Unnatural Instinct

TWELVE

Isaiah Purdy had regained his vision and was now fueled with anger, and with Jimmy Lee's horrid laughter piercing his eardrums, he gave chase. With Jimmy Lee's dead voice telling Isaiah that he was made a fool, being bested by a damned woman, the old man, with his cattle prod in hand, raced after Maureen, muttering to himself until she came in view.

He saw that she was heading for that old chemical factory buttressing the property. And even with the distance between them, he could see that she had spotted him.

Then she vanished. One moment in his sight, the next gone, like a deer in a leafy wood. She'd seen him coming, and she had dropped into a shaft of black shadow this moonless night. He carried a rope alongside the cattle prod. He meant to hog-tie her and drag her, like a squealing animal, back to Jimmy Lee.

It's what Jimmy Lee said he wanted now.

“ I'll get the bitch, Jimmy Lee, and I'll cozy the two of you up again just as soon's I do. Don't you be worrying none. Not one bit.”

Jimmy Lee would make her pay for this in the next life, just as Isaiah had made that snoopy-assed realtor pay in this life. Felt good to put the prongs of the pitchfork dead through her like I done, he thought.

Maureen DeCampe had seen the old bastard bent on slowly murdering her as he came over the rise, the man's frame, rope, and what looked like the cattle prod silhouetted against the sky when a dry lightning bolt lit up the heavens. He looked for all the world like a maniacal biblical prophet out of history. Just then, the moon peeked through an opening in the clouds. She quickly hid among some barrels just outside the fence gate. A sign proclaimed the place to be Midlothian Tool amp; Die, but the sign appeared ancient, and it remained questionable exactly what sort of place this was, except that it reeked of petroleum and alcohol and carbide odors, with a touch of methane. The old sign looked like something left over from another era. The place could just as well be a gin mill today.

She inched along the fence, not certain where or how close Isaiah Purdy might be at this moment. Having taken her eyes off him once, she'd lost his gray form in the surrounding gloom.

Still, she heard animal noises. Was it Purdy? No, it was something sounding trapped, the poor creature crying and whining off deep in the woods. She heard the pitter-patter of scurrying mice and rats among the discarded boards and barrels on the other side of the fence. In all the time she had been here, she had not heard a farm animal, not so much as a dog bark or a cat meow. Now she heard someone whistling, and she turned to stare at a man on the other side of the fence, not a hundred yards from her, lighting up a cigarette. His bulk stretched the idea of comfort in a uniform with white shirt and blue patch, the knit badge of a security guard. Her heart skipped a beat at seeing the man, as it had at seeing Nancy Willis, but Nancy lay dead now as a direct result of helping Maureen, and she was keenly aware that approaching the man certainly put him in as much danger, but she had no choice. In her condition, without help, she was not going to get free of Isaiah Purdy. Purdy had made her an expert on helplessness.

She rushed along the fence, banging, calling out, when suddenly she felt the sting of an electric bolt streak through her being, toppling her and sending her into unconsciousness, but in one instant before she lost consciousness, she realized that she was again in Purdy's hands.

“ Hey, old man! How're you doing tonight?” shouted the security guard. “What's all the ruckus?”

“ Damn varmints-rats!” Purdy called back in his most casual tone, while Maureen DeCampe lay in a patch of blackness at his feet.

“ Hate the damn things. Why'd God make 'em in the first place? To torment good people like us?” asked the guard, puffing on his cigarette.

“ What's it they say? Lord works in mysterious ways?”

“ Is that your final answer?” he joked, mimicking a now world famous game show host. “You think the same is true in His creating the mosquitoes and the gnats?” The guard swatted at something that bit his forearm.

“ OK, my friend,” Purdy added, “God didn't make rats at all.”

“ Didn't? Then who? Satan?”

“ My friend, rats came along for the ride, came out of the evil men do. They're here to remind us of our sinful natures, same as those stone statues-gargoyles. Hell, we're all just like 'em.”

