Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Jessica had learned never to discount Kim Desinor's visions or suspicions, and never to read one of her visions literally. If she said Judge DeCampe was in some place of decay, this could have many interpretations, that there were many rivers to the ocean. Decay had many connotations and images attached to it, and the place where DeCampe was being held might simply be a “place of decay” such as a cemetery or burial plot or even a cold storage meat packing company. The fact that her abductor had “confined” her could point to a decay of movement as in wither, ebb, crumble, dwindle, fade, fall off. In the most hideous sense, however, it meant spoil, corrupt, perish, degenerate, decompose, deteriorate, disintegrate, putrefaction, and adulteration. Then again, adultery came out of adulteration, so the association could go on endlessly, and therein lay both the strength and the weakness of the psychic and psychic imagery. The psychic vision might not in and of itself be useful, but in the psychic's interpretation, a use might often come of psychic information. Kim had proven herself time after time as an able and capable interpreter of her own visions. If she said that Maureen DeCampe was “in a state of decay,” there was some truth to this, but it could well mean that she was in a state within the contiguous United States that was in a state of decay, such as a farm state in a nation that no longer valued the private farm and its family of caregivers. Or it might be taken literally, that DeCampe might well be buried alive in a coffin this moment. Decay meant decline, decadence, failure-all adjectives perhaps better applied to DeCampe's abductor. Decay stood for collapse, for waste, breakdown, and breakup, dissolution, corruption, and mold, blight, and rot-perhaps the condition of a man gone mad. All these horrid images Kim had internalized, and the result was disease overtaking Kim's own body-a strange psychic malady somehow connected to DeCampe's circumstances. Psychosomatic illness taken to the tenth power, Jessica imagined.
Dr. Roy Shoate had contacted Jessica to tell her that he had never seen a healthier person exhibiting signs of Ebola virus. That's what it looked like to him. He had run no tests, but he said she was literally being eaten up, and it was ongoing unless they could find some way to arrest it.
“ She submitted to your examination without a fight?” Jessica had asked.
“ She has little strength left. She is dying, Jessica.”
Tears welled up in Jessica. “Do all you can to arrest it. Dr. Shoate.” Jessica did not confide in the doctor that Kim's condition was psychically induced. She knew that no doctor could completely stop it until Jessica brought an end to the DeCampe case, the case Kim had been so diligently working on when the strange malady overtook her.
“ This appears a public health issue to me, Dr. Coran. Will you be notifying Atlanta?” Jessica had no intention of alerting the CDC or anyone else about Kim's condition. “I'll take every step necessary, Doctor, and thank you,” she lied.
“ Meantime, we have her sedated and isolated. We will proceed under the assumption it is the Ebola but will administer no meds until we have isolated the virus itself, to be certain. That's the best we can do for now-hospital policy-now that we live in such a litigious society.”
“ How long will further tests take?”
'Twenty-four hours for initial tests, forty-eight to be certain.”
“ Thanks for all you've done, Dr. Shoate.”
“ Absolutely. I know you have your hands full. I've been reading the papers.”
Jessica hung up, her friend's life very much on her mind. She paced the office and stared out the window, weighing the news from Dr. Shoate. The ante had been significantly raised now, with Kim's life in the bargain.
J. T. stepped in, shouting, “The parking attendant has been found dead in Detroit, Michigan, as far as he got.”
“ How?”
“ Killed in a flophouse.”
“ Christ help us. We'll never know the extent of his in-volvement.”
“ What's up with Kim Desinor, Jess? I couldn't help but overhear. Is she ill?”
“ She's somehow contracted some sort of bad case of… not sure what it is, but she believes it came directly from her psychic journey into Judge DeCampe's mind. She's… she's not good.” Jessica began to cry. “But J. T., keep this information between us, please.”
J. T. fidgeted. He had rarely seen Jessica break down, certainly not in a public place. He awkwardly went to her and held her. He promised what he could not possibly deliver. “Kim's going to be all right; don't you worry. She's a fighter.”
