"What's 4-W?" Lockwood asked.
"Not sure, think it's the west side of the building, fourth floor," Malavida said.
"That's this office. We're on the west side," Stiner said.
"No shit." Malavida grinned. "So what do we have here, Curado?" he said to the screen. Then he started to bring up other file information… under Power Monitor: no surges, no sags, nothing… Phone Usage: nothing… Then he opened the time and temperature log again and paged down. He leaned closer, scrolling the log quickly up and down… He saw something. There was a minute difference in how one of the columns of data lined up on one part of the temperature log.
"Something isn't right about the temp log," he said, looking at the time and temperature readings for April 12-13, from 10:30 P. M. Friday night to 7:30 A. M. Saturday morning.
"What?" Karen asked, leaning in.
"I think there's some kinda bogus log that's been substituted for the actual log, giving out its own information. Just a minute…" He typed:
restore-I add EnviroLog. Log/April 12-13, 22:30-07:30 extract
And like magic, the bogus log that The Wind Minstrel had laid down in place of the temperature log disappeared.
"Hola," he said. And they all leaned in.
"It went up to a hundred and six degrees in here," Karen said. "My man changed the temperature." Malavida grinned. "He cranked it up to a hundred six; then, look here… at six-thirty it starts going down again. At seven-thirty, it was back to seventy-two degrees." "How'd he do that?" Lockwood asked.
"Crafted some program to overwrite the files," Malavida said. "Can you get that program? Download it?" Lockwood asked. "It's probably not here," Malavida said as he looked around for the bogus EnviroLog. "But that's not surprising. If I was going to do this, I'd put in some kinda odor eater to erase the thing after it's done its work. He couldn't erase the temperature listing, so he just stuck a bogus log in front of it for camouflage. Unless a very clever vato was sniffin', you'd never see it," Malavida said, exposing some ego.
A minute went by as Lockwood stood, thinking. "Okay, so when did he kill her? He obviously was trying to alter the time frame to give himself an alibi."
"The temperature started changing at ten-thirty Friday evening. That's gotta be the new time of death," Karen said, looking in at the screen.
"Shit… wait a minute, I got an idea," Malavida said, and he surfed back into the security log and searched until he found the exact time the alarm was set off… 7:31:07.
Malavida accessed the Southern Bell accounts log. He was looking for a long-distance call to the building phone number that came in at exactly 7:31:07 Saturday morning. It took him only ten more minutes to find it. The call was made from a cellphone, so he could only trace it to its general area code; half an hour later he determined that the call had been made from Tampa, Florida.
Chapter 14
Leonard Land had awakened in the basement of his house. He didn't know why he was there, but he knew he had to hurry. It was 4:30 on Sunday afternoon. He grabbed a suitcase and drove his dark blue pickup straight to the Tampa Airport. He bought a ticket in coach on the American Airlines 5:30 flight to Los Angeles.
His row was halfway back in the L-1011. He had the aisle seat, but his huge body overflowed it; twice the flight attendants tripped over his legs as they rushed back and forth on their important pre-flight tasks. Manufactured air came out of the nozzle above his head and spilled down on him like the cold breath of redemption. He looked at his green corduroy pants, stretched tight over his huge, corpulent thighs. He was wearing a Disney World ballcap to hide his shiny naked head, but no matter how hard he tried to camouflage his grotesqueness, people still stared at him.
Leonard tried not to exist. In the back room of the computer store, sometimes he could concentrate so hard on a program, it was almost as if he ceased to be. Leonard could be free of himself in cyberspace. When boxes of new components arrived at ComputerLand from IBM or Texas Instruments, it was always Leonard whom Mr. Cathcart asked to assemble them. When he was working with new equipment, he could disappear, completely transported by the challenge… but afterward, inevitably, he would return. He would go to lunch and people pointed at him and whispered behind their hands. Leonard was forced to wear his awkward ugliness like a sandwich-board.
He missed his mother. He'd read in an old newspaper that she had burned to death in a fire. He couldn't remember the day it happened. Sometimes the anguish of missing her was so great, he lay in his bed and cried… Tears would roll down his hairless cheeks onto his sheets. Leonard was very alone, always frightened and confused. He couldn't remember long periods of time; sometimes whole weeks would disappear from his memory like misplaced keys. Like waking up in his basement with a mission to go to L. A. and not knowing why. He had become terrified of these huge blacknesses… these holes in his existence. He wondered where he had been. His time cards at ComputerLand said he had been at work, but he couldn't remember any of it. Once he had found dried blood all over his torso and legs. He didn't know why or where it had come from.
He wasn't sure why he had to go to Los Angeles, but he knew his very survival was at stake. He had an address and a message written in his spiral notebook… It was in his own handwriting but, try as he would, he was unable to remember writing it.
The seat-belt sign was turned off and he struggled up out of his seat. He took his small notebook and lumbered to the lavatory. He went inside and locked the door. The fluorescent lights shone down on him, finding only ugliness on his huge, fat face… his sagging eyelids, his horrible burned and scarred ears. He sat on the lavatory seat and opened the notebook:
GO TO 1265 MOORPARK STREET, STUDIO CITY. CLOSE THE DOOR OF REDEMPTION.
He looked at the note again, reading it over yet one more time. What door of redemption? he wondered. What does it mean?
Leonard found the small wood-frame house on Moorpark, then parked the rental car across the street. He didn't know why he was there. He looked at his watch. It was 12:30 A. M. in Tampa, but only 9:30 P. M. here in Los Angeles. He reset his watch. Was that important? Was the door of redemption in the house across the street? He was frightened, confused, and alone.
He put his head back and touched his nipples. They were stinging slightly against the fabric of his shirt. He watched as a tall, beautiful blond woman with very short hair drove her blue Volvo into the garage, got out with some groceries, and walked toward the house. She entered and closed the door. He put his head back on the headrest and, in minutes, went to sleep.
The Rat woke up at ten and moved across the street, clutching his case. His eardrums pumped the rhythm of his heartbeat. He knew where he was and what he'd come to do. He moved in darkness around the small house, looking in the windows. The Rat had never killed. He had coveted but never possessed. He was frightened of his mission. He knew The Wind Minstrel was three or four days from coming, but he couldn't wait. He had to close the door of redemption. He walked to the back of the house. A child's easel was set up there. He looked at it and wondered where the child was. Then he saw, through the window, that a blond woman was preparing food in the kitchen. He moved to the back porch and stood, listening. The eavesdropper had been calling from this address. Could the tall, beautiful woman in the kitchen be Karen Dawson, who had been lurking in his chat room?
As always, The Rat had taken his sneaky precautions. After he had found the eavesdropper, he had made his plan. He had tracked the LAPD number long distance from Tampa and begun cracking into the police computer, while frantically packing The Wind Minstrel's tools for Leonard to take. He had finally broken through the LAPD's computer security and had saved the entire dialup and login sequence to the Police Mobile Digital Terminal system for Studio City. He stored it in a fully automated script on his PC which he could recall at any time.