Final Victim

Chapter 23

They spread the map out in the motel room, which suddenly seemed too small and too hot for the three of them. Lockwood was good at reading unspoken language between people, and he could see that there had been a shift in the dynamic between Karen and Malavida. She occasionally looked at the young Chicano with something other than clinical interest. She wrote down a lot of what he said and rushed to help him with small tasks. Malavida seemed to smile with his eyes when he talked to her.

Lockwood hated himself. It was just days after Claire's murder and he shouldn't give a damn about what happened between them, but he couldn't help it. He did. Not that he had a romantic interest in Karen Dawson… Maybe under different circumstances he could have, but under these, it was impossible. Nonetheless, he didn't want to see her with Malavida Chacone. This was made doubly difficult by the fact that he had to relinquish control of this part of the operation to a long-haired Chicano convict. Lockwood was lost in his cybernetic world. Malavida had written down all the information about the radio wave emanations he could dig out from the owner's manuals. He felt The Rat might have the latest and greatest TI and Toshiba Pentium notebooks, plus large-format monitors from Hitachi, Sony, or NEC. Malavida was packing his two radio receivers into a suitcase while Lockwood was studying a map of the Little Manatee River that he had picked up from the Tampa Tourist Bureau.

"This place is crisscrossed with shell roads. Some may have been washed out by summer rains, some might have been taken by high tides. The whole area is marshy and unstable," he said.

Karen moved over to look at the map.

"We've gotta split up," Malavida said. "Karen and I will take a boat. You take the car. Try to get in there close enough to receive his computer transmission. It should be detectable from a mile or so; then we'll see if we can walk each other in."

Lockwood noted that "Miss Dawson" had now become "Karen," but decided to wait until they were alone before saying anything to Malavida.

"We need walkie-talkies," Lockwood said, looking at Karen. "You'll have to go. My Customs credit cards are stopped. Find a radio store, get the Sony 1600s with extra battery packs and charging units."

Something told Karen not to leave them alone.

"We'll be okay." Malavida grinned. "If he gets bored, he can just pat me down again."

"I'll be right back," she finally said and reluctantly left the room. Lockwood waited till the sound of her footsteps disappeared; then he turned to Malavida, who was still packing the suitcase.

"Let's me and you get something straight…"

"What's that, Zanzo?" His back was to Lockwood.

"You wanna help. Okay, I'm gonna take you up on it 'cause, frankly, I'm outta options. You want a running head start when this is over… Okay, I hate it, but that's the price of the ticket. But you better stop giving Karen back rubs. She needs a massage, I'll find a tall Swedish guy."

Malavida stopped packing and Lockwood continued: "She's in over her head. She hasn't got a clue what she's signed on for. You an' me, we've spent time around sprung motherfuckers like The Rat, but this is just a field trip for her. He could kill her without raising his heartbeat. She needs all her senses focused on the game."

Malavida turned now, and Lockwood saw he was smiling. "Something I said was funny?"

"You fuckin' amaze me, John. You left your badge upside down in a bucket of shit, so let's you an' me get something straight. I don't have to listen to your bullshit. I'm a wanted man, but you're harboring a fugitive. You're also fucked up and operating illegally. The reason I'm doing this isn't so I can bump Karen Dawson. I'm doing it 'cause I wanna make up for getting your ex-wife killed. You, I could give less of a shit about. You got some limited law enforcement skills and they might come in handy, but dating advice you can stick up your ass. Back off or I'm shutting my end down, and without me, you won't get him."

They stood glowering at one another. The silence grew heavier in the room, but neither had anything else to say. Lockwood hadn't slept in more than twenty-four hours and his eyes were grainy. He moved to the window and looked out at the Florida interstate.

"How's your little girl?" Malavida asked, his tone softer. "She wants her mommy. So do I…"

"We'll get this guy. Let's just not forget what's going down between us. Things have changed."

Lockwood realized he was right. He looked at the young Chicano and believed he had come down here for the right reasons.

"Are you strapped?" Malavida broke through his thoughts.

