I didn't invent the world I write about-it's all true.
The crime scene felt like a cave with an opening at front and back, and the cold Washington, D.C., wind whistled through it with a banshee wail, and still the scene had “abduction” written all over it-but abduction done by a novice, not a trained professional. Although Judge DeCampe had vanished, her car and some personal effects remained behind. Professionals would have seen to the car and any effects; professionals would have created false trails of such personal property. A messy, disorganized crime scene usually meant a first-time offender, a spur-of-the-moment thing, or simply an amateur at work. So what had happened to Judge DeCampe?
The brittle air that bit into the people standing around the crime scene would not say. Still, the question hung in the air like a Pied Piper spirit, tugging at anyone caring to listen to the whisper inside the echoing wind. Authorities had immediately looked for and pulled all camera tapes within a reasonable radius of the scene, but the one most likely to have helped was not in service. They couldn't be so lucky. They wouldn't be handed a gift to uncover the person responsible. In other words, the person who had come for her remained a mystery. Had he admired her beauty, her wit, her abilities from afar? Had he sent her flowers? Offered her compliments? Wooed her and then surprised her with plane tickets to Borneo or the Australian Outback? Was she this moment off on a cruise with a six- foot-four hunk half her age? No… no way, not with the gun and the keys lying here.
God, how Jessica wished it were otherwise, but whoever had the judge had taken her under duress.
“ We've located her purse!” shouted a uniformed officer, coming in from a breezeway that led out into the Washington night where light sent shafts of silver through a delicate icy rain that wasn't enough in this dry season. “Was in a Dumpster just outside. Creep didn't bother taking it, but it's been rifled. Took the cards and cash, left the photos and ID.”
“ We can put out an all points on the card numbers,” suggested Santiva.
“ Get Lew Clemmens on that,” Jesssica insisted. “He's the best we have at tracking credit cards. Trust me.”
“ OK, if you're sure of him.”
“ I insist.”
Santiva got on his cell phone to make arrangements, but again found the phone uncooperative until he walked toward one of the exits. He called for one of the uniformed cops to walk the elder daughter over to him. He would need access to Judge DeCampe's social security number or personal pin numbers.
Kim Desinor lay now in the rear of a van, still reeling from her trance like state. Santiva passed the rifled purse to Kim, asking if she would psychometrically read it. Now with the purse, her keys, the recently fashioned. 45, and the single shoe, the picture of forced abduction came more and more into focus. Everything fit. Yet, some nagging something didn't feel right, didn't fit precisely. Jessica thought it felt like a missing but crucial element in a chemistry experiment or a missing ingredient in a recipe. Then Jessica filled in the blank with an instinctive suspicion that Judge DeCampe had had some dealings with her abductor before tonight.
Judge DeCampe certainly hadn't left the parking garage with anything resembling free will, unless she had reason to stage her own disappearance. But her closest friends and relatives believed this was an absurd possibility. The two daughters almost went ballistic at the suggestion when a pair of D.C. cops had put it to them. The women had screamed that their mother would never do anything to distress them, and certainly nothing of this nature.
One of the two strikingly tall, darkly tanned women rushed to Jessica and said, “Mother loved her life and the fact she'd become a grandmother. She loved every iota of her life here. She didn't for a moment miss Texas. We were all so… so happy with her here with us, finally in the area, you know?”
“ We're going to do everything in our power to locate her,” replied Jessica, while the woman pulled and tugged at her. “I promise you that.”
As to her disappearance, all the family members adamantly parroted the same phrases. “It's totally out of character for Maureen,” and “No one was more excited about her life than Maureen.”
Finally, Santiva swept the family members out of the garage area and talked them into giving Jessica enough space to work. But there was so damned little to work with. She looked up and saw that the garage attendant's island and ticket booth were well within view of the spot where DeCampe's car remained silent and taunting. “Has anyone talked to the attendant?”
“ First on scene took a statement from him. Says he didn't see or hear a thing.”
“ Where the fuck was he?”
“ Claims he had a bad case of the runs-a stomach virus kept him running between here and the men's room just inside the building.”
She stared at J. T. “And Santiva and the rest of you bought into his toilet excuse?”
“ The guy's a slug, Jess. We're not going to get anything from him. I think he's doing roaches.”
“ Roaches? Marijuana?”
“ Maybe crack. Can't be sure. But he definitely has lost some gray matter over the years.”
“ Where is he now?”
“ Shift was over. Santiva set him on his useless way.”
“ Christ,” she moaned.
'Trust me, Jess, he's useless,” J. T. assured her. “He really seemed honestly wanting to help, but he had nothing whatever to contribute.”
“ No one else on board at the time?”
“ Lateness of the hour… one attendant… taxpayer's money, all that.”
“ One of us better check on Kim. See how she's holding up,” Jessica said, lifting from her knees and going to the van to speak with a more lucid Kim Desinor. Jessica had known Kim now for a number of years, and they had worked a number of cases together, their first in New Orleans, where Kim had grown up Catholic in an orphanage, no one knowing of her gift of psychometry-reading objects for psychic impressions.
