Unnatural Instinct

NINE

Texas State Penitentiary, Huntsville, Texas

Lucas Stonecoat feared that a visit to the state penitentiary would likely uncover little or nothing. Most convicts had little reason to cooperate with law enforcement, and few did so without inducements of one sort or another. Lucas had come to the fortress of stone and barbed wire with no authorization to barter with or OK any promises he might make to an inmate on death row. Along with Lucas, police psychiatrist Meredyth Sanger had come, but so far, only rumor filtered to their ears, something about a dead man reaching out from the grave-a story of how Jimmy Lee Purdy meant to get vengeance at whatever cost after his execution. Purdy certainly appeared the most fixated inmate bent on DeCampe's being punished. Warden Jerold Gwinn characterized Jimmy as he led them toward Purdy's only friend inside prison walls.

“ Purdy was a Bible-thumping so-called born again,” began Gwinn. “Jimmy Lee condemned any use of the Lord's name being taken in vain, but he called up unholy hellfire to rain over his enemies, and no one cursed more or longer than Purdy. Still, the idea that Purdy-executed on the Sunday before Judge DeCampe's disappearance-could have had any hand in the judge's disappearance…7'

“ We don't know for certain that he had anything to do with it, Warden Gwinn, but we're trying to keep an open mind,” explained Meredyth.

“ Inmate Goddard!” shouted Gwinn, rousing the shackled prisoner as they stormed into the interrogation room where Goddard had fallen asleep while waiting for them.

Goddard laughed at the warden.

“ You show these people respect and answer their questions as best you can, Inmate Goddard, and you'll get two merit points, two demerits if I learn otherwise.”

Lucas wondered what kind of a kindergarten Gwinn was running here.

“ You reap what you sow,” replied Goddard, and this biblical injunction seemed to appease Gwinn, who turned to Stonecoat and Sanger and said, “He's all yours. Good luck.”

“ Inmate Goddard is ecstatic about DeCampe's suffering, if that's what you want to know,” said Goddard before they had time to sit. “But I don't know jack-shit about what happened to the bitch or who's behind it. I had nothing whatever to do with it. So, are we done here?”

“ The warden apprise you of what we're here for?”

“ Got it through the prison grapevine.”

“ Ever hear Jimmy Lee Purdy threaten the judge?” Goddard laughed uncontrollably. “Do rats shit? But hell, I don't have to talk to you, and I ain't about to rat out my only friend in here.”

“ He's no longer in here,” countered Lucas. “You can't seriously believe that you can rat out a dead man, do you?”

“ The hell he ain't, and hell yes, I don't rat out nobody, not even the dead. Besides, like I said, Jimmy Lee's still here in the cellblock. Talked to him just last night. He's a haint now, haunts the place. I hear him talking in my ears when the lights go off. He tells me what hell's like. Fact is, it don't sound so bad after all.” Goddard, a hairy chest peeking from his prison shirt, grinned throughout his little speech.

Meredyth raised a hand and said, “Cooperate with us, Mr. Goddard, and-”

“ And what? What can you do for a walking dead, sweetie?”

“ What're your chances you'll ever kiss another woman before you die?”

He laughed. He snorted. He stared into her eyes. Then he slowly formulated a reply. “They say I can't have no contact in here with my visitors. Any contact, and I'm in the hole.”

“ You willing to chance that for a moment's pleasure?” she asked.

“ What about a touch. One touch, here,” he bartered, standing and holding his crotch.

“ Only if my partner can stay and watch over me.”

He glared at Lucas now. “Shit. All right.”

“ Then you'll tell us what you can about Purdy?”

“ All right… all right.”

Meredyth indicated to Lucas to watch out for the guard. Lucas started to protest, but she put a linger on his hps and said, “It's for a good cause.”

She then turned and seductively moved to within inches of Goddard, who stank of Old Spice shaving lotion and cigarette breath. She ignored the sickening odors and the man's ugly little gnome appearance and beehive-shaped head and alligator-gray skin. She passionately kissed him and allowed him to guide her hand to where he wanted to be touched. “Easy… easy,” she cautioned, feeling his grip tighten and his body shiver in one wave after another.

She broke it off, and Goddard stumbled to his seat, holding his privates and looking as if he'd been given the greatest gift of all time.

Lucas and Meredyth returned to the interrogation table, its oak surface again a barrier between the officials and the condemned man. “All right, you got what you wanted, now it's our turn,” instructed Meredyth. “Out with it. Anything and everything you know about Purdy and his hatred for Judge DeCampe.”

