Final Victim (1995)

by Stephen Cannell

  It took her a moment to focus. She was looking at something big and curved. She struggled to identify it. A tire well. She was on the floor in the back of a truck or van. She felt a change in direction and then the sudden vibration of wheels passing over lane dots. She knew then that the vehicle was in motion. She didn’t know why she was there or why she hurt so badly. Her mind struggled to remember. She could see the back of a man’s skinny right arm as he drove. She tried to ask him for help but she couldn’t move her mouth. Where was she? What was that horrible music that was playing?

  She fought to put more pieces in place and then she heard the moaning again. Her body wouldn’t move; she tried to turn her head and finally managed. She was looking into a tangle of blood-soaked blond hair, not three feet from her. She tried to see through the mess but couldn’t, and then the head moved and the hair fell away and she could see the face. It was bloodied and swollen. A girl, vaguely familiar. Karen thought she remembered her … and then a big piece fell back into place. The public toilet … the attack … the baseball bat swinging at her.

  “Tashay,” she finally whispered to the girl, “Tashay?” The girl opened her eyes and the two exchanged a long look. A silent message of desperation passed between them. Then Tashay Roberts closed her eyes without speaking, cutting off the unspoken communication. Karen tried to roll into a better position. She struggled to turn over. It was then that she discovered she had been lashed to speaker hooks that were screwed into the floor of the van.

  The skinny driver heard her moving and turned to look at her. “Keep quiet. Make any noise, you’re gonna be pissing backwards.”

  She could see him clearly now. He was milk-white, with long black hair. The intermittent sunlight through passing trees shot lines and shadows across his gruesome, skinny features. The ghoulish tattoos under his eyes gave his hollow face a skull-like intensity. Then Baby Killer started screaming a second verse through the speakers. Satan T. Bone’s raspy voice filled the van:

  It ain’t a nice place, So shit in her face.

  She’s got no place to hide, So ya rip her inside.

  Let the dogs eat her eyes.. . Yeah, dogs eat her eyes.

  The horrible serenade continued. Tashay moaned. Karen tried to gather her resources. She remembered most of it now; the driver was Bob Shiff. He had hit her with the bat… . She didn’t know why. What she did know was that she had somehow badly miscalculated, and now was in a desperate fight for her life. She could feel the van exit the highway and come to a halt. Then they turned right and made a stopand-go trip along a street. She could see patterns of moving sunlight on the walls and ceiling of the van. She could occasionally hear cars pull up next to them. Finally they picked up speed and Karen thought that they were on another highway of some kind. A short time later they made a hard right then pulled to a stop. She saw Shiff get out from behind the driver’s seat and heard him walk to the back. The rear door opened and he leaned in. She could not turn her head to see him, but she felt him above her.

  “You two make trouble, and I be shootin’ on yer ass.” He unhooked Tashay from the floor and dragged her out of the van by her heels. She moaned. As he got her out of the back, Karen heard her head hit the bumper. She fell to the ground and let out a cry. “Shut the fuck up!” he shouted at her.

  Karen couldn’t see where they were. Her head was facing in the wrong direction and she couldn’t lift it up to turn around and look out the back of the van. She could feel the hot morning air, and she filled her lungs, trying to summon as much strength as she could. Somewhere far away she heard Sunday church bells ringing. Moments later Shiff was back. He poked her.

  “You awake?” he said.

  She said nothing, tried not to move. He reached in and over and untied her. She waited until he had unhooked her hands and legs and had started to pull her out. Then she focused all her energy, reared back, and kicked him in the face as hard as she could. He fell backwards, yelling in confusion and pain. She struggled to get to a sitting position, but she was dizzy and fell sideways. Shiff was immediately back on her, his skinny arms pushing her back into the van. Then he grabbed something. She didn’t see what, but when he hit her, her head spun with the force of the blow. She felt no pain but saw a blinding light … and then nothing.