As Jessica approached Kim in the van where she lay on a cot with a waiting attendant, Kim asked, “How're you doing, Jess?”
Jess thought her friend looked pale and drained, weary and sleepy-eyed. Somehow Kim looked smaller. The word frail filled Jessica's mind.
“ More to the point, sweetie, how're you doing? I hear you had quite a long session.”
Richard stood nearby, lending support and saying hello to Kim, whom he had met through Jessica.
“ What happened during the session? Anything useful?”
“ Mostly a jumble of confused images: darkness, a void, choking feeling, claustrophobic spaces… hands, feet tied.”
As usual, the skeptic in Jessica said, Anyone could say the same, knowing the victim was abducted.
“ Got a distinct odor of decay. Stronger than I have ever read it before.”
Jessica did not know what to say to this. “And did you get anything from the purse?”
“ Purse was handled by someone other than either DeCampe or her abductor. That's all I could get.”
“ The attendant, no doubt,” muttered Jessica. “I want to grill his ass.”
“ As to the fall I took, it was brought on by some sort of flashing pain, like a searing shock.”
“ A shock? What kind of shock?”
“ A sudden zap like I was hit by a lightning bolt, although I have no idea what that must feel like. Scared the hell out of me. Felt it in every cell in my being.”
“ Electricity?”
“ Yeah, I think so… but as you know, it could be symbolic.”
“ Or it could be literal? If he used some sort of electric tensor gun on her, that would explain her being so taken by surprise. He calls out to her, and she stops before unlocking her car, turns, sees she knows him, relaxes her grip on the gun she has already revealed when zap-she's surprised a second time by a shock of some sort.”
“ That's a pretty good line of suppositions,” replied Kim.
“ They'll have to serve us for now. So, what about when you were under? Before the shock? Were you getting anything else unusual?” Jessica persisted. “Did you see anything that might help guide us? Anything at all?”
“ Nothing else, save that strange odor… like the odor of death and decay mixed with earthy odors left by vermin, mildewy stuff, like the smell of a bad mushroom, which when I get… well, it usually ends in finding the victim dead, Jess,” Kim reiterated. “My God,” Jessica moaned, her eyes closed as she pictured die grieving family.
“ I'm sorry… but I don't hold much hope for DeCampe.”
“ Are you saying that you have absolutely no hope? That you believe she is dead already?”
“ No, no! Never any absolutes in this… I don't get that sensation, but I do get the sensation that this will end in her death, and that she will die a most unpleasant death.”
Jessica frowned and held Kim's hands in hers. “Thanks, Kim. And if you have any of those flashback moments coming to you, I'm sure you'll keep me apprised.”
“ Absolutely.”
“ In the meantime, rest up. We may need you again and again on this one. Obviously, the clock is ticking fast here.” Jessica started to leave the rear of the van where Kim now sat upright, gathering back her scattered energies. But something stopped Jessica in her tracks.
Kim realized that Jessica stood staring at her with an intensity she hadn't felt before. “What is it?”
Jessica stepped back toward Kim. She stared at a strange speck of discoloration on her friend and colleague's cheek. It looked like a beauty spot on her right cheek, but Kim had never had a beauty spot there before. “Just noticed for the first time this pinpoint of a freckle you have,” she explained.
“ I haven't a single freckle on my entire face,” replied Kim. “What're you talking about?”
Jessica then reached out to touch it and wipe away the mark. “It's likely something you picked up when you fell.” Jessica smiled even as she realized the mark didn't wipe away.
Kim smiled in return, thinking the gesture a kindness toward her, a show of sincere concern. The words about a blemish just an excuse for Jessica Coran to show a bit of genuine affection. They said their good-byes, and Jessica marched back toward the garage, stopping short of the structure.
Jessica then snatched out her cellular phone and called Lew Clemmens back at Quantico. For some time now, Lew had been Jessica's favorite contact in the computer support division of the FBI. No magician on the planet could do what Lew did. He was literally the best computer geek a girl could have-a consummate information gobbler. She'd barked out what she needed to Lew without so much as a how're you doing or how's the wife, but Clemmens, like everyone in law enforcement, knew what was going on. In fact, Santiva had already reached him with the credit card numbers he was to track.
“ I've already got it going, Jess. I put out an all points on anyone using the judge's credit cards. The family readily gave up both Visas and the MasterCard.”
Jessica gave a fleeting thought to the family-how their privacy became public the moment a crime was committed against them. The family had to give up all pretense to privacy for a safe and hopefully speedy return of a loved one gone missing. Lew continued his nonstop tirade about the judge. “Didn't waste a moment. Someone's got her cards, and we need to catch this guy before… well… ASAP, before it's too damned-”
“ Shut up for a minute, will you, Lew?” She pictured Lew at his computer, his stomach spilling over his keyboard, a broad smile generally streaking across his face.
