“ An intervention? Was she on the bottle or-”
Eriq waved his hands. “No, no! Nothing like that. They thought they could break her of her workaholism. You know, the caring children wanting the aging mother put out to pasture, all that.”
“ Gee, wish I had friends like that,” muttered Jessica.
“ We could arrange for an intervention for your obsession with work,” teased Richard. But the remark left Jessica frowning, Santiva staring, and J. T. simultaneously scratching his ear and scrunching his face up as if deciphering where and when.
Santiva said, “Jess, you do have friends like that, but they're so busy that they can't find time to intervene you, you see?”
“ Richard's only kidding, you two! Get off it. Funny, Richard. Now let me have a look at the crime grid, will you?” She pulled away from Richard's hand on her arm, and she pushed past the other two men, going for the location of the crime, saying, “If only these walls could talk.” She meant to read the crime scene and come away with some useful, guiding clues or patterns, or a direction in which to take the case.
“ Look, we'll need to get Lew Clemmens to look into the judge's caseload records for anyone who even smells bad.”
“ Can do, but there're men here at D.C. headquarters who can handle that.”
“ I trust Clemmens to be always right on, Eriq. And we don't have time to work with skeptics and people who're going to second-guess our moves, not if we want to find this creep before he kills her. Not if we want to bring her back alive.”
“ Shhh… family over there.”
Jessica saw the grieving handful of people all huddled in one corner, two pretty young women who looked like younger versions of the judge among them. She'd heard the judge had two daughters and three grandchildren with one on the way. Jessica wondered who had the little ones, and her heart sank at the thought of pain brought on the innocent grandchildren.
Jessica now approached the cordoned-off area, the grid of the crime scene. She saw that Kim Desinor, FBI agent and psychic, was well within the grid, attempting to pick up any psychic vibrations or hits that might defy both the skeptical onlooker and reality itself… at least reality as most people knew it.
“ How long has she been in trance?” asked Jessica.
J. T. replied, “Going on twenty minutes.”
“ She say anything?”
Eriq piped in with, “Before she went under, she touched the gun and the shoe.” He pointed to a shoe and a gun lying about the rear of a car tagged for impound-the judge's car. “Said the shoe and the gun belonged to Judge DeCampe. But then even I could've told you that.”
So far, Kim Desinor's efforts had remained unimpressive. Still, Jessica had worked previous cases with the psychic detective, and she sometimes proved to be uncannily accurate. “She say anything while under?”
“ Naaah… lot of nothing so far. Couple of grunts maybe.”
The moment Eriq said this, Kim Desinor screamed and stumbled forward, as if in a drunken stupor. She was caught by Santiva, only moments before she might have cracked her head on the dirty, oily pavement. Back of her, near the car tagged as the judge's, Jessica momentarily focused on a large. 45 Remington revolver-a Texas weed eater some called it-a set of keys, and a single high-heeled, stiletto- style shoe.
“ Get her some water, enough for drinking and splashing,” Jessica told Richard as Santiva collapsed to the floor with Desinor in his arms. “Eriq, J. T., get her topside where there's some cold air. It reeks of stagnant exhaust fumes in here.”
Santiva saw to helping Kim Desinor away. The psychic agent looked in a state of shock, her knees bleeding from having scraped the concrete floor. The results of the fall might have been far worse. Jessica wondered if there would be any significant results of another kind, the psychic kind. Dr. Desinor had in the past conjured miracles. However, Jessica knew she must rely on science and not magic, even if that magic might well have a basis in fact.
A team of two evidence technicians with the Washington PD stood about watching, ordered to hold until Dr. Desinor had completed her reading of the crime scene area, and further ordered to stand down until Jessica could complete her examination of the crime grid. The snickering from the WPD techs over what they had witnessed with Dr. Desinor could not be masked in this underground tomb where every word echoed and bounced.
Normally, no one was to touch a thing until the lead forensic investigator assigned to the case arrived. Dr. Jessica- “Her Highness,” as many had taken to calling her behind her back-Coran had now arrived to give the place a thorough look-see and walkover. She'd done that much; she was on deck, at the scene as soon as ordered, and she had taken it all in at a glance, while a piece of her mind wandered back to Richard.
The last time she'd been called to a crime scene it had also cost her an expensive meal. That time, her friend and colleague, Dr. John Thorpe, J. T., had come along with her, as they'd been dining together at the local Caribbean Sin on succulent mahi mahi steak dinners, which had been left cold and standing.
On staring across the taped-off area, Jessica felt a sense of dread and deja vu, and she said to herself, “Sometimes I feel like Eriq's hired bloodhound.”
“ You can bet WPD'll want this one. It is their jurisdiction, and they're going to fight for it,” said one of the D.C. police crime techs. “Dr. Sleezac's contesting jurisdiction as we speak.”
Jessica knew Herbert Sleezac, M.E. for the city. She felt no surprise at his contesting jurisdiction. If she were in his position, she'd fight for her jurisdictional rights as well.
“ Kidnapping is a federal offense. We don't need an invitation, with a federal appellate judge having been kidnapped.”
“ All the same, you know how the Washington PD works. Going to be like pulling teeth for you to get any cooperation.” Jessica knew what the guy meant. The city police still thought it was 1940, but they couldn't argue with the FBI taking over, not on this one. They wouldn't stand a chance in a court of law, and they knew it. “Suspected kidnapping of an appellate court judge is a far cry from your ordinary Missing Persons case.”
Jessica had developed a reputation among her colleagues for an uncanny ability to “read” the signs of a violent crime scene, and whatever bread crumbs an assailant or a killer left behind. She'd proven it many times over. She not only had the good “blue” sense of a fine detective, but she also “divined” from another place in her psyche that few other women or men could touch. Some called it mysticism. Jessica called it a knack, a Yankee intelligence that came with the DNA. Reading people was a gift passed on to her by her father, a forensics man for the U.S. military. Still she had no illusions about being the kind of psychometric reader Desinor was.
While Jessica had lost her father many years before, she had never lost his spirit, or what he had passed on to her: patience and hard work, how to find out what one needed in any circumstance, how to use time wisely, how to discipline oneself to a task, and how to question and then question the question. All lessons hard won and never to be forgotten, and in never forgetting, she kept her father alive as well. As a result, her father had never completely left her side.
J. T. had remained with Kim Desinor on the outside, while Richard Sharpe and Eriq Santiva had returned. Eriq whispered in her ear, “The absolute absence of a trail or a clue of any sort has dictated, at least in my mind, the need for your special talents, Jess.”
“ As a forensics guru or as backup to Kim Desinor?”
“ And tracker, and cunning person,” Santiva added. “We both know the absence of a trail would leave any other forensic investigator or techie Washington cop scratching his head for months or until a body washed up in a storm drain. With this one, the clock is ticking furiously, Jess. We all sense it. Dr. Desinor sensed it strongly the moment she stepped into the garage.”