"No, they took my gun in D. C. I need to pick something up. I've got a friend down here, Ray Gonzales. He's in Jackson Memorial Hospital with a leaky kidney, but I think he's got family in St. Pete. I'll make a call, see if I can line something up."

"Get one for me."

Lockwood smiled. "That's just what this caper needs… another unlicensed shooter."

Lockwood got in touch with Ray Gonzales in the renal ward at Jackson Memorial in Miami. Ray told him that his nephew would deliver something. Lockwood gave him a list of favorite handguns, starting with a nine-millimeter Beretta and working down to an S amp;W Chief with a two-inch barrel. It was the same piece Customs had issued to him, and although he'd never been able to hit anything with it, at least the short muzzle didn't poke him when he sat.

"How you feeling, Ray?" Lockwood asked his friend at the end of the call.

"I'm hoping I can get out of here in a month. Then I gotta take it easy for a while. I only got one kidney now, and it ain't looking so hot."

"That means you're gonna have to stop drinking all that cheap Cuban rum, amigo."

"I'd rather float face-down in the bay." Gonzales's voice grinned at him over the line.

Ray's nephew, Enrique, showed up in the motel parking lot two hours later. He turned out to be a sixteen-year-old hardcase with a bad complexion and a surly attitude. He handed Lockwood a box wrapped in brown paper.

"Ray, he say you some big-time coco-cop. You the one gonzoed all them meltdowns at Miami Airport, shoot up the place, go crazy, fucking cowboys an' Indians. Mi do works with cops, whatta fuckin' nut."

"Your uncle's diamond-hard. He's a man. You should try and be like him," Lockwood volunteered lamely.

"You think?" the boy said sullenly. "I think he's a buster." Then he moved off, bobbing his head slightly, his long black hair bouncing. He got into a primer-patched car with two other Cuban boys and they roared off, leaving a trail of blue exhaust on the asphalt.

Lockwood opened the box in the parking lot. The gun was a twenty-year-old army-issue.45 with a weak clip spring. There was half a box of ammo. Somebody had started cutting dumdum crosses in the soft lead noses of the slugs. "Great," he said to himself in disgust.

He climbed the stairs and reentered the motel room. Karen showed up twenty minutes later with the walkie-talkies. All they needed to do was rent an outboard tomorrow, get into the Little Manatee River, and wait. It was already Friday afternoon. It seemed hard for Lockwood to realize that all of this had happened in less than a week.

That night, Karen was sitting on the bed, looking at Malavida and Lockwood.

"I know you guys are sort of humoring me," she started, "and that the only reason I'm still here is because we have a severe lack of manpower."

Lockwood forced a tight smile; Malavida remained expressionless. She picked up her yellow pad, which now had pages of annotations and profiling information.

"I thought before we go get this guy, we should try to understand a little about him. I already told you I got Leslie Bowers out of the VICAP computer. Using her murder and Candice's and Claire's, I've got a beginning read on this guy, plus a couple of pretty good hunches… Wanna hear 'em?"

Both Lockwood and Malavida nodded.

"Okay. To begin with, aside from being big and ugly, I think The Rat could also be a multiple."

"Multiple personalities? Where'd that come from?" Lockwood asked.

"It's a little oblique, but follow me on this." They both waited. "We have two killings that fit one pattern, and one killing that fits a completely different pattern. All of them, we're reasonably sure, were done by one man. Candice Wilcox and Leslie Bowers were killed by a very sophisticated, very organized, highly intelligent perp. This guy used his computer to set the stage and change the time frame. He used trash bags; he used a blitz attack, taking the first two victims quickly and killing them instantly with one stroke from behind, using a narrow blade which we know, or suspect, is one of his scalpels."

"So?" Lockwood said.

"Pre-, peri-, and post-offense behavior was exact and planned in detail… very obsessive. The UnSub who killed Candice and Leslie is manipulative, compulsive, and dominant. In short, a control freak. Claire's murder, on the other hand, was sloppy: He walked in the back door, neighbors say he left his car parked in plain sight across the street. He probably didn't case the crime scene… He failed on his opening blitz attack, which looks like it happened in the kitchen and ended up with her still alive and fighting in the bedroom. He hacked and slashed at her in a frenzy. It was a mess. Then, to top it off, he got walked in on by Heather. There's no post-mortem mutilation, there's no masturbation, no sexual substitutes."

