Final Victim Read online

  "Who's prosecuting? Who you working with?"

  "Mr. Lockwood said I can't say anything about that." Chacone repeated the sentence again as Lockwood smiled, put his feet up on the facing chair, and picked up a newspaper.

  "Mr. Chacone, would you be kind enough to put that son-of-abitch Lockwood back on?"

  "Yes, sir. And it was a pleasure making your acquaintance."

  Malavida handed the phone to Lockwood and went back to Donkey Kong.

  It took Lockwood another five minutes to strike the right note with Harvey, who reluctantly agreed to make the call to the prn. The phone connection started to get weak as they passed out of California.

  "Where're you calling from? This line sounds funny. You in the air? You're in the air, aren't you, you son-of-a-bitch!"

  "I'm on a scrambled line at a protected location, Harvey. You know better than to ask me where I'm interviewing a Federal witness in the protection program. I'm surprised at you. I gotta run. Make that call or we're both toast." And he was off the phone as the static started to sound like bacon frying at a Boy Scout cookout.

  Lockwood knew that the small Citation jet didn't have the fuel capacity to fly all the way back to Washington. They would have to make a gas stop somewhere along the way. He felt the plane make a banking turn and glanced up at the "air show" in the cabin that depicted their location. According to the electronic video map, they had just passed over the California/Arizona border. "I'd like to get him to set down in Atlanta…" Lockwood said to Karen, who was still scribbling notes followed by question marks on her yellow pad. "If The Rat killed a girl in Atlanta, it'd be nice to talk to the homicide dicks… maybe take a look at the crime scene."

  "Atlanta is a little out of the way, isn't it?"

  "Not really," he said earnestly. "Instead of taking the boring, obvious route over Missouri and Kentucky, we'll take the more cultural southern route through the glorious picturesque Panhandle." He realized, as he looked at the video map, that this route would add hundreds of miles to the Journey.

  "Red will never go for it," Karen said. "We kept him waiting in Burbank as it was."

  Lockwood took a deep breath and lunged out of his chair. "We'll never know if I don't try," he said as he moved up to see his old buddy.

  In the cockpit, Lockwood settled into the seat beside Red and looked out the windshield at the clear night and the twinkling lights below. "You ever had Georgia crayfish in Cajun gumbo?" he said, knowing Red's weakness for food. "They've got the best Cajun food in the entire South in downtown Atlanta… Joint's called Little Beau-regard's. It's even better than New Orleans Cajun."

  "I'm not refueling in Atlanta, John. 'Sides, there's a weather front down there." That was where they started. It took Lockwood almost forty minutes, and the Dallas games off his Redskins season tickets, to talk Red into the course correction.

  They made their approach to DeKalb Peachtree Airport in Atlanta at two A. M., Monday morning. A thunderstorm was throwing big chunks of lightning around in thick, ominous cumulonimbus clouds. They got bounced around badly on the approach, before Red finally got the wheels down and rolled out on the rain-washed tarmac. He taxied to a stop in front of the Executive Air Terminal. Red got out and ran through the downpour to the private executive lounge to try to find the gas truck driver.

  Lockwood, Karen, and Malavida stood in the jet's door for a moment and watched the pelting rain. Lockwood had put the cuffs back on Malavida. They turned up their collars and made a run for it through the wet night into the terminal.

  Ten minutes later a taxi arrived, and they promised Red they'd be back in three hours. He had decided to sleep on the sofa in the terminal till they returned. He told them if they didn't get back by six A. M., he was taking off without them.

  The Atlanta Police Department was housed in a huge building on Ponce de Leon Drive. It was extremely busy at three A. M. There were more cops standing around than Lockwood guessed would be normal for the graveyard shift. He'd been in enough cop shops over the years to spot an angry vibe. The blues stood in clusters, wearing crisp uniforms and slack expressions. Lockwood knew something must have just happened. They found the Chief of Detectives for the watch. He was a rumpled twenty-year veteran named Bryce Oakland. Sometime during his twenty, he'd taken a knife or a bullet in his vocal cords. The scar ran down his neck, into his day-old white shirt collar. When he spoke, his voice sounded like sandpaper on steel. His unpleasant attitude said he didn't have much time for them as he settled into his squeaking wooden swivel chair in the command cubicle. Glass walls looked in both directions at the littered homicide squad room. He glared at them over a walnut desk that had been scarred by the rings of insolent killers… FUCK You appeared in three languages.

