"I don't need to prove it to arrest you. And if I arrest you, I can also hold you for forty-eight hours, just to be pissy."
"I'm more worried about where Leonard Land is, which is one hell of a lot bigger problem. We know he's a weekend killer; it's Saturday, and unless we divert him, I think there's a good chance a woman could die tonight."
"You don't know that for a fact."
"All the profile points indicate it. We can argue about bullshit or we can get in business with each other," she said hotly. "I'm coming to you for help. Chacone is pretty small stuff compared to this serial killer. Whatta ya say we try for big game?… The old eight-point hat rack.
"You're pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?" he growled. "I've only been in law enforcement for forty years, so I don't need a lecture on criminal priorities from some Princeton Ph. D."
"Then why are you talking to me about Chacone? You know I'm right… I need help, so help me. I have a way to get this guy out in the open, but you gotta pitch in."
"Let's hear it," he finally said, feeling sure he would come to regret it.
After he heard her plan, Captain Fredrickson's voice was full of amazement. "Of course you're kidding," he said.
"I've done a very specific background check on Leonard Land. This started with his mother and her religious fanaticism. She passed her sickness on to Leonard. I think she killed her first foster son in Mississippi, in the early eighties. His name was Robbie Land, he's never been seen again."
"That case is twelve or fifteen years old. What you're talkin' about now is much different."
"Everything is tied together… You can't look at one piece without looking at them all. Captain, I want you to agree to meet with me. Hear me out. I think, once you see my whole profile, you'll agree that it's the only string we have. But If I'm right and we pull this off, he's going to react. I'm doing this with or without you. I just figured that you'd want to be in on it."
The Wind Minstrel sat in his underwear and stared at the walls of the barge in a rage. The Rat had betrayed him.
"The god of fuck and mutilation must be appeased," he screamed at the rusting walls. The Wind Minstrel's skin was on fire; the rash was all across his chest and under his arms. He shrieked with pain in The Rat's rusting, stinking garbage barge. He looked up at the picture of Shirley Land on the wall. He glowered at The Rat's neat lines across the picture, at his scribbled dates. "You have desecrated the timetable, you have shit on the resurrection of the Beast." His voice ricocheted in the cavernous metal room. "I am here but you give me nothing to possess," he screamed at The Rat's memory. He moved, in pain, to the large blowup picture of Shirley. He hated the bitch more than he hated his own existence. Her religious rantings were worthless hypocrisies-blatant, primal non sequiturs. He stood before the picture of his foster mother holding the cat he had strangled long ago. The cat was the first living thing he had destroyed, choking it till its tongue curled. His fire-ravaged skin glowed and looked almost purple from the low light thrown from the portable TV that flickered in the far corner of the barge. He slammed his head savagely into the crotch of the picture, which was taped to the metal bulkhead.
"Rat, you have betrayed me. We will be annihilated in the fire that follows my Second Coming."
Then he looked up at the picture. He saw a smear of his red blood on Shirley's crotch. "The bitch bleeds!" he screamed, as his own blood now dripped down his face and splashed between his toes.
Then he turned and saw something that shot a chill across his burning, ravaged skin. There, on the TV, was his long-dead mother. She was talking to some nigger bitch. He was staggered by the vision. He moved on quivering legs and knelt, as if in prayer, before the television set.
Chapter 34
Earlier, Captain Fred T. Fredrickson had pulled in four off-duty police officers to work the detail. They had been cooling their heels at the Ramada Inn parking lot, in two surveillance vans. All four of them were in black flak-vests, holding Ithaca shotguns, and watching Karen's room through their smoked-glass windshields.
Inside her motel room, Karen was in the bathroom with Trisha Rains and a redheaded make-up girl from WTAM-TV named Marlene. Marlene was looking at the picture of Shirley Land, which was taped to the mirror. They had already cut Karen's hair and dyed it with Lady Clairol's sunset blond. It had ended up coming out a mousey dishwater color that Karen hated.
"I don't know," Marlene said, looking at the picture. "It could be strawberry-blond, it could be mid-brown. Hard to tell from this blackand-white picture." She continued to work behind Karen with a hair dryer.
"It's okay. We'll just do the best we can," Karen said. "I couldn't find a color shot of her, so we've gotta guess."
Marlene began to re-style Karen's hair, looking at the picture. She turned it under as she blow-dried it, shaping it closer to her head. "Pretty frumpy do," she said off-handedly.
Marlene finished and Karen stood in front of the mirror in her slip, looking at her new short, light-brown hair. "I've gotta use makeup to do the rest," Marlene said. "I can add a little mole like she has on her cheek easy enough… and maybe, with shading, I can narrow your face slightly… arch the eyebrows."
They worked on her makeup, until they got it as close as time would allow. Then Karen put on a print dress with long sleeves and a lace collar that resembled the one in the obit photo. She had bought it that afternoon at a second-hand store. She finally walked out of the bedroom, where Captain Fred T. Fred was waiting. He got up as she entered and looked at her carefully.
"What a transformation. You look…" He stopped.
"Like the Church Lady?" She smiled. Then she sat with Trisha on the stained green sofa.
"I think this whole thing hinges on Revelation 13:13 to 15. If I'm wrong, I've screwed up a great haircut for nothing."
"Revelation 13:13 to 15? How do you know?"
"Under the brand on the dead women, it says, 'R. 13-15.' At first I thought it was some computer designation, or maybe it stood for `revised' or Rat or something, but then on a hunch I looked up Revelation in the Gideon. Those sections are about building a beast."
"You think he's building a beast?" Trisha asked.
"It's probably more of a religious incarnation. I'm banking that he hasn't finished it yet."
Twenty minutes later they moved down into the parking lot and set up so that the TV camera could photograph the Ramada Inn sign and the building behind them. She was sure The Rat had been there before and would recognize the setting. He had to have followed Lockwood there, to phone in the anonymous tip that almost got them killed.
They stood in the parking lot in the warm Miami night, while the cameramen adjusted the lights and cleaned up the signal on the remote feed with the news director in Tampa.
At ten minutes past ten, the anchor, Hal Savage, threw the newscast to Miami. "Trisha Rains is standing by in Miami with an interesting update on 'The Rat,' South Florida's mutilation murderer."
"Thanks, Hal," Trisha said, looking into the camera. "We're here in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn in Miami, with noted criminal psychologist Dr. Karen Dawson. She's here to discuss a psychological criminal profile she's written on Leonard Land, the fugitive serial killer also known as 'The Rat.' " Trisha turned, and the shot widened to include Karen, who was sitting on a director's chair next to Trisha. "So, tell us about this guy. Why is he doing this? What makes somebody go out and repeatedly kill and mutilate?"
The shot was framed so that the lighted Ramada Inn sign was just over Karen's shoulder.
The Wind Minstrel was inches from the TV screen. He could tell, now that he was closer, that this was not Shirley. His heart rate slowed. For a moment, when he first saw her, he had panicked. If Shirley had been resurrected, then that would mean she had been chosen by God to come back and torture him. It would mean she had been given the power of the angels.