Final Victim

Chapter 25

The Rat suspected that he had started the journey. There was no other explanation. He sat on the floor of the garbage barge, rocking slightly back and forth. His mind flitted across the pitted landscape of his problem.

It seemed big and unfixable. He wondered, if he sacrificed himself, would he change the timetable or just make everything happen sooner? He wondered if there was still time to build the Beast and get the answers he had been looking for. He wondered why he was always so frightened and alone… why, in his whole life, nobody had ever tried to comfort him. And then he got angry. They would pay. He would be taken on this Journey of Redemption clawing and biting. He would not walk obediently into the Hall of Sleeping Spiders.

He had seen them leave in his pickup truck, from a hiding place downriver. He had sneaked back and found the Mexican's windbreaker. In the pocket was a receipt from the Radio Shack. The credit card belonged to Karen Dawson, the woman at U. S. Customs who had invaded his chat room. Was it possible that she was still alive? The signature on the receipt read Malavida Chacone. He thought he knew that name from somewhere. He ran back, untied the barge, tied his air-boat to it, and climbed aboard. The barge started to drift slowly downriver, riding on the current. He stood on the deck and steered with the big hand rudder. Twice the barge almost got stuck in the shallows, but miraculously he managed to keep it from going aground. He finally arrived at the hiding spot he had found before. It was a place deep in the wetlands of the Little Manatee River, almost four miles from his house. The barge was now tied under a dense growth of mangroves and weeds. It would not be visible even from the air.

He wondered if he dared go back to Shirley's house. He had burned it down twelve years before, then had run away and lived in the park. The property had been sold to a retired plumber who had rebuilt it. Five years later the plumber had died of a stroke. Because of its remote location, nobody had bought it. The Rat knew it was currently boarded up and empty; he had gone there once and looked at it from the road. It didn't look like Shirley's house anymore. This new place the plumber had built was stucco, with no porch and a low, sloping roof. Still, it was where his home had once been. He had lived there till he was fifteen. More important, it was a shrine of sorts, because it was the place where he'd first met The Wind Minstrel.

He had been just fourteen when that happened, and very sick with a high fever. His ears had become infected because of the burns. Shirley would not let a doctor come. She said Leonard was weak, and that if God decided to take him for his weakness, then she would bear that consequence. The Rat had already learned to control Leonard. He hid inside him like an evil shadow and listened to Shirley's shrill condemnations.

That night his fever grew. He slipped into a delirious sleep and had a frightening, life-changing nightmare. In the dream, he was both The Rat and Leonard, walking in a hall of huge sleeping spiders. Leonard was so scared he could barely breathe. He whimpered constantly, but The Rat was cunning, moving silently between the spiders' hairy legs. Their eyes were closed, their huge mandibles dripping moisture at his feet. The Rat knew that if he woke them, they would tear him apart, chew him slowly, and eat him alive. Somehow he also knew that the Hall of Sleeping Spiders was at the beginning of the Journey of Redemption.

Then, as if by magic, he was somewhere else, strapped on a plank before an altar, while God screeched at him through huge speakers in a voice that growled and barked. God threatened him with more fire and scorned his weakness. The Almighty cursed his impotent wretchedness. Leonard shuddered and cried in fear. The Rat calculated his odds and schemed and lied, telling God he worshiped Christ and the Apostles. It was then that The Wind Minstrel appeared before them. God stopped screaming. Suddenly it was very quiet. Leonard was still strapped down before the altar, unable to move. He whimpered and The Rat looked over Leonard's bloated stomach at the apparition… Physically, The Wind Minstrel was exactly like Leonard, only somehow he was also very different. He had beauty and authority. He could get erections. The Rat instantly worshiped him.

The Wind Minstrel told The Rat that Leonard would always be a supplicant, always be afraid, because he believed in Christ and the Apostles. Doctrine, The Wind Minstrel explained, was inflexible. Inflexible things were brittle and could be broken. You only had to see the way. And while he slept and dreamed, The Wind Minstrel let him see. In the dream, The Wind Minstrel entered him. The Rat knew it was sexual, but it was also spiritual. While he slept, for the last time in his life, Leonard became erect, but The Rat saw true everlasting glory. He saw the way it could be. He knew God would no longer control him. From now on he would break God's doctrines. He would fight against Christ and the Apostles. Leonard never dreamed about The Rat or The Wind Minstrel again. He never remembered what they did, although they shared his body.

After the dream The Rat had a direction… That night he decided he would set fire to the house and kill Shirley.

The Tampa police set up a crime-scene perimeter around the remains of the house and started to sort through the evidence. By ten A. M Monday morning there were twenty reporters and three TV news crews. Nobody respected the police crime-scene tape.

Lockwood and Karen tried to supervise the Tampa police, but Detective Grady Raynor pulled them off the scene and made them sit in the back of his car, under threat of arrest. They watched helplessly while news crews trampled through the smoking rubble and did stand-ups in front of the missing house. Karen's mind was far away. She was thinking of Malavida. He had looked so vulnerable on the gurney. She was still having trouble sorting out the way she felt about him. Was it something to preserve, or was she again just tempting fate?

