Final Victim

Chapter 27

The barge rocked softly on a wind tide.

The Rat leaned over and got his CD headset. He put the earphones on and hit Play… Satan T. Bone's raspy voice filled his head with glorious hatred:

Hit on the girl, screw her at last, Cut off her arms, plug up her ass.

The screaming will end when the body goes soft. The fucking will start when her head is cut off.

He swayed to the music in the cooling air as he worked. He had saved the head for last. The Rat knew there were more than one hundred identification points on the face and neck. For the Beast to come to life, it had to look like Shirley. So far, all of his searching had found nobody who answered his need. He had always known the head would be the hardest. The head would be his final victim. He was being pursued now, so he had to turn away from this difficult selection and deal with his enemies.

Using his modem and cracking kit, it had taken The Rat almost two hours to penetrate security blocking codes in the computer at the U. S. Customs Service. As was always the case, he had searched for a hole in the system, and had finally broken through. Lockwood's picture and file were now in front of him on the screen. He read it quickly, his eyes scanning the information. The sweltering afternoon heat in the wetlands around the Little Manatee River had lessened with the evening breeze and he had left the hatch open to catch its wispy coolness. Sweat was drying on his slick, shiny skin. He could feel the beginning of the stinging sensation which indicated that The Wind Minstrel was starting to emerge. In two or three days, he would claim The Rat's body. He knew when that happened, The Wind Minstrel would be enraged. The Rat had made no selections for him. He was not ready to give The Wind Minstrel the final victim to possess.

John Lockwood's file gave The Rat a quick but thorough look at this enemy: unorthodox, talented, frequently reprimanded but usually successful. There were pages of Internal Affairs complaints against Lockwood, and yet there were pages of official commendations for excellence. It was a confusing picture of success amid failure.

The Rat realized, after reading the file carefully, that Lockwood was an awesome threat that would not go away. The picture of the handsome agent stared accusingly out of the computer screen at him. The Rat hated him on sight. Lockwood had been given a gift of physical attractiveness, while The Rat had been forced to live in Leonard Land's fat, ugly body… always hiding, always being laughed at and despised.

A plan formed in The Rat's clever brain. He felt he could attack and kill Lockwood without ever leaving the rusting barge. It required very little beyond his genius and a little luck to accomplish the feat. He needed to download Lockwood's Customs picture and prints… and he had to alter them slightly and add a few manufactured details. Then he had to crack into one more "secure" computer. After he had accomplished that, he would simply wait for the right moment to spring his trap. In the meantime, he would take care of a much easier problem. He would reach out and end the life of Malavida Chacone.

The gas station was at the north end of Miami. Karen was filling the tank while Lockwood stood at the pay phone near the corner, gripping the receiver too tightly. He had tried to call Tashay Roberts but had gotten her answering machine. Then he dialed Children's Hospital in California.

Heather's voice sounded frail and uncertain, coming across three thousand miles of telephone cable. "I'm okay," she said bravely. "When will you come home, Daddy? I'm worried for you."

"I promise nothing will happen to me, but I have to finish this… It's very important. I'll be careful. Don't worry about me."

There was a long, awkward silence on the phone and then, "Daddy… I want us to live on a farm, like you said. I've been thinking about that. I want to leave Los Angeles. Can we really do that?"

"It's a promise."

"A promise on a promise?" she said, her voice small.

"A promise on a promise."

"I love you, Daddy. I've asked God to look after you. Mommy's with Him, and they're both looking down. I'll pray to them not to let anything bad happen."

"I'll pray too."

"Here's Grandad," she said. "Bye."

Then Rocky was on the line.

"She sounds better," Lockwood said.

"Think?" the voice was gruff and distant. "She cries in her sleep and don't talk much… lookin' out the window most'a the time… If that's better, then she's better."

Lockwood winced at the remark but kept going.

"When will she be getting out of the hospital?"

"Couple a'days. Then we're gonna take her back to Minnesota, whether you agree or not."

"Maybe that's best. It's familiar surroundings. I can meet you there when this is over."

