Final Victim

by Stephen J. Cannell

  "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 wo
uldn'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.