“ What? Oh, sure.”
“ We need to look closely at the cases she was working on at the time of her disappearance. I seem to recall some racketeering case, involving the D.C. Mafia. Then there's that nasty business with the Wainwright case, where the guy may or may not have murdered his sister's husband, after the husband was found innocent of murdering the sister. We need to work back from her most recent cases-things she's involved in now, yesterday's verdicts, last week's, last month's, since she's been in D.C. You got that?”
“ Just since she's been in D.C. Got it. Nothing before that?”
“ No… she was abducted here. Not likely some pissed- off Texan is going to cross the continent to settle a score.”
“ Unless he happens to be in town, or unless it's a guy with a Texas-sized vendetta,” countered Lew.
“ Points taken, but-”
“ But we can't waste time down a blind alley, so let's begin with her D.C. cases,” Lew finished for her.
“ Agreed, and thanks again, Lew.”
“ Gotcha… will do.”
Jessica hung up, and the click resounded in her ear like the closing of a tomb. Something about what Lew had said, about the judge's cases before she had moved to Washington, D.C… about someone stalking her clear from Texas… something about the finality of not finding the right information in time. It all made Jessica ill, to think what might be happening to Judge DeCampe at this moment.
Jessica had returned to the crypt like area of the parking garage where court authorities this morning had begun to show up in search of their usual parking spaces. Disgruntled judges and clerks of court and attorneys gave varying degrees of cold stares, some demanding to know the reason why. All of them had been rerouted to another area set aside for them until the FBI-and Jessica in particular-chose to release the crime scene.
Every time a crime scene like this, out in the open, subject to the elements and the traipsing of man and dog was released, it seemed to Jessica an inevitable loss to forensic investigators. No matter how long a crime scene like this was held cordoned off, there was always a need to have kept it whole and intact longer than authorities generally allowed. End result, something was missed. But pressure to resume things as normal always won out, and so losing the crime scene to time demands normally meant tying investigative hands.
However, as it stood and in all outward appearance, she expected that very little else of any use might come of this place. Still, she combed the area for fibers, hairs, anything that might, under a microscope, lead to a clue or even a DNA match with the abductor once they located him.
Even as her hands worked to gather the minuscule evidence that might or might not have been left by the attacker, Jessica's mind flashed over a deep-seated fear that she had been pushing off since Richard's arrival in the states. Dare not drag it into the light was a phrase that kept repeating in her head over this. She only dared to now look at it in a waking dream, a kind of half-life existence that took her back to London, England, where she had met Richard Sharpe. So much time had gone by while she had awaited Richard's arrival at Dulles International for their reunion, and finally the day had come, and finally they were together- truly together. Only apart since then for the time it took to shower and dress and do all the routine things of life. She sensed a horrid dread come over her whenever she thought of separating from him for any length of time, as if to do so meant to lose him. Even now, here, with him nearby, as she did her work, she felt an irrational fear of losing him somehow to her other world, her work. And so she found herself pacing about the corridors of her subconscious, second-guessing every word, every action she'd taken with Richard. How long would he stand for this, for her work being more important than him? What man did she know on the planet who willingly stood second place to a woman's work? A woman's other passion? Pacing the corridor of memory… pacing the corridor of old regret, past the foyer and into recent remorse. Pacing even in her soul, her heart turning slowly into a garrison, like a sad and empty room made of mortar and stone. Lonely echoes against walls filled with chinks born there out of past pains. God, the fear of losing Richard now that she had found him might paralyze her.
Then Jessica imagined again the nightmare that was no dream. She imagined the disappearance of Maureen DeCampe. She journeyed down each path of the labyrinth to examine the myriad possibilities. She had already tossed out the one path, a wild, romantic fling with a secret suitor who had whisked her off to some beach shore or cabin retreat. Now she must explore the darker possibilities. Perhaps some sociopathic fiend held her hostage for lust-torture-murder in that sequence. She imagined horrible decapitation and mutilation of various body parts; she imagined wood chippers and blood sent to the heavens, of postmortem defilement, and of shallow graves and animal finds.
She'd seen it all too many times in too many situations. She suspected the worst had happened to the judge; she expected to find her dead in some ditch somewhere along some abandoned highway. Friends and relatives would hold out hope till the end, like a twisting hand cloth that comes to tatters in the end, the stress and horror of it all taking its toll on all those who loved the victim. Jessica's own friends had told her how jaded she'd become after over two decades of chasing monsters. Still, something different about this case mercilessly nagged at her gut, tearing at it the way a vicious animal might rip apart a beautiful bird caught in a snare. Past villains she had known-their features and their crimes played inside Jessica's head. Violins also played inside her head-a song of sadness so deep and abiding that it created a black, empty hole where life ought to be. The violins played for the victims, always the same refrain, one that spoke of an endless well of pathos for the human condition, a condition that often created angels but just as often created monsters. The violins played for a world in which mankind did so much good and yet so much evil in the same breath, a world in which fast-moving clouds in a moon-and-star-filled sky, or a full moon rising over a silver ocean, stood shoulder to shoulder with child molestation and cruelty of all sorts. The sound of it was something she felt more than heard-vibrations on a tuning fork-and they disturbed her core being more than she dared admit until a near mental breakdown had sent her to Dr. Donna LeMonte for psychotherapy some years back. Even so, even today, after several years of professional help, the tuning fork continued to disturb her more than she understood.
