Final Victim (1995) (23 page)

He had returned to the SurgiCyberNet chat line every evening. Each time, he would find Leslie Bowers's picture and surgical data. Then one night, he saw the message! Under the picture of Leslie Bowers, it said:

Surgery date 1/13/94 And below that:

R. 13-IS

Had the surgery date been revised from the thirteenth to the fifteenth?

He wondered if it could mean something else. Could it be a cleve
r m
essage? The Rat had learned that numerals were often disguised messages. And then the true meaning screamed at him. . . . How could he have missed it? He ran upstairs and found Shirley's Bible. His hands shook as he looked up chapter 13 of Revelation and read verses 13 and 14:

And he doeth great wonders . . . And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth, by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

He read on to verse 15, his throat dry, his mouth open:

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

It had taken a great deal of effort not to shout his joy. He had found the answer. He should make the image of a Beast. . . . He had long known that he had the mark of the Beast on him. Shirley had told him, when he got the sickness and all of his hair fell out, that he had been marked by the devil. Revelation 13:15 said that he had the power to give the miracle of life unto the image of the Beast, that the image of the Beast should speak, and that all who would not worship the image would be killed. . . . He knew this message this from the Anti-Christ, and the clever devil had used the Lord's own testament to send it, using a woman who had Shirley's unshaven legs as the messenger.

From then on, his mission had been clear. He would construct the Beast. Shirley had all the answers and so it was Shirley to whom he had to give life. That prophecy in Revelation had been made clear to hi
m t
wo years ago. It had been the beginning of the reconstruction and resurrection. The Rat had learned to covet and The Wind Minstrel had come forward in all his glory to swing the sword of reckoning. The first victim had been Leslie Bowers. She lived in Detroit. Her fat calves and ankles were in a freezer not ten feet from where he now sat in the rusting garbage barge. There had been five others who had contributed to the Beast; everything was there but the head. But the head was a special problem. It had to look exactly like Shirley. The head would be his final victim.

Malavida had driven Karen across to St. Petersburg early the next morning. She had checked into the Comfort Inn, which was well positioned, right on the bay. They had stood in the parking lot, holding hands in silence. "I better get back," he'd finally said. They both felt awkward, wondering if they had true affection for each other or had just taken care of long-overdue emotional and biological needs.

"I'll call you. Get all that stuff set up on the balcony," he'd said, then gotten into his rental van and driven back to Tampa. That had been four hours ago.

In his motel room, Malavida's computer picked up the tones of The Rat's login and rang an alarm, bringing him in from the balcony where he'd been setting up his direction finder. He grabbed his phone and dialed Karen Dawson's cellular. Karen picked up on the second ring.

"Hello?"

"He's hot." Malavida looked at his computer screen, which had captured the exact frequency of The Rat's cellphone:

"See if you've got anything on eight-seventy-six megahertz," Malavida said, and both of them were silent as they carefully twisted their antennas. He could now hear the sound of electronic static, indicating that on 876 megahertz he had a cellphone in use with a modem somewhere on the Tampa pod. "I got it!" he said.

"Me too," she answered.

"Find the null point and gimme the degrees," he commanded.

Karen had her radio unit and loop antenna out on the tenth-floor balcony of the Comfort Inn, overlooking the windswept bay. She twisted the antenna loop until she could no longer hear the transmission static, quickly finding the null point. She laid the Boy Scout compass that Malavida had given her on the table and rotated it to line up with the loop antenna.

"One hundred and sixty-four degrees," she said into the telephone. Malavida, with his phone cocked under his ear, also found the null point. His compass said 193 degrees.

"Hold on a second," he told her and ran inside. He laid his compass on the map. He found Karen's coordinates first. He had marked her hotel's location at the end of the Howard Frankland Bridge on Highway 275 with a big X. He marked a course 164 degrees from that location and drew a line with a pencil and ruler. Then, from his own location, he found 193 degrees and drew another line.

The lines intersected in the wetlands south of Tampa, about a mile and a half up the Little Manatee River.

"Gotcha, you cocksucker," he said under his breath.

Chapter
22

"Yeah?" Lockwood said into the telephone.

"How you doing?" Karen's voice came back softly.

"Not good," he sighed. He was standing at the hospital nurses' station. It was nine P
. M
. and, after almost four hours of tossing and turning, Heather was finally asleep in her room down the corridor.

"I'm really so sorry, John," she said, and when he didn't answer, she went on. "How's Heather?"

"You tell me. She saw this guy kill her mother. She's just coming out of traumatic shock."

"That's horrible," she said, stating the obvious and feeling dumb because of it.

Karen was calling from Malavida's motel room in Tampa. Malavida had made her promise that she wouldn't tell Lockwood he was there. He was afraid Lockwood would run a team in and bust him.

"Did Heather get a good look at who did it?" Karen finally asked.

"Yeah. She said he was huge, fat, and bald. She said he was killing her mommy with a knife and that he didn't have any eyebrows. I'm not sure it's a good description. A lot of it may be mixed up with the shock."

"John, I'm in Tampa. I'm working with a friend of mine from the University of Miami. He's an ace computer cracker. We did a triangulation program down here, looking for the guy Malavida found on Pen-net. We think we picked up his cellphone location. My friend tells me it's accurate within a square mile or so. . . ."

Lockwood straightened up and looked at the nurse who was preparing a tray of night medicine a few feet away. "You're doing what?"

