Malavida turned now, and Lockwood saw he was smiling. "Something I said was funny?"
"You fuckin' amaze me, John. You left your badge upside down in a bucket of shit, so let's you an' me get something straight. I don't have to listen to your bullshit. I'm a wanted man, but you're harboring a fugitive. You're also fucked up and operating illegally. The reason I'm doing this isn't so I can bump Karen Dawson. I'm doing it 'cause I wanna make up for getting your ex-wife killed. You, I could give less of a shit about. You got some limited law enforcement skills and they might come in handy, but dating advice you can stick up your ass. Back off or I'm shutting my end down, and without me, you won't get him."
They stood glowering at one another. The silence grew heavier in the room, but neither had anything else to say. Lockwood hadn't slept in more than twenty-four hours and his eyes were grainy. He moved to the window and looked out at the Florida interstate.
"How's your little girl?" Malavida asked, his tone softer. "She wants her mommy. So do I…"
"We'll get this guy. Let's just not forget what's going down between us. Things have changed."
Lockwood realized he was right. He looked at the young Chicano and believed he had come down here for the right reasons.
"Are you strapped?" Malavida broke through his thoughts.
"No, they took my gun in D. C. I need to pick something up. I've got a friend down here, Ray Gonzales. He's in Jackson Memorial Hospital with a leaky kidney, but I think he's got family in St. Pete. I'll make a call, see if I can line something up."
"Get one for me."
Lockwood smiled. "That's just what this caper needs… another unlicensed shooter."
Lockwood got in touch with Ray Gonzales in the renal ward at Jackson Memorial in Miami. Ray told him that his nephew would deliver something. Lockwood gave him a list of favorite handguns, starting with a nine-millimeter Beretta and working down to an S amp;W Chief with a two-inch barrel. It was the same piece Customs had issued to him, and although he'd never been able to hit anything with it, at least the short muzzle didn't poke him when he sat.
"How you feeling, Ray?" Lockwood asked his friend at the end of the call.
"I'm hoping I can get out of here in a month. Then I gotta take it easy for a while. I only got one kidney now, and it ain't looking so hot."
"That means you're gonna have to stop drinking all that cheap Cuban rum, amigo."
"I'd rather float face-down in the bay." Gonzales's voice grinned at him over the line.
Ray's nephew, Enrique, showed up in the motel parking lot two hours later. He turned out to be a sixteen-year-old hardcase with a bad complexion and a surly attitude. He handed Lockwood a box wrapped in brown paper.
"Ray, he say you some big-time coco-cop. You the one gonzoed all them meltdowns at Miami Airport, shoot up the place, go crazy, fucking cowboys an' Indians. Mi do works with cops, whatta fuckin' nut."
"Your uncle's diamond-hard. He's a man. You should try and be like him," Lockwood volunteered lamely.
"You think?" the boy said sullenly. "I think he's a buster." Then he moved off, bobbing his head slightly, his long black hair bouncing. He got into a primer-patched car with two other Cuban boys and they roared off, leaving a trail of blue exhaust on the asphalt.
Lockwood opened the box in the parking lot. The gun was a twenty-year-old army-issue.45 with a weak clip spring. There was half a box of ammo. Somebody had started cutting dumdum crosses in the soft lead noses of the slugs. "Great," he said to himself in disgust.
He climbed the stairs and reentered the motel room. Karen showed up twenty minutes later with the walkie-talkies. All they needed to do was rent an outboard tomorrow, get into the Little Manatee River, and wait. It was already Friday afternoon. It seemed hard for Lockwood to realize that all of this had happened in less than a week.
That night, Karen was sitting on the bed, looking at Malavida and Lockwood.
"I know you guys are sort of humoring me," she started, "and that the only reason I'm still here is because we have a severe lack of manpower."
Lockwood forced a tight smile; Malavida remained expressionless. She picked up her yellow pad, which now had pages of annotations and profiling information.
"I thought before we go get this guy, we should try to understand a little about him. I already told you I got Leslie Bowers out of the VICAP computer. Using her murder and Candice's and Claire's, I've got a beginning read on this guy, plus a couple of pretty good hunches… Wanna hear 'em?"
Both Lockwood and Malavida nodded.
"Okay. To begin with, aside from being big and ugly, I think The Rat could also be a multiple."
"Multiple personalities? Where'd that come from?" Lockwood asked.
"It's a little oblique, but follow me on this." They both waited. "We have two killings that fit one pattern, and one killing that fits a completely different pattern. All of them, we're reasonably sure, were done by one man. Candice Wilcox and Leslie Bowers were killed by a very sophisticated, very organized, highly intelligent perp. This guy used his computer to set the stage and change the time frame. He used trash bags; he used a blitz attack, taking the first two victims quickly and killing them instantly with one stroke from behind, using a narrow blade which we know, or suspect, is one of his scalpels."
"So?" Lockwood said.
"Pre-, peri-, and post-offense behavior was exact and planned in detail… very obsessive. The UnSub who killed Candice and Leslie is manipulative, compulsive, and dominant. In short, a control freak. Claire's murder, on the other hand, was sloppy: He walked in the back door, neighbors say he left his car parked in plain sight across the street. He probably didn't case the crime scene… He failed on his opening blitz attack, which looks like it happened in the kitchen and ended up with her still alive and fighting in the bedroom. He hacked and slashed at her in a frenzy. It was a mess. Then, to top it off, he got walked in on by Heather. There's no post-mortem mutilation, there's no masturbation, no sexual substitutes."
"That doesn't mean anything," Lockwood said. His heart was skipping beats as they talked about Claire's murder. He was determined not to let his voice or face betray the frightening loss he was feeling. "If Heather walked in, the UnSub wouldn't have time. He killed Claire for lurking in his computer chat room. He was trying to eliminate an eavesdropper… That's why there's no ritual."
"I understand," she said, "and I agree, but the guy who did the first two murders, in my opinion, wouldn't have done the third. The first guy would still have tried to control the scene. He gets nothing for doing a hasty, sloppy job-he put himself at risk."
"So you think he's got two personalities?" Lockwood said slowly.
"Or more," she said. "We know he's on a week or ten-day cycle and he's degenerating. Maybe he's different people at different times in the cycle. When he sees us in the chat room, he's the wrong guy. But he has to move, he's panicked. So he comes out to L. A. and does his thing, but it's not with the same control or preparation… It's spur of the moment, amateurish. Off the cuff and sloppy. But we know the murderer is the same physical being, because he used the same weapon all three times."
"That's pretty farfetched," Malavida said. "What if it's two guys?"
"I don't think so," she said. "My gut tells me this guy's a loner."
"I think she's got something," Lockwood said, giving it careful thought. "I mean, maybe it's not exactly right, but it fits the crime scene information. Psychiatrists always start with a personality and infer behavior, but you can make mistakes that way. The way she's doing it is better. You start with the behavior, what he actually did, and infer personality from his acts."