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 fill
ing 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.
SEVEN
I will ransom them from the power of the grave: I will redeem them from death…
Hosea 13:14
Isaiah Purdy had gone to his son's execution with no expectations save to see the thing through and to follow through on Jimmy Lee's requests-appeals made in his psychic visits.
After the execution, which had been handled with an eerie and perfunctory precision, Isaiah made his way down an institutional green and yellow corridor that felt like a tunnel out of The Wizard of Oz, at the end of which, he could view the body. It was a cold and stony Jimmy, his boy, whose head had been shaved, and whose temples were bubbled- marks of the boiling brain that had been scrambled by the electrocution. He didn't want to know the number of volts they'd fired into the boy's head. Poor Jimmy. Poor boy… Last of his lineage… end of the line…
After this, they told Isaiah to drive his van around the back to a sign indicating the prison wood shop, where he could take possession of the body. Once at the wood shop, he requested the extra coffin, telling them he'd pay for it, and telling them that it was meant for himself. The shop foreman readily obliged, saying he couldn't take any money from any father of Jimmy Lee's. This made Isaiah proud to know that his son had still managed to make friends here, even as a death row inmate.
They had carried Jimmy Lee down on a stretcher to the wood shop, just like as if he were a side of beef, and they lifted him from the gurney and into the pine wood box that'd been awaiting him, throwing his arms and legs in last. The men in the shop loaded Jimmy's coffin into the van, and then they loaded the one meant for his bride, the judge who'd sent him to the electric chair so many years before. Jimmy Lee meant to travel into eternity with his chief accuser.
Once the two coffins and his boy's body were loaded, the old man solemnly thanked all involved and waved a good Iowa wave to the incarcerated men, wishing them all good luck. Moments later, the wood shop's loading platform door ratcheted down and came to a metallic, screeching halt, leaving Isaiah once again alone. But he was hardly alone. Jimmy Lee's body might be in the coffin inside the black van, alongside the pine box awaiting the judge, but in point of fact, Jimmy Lee himself was inside Isaiah now.
'Taking you home, boy,” muttered Isaiah as he stepped from the loading dock and down the stairs. “Home to your Lord and Maker, son.”
Isaiah snatched open the van door and climbed behind the steering wheel. He turned the engine over and switched on the radio, which was playing a Gordon Lightfoot song. The words wafted through the cab of the van: “If you could read my mind, love… what a tale my thoughts would tell.”
It was Isaiah's favorite song of all time, but now, with Jimmy Lee actually crawling around in his head, the song made more sense for Isaiah Purdy than ever it did before.
Her interrogations for twelve hours had netted little save heartburn and mental heat stroke. No one knew anything, and Jessica's team's usual sources on the street, from paid snitches to prostitutes, had nothing to barter. It was as if Judge DeCampe had literally vanished from the planet, like one of those weird alien abductions that Whitley Streiber had been writing about for two decades.
Poof, and she was gone.
“ We're not getting anywhere this direction,” Jessica confided to J. T., who had stood around making time with Dr. Shannon Keyes, an FBI psychiatrist on standby should they need any psyche evaluations done or any psychiatric advice on a given individual as they processed suspects called in for questioning. Only Jessica and Santiva knew the complete truth of the situation, that Keyes was Kim Desinor's replacement, at least for now.
“ I fear whoever has her, he's an amateur at this and just lucked out, leaving us nothing,” Jessica told J. T. and Keyes.
A cop's worst fear was the crime scene that left not a single trace of victim or assailant-exactly what faced them now. Either the perpetrator had planned his every move, rehearsed his every line, or it was a crime of opportunity, a random violence. Hard to tell at this point which. While they leaned toward the judge's having been a victim of a carefully crafted stalking attack, they had zero suspects who posed an immediate threat to the judge before the abduction. Court records were being pored over, some by Lew Clemmens and his supercomputer, some by other members of the team, including Richard Sharpe.
In the meantime, Jessica had put out a general call to locate anyone who had ever made t
he remotest threat against Judge Maureen DeCampe, and anyone capable of acting on such a threat, and anyone available to act on his or her threats.
“ It's just remotely possible that some guy she put away arranged for all this,” suggested Keyes. “Being incarcerated nowadays doesn't stop a person from being violent on the outside, not if he's got contacts.”
Jessica looked across at Keyes, a beautiful ash blonde with an hourglass figure and penetrating gray eyes. Keyes had come up through FBI ranks via the Chicago field office, and by all accounts, she had seen a great deal in her capacity as a profiler there. She had been instrumental in capturing the infamous serial killer who called himself Doctor O, when she was just a fledgling police officer with the Chicago Police Department.
“ Then we need to scrutinize everyone she ever put away who's still alive,” offered J. T., looking mesmerized by Dr. Keyes, who normally worked with the Washington Field Bureau of the FBI these days.
“ And perhaps interview a few people around them,” added Jessica. “And that's going to take a great deal of time, and time, I fear, is the scarcest commodity we have right now.”
“ Certainly likely that time is the scarcest thing DeCampe has,” added J. T. “What other choice have we?” asked Keyes. J. T. agreed with Keyes next, saying, “Yeah, guess we don't have any other choice, Jess.
“ Jessica tried to ignore J. T., going to Keyes and saying, “You're the expert on the way the mind works, Dr. Keyes. What do you think the abductor wants? You've had time to review what we have. Any conclusions?”
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