"It's a long story, but we've got the location of his cellphone site pinned down to about a square mile. Unfortunately, it's in a huge swampland that's fed by a Tampa Bay river. It's gonna be hard to find him in there because it's marshy and pretty dense, but my friend says there's a way to narrow the location down further. It might go faster if we had a helicopter and some boats. I thought you could arrange that through Customs-"

"Let me get this straight. You're in Florida? You went to Tampa? You looked up an old friend from the University and you're working this headcase on your own?"

There was a long pause. "Not smart, I bet, huh?"

"It's way south of not smart, Karen."

"Well, John, it's done, and we got the fix without leaving our hotel rooms. So we weren't in much danger. If we narrow it down, I thought you'd want to be in on it," she said, knowing he wouldn't refuse.

After he hung up with Karen, he booked the 11:30 red-eye to Tampa. Then he went back into Heather's room. She was awake, looking at the door as he moved through it.

"Daddy," she said softly.

He gently sat on the bed and took her hand.

"I'm scared, Daddy. What if he comes?"

"I won't let that happen, honey."

"How do you know he won't?"

" 'Cause I'm gonna go find him and catch him and put him away where he won't be able to ever hurt anyone again."

"Daddy . . . I don't want him to hurt you," she said suddenly. "He won't hurt me. He can't . . . not ever."

"Why not?"

"Because I have your love to protect me." He leaned down and hugged her. Her face felt warm against his. He sat back and looked at her; he saw in her Claire's cobalt-blue eyes. Their legacy haunted him. "And then we'll go away and live happily ever after," he said, smiling. "Maybe on a farm. Just you and me, a few horses, some chickens and ducks . . ."

"And a hippopotamus." She was looking at the colorful painting on the wall.

The airplane took off on schedule, and he tried to sleep but his mind raced. He had not told Karen that he'd lost his badge, that he was now just John Lockwood, unemployed private citizen. But he was still one of the best pound-for-pound bullshitters on the planet, and, even without his badge, he would find a way to even out the terrain. He leaned back and tried to get some sleep as the jet engines hummed, but his eyes kept popping open. He felt strange, as if he'd lost something he couldn't fully calculate. It was tied to Claire's death, of course, but it was also more than that. . . . It was as if everything was flat, with no depth or substance. It was as if he'd somehow lost a full dimension. He was afraid, unable to control his course. . . . Like the purple hippo on
Heather's wall, he felt like he was looking down with wide eyes, riding powerless under a brightly painted gas balloon.

Karen Dawson got to the airport early, had a Coke, and watched an old Roy Rogers movie on the TV over the bar in the passenger lounge.

It was 7:30 A
. M
. when Lockwood's plane landed and Karen met him coming off the American flight. They moved quickly out into the humid Florida morning. She led him across the street to her blue LeBaron and filled him in on how they'd triangulated on The Rat's cellphone signal, explaining the 800-megahertz band and all about null points. He listened and settled in next to her in the passenger seat while she put the car in motion.

"Okay, where to next?" he asked.

"My friend has a lot of stuff in a motel room. He says the next part of this operation is to get into that swamp and start scanning for the computer The Rat's using--"

"And how do we do that?" Lockwood said, looking at her.

"Well, my friend says that every radio, as well as every TV and computer console, acts like a transmitter as well as a receiver. . . . He says electrical equipment in use always transmits radio frequency signals. He also thinks our killer is using top-of-the-line stuff--"

"Really?" Lockwood interrupted.

"My friend says that crackers are all equipment freaks; they need to have the latest stuff. A generation in computer technology is six months or less. If this guy's current, he'll have a TI or Toshiba Pentium 166-megahertz notebook with 128 megs of RAM, or some equivalent. Like I just told you, all electrically powered units transmit radio frequency signatures while they're on. He says there's a thing called TEMPEST;

it means Transient Electromagnetic Pulse Emanation Standard and it's the maximum amount of electromagnetic radiation the Federal government will allow high-security devices to emit.

"Even the best-shielded system still leaks. It's unlikely the killer has lined his computer and keyboard with lead foil to decrease its TEMPEST emissions, because my friend says nobody but spies and cold-war spooks ever did that."

"Who is this guy? What's your friend's name?"

Karen, who did not have a degree in bullshit, threw out the first name that jumped into her head. "Dale Evans," she said. Immediately her face turned red.

"Dale Evans? Like in Roy Rogers?"

"Yeah. In college we called him Trigger. Pretty funny what some parents will name their kids, huh?" She felt moronic, but Lockwood turned away, looking out the window.

He always thought that Florida was beautiful, even though it was flat as a table. He marveled at the white, puffy clouds that hovered over Tampa Bay, throwing dark shadows across the aqua-green water.

They arrived at the motel. Karen unlocked Malavida's room and they entered. Lockwood looked down at the electronic equipment scattered on the bed. Then the bathroom door opened and Malavida stepped into the room.

"How you doin', Zanzo?" the tall Mexican said.

"Well, whatta we got here? . . . Is this good ol' Mr. Trigger?" Lockwood said, his face going cold.

"That's him," Karen said, hoping the whole plan wasn't about to go ballistic.

"You're under arrest, Chacone. Turn around, put your hands on the wall."

Of course, Lockwood didn't have a gun, badge, or cuffs, but he went through the pat-down anyway. Then he spun Malavida around, shoved him against the wall, and glared at him.

"Are you through with this chickenshit performance?" Malavida said, his back to the wall.

"Karen, if you came down here with this guy, you're an accessoryafter-the-fact in a Class A felony."

"Actually he called me and invited me down."

"Hey, Lockwood, instead of fronting me off and getting your balls all puckered, why don't you calm down and listen for a minute?"