Final Victim (1995) (15 page)

"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:

hoyt login:

He typed in:

root

And the computer said:

Password:

He typed the most common supervr password, which was:

And the computer responded:

You are logged in to host hoyt as root. Good evening, root.

Malavida smiled, then scanned the directories on the host computer. He saw one called /urs/bin/building and moved into that directory. There he saw a program, EnviroLog, which he knew contained all of the major systems in the building including phone, security, fire, etc. He typed:

EnviroLog

And in a few seconds the system said:

EnviroLog Version 3.1.2 Enter your password:

"I could get into the guts of this thing if I had my tool kit," he said, "but I left it on the plane. . . ."

"What are you looking for?" Karen asked.

"I won't know till I see it. But we already know this guy is a master hacker, and all these new buildings are run by computers. I was thinking, what if he gronked that alarm, triggered it somehow, then bogused the time when it started ringing . . . ? That wouldn't be hard to do. He could set a different time of death by accessing the security program for the building. I can crack in here by random trial and error, but it could take hours. The other way is, we get the building supervr outta the sack and try to get him to do it, but he won't probably get here for an hour. Then he's gonna wanna get permission from the building's owner, who won't get in till noon. So why don't we save all the hassle and get my metal suitcase full of cracker-jacks."

Lockwood looked at his watch and then at one of the patrolmen who was standing near the elevator, staring at his shoes. It was already 4:30 in the morning. Lockwood was supposed to be in the D
. C
. fifth-floor conference room at 9:00 A
. M
. to face his IA trial board. If h
e m
issed that, he'd be dust. He wondered why he didn't give a damn. "Could one of your guys run Miss Dawson out to the airport and back?" he finally asked a patrolman, who glanced at Stiner. Stiner nodded his approval and Karen left with him.

Forty minutes later, she was back with Malavida's metal suitcase. The Chicano cracker opened it up and started selecting disks. The sun was just coming up on the cloudy horizon as he started, hunched over his keyboard. He was still in handcuffs. Malavida knew he needed to get them off if he was going to get loose from Lockwood. He looked over at the Customs agent. "Can't we lose the jewelry, Hoss?" He said, smiling. "I'm not going nowhere."

Lockwood hesitated.

"For God's sake," Karen said sharply. "What are you worried about? You've got a gun. Where's he gonna go?"

Malavida held up his manacled hands, and finally Lockwood unhooked the handcuffs from the waist chain to give him more mobility, but he didn't take them off.

"You're very careful, Zanzo," Malavida said as he turned back to the computer and Karen glowered at Lockwood.

Malavida had tried the system supervr password, GOD, but the EnviroLog program's password was different and would have to be obtained from scratch. He worked patiently as time clicked silently off everybody's wristwatch.

At 5:50, Lockwood picked up the phone, dialed the Executive Air Terminal, and got Red on the line. When Karen had returned to get Malavida's suitcase, she'd seen him sleeping there on the sofa and decided not to wake him.

"Look, this is taking a bit longer than I thought," he told the pilot.

"I gotta go at six-thirty, John. I got the D
. O. C
. coming back to
Washington. I'm on standby for him. If I'm not in the Ready Roo
m w
hen he calls to use his bird, my ass gets transferred back out in the field, and I'll be taking nut-pucker rides under Doper Cessnas again. This is the best job I've had in this outfit and I'm not gonna lose it."

"Six-forty-five," Lockwood pleaded.

"I'm wheels-up at six-thirty, with or without ya."

At six-thirty, just as Red roared down the Atlanta runway in the empty Citation and lifted off for Washington, D
. C
., Malavida finally got into the building computer and began surfing around in the security system, while Lockwood and Karen and Detective Stiner all watched over his shoulder. He accessed the records for Saturday morning, April 13, the day the police thought Candice had been killed. The security profile for that morning showed that the Center Street fire door alarm had gone off at 7:30 A
. M
., just as the police said. Malavida moved on. When he finally got to the environmental log, he wasn't paying too much attention so he almost missed it. He had already scrolled that log off the screen when his mind caught up with his vision. Had he seen a slight jitter on one of the log files? He opened it again and began to study the information more carefully. He saw that the building environment was broken up into forty different zones. The one that said 4-W had a slight quiver when he scrolled by it. He leaned in and looked at it more carefully. Then he backed the log up to April 12 and looked at 4-W.

"What is it?" Karen asked.

"I don't know. There's a phase jitter on this EnviroLog data. On 4-W, for April thirteenth . . . but not on the twelfth. Snoopy smells dogshit."

"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
. L
og/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. "H
e c
ranked it up to a hundred six; then, look here . . . at six-thirty it start
s g
oing 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 th
e b
ogus 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, hi
s h
orrible 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.