"That doesn't mean anything," Lockwood said. His heart was skipping beats as they talked about Claire's murder. He was determined not to let his voice or face betray the frightening loss he was feeling. "If Heather walked in, the UnSub wouldn't have time. He killed Claire for lurking in his computer chat room. He was trying to eliminate an eavesdropper… That's why there's no ritual."

"I understand," she said, "and I agree, but the guy who did the first two murders, in my opinion, wouldn't have done the third. The first guy would still have tried to control the scene. He gets nothing for doing a hasty, sloppy job-he put himself at risk."

"So you think he's got two personalities?" Lockwood said slowly.

"Or more," she said. "We know he's on a week or ten-day cycle and he's degenerating. Maybe he's different people at different times in the cycle. When he sees us in the chat room, he's the wrong guy. But he has to move, he's panicked. So he comes out to L. A. and does his thing, but it's not with the same control or preparation… It's spur of the moment, amateurish. Off the cuff and sloppy. But we know the murderer is the same physical being, because he used the same weapon all three times."

"That's pretty farfetched," Malavida said. "What if it's two guys?"

"I don't think so," she said. "My gut tells me this guy's a loner."

"I think she's got something," Lockwood said, giving it careful thought. "I mean, maybe it's not exactly right, but it fits the crime scene information. Psychiatrists always start with a personality and infer behavior, but you can make mistakes that way. The way she's doing it is better. You start with the behavior, what he actually did, and infer personality from his acts."

"Another thing," she said. "He kills quickly. One strike to the chest, attacking from behind; they're dead in seconds. If he's seven feet tall and as big as Heather says, he could easily control his victims. Why the blitz attacks?"

"I give up, why?" Malavida asked.

"I think he's afraid of women-not in a physical sense, but in an emotional one. He's been hurt, possibly terrorized, by a woman as a child. He's afraid of emotional or mental contact. If he was abused by a mother or older female adult when he was young, that could fit in with the split in his personality. He becomes a multiple, splits into a separate new personality, so he doesn't have to deal with the pain of the abuse against him by the adult female."

"Why do we need to know all of this?" Malavida said. "We just go out there and level this bastard."

"Because this is not somebody who will act or react the way you think he will. We have to study The Rat, learn who he is, to be able to anticipate him." She said, "Look, this is my field, I've spent years learning this. It's all in DSM if you wanna plow through it."

"What's DSM?" Malavida asked.

"Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Drders," Lockwood explained. "And I'm listening. As a matter of fact, I'm impressed. You got anything else?"

She looked down at her yellow pad.

"He'll probably drive a dark blue or black van or truck." "Oh, come on," Malavida said.

"He's orderly and compulsive. Orderly and compulsive people like dark cars… ask any car salesman. Repeat killers tend to prefer windowless vans or trucks; it gives them a work space and room for the body if they need to move it. That, by the way, is a computer-generated fact."

Malavida leaned back on the bed and smiled at her as she went on.

"The last thing you need to know is he's got what we call, in the language of mental drders, an assassin's personality. He's a loner, nocturnal, extremely compulsive, and is probably an incessant journal writer. He's probably got books full of his ideas and rantings. If we find them, his handwriting will be cramped and tiny. When cornered he will be ferocious beyond description, vicious beyond belief. He has no empathy for anything. He lives in a world he's created. He's shut out most human contact." She turned the pad over on the bed and looked at them for a moment. "I've got some other things here, but they're still too farfetched to really talk about, till I get more."

"That's a hell of a start, Karen," Lockwood said.

"Here's a problem you can work on." Malavida moved from the bed over to the direction finder on the table. "We can only home in on this guy while he's using his computer… We could be drifting around out in the swamps forever, waiting for him to get hot, which is the only time we can read the electrical leakage from his equipment. I'd sure like to narrow the time frame, or we're gonna be using a hell of a lot of bug repellent."

"I think we should be out there at about the same time we first intercepted him," she finally said. "That will be day after tomorrow, say four-thirty in the afternoon."