“ Just like who?”

“ Rats! Ain't you listening, son?” Purdy cleared his throat and pulled on his chewing tobacco, one foot on top of the game he'd just hunted down, keenly aware that if the moon should return, or if another lightning strike lit up the place, the guard would see what lay at the old man's feet. He thought on the one hand how he might need to get a few steps closer to the guard, that he might need to zap him with the cattle prod, and on the other hand, he thought, I gotta get her up and outta here, but I can't so long as this idiot is talking to me.

“ There are some among us who can't help but give in to that nature.” Purdy fished for words to extricate himself from the conversation.

“ Nature of the rat, you mean?”

“ Chinese have it on their calendar-year of the rat.” old man now wondered if babbling would work, in hopes that the younger man would grow bored and end it and walk off. “Yeah… hey yeah, and the Chinese are 'sposed to be real smart.”

“ It's what ya might call imprinting from birth for some. Why, the Lord don't have any more use for rats than we do, son. Still, the rats among us flourish, and it's a damn rare moment in this life when a man gets even a whiff of real home-grown justice.”

“ I 'spose you're right, old man.” The security guard hadn't seen DeCampe or heard her pleas. A radio played from a nearby doorway, a loud medley of Johnny Cash tunes. The old man secretly thanked Johnny Cash.

But now the guard stepped closer to the fence, closer to Purdy, and he would see DeCampe crumpled at his feet. The idiot was actually interested in the gibberish Purdy had concocted to put him off! Shit.

Closer and closer he came. Purdy stiffened his hold on the cattle prod, gauging his reach through the gate; exactly at what point would he be able to stab the beefy man with it, to render him unconscious? He would not get a second chance. The man was not wearing a side arm, but he had a nightstick and a huge flashlight, which thus far, he had seen no use for. But this meant he had good eyes, and with each step, those good eyes came closer to discovering the woman lying prone at the old man's feet.

One more step, and there'd be hell to pay, but then someone at the door called out the name Frank several times. Frank stopped and turned, waved and shouted across forty yards to his boss at the door. “Be right there, Mr. Wainwright.” He then muttered under his breath for Purdy's sake, “Now you wanna talk about rats? That SOB has incisors longer'n any rat's gonna have.”

Frank the watchman then looked over his shoulder and said to Purdy, 'Talk to you again, old-timer. Gotta go. Duty calls, and ain't that a bitch. Some fifteen-minute break, huh?” Cigarette smoke trailed after the man as he sauntered off.

Purdy waited for the man to disappear through the factory door, taking his flashlight, nightstick, his eyes, and radio with him.

Purdy kicked the woman at his feet for making him sweat and for shaming him, as Jimmy Lee's taunts continued in the old man's brain. She'd shamed him good, breaking free like this; even if she were recaptured without incident, it was incident enough to give him ulcers. Not to mention how things looked to Jimmy Lee. Jimmy Lee would be laughing in his ears for weeks over this.

Purdy bent and placed DeCampe's limp form over his shoulder and started back with his prize toward the safety of the bam. “Some big rat you are, Your Judgess. Had yourself a nice little runabout, but now it's time to go back and nest down with Jimmy Lee, like two mice nestled in a burrow.”

With no one to see her, with no one watching him, with the watchman gone and sirens in the distance not finding this place, Isaiah Purdy returned his unruly charge to the safety of the old farmstead. He returned Maureen DeCampe to the hell he meant at all costs to inflict on her.

Reaching the interior of the bam, stepping over the realtor lady, he dropped DeCampe's unconscious body hard on the earth beside Jimmy's still grinning corpse.

“ A couple few bruises now. You brought 'em on yourself, dearie,” he began. “Ought to speed up the process some, like a bruised apple-jump-start this death by decaying, huh? Whataya think, Jimmy Lee?” he asked the corpse and cackled, pleased with his own words, even though only Jimmy could hear them.