"I'm sure you'll do whatever it is you want," his father-in-law said without emotion. "But this little girl can't take no more, John."

And then, without saying good-bye, Rocky hung up and left Lockwood with the phone pressed hard against his ear. He replaced the receiver and looked over to Karen, who had finished gassing the car and was wiping the windshield. He moved to her slowly.

"How is she?" Karen asked.

"She's…" He stopped, not sure how to put it. "Hurting," he finally finished, deciding to leave it at that.

He got into the passenger seat, and Karen pulled out of the gas station. The silence in the car was nerve-racking. Lockwood looked over at Karen; her brow was furrowed and she was deep in thought.

"You're worried about Malavida?" Lockwood said, and she looked over. "I'm sorry about not going down there, it's just I know what would happen."

"It's okay," she said. "It just seemed like we owed him some support. Not that he'd even know we were there."

The silence brimmed around them. Lockwood speared it again.

"What happened between you two while I was gone?" he finally asked, and she turned her gaze quickly out the front window in a reflex action that Lockwood didn't need twenty years in police work to read. She focused her gaze on the flying night bugs lit by their headlights: specks of light that vectored and occasionally wiped out on the windshield.

"Whatta you mean, what happened?" she said, so softly he had to strain to hear it.

"Y'know, Karen, it's not a good idea to get romantically involved with people you're working a case with. Especially people like Malavida, who see life from a completely different angle."

"Why are we having this conversation?" she finally asked, still not looking at him.

"I have a distinct feeling that something changed while I was gone. I'm just telling you that we're up against a monster here. We can't have our personal feelings changing the perspective on our judgment."

"It sounded for a minute like you had something else you were trying to say." She now turned and looked at him.

He felt his heart beating in his throat; he shifted in his seat under her gaze. His face reddened slightly. "Whatta you mean?" he finally asked lamely.

"It sounded like you were staking out some sort of claim yourself, to use at a more convenient time."

Again they fell into an awkward silence. Lockwood felt himself choosing his words carefully. "I like you, Karen. I didn't think that was going to be the case when we first met in Washington, but you turned out to be a very pleasant surprise." He stopped because he was sure he was moving in the wrong direction. He didn't want to declare any intentions… He was too mixed up.

"But…" she prodded.

"But, my life is in turmoil. Claire is dead. And I'm responsible. I'm not dealing with that well. I have Heather to think about… and I want to catch this son of a bitch who killed her, or I won't be able to sleep."

"You're not saying anything that I don't already know."

"Malavida's not for you," he blurted. "I know guys like this, he's on the con. He sees people as targets, he'll work you like a mark to get what he wants."

"I see. And what do you want…?"

Lockwood fell silent. Finally, he looked over at her… "I'm not sure how good a friend I can be to you or anybody right now. I know I want to be, but-"

"You're right, John. Something happened between us, and I'm not sure right now how I feel about it. But Malavida is in the hospital, he may be dying. If he lives, he may never be the same, and I'm worried about him. I think you should be too. It bothers me that you aren't." Lockwood looked over at her; she was very beautiful in the reflected dash lights. He hated hearing her admit that she had started something up with Malavida. Was she right? Was he staking out some claim to pursue when the timing was more acceptable? He had come to the point where he didn't trust his ability to evaluate himself anymore. He had been doing things for all the wrong reasons lately.

"I can't trust Malavida because I know how he thinks," he started by saying. "I'm sorry we got him hurt, but I'll never be able to trust him. I know you probably think that's cold, but he and I come from the same place. He and I were both disenfranchised by the system and then incarcerated by it. I've been behind bars. I know how that changes you. He sees everything and everybody as a player. He calculates everything by how it affects him, or how he can use it. I know because it's still how I think. I'm not sure you should take a chance with either of us."

"You know what I like best about you?" she finally said. "You never try and lie to yourself or about yourself. You wound yourself with honesty. It's noble, but hard to witness."

Lockwood knew she was close. He had come to believe that in most people, their strongest link was directly hooked to their weakest link. He thought his strongest link had always been his ability to level frank appraisals. He cut himself no slack. It was also this quality that was now destroying him. "Why don't we get something to eat?" he finally said, desperate to change their conversation.