"Why?" Lockwood asked.

"There was something about that call that seemed like it was scheduled," she continued.

"What it seemed like to me was a lotta sick, rambling bullshit," Lockwood corrected her.

"Satan in Oslo said, 'You have severed her limbs, which are worthless, lustful appendages. How did it feel? Did you taste her blood this time? It has been a week. How did it feel?' A week. Maybe he's saying it's been a week since they last talked."

Again, Malavida and Lockwood were both impressed by Karen's total recall of Satan's message on the monitor. It was becoming obvious that she had a photographic memory.

Lockwood stretched out on the adjoining bed and laced his fingers behind his neck. "He could have been talking about a week since The Rat's last kill, not since his last call."

"Yeah, I thought of that too. But after The Rat unrolled all that religious gobbledygook about the wicked not suffering punishment in eternal hell, Satan said, 'Enough about this. I've told you each session I can't use your religious rantings.' Each session… A session is generally by appointment. I was wondering, what if these two freaks have a weekly date to talk on the Internet?"

"This guy is in Oslo, Norway. Why wouldn't he just send e-mail to talk to The Rat? Why would it have to be by weekly appointment?" "I think he's in prn," Malavida volunteered.

"He's where?"

"In prn. I did a UNIX 'who is?' on Pennet. I found he was on from the Inselbrook State Penitentiary in Oslo. The number he was calling from is in the law library. They wouldn't tell me who was there last Sunday at midnight."

"If he's got a prearranged time," she said, "we could just show up out in the wetlands when they're chatting on the Net. We'd have a much better chance of catching The Rat if we knew the exact time." Lockwood knew Karen was right. He sat up on the bed.

"How come you didn't come up with this?" Malavida said.

"Cut me some slack. I'm just here with my limited law enforcement skills," Lockwood said, and then suddenly all of them were smiling.

Lockwood slept all day Saturday and into Sunday. He woke up a few times and saw that Karen was watching television while Malavida was working on his equipment. At noon Sunday, he called Heather in the hospital in Hollywood, but was told by the nurse that she was sleeping.

At two P. M. they drove south, toward the Little Manatee River, on Interstate 75. A few miles north of Sun City, they saw a wooden pier with a small shack that advertised boat rentals, and pulled into the gravel parking lot. They went inside the shack and rented a fifteen-foot aluminum boat with two wooden benches and a fuel-stained twenty-horsepower Evinrude outboard. The man who rented it to them was as stringy as alligator bait, with the name "Gilbert" stitched on his greasy shirt. Lockwood asked him about the roads in the wetlands and if there was a map.

"Ain't no road map. Them roads change ever' season. Y'all try an' take that blue LeBaron in there, y'gonna be buyin' it from Mr. Hertz straight off"

The man took forty dollars cash and Karen's driver's license as a deposit, and told them that the Little Manatee River was about a mile farther down the bay. After warning them to stay out of the marshlands, and that if he had to come pull them out it was an extra hundred, he gave them a quick instruction course on how to operate the tired motor, and then he wandered back up the pier to his shack.

They needed to change the plan. Since the roads weren't marked and Lockwood would be at a distinct disadvantage in the car, they decided to go together in the boat.

They loaded in the equipment. Lockwood hit the starter button and the Evinrude coughed to life. Malavida untied them, jumped aboard, and pushed off. Lockwood had little experience with boats and was delighted to find that Karen Dawson came from a family of recreational fishermen; he readily handed over the helm.

A mile down the bay they found the mouth of the Little Manatee and glided into its reeded silence. Karen idled the engine down and they slid along the placid waterway. The dense reeds on both sides lined the channel like slats on a picket fence. It was as if they had moved back in time. The muted colors were washed and cooked pale from the Florida sun. Once they saw a gator slide off the bank and submerge itself in the pale-brown water by the edge of the river. Blue herons sat on dead logs and watched with curious, frightened eyes, their long necks stretched forward like old men in church. Water bugs slithered across the surface, their large, winged bodies making the feat seem impossible. The ever-present keening of insects was overpowering.