  Malavida and Lockwood ordered a car from Hertz. They waited in Bungalow 7 of The Swallow Inn for the rental agent to deliver it. Lockwood had called the Miami police. He had tried to talk to Fred T. Fredrickson but couldn’t get through. When he explained his concern about Karen’s disappearance, he was transferred to Missing Persons. He was having trouble making himself understood, so he handed the phone to Malavida, who gave the information to a policewoman but refused to identify himself. Lockwood knew the case would be tossed on a pile with hundreds of runaways and would get little attention. After he hung up, Lockwood watched with distress while Malavida got out of bed and, using a chair for support, moved to the bathroom. Neither of them could get around at all. They moved like two old convalescents doing a Thorazine shuffle. Lockwood wasn’t sure he could drive; he was still having trouble with depth perception. When Malavida returned, he sat on the edge of the bed. They surveyed each other optimistically… . Each thought the other looked like hell.

  “How we gonna do this, Zanzo?” Malavida finally asked. “Don’t know,” Lockwood replied. “Gotta find …”

  “No shit.”

  Again they fell into silence. Then Malavida continued, “Before she went on TV yesterday, she showed me this picture of Shirley Land. It was an obit photo or something. She said she got it at the library along with some articles on how she died. I accessed the Miami library computer to see if I could pull anything up on Shirley, but this stuff must be too old. It’s not in their information bank … probably on microfilm.”

  “Microfilm,” Lockwood repeated, as if he’d never heard the word before.

  “Hey, get on board here, will ya? She could be in bad trouble. We probably don’t have much time,” Malavida said sharply.

  “I’m, ah … not … I.” Lockwood couldn’t get his thought out. Periodically his vocabulary just seemed to disappear. He knew what he wanted to say but couldn’t find the words. And then without warning, his grasp of language would come back. It was one of the most frustrating feelings he’d ever experienced.

  Malavida watched him and knew it had been a time-wasting mistake to bring Lockwood down. He was worse than useless. “We’re gonna get smoked,” he said. “Neither of us can move and you need a brain transplant. The gimp squad to the rescue. All we need is Martin Short to drive the car.”

  Lockwood sat and looked at him, still waiting for the right words to form. “You shouldn’ta loved her,” he said. “Wrong verb,” he added.

  “And you weren’t trying?”

  “Shouldn’ta done it. I told you. Said she was. She couldn’t …”

  He stopped as the right words left him but his anger swelled. “Fuck!” he shouted.

  “Hey, Lockwood, did it ever occur to you that I might be honest about my feelings toward her?”

  “No.”

  They glowered at one another.

  The rental agent showed up with the car ten minutes later. They had agreed to pay a fifty-dollar delivery charge, which, of course, would never get charged to them because Malavida had executed the whole thing by computer. All that needed to happen now was for Lockwood to take delivery of the car and sign the contract. Malavida was in a chair by the window when the agent knocked on the door. Lockwood used his hospital walker to get to the door. He folded it, placed it out of the way, opened the door, and stood teetering like the last drunk at a party. The agent took Lockwood’s license and watched while he signed the contract. Before he left, the young man turned. “You guys okay?” he asked, concerned by their appearance.

  “Sure are.” Malavida smiled painfully.

  “Upsy daisy,” Lockwood chipped in, selecting the wrong cliche.

  Malavida and Lockwood got into the rented gray Linc
oln Town Car with some difficulty. They agreed that Malavida would drive because of Lockwood’s impaired vision. Malavida got carefully behind the wheel and put his laptop on the seat. He watched the ex-Customs agent struggling to get into the passenger side.

  “Get in there, cocksucker,” Lockwood cursed at himself as he fumbled to get his legs into the car. Then he looked at Malavida for instructions.

  “We got one choice,” Malavida said. “We go to the library, see if we can get that material on Shirley Land. The picture Karen had was of the same woman we saw taped up inside that barge.”

  Lockwood knew there was a better move but he couldn’t pin it down. He struggled to think what it was.

  Malavida put the car in gear and started to pull out of The Swallow Inn.

  “No,” Lockwood said.