They stopped at an all-night fish house called The Blue Fin, at Miami Beach Marina. They got a table out on a deck that overlooked the water. A fleet of commercial and private fishing boats was slipped there. A light breeze swayed the boats' outriggers. Water lapped up against the concrete pilings under the deck. The waitress had a name tag that said she was Claudine. She wiped a shiny varnished table next to the rail before they sat down.

"Cocktail?" she asked.

"What's it gonna be, Lockwood?" Karen said. "Another Scotch with a beer back?"

"That was Washington. Up there in the spring I drink Scotch to forget my sinuses. I'm allergic to something blooming in that damn swamp. Down here I'll just have a Heineken in a bottle."

"Two," she said. And Claudine moved away on shapely legs.

Lockwood surveyed the fishing fleet. His brow furrowed while Karen looked at him. The residue of the conversation in the car was still on them, and they were both unsure about it, trying to put it behind them.

"John," she finally said, a bit too brightly, "I know if we get The Rat, we go a long way toward making things better. So let's get started." She pulled a yellow legal pad out of her purse.

He looked down at it, nodded without speaking, then reached over and turned the pad so he could read it. He glanced at the columns of behavioral traits she had listed, and then turned the pad back.

"A real psychotic?"

"Far from it," she said. "A psychotic is someone who's lost touch with reality. Psychotics are easy to catch. They don't usually have a plan. The Rat has a strong reality. He knows what he's doing. He's organized, methodical, and very smart."

"So what is he?" Lockwood asked.

"He's a psychopath," she replied. "Psychopaths are much more dangerous."

"I stand corrected," he sighed, "but you know what I meant."

"Right. Sorry. In my field of study I tend to be a little anal." She smiled. "I've been trying to predict his behavior," she continued, "because all of this is useless unless we can figure him out and get a step or two ahead of him."

"Right."

She paused as Claudine brought back the beers and waited while they glanced at the menu. Both of them ordered stone crab and key lime pie.

After Claudine had gone, Karen went on. "I think his post-offense behavior is very significant. I've been focusing on that. He does his mutilations after death. That probably means he's not a sexual sadist. He's not killing for sexual gratification. Even though he masturbates at the scene of the crime, it isn't, in my opinion, the main reason for the killings. I've been trying to categorize these murders. I think they belong under the general classification of personal cause homicides."

Lockwood's career in law enforcement had concentrated on drug and gun smuggling and money laundries. Psych murders were a category he had never focused on.

"They are acts resulting from interpersonal aggression," Karen explained. "The victim in a personal cause killing might not know the killer, and the homicide is not generally motivated by material gain or sex. Emotional conflict usually drives the act."

"Oh," Lockwood said, not much closer to understanding.

"To further tighten the classification, he shows some signs common to two sub-categories: One is Erotomania, which is fantasy killing stemming from the UnSub's fusion of identities. The other category is Extremist Homicides, which are characterized by an overwhelming political or religious belief. I also think he may be a Collector. He's collecting body parts…"

Lockwood winced. "Neat hobby, but why?"

"There's no way we're gonna figure that out until we catch him. The reasoning with these UnSubs is always very twisted. There was a guy in California who was killing women and eating their reproductive organs, because he believed that his skin was dying and that the reproductive organs would reproduce new flesh and keep him alive. Doesn't make sense, but the guy in California killed ten women as a result."

Lockwood lost his appetite for a moment, then nodded. "Go on," he said.

"So his post-mortem behavior is methodical. He surgically removes parts, he burns his brand on their left breast. By the way, that may indicate that he's right-handed, if he faces them, stands over them when he does it. Then he cleans up his crime scene and leaves. He cools off for a while, a week or two. During this period, he could contact people, become slightly more normal. If he's a multiple, as I suspect, he might even return to his core personality, Leonard Land. This phase is probably short-lived, and then his cycle begins again.