She hadn't felt so much unleashed fear since the night she'd been trapped and strung up by her hands and feet to die in the manner of Christ on the cross in an underground cavern below London. And while that fear had been for her self, this new, awful fear was for Maureen DeCampe.
Jessica's knees now began to hurt where she had been kneeling over the few clues left them. She stood to straighten her legs, and she looked about the cold institutional gray walls of the underground parking garage. There seemed a solitude here that felt eternal. “This fucking place feels like a goddamn mausoleum.”
Richard appeared next to her and squeezed her hand, whispering, “It must feel like a horror chamber for a woman alone at midnight.”
While she squeezed Richard's hand in return, Jessica's eyes registered the quiet, thoughtful faces surrounding her. She simply said, “We're done here.” It came out as a statement of fact, as if to say there was nothing whatever left to examine at the scene. “Anything else we do here this morning will add up to a complete waste of time and energy.”
“ We're done asked J. T.
“ There's nothing more here that's going to talk to us, John.”
“ But we still haven't dusted the car or-”
“ Do it if you like, but he never touched her car. Neither did she, for that matter.”
“ Yes, from the look of it, she never got that far,” Richard added.
“ So there's absolutely not a damned thing left for us. The answers to this one aren't going to be found in the fibers or the prints or the dust.”
J. T. only stared at her, wondering what was going through Jessica's mind. She knew he could not imagine the terror of a woman alone with her captor.
The next day, Jessica stared out the window of the spartan office turned over to her at FBI headquarters in D.C., where she could remain in close proximity to the case. Her office overlooked a section of the D.C. Beltway, now that some old tenements had been demolished and reduced to ashes to make way for construction of more new high-rise upscale apartments. If you lived inside the Beltway, you likely worked for one of the many companies supplying services and goods to the government. Jessica could see a strip of Beltway bandits, companies that lined the Beltway and did almost exclusive business with the U.S. government. Scam in D.C. was a way of life.
As a result of having to take up temporary residence in D.C., she'd had to say good-bye to Richard and her new Quantico farmstead, at least for now. She'd driven back to the apartment with him, and they'd talked about the situation as well as the Missing Persons case that had so suddenly changed their plans.
“ Circumstances like these can't be ignored,” Richard said at one point on the drive back.
“ Santiva and his special cases always seem to screw with my life.”
Richard puzzled over the remark for a moment before saying, “Oh, yes… as in screw up.”
“ Yeah, you've got that right, darling.”
They both laughed. Richard's response was one of interest in the case. He encouraged her instinctual response to the lack of any evidence of a struggle pointing to either a surprise grab or that the woman did not fear her attacker. He also agreed that the lack of concern on the abductor's part in leaving her keys and the. 45 lying there was an act of defiance against authority, likening it to the criminal who defecated at the scene just to piss cops off.
“ And what sort of bugger uses a cattle prod to control his victims?” Richard had asked. “I mean if your psychic is right, then he's using a stun gun or a bloody cattle prod of some sort, don't you think? That might make 'im either a farmer or a cop himself… maybe.”
“ Nowadays anyone could get hold of a stun gun, Richard. Doesn't have to be a cop.”
“ So true,” he'd agreed.
“ Anyone with a computer can order any damn thing that might come to mind these days.” They'd arrived at her Quantico apartment, and they promptly went up and inside. Richard hadn't any of the reserve of fear she had felt well up inside when she thought of how much time away from him this case meant.
“ It's your work, dear, and who does it better? Just promise me one thing.”
“ What's that?” she mirthfully replied.
“ That you'll come back to me… home safe.”
“ Promise.”
They had made passionate love then, and afterward, she packed a bag and returned to D.C. All of the evidence- gathering and lab work would be handled out of the D.C. field offices and crime lab. Until the case was solved, she'd be living in a D.C. apartment at taxpayers' expense. To complicate her life, it appeared D.C.'s dry season had ended. The rain had come down the night before in a steady, calm downpour, leaving the streets awash, sewers drinking it in. And now Jessica watched the light rain that J. T. had exaggeratedly characterized as “The Flood.” It barely washed clean the windows. She had gotten six hours' sleep, and she continued to work at clearing her mind of the overwhelming fear growing by the hour that Judge Maureen DeCampe would not be found alive. To fend off this negative and depressive thought, she abandoned it long enough to count the now evaporating raindrops on the windowpane of her temporary D.C. office in a building filled with files on missing persons. Jessica couldn't clear from her mind that creeping, familiar sense of clawing claustrophobia overtaking her. The room filled with a thousand dead voices and dead stories-all the innocent women and children who had ever disappeared without a trace, all seemed to cry out with the rhythm of the raindrops against the windowpane. And yet the cry was all of one voice.
