He wondered if he dared go back to Shirley's house. He had burned it down twelve years before, then had run away and lived in the park. The property had been sold to a retired plumber who had rebuilt it. Five years later the plumber had died of a stroke. Because of its remote location, nobody had bought it. The Rat knew it was currently boarded up and empty; he had gone there once and looked at it from the road. It didn't look like Shirley's house anymore. This new place the plumber had built was stucco, with no porch and a low, sloping roof. Still, it was where his home had once been. He had lived there till he was fifteen. More important, it was a shrine of sorts, because it was the place where he'd first met The Wind Minstrel.
He had been just fourteen when that happened, and very sick with a high fever. His ears had become infected because of the burns. Shirley would not let a doctor come. She said Leonard was weak, and that if God decided to take him for his weakness, then she would bear that consequence. The Rat had already learned to control Leonard. He hid inside him like an evil shadow and listened to Shirley's shrill condemnations.
That night his fever grew. He slipped into a delirious sleep and had a frightening, life-changing nightmare. In the dream, he was both The Rat and Leonard, walking in a hall of huge sleeping spiders. Leonard was so scared he could barely breathe. He whimpered constantly, but The Rat was cunning, moving silently between the spiders' hairy legs. Their eyes were closed, their huge mandibles dripping moisture at his feet. The Rat knew that if he woke them, they would tear him apart, chew him slowly, and eat him alive. Somehow he also knew that the Hall of Sleeping Spiders was at the beginning of the Journey of Redemption.
Then, as if by magic, he was somewhere else, strapped on a plank before an altar, while God screeched at him through huge speakers in a voice that growled and barked. God threatened him with more fire and scorned his weakness. The Almighty cursed his impotent wretchedness. Leonard shuddered and cried in fear. The Rat calculated his odds and schemed and lied, telling God he worshiped Christ and the Apostles. It was then that The Wind Minstrel appeared before them. God stopped screaming. Suddenly it was very quiet. Leonard was still strapped down before the altar, unable to move. He whimpered and The Rat looked over Leonard's bloated stomach at the apparition… Physically, The Wind Minstrel was exactly like Leonard, only somehow he was also very different. He had beauty and authority. He could get erections. The Rat instantly worshiped him.
The Wind Minstrel told The Rat that Leonard would always be a supplicant, always be afraid, because he believed in Christ and the Apostles. Doctrine, The Wind Minstrel explained, was inflexible. Inflexible things were brittle and could be broken. You only had to see the way. And while he slept and dreamed, The Wind Minstrel let him see. In the dream, The Wind Minstrel entered him. The Rat knew it was sexual, but it was also spiritual. While he slept, for the last time in his life, Leonard became erect, but The Rat saw true everlasting glory. He saw the way it could be. He knew God would no longer control him. From now on he would break God's doctrines. He would fight against Christ and the Apostles. Leonard never dreamed about The Rat or The Wind Minstrel again. He never remembered what they did, although they shared his body.
After the dream The Rat had a direction… That night he decided he would set fire to the house and kill Shirley.
The Tampa police set up a crime-scene perimeter around the remains of the house and started to sort through the evidence. By ten A. M Monday morning there were twenty reporters and three TV news crews. Nobody respected the police crime-scene tape.
Lockwood and Karen tried to supervise the Tampa police, but Detective Grady Raynor pulled them off the scene and made them sit in the back of his car, under threat of arrest. They watched helplessly while news crews trampled through the smoking rubble and did stand-ups in front of the missing house. Karen's mind was far away. She was thinking of Malavida. He had looked so vulnerable on the gurney. She was still having trouble sorting out the way she felt about him. Was it something to preserve, or was she again just tempting fate?
"If there's any evidence here at all, it's been contaminated by this circus," Lockwood said, interrupting her thoughts.
Karen nodded. "Maybe we oughta run some of this new stuff through VICAP," she said, bringing herself out of it. She forced herself to focus on the problem. "We've got some pretty good partial data on Leonard Land. A computer hacker, mutilations, maybe he's got a record somewhere. Maybe we even have enough to get a match on some more killings."
"Good idea, if we can get away from Barney Fife over there," he said, nodding toward Grady Raynor, who was doing a stand-up interview for a local news station.
"Lemme give that problem a little attention," she said, and got out of the car, heading over to where Grady was blowing hot air at a black field reporter named Trisha Rains.
"Right now," Raynor was saying to the camera, "we know that this property was rented by a man named Leonard Land. We're checking for State Tax Board employment records. No charges have yet been filed against Mr. Land, but this explosion was caused by unnatural products. A well-known computer criminal named Carlos `Malavida' Chacone was also involved and is critically injured…"
"Can you tell us a little more about Malavida Chacone's condition?" Trisha Rains asked, her straightened black hair bobbing and beginning to lose its tight set in the oppressive morning heat.
"He was a fugitive from justice and is now back in the hospital being closely guarded. If he survives his injuries, he will be transported back to Lompoc, California, where he was doing time before he was released by a Customs agent named John Lockwood. We're still trying to get to the bottom of that." He paused, wondering if he'd said too much. "That's about all I can say for now," he concluded.
The camera crew shut off their lights and Trisha Rains put a hand on the back of her neck, holding her hair away to cool herself.
"I need a reverse. We can shoot it over by the house. Get the smoking remains over my shoulder," she said to her crew, and they moved off, leaving Grady Raynor smiling. He then saw Karen as she held up her cellphone.
"Just got a call from my SAC in D. C. and my District Supervr down here. They want me and Lockwood back, at the Federal Building in Tampa, forthwith."
"In the words of that great American sports legend George Steinbrenner, 'Fuck 'em.' "
"Hey, Detective, I'm just a bystander here, but your best bet of holding on to this case, which is about two hours away from going national, is to set up a joint-op with Customs. If you don't, they're gonna go over your head to the Governor and you're gonna be up in the bleachers with Steinbrenner eating a foot-long."
He looked at her for a puzzling moment while his walnut-sized brain calculated the truth in her remark.
"You do this for me, and I'll do a Grady Raynor commercial at Justice," she added. Then another news crew moved in, looking for a statement. They turned on their lights. Raynor's eyes darted over to them, anxious to get at it.