Final Victim (1995) (3 page)

"So you hit him?"

"Accounts vary. There was undoubtedly some kind of struggle--" "You fuckin' amaze me."

"He tried to hijack the bust to get those two dirty counter agents. There were over a hundred baggage handlers and skycaps involved in that smuggle. Those two Customs guys were less than five percent of the bust. Internal Affairs is supposed to investigate bad police work, not cowboy investigations to get headlines. We ended up in a dick-dragging shoot-out because Kulack jumped early and the cat got loose."

"So you hit him?" Heath asked again.

Lockwood didn't answer. He could tell by the red that was working its way up from under Heath's collar onto his neck that he was probably going to come out better by holding his silence. Larry Heath leane
d f
orward, snapping out his words. "Vic Kulack is shit on Melba toast, but he is also an Internal Affairs SAC. Internal Affairs, in case you haven't read your organization manual lately, is a couple of limbs higher on the tree than Operations. Technically, that makes Kulack your boss. Kulack says you fucked up the bust. He says five thousand dollars is missing. The hint implicit here--in case you missed it--is you and Gonzales were dealing drugs with Federal money and keeping the proceeds. I know it's bullshit, but if he files that paper and it gets into court, Operation Girlfriend develops a dose of the clap."

"Sir, if you're suggesting that I turn this over to Kulack because he filed this bullshit charge against me--"

"He hasn't technically filed it yet. He said he'd consider sitting on it to protect the integrity of the case."

"Isn't that against the law? If he's got something on me, let's do the dance."

"Shut up. . . ."

Lockwood stood in front of the desk and watched the red line finish its climb up the side of Heath's neck and begin to turn his shaved head a nice watermelon-pink.

"My job here is to manage the flow of arrests and convictions. Internal Affairs is not my favorite division, but the Customs Service has to guard against illegal action in the ranks, just like every other law enforcement agency."

"Sir . . . may I speak, sir?"

Heath didn't answer but lifted his chin slightly, indicating this better be great.

"This case was in my jacket for almost eighteen months," Lockwood began. "I developed Gonzales as an informant. I talked him into going back to Miami Airport and getting his old job back. Gonzales i
s a
stand-up player. He risked his life for us. He solicited every one of those dirty baggage handlers without regard for his own personal safety. And then, at the last minute, Kulack moves in and jumps all over the take-down. Fucks it up. Gonzales gets a bullet in his kidney and damn near dies. He's still hung up in a Dade County hospital."

"I got all of this from the newspaper."

"Don't turn Operation Girlfriend over to Kulack."

"Why not?"

"The guy's a moron. He can't put spaghetti on a plate without a diagram. The A
. A. G
. is green and the case still needs a lot of evidentiary investigation. Kulack's gonna fuck it up."

"If he files this mismanagement charge against you and implies you were dealing drugs, it's gonna be in the court record and you're gonna be an anchor at the trial."

"That's blackmail."

"That's government service. He's also demanding a hearing for hitting him in Florida. It's scheduled at nine on Monday morning. The IA conference room on five. Be there. Personally, I think he's got a shot at getting you cashiered. I think I can get him to scotch the mismanagement complaint if we give him Girlfriend, but you're turning into your own worst enemy. What the hell's happened to you, John?"

Lockwood said nothing. He had no answer.

"I'll have Bob Tilly supervise Kulack and the greenie in the A
. G
.'s office. Tilly's got plenty of field and court experience. You can fill the prosecutor in but, as of now, you're outta Operation Girlfriend."

Lockwood stood there and felt the blood going up into his own head. But he had a thick shock of black hair and a swarthy complexion, so, unlike Heath, whose blush made him look angry, on Lockwood, it just made him look darker. Finally, he nodded and turned to leave.

"Lockwood."

He was almost out the door, but he turned and looked back at Heath. "Yes?"

"Agents like you are good for the Service, because they remind everybody else there's a creative way to do the job, a way that may not be printed in the manual. But agents like you are also an administrative nightmare, because you strain my ability to cover your ass. Whether you know it or not, son, I'm doing you a huge favor here."

"Right."

"In the meantime, I understand that Dr. Karen Dawson could use some help updating the sex offenders computer program. Since you're on desk leave, you're assigned to work with her. She's in B-16. You start down there tomorrow."

Lockwood didn't respond. He nodded his understanding and left. This run of bad luck seemed unending. He had just lost a case he had spent a year and a half working on, to a man he despised. And, if that wasn't enough, he'd been assigned to go down to the basement tomorrow morning and work on some dry-biscuit computer program with "Awesome Dawson."

Chapter
3

He slept all day Friday and woke up without an alarm at six, Friday evening. His skin was on fire. Glowing. He had transformed. He was The Wind Minstrel, glorious and alive. He dressed in silk pajamas, gathered his autopsy saw and scalpels. The last tool The Wind Minstrel packed in his large suitcase was The Rat's computer. He had left The Rat behind, but he was following the cunning rodent's careful plan. Every inch of his body was sore now, even the bottoms of his feet. It was as if his skin couldn't contain his glory and had been stretched, painfully, to accommodate him. He left the Marriott and approached his pickup. Earlier, he had stolen a Georgia license plate and now he attached it to the plate holder. He put on his CD headphones and played Baby Killer's new album, Chant to the Dead. He drove back across town toward Hoyt Tower while the music filled his head with its destructive beauty. He parked across from the building on Lee Street. Using his cellphone, attached to his laptop, h
e p
laced a call to the building security computer. On his screen, the computer answered his call:

hoyt login:

He typed "root" and pressed Enter. The system responded:

Password:

He typed in a password for root, which was GOD. The Rat had downloaded all of this from the building computer using the elevator phone the day before. Immediately he was logged in to the computer:

WELCOME TO HOYT TOWER.