"If there's any evidence here at all, it's been contaminated by this circus," Lockwood said, interrupting her thoughts.

Karen nodded. "Maybe we oughta run some of this new stuff through VICAP," she said, bringing herself out of it. She forced herself to focus on the problem. "We've got some pretty good partial data on Leonard Land. A computer hacker, mutilations, maybe he's got a record somewhere. Maybe we even have enough to get a match on some more killings."

"Good idea, if we can get away from Barney Fife over there," he said, nodding toward Grady Raynor, who was doing a stand-up interview for a local news station.

"Lemme give that problem a little attention," she said, and got out of the car, heading over to where Grady was blowing hot air at a black field reporter named Trisha Rains.

"Right now," Raynor was saying to the camera, "we know that this property was rented by a man named Leonard Land. We're checking for State Tax Board employment records. No charges have yet been filed against Mr. Land, but this explosion was caused by unnatural products. A well-known computer criminal named Carlos `Malavida' Chacone was also involved and is critically injured…"

"Can you tell us a little more about Malavida Chacone's condition?" Trisha Rains asked, her straightened black hair bobbing and beginning to lose its tight set in the oppressive morning heat.

"He was a fugitive from justice and is now back in the hospital being closely guarded. If he survives his injuries, he will be transported back to Lompoc, California, where he was doing time before he was released by a Customs agent named John Lockwood. We're still trying to get to the bottom of that." He paused, wondering if he'd said too much. "That's about all I can say for now," he concluded.

The camera crew shut off their lights and Trisha Rains put a hand on the back of her neck, holding her hair away to cool herself.

"I need a reverse. We can shoot it over by the house. Get the smoking remains over my shoulder," she said to her crew, and they moved off, leaving Grady Raynor smiling. He then saw Karen as she held up her cellphone.

"Just got a call from my SAC in D. C. and my District Supervr down here. They want me and Lockwood back, at the Federal Building in Tampa, forthwith."

"In the words of that great American sports legend George Steinbrenner, 'Fuck 'em.' "

"Hey, Detective, I'm just a bystander here, but your best bet of holding on to this case, which is about two hours away from going national, is to set up a joint-op with Customs. If you don't, they're gonna go over your head to the Governor and you're gonna be up in the bleachers with Steinbrenner eating a foot-long."

He looked at her for a puzzling moment while his walnut-sized brain calculated the truth in her remark.

"You do this for me, and I'll do a Grady Raynor commercial at Justice," she added. Then another news crew moved in, looking for a statement. They turned on their lights. Raynor's eyes darted over to them, anxious to get at it.

"Okay. You gimme a number where I can reach you." "We're at the Best Western in Tampa, the one by the water."

"Roommates?" he said, a leer creeping up on his drganized, pockmarked face.

"Grow up, Detective," she said softly.

"Lou," he yelled at a police lieutenant in a brown uniform, "take these two back to Tampa an' drop 'em at the Federal Building. Stay with 'em."

The lieutenant handled the first part of the order, not the second.

They called a cab from the lobby of the Federal Building and slipped away from their police guard through a side door. They picked up Karen's car at the boat rental, drove over and got Leonard Land's dark blue truck at the Tampa hospital, then headed back to the Best Western, packed everything, and checked out. It was noon by the time they stood in the dense heat in the parking lot, trying to decide where to go.

"Let's get a place in St. Pete or in Clearwater," Lockwood said.

"We get out of this dickhead's jurisdiction, maybe get a little breathing room."

"I drove through Clearwater Beach yesterday. There's an EconoLodge near the water, with special rates," she volunteered.

He nodded and they drove out of the parking lot. Lockwood, in Leonard's truck, followed Karen's rental car. They crossed Tampa Bay on the Courtney Campbell Causeway, drove through Clearwater, then took the smaller Garden Memorial Causeway over to Clearwater Beach.

They rented two rooms at the Econo-Lodge. The accommodations were clean, bland, and decorated in pastels. Both had windows that overlooked the Gulf of Mexico across a wide, sandy beach. It was almost three in the afternoon by the time they had all of this accomplished.

"I'm going to run this reg slip with DMV and load this new stuff into VICAP," she said. "I can use the modem on my laptop, then go right into the system from here."

"Okay. While you're doing that, I'll go through the truck, see if anything lives there we can use." She nodded and went inside.

He looked down and saw some of Malavida's dried blood in the truck bed. He wondered how Mal was doing. He and Karen had discussed going down to Miami and sitting there until Malavida was out of danger. After a spirited argument, he had convinced her to discard the idea as sentimentally worthwhile, but operationally stupid. He knew it would be a game-ending move for him. He was a loose cannon by anybody's calculation. Going to Miami was an invitation to an arrest. He knew, so far, he was good for at least one count of obstructing justice; probably also good for felonious malfeasance of duty, and aiding and abetting a prner during an escape. That charge was probably beatable, but not the reckless endangerment of a prner, impersonating an officer, withholding evidence… The list was endless.