Lockwood was trying to keep his senses alert, although the placid scenery had a dulling effect… The marshy wetlands were desolate and beautiful in their peaceful lation. Occasional deciduous trees hung out over the river, gnarled stick figures pointing the way.

At ten past four, Malavida, who was in the bow, held up his hand. "Hold it. Got something." He was looking at a volt-ohm meter attached to the radio receiver. "Turn right," he commanded and Karen swung the boat right. "Hold it, hold it!" he shouted. "Shut off the engine."

She did, and then they were drifting. Lockwood grabbed the paddle in the boat and put it into the water to stop their turn.

"Back to the center," Malavida said, and he waited while Lockwood made the correction.

"See this?" He pointed at the little digital display on the meter attached to the radio receiver. "That's a very weak, fluctuating electrical signal. It's consistent with the kind of TEMPEST output we should get from a new TI or Toshiba notebook. It's coming from that direction…" He pointed at a wall of reeds on the side of the river.

"We're gonna need a dozer to get through there," Lockwood said. "Maybe there's a tributary farther up that heads back around," Karen ventured.

"Okay, let's look," Lockwood said.

She hit the starter and the engine coughed and turned over, running roughly, choking on unused gas and oil. She smoothed it out and they continued on up the river, which was now beginning to snake back and forth as it transected the watery swamp.

Lockwood opened the box and checked the clip on his.45. He had loaded the dumdum bullets in so they would be fired last, just in case the first several shots failed to do the job. The saying in law enforcement is "If you don't get 'em with one, you'll be carried by six." But Lockwood was such a bad shot, he liked a full clip.

Karen was right. They found the tributary about a quarter mile farther up on the left. She turned into it and they headed back in the direction they had just come from.

The channel was twisting and blocked in narrow spots by fallen trees. A few times Lockwood and Malavida had to get out of the aluminum boat and pull branches out of the stream. It was slow going, but Malavida said the computer signal was getting stronger.

"This guy is up here somewhere," Malavida said.

At 4:15, the signal abruptly stopped and the needle gauge went to zero. They were moving slowly up the river. "Cut the engine," Malavida said, and Karen shut off the outboard. They were drifting silently, the river narrowing and getting shallow. They listened to the keening insects, their ears desperately trying to peel some other sound out of the wall of noise.

"Keep going," Malavida finally said. "Use the paddle."

Lockwood put the paddle into the water and pulled them along. The late-afternoon sun glistened on the rippling water. The desolate beauty somehow managed to steal from their sense of danger. Karen found herself watching wild flowers and brightly colored swamp birds hopping from limb to limb, flying low among the river foliage.

They rounded a corner and almost ran smack into it. Tied to a tree with a rusting chain and two ropes, it loomed in ghastly decaying ugliness. It was some sort of old metal garbage barge. Lockwood estimated it was about two stories high and maybe thirty feet wide. Painted on the stern, in faded chipped letters, was WIND MINSTREL.

Lockwood pointed at the name, and Karen and Malavida nodded, their lips tight.

"Okay," Lockwood whispered, "let's beach it over there."

He paddled the aluminum boat silently toward the wall of reeds and the bottom slid up on the marshy, shell-encrusted ground, making a slurpy, scratching sound as it stopped. They got out, ruining their shoes with river mud.

Lockwood motioned with the gun, and they pulled the boat up out of sight and then silently moved away from it toward the barge. Lockwood wanted a visual reconnaissance before he moved in. They crouched in the reeds and looked at the barge in the gathering twilight. From the side, it appeared much larger than he had originally anticipated. It was at least a hundred feet long.

"Okay, I'm going in. You stay out here and make sure I don't get surprised…"

"You any good with that thing?" Malavida asked, pointing at the.45.

"Not much," Lockwood admitted.)

"I'm going with you. I'm not gonna do you any good out here. At least I can throw a punch."

Lockwood nodded. "But Karen, you gotta stay here and watch the back door. If this guy's aboard, that's one thing. If he's not, I don't want him coming in behind us." He handed her one walkie-talkie, which was set on Channel 72. He kept the other unit himself. "It's on. If you need help, trigger it twice. Two static bursts and we're back out here. If anybody's coming up behind us, give us one."