She flipped two pages back on the pad and glanced at what she had written. "I think the choice of the name Rat' is significant. I've done a profile on that animal's real and perceived characteristics-"

"Come on, Karen. You're profiling rodents?"

"John, everything this guy does in connection with these crimes is significant. If he'd called himself The Shepherd I'd be looking at sheep. There's something in that name… a reason he chose it. Hang with me, it comes out with a conclusion."

"Go."

"Under factual information, the word rat comes from the Latin rodere, meaning to gnaw. There are two kinds of rats that make up the majority of the American rat population, brown ones and black ones. In general, black rats live aboveground, brown rats live in walls and dark spaces and underground. I'm going to concentrate on the brown rat because he seems to fit better… He lives and feeds frequently on garbage… I think it's more than mildly significant that our boy works in an abandoned garbage barge. Rats are known to be extremely wary and cautious creatures that quickly detect approaching danger. They usually feed at night and are classified as nocturnal." She looked up at Lockwood. "So far, our Rat is a night killer. Rats tend to live in small concise areas, usually not more than one hundred fifty feet in diameter, but if food is scarce, they can travel long distances to forage. I'm not sure how appropriate that characteristic is and I don't want to beat this analogy to death, but from what we know, our Rat seems to move around when he kills. Maybe that's because he can't find the 'food' he needs near home."

"Okay, or maybe his selection process isn't based on geography, maybe it's based on something else."

"Exactly… According to scientists, rats are generally considered to be the most dangerous animals to people on the face of the planet." "Come on, really?"

She nodded. "In terms of sheer body count, it's true. They attack infants, often killing them. They frequently cause apartment fires by chewing through wires. And then, of course, there's disease, plague, rabies, you name it." She looked up. "Okay, that concludes the factual data.

"Now we go to folklore… what people believe about rats. We have assigned them a very low place on the personality scale. They are considered to be mean, vicious, and disloyal. Rats are also thought to be sneaky. I think these are traits that Leonard believes he has. They're ugly and dirty. I think our Rat hates the way he looks. Rats are shrewd. He might think of himself as cunning and shrewd. I'll tell you this… He's no dummy. That trick with the heat and air-conditioning in Atlanta was very inventive and difficult to achieve… close to brilliant. Without Malavida, we never would've come upon it."

"Okay, so he's smart, cunning, ugly, vicious, disloyal, and nocturnal.. what else?"

"Rats are ferocious. When cornered, rats will attack viciously with little regard for their safety… and this is a point I'm most interested in. I think our going to his place could represent, in his mind, an attack on him. It caused him to blow up his own house, move his barge. I think he may feel cornered."

"You saying he's going to attack us?"

"I think we have to consider the possibility."

"How's he gonna attack us? He doesn't even know where we are." "I don't know. It's just something to be alert to."

Lockwood looked out at the boats tied up at the dock. He listened to the rigging rattling against the aluminum masts. His mind skipped across what she had said and a thought hit him. He turned and looked at her, realization in his eyes.

"If he's been watching the news, he knows where Malavida is," Lockwood said.

"You're right, he does. But Malavida's under guard. Hard to attack when there're cops outside his door."

They sat in silence for a minute, and then the stone crabs came. They cracked them open, pulled out the meat, and ate, both of them deep in thought.

"Look, let's say I wanted to get to Malavida," Lockwood ventured. "This guy hacked into one computer very efficiently. How hard would it be to hack into the computer network at Jackson Memorial Hospital?"

Karen looked at him, realization dawning. "Shit," she finally said, as they both scrambled to their feet…

The Jackson Memorial Hospital records were on The Rat's screen. He was looking for Malavida's blood products sheet. He quickly found it. Malavida had type 0-negative blood. The Rat knew that if he could change the negative to positive, once the foreign blood went into his body it would stop Malavida's heart within minutes. The Rat had cracked into the computer and could now easily change the records. The Rat knew he had to take care of two things: He couldn't just change Malavida's blood type; he also had to tinker with the cross-matching safeguards the hospital maintained.

