Final Victim (1995)

by Stephen Cannell

  “Can you tell us a little more about Malavida Chacone’s condition?” Trisha Rains asked, her straightened black hair bobbing and beginning to lose its tight set in the oppressive morning heat.

  “He was a fugitive from justice and is now back in the hospital being closely guarded. If he survives his injuries, he will be transported back to Lompoc, California, where he was doing time before he was released by a Customs agent named John Lockwood. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of that.” He paused, wondering if he’d said too much. “That’s about all I can say for now,” he concluded.

  The camera crew shut off their lights and Trisha Rains put a hand on the back of her neck, holding her hair away to cool herself.

  “I need a reverse. We can shoot it over by the house. Get the smoking remains over my shoulder,” she said to her crew, and they moved off, leaving Grady Raynor smiling. He then saw Karen as she held up her cellphone.

  “Just got a call from my SAC in D. C. and my District Supervr down here. They want me and Lockwood back, at the Federal Building in Tampa, forthwith.”

  “In the words of that great American sports legend George Steinbrenner, ‘Fuck ‘em.’ “

  “Hey, Detective, I’m just a bystander here, but your best bet of holding on to this case, which is about two hours away from going national, is to set up a joint-op with Customs. If you don’t, they’re gonna go over your head to the Governor and you’re gonna be up in the bleachers with Steinbrenner eating a foot-long.”

  He looked at her for a puzzling moment while his walnut-sized brain calculated the truth in her remark.

  “You do this for me, and I’ll do a Grady Raynor commercial at Justice,” she added. Then another news crew moved in, looking for a statement. They turned on their lights. Raynor’s eyes darted over to them, anxious to get at it.

  “Okay. You gimme a number where I can reach you.” “We’re at the Best Western in Tampa, the one by the water.”

  “Roommates?” he said, a leer creeping up on his drganized, pockmarked face.

  “Grow up, Detective,” she said softly.

  “Lou,” he yelled at a police lieutenant in a brown uniform, “take these two back to Tampa an’ drop ‘em at the Federal Building. Stay with ‘em.”

  The lieutenant handled the first part of the order, not the second.

  They called a cab from the lobby of the Federal Building and slipped away from their police guard through a side door. They picked up Karen’s car at the boat rental, drove over and got Leonard Land’s dark blue truck at the Tampa hospital, then headed back to the Best Western, packed everything, and checked out. It was noon by the time they stood in the dense heat in the parking lot, trying to decide where to go.

  “Let’s get a place in St. Pete or in Clearwater,” Lockwood said.

  “We get out of this dickhead’s jurisdiction, maybe get a little breathing room.”

  “I drove through Clearwater Beach yesterday. There’s an EconoLodge near the water, with special rates,” she volunteered.

  He nodded and they drove out of the parking lot. Lockwood, in Leonard’s truck, followed Karen’s rental car. They crossed Tampa Bay on the Courtney Campbell Causeway, drove through Clearwater, then took the smaller Garden Memorial Causeway over to Clearwater Beach.

  They rented two rooms at the EconoLodge. The accommodations were clean, bland, and decorated in pastels. Both had windows that overlooked the Gulf of Mexico across a wide, sandy beach. It was almost three in the afternoon by the time they had all of this accomplished.

  “I’m going to run this reg slip with DMV and load this new stuff into VICAP,” she said. “I can use the modem on my laptop, then go right into the system from here.”

  “Okay. While you’re doing that, I’ll go through the truck, see if anything lives there we can use.” She nodded and went inside.

  He looked down and saw some of Malavida’s dried blood in the truck bed. He wondered how Mal was doing. He and Karen had discussed going down to Miami and sitting there until Malavida was out of danger. After a spirited argument, he had convinced her to discard the idea as sentimentally worthwhile, but operationally stupid. He knew it would be a game-ending move for him. He was a loose cannon by anybody’s calculation. Going to Miami was an invitation to an arrest. He knew, so far, he was good for at least one count of obstructing justice; probably also good for felonious malfeasance of duty, and aiding and abetting a prner during an escape. That charge was probably beatable, but not the reckless endangerment of a prner, impersonating an officer, withholding evidence … The list was endless.

