“ Now what?” asked one of the patrolmen, his hat in his hand.
“ Now I gotta tell these people in Houston and in Washington, D.C., that their information was wrong and their warrants useless.”
The young lieutenant standing by said, “Suppose maybe Purdy's still on his way back here, Chief? Sir?”
“ Maybe… but we can't take that chance. Search high and low. And Marty, put a cruiser out on 1-80 and one on that old dirt road that runs betwixt here and Three Comers. Only roads he can take down through here. Watch for anything smacking of the vehicle the Feds put the APB out on. If he is still transporting this judge, we'll get the damned old fool.”
“ Right, Virgil. On it.” Virgil Gorman stared Dunkirk down and said, “I gotta call this lady doctor in D.C. and this fellow Stonecoat in Houston with the bad news. Keep everyone looking for anything outta the ordinary, Chester. Don't take anything for granted.”
At the same instant, someone shouted out, “Grave site! Gawl-darn grave site here!”
Everyone converged on the shouter and the circle of light his flash beam made over a mound of freshly dug earth. “Break out your shovels, boys!” shouted Gorman. Many of the officers had by order brought their shovels along for the grisly work, and they set the spades to working now, the dirt flying like a black water spray.
Still, they could not work fast enough for Gorman, who wanted this nightmare not to be happening in his rural jurisdiction. “Get that damned generator and field light out here. Get some of them damn car lights on this spot!” he ordered. “Get it dug up, you men! Now! Now! Now!” shouted Gorman, pushing past Dunkirk and the others. “Dig her out!”
The younger, stronger men bent to the work, tearing at the recently disturbed earth. The excited young officer who had first discovered it dug ferociously while saying, “The dogs first picked up animal tracks around it. Told me animals been sniffing around here. Then my light picked up the fact the dirt here 'bout didn't look pat, you know. All stirred up, you know, darkest patch in the moonlight.”
A field light came suddenly on, flooding the grave site and the men working at the gruesome task of disinterring the body were suddenly surround by their own giant shadows.
Someone handed Virgil Gorman a cellular phone, saying, “It's that Texas cop, Virgil. He wants to know what's happening. Told him only you could say.”
Gorman snorted like a walrus at this, took the phone, and spoke into it. “Stonecoat? We got bad news and-whoa… hold on… and on top of the bad news, we got more bad news. First off, Purdy is not here and nowhere to be found. Second, we've discovered a single grave site and are in the process right this moment of shoveling it empty for a look- see. You understand?”
“ Gotcha, Chief.” At his end, Lucas Stonecoat conveyed the bad news, a chorus of despair replying and filtering through the line all the way to Iowa.
“ I want to stay on the line until you ID Judge DeCampe, sir,” Lucas said to Gorman.
“ I fully understand, Lieutenant Stonecoat. Will keep this line open. We have the Feds on the other line. I gotta tell them what's up.”
Gorman switched lines and was on the phone with Jessica Coran now. He brought Jessica up to date, adding, “We have a faxed photo of DeCampe. As soon as we have verification she is… you know… in the grave out here, we will let you know.” He held up the phone to the grunting and the sound of dirt flying. “We're doing it without benefit of a backhoe, so it'll take a little bit.”
“ Thanks, Chief Gorman. Anyone from our field office in Davenport arrive yet?”
“ Negative on that. Sorry we don't seem to have any good news whatsoever for you folks.”
Gorman felt painfully aware of the chorus of grunts, snorts, cursing, and gravel-tossing relayed through his open line to Dr. Coran. He felt an acute sense of disappointment at the situation, at his inability to do anything ultimately useful, as he assumed the woman was long dead, and at the depths to which human depravity sank, and in particular one lone Iowan. He wondered if this Isaiah Purdy might not actually have been born elsewhere and migrated to the state, but he rather doubted this, too.
IN the pitch-dark stall, Maureen DeCampe, at the same moment that Purdy's farm was being dug up, felt like a cornered and wounded animal, her strength sapped but her mind raging with anger and hatred for her pursuer. In the darkness, she blindly pulled down an ancient horse harness with metal fasteners as large as studs. As Purdy now approached, she readied herself. Taking a mighty swing at the old man's face, she sent the harness and its metal parts into his eyes, lacerating his forehead and sending him to his knees, temporarily blinded.
Disorientated for a moment, he raged and lashed out with the pitchfork he'd snatched from Nancy Willis's body. He next stumbled backward, and she ran past him and out into the night to find herself below the firmament of a star-filled sky.
“ My God, I'm not in Iowa,” she muttered, realizing instantly that the landscape of rolling foothills and cleft valleys didn't compute. She saw the lonely, old, dilapidated farmhouse on the rise, so she was on an isolated farmstead, but this was not Iowa. If she knew one thing for certain, this was not the Iowa she had always her entire life heard about. It was not colorless enough, not characterless enough, and certainly not flat enough to be Iowa. Texas? Were they near Huntsville, where he'd picked up Jimmy Lee for this horror ride? No, the land was not ochre or sand brown. In fact, this area was a mix of boulders and verdant greenery with a forest of black trees standing silent and ancient.
No time to cipher it out.
As she ran blindly away from the bam and scene of her torture, she saw a large collection of faded, whitewashed factory buildings surrounded with ten-foot-high fences. Between these two extremes-silent, dark forest and silent, run-down factory-she opted for the man-made structures in the hope of finding help. However, the old factory looked lonelier than the ancient farmhouse and the bam from which she had run. Still, some lights burned there, sending shards of light and shadow out from its center.
The odor from the factory assailed her nostrils, but it was a welcome relief from the odor of decay from which she ran. Still, the air around the place choked on sulfur-filled gas belching from two enormous smokestacks. She guessed it to be some sort of chemical factory, possibly a paint factory. She might find someone, a guard, a night watchman perhaps, who might help her. A telephone that fucking worked! If she could get inside the fence, get to a phone…
TWELVE
Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.
Isaiah Purdy had regained his vision and was now fueled with anger, and with Jimmy Lee's horrid laughter piercing his eardrums, he gave chase. With Jimmy Lee's dead voice telling Isaiah that he was made a fool, being bested by a damned woman, the old man, with his cattle prod in hand, raced after Maureen, muttering to himself until she came in view.
He saw that she was heading for that old chemical factory buttressing the property. And even with the distance between them, he could see that she had spotted him.
Then she vanished. One moment in his sight, the next gone, like a deer in a leafy wood. She'd seen him coming, and she had dropped into a shaft of black shadow this moonless night. He carried a rope alongside the cattle prod. He meant to hog-tie her and drag her, like a squealing animal, back to Jimmy Lee.
It's what Jimmy Lee said he wanted now.
“ I'll get the bitch, Jimmy Lee, and I'll cozy the two of you up again just as soon's I do. Don't you be worrying none. Not one bit.”
Jimmy Lee would make her pay for this in the next life, just as Isaiah had made that snoopy-assed realtor pay in this life. Felt good to put the prongs of the pitchfork dead through her like I done, he thought.