  "This is Karen Dawson," Lockwood began. "She's a U. S. Customs psychologist and criminal profiler. And this is Mr. Chacone. He's a Federal informant."

  "Looks like a Federal convict to me," Bryce Oakland said as he glanced at the handcuffs.

  "Just think of those as funky New Wave jewelry."

  "You're a funny guy, Agent Lockwood, but I'm having a horrible night. I had a patrolman pull over a hot roller 'bout two hours ago. One a'them boys in the stolen car opened up on my man, who's in Atlanta General breathing through a tube and, according to the docs, ain't never gonna wake up. Right now, half my department is up outta bed. They got their noses wide and their shotguns cocked. If they find those hucklebucks, I'm gonna have a hollow-point street dance on my hands, but in my spare time, what can I do to serve my Federal government?"

  Karen leaned forward. "Hey, Captain Oakland, we didn't come here to get in your way. We're working a degenerating, homicidal-sexual psychopath, and we think our perp may have killed here. Maybe he even lives here. Now, if that's too much trouble for you, could you please turn us over to somebody who can give up a few minutes without pissing all over us?"

  Lockwood was taken aback by Karen's approach. He'd never seen her like this. Then she softened slightly. "I'm sorry about your patrolman," she added and reached into her purse, took out some bills, and put them on his desk. "I'm sure there's a fund that's been started for the patrolman's family. There's fifty you can add to it. But a killing is a killing, and it shouldn't be more important because the victim's a police officer."

  Bryce Oakland leaned back. The chair squeaked in the suddenly too-quiet room. Finally, he nodded his head. "Point taken. Go on."

  "Did you have a killing here, a murder of a woman, probably happened a few days ago…?" Lockwood asked.

  "This is a big ol' place I'm policing. I got a population a'five million. I got twenty-five hundred square miles. I got hooker murders every night or so in them skin shops down on the Chattahoochee River. Maybe you could be a little more specific."

  "This one you wouldn't miss," Karen said. "It was probably a hard kill with peri-mortem mutilation… The UnSub probably also had peri-mortem sexual paraphernalia."

  "*** the fuck you talkin' about?" he rasped. "Speak English. The what?"

  "UnSub," Lockwood said. "It stands for unknown subject. We use that term to avoid saying 'him' and subconsciously attaching a gender specification."

  "The body was sexually attacked, ferociously… probably mutilated at the time of death," she added, finishing the translation.

  "That sounds like that Financial District killing. Happened Saturday morning, woman in her thirties. Perp killed her, hacked her arms off. Name was Candice Wilcox."

  "Can we see the homicide folder?" Lockwood asked as Bryce leaned forward, put his meaty arms on the desk, and glared at them.

  "We'd also like to go see where it happened, if that can be arranged," Lockwood said, pushing his luck.

  "Okay, I'll give you a couple'a them trigger-happy troopers out there. Anything to keep 'em from sitting around, rubbin' Hoppe's Number Nine on their sidearms. The detective on that case is off duty. I'll have to call and wake the poor bastard and ask him if he don't mind if ya see his notes."

  "If it's not too
much trouble," Lockwood said, as Bryce got up and moved out of the cubicle. When he was gone, Lockwood turned to Karen. "You don't pull any punches, do you?"

  "Just a little psychology. He was angry about his police officer. That cop means a lot to him, so he put him first, our dead woman second. I caught him leaning the wrong way, and to make up for it, he's now overcompensating."

  Lockwood nodded. He had been worried about getting cooperation when they first walked in and felt the intensity in the place. Karen had quickly turned that to their advantage.

