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 courtiers 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.