Stephen Cannell - Final Victim

"Oh," Lockwood said, not much closer to understanding.

"To further tighten the classification, he shows some signs common to two sub-categories: One is Erotomania, which is fantasy killing stemming from the UnSub's fusion of identities. The other category is Extremist Homicides, which are characterized by an overwhelming political or religious belief. I also think he may be a Collector. He's collecting body parts…"

Lockwood winced. "Neat hobby, but why?"

"There's no way we're gonna figure that out until we catch him. The reasoning with these UnSubs is always very twisted. There was a guy in California who was killing women and eating their reproductive organs, because he believed that his skin was dying and that the reproductive organs would reproduce new flesh and keep him alive. Doesn't make sense, but the guy in California killed ten women as a result."

Lockwood lost his appetite for a moment, then nodded. "Go on," he said.

"So his post-mortem behavior is methodical. He surgically removes parts, he burns his brand on their left breast. By the way, that may indicate that he's right-handed, if he faces them, stands over them when he does it. Then he cleans up his crime scene and leaves. He cools off for a while, a week or two. During this period, he could contact people, become slightly more normal. If he's a multiple, as I suspect, he might even return to his core personality, Leonard Land. This phase is probably short-lived, and then his cycle begins again.

She flipped two pages back on the pad and glanced at what she had written. "I think the choice of the name Rat' is significant. I've done a profile on that animal's real and perceived characteristics-"

"Come on, Karen. You're profiling rodents?"

"John, everything this guy does in connection with these crimes is significant. If he'd called himself The Shepherd I'd be looking at sheep. There's something in that name… a reason he chose it. Hang with me, it comes out with a conclusion."

"Go."

"Under factual information, the word rat comes from the Latin rodere, meaning to gnaw. There are two kinds of rats that make up the majority of the American rat population, brown ones and black ones. In general, black rats live aboveground, brown rats live in walls and dark spaces and underground. I'm going to concentrate on the brown rat because he seems to fit better… He lives and feeds frequently on garbage… I think it's more than mildly significant that our boy works in an abandoned garbage barge. Rats are known to be extremely wary and cautious creatures that quickly detect approaching danger. They usually feed at night and are classified as nocturnal." She looked up at Lockwood. "So far, our Rat is a night killer. Rats tend to live in small concise areas, usually not more than one hundred fifty feet in diameter, but if food is scarce, they can travel long distances to forage. I'm not sure how appropriate that characteristic is and I don't want to beat this analogy to death, but from what we know, our Rat seems to move around when he kills. Maybe that's because he can't find the 'food' he needs near home."

"Okay, or maybe his selection process isn't based on geography, maybe it's based on something else."

"Exactly… According to scientists, rats are generally considered to be the most dangerous animals to people on the face of the planet." "Come on, really?"

She nodded. "In terms of sheer body count, it's true. They attack infants, often killing them. They frequently cause apartment fires by chewing through wires. And then, of course, there's disease, plague, rabies, you name it." She looked up. "Okay, that concludes the factual data.

"Now we go to folklore… what people believe about rats. We have assigned them a very low place on the personality scale. They are considered to be mean, vicious, and disloyal. Rats are also thought to be sneaky. I think these are traits that Leonard believes he has. They're ugly and dirty. I think our Rat hates the way he looks. Rats are shrewd. He might think of himself as cunning and shrewd. I'll tell you this… He's no dummy. That trick with the heat and air-conditioning in Atlanta was very inventive and difficult to achieve… close to brilliant. Without Malavida, we never would've come upon it."

"Okay, so he's smart, cunning, ugly, vicious, disloyal, and nocturnal.. what else?"

"Rats are ferocious. When cornered, rats will attack viciously with little regard for their safety… and this is a point I'm most interested in. I think our going to his place could represent, in his mind, an attack on him. It caused him to blow up his own house, move his barge. I think he may feel cornered."

"You saying he's going to attack us?"

"I think we have to consider the possibility."

"How's he gonna attack us? He doesn't even know where we are." "I don't know. It's just something to be alert to."

Lockwood looked out at the boats tied up at the dock. He listened to the rigging rattling against the aluminum masts. His mind skipped across what she had said and a thought hit him. He turned and looked at her, realization in his eyes.

"If he's been watching the news, he knows where Malavida is," Lockwood said.

"You're right, he does. But Malavida's under guard. Hard to attack when there're cops outside his door."

They sat in silence for a minute, and then the stone crabs came. They cracked them open, pulled out the meat, and ate, both of them deep in thought.

"Look, let's say I wanted to get to Malavida," Lockwood ventured. "This guy hacked into one computer very efficiently. How hard would it be to hack into the computer network at Jackson Memorial Hospital?"

Karen looked at him, realization dawning. "Shit," she finally said, as they both scrambled to their feet…

The Jackson Memorial Hospital records were on The Rat's screen. He was looking for Malavida's blood products sheet. He quickly found it. Malavida had type 0-negative blood. The Rat knew that if he could change the negative to positive, once the foreign blood went into his body it would stop Malavida's heart within minutes. The Rat had cracked into the computer and could now easily change the records. The Rat knew he had to take care of two things: He couldn't just change Malavida's blood type; he also had to tinker with the cross-matching safeguards the hospital maintained.

The Rat checked the orders for Malavida. He scrolled down through pending orders for other patients until he found a patient with blood type 0-positive. He knew from the one time he'd been in the hospital for surgery that the technician drawing the blood would check Malavida's wristband, then hand-write the patient number on the blood tube after drawing the blood. When it reached the lab, a generated label, keyed to that number and printed with the patient's name, would be stuck on the tube. The Rat looked and saw the labels were already in the computer, waiting to be printed. He scrolled down to the one for the patient with 0-positive blood, deleted that patient's name, and replaced it with Malavida's.

Now, if he could change the blood designation in the blood bank before the new shift came on and hung another unit of blood, the new nurses would, unknowingly, be ordering up the wrong blood. Malavida would be dead by 12:30. The Rat switched to the patient records section in the blood bank and searched for Malavida's record. When he found it, he leaned over the keyboard and positioned his cursor in the "0-negative." He pushed Delete four times and his cursor ate the "nega" letters. Then he typed in "post" and looked at his magic up on the screen.

He wanted to watch Malavida die. He went back to "Log Listings." He found "Video Security" and punched it up on the screen. His console now showed that there were twenty different camera positions in the hospital, mostly hallways and nurses' stations, and a few operating theaters. He knew from the records that Malavida was on the fifth floor. He found that designation and punched it up. The hospital used videoconferencing technology to send doctors radiology images. Up on his computer, he was now looking at the fifth-floor sub-acute nurses' station. Three nurses were working at the desk. Off to the right of his screen, up the hall, a uniformed policeman was sitting on a metal chair outside a door. The Rat guessed this was Malavida's room.