“ 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.
THREE
A man whose blood
Is very snow broth; one who never feels
The wanton stings and motions of the sense.
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.