“ Consider it done. You really came through for me, Jess. So now you get yourself packed.”
“ I've felt on standby since Wekosha, expecting a call at any time, so I am pretty well packed already.”
“ Good.”
“ I'll just see that my people in the lab know what to do, and I thought I'd get some range time in before I left.”
He nodded. “Behind on mine, too.”
“ Join me there?”
“ I'd like to but…” He lifted a stack of files and papers and let them plop on the desk before him.
She wondered if his reasons were more complicated than the work load, but she said nothing, nodding. “I'll see you then when I get back.”
“ Sorry that I won't be able to see you off.”
“ Well, that can't be helped, I'm sure, and I am a big girl.”
He laughed lightly at this. “You've certainly impressed my team and Leamy, Jess. We've made some great strides in reinstating the importance of physical evidence in psychological profiling techniques. Thanks mainly to you.”
She bit her lower lip, forming a pout. “I understand why you can't see me off, Otto.”
He stopped the shuffling of papers and looked deeply into her eyes. “I'm very glad that you do understand.” She closed the door to his office, understanding completely. He was feeling guilty, and he was worried about what J.T. had seen, or thought he had seen. He was worried about keeping up appearances, she decided.
As she stood there, hesitating, she realized that Otto's secretary was staring at her.
# # #
Every FBI person working as a field agent was required to log in a minimum of three hours a week at the shooting range. Unlike most people in the labs, Jessica Coran liked the firing range and enjoyed the feel of a gun in her hand, and the power it unleashed and the frustrations it exploded. For her, the shooting range was a place of catharsis, clearing her head, relaxing in its simplicity, representing as it did the ultimate solution to a problem. Even if the solution was symbolic instead of real-the target paper instead of the Wekosha fiend who had tortured Annie “Candy” Copeland-the act of imagining it so, helped her soul in the way a hot shower or a walk in the park might for someone else.
For the period of time that she concentrated on the target, putting. 38 shots into the head of the black silhouette of the monster that had killed the Copeland girl, and possibly Melanie Trent in Illinois and Janel McDonell in Iowa, she felt the same kind of rush she got when closing a case. That feeling of putting an end to it was only temporary here on the firing range, but it was better than the scattered pieces that, so far, represented such a maze that no end seemed in sight.
She emptied her gun in rapid-fire succession, and after the deafening echo died down, she heard Jim Bledsoe's voice coming through her protective earphones. “Hey, hey, Dr. Coran! You're about the best shooter we got going through here these days. You going to make the contest on Saturday?”
Bledsoe was speaking from his soundproof office, a small cubicle some thirty yards away. She pressed a call button on the wall and replied, “Doubt I can make it, Jim. Things have gotten pretty heavy for me, just lately.”
“ Yeah, so I've heard.”
She was an excellent shot, with the accompanying confidence that assured her of placing every bullet where she wanted it. She had learned to shoot as a child from her father, who had also taught her everything he knew about firearms. When she banged the switch that sent her target flying toward her, she saw that every shot had gone into the head of the silhouette, but that not all her shots could be accounted for, because several had passed through the same hole. Bledsoe's binoculars told him the same story, and his close inspection of the target would confirm this.
Her watch told her she hadn't any more time if she planned to shower and catch that transport. She had told J.T. to report to the airstrip also, that he was going to southern Illinois after the throat of Melanie Trent. She had given detailed instructions to her staff regarding the remaining Copeland evidence and the tests to run. She had expressly asked Dr. Stephen Robertson, a specialist in blood and semen analysis, to determine if the specimens displayed any disorders.
She holstered her weapon, ripped down her final target and grabbed her lab duster off the hook and made her way to the range master's office, where she turned in her target. Jim Bledsoe knew her well, and he both admired and liked her.
“ Another perfect shoot, Dr. Coran. You're wasted in a laboratory. Chicago or New York could use you.” He laughed lightly. “I'd like to get back into the field myself, but my leg… what happened in Akron…”
She'd heard the story many times before from Jim and did not have time to listen to it again. He had been wounded during a manhunt. Bledsoe was a big man, and even wounded, he had brought down his man, and for this act of bravery he was decorated. Now Big Jim Bledsoe logged time and targets for younger men and women on a shooting range.
He was an athletic-looking forty-six with the features of a golf pro. He kept himself in excellent health and shape, waiting for the day he would get a reassignment.
“ Jim, you're just a big flatterer.”
“ I hear you're doing fieldwork these days, though! What gives? How'd you swing it, the Wekosha gig? Heard it was a bloody mess.”
Far from bloody, she thought. “It was pretty awful, Jim.”
“ Heard you went as Boutine's protege?”
She now blushed and felt the redness in her face, realizing the implication in Bledsoe's words, that she had gotten the fieldwork by sleeping with Boutine. “I earned it, Bledsoe, pure and simple.”
“ Hell, I know that. Dr. Coran. I didn't mean anything by… by…”
She said, “Log my time and targets, will you, Jim? And just so the rumor mill has something to grind, I've gotten another field assignment in Iowa. Going tonight-solo!”
“ That's great. Dr. Coran. I always said you were wasted, like me, here, doing this!” He gestured to the small wooden office where he worked, overseeing the range.
“ I know you mean that, Jim.” She calmed. “Thanks.”
“ I do… I always say you're wasted in the lab.”
She imagined what Jim meant to say, a pretty woman like her was wasted locked away in a lab.
“ Thanks, Jim. And you might tell anyone who's even remotely interested that-”she paused-”that I'll be traveling alone.”
“ None of my business, Dr. Coran.”
“ Just… just log these in.” She pushed the targets at him once more. As she walked off, she wondered if maybe Otto was right. Maybe Iowa City was the best place for her to be for now. Maybe there was more talk going about than she had realized.?
TEN
They were delayed at the airstrip, a messenger telling them that she and J.T. would both be “accompanied” by pathologists from the AFIP, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington.
Both Jessica and J.T. were upset not only with the delay but by the obvious intrusion of the AFIP in the case. For the better part of his life, her father had been with the AFIP, carting his family all over the globe with him, going wherever he was needed. This was necessary because he was the only medical examiner in the AFIP. And things hadn't improved much since then. It was a given, and it was quite well known, that Oswald Coran was the exception to the rule, that most medical men with the AFIP were relatively helpless during an autopsy. It was like sending a boy who had learned his first finger exercises into Carnegie Hall to play a Mozart concerto.
Military pathologists knew less than hospital pathologists, and they hadn't the wide range of experience or education that she and J.T. had, and yet, here they were, coming on like a pair of “watchdogs” to oversee her work! It had been the AFIP that had so badly bungled two Kennedy assassination autopsies. Their uniforms looked a lot better than their credentials.