  “Whatta you mean no? You got a better idea?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  Lockwood looked at him blankly. “Can’t remember.”

  “You can’t remember?” Malavida shook his head in disgust. “At least you’re finally acting like a regular G-Man,” he said, and accelerated out of the parking lot, heading back along the river toward the highway.

  “Tashay Roberts,” Lockwood finally said, “knows something.”

  “Who’s Tashay Roberts?”

  Lockwood remembered now that Malavida had been in the hospital when he and Karen had talked to Bob Shiff and Tashay. He slowly formed the words, telling Malavida who they were and that Tashay had tried to contact them with information about Leonard Land. “Don’t know address,” he finally said.

  Malavida pulled over, grabbed his cellphone out of his pocket, and called Tampa and Miami Information. There was no listing for either of them.

  “These punk kids got unlisted numbers? Why?” Malavida complained.

  “Owe money … junkies,” Lockwood finally managed to say.

  Malavida grabbed the computer off the seat beside him. He reached into the pocket of his jacket, took out a small leather cracking kit, then removed a fone-phreaking diskette. He hooked his cellphone to the computer’s external modem and started to go to work on the phone company’s computer. Lockwood was sweating in the late-afternoon heat. He put down the window but it was still unbearably hot in the gray sedan. It took Malavida twenty minutes to break through. There was no listing for Tashay Roberts, but Bob Shift’s number was there. The billing address was 1818 Coral Grove Road, Miami … less than ten minutes from where they were parked.

  Chapter 38

  ESCAPE

  This time when Karen woke up she was surprisingly alert. She still felt horrible and her head and jaw ached. Her muscles screamed at her, but her senses were tingling. Even before she opened her eyes she could smell mildew and dust. She knew she was tied up, sitting on a cold floor. She could hear Tashay crying. Karen’s hands were lashed behind a wood post. She opened her eyes and looked around; there were boxes and junk piled everywhere. She determined that she was in a garage, but there was no room for a car. The garage had been completely taken over as a junk room. She could hear Tashay but couldn’t see her. Karen craned her neck and finally saw that Tashay was standing, slumped over, her hands tied to a chain under an old block-and-tackle that was hooked to the heavy center beam. Tashay was half hanging by her wrists, sagging with her knees bent, her head tilted down, her gaze on the floor between her legs.

  Karen took a moment and pushed everything but her terrible dilemma out of her mind. Her mouth was a pulsating bright spot of agony. The broken teeth had exposed nerves that screamed in pain. Karen knew she had to blot it out in order to function. She knew from past experience that if she acknowledged the pain, it would control her. She had been through bouts of agony before. She knew she had to put it on another level. Focus hard on something else. In the hospital, after the ALFA Wing fiasco, she’d had a lot of time to practice. She now focused her mind on her current dilemma and tried to dial the pain down. Her mind started to rapidly collect facts. She looked over at Tashay and saw that she had stopped bleeding. The blood that was on the floor between her feet was caked and dry. That told her they had been there for at least an hour. Satan T. Bone must be waiting for someone or something, she reasoned. Where were they? she wondered. From what she could see, the garage was a mess. Extremely drganized She didn’t think the mess belonged to Leonard Land. She had profiled him as compulsive and obsessive. He would be a neat freak; this garage would drive him nuts. She now focused on Tashay, who had stopped crying.

  “Tashay,” she said, her voice low and whispery.

  “Oh, God … oh, God … Why is he doing this? Why?” Tashay said and started to cry again, but she didn’t look up.

  “Tashay, you’ve gotta stop it. We’ve gotta get something going here.” Karen tried to straighten up but her arms and shoulders screamed at her. She winced as she struggled to push herself up the wood post. She was still dizzy, so she stopped and sat back on the cold concrete.

  “Oh, God … What’d I do? I was helpin’ him, why is he doin’ this? Why … why?” Tashay was becoming even more emotional, choking back huge, sobbing breaths.