The Rat checked the orders for Malavida. He scrolled down through pending orders for other patients until he found a patient with blood type 0-positive. He knew from the one time he'd been in the hospital for surgery that the technician drawing the blood would check Malavida's wristband, then hand-write the patient number on the blood tube after drawing the blood. When it reached the lab, a generated label, keyed to that number and printed with the patient's name, would be stuck on the tube. The Rat looked and saw the labels were already in the computer, waiting to be printed. He scrolled down to the one for the patient with 0-positive blood, deleted that patient's name, and replaced it with Malavida's.

Now, if he could change the blood designation in the blood bank before the new shift came on and hung another unit of blood, the new nurses would, unknowingly, be ordering up the wrong blood. Malavida would be dead by 12:30. The Rat switched to the patient records section in the blood bank and searched for Malavida's record. When he found it, he leaned over the keyboard and positioned his cursor in the "0-negative." He pushed Delete four times and his cursor ate the "nega" letters. Then he typed in "post" and looked at his magic up on the screen.

He wanted to watch Malavida die. He went back to "Log Listings." He found "Video Security" and punched it up on the screen. His console now showed that there were twenty different camera positions in the hospital, mostly hallways and nurses' stations, and a few operating theaters. He knew from the records that Malavida was on the fifth floor. He found that designation and punched it up. The hospital used videoconferencing technology to send doctors radiology images. Up on his computer, he was now looking at the fifth-floor sub-acute nurses' station. Three nurses were working at the desk. Off to the right of his screen, up the hall, a uniformed policeman was sitting on a metal chair outside a door. The Rat guessed this was Malavida's room.

"When he's cornered, The Rat will fight," he said, then sat back and watched the black-and-white security picture in fascination. His gaze was focused on the door, behind which he knew his mortal enemy, Malavida Chacone, was close to death.

The nurses on the evening shift moved onto the floor a little before midnight and quickly began to make their rounds. They glided silently on crepe-soled shoes, taking pulses, blood pressures, and temperatures, entering the data into the hospital's on-line CardEx system via the PC work stations outside the rooms. At 12:15, nurse Eleanor Fleetwood noticed that the whole-blood bag on Malavida's I. V. stand was low. She checked the orders at her work station and saw the doctor had okayed an order for another unit, as needed. Malavida's pressure was still low so he needed the extra blood volume. She switched to the appropriate screen and placed the order for a unit of blood to the hospital blood bank via the computer system. A unit of 0-positive blood was delivered to Malavida's room at 12:20 and was attached to his stand at 12:25.

Lockwood and Karen had tried to finish mapping out The Rat's logic as they raced the rental car toward Jackson Memorial Hospital. Lockwood was at the wheel and he had his foot to the floor. They could have called ahead but nobody would have believed them. Rather than argue about it, they just made a run for it. They were only ten minutes away. "If this guy gets into the computer," he said as he ran a red light on U. S. 1, "then he could change medication, create an overdose, anything…"

They screeched into the hospital parking lot at 12:30 and ran through the huge double doors. They were slowed for a few minutes, trying to obtain directions to Malavida's room. The hospital was fifteen stories high and included several annexes which were sprawled across four acres. They found themselves running down polished linoleum corridors, dodging gurneys and wheelchairs, looking for the sub-acute unit.

The nurse in Malavida's room opened the valve and let the 0-positive blood drip into Malavida's vein. He was unconscious, pale, and broken, lying in the bed in a single-patient room. The explosion had torn through his body, embedding chunks of plaster and wood in his abdominal cavity, one piece barely missing his fifth lumbar nerve. Had that nerve been severed, he would have lost the use of his right leg. His entire abdomen was badly perforated. The surgeons had sewn up what they could save and removed what they couldn't. The medial umbilical ligament was a mess, and they had almost lost him because his superior mesenteric artery was pierced and pumping blood into his abdominal cavity, causing a life-threatening drop in blood pressure. They had managed to clamp it off just in time and repair it. That had been eight hours ago. Now, the barely functioning remains of Malavida Chacone were strapped to a bed next to a metal I. V. stand, which, aside from whole blood, was feeding him saline fluids and strong antibiotics. Because his GI tract had been so badly ruptured, there was a fear that he might develop peritonitis. Only time would tell if he would survive his injuries.