  Lockwood and Karen had decided to keep track of Malavida’s progress by phone, maybe risk a visit once he was conscious. Karen had called the Miami hospital just before they checked out of the Best Western. She’d gotten almost nothing from the floor nurse, who had told her Malavida was out of surgery and listed as critical. “How critical?” Karen had asked.

  “Critical critical.”

  Lockwood had been surprised by the depth of Karen’s concern. He was now sure that, during the short amount of time he had been in California, something had started up between them. It annoyed him. Had he been harboring a secret fantasy about Karen? In the wake of Claire’s murder, had he been secretly hoping for a shot at Awesome Dawson? He hoped he wasn’t that shallow, but he had been surprising himself a lot lately.

  Inside the motel room, Karen hooked her modem to the computer and started to check out Leonard Land. There was no criminal record on him in the Federal computer. She cross-referenced with NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. Nothing there either. She punched the name into the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles, including the truck registration number, and up on her screen popped a driver’s license picture. Leonard looked slightly different from when he had attacked her. In the picture he seemed wistful, almost pathetic. He was smiling earnestly, his bald head and missing eyebrows not as menacing as in the awful moment when he’d grabbed her outside the house in the wetlands. The address they already had: 2200 Little Manatee Road. The license said he was twenty-seven years old, six feet eleven inches tall, and 367 pounds. No hair, brown eyes. That was it. She downloaded the information and picture, then stored them in her hard drive. She wished Malavida were with them; his dark eyes and dry humor hung with her like a lingering fragrance. She prayed quietly for him. “Please, God, don’t let him die,” she heard herself whisper.

  She turned her mind back to the target. She was pretty sure that Leonard wouldn’t go back to his job even if he had one. He was in the wind, hiding someplace, ready to strike from the darkness. Something else was moving restlessly in the back of her mind … a thought or feeling that she couldn’t quite capture. Finally she slapped it down. It was a feeling she’d gotten when Leonard grabbed her out in the yard and dragged her into his kitchen. He had held her down on the table, breathing through his mouth. She was looking up into his crazed eyes, and before he hit her with his fist, in that instant she knew that this was about more than just ritualistic homicides. It was about survival. She didn’t know how she knew that, but somehow she read it on him or in his eyes.

  Karen sat thinking for a minute, then turned back to her computer. She needed to see if she could throw a wider net and get a better VICAP sample with the new specifics she had. She always learned a lot about a killer from studying the victim. Something had drawn Leonard Land to Candice Wilcox and Leslie Bowers… . And then she remembered the strange picture that Lockwood had told her about, the one that was in the rusting garbage barge. He had said that the woman’s body had been divided into parts with Magic Marker and that each section had been dated. She wondered if Leonard was constructing a woman out of harvested body parts.

  She reviewed again what she knew, trying to arrange the facts differently to get a new pattern. Leonard Land was twenty-seven, and thus fit perfectly the mean age for serial murderers who left behind “organized” crime scenes. She knew from her research that most serial criminals began to realize the scope
of their hopelessness in their early twenties, and it was at this time that fantasies about striking back began to grow. Around age twenty-five, the anger and depression would get to the point where they could no longer relieve the pressure by the torture or killing of animals. They would then begin to kill people. An organized crime scene indicated a slightly older killer. And two years were usually added to the mean age. Traditionally, a serial murderer killed to relive some specific sick fantasy. The act was often ritualistic in nature. Karen knew that the ritual surrounding the murder rarely changed because it was the ritual that was the real reason for the crime. The ritual drove the act thus creating a pattern that could be used to match other murders. After a serial killing, there was a cooling-off period, which could be anything from less than a week to several years. Then, inevitably, the subject killed again to relieve the pressure, and the whole cycle started over. If the time period between murders shortened, the subject was said to be degenerating, becoming potentially more destructive and more violent, as well as more careless.

  Karen sat in the room in Clearwater Beach, listening to the distant surf. Leonard had told his pen pal in the Oslo prn that he mailed totems. She wondered if he used everything that he harvested at the crime scene. He had taken both of Candice Wilcox’s arms, both of Leslie Bowers’s legs. She wondered if he had discarded anything. She leaned over her keyboard and began to construct a new query. She asked VICAP to list any record of body parts being sent through the mail. She narrowed the request to within a week or two of the dates of Candice’s and Leslie’s murders. She entered the data, then sat back and waited. Just as she was about to lose hope, she got one bounceback.