  “Stop it!” Karen commanded loudly. “He’s going to kill us. You’ve gotta stop crying.” And then finally Tashay brought her gaze up from the floor and looked at Karen. One of her eyes was completely swollen shut. The blood that had been flowing out of the cut in her head had stained her silk blouse. She was in short-shorts and had dried blood on her legs and thighs.

  “I need to know what’s going on,” Karen said. She struggled to keep her voice calm. She could see Tashay was in panic, on the edge of hysteria. Karen surprised herself that she had such a firm grasp on her situation after having been knocked unconscious twice. “Why is Bob Shiff doing this?” Karen asked in a calm voice.

  “I don’t know… . I don’t know.” Her voice was slurred through swollen lips. “I swear. He’s been actin’ strange since you asked us about that guy … the big, ugly one …”

  “Leonard Land?”

  “Yeah. You were right, he came to all our concerts, but never to the house. Now, he’s been here twice this morning. He’s creepy. He calls Bob ‘Robbie.’ “

  “Robbie?” Karen said … and then she knew who Bob Shiff was. He was the missing foster brother, Robbie Land. She and Lockwood had wrongly assumed he was killed in Mississippi in the early eighties. If Bob Shiff was Robbie Land, it answered a lot of questions. Her mind was reeling with this information, fitting it into the puzzle. She knew that serial killers are not born but made, usually by parental abuse. Of course, the right psychological pre-dispositions and stressors have to exist, but, if Shirley had raised Robbie the way she had raised Leonard, it was not at all inconceivable that they could come out with similar pathologies. It also explained the Death Metal lyrics and the worship of other serial killers like Gacy and Dahmer. She wondered if it was possible that Leonard and Bob worked as a team—like Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono.

  “Tashay, is Bob helping Leonard commit these murders?” “What murders? Oh, God, why would he hurt me like he did?”

  “Can you move your hands? Can you get loose at all?”

  Tashay looked at Karen for a long moment, as if the idea hadn’t even occurred to her.

  “I hurt … I hurt so bad,” she said.

  “Tashay, see how close to me you can get.”

  Tashay Roberts moved slowly across the garage toward Karen. The block-and-tackle chain allowed her to get almost three feet nearer.

  “Lemme see if I can get up,” Karen said, and again she struggled to stand. She worked her legs under her and then started to rise up. This time, with careful effort, she controlled the dizziness. Her arms were lashed behind the post but she could slide them up slowly. The wood was rough and gouged her with splinters as she worked her way to a standing position. Then she rotated around until she could face Tashay.

  “We ain’t never gonna get loose… . We ain’t never,” Tashay moaned, and again s
he began to cry.

  “Tashay, stop it. Stop it right now!” Karen knew that her only chance of getting away was to include Tashay. She had to get her focused on the idea of escape and away from feeling sorry for herself.

  From this new position on her feet, Karen could see the rest of the garage. She looked up and saw that some gardening tools had been thrown up on the rafter beams overhead. The beams were only a few feet above where Tashay’s hands were tied to the block-and-tackle.

  “Okay, Tashay, you see above your head … the gardening tools up there?”

  Tashay looked up but didn’t answer.

  “See if you can jump up and knock them down. See that hedge clipper? See if you can knock it off the rafters and over toward me.”

  Tashay looked at her again. “Bob and me was in the grip, y’know? We was rollin’ deep. He says to me, `Tash, we gonna get outta this bonk town, go to Europe.’ He’s alla time talkin’ to me about the Riviera and goin’ to see Satan Wolf in prn. So why’s he goin’ and shootin’ on me like this? Why’s he wanna go ruin it? Why?”

  “Tashay, try and knock the gardening tools down. Will you do it!” she commanded, her voice taking on an edge as her frustration grew. “Don’t yell at me …” Tashay started to cry again.

  “I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I yelled. Can you do it?”

  “Why’s he go an’ do this to me? I don’t understand. Why?” “Jump up and knock that rake handle. See if it’ll drop the hedge clipper down. Do it … jump … jump up and hit it, can you ** ?