Final Victim (1995) (13 page)

The Rat had his program send the tones. They left his computer in Florida and went through an intermediate host into the Electroinc Switching System at UCLA and over to the 5-ESS switch in Studio City, California. Then the signal was traced back through The Rat's telnet connections and printed:

818/555-7693

The Rat knew he could easily get the address for this number, so he ended his conversation with Satan and shut off his equipment. Whoever had done this to him was brilliant, but The Rat now knew he was better. He had back-traced the intruder without her ever knowing. He stood up, his white body glistening in the sauna-like heat. The walls seemed to close in on him. He lumbered up the metal ladder, out onto the deck of the rusting garbage barge. The late-afternoon sun had turned the heavy cloud-strewn Florida sky orange. He didn't see its beauty. A horrifying thought had just struck him: Maybe this intrusion was the beginning of the two-thousand-three-hundred-day journey? Maybe his six years of torture had just started? He knew he could never survive it . . . but could he stop it? Could he close the door of redemptive cleansing once it had been opened? He didn't know the rules. Shirley had taken all the knowledge with her. He didn't have the answers. How could he find out?

He ran across the weeds and brambles in his bare feet and underwear, not even feeling the thorns. His run was always sort of a gallop. . . . They had teased him about it in grade school. He had looked stupid, slow, and uncoordinated on the playground, galloping as he ran. The sun was almost down when he got home. The pale moon was coming up over the swamp. He could hear the night birds flying low, hitting their wings against the swampy water. Insects keened in the humid darkness. When he got to the house, he ran downstairs and crouched in the corner of the basement, out of breath. He huddled there as the sweat cooled on his body. The Rat was vile and wretched, but his mind was clear.

"The cornered Rat will fight," he said, his voice a harsh whisper. He was already in terrible pain and he knew he couldn't stand the agony of the two thousand and three hundred days of redemptive punishment that Shirley had promised him. He knew he had to attack this cleve
r e
avesdropper. If he killed him, maybe it would close the door of his eternal cleansing.

* * *

When the screen went dark in Claire's den, it took a moment before the three of them said anything. The first to speak was Malavida: "That is one very sick puppy.

"I told you this remailer was a cesspool!" Karen said in triumph.

"It could just be a couple of white squirrels getting off, trying to horrify each other," Lockwood said, not really believing it. The ungodly nature of the messages rang true.

Karen got up from her seat and started pacing around the room. "You don't believe that and neither do I. . . . All that religious stuff, all that ersatz fire and brimstone, that's Grade A sexual repression. 'The wicked do not suffer punishment in the eternal hell and are not destroyed or annihilated in a special mosaic of cleansing.' . . . That sure ain't 'Onward Christian Soldiers.' "

Karen Dawson impressed Malavida more and more.

"Listen, guys . . . this is something. I know it," she said. "The Rat sounds like a serial psychopath. According to him, he's on a two-week degenerating cycle. He said the coveting begins much earlier now, and he has to slow it down by mailing totems."

"What's a totem?" Malavida asked.

"It's a trophy," Lockwood said. "A body part . . . In this case, it sounds like he sent someone a hand."

"Get the fuck outta here," Malavida said in shock.

"Look, we've gotta go cross-check this through the FBI's VICAP serial crime computer in Washington," Karen said. "He said he killed and mutilated somebody in Atlanta. There's got to be a record of that.

Let's get outta here." She moved to the desk and started to help Malavida unhook the modem from the phone and disconnect the monitor from the PC.

"We gotta get Malavida back to Lompoc," Lockwood reminded her. "I gotta drop him at the Burbank sub-station. I've made arrangements with the L
. A
. Sheriff to transport him up there tonight."

Malavida had been dreading this moment and now he made his play. "You're making a mistake, Jefe," he said. It was one of the few times he looked straight at Lockwood.

"I'm sure I am, but it happens all the time, so I don't let it bother me."

Malavida finished unhooking the computer and they moved the stuff into the living room, where Claire was standing with Heather.

"This guy constructed an invisible chat channel on the Internet," Malavida continued. "You know how hard that is to do? Forget for a moment that he's going around killing people. This guy is a real ace computer hacker. Nobody but me would have ever found that room, let alone gotten in there. He may even know we cracked in." That thought had been bothering Malavida. In his haste, he had not bothered to mask their location. "If he does know we were lurking, he'll be even tougher to find. If you ever want to catch him, you're gonna need me. Nobody else could do it. Certainly not that bunch of middle-lane road dogs you got working for you in Customs. I'll shoot this puke down. . . . You got the Snoopy double-your-money-back guarantee."

"That's great, but I still have to get you back to the Federal pen or take a pile of heat, and I still have to catch the six o'clock flight out of Burbank to make my Internal Affairs hearing Monday morning."

"Take me with you, Karen," Malavida said, his eyes turning soft as a puppy in the pound. "I can help you. Honest, I can. What good am I gonna do you in prn? You'll be wasting a generic resource."

"Wasting a generic resource?" Lockwood said, amazed.

Then Karen nodded her head. "You should've seen him. He went through that computer's security like he had Nintendo magic mushrooms. I can't do what he can. Our only other choice is to just walk away from this, and I think this Wind Minstrel guy, or Rat or whoever he is, is white-hot. He's degenerating. If he's for real, he could kill again in two weeks or less."

"Okay," Lockwood said after almost no thought. "I'm probably gonna get benched by IA tomorrow anyway. I might as well go ahead and clobber my pension while I'm at it."

They loaded the stuff in the trunk of the LeBaron, and Lockwood went back to say good-bye to Heather. Claire was standing by the door with her hands on her hips and watched while he hugged and kissed his daughter. Then he faced Claire. She was so beautiful he was momentarily stopped. The afternoon light played on her face and made his heart ache. . . . How could he have let this divorce happen? He could find no words, so he walked back across the street, but she dogged him. When he turned and faced her, he was looking into ice-cold Nordic blue eyes.

"Thanks for bringing a convict over to meet our daughter, John."

"Claire, he's just a computer hacker. He wouldn't hurt anybody."

"One of these days, you're gonna get a sobering experience. I just hope it grows you up before somebody else gets hurt." Then she turned and walked back across the street and into the house. She never looked back.

Chapter
13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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