He paused a moment to study Jimmy Lee's badly spaced, badly cracked, yellowed teeth just back of the bloated, mottled lips that'd been pulled by death into the familiar dead man's smile. Isaiah said to the empty bam, “Always had to fight the boy to brush his damned teeth. The one thing I hated seeing was the boy's bad teeth. If only the fool had listened, but guess it don't matter nary a bit now. Once't you're dead, good teeth, bad teeth's all the same by then, huh, Jimmy Lee?”

Isaiah turned from the corpse and its now-decayed eyes and stepped back to the heavy bam doors, creaking now in a growing night wind that had turned the tops of pine trees into giant brushes that painted the underbelly of the crushing gray clouds that had rolled in. He latched the doors with a makeshift latch that he must replace with something stronger-a cord of hemp wasn't going to do it. Miss High and Mighty Realtor Nancy proved that much. He'd have to go to work on the latch, use his Iowa ingenuity, his Yankee know-how.

For now, he pulled the doors tight with the cord and closed out the world to him, the judge, and Jimmy Lee. Then he went to fashion some new leather straps. It would cost more time, but at least his father had taught him how to cut a tanned hide into useful strips, a job his father learned from his father and so on down the branches of the family tree. Those strips were usually used to beat an unruly child, but Isaiah had found a better use indeed.

Lew Clemmens, FBI computer whiz, looked in on Jessica to see how she was holding up and to offer his apologies that things in Iowa had not worked out as everyone had hoped. “Something good did come out of our liaison with Houston, however.”

“ Oh, and what's that?” she asked, accepting the cup of steaming coffee he had brought as a gift.

“ I hooked up with this guy named Randy Oglesby, Houston PD's civilian computer genius, and together we managed to uncover some interesting cyber facts on the case.”

She indicated the chair, and he sat down, getting comfortable. “Go on,” she said, after sipping at her coffee.

“ Well it was mostly Oglesby. He has inroads to the Houston court system. He's kind of a legitimatized hacker, if you ask me. Any rate, he tapped into the fact that Judge DeCampe had recused herself on a case recently, and this caught his full attention, and it led him to search back for a nine-year-old case, and guess who it involved?”

“ Jimmy Lee Purdy?”

“ Exactly, a case in which she put a man on death row: James Lee Purdy.”

“ But she recused herself from his appeal nine years later… makes sense. Conflict of interest.”

“ Yeah, Purdy's case had come up for appeal and oddly, it had fallen on her desk.”

“ Snafu?”

“ Snafu or greased hands? Hard to tell. But coincidence, I find hard to buy.”

“ What're you saying, Lew?”

“ From the way the papers were drawn up, Jimmy Lee asked for her, specifically requested Judge DeCampe to oversee the appeal. I know that's stupid, but people chalked it up to Jimmy Lee's having an idiot for a lawyer and a fool for a client.”

“ Don't tell me, he was acting as his own lawyer?”

“ Yeah, and as it appears to Randy, he was orchestrating a rendezvous with DeCampe. He definitely had an unhealthy interest in her. DeCampe turned the appeal over to a Judge Parker, same one that got a warrant out for Purdy's farm.”

The phone rang, and Jessica heard a man introduce himself as Judge Raymond Parker in Houston. “I have issued a warrant for search and seizure to go ahead in Iowa. Anything else I can do, please let me know.”

She covered the mouthpiece a millisecond to gather her thoughts. Clearing her throat, she replied, “Yes, your honor, we received word via fax about… a while ago.” She had had her secretary forward Parker's warrant and the federal warrant on to Virgil Gorman's office, which ought to satisfy Iowa authorities and cover her earlier lie-her jumping the judiciary gun.

“ Did they find anything? Is there any news?” Parker asked.

'Their search has uncovered nothing of significance so far, and I am afraid, sir, that Judge DeCampe is not at the Iowa location.”