“ I've got her under the best care in Quantico. Still, I wish I could do more. If we could locate Maureen DeCampe, put some closure on this case, maybe… it might have a beneficial effect on Kim, but as of now… Kim is slowly dying of wounds she feels are empathetic in nature. They're like the open sores of a leper, J. T. In all my career, I've never seen anything like this before, except-”
“ Except where?”
“ Except on an autopsy slab.”
“ What are you talking about?”
“ I drove down to Quantico to see her, and I tell you, she's exhibiting leprosy-like spots, like we see on decaying corpses. She even smelled of decay. Her whole apartment did.”
J. T. could find no words of comfort now. Instead, he offered her a shoulder and continued to hold his friend. “I got Roy Shoate to see her, and he admitted her to Washington Memorial. He's the best in his field.”
“ He's a rare disease man, isn't he?”
“ Yeah…'fraid so.”
J. T. said no more.
Maureen DeCampe, judge of the First Appellate Court of Washington, D.C., believed her mind had always had a perverse liking for frightening her; it played games all the time. So why should a moment in a darkened underground parking lot be any different?
Her logical left side of the brain told her right side how foolish it was being, and that she was not about to pay heed to the false instinct to flee from the stranger in the parking garage. Such an act would make her appear foolish; in the end, it would amount to twaddle, what her career Navy father called bilge-rot, malarky, drivel, and she would, in the end, senselessly appear nonsensical.
She hated to be embarrassed or made the butt of a joke.
Still, a distinct odor of fright-a thought of horror winging shadowlike out to her car-or was the shadow him? Shadowing in her shadow?
Shadow… such a positively lovely word when properly sounded out; it played melodic over the concave surface of the mind… shadowlike in a shadowed land that smelled of ancient, earthy, red dirt and rotting ears of com and of hay and of more odors than she could enumerate, all commingling here in this place of her captivity.
Something brought her around to a startling realization, an epiphany: What at first had felt like a dishonest emotion was in fact a righteous paranoia, after all. Despite her self- assuredness, her directed and fast gait from stairwell to waiting car, and the fact she was armed and capable of bringing down a tundra yak with her Remington. 45, a sense of vulnerability cast itself over her like a Maine fog. She felt the touch of this blanketing vulnerability; felt it the way an animal at a watering hole knows it is being stalked. Death, the ultimate stalker… She felt the fear of an animal about to be devoured whole and with pleasure.
She'd felt it then, and she felt and feared it even more now. Now that she sensed him close by, observing as before, watching her terror, enjoying her slow spiral into insanity and despair and fainting and recovering and what must come soon-her final death. She'd given little thought to life or the possibility of some savior crashing in to free her.
She willed herself to no longer contemplate long on her family, what they must be suffering. She willed herself to think only of mercy and prayer.
There in the underground lot, she had wheeled and brought her weapon into the stalker's face, but the man's sheer fright lessened her resolve. It was a passing homeless fellow looking for a warm comer to sleep it off in. She scolded him. Told him to get himself together as she pushed a five dollar bill into his hands, turned, and continued to her car, while the tall homeless man ambled off. Then someone tapped on her shoulder, and she reacted, bringing the firearm up to eye level on the white-haired man with the gray-stubbled chin.
“ Please, don't shoooot,” pleaded the little man in the rumpled old suit. He was shorter by a head than she. This old coot must have witnessed her generosity toward the other fellow and wanted some shown him, she had guessed. His skin appeared as rumpled and loose as his clothing. His country drawl made him a simple fellow, and when he'd thrown up a pair of wrinkled hands in the universal posture of defeat, Judge DeCampe almost felt sorry for his having startled her into putting the muzzle of the. 45 in his face. Then she recognized him with a startled shock.
“ Mr. Purdy? James Lee Purdy's father?” she then asked, somewhat amazed to find the man so out of place and time.
“ You couldn't forget the likes of me, now could you?”
“ No… haven't forgotten, no.”
“ Guess that goes a long way to show your guilt, Your Honorable Judgess.” He uttered her tide as if spitting battery fluid.