“ Yeah… a deal's a deal.” He was aglow now, his eyes riveted to hers. “You're some lay, Doc.”

“ Never mind that. Out with it.”

Goddard took a deep breath, still touching himself, as he spoke. “Hell, every other conversation we had, he was going to fuck her over, until he started getting really weird.”

“ What do you mean, really weird?”

“ Ahhhh, mouthing off how he'd like to be fucking her while she's straddling him on The Chair-Old Surefire we call it in here. Jimmy Lee got quite graphic about it. Want to hear more?” he asked, leering at Meredyth. “Said it'd be one hell of a fuck, you know, his penis frying up in her at the same moment they both are electrocuted together. Her pussy electrified along with his organ, and them fusing together like that.”

Lucas grabbed him by the arm, shouting, “That's enough bullshit, Goddard! Get to the point.”

Goddard snatched his arm away and growled, bear like.

“ Just get on with it,” Meredyth firmly said, her green eyes pinning him.

“ All right, and after that, Purdy started talking even more weird shit than that.”

“ Like what?” demanded Lucas.

“ Look, I got no reason to say no more against Jimmy. He was a stand-up guy. Cut two bastards bad who run up on me.”

“ What's the worst weird shit he told you in connection with the judge, Mr. Goddard?” pressed Meredyth.

“ Look, I'm no fool. I watch the TV news. I know what you people want, and it's going to cost you.”

“ We had a deal, Mr. Goddard,” said Meredyth.

“ I want my appeal heard.”

“ We don't have any juice there,” said Lucas.

“ But we'll do everything we can in that regard, Mr. Goddard,” Meredyth replied, holding a hand on Lucas's arm when he had come out of his seat toward Goddard.

“ All right, if you're sure you're going to go to bat for me, I'll tell you what I know.”

“ Please go ahead”

“ J. P.-I called him J. P.-he said shit like, 'When I'm dead, I will have her.' “

“ Her? The judge, you mean?” she asked.

“ Have her in what manner?” asked Lucas.

“ Said he would share his coffin with her. Said it was all arranged. Said God told him how to do it. Said his father in heaven had arranged it with his father here, on earth. Said it was ordained, foretold, all that shit. He even believed it was coded into his Bible that DeCampe would lie down with his dead body and follow him into the next world. Crap like that. I only listened and agreed with him and went along because he never done me no harm.”

“ So… what about you, Mr. Goddard?” asked Lucas. “Do you want to see Judge DeCampe dead?”

“ Jimmy wanted to ride her into eternity. Me, I just wanted her to die slow and suffer. I guess maybe he had more imagination.”

Lucas produced the faxed artist's sketch of the suspect, the aged man who had abducted DeCampe, according to FBI sources. 'Take a close look at this. Do you know the man in the picture?”

“ Ahhh… looks roughly like Jimmy Lee's old man, yeah.”

“ How would you know what he looked like?”

“ Old Isaiah? Hell, Jimmy Lee showed me his picture more'n once. Claimed he loved his mama and papa. Seen her picture more than the old man's, but yeah, that looks like his old man, all right.”

“ That fits with the old man with the van and two coffins,” said Lucas.

The interview came to an abrupt halt when Meredyth stood, rushed the door, and banged for the guard to open it.

Goddard shot to his feet, shouting, “What about my appeal? What're you going to do for me?”

Lucas, who stood a head taller than Goddard, intercepted him with a threatening glare that halted the man. “We'll do whatever we can,” he lied and then rushed out after Meredyth.

Outside the interrogation room, Meredyth held up the artist's sketch and said to Lucas, “If this is James Lee Purdy's father, and he's been here to collect his son's body, then Warden Gwinn can ID him. We don't need that low- life belly crawler Goddard.”

“ Hell of a show you put on back there, but are you OK?” Lucas asked Meredyth as they approached the warden's office in the company of a guard who had been assigned to them. Already the prison was abuzz about their visit and why they were here.

She breathed deeply. “I'll survive. Been through worse, and I think Goddard did definitely put us onto the right path. I'm not exactly a stranger to the James Lee Purdy case. The guy was a classic megalomaniac. Some kind of weird complexes that it might take a lifetime to unravel, but he had a definite fixation on DeCampe, if Goddard's to be believed.”

“ Yeah, big if. If Goddard can be believed.”

'Trusted no, but believed, I think so. He seemed a little afraid of Purdy himself, if my reading between the lines is as accurate as I think.”