Lockwood and Karen had decided to keep track of Malavida's progress by phone, maybe risk a visit once he was conscious. Karen had called the Miami hospital just before they checked out of the Best Western. She'd gotten almost nothing from the floor nurse, who had told her Malavida was out of surgery and listed as critical. "How critical?" Karen had asked.

"Critical critical."

Lockwood had been surprised by the depth of Karen's concern. He was now sure that, during the short amount of time he had been in California, something had started up between them. It annoyed him. Had he been harboring a secret fantasy about Karen? In the wake of Claire's murder, had he been secretly hoping for a shot at Awesome Dawson? He hoped he wasn't that shallow, but he had been surprising himself a lot lately.

Inside the motel room, Karen hooked her modem to the computer and started to check out Leonard Land. There was no criminal record on him in the Federal computer. She cross-referenced with NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. Nothing there either. She punched the name into the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles, including the truck registration number, and up on her screen popped a driver's license picture. Leonard looked slightly different from when he had attacked her. In the picture he seemed wistful, almost pathetic. He was smiling earnestly, his bald head and missing eyebrows not as menacing as in the awful moment when he'd grabbed her outside the house in the wetlands. The address they already had: 2200 Little Manatee Road. The license said he was twenty-seven years old, six feet eleven inches tall, and 367 pounds. No hair, brown eyes. That was it. She downloaded the information and picture, then stored them in her hard drive. She wished Malavida were with them; his dark eyes and dry humor hung with her like a lingering fragrance. She prayed quietly for him. "Please, God, don't let him die," she heard herself whisper.

She turned her mind back to the target. She was pretty sure that Leonard wouldn't go back to his job even if he had one. He was in the wind, hiding someplace, ready to strike from the darkness. Something else was moving restlessly in the back of her mind… a thought or feeling that she couldn't quite capture. Finally she slapped it down. It was a feeling she'd gotten when Leonard grabbed her out in the yard and dragged her into his kitchen. He had held her down on the table, breathing through his mouth. She was looking up into his crazed eyes, and before he hit her with his fist, in that instant she knew that this was about more than just ritualistic homicides. It was about survival. She didn't know how she knew that, but somehow she read it on him or in his eyes.

Karen sat thinking for a minute, then turned back to her computer. She needed to see if she could throw a wider net and get a better VICAP sample with the new specifics she had. She always learned a lot about a killer from studying the victim. Something had drawn Leonard Land to Candice Wilcox and Leslie Bowers… And then she remembered the strange picture that Lockwood had told her about, the one that was in the rusting garbage barge. He had said that the woman's body had been divided into parts with Magic Marker and that each section had been dated. She wondered if Leonard was constructing a woman out of harvested body parts.

She reviewed again what she knew, trying to arrange the facts differently to get a new pattern. Leonard Land was twenty-seven, and thus fit perfectly the mean age for serial murderers who left behind "organized" crime scenes. She knew from her research that most serial criminals began to realize the scope of their hopelessness in their early twenties, and it was at this time that fantasies about striking back began to grow. Around age twenty-five, the anger and depression would get to the point where they could no longer relieve the pressure by the torture or killing of animals. They would then begin to kill people. An organized crime scene indicated a slightly older killer. And two years were usually added to the mean age. Traditionally, a serial murderer killed to relive some specific sick fantasy. The act was often ritualistic in nature. Karen knew that the ritual surrounding the murder rarely changed because it was the ritual that was the real reason for the crime. The ritual drove the act thus creating a pattern that could be used to match other murders. After a serial killing, there was a cooling-off period, which could be anything from less than a week to several years. Then, inevitably, the subject killed again to relieve the pressure, and the whole cycle started over. If the time period between murders shortened, the subject was said to be degenerating, becoming potentially more destructive and more violent, as well as more careless.

Karen sat in the room in Clearwater Beach, listening to the distant surf. Leonard had told his pen pal in the Oslo prn that he mailed totems. She wondered if he used everything that he harvested at the crime scene. He had taken both of Candice Wilcox's arms, both of Leslie Bowers's legs. She wondered if he had discarded anything. She leaned over her keyboard and began to construct a new query. She asked VICAP to list any record of body parts being sent through the mail. She narrowed the request to within a week or two of the dates of Candice's and Leslie's murders. She entered the data, then sat back and waited. Just as she was about to lose hope, she got one bounceback.

The computer showed that a Florida sheriff named Carl Zeno had taken into evidence a severed female hand with the fingertips removed. The hand was at the Tampa Coroner's Office. It had been delivered to a woman on April 13, one day after the murder of Candice Wilcox. The name of the woman who had received the hand was Tashay Roberts, 901 Court Road, Tampa, Florida.

"John," Karen called excitedly, "I got something!"