"Okay." Her voice was tight and she looked scared, but he knew she wouldn't bolt or go soft in the clinch. He motioned to Malavida. "Okay, Ladron, it's you and me."

"Let's go, Zanzo."

They moved around to the right, looking for hard ground, which they found a few yards upriver. Moving in a crouch, they headed toward the small ramp that led from the ground to a door cut halfway up in the vertical face of the hull. It appeared to be a hatch that had been used to off-load garbage from amidships.

Lockwood went first, with the gun at port arms. He moved up the ramp with Malavida on his heels. Lockwood pushed the door gently, but the rusting hinges squealed loudly. Lockwood froze and listened for movement. There was nothing, so he pushed it farther open, ducked quickly through the hatch opening, and pressed himself flat against the interior wall. Malavida came in behind him.

It was humid and dank inside. The walls reeked with the smell of old refuse. Lockwood's stomach leapt up in his throat. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he moved along a narrow gangplank to a descending ladderway. He glanced back at Malavida, whose face was tight and eyes large. "Here," Lockwood said, handing him the.45. "Cover me. I'm going down the ladder."

Malavida took the gun as Lockwood turned and climbed down the metal ladder. His back was to the huge open hold. He was an easy target as he climbed down. His neck hairs and shoulder muscles tingled as he risked exposure. Malavida watched the dark companionway, staring out at the blackness, his mouth open so he wouldn't have to breathe the stench through his nose.

Lockwood reached the bottom of the ladder. "Throw it down," he whispered. "Put the safety on first."

Malavida pushed the safety on and dropped the gun down to Lockwood, who caught it; then Malavida climbed down the ladder while Lockwood covered him…

Karen was in the weeds and brambles, holding the walkie-talkie. She moved slowly to her right so that she could get a better view of the barge. The dense brush and thorns ripped at her ankles. Then she saw something out of the corner of her eye. She turned and glimpsed a shape moving some distance away through the reeds. She didn't know if it was a man or an animal, but it was large. She turned and edged in the direction of the moving form, which had now disappeared. Her problem-solving mind instantly calculated that there must be a path over there, because she had heard no reeds or underbrush snapping as the figure passed. She moved slowly in that direction, her hand on the button of the walkie-talkie.

She came out of the dense brush and saw there was a one-lane dirt road cut through the foliage that was wide enough to accommodate a car. She edged out onto the road and looked in the direction the shape had been moving. Off in the distance, through the dense reeds, she could barely make out something that was painted a pale shade of blue. She moved toward it, hugging the overgrown dense brush at the side of the road. Then she saw the pale-blue house…

It was about twenty yards away. The yard was cut from the thick surrounding underbrush; the roof was pitched and the entire structure made of wood. A well-maintained porch fronted the house and in the yard were several old cars, a bicycle, and a swing. It was picturesque… a peaceful house deep in the middle of a lush watery swamp.

Lockwood and Malavida opened the large hull door and found themselves in the center hold of the barge. This was the main area where the garbage was once carried. The metal hatch overhead was rusting, and when Lockwood and Malavida looked up, they could see only a few pinholes of sunlight leaking through. Malavida found a light switch and turned it on.

It was hard to believe what they saw. The computers were all brand-new warp-speed, superhighway monsters from Toshiba. There were three of them, all placed neatly on a wooden desk pushed against the rusting hull. Also on the desk was an external 28.8 modem with a line-conditioner. There were hundreds of utility disks in disk holders on a free-standing wooden bookshelf. Malavida moved to them and started rummaging through the index tabs.

"He's got it all… various flavors of UNIX, crackers for UNIX, VMS, Novell, 'elite' addresses on the Internet, CERT security advries… He's fully locked and loaded." Malavida glanced at Lockwood, who was moving toward a coffin-sized freezer. He tried to open it, but it was locked. Over the freezer, taped to the wall, was a large blowup of an old photograph.

"The fuck is this?" Lockwood said. It was a picture of a woman with dishwater-blond hair. She was in a bathing suit, standing next to a tree. There was a portable pool out of focus behind her. The woman was holding a cat and smiling into the camera lens. Her body was muscular but trim; she had even rows of teeth and iridescent eyes. But her smile was mean, mixed with a defiant glare. The thing that was strange about the photograph was that certain parts of her body had been transected with a dark Magic Marker. The legs and arms were numbered and dated; so were both feet and the torso. Lockwood took a mental picture of the photograph.

Then the walkie-talkie erupted with two frantic blasts of static and went dead.

Lockwood looked at Malavida and they took off, climbing quickly up the stairs, running along the interior gangway, and exploding out of the barge into the evening darkness. The sound of night birds greeted them as they ran down the ramp. Malavida looked where they had left Karen, but she was gone. Then they heard her scream.

Lockwood and Malavida bolted in that direction. They were moving through a wall of heavy brush, crashing through thickets, tearing their skin on brambles and thorns. They plunged on blindly, Lockwood leading the way… until the ripping thorns became too painful.** then Malavida pushed past him and took the lead.

Finally, they broke out into a clearing and saw a blue house some distance away. Lockwood, gun in hand, moved in a low crouch toward the house, Malavida right beside him.

The sun was down but the horizon was a soft pink, lit from the afterglow in the western sky. They got to the front door. Lockwood found it ajar, kicked it wide, and ducked inside.

A huge man lumbered out of the kitchen. He was dressed only in baggy shorts. His pale white body had no definition. He had a cellphone in a holster on his belt. His bald head gleamed in the pink light coming through the living room window. Lockwood guessed he was almost seven feet tall. Heather had been right-he had no eyebrows, no hair on him at all.

"Get out of my house," he said, his voice was tight and high. "Where is she?"

"Get out…" he repeated.

Lockwood brought the gun up. "I'm John Lockwood, U. S. Customs. Put your hands up and get on your knees, facing the wall. Do it now, you cocksucker, or I'll blow you to fucking pieces!" It was all Lockwood could do to keep from shooting the man who had mutilated Claire.

Then the huge man bolted out a back door. Lockwood pulled the trigger and the gun jumped in his hand. A piece of the doorway splintered. The shot missed and the man was gone… out into the backyard.

"Find Karen, I'll go after him!" Lockwood commanded and took off after the seven-foot apparition.

When he got outside, Lockwood could barely see him. Then his eyes finally picked him out in the dim light. He appeared to be galloping, favoring his right side, running for all he was worth through the weeds. Lockwood covered the ground more easily and athletically, but the man was now out of sight in the reeds at the water's edge. Then Lockwood heard an engine start. He saw the path the man had taken and ran down it. When he came out at the water's edge, he saw the second tributary. An air-boat was skimming across the marshy lowland, cutting down swampy undergrowth as it went, moving like the wind, the doughy seven-foot bald psychopath at the helm. Lockwood crouched and fired twice but the airboat was picking up speed. He knew the old army.45 automatic was barely accurate at ten yards, let alone a hundred. The shots crashed out into the dense foliage, snapping leaves and branches, before whistling away uselessly into the night.

The Rat was flying, the air drying his teeth. He grabbed the cell-phone on his belt. Holding the wheel of the speeding boat with one hand, he dialed a number. Deep in the basement of the house he had just left, a phone rang…

Malavida had found Karen in the kitchen. She was dazed and almost unconscious. He picked her up and carried her out of the house. When he laid her on the grass, her eyes opened.

"Thanks," she finally said.

Then Malavida heard the distant sound of the phone ringing. He looked down at her. "It's him," he said. "I wanna talk to him." He started back into the house.

"No… don't…" Karen said. Malavida hesitated for a moment, unsure; the phone kept ringing; then he bolted for it, running up the steps and into the house.

He didn't get far. He was two steps inside the living room when the explosion took him. It started in the basement and erupted up through the floorboards of the old house, throwing concrete and plaster into the air like papier-mache.

The concussion rocked Lockwood, who was forty yards away, and caused him to go down on one knee.

Malavida Chacone was blown backward out the front door. He landed ten feet from Karen, his body broken and bleeding. Karen screamed in terror as she looked over at him… and the remnants of the house rained down around them.