“ So we need a far more serious talk with Warden Gwinn, the keeper of this asylum, and this time, we'll put the tough questions to him.” Lucas grasped his aching neck in his large right hand and massaged it as the winding way to Gwinn's office came to an end.

Gwinn, a thin, sickly looking man, stood to greet them. “I told you… wasting your time with Goddard.”

“ Not entirely,” replied Meredyth.

“ Oh?”

“ He had a lot to say about another of your inmates, a Jimmy Lee Purdy,” Lucas added.

“ Purdy died last Sunday in Old Surefire. Again, you're barking up the wrong tree, Detective Stonecoat.” Gwinn displayed a self-satisfied grin on feeling a step ahead of them.

“ We don't think so.”

“ I see, then you think that Purdy arranged for something to happen to Judge DeCampe after his death?”

“ How about on the evening of his death?” replied Lucas. “Who came to claim the body?”

“ Purdy's father.”

“ Did he look anything like this?” Meredyth pulled the police sketch of the old man from his breast pocket.

Gwinn studied the face. “Doesn't look like the same man, no. Eyes are all wrong. That turn at the mouth upward. No… I'd say Purdy's mouth was pulled down, like gravity had a- hold.”

“ But it could be Purdy's father. He had the same general features?”

“ You could say that.”

“ All right, but it was the old man who took possession of the body after the execution?”

“ Yes, correct.”

“ And he had these general features.”

“ Generally speaking, maybe yes.”

Meredyth thought how this man qualified everything he said, a typical politician. She asked, “What about the old man's vehicle?”

“ Wouldn't know. I had left before then. Did not meet Mr. Purdy Senior except to see him through the glass, sitting like a zombie up front during the execution. Didn't make eye contact. He didn't seem or appear capable of it. May've been on drugs for all I know.”

“ Who takes care of turning over the remains?”

“ It was taken care of by a guard and honorary inmates who've earned the respect of the guards.”

“ I see.” Lucas realized now that Gwinn had not seen the old man face-to-face, nor had he talked to the elder Purdy. That all the dirty business of cleaning up after an execution-once the show was over-fell to inmates and guards.

Meredyth broke the uncomfortable silence. “According to the only eyewitness we have, Judge DeCampe's abductor shapes up to be old man Purdy.”

“ And that old man left here with two pine box coffins in his van,” finished Lucas. “One housed his fried son's body, and the other was intended for the judge.”

Meredyth added, “Goddard corroborates our worst fears, that the old man means to bury his son and the judge, and she most likely alive.”

Visibly shaken, Gwinn's mouth moved, but only an unintelligible utterance sounded.

Lucas stormed at him. “Last time I looked, the State of Texas still supplies pine boxes for death row inmates, but somebody had to have given or sold the old man that second coffin. Any guesses who?”

“ Pine boxes can be had at any funeral home. You just have to ask.”

“ Do you really believe that is how Purdy came to have two coffins in back of his van, Warden?” asked Meredyth. He bridled and puffed up as if every fiber had filled with air. “All right, we build pine boxes with gold-chrome-plated handles in our inmate wood shop. Keeps idle hands busy. Takes some stress off to work a plane and a sander.”

“ We'll want to talk to your man in charge of the wood shop where they make the coffins for death-row inmates.”

“ There're three of 'em. Each on different shifts. As for the coffins, we supply them to public funerary homes all over the state, and some out-of-state locations. It's the only alternative to those high-priced Cadillac models, and there're a lot of sharecroppers in the state who don't want to go broke over a funeral.”

“ So a coffin or two going out the door wouldn't necessarily be missed?”

“ You'd best talk to my men.”

“ Before we talk to them, let me see their records,” suggested Meredyth Sanger.

“ If you wish, Dr. Sanger.”

“ We're trying to win a race here, sir, against time. Perhaps we can save some time by my going over the records. Sometimes it's in the ink-the handwriting. I'm something of a handwriting expert,” she explained. She had taken up the science of reading handwriting after learning how it served Kim Desinor, when she and Lucas had worked with her on the Snatcher case two years before.

The warden only frowned at this, punched a button on the intercom, and shouted, “Shirley, I want three personnel files in here stat. Bill Lowry, Karl Tubbs, and Jake Pascal. Got that?” He then turned to his visitors and said, “I trust every one of my guards here at Huntsville. They're the best.”