  The computer showed that a Florida sheriff named Carl Zeno had taken into evidence a severed female hand with the fingertips removed. The hand was at the Tampa Coroner’s Office. It had been delivered to a woman on April 13, one day after the murder of Candice Wilcox. The name of the woman who had received the hand was Tashay Roberts, 901 Court Road, Tampa, Florida.

  “John,” Karen called excitedly, “I got something!”

  Chapter 26

  FIVE O’CLOCK NEWS

  Sheriff Carl Zeno leaned back in his metal chair and put a dusty boot up on the corner of his desk. He sucked loudly on a toothpick and spun his wide-brimmed Smokey hat insolently on his index finger as he looked at them.

  “Tashay, she gets herself in with some pretty strange people,” he said, dropping the hat on the desk. “I’m her stepdaddy and that gives me some rights, I spose, but you know how that is… . I ain’t blood, so I do what I can t’help her mom, Cherise, with her … but it don’t always go down the way I want.”

  They were in the Sheriffs substation in Fort Myers, Florida. Karen had shown Zeno her Customs ID and introduced Lockwood as a Customs Inspector. Zeno had written down their names but had not asked to see Lockwood’s badge. The office was a five-man cop-shop in a one-story brick building. Yellow linoleum floors, metal desks, and the smells of disinfectant and tobacco smoke completed the ambience.

  Carl Zeno was blond, with a rock-hard handshake and a Sam Brown gun harness stretched tight over a potbelly. He had good-ol’-boy charm that barely hid a nasty disposition.

  Karen thought she’d hate to be pulled over by this guy on an empty highway and say the wrong thing.

  ” ‘Course she’s got this Bobby Shiff guy she lives with now,” he said sneering. “Hosed off and naked, that freak don’t weigh a hundred pounds. Tashay, she’s real easy on the eyes, but you oughta see Shiff … looks like an extra in a vampire movie. He sings in a Death Metal band called Baby Killer … calls himself Satan T. Bone. Don’t y’love that?”

  Karen looked over and caught Lockwood’s eyes.

  Zeno caught the glance. His gaze was lazy and insolent, and there was a small smile playing at the side of his mouth.

  “What’d you say your name was again, sugar?”

  “You wrote it down. It’s right in front of you.”

  He smiled at her. “We don’t get good-lookin’ lady cops in this unit. All we got is bats with hats. Got one patrol woman on this shift, looks like Mike Ditka.”

  “That’s real helpful,” Lockwood said, smiling. “But we’d like to get in touch with Tashay Roberts. We checked the address on Court Road in Tampa; nobody answers the door.”

  “She and Shiff are down in Miami. He’s got a gig down there. Left last night. She dropped by an’ gimme two tickets … like I’m gonna go down there an’ listen to that stringbean holler into a twenty-dollar sound system. I can hear better music sitting right here, listening to drunks fart.”

  “If you’re not using the tickets, we’ll take ‘em,” Lockwood said.

  “Let’s see here …” He reached into his pocket slowly; then, not finding them, into his desk drawer. He finally extracted two tickets and held them up. “Twenty dollars gets you into seats C-16 and 17, front an’ center. Ear and nose plugs are extra.”

  Lockwood pulled out his wallet and dropped the twenty on the desk. “That hand she got sent, is it still in the Tampa morgue?” he asked as Zeno handed him the tickets.

  “Far as I know. But it ain’t got no fingertips so y’can’t print it… .”

  “I wanna get a blood type and tissue match. I think it came off a dead woman in Atlanta.”

  “You go on up there an’ talk to Deke Sanders. Dr. Death … dead bodies, bad jokes, and Muzak. Runs that icebox like it was the fuckin’ Tonight Show. You laugh at his jokes, he’ll give you anything you want.”

  Lockwood looked at Karen. “Anything more you wanna ask him?”

  “Down here,” Zeno said, “the men do the investigatin’ an’ the ladies string the yellow tape an’ chalk up the sidewalk.” He turned and smiled at Karen. “But go on an’ ask anyway, Honey.”