  The two police officers who drove them to the Atlanta Financial District were both lost in thoughts of their fallen comrade. When they arrived, there was a young man with curly hair and a thick moustache waiting for them at the door of a ten-story building named Hoyt Tower. He was holding a case file and looked about twenty-five. He introduced himself as Detective Bill Stiner and said he was the primary on the Wilcox homicide. The rain had stopped, but thunder and sheet lightning still rumbled on the Atlanta horizon like Sherman's artillery. The security guard let them into the lobby and they went up to the fourth floor to the offices of Cavanaugh and Cunningham. The crime scene had been totally destroyed since the murder. The floors had been scrubbed of Candice's blood, but tomorrow, Lockwood suspected, the people who worked here would come to work and subconsciously walk around the offending spot where her body had been found.

  Lockwood and Karen both read the crime scene and lab reports. Then they looked at the victim's desk and watched while Stiner showed them the location where the body had been found. Lockwood opened Stiner's folder and laid out several gruesome crime scene photographs. Malavida flinched, then moved over to the windows and stood there with his back to them, rattling his handcuffs. Lockwood studied the photographs-the clean surgical cuts, the identical incisions on both shoulders. The killer had placed Candice Wilcox's sweater over her face. The scissors from her desk set had been shoved into her vagina. The UnSub had branded her on the left breast. Lockwood studied the brand:

  R. 13-15

  Something started tugging at his thoughts. He passed the pictures to Karen.

  "The burglar alarm went off at seven-thirty A. M.," Stiner said. "When we got here, at about seven-forty-five, we found the body. She monitored foreign money exchanges for this firm at night and was alone on the floor. The coroner measured her liver temperature at eight o'clock and it indicated that she had just died. So we figure that the killer set off the silent alarm when he entered by the Center Street door at seven-thirty A. M. We also figure that while the security guard was checking the building, the perp came up here and killed her… did the mutilations. We musta just missed him."

  Karen sat down at Candice Wilcox's desk and looked carefully at the crime scene photographs. Then she reached into her purse and took out her yellow pad. She began to add to the list she had started on the plane. The scissors that were stuck into the vagina were a sexual substitute, so she wrote down: "Sexually immature, inadequate individual."

  "I think it's possible he may have stood here and masturbated," Karen said. "Did you check her body for semen?"

  "I don't think so, not yet," Stiner said. "The autopsy won't be till nine this morning."

  "Check. If he's a secretor, we could get a blood type from the semen," Lockwood said.

  Karen looked at the pictures again. The sweater was carefully placed across Candice Wilcox's face… She felt this could mean one of two things. The killer could have felt bad about the crime after committing it and covered her face as some show of respect… Karen tried to think like this monster. The scissors connoted anger, sexual frustration. The mutilations had been precise and surgical. The post-mortem behavior had been methodical. The killer had stayed with her for a long time, working to remove the arms… Karen didn't think he had respect for Candice Wilcox. After she was dead he had butchered her, harvesting body parts. She decided the sweater had not been placed there because he felt bad about the crime… On her yellow pad she wrote: "Possibly very ugly, even disfigured." She thought it was possible the UnSub had covered Candice's face so her lifeless eyes would not stare at him. She studied the brand. It looked like an S inside a C… It could mean anything. It looked partially like the Chinese yin-and-yang symbol, but not exactly. She sketched it and copied the symbol along with the "R. 13-15" that appeared underneath. She wondered if it was some kind of computer symbol. She would study it in detail later.

  Karen then turned the page and started a file on Candice Wilcox. Under her name, she wrote: "Victimology." She knew that profiling the victim was as important as profiling the UnSub. On this page she wrote: "Blond, thirty, Caucasian." She was almost certain that the UnSub was also white… Ritual or serial killers almost never kill outside of their own racial group. She thought it was probable that Candice had been a victim of choice. She had been selected by the UnSub for murder. There had to be some specific reason why she had been targeted for death. What did she represent to the killer? How had he selected her? What were the things about Candice that had led her to this terrible end? Candice did not seem to have led a life that would make her an easy target. She wasn't a prostitute or a small child who could easily be lured into a stranger's car; she had been working in a secure building, with a guard at the door. It was a high-risk crime committed against a low-risk victim-a difficult crime to pull off. Karen flipped the page back to her criminal profile. Under "UnSub," she added, "Possibly very smart, cautious." Her primary list of profile characteristics was beginning to grow.