And all the voices had one other thing in common: Here in the city resided countless unexculpated murders. The files of victims that lay silent and unanswered in D.C., as with each major American city in the nation, finding voice, would drown out the living, she imagined. Hardly a new story- not enough manpower to begin to do the job.
However, Jessica had been working with Lew Clemmens on an electronic answer to give true voice to the dead of D.C., and if successful, to carry the plan to other major cities throughout the country and possibly abroad. She had modeled her idea on a Houston Police Department program called COMIT, run by a Cherokee Indian detective named Lucas Stonecoat with whom her friend Kim Desinor had successfully worked a case. As a result, Jessica felt confident that very soon ancient necrofiles nationwide would be placed on computer files, and any one of them could be accessed from anywhere in the country. This would save countless hours and manpower.
However-and there always was a however-it had proven a tedious process, and still some 60 percent of D.C. 's cold files had as yet to be revived in this fashion; the 40 percent that had been scanned to disk and transcribed onto the Washington Police mainframe database under USA- COMIT had not been read by anyone human, except for Lew Clemmens. For the time being, it had been for electronic eyes only. Today they could plug in key words to flag any cases that might now be solved via DNA evidence, new fingerprinting techniques, photographic imaging, or any other new technology. In many ways, the tide was turning in favor of the crime fighters and away from the criminals, thanks to modem scientific police and forensic detection. Once the old file transfers were completed, anyone anywhere in the world who might be working a cold case could conceivably do searches for unsolved murder investigations, which might now be reassessed on grounds of new technologies designed to combat crime.
The trouble was the sheer number of cold cases. Any death investigation with moss on it could benefit from current scientific knowledge and techniques not available to earlier law enforcement-an unpleasant fact shared by every police agency in the world. Jessica imagined a time- traveling modern medical examiner who might go back to significant moments to unravel mysteries surrounding deaths that, at the time, could not be solved, from Jack-the-Ripper to Lizzie Borden. The thought recalled a fascinating book that her mentor, Dr. Asa Holcraft, had insisted she must read when only a fledgling student in his classes. The book was Century of the Detective by Jurgen Thorwald, a fascinating attempt to survey the history of crime detection and the science that had built up around it. The book put a great deal into perspective, not the least being the question of guilt or innocence of a man convicted at a time when animal blood and human blood could not be separately identified, a time when there was no microscopic evidence since there was no microscope, a time before fingerprinting was discovered as a viable crime-fighting tool.
Jessica had stepped away from the window, the sadly anemic rain, and her thoughts. She held her hand against her chest, an acidic pain rising there to threaten her. Her team so far had uncovered nothing new, and the case was stalemating quickly. She walked out of her temporary office and into an adjacent one where Lew Clemmens sat at a state- of-the-art computer, working away.
Jessica joked with Clemmens about the notion of a time- traveling crime fighter, since Lew had earlier talked up a blue streak about some TV program named Time-COP with the same premise.
“ Hell, even Jack-the-Ripper could be discovered with the new technologies,” Lew Clemmens said over his shoulder as he worked at the screen. She thought them finished with the subject then, but Lew kept up chatter about the idea.
Lew, like her, had set up shop in D.C. at Santiva's insistence. She now went to stand over his hefty shoulder, where the young man worked at bringing Jessica caseload information lifted from the courthouse where DeCampe had worked.
“ Old Jack wouldn't stand a chance against the crime- fighting tools we have today,” Lew said.
“ Can't argue with you there,” she agreed, her mind now set on the present, on the DeCampe case, which had seen zero progress so far.
Clemmens continued, adding, “Imagine if we could go back in time and hand over our crime-fighting tools to London authorities when the Ripper was at large and taunting police.”
Jessica knew how Lew's mind raced with two and sometimes three subjects at once, and while he worked on the DeCampe case, he could sit about and talk on another topic as if his brain simply partitioned off the separate jobs needing to be done. He was amazing for this.
Clemmens continued, “Yeah… if even they'd had only a laser blue light to follow the blood trail, they would have caught the guy. History's most infamous serial killer.”
“ Are you kidding?” she finally asked, a bit miffed. 'Today, Jack's career would have been cut extremely short. The man left a slime trail as wide and as obvious as a walrus dragging his ass over a mud puddle.”
Lew looked young enough to be delivering Jessica's newspaper. He hardly looks the part of a fellow whose job touches so many lives, she thought. “Still, if Jack were alive today,” countered Lew, “he'd know to be a hell of a lot more tidy, wouldn't you say? I mean like the creep that got hold of Judge DeCampe?”
Jessica liked Lew's enthusiasm for a subject he warmed up to-war-pathing over it, as Lew professed an Ojibwa heritage along with his flinty Irish looks. As the young man's eyes-reflected in the computer screen-lit up green and luminous, he said, 'Today's serial killer has more readily available information at his disposal about what we know and how we work.” Lew's fingers seemed to operate independently over the keys. “Thanks to the TLC channel. Still, crime makes you stupid; I've heard you say it time and again. Jack isn't necessarily more intelligent today than he was in 1872 when he killed that string of prostitutes in White chapel.”
Jessica smiled at this. “I'm telling you, today the Ripper would be apprehended.”
“ Only because of the poor condition of criminal detection in his day, he was never caught. If he were alive today, Jack would have to bone up big time,” countered Lew.
Jessica snickered and added, “Yeah, you're right. Today's criminal can and sometimes does study criminology right alongside the criminologist. I take your point.”
“ And they gain much of their information off the Internet, from FBI public relations officers, from police bulletins, law enforcement gazettes, Ann Rule and other true crime books, as well as novels and films depicting criminal behavior, police procedure, profiling, and crime-scene detection. Ever read The Handyman or the Decoy series?”
“ Price of a free and open society; price of democracy: freedom and access to information.” Jessica snatched an office chair and wheeled it to a stop beside Lew, and she slipped into it, groaning at a spasm of pain that cut knifelike through her back. “Like a double-edged sword,” she agreed.
Lew glanced at her, wondering if she meant the pain in her lower back, evidenced by Jessica's grimace, or if she meant the double edge of freedom. He snatched at the back of his neck as if to rip some pain of his own from it, and then he continued downloading cases which had been tried by Maureen DeCampe.
The printer was abuzz with information spewing forth. Jessica picked up a stack of papers and said, “Damn, we're going to need an army of readers. I'll have to put together a small task force to review DeCampe's cases.” Still, she began reading, scanning, hoping to light on something useful, a verdict, a name, a clue of any sort.
The phone rang, and Jessica grabbed for it; anything to end her staring at the reams of paper that made up the bulk of DeCampe's cases in just the last month.
The call was for Lew, his wife, sounding pissed off. Jessica handed him the phone and tried not to watch him squirm. Jessica liked Lew, but she thought the man ought to show a little firmness with the woman on the other end of the line.
Clemmens hung up, shaking his head. “Sorry… she has no idea why we have to be in D.C. I had to leave a message at home for her. She wasn't pleased.” Again the phone rang. This time J. T. came on the line, going on about how the newsies had gotten the entire story of Judge DeCampe's disappearance and still no ransom note, nothing whatever, in fact, from the abductor. J. T. sounded as if he might hyperventilate.
“ And everyone's gunning for you, Jess. They think you're not moving fast enough on the case. Can you believe the crap that-”
“ Slow down, J. T. Take it easy, and take a deep breath. I'm working on the case. I've got Lew Clemmens here, and we're searching electronically through old case files that have anything to do with Judge DeCampe. Going to take it back incrementally to her first year out of law school if necessary to find any clue as to what sort of phantom we are chasing. You tell all the whom evers that. Give it to Santiva. He'll kick it upstairs.”
“ Yeah… good thinking. He'll run to the end zone with that. Gotcha. I told them you were on top of it.”
“ Thanks, John. And John-”
“ Yes?”
“ Don't let the bastards wear you down.”
“ Situation normal, all fouled up,” he replied and laughed.
“ And let Santiva know that Lew and I have been at work at HQ for two hours this morning on this.”
“ Right… check… count on it. Lew's with you al-ready?”
“ Picked him up on my way back from Quantico. Tell anyone busting our asses that we are busting our own asses and don't need any help. See you back here when you can get here.”
“ Will do. You did the right thing calling in Lew.”
'Tell them that. I wouldn't trust anyone but Lew with this. He knows the COMIT project like no one else aboard, so if this guy's MO is in any of the files, open or unsolved, that we've poured into the system to date, then we'll get him.”
“ Just a matter of time.”
“ Nice of you to say so, J. T.”
She hung up. Lew stared up at her where she now stood. “Thanks again, Doctor, for the confidence. I'm correlating any unsolved murder cases in the system with the judge.”
“ Who knows? We might get lucky. Meanwhile, I also want you and Steve Conyers to work on/off shifts so there's no slowdown on this info gathering. And Lew…”
“ Yeah?”
“ Do the same for solved cases as you're doing for unsolved cases, and cases that resulted in threats on the judge's life.”
“ Let our fingers do the legwork,” he replied. “Why not?”
“ It's the time element that's crucial here. Guy abducts a woman and does not make a ransom demand… well, you figure it out. Not much hope that time is on our side here. Maybe the computer can even the odds a bit.”
Lew fell silent for a moment. The personal aspect of this case called on them both to work especially hard to locate a female judge whom they both knew from stints at the courthouse. They were at war with the clock. And time had no beginning and no end here; instead it took on the nature of a runaway train.
“ What're we really looking for, Jess?” asked Lew.
“ In the Native American scheme of things, Lew, a wrong done at the beginning of time still festers because it may as well have been done today. Now, all things in nature being cyclical, even human nature and actions are understood as circular, and time is no exception.”
“ I see… I think.”
Jessica continued, not missing a beat, talking over Lew. “Nor is revenge. It's the same kind of thinking that has kept the ancient, tribal belief in avenging one's brother by one's own hands an absolute trust. But the belief is not limited to Native Americans. It's one that has come down through the ages through all cultures.”
“ Is that why Native Americans view the atrocities of the Indian Wars as having just happened like yesterday?”
“ Same holds true of black men who'd never lived under the institution of slavery, yet they still often act as if wronged personally, because it was a kind of slow death meted out to their ancestors. Easily understandable, really. Who can blame a black man or a red man for not putting a time limit on such atrocities?”
“ Little wonder the Indians take such glee in victories like the Little Big Horn.”
“ While Wounded Knee continues as an open sore for Indians and an embarrassment for whites.”
Jessica, who had always had a fascination for Native American culture and art, had joined some friends who had gone to the small reservation town of Wounded Knee with its long history of bloodshed. Wounded Knee's largest cemetery cradled the murdered Sioux who had died there, victims of a bloody massacre at the hands of the U.S. Cavalry in 1890 that proved to be the last major encounter between the red man and the white man on a battlefield. Then, on February 27, 1973, absolutely frustrated with conditions at the reservation town of Wounded Knee, American Indian Movement leaders staged a takeover and an encampment to bring national attention to the plight of Native Americans and the deteriorating reservation conditions everywhere. They occupied several buildings to dramatize their complaints. FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs police surrounded the AIM camp. During the next seventy-one days, gunfire was exchanged, until AIM members could no longer go on. Trapped without food, water, or electricity amid the bitter winter, the noose was drawn, not unlike the Sioux before them. Two members of the occupying force-Anna Mae Aquash and Joe Stuntz-became martyrs to a cause for which most Americans took no heed. Nine other people were wounded, including a federal marshal, who came away paralyzed.
Jessica had felt an overwhelming sense that the judge was the victim of a kind of justice, or injustice, not entirely different from the kind of injustice that came with “blood” vengeance-Native American style.
Jessica had had DeCampe's Western-style pistol brought into the task force room to keep focused on who they were working to locate.
The cold sight of the. 45 brought Jessica back to the present, full circle. “How long has she gone missing?” She recalled having asked the WPD detectives the night before.
“ Long enough to alarm her family; they waited dinner for her after she'd called to say she was out the door, on her way home after working overtime. It was her 'overtime' night as she called it, Thursday nights. But it went unusually long, and then she didn't show up at all. Finally, she was not answering her cell phone, so her son-in-law comes down to investigate when midnight rolled around,” Jack Dane, a longtime veteran of the department who had no love lost for Judge DeCampe, had replied.
“ Found her cell phone in her purse,” added Dane's heavyset partner, Joe Myers. Jessica had taken one look at the pair and instantly understood why the higher ups wanted an “independent” brought in to lead the investigation. These men were emotionally involved, yes, but in a negative sense; in fact, they were so negative that they might have done the deed themselves, if Jessica didn't know better. It appeared that DeCampe had managed to offend every working cop in D.C. at one time or another, even to the degree that some in the city would as soon leave her to her fate. In fact, officialdom didn't believe they could scrape two Washington cops together who could devote themselves to DeCampe's case without some prejudice. As a result, Jessica felt certain that the bureau could and would do a better job of finding the judge than the D.C. police for more reasons than manpower and technological support.
“ And so her son-in-law comes down to investigate, and what'd he find?” Jessica asked after staring down the men, a small gargoylish creature lurking at the back of her mind to tell her that she would, despite any feelings toward the victim, do her utmost to find DeCampe-dead or alive.
“ Peter Owens,” said Dane, “House representative.” He handed over his pocket notebook where his address and phone number and remarks were jotted down. “Said he found her car in her spot at the courthouse. Some suspicious items scattered about.”
“ Cell phone and her purse were missing,” added Myers. “Looks like a simple abduction, straight up, no-nonsense snatch and grab.”
She wondered how much they had already disturbed. She stared them down before saying, “We'll keep you apprised of every step of the investigation from our end, detectives, and would appreciate it if you reciprocated.”
“ Reciprocated… sure,” said Dane.
As they walked off together, talking of a place to grab some breakfast, the two laughed over Jessica's use of the word reciprocated. Something told Jessica that Maureen DeCampe faced an even worse fate than a simple abduction. Was there ever such a thing as a simple abduction? She didn't think so. Still, she didn't know exactly what her intuition meant to tell her, or if this instinctual feeling that the judge's abduction had to do with her being a judge had a name, or even if it were right. Still, something kept hitting that nail, that this abduction had to do with who the victim was, that it was tied to an official case, one of her courtroom decisions. So, did it have a name and a number, this case?
As luck would have it, at the same time that the judge had become a Victim for the first time in her life, Jessica was heavily invested in the Claude Lightfoot case, the murder of an Indian activist that appeared complicated beyond the norm. The case involved the death of a Blackfoot Crow Indian activist and civil rights worker, who had overcome serious physical handicaps his entire life only to be killed in a vicious attack in the early '80s that nowadays would go for the most heinous and brutal of racially motivated hate crimes. The murder had gone unsolved all these years, what police called a cold case. Claude Lightfoot had been twenty- seven when he faced multiple attackers. No one was ever apprehended in the case, and few were questioned in the murder that had happened at a closed-down drive-in theater. Pieces of his mangled body had been hung from the marquee and discovered at daybreak by passing motorists. This all in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where such ugly things weren't supposed to ever happen.
In effect, after much beating and torture, Lightfoot had been lashed to two cars, his feet to one bumper, his wrists to another. A bumper of one vehicle remained behind in a spray of blood, a souvenir to the night's violence. The young man had been literally torn in two when two cars drove off in opposite directions. According to the local coroner's report at the time, Claude Lightfoot likely felt nothing, as he was unconscious from a severe beating and trauma to the head with lacerations to the brain, but he was alive when his body was literally ripped in two.
It had occurred out at a lonely moor surrounding an abandoned old outdoor drive-in called The Apache Theater. It had been far from any town lights or houses off the main arteries leading to Sioux Falls. No one save those responsible had seen a thing, and no one else heard Lightfoot's screams-none but the coyotes and the scrub cactus, and recently a man named McArthur, who was now dealing in information.
Anyone hoping to solve such a case would have a hard time jogging memories lurking so long in the darkness of a decrepit guilt and a crippled remorse, but perhaps somewhere out there in South Dakota's heartland, there lived a gnawing, unrelenting regret, a flicker of positive humanity burning like the last wisp of a candle. If there were any hope whatsoever, Jessica wanted more than life itself to avenge the voiceless young Crow man who had died so horribly at the hands of an obvious pack of rabid racist jackals.
Jessica's old curse was a simple one: her obsessive and near maniacal seeking out of the truth to help the underdog, the beaten, the dead, who had no one to speak for them; this all warred with her desire to have a life. Her enormous tolerance for things, her Job-like patience to learn and uncover truths, and her relentlessness-all her best qualities- proved to be her worst qualities as well, especially for those who got close to her. Preordained by some unseen force or hand, she felt a constant gargoyle perched on her shoulder, gnawing and ranting and sullen until she provided it with answers. This had been the case now for almost two decades, when her mentor and lover, Otto Boutine, had died on the altar of her relentlessness. It had been her first major case as an FBI agent, and Otto had so believed in her. Since his passing, she had been driven to prove that his faith in her abilities as a medical examiner extraordinaire had not been misplaced.
Time and again she had had to prove her worth to the FBI, and both her physical self and her mental state went through repeated reassessment by her superiors. Try as some might, they could find no fault with her performance, and she still remained the best shot with a handgun the boy's club had ever produced. Still, she knew they were less interested in her ability with a weapon and even a microscope than in being assured 100 percent that she had overcome all of the emotional pain brought on when one's life amounted to chasing monsters. She had convinced her superiors anew that she was psychologically fit to continue doing what she did best-only a partial lie, for truth be told, she knew that the mental anguish would pursue her to her grave, despite the bravest effort on her part. It was for this reason that she so empathized with Kim Faith Desinor, whenever Kim faced down a killer inside her visionary readings of crime scenes and objects and photos associated with a murder investigation.
She had learned to appreciate Kim's gift and the inherent dangers associated with it. She was not far removed from the same dangers herself. But she had learned also to appreciate the best efforts put forth by her friends and coworkers to help her. She also felt good about working with the new FBI shrink with whom she'd had an instant rapport. All of these people she allowed close knew her for the liar that she was when it came to her own well-being, and there was comfort in that; comfort in the fact that others knew how deep she had traveled into the abyss and had managed to keep her sanity intact and her priorities in focus.
Still, the superiors worried about Jessica becoming a crack-up case, so from time to time, they saddled her with duties that kept her pinned down to either the lab or more recently to a computer. The restoration of dead files, to keep her both busy and off field duty for a period, was when she came across the Lightfoot file.
Dealing with the COMTT plan on a national level primarily meant a desk job, a prison to a woman of her nature. But then the DeCampe thing happened, and her superiors couldn't help themselves. They knew her as the best. They demanded she take charge of the case, despite any earlier misgivings about Jessica's sanity or loss of humanity or any such thing. DeCampe had people in high places, friends and family alike. Her case demanded the best and the brightest.