“ God does not dictate here, Mr. Purdy. The court system does. I can't break the law to enforce the law. Now, please, I have no more to say on the subject.”
“ I have lived in perdition all these years Jimmy's been on death row. I won't apologize for taking up a half hour of your life, Your Honorable Judgess.” He'd stood, rail thin, bony, emaciated, haggard, and sickly. He'd come like a visit from Death himself to her chambers there in the Sam Houston Central Courthouse. That had been almost a year ago, long before she'd taken the position in Washington.
“ He'll get a fair appeal, Mr. Purdy, before Judge Raymond Parker,” she had assured the scarecrow before her.
That had been the last she'd seen of the old man, but this Jed Clampett parody continued to wander the courtroom halls like a ghost, sitting in every day of his son's doomed appeal, just as he had for three months during the original trial. She had caught glimpses of him, and she also caught moments when his eyes staked her with their mix of frustration, sadness, and a kind of fire that spoke an angry and sullen language all their own.
Even though she had no choice but to recuse herself from the case in Houston, Texas, she'd secretly blessed the fact she did not have to hear Jimmy Lee Purdy's bullshit ever again. Further, she never wanted to see his ugly face again. She'd begun to feel exactly the same toward the old man.
The state by and large had to bury death row inmates using large sums of taxpayer dollars, and they were interred in a sad potter's field. Judge Parker, with whom she'd remained in contact primarily through E-mail, had confided to her that on sentencing day, Mr. Isaiah James Purdy had asked for only one thing from the court before he'd ended his plea for leniency for his son. He had asked that the boy's body be returned to him, to be shipped back to Iowa, where Mr. Purdy meant to inter his son on the family farm.
That had all been a lie.
The wizened little old man wanted the body for a far more grim and sinister reason; he wanted it to wreak its slow revenge on Judge Maureen DeCampe; he wanted to watch his son's decaying flesh eat away at her, to eventually murder her in a slow and agonizing fashion not heard of in modem times. Something he'd muttered about Romans… and something about the biblical injunction of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but she hadn't gotten it all. Flesh for flesh, she imagined now. She failed to dredge up some words he'd read to her from his Bible. She was unable to recapture every word, far too busy as she was with the horror of the moment, lashed to Jimmy Lee Purdy's decaying, shrinking corpse, the odor of it certain to drive her insane long before her body would turn to rotting mush. Die, let me now… now let me die, she mentally pleaded.
The duct tape around her mouth worked twofold: to silence any screams and to hold her head into the deadly, flesh-eating decay. It was all too horrid and heart-sinkingly terrifying to contemplate. Mercifully, her mind sent her into a spiral of unconsciousness, her only means of escape.
They began the tedious process, requiring a small army of agents, of re interviewing everyone, starting with the parking lot attendant. But Jessica soon learned that the man could not be located, and that it appeared Arthur Collins had packed his belongings and had vacated his apartment. He might be on a plane, a train, or a bus bound for anywhere. His suddenly fleeing the area told Jessica that her instincts about the creep had been perfectly right all along, and now she cursed herself for allowing Collins the time to vanish. She immediately ordered an all points bulletin for his apprehension and return.
In the meantime, they spoke to the judge's youngest offspring, her adopted son, Michael. Michael, a law clerk, tearfully told them that he meant to follow in his mother's footsteps. At twenty-five, Michael blamed himself, saying he'd wanted to stay late in the building and go out with her that night for dinner and drinks, but that she had insisted he go on his way when it became extremely late. He'd met his fiancee at a restaurant, and he'd wanted the two women to get along, so he had the date set for weeks, but his mother hadn't really wanted to meet with them. She'd begged off, using her usual excuse: work.
“ She is a workaholic, you know,” Michael had said during the course of the interview. “She'd been happy for me,” he said. “I didn't know anything was wrong until the following morning, when my sister called.”
The daughters had been the ones to initially cry foul. Further discussion with them amassed no new information. The family was at a total loss as to how anyone could possibly want to harm their mother.
Hours passed like days on this case, a case that had nerves frayed from the lowest civilian to the governor of the state. Information of any useful sort simply failed to materialize; every person questioned seemed unable to supply a single helpful clue. Jessica's anger at herself for not cornering the parking attendant when she had had the chance threatened to explode. Richard Sharpe's detailing of the suspect from his unique perspective, from what few givens he'd had to work with, while not adding anything startlingly new, did corroborate Jessica's own worst fears for Judge DeCampe, that her abductor was in it for revenge, that his motive must be to inflict pain and suffering on the woman. Such evil revenge might come in any number of cruel ways. The revenge motive, in the experience of the people running the investigation, proved the worst possible scenario for the victim. The only crime that rivaled it was lust-torture and lust-murder done by a psychotic killer who had created some fantastical notions of right and wrong in his head in order to come to sexual release. A typical rape- if there were such a thing-was by contrast all about power and domination, while a lust-rape-murder had also to do with the mental state of the killer who must take life to feel alive or to fulfill some demented commands made on him by Satan or some hound of Satan's, or some other “outside” force he could not fully control.
Still, murder for revenge could be as savage as any. It certainly predated most reasons for murder.
Richard had agreed. He had cast aside all other possibilities, just as Jessica had on reading Richard's profile of the abductor.
“ A media stalker is usually an amateur, who is a great deal sloppier,” Richard had assured her, once again corroborating her own feelings. She knew her abductor. Jessica and Richard decided to drive back to the scene of the crime, where they hoped to speak to anyone who had come into contact with her on the night of her abduction. Now, as they made their way to their waiting car, they talked. “I've contacted Eriq Santiva,” she informed him, “and he's convinced that bringing you on board, Richard, lends a certain air of respectability to the investigation.” She laughed lightly at this.
“ And why does this make you laugh?”
“ Don't you see? He can tell the governor and the mayor that he's got a bona fide Scotland Yard investigator on the case alongside his best profiling team.”
“ I'm here merely as a consultant on the case.”
“ You're Richard Sharpe of Scotland Yard. Your record speaks for itself.”
“ And the Yard has handled countless abduction cases, and I've certainly had my share.”
“ You know a great deal about the psychology of abductors, as well as being an expert on stalkers.”
“ I'm sure the official thinking is that you Yanks can use all the help you can get, Jess.”
“ Some people are going to say it was the only way I could get you over here, Richard.”
“ Really?” Now he laughed.
“ That it took a fee to entice you to me. That you are a kept man.”
He laughed louder, his tone rich and resonating. Then he said, “Fuck anyone who says so.”
“ Thanks. I needed that.”
“ You hungry?”
“ I could eat.”
He turned right. “Do you know of a nearby useful place?”