Final Victim (1995)

by Stephen Cannell

  “You wouldn’t believe this neat doctor I got. His name is Dr. Dumbbell… . That’s what he told me and Mommy his name was… “

  Lockwood knew she was talking about Dr. Dumbolten, who had performed the tonsillectomy last year.

  “Isn’t that a stupid name, Dr. Dumbbell? I think it’s very stupid, but he’s a good doctor anyway, because I don’t even have a sore throat. I called Mommy and I tried to tell her, but I can’t find her anywhere. She’s not at home or at the office. I talked to Mrs. Watkins, that’s her new secretary, and she kept crying and wouldn’t say where Mommy is. And I’m ready to go home… . Where is Mommy … ?”

  Lockwood looked at his daughter, then at Beth, who shook her head in a gesture that said, Don’t tell her. He didn’t. They talked about her year-old operation and they talked about her cat, Fluffy, which had been run over by a car last summer but which was now still very much alive in Heather’s mind. Then she said something that almost doubled him over with anguish.

  “Daddy, do you ever talk to God?” she said, looking at him earnestly and holding his hand.

  “Sometimes I do, yes …

  “Well, see … I talk to him all the time. I think God knows best and God would never let anything happen to hurt me because He loves me … just like he loves you and Mommy.”

  “I know He does… .”

  “When I talk to Him, you know what I ask for?”

  “What?”

  “I ask for you and Mommy to get back together … for you to fall in love again. I ask God in my prayers. I’ve been doing it every night for a year. I don’t want to bug Him, but it’s very important, and guess what?”

  “What?” Lockwood said.

  “God answered my prayers.”

  “Good …” Lockwood’s mouth was dry. His heart was skipping beats. He could feel it pounding in his throat.

  “See … ‘cause last Saturday, after you came, I asked Mommy if she still loved you like before … if we could ever be a family again. And you know what she said?”

  “No, honey, what did she say?”

  “She said she always loved you … that she never stopped and that she always would. Then she said that it was up to you. She said, ‘When Daddy wants it, it will happen.’ That’s what she said. So now I’m asking God to make you love her back.”

  Lockwood had lost so much. His timing had been simply terrible. He had realized the enormity of his mistake just as Claire was snatched from him. He held Heather’s hand and smiled at her through his tears. “I’ll make you a deal, Pumpkin,” he said, using the childhood nickname he had for her. “When we go home to Mommy’s house, I’ll come home and I’ll live with you. I’ll take care of you.”

  “But Mommy does that, and you have all your important work in Washington. How can you, Daddy?”

  “I’ll get some other kind of work. I’ll get a job that will give us lots of time together.”

  “Can we go riding?” she said, smiling.

  “Anytime you want.”

  “Can we paint pictures?”

  “You bet. And you wanna know something else? I won’t ever break this promise to you. It’s a promise on a promise.”

  She smiled at him and squeezed his hand. “See, when you ask God for stuff, He listens,” she told him sagely.

  “I know… .”

  He reached down and hugged her again, and this time she didn’t squirm. But after a moment he felt her stiffen slightly, so he pulled away and looked at her. Her eyes were clouded with concern.

  “Daddy, I wonder where Mommy is… . She’s never late. You don’t think something could have happened to her … ?”

  Lockwood didn’t trust his voice to answer.

  *

  Malavida couldn’t bring Claire Lockwood back, but he made a deal with himself. He decided he would find out where the crazy son of a bitch who killed her was hiding. He had the number of the cell pod in Tampa, where the call to Hoyt Tower had come from. He had his computer and he had Karen Dawson’s credit card.

  He would try to set up a triangulation. He had bought some surplus clothes with Karen’s money at a second-hand store and hitchhiked to Macon, where he’d stolen a car from a supermarket parking lot. He had loaded his meager belongings into the trunk and driven from Macon due south into Florida. It was ten P. M., Tuesday night, when he pulled into a Best Western motel off Interstate Highway 75 and parked his stolen car in the back where the plates wouldn’t be seen by a passing patrol car.