“ Have they located Purdy?”

“ No, sorry once again, but should the search of the property yield any useful information, well… one never knows, sir.”

“ We appear to be back at square one, as they say.” Parker then apologized for the time it had taken to draw up the warrant. “Due process… takes time; we rushed it through as best we could the moment I learned of your suspicions.”

She again thanked him. “I understand you were the judge who handled Jimmy Lee Purdy's appeal, and that you saw the senior Mr. Purdy in your courtroom.” Her last conversation with Lucas Stonecoat had provided a lot of useful information.

“ That's true; I gave authorities here a few items to add to the artist's sketch you're circulating. Hope it helps catch this maniac. Frankly, it could just as well have been me targeted rather than Maureen, I suppose.”

“ Hard to tell. Seemed his son was fixated on her.”

“ If I could take her place in this nightmare… well, I would in a heartbeat.”

“ Brave of you to say so, sir.” Easy to say, she thought. “Do you have any idea where next you will look?”

“ I've kept in touch with Houston PD and the FBI there.”

“ There? You mean Iowa?”

“ In Iowa, yes, but also there-in Texas.”

'Texas?”

“ Everywhere within a fifty-mile radius of Huntsville is being closely looked at, thanks to HPD, Dr. Sanger, and Stonecoat. We're doing the same in the D.C. area, but frankly, other than that, we've come to a standstill.”

“ Stalemate, I see. If there is anything this office can do…”

“ You can be on twenty-four-hour alert, should we need another warrant in the Huntsville-Houston area. And thank you, Judge Parker.”

“ There's something else you should be clear on, Agent Coran.”

Bored by now, she said a sleepy, “Yes?”

Judge Raymond Parker recounted how DeCampe turned over the Purdy case to him, telling him that all she wanted was to see Purdy die in the chair. While she had to recuse herself from his appeal as a matter of course, since she'd tried him originally, she made it clear that in her opinion, there was no room for appeal of the death sentence in Purdy's case.

“ She was clear on that?”

“ Expressly. She said that all his Bible-thumping, born- again crap was just that: crap.”

“ Anything you can tell me about the old man?”

“ I'd've sworn the old geezer to be, you know, harmless, but who knows these days anymore? He carried a Bible into the courtroom every day; read passages from it. Lips moved as he read. Used his fingers to help him read. Never a peep.”

Another line rang. “I'm afraid I have to go, Judge Parker. Another line, and I'm hoping it will be Iowa with some good news.”

“ Yes, I do hope you can salvage something out of this.”

“ Yeah, me, too,” she said to herself, after she had hung up the phone.

“ What's that?” asked Clemmens who had remained seated across from her.

“ Gotta get this other call, Lew. Could be important.”

Lew Clemmens nodded, raised his hands, and indicated he would leave her in peace. He made his way to the door and back down the hall.

Jessica took a deep breath and prayed for good news from Iowa, that her patience would be rewarded. She could hardly stand working like this, feeling as if her hands were tied. She'd rather be in a lab or in the field. Working out of a task-force operations room was killing on the nerves.

“ It's Iowa,” said her secretary.

“ Give me half a second to get into the ops room, and put it through there. I want this on the speakerphone for the task force to hear.”

“ Not a problem.” Jessica saw that Lew had disappeared, likely with a sense of feeling like the proverbial third wheel. She didn't want him or anyone else to feel that way, not on account of how she worked or failed to work. She raced after Lew, grabbed his arm, and said, “Come on, Iowa's back.”

“ Virgil, you mean?”

“ Yeah, think so. I've got it on speaker in ops.”

“ Let's hear what Virgil has to say.”

She nodded, and when they stepped into the ops room, she shouted for everyone's attention. “Iowa's on line one.” She pressed the button, and everyone fell silent, anxious to hear if Virgil and his small army of men had come up with anything at all remotely worthwhile down on the farm.