Before even meeting the three guards who rotated over seeing the wood shop, Meredyth Sanger had a fix on Jake Pascal as being the rascal who had sold a second coffin under the table to the old man, based on his handwriting. They didn't bother speaking to the other two men. Summoned to the warden's office, Pascal was immediately apprehensive and defensive, and spilled his guts the moment Meredyth displayed the artist's sketch of the elder Purdy.

“ I thought it'd be OK, you know. The old man said it was for himself, for when his time would come. Said he didn't have nothing in this life but the van he'd just bought. When we loaded his son into the van around by the shop, I just had the boys toss in another for him at no charge.”

“ No charge?” asked the warden.

“ Sir, I swear, I didn't take a cent for it. You can ask Fletcher and Columbo; they were the ones who helped load the coffins. No mystery about it.”

“ What kind of van did the old man drive?”

“ Ahhh, fancy, large, expensive, well carpeted. Roomy. Both the boxes fit in side by side. He'd taken out all the backseats.”

“ What make and model?”

“ Chevrolet, I think. Big American job. Maybe a Ford. I didn't pay any mind to that. But I wondered where he'd put the seats he'd removed so the boxes would fit.”

“ So he anticipated getting two coffins before he ever got here?” asked Lucas.

“ Look, we all knew Jimmy Lee pretty well after ten years. Jimmy asked me as a favor to him to cut out a coffin for the old man. I… I was expecting the old man and his request.”

“ But you took no money for it?” repeated the warden.

“ Not a cent, sir. Honest.”

The warden waved him down.

Lucas wanted the warden to leave the room, but he knew making such a request would only anger the man. “Did you notice anything unusual about the license plate?”

“ Wasn't one of ours. Out of state. Indiana, I think.”

“ All right. Officer Pascal. You can go now,” said the warden, seeing that Lucas and Sanger were finished with the guard.

“ I'm sorry, Warden Gwinn, sir.”

“ I'll deal with you later, Pascal. Some tough guy you turned out to be. You allowed yourself to be hoodwinked by an old Iowa farmer.”

The phone rang; a call for Lucas from Randy Oglesby, his computer support. Randy had unearthed some fascinating facts, if belated. “Get this, Lucas-old man Purdy had made two previous trips to Houston, the first time was almost ten years before, when Judge Maureen DeCampe, a newly appointed judge, saw his son to the death chamber in a ruling she alone made-no jury trial. Jimmy Purdy was found guilty of sex crimes that had turned to sex-lust- murder. He had opted for a no-jury trial, and his case had fallen into DeCampe's lap.”

“ Good work.”

'That's not all. The old man returned recently when Jimmy's appeal was being heard before Judge Raymond Parker, but not before it first fell into DeCampe's hands. DeCampe hand delivered it to Parker. She recused herself from hearing the appeal since she was, to say the least, extremely prejudiced where Jimmy Lee Purdy was concerned. It was a direct conflict of interest, a no-brainer,” said Randy. “However, the senior Purdy made an appointment and saw her before the appeal trial began. What was said during that meeting remained between them. Judge DeCampe shared it with no one.”

“ And the old man's third trip here,” said Lucas, “was to retrieve his son's body.” He thanked Randy and hung up. Lucas then conveyed this information to the warden and Sanger. They next stood and said their good-byes.

On leaving the prison and locating the car, Sanger said, “Lucas, as I see it, we have one more stop, and then we call out the armed forces in Iowa to locate one Isaiah Purdy.”

“ Warrant across state lines can take time,” replied Lucas. Darkness was already descending over Texas when they made their way out to the parking lot. “Not if the judge is sympathetic to our cause,” countered

Sanger, “and being highborn as I am, I have a few friends in high places around here, and so did DeCampe. If Judge DeCampe is suffocating somewhere in a pine box between here and Iowa or back at this guy's property and six feet under, we… well, we have to act fast, and even then it may be too late.”

“ I've got to call this medical examiner with the FBI, tell her what we've got. Maybe she can get a federal warrant to search the guy's property faster than the State of Texas can talk to the State of Iowa.”

“ I know Judge Parker, and he'll be extremely sympathetic, and-”

“ I see. Play on the old saw: There but for the grace of God could a went Judge Parker, right?”

“ With these men, father and son, fixated on DeCampe, I suspect Parker was never in the running. But of course, I'll work every angle on him, Lucas. Meanwhile, you get the feds to jump-start the state patrol in Iowa. Have them at the ready to move in at a moment's notice. One or the other of us, Texas or the Feds, whoever gets a warrant first, we use.”

Lucas placed his strobe light over the top of the car and turned on the siren. They raced for the courthouse.