You are logged in to host hoyt as root. Good evening, root.

"Root" was the name a lot of computers used to identify the computer system's main user. GOD was often used as the root password because root was the "God" of the system. If you logged in and were accepted as root you could do anything you wanted. You could reprogram, delete, or change the entire system. Since the main function of the building's computer was to run the building, root controlled the brains of the building.

He accessed the building's security panel, and up on his laptop came a computer graphic of the ten-story structure. He scrolled his way down to the first-floor fire door on Center Street. Working carefully, he shut off the alarm on that door by deleting it from the program. He watched the building's "police telephone module," listed on the bottom of th
e s
creen, to see if the system sensed his tampering and if the automatic dialer would place a call to the Atlanta police. It didn't.

It was a sign. He knew that now he was completely transformed. Now he could possess.

She never saw him come through the glass door into the office. By the time she sensed his presence and began to turn, it was already too late. He grabbed her head from behind and brought a surgical knife down over her shoulder and plunged it deep into her chest. He felt the warm blood flow over his latex-gloved hand. He held his forearm tight against her Adam's apple. He had studied anatomy and could feel the cricoid cartilage break, collapsing the vocal ligament into her rima glottidis, rendering her mute.

He held her in a strangulation embrace, with the knife buried deep in her chest, until he felt a death shiver. Moments later she went limp. He laid her on the floor and moved quickly out into the hall, where he had left his large suitcase. He felt her dead eyes watching him. He returned with the suitcase, grabbed her sweater from the back of her chair, and put it across her staring dead eyes . . . eyes that mocked his ugliness.

He undressed her . . . removing her dress, her slip, bra, and panties. His nostrils flared as he smelled her blood. He put on his headset and punched a button on his CD player. As the music started, he pulled down his silk pajama pants and grabbed his semi-erection. Slowly, he worked himself to climax as he swayed over her. The music screamed in his ears:

I slaughtered the whore, Skinned her alive.

I did it for the thrill. It was so nice to kill.

His erection was soft, but he ejaculated onto her body. . . . Anger flared. The bitch had scorned him with her stare, spoiling his erection. He grabbed the scissors off her desk and jammed them up her vagina. "Fuck, fuck, fuck," he grunted as he plunged them in repeatedly. Then he left them there. The song finished, and he removed the headset. He always possessed without music so he could hear the sounds of his work, the cutting, the rending of tissue. He picked up the saw and attached the round 10004 blade with the crosscut teeth. It was the best for medium and small bones.

He plugged the saw into a wall socket and tested it. The blade oscillated and vibrated in his hand. Then he switched it off and laid it next to the body.

"If, as you told me, fire cleanses," he said to the dead girl whose body he had just defiled, "then why does fire leave such a dirty ash?"

Using the scalpel, he started to sever the right arm, working with surgical precision. He made the incision below the shoulder, finding the brachial artery under the anterior humeral circumflex. He cut through it first. His gloved fingers pinched it off with surgical clamps; then he clamped the auxiliary artery and vein.

"If it's true that Satan is only the author of sin, then why, dear Shirley, in the fires of the last day, was he not reduced to a state of nonexistence?"

The woman, whose desk plate read CANDICE WILCOX, lay silent before him. The Wind Minstrel was lost in ritual fantasy. "You told me he would perish, but he hasn't. Would you explain that, please?" he demanded.

He turned on the saw and cut the humerus bone just below th
e p
ectoralis minor muscles on the shoulder. He worked for twenty minutes. When he was through, he carefully loaded what he had removed into garbage bags--turned the twisties and packed everything into the large suitcase he had brought with him. He arranged the body, putting some books beneath her torso so that the head was lower. This, he knew, would allow the blood to drain from the body and eliminate lividity--discoloration from the collection of blood in the lower extremities. It turned the skin a deep purple and took almost nine hours to occur. He knew the police used lividity to fix time of death.

The Wind Minstrel needed to claim the whore as his divine work. He pulled out his branding iron with the special head. He had made it from a woman's electric curling iron. He plugged it in, waited for a minute till it got hot, and pressed it to Candice Wilcox's left breast. When he could smell flesh burning, he removed it and looked at the brand:

R. 13-15

The Wind Minstrel put his branding iron away, pulled out The Rat's notebook PC, disconnected the incoming phone line from the fax machine on Candice Wilcox's desk, and hooked it into The Rat's PC.

Once again, he typed in the system username, root, and the password, GOD. After a few seconds, the system logon welcome message came on the screen. Then he typed in:

EnviroLog

The environmental log was in the building's computer under the Enviro
-
Log program. In a few seconds, up on his screen came the building's fort
y z
one listings. He was on the west side of the building in Zone 4-W. H
e h
ad already prepared a program on his own computer and stored it for this moment. He had named the program WindLog. He uploaded the program into the building computer. WindLog would override the climate control for Zone 4-W. This new program would first drive the heat in that sector as high as it would go, approximately 110 degrees. The Wind Minstrel knew that this would keep the dead body's temperature high while he was on his way back to Tampa. Since the police also used cooling body temperature to fix time of death, the heat would throw them off. But he also knew that if he left the heat on, the police would be alert to his deception, so he had instructed WindLog to shut off the heat in 4-W at 6:30 A
. M
. and turn the air-conditioning on full, driving the room temperature back down to approximately 70 degrees by 7:30. Then his program would reset the environmental control to the normal temperature of 72. But The Rat was clever, and he knew that there would be a record of this wild temperature fluctuation, so he had written another program, which he had named BogusLog. It would quietly replace a section of the building's environmental log and show a normal temperature record for 4-W. As its last act, WindLog would erase itself and leave BogusLog to reflect the incorrect time and temperature information, leaving no trace of The Wind Minstrel's magic.