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.
THREE
A man whose blood
Is very snow broth; one who never feels
The wanton stings and motions of the sense.
— William Shakespeare
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 cou
rtiers 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 Hi
s 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.
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