Still, her recognition of the quiet little man who had sat for almost three months in her courtroom nearly nine years ago, month after month during his son's murder trial, listening to testimony condemning his son to die in a Texas electric chair, told her she had nothing to fear from this sad Iowa farmer. “What the hell're you doing here? In Washington? Wasn't your son's execution scheduled and carried out?”
It came as a surprise to find him here, seeking her out. His son's case had come full circle, the final appeal, and through some strange judiciary coincidence, it had fallen on her desk when she was hearing appeals in Houston. Of course, she'd immediately refused the case on grounds of conflict of interest, since no judge could try the same case twice, even if she had become an appeals judge by then and even if Jimmy Lee Purdy had kept up with her career for some perverted reason. Still, at that time and now, she suspected, the old Iowa farmer must be absolutely confused about the judicial system. A simple Iowa farmer lost amid Houston's court system with its winding, twisting corridors until he found her office.
He had entered her chambers and there he stood the entire time, pleading with her to handle the appeal, that Jimmy Lee wanted it that way, so there could not be any real conflict of interest due to Jimmy Lee Purdy's final wishes. “A man's final wishes are a sacred thing,” the senior Purdy had told her then. Of course, no amount of magical thinking on Purdy's part could convince anyone in the Texas judiciary system to break generations of protocol for “a man's final wishes.”
Now here stood old Purdy again before her in an underground lot in D.C. Part of her mind asked why had he sought her out again, here, now. She knew that his son's execution had occurred over the weekend, and this knowledge only made her clench tighter to her Remington. “I know your son's execution was set for the weekend,” she told him. Colleagues in Houston didn't let her miss much, and besides, it'd made national news and had sparked new debate on the capital punishment issue and the State of Texas's penchant for using the chair often and often again.
She had recalled how the worn-out looking little man had abandoned his crops and life on the farm to be at his son's trial, and it had surely proven an ordeal for the father of the accused and convicted defendant. The fact was that the young defendant had no defense; he'd left enough DNA at the series of rape-murders to convict hundreds of men several times over. He'd been careless and messy, meaning to be, taunting law enforcement to stop him, as if it were all a game, and he killed with the thoughtless abandon and impunity of a natural disaster, and he ought to've been put to death the day after his conviction. Instead, they had run him through all of his civil rights until finally he had no more, and Judge Parker had-just as she'd known on the day she'd handed the case over to him-found Jimmy Lee guilty on top of guilty. He'd just been executed over the previous weekend.
So seeing the father here now did not completely surprise her, yet it did surprise her, all the same.
“ Mr. Purdy, you startled me.”
“ I sure don't want that, ma'am, Your Judgess.”
“ I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Purdy,” she said without sincerity.
“ I 'predate that… coming from you, Your Judgess.” Aside from this wizened old man, no one gave a whit for Jimmy Lee Purdy. Even the opponents of the death penalty had remained strangely silent on Purdy and his execution, as if to say they'd give the state this one since Purdy was- or appeared by all rights to be-a natural born killer. Certainly, he did not make a good poster boy; he cursed, spat, and made filthy gestures whenever and wherever given the opportunity.
The old man appeared his exact opposite. The old man had sat straight and stiff throughout the proceedings like a staff, an ancient, worm-eaten wooden staff, erect and unbending, proud and sad all at once. Judge DeCampe could only imagine how a parent might react under such stress as God, Texas, his son, and circumstances had placed on him and his absent wife. DeCampe had come to think of the elder Mr. Purdy as a biblical character like Lot or even Job-the Job of Iowa Falls, Iowa.
She relaxed her arm along with the weapon, pointing it downward just as her father had always taught her. “Mr. Purdy, you damn near got your head blown off. You startled me.
Then he grinned a twisted and grimacing grin and mocked her words, “Mr. Purdy, you startled me. I plan for a heap more'n to startle you, Missy.”
Now she felt real fear of the sort that went without the blink of second-guessing, but too late! Maureen DeCampe didn't see the electric cattle prod he shoved into her abdomen from somewhere deep within the rumpled coat, through a hole in a pocket. She saw a flash of the silver tip, like the giant sting of a wasp, even as it remained somehow attached to the inner lining of his cloth overcoat. She only felt its report as it sent her into a confused convulsion, a sense of burning material and flesh filling her last thought before passing out.
“ You had your chance, woman. You done sat in judgment twic't on my boy, and you done kil't Jimmy Lee, but he ain't going outta this life without company. Electrocution… How's it feel? My boy and me're now gonna teach you a little about old time religion and justice. Call yerself a judge. Hawww!”
Her gun had fallen immediately, her hands reacting violently to the electric bolt sent through her every cell. She had slumped forward into him, unconscious, her weight against the frail figure nearly knocking Purdy over. He then must have used some sort of drug on her, she now surmised. Likely used a premeasured dose from a hypodermic.
“ I lifted your body, carried you to my waiting van, and there I deposited you… inside a pine wood coffin, same as Jimmy Lee's. You rode here right alongside one another in the back of the van. After I put you into the coffin, I nailed shut the top of the thing.”
She had a vague memory or sixth sense of having been shut up into a black inkwell.
Darkness complete.
Isaiah Purdy had grown tired, his eyes so heavy they had closed, his ears no longer registering the whimpering and animal cries of his victim. He dozed on the three-legged stool that sat in the barn. He half remembered, half dreamed now, rewinding his experience through the mechanism of his mind. What had happened? How had he found the courage and strength to carry out his dead son's wishes?
He recalled again how he had taken the woman in the garage in Washington, D.C., after he'd made a cruise by the White House and the Lincoln Memorial-places he'd always wanted to see. He recalled standing in a crowd of tourists, feeling he needed a bath or a shower.
He recalled next going to the courthouse, and what had happened after he'd jabbed her with the cattle prod and injected her with the drug. He had then banged tight the coffin lid over her unconscious form, nail after nail. When he had turned to climb from the van, he was shocked to see a vision standing there, a biblical character if ever there was one, a giant, bearded prophet, asking, “What're you doing there, mister?”
The unexpected man wore tattered clothes, sported a long beard, ragged hair, and confused eyes. With mouth wide open, he gazed at Purdy and past him to the coffin into which Isaiah had deposited Maureen DeCampe's benumbed form. Purdy thought of Moses and John the Baptist when he stared at the homeless man, who now asked, “Do ya' think you're doing the right thing here?”
“ I'm about doing the Lord's work. And you? You have come from God as a messenger, like John out of the wilderness, and you, sir, are a sign!”
“ A sign? Me?”
“ Yes, a sign that I am doing exactly as God intends me to do.”
“ Really?” Purdy's arms went up as he spoke, making him look like a preacher. “I am following the dictates of the One True Lord God. And you? Are you one of his prophets?” Purdy opened his palms to the homeless man. “Be at peace, brother.”
“ Then you're taking care of her, you mean?” The homeless man indicated the two coffins with a single finger. “Or them…”
“ Precisely, yes.”
“ Can I have her purse money?” The homeless man indicated where DeCampe's purse lay alongside her gun, several feet from her car.
'Take it; render unto Caesar that which is his.”
Purdy closed the van's rear doors on one coffin from which a slight groan erupted, and on one silent coffin. At the same time, the homeless man shuffled off for the purse DeCampe had dropped, but he first stared at the long- barreled gun, lifting it in his greasy, food-stained hands. His heart said use it, but his logical side won when he lifted the purse and carefully placed the gun back where he had found it.
“ I ain't been nobody's hero for a long time,” the man muttered to himself.
Purdy walked around to the front of the van and stared back at the homeless man. Purdy simply waved at the old prophet, climbed into the van, put his keys into the ignition, turned the motor on, and then slowly pulled away. The homeless man had already disappeared into the gray walls.
“ Well, Jimmy Lee… our undertaking's been blessed… blessed by Ol' John the Baptist himself,” the old Iowa farmer muttered as he arrived at the ticket booth, where he calmly paid his bill and continued on, the attendant so strung out on drugs that he had seen nothing and had heard less. Purdy, at Jimmy's urging, had brought plenty of drugs- mostly animal tranquilizers-to bargain with.
As for- Judge DeCampe, she was past caring, at least not for now. Purdy would taunt her with the story of her would- be knight in shining armor, who turned out to be Purdy's prophet. He'd share it all with her in detail when she next regained consciousness and when he next awoke. He knew the story well, but she had yet to hear it.
Maureen DeCampe now lay amid hay and dirt in an open room filled with dust, mites, and pollen. She could only imagine being in the coffin which was standing in a comer alongside Jimmy Lee's. The old man had told her all about how he had transported her here in it. He'd also begun to hint that it had all been a plan concocted in Jimmy Purdy's fevered brain. DeCampe at this point would prefer the safe confines of the coffin and a death by asphyxiation to that which the Purdy men had in mind. Had in mind was the right phrase, for the old man had his son's dead voice filling his mind, or so it seemed to her.
She would readily have chosen being buried alive to what torture she now endured. She felt her skin crawling with the decay from Jimmy Lee's body. For now she was in some sort of large area where animals had once been kept, some sort of a barn like structure, she realized.
“ Am I'n I-o-wa?” she asked under the gag, realizing the tape around her mouth protected the only area of her body touching the dead man's flesh-and grateful for this two- inch-wide swath of freedom from the desiccation. Unclean tissue… contamination, these words swam in her mind like feeding piranhas, but these toothy microbe fish ate away at her sanity and soul as well as her flesh.
The only response from the nearby darkness was a hearty laugh at her attempt to speak; she wondered if the old man could understand anything she said, that she had guessed at her whereabouts. If it were Iowa, how did he transport her without anyone knowing or seeing something? As if to answer her thoughts, the dark little man, Purdy, stood and lifted a kerosene lantern and turned the light up. She welcomed the pungent kerosene odor into her; for half a nanosecond, it masked the overwhelming odor of decay that had caused her to pass out more than once. Worse thought yet, she had gotten somehow used to the odor.
Her father had been a cattleman rancher in Texas, and his father before him, and she had often wondered how the DeCampe men could get used to the smells that came with slaughtering cows, but they did. In fact, it seemed to have lodged in their genes. Her grandfather had once sat her down and told her that men could, given the circumstances, get used to anything-anything at all. Any odor, any deed, any sinful behavior, if exposed to it long enough. He pointed to the slave trade, the Holocaust. She began to feel that she'd reached that point here, the point of no return, in which her senses, so assailed by the decay, simply had shut down. She could tolerate it, at least long enough to hate this man Purdy strongly enough to want to live to wreak vengeance on him.
Why was the old man turning up the wick on that damned kerosene light of his? At first, she thought he simply wanted a better look at the progress of his gruesome art. However, in the next instant, the light shone on the two white pine boxes with cheap chrome handles: coffins. One had held his son's electrocuted body, and now she recalled the horror of having awakened inside her coffin. He'd lifted the lid, smiled down at her in grotesque, toothless fashion, and then he'd shoved a cloth filled with chloroform over her face, and when she next awoke, she was lashed to his son's decaying corpse.
And my brain is beginning to accept this shit? she inwardly screamed.
How long? How long had they journeyed from D.C. to this godforsaken place? Had she been lying unconscious for the duration of a trip that had taken her near lifeless body from Washington to Iowa, where the old man resided? Had she been out that long? Had he managed to bring her back to his private property-to the safety of his homestead amid the nothing void of rural Iowa, where the only other soul to set foot in his bam might be the occasional postman, or Jimmy Lee's mother, the old man's wife? Did he have a wife? Did she condone what was going on out in her bam? Had she masterminded the entire abduction from her front porch rocker? Was it a ma and pa operation? Or was ma out of the loop? It felt unseasonably warm for an Iowa fall; even the nights had felt somewhat warm. The warmer the weather, the faster the decay, she knew. What was the cause for the warmth? Was it part of that large thing they called global warming, Indian summer come early? Or was it simply the heat of her own decay?
She wondered these things and why the old man was hovering with the light over her, studying her again. She wondered all these things before passing out again.