"I'll call you. Get all that stuff set up on the balcony," he'd said, then gotten into his rental van and driven back to Tampa. That had been four hours ago.
In his motel room, Malavida's computer picked up the tones of The Rat's login and rang an alarm, bringing him in from the balcony where he'd been setting up his direction finder. He grabbed his phone and dialed Karen Dawson's cellular. Karen picked up on the second ring.
"Hello?"
"He's hot." Malavida looked at his computer screen, which had captured the exact frequency of The Rat's cellphone:
876.000 MHz
"See if you've got anything on eight-seventy-six megahertz," Malavida said, and both of them were silent as they carefully twisted their antennas. He could now hear the sound of electronic static, indicating that on 876 megahertz he had a cellphone in use with a modem somewhere on the Tampa pod. "I got it!" he said.
"Me too," she answered.
"Find the null point and gimme the degrees," he commanded.
Karen had her radio unit and loop antenna out on the tenth-floor balcony of the Comfort Inn, overlooking the windswept bay. She twisted the antenna loop until she could no longer hear the transmission static, quickly finding the null point. She laid the Boy Scout compass that Malavida had given her on the table and rotated it to line up with the loop antenna.
"One hundred and sixty-four degrees," she said into the telephone. Malavida, with his phone cocked under his ear, also found the null point. His compass said 193 degrees.
"Hold on a second," he told her and ran inside. He laid his compass on the map. He found Karen's coordinates first. He had marked her hotel's location at the end of the Howard Frankland Bridge on Highway 275 with a big X. He marked a course 164 degrees from that location and drew a line with a pencil and ruler. Then, from his own location, he found 193 degrees and drew another line.
The lines intersected in the wetlands south of Tampa, about a mile and a half up the Little Manatee River.
"Gotcha, you cocksucker," he said under his breath.
Chapter 22
"Yeah?" Lockwood said into the telephone.
"How you doing?" Karen's voice came back softly.
"Not good," he sighed. He was standing at the hospital nurses' station. It was nine P. M. and, after almost four hours of tossing and turning, Heather was finally asleep in her room down the corridor.
"I'm really so sorry, John," she said, and when he didn't answer, she went on. "How's Heather?"
"You tell me. She saw this guy kill her mother. She's just coming out of traumatic shock."
"That's horrible," she said, stating the obvious and feeling dumb because of it.
Karen was calling from Malavida's motel room in Tampa. Malavida had made her promise that she wouldn't tell Lockwood he was there. He was afraid Lockwood would run a team in and bust him.
"Did Heather get a good look at who did it?" Karen finally asked.
"Yeah. She said he was huge, fat, and bald. She said he was killing her mommy with a knife and that he didn't have any eyebrows. I'm not sure it's a good description. A lot of it may be mixed up with the shock."
"John, I'm in Tampa. I'm working with a friend of mine from the University of Miami. He's an ace computer cracker. We did a triangulation program down here, looking for the guy Malavida found on Pen-net. We think we picked up his cellphone location. My friend tells me it's accurate within a square mile or so…"
Lockwood straightened up and looked at the nurse who was preparing a tray of night medicine a few feet away. "You're doing what?"
"It's a long story, but we've got the location of his cellphone site pinned down to about a square mile. Unfortunately, it's in a huge swampland that's fed by a Tampa Bay river. It's gonna be hard to find him in there because it's marshy and pretty dense, but my friend says there's a way to narrow the location down further. It might go faster if we had a helicopter and some boats. I thought you could arrange that through Customs-"
"Let me get this straight. You're in Florida? You went to Tampa? You looked up an old friend from the University and you're working this headcase on your own?"
There was a long pause. "Not smart, I bet, huh?"
"It's way south of not smart, Karen."
"Well, John, it's done, and we got the fix without leaving our hotel rooms. So we weren't in much danger. If we narrow it down, I thought you'd want to be in on it," she said, knowing he wouldn't refuse.
After he hung up with Karen, he booked the 11:30 red-eye to Tampa. Then he went back into Heather's room. She was awake, looking at the door as he moved through it.
"Daddy," she said softly.
He gently sat on the bed and took her hand.
"I'm scared, Daddy. What if he comes?"
"I won't let that happen, honey."
"How do you know he won't?"
" 'Cause I'm gonna go find him and catch him and put him away where he won't be able to ever hurt anyone again."
"Daddy… I don't want him to hurt you," she said suddenly. "He won't hurt me. He can't… not ever."
"Why not?"
"Because I have your love to protect me." He leaned down and hugged her. Her face felt warm against his. He sat back and looked at her; he saw in her Claire's cobalt-blue eyes. Their legacy haunted him. "And then we'll go away and live happily ever after," he said, smiling. "Maybe on a farm. Just you and me, a few horses, some chickens and ducks…"
"And a hippopotamus." She was looking at the colorful painting on the wall.
The airplane took off on schedule, and he tried to sleep but his mind raced. He had not told Karen that he'd lost his badge, that he was now just John Lockwood, unemployed private citizen. But he was still one of the best pound-for-pound bullshitters on the planet, and, even without his badge, he would find a way to even out the terrain. He leaned back and tried to get some sleep as the jet engines hummed, but his eyes kept popping open. He felt strange, as if he'd lost something he couldn't fully calculate. It was tied to Claire's death, of course, but it was also more than that… It was as if everything was flat, with no depth or substance. It was as if he'd somehow lost a full dimension. He was afraid, unable to control his course… Like the purple hippo on Heather's wall, he felt like he was looking down with wide eyes, riding powerless under a brightly painted gas balloon.
Karen Dawson got to the airport early, had a Coke, and watched an old Roy Rogers movie on the TV over the bar in the passenger lounge.
It was 7:30 A. M. when Lockwood's plane landed and Karen met him coming off the American flight. They moved quickly out into the humid Florida morning. She led him across the street to her blue LeBaron and filled him in on how they'd triangulated on The Rat's cellphone signal, explaining the 800-megahertz band and all about null points. He listened and settled in next to her in the passenger seat while she put the car in motion.
"Okay, where to next?" he asked.
"My friend has a lot of stuff in a motel room. He says the next part of this operation is to get into that swamp and start scanning for the computer The Rat's using-"
"And how do we do that?" Lockwood said, looking at her.
"Well, my friend says that every radio, as well as every TV and computer console, acts like a transmitter as well as a receiver… He says electrical equipment in use always transmits radio frequency signals. He also thinks our killer is using top-of-the-line stuff-"
"Really?" Lockwood interrupted.