The Rat watched his computer screen and saw Lockwood and Karen rush onto the hospital floor. Nervous sweat dripped from under his arms as they ran to the nurses' station. He watched in horror. "The wicked raised in the Second Resurrection will go up on the breadth of the earth with Satan at their head," he said in a monotone, rocking back and forth on his wooden chair. On the closed-circuit TV, Lockwood appeared to be shouting at the frightened nurse. Then he broke away and ran up the hall toward Malavida's room. The cop who had been sitting on the chair exploded up and grabbed Lockwood. The Rat cursed and leaned close to his screen as the two men wrestled in the narrow doorway-the way the shot was framed, The Rat could barely see them.

Then The Rat screamed in protest as Lockwood pinned the cop against the far wall…

In the hospital, Karen saw Lockwood struggling with the Dade County policeman. She ran to help him. Nurse Fleetwood came out from behind the station after her.

Lockwood could see Karen coming. He had the cop pinned against the wall. He timed it perfectly and threw his first punch as Karen got there. The cop went down, clawing for his holster. Lockwood stepped on his hand as Karen rushed into the room.

She could see Malavida taped up and unconscious in the bed. She ran to him and frantically started pulling I. V.'s out of his arm. Then she looked up at the blood bag.

"What the hell're you doing?" Nurse Fleetwood yelled as she ran through the door a few seconds later. Karen had now unhooked Malavida from all of his I. V. drips and was removing the whole-blood bag from the stand. She was reading the label as Nurse Fleetwood grabbed it away from her.

"What's his blood type?" Karen demanded.

In the hall outside, Lockwood stepped away from the cop, who pulled his gun and aimed it at him with the hammer back. "You done, greaseball?" The cop's voice was shaking with anger, and Lockwood put his hands in the air.

"I'm done," he said softly.

The cop grabbed him and spun him around, then he muscled Lockwood into the wall so hard that pieces of bad hospital art fell and shattered on the floor. The cop slammed handcuffs on him, ratcheting them tight.

Karen grabbed the clipboard from the foot of the bed and looked at it. She saw the blood delivery slip clipped on the top: "O-positive." Then she flipped back one page and looked at the earlier slip that had been clipped to the board in post-op. The first slip said "0-negative."

"Let go of that!" Nurse Fleetwood yelled, as she snatched the clipboard away from Karen. Now there were frantic footsteps in the corridor and the room filled with white coats. One was the surgical resident for the wing.

"Which is it?" Karen shouted at the nurse. "0-negative blood, like it says on the page from this morning, or 0-positive, which you're putting into him now?"

The young resident grabbed the clipboard and looked at it. "What the fuck is going on, Eleanor?" he said, anger beginning to swell. "You're giving this guy 0-positive? He's 0-negative. I typed him myself How much went in there?"

Nurse Fleetwood was now in full retreat. "I don't know, Doctor. We just hooked him up. The slip said 0-positive."

The resident turned to the cop. "Let's go! I need help getting this guy back up to ICU."

The two of them yanked the bed away from the wall, spun it, and pushed it out into the hall. Lockwood and Karen trailed behind. They shoved the bed into the express elevator and went to ICU, a floor above. The resident and two ICU interns grabbed the bed and pushed it quickly down the hall, leaving Lockwood and Karen standing with the startled policeman they had fought with seconds before. It was an awkward moment.

"Maybe you could unhook these cuffs?" Lockwood finally suggested. The cop reluctantly took out the keys and released him.

The Rat climbed up the steps in panic and stumbled out onto the deck of the barge. The swamp was pale in the three-quarter moon that lit the dense undergrowth of the Manatee wetlands. He filled his lungs with its heavy, moist air and let out a scream of fear and anger. His screech carried across the murky wasteland like the scream of a dying animal. Night birds broke for the sky in a flurry of beating wings. He was in agony. God had finally focused on him.

"When cornered, The Rat will fight," he cried at the moonlit night.