  “You ever sleep with your stepdaughter?” Karen deadpanned.

  Zeno sat up straight in the chair. It was as if she’d lit him up with a thousand volts. Then he started to flush and stammer. “Uh … I .. . What you talkin”bout? What the hell kinda dumb-ass question is that? ‘Course not. Why don’t you two get outta here? I got a heapa things to attend to.”

  Karen got up; as they left, a light sheen of sweat had already started to form on Carl Zeno’s forehead.

  Outside the substation, Lockwood stopped her before they got into the car. “Bull’s-eye, but where did that come from?”

  “Guy was pissing me off”

  “How did you know?” He grinned at her.

  “Picture of his family behind the desk. I figured the sexy one was Tashay. He was holding her closer than his wife. And that story about her dropping off the tickets … She drives all the way down here to give that slimeball two tickets instead of mailing ‘em? And the way he said she was easy on the eyes. I don’t know, it just hit me as possible.”

  Lockwood smiled as he got into the car. The best cops always had that instinct: the ability to play streaky hunches that sometimes defied logic but hit the 10 ring. Often that ability could make a case. You couldn’t teach it; it didn’t come with a uniform or badge, or in the long, tedious classes at Quantico. You got issued that instinct by a higher power.

  He’d once been trying to arrest a child pornographer in a small Georgia town. The investigation had led him to a psychologist who treated disturbed children. He’d been there just to get background information, but he’d looked at the photographs of children on the wall and knew instinctively that he was talking to the perp… . It was such a long shot, it was off the boards. But he knew the child psychologist was molesting the children. There was something strangely sexual about the innocent pictures. Lockwood couldn’t describe it or say how he knew, but he did. He set up a stakeout and busted the doctor two nights later.

  The five o’clock news had the whole story. The Rat watched it on the television in the darkened hull of the rusting barge. The generator hummed outside, causing a pleasant vibration in the hull. He saw what was left of his house on the newscast … scattered debris, the smoking
ruins. He saw the picture of Malavida Chacone with his prn number across his chest. The field correspondent, Trisha Rains, said Chacone was a famous computer criminal. And then The Rat knew where he’d heard the name. The black eyes of the Mexican convict stared straight at him from the TV and bored holes of pain through The Rat’s head. Malavida was a famous cracker, some said the best ever. He’d read about the “Mac Attack” in computer journals. The Rat now knew it was Chacone who had penetrated his secret chat room on the Internet. Killing the woman in Studio City had solved nothing. It had only made things worse, because now there was this other man, this Customs agent whom the newscasts had mentioned.

  The Rat had been clever and lucky. The bomb in his basement had gotten Chacone. The newscast said that he was hanging between life and death in a Miami hospital. The Rat wondered if he could use his computer to find a way to cut the cord. Then the story switched to John Lockwood. It showed a picture of a handsome, dark-haired man standing at the crime scene. Next to him was a woman. Her back was to the camera. She was identified as Dr. Karen Dawson. The Rat moved closer to the TV screen and leaned in, looking intently at the woman. Then she turned and he could see her more clearly. It was the woman he had caught snooping at his house. He was troubled and frightened. The newscast ended, but The Rat remained unusually agitated for a long time.

  Malavida Chacone, John Lockwood, Karen Dawson … What was the significance? Was it a sign? What should he do?

  “When cornered, The Rat fights.” His voice echoed in the hollow barge. Then he turned to his shelf of cracking tools. He selected his best UNIX cracking kit. He booted up his Toshiba notebook. When it was up, he slipped the program into the machine. He would start with John Lockwood and the Government computer at U. S. Customs. He hunched over his keyboard, his body damp with sweat. His fingers danced on the plastic stage before him… .

  The Loomis Theater was on Fourth Street and Miami Avenue, a half block from the downtown bus terminal. It was in a bad neighborhood. Taggers had scrawled bizarre artwork everywhere. The old theater had been shut down for almost two years, giving up its audience to the busy mall Cineplex Theaters. The Loomis had three hundred seats and a steeple tower that rose two stories above the marquee. Pasted onto the billboard was a sign scrawled in Magic Marker on butcher paper: