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.