  He set up his computer in the single room he’d rented on the second floor of the large Colonial structure. He could hear trucks on the Interstate growling like Rottweilers. He plugged his computer into the wall and went to work, trying to get a list of calls from the cellphone site that had relayed The Rat’s call to Atlanta. He was focusing on time charges for April 12-13, the night of Candice Wilcox’s murder, hoping The Rat hadn’t bothered to hide his billing address for the call.

  The Rat was worried. The barge where he had been doing the reconstruction and storage was buried deep in the Tampa swamp, but he felt exposed like never before. He hoped he had closed the door of redemption by killing the woman in Studio City, but he couldn’t be sure. Only time could answer it. So The Rat waited and worried. He knew he had to reconstruct the answers that Shirley had taken to her grave. Her grave was actually empty. Her remains had perished in the fire, but her empty grave beckoned him. He had been there often. He would go after dark and roll in the dirt, trying to relive the wonderful, terrifying memory of her death. But finally he got no pleasure from going. Her grave held no wisdom… . It was a place without meaning that was filled with the darkness of oblivion.

  Shirley had told him he had the mark of the Beast on him and was destined to go to the grave-like pit of darkness. To avoid this, he had burned the house where he lived, killing Shirley. He’d hoped the Deity would be fooled and think he had perished with her. From that point, The Rat had become a vile creature, scurrying in the darkness, hiding from God. But he was always afraid God would spot him and punish him for his deeds.

  It was this fear that made him finally decide to move the barge. He made a deal with himself. Despite the huge effort involved, he would find a better place—at least until the Second Resurrection, which The Wind Minstrel said was coming soon. It was not the resurrection of the Holy Spirit, as lied about in the New Testament. It was, instead, the resurrection of the unrighteous. When that glorious day arrived, The Rat could destroy the forces of Christ and his armies. He could stand in the sunshine. He could finally breathe the clean air. He could finally spit into the face of God.

  Karen had watched Lockwood’s plane take off, heading back to California. She felt lost and abandoned. The tragic, strained look in Lockwood’s eyes had shown her the depth of his grief.

  She had cabbed back to the Customs Building and ended up at the little office in B-16. She sat in front of the computer, looking vacantly at the starburst on the cobalt-blue screen… . A stack of new VICAP folders was sitting on her desk and she thumbed through them listlessly… . Her mind went back to her father, Robert Dawson, Ph. D., DNSC, BSEE. More letters than the Chinese alphabet. She smiled, remembering Lockwood’s remark. She always remembered her father with both love and regret. He had wanted so much for her… . His dying wish had defined her, but it had altered her life.

  Her father had always been preoccupied. His high-horsepower thoughts had consumed him, and it was this trait that finally claimed him. He had stepped out between two cars at the university and been hit by a van driven by a student. He hovered between life and death for weeks. Karen and her mother stayed awake nights and prayed that God would bring him back… . While they prayed, the vacuum pumps hissed, the catheters dripped, and the monitors beeped. It was an ugly concert of fluids and electrodes that played to a frightened audience of two.

  Then, one afternoon, he regained consciousness and asked for her. Karen was in school. Her mother came and got her and brought her to his bedside. He looked up and told Kar
en that the best of him was in her, that he had given her his greatest gift … his unrelenting mind. And it was true. She was a brilliant student and had been advanced beyond her grade three times. She was only twelve years old and in the eleventh grade. He had insisted she take her practice college boards and she scored a perfect 1,600. As he lay in his hospital bed, he made her promise that she would go to college immediately. That she wouldn’t waste any more of her valuable learning time in high school. She said yes because she didn’t want to say anything that would upset him. He looked so weak and frail … She knew once he was better, she could talk him out of the promise.

  Two days later, Robert Dawson died of pneumonia. He slipped into a coma, leaving them as quietly as a drifting cloud. He had been the main force of her life. She felt his dying wish could not be broken. She entered the University of Michigan four days after her thirteenth birthday. She lived with her widowed aunt in Flint, just up the road. Every afternoon she sat alone in the main quad outside the student center and ate her lunch while she watched the other students talking and laughing. She graduated three years later and did her postgraduate work at Princeton. She had been given great gifts. She knew it must be true, because her father had told her so. She had the gifts of health and looks and her wonderful analytical mind … but despite it all, she was always lonely. It was shortly after graduation that she began to battle boredom.

  By Tuesday afternoon the room in the basement was getting unbearably stuffy. She had caught up with all the updates that Operations had sent. She looked at the computer and the completed stack of VICAP folders, then she reached into her briefcase and again pulled out the Rat’s profile. “The Rat,” she had noted “is a nocturnal rodent.” She turned on the computer and accessed VICAP. She inputted all the information on Candice Wilcox’s death: the surgical data on the removal of her arms, the fact that her face was covered by her sweater, the peri-mortem masturbation, the sexual substitution with the desk scissors, and the overpowering blitz attack, including the wound made by a narrow blade or scalpel. She entered it and waited… . After less than a minute she got a hit. Up on the screen flashed a case code:

  H. F. DT. MI. 67-94 108.01

  She knew that stood for “Homicide, Female. Detroit, Michigan.” The sixty-seventh killing in that city in 1994. The 108.01 was a Uniform Crime Report number. All crimes were categorized by number, starting with criminal enterprise homicides at 100 and going all the way to group excitement homicides at 143. The decimal points were for sub-headings. The 108.01 stood for indiscriminate felony murder, which meant that the police in Michigan felt that it was a homicide planned in advance without a specific victim in mind.

  Karen asked the computer for the case file … and in seconds she was looking at the face of a woman named Leslie Bowers, age thirty-five. She had been murdered in her house late at night. Leslie’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac. She had a similar narrow-blade knife wound in her chest. The angle and depth of the track indicated she had been grabbed from behind. The crime scene photos, and police and autopsy reports, showed that her legs had been amputated surgically, her face covered by a tablecloth. When they found her, she had been masturbated on. The perp was a secretor, and from his sperm they determined he had AB blood. A candlestick from a nine-foot-high dormer shelf had been jammed inside her vagina.

  This, in Karen’s opinion, was not an indiscriminate felony murder. The Michigan police had mislabeled it. She thought it was more likely a personal cause homicide. Karen also knew instantly that it was the work of the same killer when she saw the identical brand on Leslie Bowers’s left breast.

  The National Crime Institute said any series of more than three murders—that included a cooling-off period between crimes—represented serial murder. Karen was now sure The Rat was a serial killer. God knew how many others he had murdered and mutilated. For a case to be in the VICAP system, the local police department had to take the time to enter it. Often they didn’t go to the trouble; that was the system’s tragic flaw.

  She picked up the phone and called Detective Stiner at home in Atlanta. She finally tracked him down at his house, where he was having dinner. He told Karen that the autopsy had proven that the cause of death had been the initial strike to Candice’s chest with the narrow blade. And all of the mutilations had been post-mortem. He also confirmed what she had already suspected: When the coroner took swabs off Candice’s body, he had found traces of semen.

  “Was he a secretor?” Karen asked.

  “Sure was.”

  “Was it AB blood?”

  “How’d you know that?” he asked.

  “There was another murder in Michigan, same kind of wound, same kind of surgical amputations, only he took her legs below the knees. Her name was Leslie Bowers. It happened in November of ‘94. She had semen on her and it was from AB blood.”

  “You know, you’re pretty good at this, Miss Dawson,” Stiner drawled. “I ever need any help on something, you mind if I send you some crime scene pictures and forensic printouts?”

  “Anytime … Listen, Detective, this guy, I think he may be very, very big… .”

  “Where’d that come from?” Stiner said, his wife now glaring at him from the dining room table.

  “The sexual substitute in this Michigan murder was a candlestick… . The mate to it was on a nine-foot-high shelf… . I doubt the UnSub would climb up to get it. It was a random choice; I think he just reached up and pulled it down.”

  “Nine-foot shelf? He’d have to be at least seven feet tall.”

  “I know. It’s just a guess, but anybody that big might have been noticed… . You should ask around. This UnSub spent a lot of time setting up Candice. That means he probably went up and checked the office, maybe pretending to be a deliveryman … or a messenger, or something. He’d want to get the lay of the land. You might ask if anybody saw a very tall man, perhaps disfigured. Maybe we can get an eyewitness description.”

  “Okay,” Stiner said, and, seeing his wife’s rising anger, he got off the phone.

  Karen was alone in the basement, looking at the computer. The silence and her loneliness began to get to her. After a minute she downloaded the Leslie Bowers information, including all of the police reports and autopsy photos, then left the room.

  It was nine o’clock when she got back tc her Washington apartment. She sat at her desk and read the rest of the Bowers file; it was full of unanswered questions. She finally pushed it aside and looked at her watch. She knew that Lockwood was in California by now and she found herself thinking of him. Three or four times she reached for the phone to call, but she didn’t have anything except his beeper number and she wasn’t even sure he had it with him. She promised herself she would do something to help Lockwood escape his pain. She would use her profiling skills to find this animal who had killed his wife. Maybe that would help mend him. It seemed like a project worthy of her huge intellect. She had somehow become attached to him in a very short time. It didn’t feel like just sexual attraction; this was something else as well. John Lockwood presented a different equation. She had tried to understand it, but the more she analyzed it, the more it mystified her. It was emotional and chemical and very unsettling. She knew it might hurt or disappoint her, or even destroy guarded parts of her, but maybe it wouldn’t bore her. She also knew she had a delicately balanced emotional and mental mechanism. It was all she could do to keep the twelve-cylinder monster in her head from attacking her.

  The phone on her bedside table rang. She reached over and picked it up. “Hello …” she said hesitantly.

  “If I asked for your help, would you give it to me or get me busted?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.

  “Malavida?” She was surprised to hear from him.

  “I fucked up, Miss Dawson … fucked up big. I got that lady killed.” “I know,” she said softly.

  “I wanna run a campaign on the buster who did it. I think I can find out where he is. But it needs two people… .”


  “You still using my credit card?” she said, ” ‘Cause I canceled it yesterday.”

  “I maxed it out yesterday.”

  “Where are you?”

  “You blow me in and I’m gonna go back to the joint for twice the time,” he said. “Can I trust you?”

  “You’re too much. You called me,” she said.

  “I need to hear it, chica. Can I trust you? Tell me.”

  “Yes, despite the fact you played me like a mark,” she said hotly. “I had to. I apologize. I couldn’t go back.”

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “You got a cellphone?”

  “Yeah …”

  “Gimme the number… .”

  She gave it to him, and, while he was writing it down, she asked again, “Where are you, Mal? You’re in Tampa, aren’t you?”

  “Yep. I’m gonna use the Snoopy Home Shopping Network to pick up what we need. Get on a plane and get down here. I’ll call you at noon tomorrow and give you an address where we can meet.”

  She was silent. She wasn’t sure what she was getting herself into.

  “Have we got a deal?” he asked.

  “Deal,” she finally answered.

  Chapter 18

  THE KILL/DIE RATIO

  He never left her room. All night, Lockwood slept on the short, hard leather couch under the basket of colorful, wide-eyed hippos.

  When Heather was awake, he held her hand and talked to her about horses and her painting, her school and friends. He let her know that her grandparents were coming to visit. Heather’s concern about her mother’s disappearance was growing hourly. She was increasingly agitated, her eyes darting wildly around. Any noise in the hall brought her to an upright position. “What’s that? Is that Mommy?” she would demand.

  It finally happened when she was sound asleep. At three A. M., Lockwood was awakened by a mournful cry. He sat up, not sure for a moment where it was coming from. He looked over and saw that Heather was tossing in a desperate tangle of bed sheets and blankets… . The horrible sound coming out of her seemed manufactured in some primal cavern deep in her soul. He moved quickly to the bed and grabbed her shoulders.