've got the best Cajun food in the entire South in downtown Atlanta… Joint's called Little Beau-regard's. It's even better than New Orleans Cajun."

"I'm not refueling in Atlanta, John. 'Sides, there's a weather front down there." That was where they started. It took Lockwood almost forty minutes, and the Dallas games off his Redskins season tickets, to talk Red into the course correction.

They made their approach to DeKalb Peachtree Airport in Atlanta at two A. M., Monday morning. A thunderstorm was throwing big chunks of lightning around in thick, ominous cumulonimbus clouds. They got bounced around badly on the approach, before Red finally got the wheels down and rolled out on the rain-washed tarmac. He taxied to a stop in front of the Executive Air Terminal. Red got out and ran through the downpour to the private executive lounge to try to find the gas truck driver.

Lockwood, Karen, and Malavida stood in the jet's door for a moment and watched the pelting rain. Lockwood had put the cuffs back on Malavida. They turned up their collars and made a run for it through the wet night into the terminal.

Ten minutes later a taxi arrived, and they promised Red they'd be back in three hours. He had decided to sleep on the sofa in the terminal till they returned. He told them if they didn't get back by six A. M., he was taking off without them.

The Atlanta Police Department was housed in a huge building on Ponce de Leon Drive. It was extremely busy at three A. M. There were more cops standing around than Lockwood guessed would be normal for the graveyard shift. He'd been in enough cop shops over the years to spot an angry vibe. The blues stood in clusters, wearing crisp uniforms and slack expressions. Lockwood knew something must have just happened. They found the Chief of Detectives for the watch. He was a rumpled twenty-year veteran named Bryce Oakland. Sometime during his twenty, he'd taken a knife or a bullet in his vocal cords. The scar ran down his neck, into his day-old white shirt collar. When he spoke, his voice sounded like sandpaper on steel. His unpleasant attitude said he didn't have much time for them as he settled into his squeaking wooden swivel chair in the command cubicle. Glass walls looked in both directions at the littered homicide squad room. He glared at them over a walnut desk that had been scarred by the rings of insolent killers… FUCK You appeared in three languages.

"This is Karen Dawson," Lockwood began. "She's a U. S. Customs psychologist and criminal profiler. And this is Mr. Chacone. He's a Federal informant."

"Looks like a Federal convict to me," Bryce Oakland said as he glanced at the handcuffs.

"Just think of those as funky New Wave jewelry."

"You're a funny guy, Agent Lockwood, but I'm having a horrible night. I had a patrolman pull over a hot roller 'bout two hours ago. One a'them boys in the stolen car opened up on my man, who's in Atlanta General breathing through a tube and, according to the docs, ain't never gonna wake up. Right now, half my department is up outta bed. They got their noses wide and their shotguns cocked. If they find those hucklebucks, I'm gonna have a hollow-point street dance on my hands, but in my spare time, what can I do to serve my Federal government?"

Karen leaned forward. "Hey, Captain Oakland, we didn't come here to get in your way. We're working a degenerating, homicidal-sexual psychopath, and we think our perp may have killed here. Maybe he even lives here. Now, if that's too much trouble for you, could you please turn us over to somebody who can give up a few minutes without pissing all over us?"

Lockwood was taken aback by Karen's approach. He'd never seen her like this. Then she softened slightly. "I'm sorry about your patrolman," she added and reached into her purse, took out some bills, and put them on his desk. "I'm sure there's a fund that's been started for the patrolman's family. There's fifty you can add to it. But a killing is a killing, and it shouldn't be more important because the victim's a police officer."

Bryce Oakland leaned back. The chair squeaked in the suddenly too-quiet room. Finally, he nodded his head. "Point taken. Go on."

"Did you have a killing here, a murder of a woman, probably happened a few days ago…?" Lockwood asked.

"This is a big ol' place I'm policing. I got a population a'five million. I got twenty-five hundred square miles. I got hooker murders every night or so in them skin shops down on the Chattahoochee River. Maybe you could be a little more specific."

"This one you wouldn't miss," Karen said. "It was probably a hard kill with peri-mortem mutilation… The UnSub probably also had peri-mortem sexual paraphernalia."

"*** the fuck you talkin' about?" he rasped. "Speak English. The what?"

"UnSub," Lockwood said. "It stands for unknown subject. We use that term to avoid saying 'him' and subconsciously attaching a gender specification."

"The body was sexually attacked, ferociously… probably mutilated at the time of death," she added, finishing the translation.

"That sounds like that Financial District killing. Happened Saturday morning, woman in her thirties. Perp killed her, hacked her arms off. Name was Candice Wilcox."

"Can we see the homicide folder?" Lockwood asked as Bryce leaned forward, put his meaty arms on the desk, and glared at them.

"We'd also like to go see where it happened, if that can be arranged," Lockwood said, pushing his luck.

"Okay, I'll give you a couple'a them trigger-happy troopers out there. Anything to keep 'em from sitting around, rubbin' Hoppe's Number Nine on their sidearms. The detective on that case is off duty. I'll have to call and wake the poor bastard and ask him if he don't mind if ya see his notes."

"If it's not too much trouble," Lockwood said, as Bryce got up and moved out of the cubicle. When he was gone, Lockwood turned to Karen. "You don't pull any punches, do you?"

"Just a little psychology. He was angry about his police officer. That cop means a lot to him, so he put him first, our dead woman second. I caught him leaning the wrong way, and to make up for it, he's now overcompensating."

Lockwood nodded. He had been worried about getting cooperation when they first walked in and felt the intensity in the place. Karen had quickly turned that to their advantage.

The two police officers who drove them to the Atlanta Financial District were both lost in thoughts of their fallen comrade. When they arrived, there was a young man with curly hair and a thick moustache waiting for them at the door of a ten-story building named Hoyt Tower. He was holding a case file and looked about twenty-five. He introduced himself as Detective Bill Stiner and said he was the primary on the Wilcox homicide. The rain had stopped, but thunder and sheet lightning still rumbled on the Atlanta horizon like Sherman's artillery. The security guard let them into the lobby and they went up to the fourth floor to the offices of Cavanaugh and Cunningham. The crime scene had been totally destroyed since the murder. The floors had been scrubbed of Candice's blood, but tomorrow, Lockwood suspected, the people who worked here would come to work and subconsciously walk around the offending spot where her body had been found.

Lockwood and Karen both read the crime scene and lab reports. Then they looked at the victim's desk and watched while Stiner showed them the location where the body had been found. Lockwood opened Stiner's folder and laid out several gruesome crime scene photographs. Malavida flinched, then moved over to the windows and stood there with his back to them, rattling his handcuffs. Lockwood studied the photographs-the clean surgical cuts, the identical incisions on both shoulders. The killer had placed Candice Wilcox's sweater over her face. The scissors from her desk set had been shoved into her vagina. The UnSub had branded her on the left breast. Lockwood studied the brand: