Unnatural Instinct

THREE

Normally speaking, everyone but Jessica was happy about her taking time off the job, of her slowing down, her periods of personal leave, but now with Richard and their plans going forth, she was the happy one, and she didn't particularly want to be bothered by any other reality, especially the job of hunting down monsters. But the FBI was like a force of nature-a mindless chaos unto itself- and the force had come to her again. They had strongly encouraged her to take on the DeCampe case, but she comforted herself in believing she could, if she wished, decline the case, that she did in the final analysis have the strength of reputation and power within the “family,” as many called the FBI, to have the last word. But she wasn't so vain as to truly believe that if push came to shove, she could win against the top echelon in such a disagreement. And besides, with Richard's encouragement, she did find the case important and tugging at her. So once again, she was heading up perhaps the most important case of the year, as it were.

At least she had had the last say as to how they would proceed and with whom she would be working, and she was pleased with the speed with which Santiva had arranged everything. “Good to be needed,” she'd confided to J. T. at a moment when she had first come on board.

She kept no secrets save those of the heart from J. T. Only one other person understood her anger and resentment at her superiors, and that was her new shrink, Patricia Phelan. Patricia knew her to be a ticking bomb if she felt unduly cooped up or hog-tied. Pat daily proved to be a no-nonsense, fiery-tongued petite redhead who had skillfully worked around FBI officials to arrange for real investigative work for Jessica, assuring Santiva and other higher ups that it was just precisely what the “patient” needed: work. No one else knew it, but Jessica certainly did know how influential Pat Phelan had been in Jessica's decision of whether to take on the case or not. Jessica knew herself well enough to know that she did indeed need to work. Work was like breathing for her. So she was, after all, glad to have been called up to bat on the DeCampe case.

While Jessica's first curse was the painful realization that she was as obsessed about finding the facts and ending the careers of murderers as Ahab was with the whale, her second curse was also a simple one: She simply could not abide injustice of any kind, but especially injustice toward the helpless and the weak.

She thought of the Claude Lightfoot case. She'd been obsessed with it before Richard had arrived in America. She and Lew Clemmens had been digging up the bones around that old case.

“ Where do you begin to search for such Gila monsters?” Lew Clemmens had asked her when he had brought the twenty-year-old case to her attention. “Under the nearest rock,” she'd replied. Jessica had been poring over the file since Lew had programmed the computer to red-flag hate crimes-anything smacking of a racially motivated crime. This was his job, but he was also looking for anything that might rival the ferocity of this murder, anything similar in the least that might point them toward a suspect or suspects, first within the same geographical location and then expanding from there.

It took time, but they'd found two men who had served time at Folsom State Prison for hate crimes similar to what had occurred in the Lightfoot case. The two had discovered the Aryan Brotherhood in prison, where they'd also found one another, and when one was released, they stayed in touch until the second stepped out of prison. Together, they went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, ostensibly following a job, working day labor on a construction site. Joseph Ireland and Montgomery Nestor had become Jessica's primary targets as a result of computer snooping.

Jessica had not left her Quantico, Virginia, office for Sioux Falls, but with Lew's ingenious help, she had put out an ever-widening electronic eye on the two former convicts with ties to the Aryan Nation. But they needed eyewitness information, and so they began building information from acquaintances, a Malcolm McArthur in particular.

Jessica knew just the right man to call, a field agent in the Sioux Falls area. She had made some calls and had sent the perfect man for the job: a very scary, huge black man named Hosea Crooms, who would frighten a bounty hunter. Crooms was told to look under all the rocks and to ask some tough questions of McArthur, and early reports back said that McArthur was definitely in the know and was willing to talk for immunity and a place in witness protection and for a hefty sum. Negotiations had gotten under way.

It was a hate crime Jessica still wanted very much to do something about. She was well aware of the foolish debate going on nationally over the semantics of the phrase hate crimes', some people believed all crimes of a violent nature were inherently crimes of hatred. But law enforcement people knew better. Hardly a country on the face of the planet was unaffected by racism, bigotry, and all its courtiers of ignorance and stupidity. Hate crime in the legal sense implied a premeditation to harm another based on his race, religion, sexual preference, or cultural heritage, and this “evil intent” ultimately meant a judge or a jury could add more time onto a convicted man's sentence for his display of hatred on the basis of dislike for a whole population of people. A hate crime on the books, whether before or after hate crime legislation, looked and smelled like violence directed at an individual because of the color of her skin, or his sexual orientation or religious preference. The spirit of hate crime legislation meant to more severely punish those ape men still involved in clubbing to death anyone who did not appear to squat about the campfire in the exact fashion of everyone else seated around the campfire.

Hate crime legislation intended, like laws made since men began making laws, to end fear, ignorance, intolerance, and hatred based on fears. Regardless, fear continued as the great leveler of mankind, despite all his technological accomplishments, and part of his growing fear was inculcated now through his own technological wonders, such as neo-Nazi cyber domains, where hatred and bigotry were preached to whole new generations and whole new populations of people via the Internet. Any crackpot with a laptop… Jessica mused. Anyone could set himself up as a guru of truth or religion with the push of a few key strokes in cyberspace, where none of the rules of decency or even laws of ethics and tolerance applied. So hate crime legislation came into being as perhaps a futile act, an attempt to muzzle the human race. The law of mankind, especially in a democratic society, was indeed an ambitious creature. So, using key search words, the computer had obliged with the Light- foot case and hundreds more, but Lew had also included mutilation by ripping apart of limbs as a key phrase, and Lightfoot's case itself came up among these.

So it had caught Lew's attention first, and Lew had hoisted it on to Jessica with a kind of challenge. “Bet if anyone could solve this horrible crime, it'd be you, Jess. What a horrendous way to die.”

After studying the file, Jessica shivered at how young Lightfoot had met his end. She'd muttered to Lew, “Some plains tribesmen ripped apart their especially hated enemies, only they used horses instead of horse powered Fords and Chevys.”

“ So… where would you begin?” asked Clemmens, pushing it, his eyes dancing, curious, intelligent.

“ In a hate crime, you begin with the bottom feeders and you work your way up.”

However, the Lightfoot case, like so many others, had to be placed on hold, at least for now. So Jessica had pushed it aside, shunted it off. For now, Jessica's entire attention must be devoted to the DeCampe case. She must concern herself with the here and now, with the living case and not the dead one, with the live Judge DeCampe, who had to be alive.!

Isaiah James Purdy's brain felt too heavy inside his cranium, as if the jar of his skull had become filled with fluid, and worse yet, his mind, as well, had been turned over to the clawing, nonstop agitation that he must do what his God and his dead son clearly told him to do before the execution. He'd gone down to Huntsville, Texas, alone, clear from Iowa City, Iowa, to sit in a straight-backed folding chair to watch them electrocute Jimmy Lee until his poor boy was gone, as fried as a chicken wing by what they called executive order, as the governor had granted no reprieve.

Isaiah had grown up on black-and-white, tough-guy gangster movies from George Raft to Jimmy Cagney to Bogey duking it out with police in frantic shoot-outs, the hero bad guy always getting it in the end, sometimes via the electric chair. But nothing Hollywood could create could possibly have prepared the old man for what he had had to witness; nothing in Hollywood could ever match the sheer horror of a man sitting before a glass case and watching his son literally brain-fried and tortured to death, as burned at the stake as Saint Joan of Arc had been, and by whom? The authorities. Isaiah had watched with the tears of Jimmy Lee's mother in his eyes. Jimmy Lee's mother could not have been there for the execution, even if she were alive, because she could not have borne up under the crushing horror of such emotions that flooded in on Isaiah, watching his own flesh and blood destroyed before his eyes in such a fashion. Destroyed like a rabid animal by the state, and on less evidence than it took to free that black man who was some big-shot basketball player and movie star.

When Jimmy Lee's mother had died, it was then that the voice of her son came full-blown into Isaiah's head, all the way from the prison cell in Huntsville, Texas. Isaiah had at one time decided not to go to the execution, had decided no man should sit and stare at what the sovereign State of Texas planned for his son. He could not leave his ill and dying wife, Eunice Mae, who had never wavered in her devotion and duty to him. He couldn't leave Eunice in her state, not for the likes of Jimmy Lee, not for a moment.

Still, Jimmy Lee's words came creeping, seeping into Isaiah's head through his mother's mind first: clawing, snatching start-stops, stutters, and pleas. Toward the end, he'd thought that perhaps, just perhaps Jimmy Lee had found peace, but maybe in the end, Jimmy Lee simply didn't want to be alone… in the end. Something about how he had done as his daddy had told him. That he'd confessed his sins before Christ and had discovered the healing power of the Word.

Isaiah had pleaded with young Jimmy to read the Bible his mother had sent him, simply to read the Bible and to read it closely, and to find its message, and to deliver himself over to Christ his Savior, for many a battle was won with the Bible in hand, and those reading the Bible over the ages had been so taken over as to go out and win wars against Philistines and Muslims and all manner of infidels and soldiers of the Antichrist, to wage war on the Antichrist in whatever form he next chose to appear. And if whole races and populations could act out what they read in the Bible, if it had that power over the minds of multitudes, then why not over the individual, and why not Jimmy Lee, the most lost soul on the planet?

Isaiah thought it a strange debate going on in America as to violence on TV and film, when in fact for countless generations the Bible had depicted more true violence than any film imaginable. Still, there it was, and if the Holy Book could affect the passions of nations, why not the dedicated individual who sought to understand its deeper purpose?

So with Eunice Mae now at peace, deep in the ground, a Bible passage she herself selected and impressed upon Isaiah as the sure way to vengeance to see her over to the other side, beyond the River, he had pulled up stakes for the greater Houston area. He'd been on the road for hours without sleep. He feared he would miss the execution, his final good-bye to a son who had been born a bad seed, born with the mark of Cain. Cain slew his brother Abel, and while Jimmy Lee never had a brother nor ever killed a man, he had killed some women: six in all, and all of them loose and no account. Even the police reports said that much.

It was the last thing Isaiah Purdy meant to do before he died: give something back to his son, his only son born with a fevered brain, an agitated soul, and a broken heart. Be there in the end for him, a show of support they called it.

The drive was lonely-utterly so. No amount of music or talk radio could end the metallic, hard, awful-tasting emptiness that exuded an odor like death surrounding Isaiah there in the cab of the van he'd purchased for the trip. And why shouldn't everything smell of rot and decay and death? Death now stalked his little family like some rabid hound of hell. Here he was leaving his wife in a lonely grave that he'd dug with his own hands, followed by a journey toward his son's execution, followed by a claiming of the body, followed by what Jimmy Lee kept telling him he-and by extension they-wanted.

His cross-country journey was one of a modem day black hearse pulled by an engine fueled by vengeance. The Lord called for vengeance in a place inside Isaiah's head that he had no previous knowledge existed, a place where contact with voices of a purely evangelical hatred dwelled. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, blood for blood, flesh for flesh. He need only gather the parts for the ageless, timeless ritual, and like Jimmy Lee and God kept repeatedly telling him, he could do this. He could be the hand of God, the instrument of His wrath.

A fitting ending to a life that had had no specialness about it, a life of a simple man without dreams or aspirations above working the land. Sometime during the journey to Huntsville and to Jimmy's execution, Isaiah began to wonder how the boy got the way he did. “How'd my boy come out so bad?” he'd asked the air.

Isaiah, with Eunice's considerable help, had raised Jimmy Lee in as strict a biblical sense as possible, always mustering up the courage to punish the boy with the rod as the Bible said. Isaiah had beaten the boy whenever he did wrong, so why had he come out the way he had come out? Had to be a bad seed.

As the white lines and road signs whizzed by, Isaiah continued to ponder the question of his troubled son. The more he rolled it over in his mind on the long, empty blankness of highway leading out of Iowa City, the more he believed in his deepest recesses that Jimmy Lee had one of those gene defects the scientists talked about on that TLC television show that Eunice Mae would stare at for hours late in the night. Late in life, Eunice Mae had discovered her liking for such, that and the animal stuff. He chuckled, recalling how it'd been Jimmy Lee who had insisted on putting in a satellite dish and a brand-spanking-new twenty-five-inch TV. Regardless of all his vile and admittedly wicked ways, the boy had always been good to his mama and in his way to Isaiah, his papa; regardless of all those women they said he had harmed, he had never once taken on devilishly or evilly toward his own… at least that much could be said of the boy.

Isaiah swerved to avoid the headlights of an oncoming Mack truck that blared its horn at him. He turned hard to avoid the truck, sent up a shower of debris as he hit the shoulder and grass off U.S. 20 outside Sioux City. He'd buried his wife this day and had begun his journey, and now he'd almost joined Eunice in the hereafter. The minivan careened to a full stop, but not before the van rocked to one side, nearly going completely over an embankment, but somehow righting itself with a bounce onto all four Firestone tires.

He sat there for a moment with the engine idling and the headlights piercing the emptiness of a wall of black trees. For a long moment, he wondered at the fickle hand of fate in a man's life and why he had not been killed. The truck had come within inches of smashing into his left front end. The embankment had been just steep enough to have easily reached out its arms to pull him into the waiting creek twenty feet below. He imagined the van upside down in the creek, him upended with it, unable to free him self, and drowning in the muddy bottom. Maybe it'd been best had it happened that way, he thought, anxious as he was to join Eunice, and besides, it would end this strange, unbidden pilgrimage to Huntsville. Death would have brought an instant solution to his immediate problems and an end to Jimmy Lee's voice in his head, a voice like a bull terrier that had clamped down on his brain, holding firm and taking control, without letup, day and night, night and day, over and again, endlessly tumbling in-out-around-through the pathways of Isaiah's skull.

“ Maybe I best ought to park it right here and get some damn sleep,” he said to the photograph he had pinned to the overhead visor, a picture of himself with an arm draped over Eunice's bony shoulder. The photo had been taken when they had gone to the Jersey shore to see the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. It had been a wonderment of nature the likes of which neither of them could muster words for, and so they had asked a stranger to snap a photo of them with the ocean as backdrop, and Eunice had said that every grain of sand on the beach was special and unique, and that she regretted that they had never found that special uniqueness that seemed buried in their boy, Jimmy. Still, they had smiled for the camera even then, even knowing that their only son had that same day been placed on death row and placed on the schedule for execution. The trip had been Eunice's swan song, he told himself; she had somehow known that her heart would give out, just as the doctors had said: a condition of the heart. Isaiah wondered how much of the condition was brought on by the situation her son now found himself in.

“ Sleep… best to sleep till dawn rise,” he said now to the photograph. Beside the photo of Eunice and himself, a photo of Jimmy Lee stared back. Short-cropped head of sandy blond hair, narrow eyes too close to each other, a beaked nose, and a freckled face. The chin was weak, near nonexistent, while the ears poked out from each side of the head like some strange pair of Brussels sprouts. He'd been a damn homely infant with the look of an opossum, and he'd not improved since.

One other photograph accompanied Isaiah on the long journey to Huntsville and later to D.C., and that was a photograph ripped from a Houston newspaper, a photograph of Judge Maureen DeCampe, posing with some other fancy judges on the steps of the courthouse.

Isaiah shut off the van lights. He'd taken a slight blow to the head against the dash. He tried to refocus and found himself staring into the rearview mirror. Behind him, he saw the shell of the van as if it had been carved out with a giant knife. He'd taken out the seats in the rear and had made a pallet of the blankets from his and Eunice's bed. Even if Eunice were alive, she might not be on the trip to see their son executed. But even in death, she was here in the spirit, inside Isaiah, and he took comfort in knowing this. “For a fact,” he muttered as he shut down the engine, locked the doors, and worked his thin, small frame to the back of the van. Once there, he lay down in his clothes and pulled the blankets up around his chin just as he and Eunice had done for forty- four years.

He lay there on his back, missing her spooning up against him. He lay there, looking out through the side tinted window at stars overhead, thinking out loud. “Eunice… this here universe is too much for me. All them stars… makes me feel so damn small. Wish you was here to see them… to see me through all this.”

He felt a tug at his old heart. He felt so alone. Still, he knew that he could never truly be alone anywhere, not in this life, not since Jimmy Lee had gotten into his head through some magical projection that had come through Eunice Mae, had somehow leaped full-blown from out of her head and into his, and it was him, Jimmy Lee come a- calling.

Jimmy Lee had sent him a mental picture, full-blown and frightful, of himself in the death chamber where they meant to throw the switch on Isaiah's boy. Isaiah watched from outside a giant glass jar inside a maximum-security prison where they officially and efficiently killed people.

Isaiah didn't begin to think he could ever understand how Jimmy Lee's voice got into his head from such a distance, except to say that perhaps it had been something like divination or sorcery; perhaps a kind of witchcraft associated with Christian curses and the Bible, something tangible though, like a cream or a gel or a jam, that oozed from Jimmy Lee's letters to Eunice's hands and then to Isaiah's head. Whatever or however, this power crept unseen and unknown into Isaiah's brain via the cells. After all, Jimmy Lee had miraculously begun reading his Bible, but Isaiah could not be certain just how much the boy had been getting from the Word until that first contact, when Jimmy Lee might as well have been in the rocker across from him on his falling-down old farmstead porch.

When Jimmy Lee's words came into his brain, only ten minutes after Isaiah had buried Eunice Mae, Isaiah had no hope of denying Jimmy or to not hear his last wish, and certainly to not act on it.

He'd buried her with a Bible passage suggested to him by Eunice Mae herself, but she might have gotten it from Jimmy Lee, in Jimmy's last letter to home. Eunice could read, and she'd read all his letters to Isaiah, but he knew she'd leave out any unpleasantness. Jimmy's kindness toward his mother and Isaiah in his last letters proved he'd been reborn, proved that his words were sincere, that he had come to that plateau of spirit that would indeed cleanse him in the next life, while the State of Texas made its feeble attempt to do likewise through several hundred thousand odd volts of electricity. Sons a bitches, he thought, one and all, and especially the judge who refused to show a stitch of mercy to my boy.

“ Just go to sleep, old man,” he told himself, there where he'd nearly been killed, there in the ditch alongside the road, his voice thin, bony fingers running over a scrub board of a face. But he'd still remained wakeful. “Get some rest. You'll be needing every ounce a' your energy, so get some damned rest.” He now ordered it, willed it, wishing to end the agitation and unrest that had created of his mind a chaotic whirlwind. His eyes closed on the dark road that lay ahead of him, and they closed on the barn, where he sat on the stool, and they closed on the image of the judge in her bonds. He had done it. He had lashed her to Jimmy Lee's body.

Jessica Coran found Washington, D.C., a city of contrasts. The tourists' finds and traps abounded, of course, the city being the so-called capital of the free world, but it also housed crime, poverty, pestilence, and the usual infrastructure problems. This along with its soft underbelly where drugs flowed freely, where an overburdened police and judicial system tolerated prostitution and other crime, and where politics meant everything and public outcry demanded more out of the current White House administration than the latest scandal.

This time of year, the cherry blossoms all along the main thoroughfares were sadly gone, and the cold chill of a fall that promised a frigid winter left homeless people in doorways within the shadow of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The city had earned the reputation of D.C.-District of Crack.

FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., was nothing whatsoever like Jessica's country club atmosphere at Quantico, Virginia, where people showed attitudes more positive and goal-oriented. And the pace and stress set here proved mind-boggling, as did the number of ringing telephones. In order to think, she had to close two doors that led into the office turned over to her.

Despite the distractions and the vibes here, Jessica had immediately set out to take action. She called in all the D.C. field agents assigned to her, and she ordered them to work closely with local authorities, and to put out a street request for anyone knowing anything about the disappearance of Judge Maureen DeCampe. “Anything coming of such inquiries,” she told them, “gets reported to the task force and posted on the electronic bulletin board in the operations room.”

“ Where's that? The ops room?” one of the agents asked. “Where you're standing.” It was a room that hadn't seen use in at least a decade, but the ancient furniture was enhanced by state-of-the-art phones and computers for the operation. The room stood adjacent to the office they'd given Jessica to work from, and the moment she had stepped into the room, she had felt something, a kind of ghostly history to the place that had seen no use in such a long time. In her mind's eye, she saw a busy, frenetic office with old- fashioned furniture and dated telephones and a teletype machine in the comer. No computers. A lot of noise and movement, all in an empty room. The room begged to be put to use, and since every other room in the building that might serve was already in heavy use, she had selected this one to be outfitted for their needs, and an army of technicians had made it so.

“ Secondly,” she added to her task force people, “I want a complete rundown on everyone Maureen DeCampe would have or could have come into contact with on the day of her disappearance. Add to that anyone she came into contact with on a daily basis.”

“ A judge comes into contact with a lot of people in any given day,” said George Marks, a tall, clean-shaven agent, hand-picked for his knowledge of D.C. streets and street life.

“ We're hauling in the usual suspects,” Jane Cardinal, his younger partner, added.

“ We need to focus on specific suspects. That means we don't have the luxury of interrogating useless suspects for hours on end,” she countered. “We need to zero in on someone we like for the crime or someone we catch in a lie and to quickly focus our search. We need to think clearly about what comparison points to use to narrow the field.”

“ I'm not sure I follow you,” replied the young female agent named Cardinal. She'd been selected to be on the team due to her expertise in Missing Persons cases.

“ Which of the usuals has proven violent? Which is or has been capable of abduction in the past? Twenty questions, people, will reduce the numbers. Those who forced themselves on another person reduce the pile by one-third. Which of the usuals has ever used a weapon in the commission of a crime? We know that the judge showed her assailant a. 45 but was overpowered or outgunned. This reduces the pile further. So who is left? Which of the usuals has ever threatened the judge?”

“ That just might tend to increase the pile,” said Cardinal, drawing a laugh from the others. For a moment, Jessica recognized a little of herself in the younger agent. Give her ten years, and if she continues as an agent, she might have learned something, Jessica thought.

“ Look,” began Jessica, “I know that DeCampe is relatively new to D.C. and that she didn't waste any time creating enemies here, and that she's not everyone's favorite D.C. judge, but she deserves our best effort, same as anyone else abducted off our streets. As things stand, we have zero ideas on how to proceed, people. Get me some leads; if you can do this through your snitches, it may save us more time than collaring and interrogating the array of lunatics you call the usual suspects. That's all I'm saying.”

Richard Sharpe stood to put in his say. Everyone's eyes turned to the tail, handsome Englishman. Everyone knew that he'd retired from New Scotland Yard and had come on as a consultant to the FBI. Everyone also knew that he and Jessica were seriously involved with one another. “Where I come from, the usual suspects are called the street nasties, but in either case, they're called the usual suspects for good reason, but we don't believe this is the usual case. Besides, this is D.C., and the list of perverts in this city is endless, not unlike London.”

“ So, your thinking is that we'd be wasting our time with the street nasties, as you call them?” asked Agent Marks.

Sharpe paced the room as he spoke. “Canvassing them all… well, we just don't feel the judge has that kind of time, and we fear it would be a waste of time, energy, and manpower, you see. We believe the judge's assailant knows her in some capacity, and that this is about what you Yanks call payback of some sort. Otherwise, ransom demands would have long since been made by now.” 'To that end, we're electronically canvassing court documents and records,” added Jessica.

“ In the meantime, what do we do?” asked a second female agent taller than any man present.

“ As I said, put out feelers with your usual snitches. There has to be something on the street about the case, something useful.”

“ We need to know where this rat is holed up,” added Sharpe.

“ Someone collects his rent.” Jessica paced toward Richard, and together they stood as a united front before the agents assigned to her. The usual protocol would be to put the entire team on the track of known offenders-kidnappers and rapists. But Jessica and Richard had discussed this fact and found such an exercise wanting. “So, get your noses to the pavement and get me something I can use.”

After the others left, Richard asked, “What about that pending case you were looking into, that Native American thing?”

“ All other pending cases will just have to pend longer,” she replied.

“ If it works… fix it anyway.” Richard stated the oft- repeated, unofficial motto of the division, a phrase she had shared with him one evening when he'd been asking questions about how the bureau worked or failed to work in some cases.

Jessica found a chair and fell into it, squishing the air from its cushions. “It doesn't appear to be or even feel like the judge's disappearance was a random act of violence.”

“ Agreed.” He joined her, placing a hand on her hair, stroking it. “Everything points to a premeditated plan, although the crime scene was a bit messy.”

“ A bit messy, yes, but the perpetrator collected up what he wanted.”

“ Her, yes.”

“ Her-and vanished without a trace. What does that say about him?”

“ That tells me he made exacting plans.”

“ Right. Whoever did this staked out the judge's home, her office, stalked her, knew her habits, and took her at her most vulnerable.”

“ You think he knew she was in the habit of eating in chambers and working late every second Thursday of the month? asked Richard. “Only her family knew that.”

“ And her working family,” Jessica countered, “including the parking attendant. It was no big secret, after all.”

“ Do you think the parking lot fellow had something to do with it?”

“ No, too stupid.”

“ Stupid might be why we ought to look closer at him,” countered Richard. “Sometimes you can learn a great deal from a stupid man.”

“ What's that? Shakespeare?”

“ Scotland Yard.”

“ OK, explain.”

“ Just suppose the attendant spilled some details of when and where someone might catch the judge, thinking the guy just wanted to talk to her.”

“ And suppose he took a few bills for the information? Then the judge turns up missing, possibly raped or killed…”

“ Now he's shitting his pants.”

She agreed. “He's got to be thinking it's his fault and that he's an accomplice to the crime.”

Sharpe went to a coffeepot that had been burning too long, poured himself a cup, and asked if she'd like one. She declined with a wave of the hand. He returned to her, sipped at his steaming cup. A well-proportioned man, he had an easy, rolling gait. He continued pacing the room. “We need to send a patrol car around to bring the parking attendant in for questioning.”

“ Do it.”

Sharpe made the call. After he hung up, he said to Jessica, “Maybe it's a jealous old suitor who's nabbed the judge.”

“ How old?” asked Jessica. “How old you think this suitor is, Richard?”

“ I'm not talking old as in age; I mean, an old boyfriend.”

“ Yeah, but how old? How many boyfriends do we have to go back to? Besides, the family is adamant that she was not involved with anyone who could be construed as violent or obsessive, and you met her current boyfriend. Nothing there. From everything we could turn up along those lines, we suspect that if the motive is an obsessive fixation on the judge, it's come from a source the family and likely the judge herself knew nothing of.”

“ You mean like someone who saw her in the media, maybe,” he replied.

Leaning across her desk, her hands going through her auburn hair as if to assist her thinking, Jessica said, “My suspicion is that either he knew her, so she let her guard down, or he looked harmless.”

Richard considered this for a moment, his chin propped up by his right hand and elbow on the chair where he now sat across from her in the operations room, the conference table separating them. “But no one she would have had a personal relationship with.”

“ Agreed. The abductor may think he has a relationship with the judge, that in his head, he does have a full-blown relationship with her. Get into that.”

“ You're right on about the media, Jess,” he replied, toying with a pen as he spoke. “They have a name for that sort of thing.”

“ It's called a media fixation,” she filled in. “Some Joe gets it in his head he has a special connection to a news anchor or other TV personality, movie star, or other public figure. Listen, Richard, get hold of any old tapes we have of the judge from media sources.”

“ What'll you be doing in the meantime?”

“ Praying.”

“ Praying?”

“ Praying we hear from the abductor or get a ransom demand.” Jessica now went for coffee only to find that Richard had emptied the pot, leaving it on to burn the bottom of the glass container. She returned to him and took what was left in his cup, drinking it down. “We've got the phones at every possible contact point bugged. We're just waiting to hear his demands.”

“ After all this time, Jess, I doubt he's interested in contacting the family.”

She sighed deeply. “Gotcha.”

“ I feel so damned helpless. What can we do to find her, Jess, and how do we know which path down the maze to take? How do we keep from wasting a minute?” He took the cup from her and studied its emptiness, a reflection of his gut feeling about the progression of the case thus far.

“ We work round the clock,” she replied. “We keep running down leads, as in any case.”

“ Meanwhile, we dodge the media and the brass?”

“ Nobody's asking you to dodge Santiva or anyone else, Richard. But… but…”

“ Yes, of course, I appreciate what you're not saying.”

“ Trust me. I have an ill feeling about Judge DeCampe's disappearance, and I fear it can only get worse, but if she has an iota of a chance, it can easily be lost if, say, Santiva or someone over his head decides to take the case out of our hands and changes horses in midstream or begins to dictate what direction our investigation ought to go in.”

“ What exactly do you mean, Jess, by an ill kind of feeling?”

Abandoning her chair, she again paced the operations room. “Gut feeling is all.”

Richard knew by now that her pacing actually signaled either a characteristic impatience at the lack of leads or her frustration with the four walls closing in on them, time being so short. 'Texas may have some input here, you know,” she now said. “Before the judge was an appellate judge here, she was a criminal judge in Houston, Texas. We've got friends in Texas; field office SAC is George O'Leary, right? And there's this Lucas Stonecoat with the Houston Police Department.”

“ Stonecoat?”

'Texas Cherokee… worked a case with Kim Desinor a couple of years back.”

“ Oh, yeah… the case that was shaping up as another Atlanta black boys murder thing. I recall reading about it and hearing about it on the telly.”

“ The case took a real toll on Kim, but nothing like this has… Who knows, maybe our friends in Texas could jump-start us on any cases Judge Maureen DeCampe tried in Houston.” Richard nodded, agreeing. He somehow sensed that this time Jessica's pacing meant more, that she was searching for any errant clues in her mind. Sharpe's eyes followed her movement; as always, she fascinated him, and as always, he resisted her fascination at the moment with cold caution. He thought of how quickly they had come to a full-blown, rich relationship that was more than that of simply lovers but that of friends. He'd be the first to admit that his sexual interest in her remained as high as ever, but his fascination for her keen scientific mind and what the two of them shared in this world was just as important to him. He understood that her work had always been her first love, that she was positively obsessive about the hunt, and so in a sense she was involved with another lover, but he accepted this as part of the person he loved, one of the major reasons he loved her. Aside from this, she was a Scorpio to boot.

She caught his eyes on her. She quickly asked, “What does your gut tell you?”

“ Doesn't tell me anything unless I've just swallowed a pepperoni pizza.”

She didn't laugh at the joke. “Me… I have a tick. An uneasy tick… like a ticking bomb in my head.”

“ So you think she is alive?”

Jessica turned to him and forced direct eye contact. “Yes, but I fear her time is limited, and maybe…” She hesitated to say more.

“ Maybe what?”

“ Perhaps she'd be better off if she were… dead.”

Richard's jaw quivered. “What makes you say that?”

“ Just a sense I get. Revenge motive, you said it yourself. If this guy knows her from her court dealings, he's going to hurt her, right? He's out to hurt her badly. That's what revenge is all about. In its way, it's as horrid as any hate crime because of the level of hatred involved.”

“ Well then, we'll just have to hope that her abductor instead fell in love with his victim, that it's that media- fixation thing at work, right?”

“ Yeah, maybe we can do a better job focusing on that scenario.”

“ But you don't think so.”

“ It's certainly a possibility.”

“ But if it's wrong?”

She nodded. “If it's wrong, it could cost her precious time. Fact is, any move we make down a wrong path will cost her precious time.”