  She continued to study the photographs of the crime scene. She saw that the head was lower than the torso and that there was a large pool of blood around the body. Then she noticed the books propped under Candice.

  "I wonder why he had these books under her like this?" she said.

  "We don't know," Stiner replied.

  "Sometimes a psychopathic killer will arrange a body in a special way," she said.

  "You mean posing the corpse?" Stiner asked.

  "Well, I'm not sure," Karen said, chewing on the tip of her pen.

  "There's a difference between posing and staging. I'm not sure yet which this is. Posing is something the killer can't control, it's part of his ritual… He has to degrade the body for psychological reasons, dealing with a whole range of emotions-anger, hatred of women or his mother, sexual fantasy. Staging, on the other hand, is a post-mortem behavior aimed at throwing the police off"

  Stiner looked at her for a long moment. "No kidding?" She nodded and looked again at the pictures. "So which is this?" he continued.

  "I don't know for sure… Let me take a guess." She looked at the spot on the floor where Candice had died… then back up at Stiner and Lockwood. Malavida was still at the window, but he had turned slightly to listen to her.

  "This crime scene was organized," she said, studying the pictures. "That means the guy we're dealing with is slightly older than the mean age of sex killers, which is twenty-five. He's more sophisticated, less frenzied. He cleaned up after himself. Probably used garbage bags to carry the limbs out, because there's no blood trail I can see from the crime scene pictures of the hall or the staircase."

  "That's what we figured," Detective Stiner said.

  "My guess is that since he cleaned up after himself, this thing with the books probably isn't ritual. He was trying to throw the police off somehow. I think it's staging."

  "How would that do anything?" Stiner asked, puzzled.

  Lockwood moved away from them and stood looking out the window. He could see down into the still-wet street and he wondered if the killer had watched her from there. Her desk was near the window. After a minute, Karen moved over to where he was standing and noticed a frown on his face. "What is it?" she asked.

  "Karen, did you ever take any pre-med when you were getting your doctorates?"

  Malavida was standing next to them, listening.

  "They aren't that kind of doctorates."

  "Well, I've been to maybe a hundred autopsies," he continued,
still looking down into the street. "You have any idea how hard it is to sever somebody's arms like that? How long it takes? You need bone saws and clamps, extremely sharp instruments. Those photographs show clean incisions. Clean bone cuts. This guy didn't do this in a frenzy. This was methodical. I just.** "

  They stood in silence and waited for him to finish his thought.

  "… Okay, so he comes in, sets off the alarm at seven-thirty. He kills her, surgically removes both arms, brands her, then arranges the body with books… then bags all this up, cleans up the site, and leaves. All of this in fifteen minutes?" He turned now to face them. "That sound right to you?"

  "Liver temperature is just approximate. It could be longer," Karen said.

  "You know why he might have arranged the body like that? With the books under it?" Lockwood said, looking at the place on the floor where her body was found.

  "No, why?"

  "This is just a guess, but maybe he was trying to drain it so it wouldn't register lividity."

  "Lividity?" Karen said. "If I remember correctly, lividity doesn't take place for eight or nine hours. So why would he worry about lividity? When the police arrived, her liver temp was still one hundred and one degrees. The liver is a chemical factory, the hottest organ in the body. In a normal human, it is one hundred and two degrees, and cools at one point five degrees per hour. That means the police found her body less than an hour after he killed her."

  Malavida was again very impressed. Karen Dawson really knew her stuff.

  "If he couldn't have done these amputations in fifteen minutes, then maybe the whole timetable is off," Lockwood continued.

  "How could it be off? The burglar alarm marks the entry," Karen replied.

  "I don't know… Maybe he changed the timetable somehow." Malavida sat down at one of the desks, took the plastic cover off the computer, and turned it on… The PC booted up and the screen said: