Isaiah turned from the corpse and its now-decayed eyes and stepped back to the heavy bam doors, creaking now in a growing night wind that had turned the tops of pine trees into giant brushes that painted the underbelly of the crushing gray clouds that had rolled in. He latched the doors with a makeshift latch that he must replace with something stronger-a cord of hemp wasn't going to do it. Miss High and Mighty Realtor Nancy proved that much. He'd have to go to work on the latch, use his Iowa ingenuity, his Yankee know-how.
For now, he pulled the doors tight with the cord and closed out the world to him, the judge, and Jimmy Lee. Then he went to fashion some new leather straps. It would cost more time, but at least his father had taught him how to cut a tanned hide into useful strips, a job his father learned from his father and so on down the branches of the family tree. Those strips were usually used to beat an unruly child, but Isaiah had found a better use indeed.
Lew Clemmens, FBI computer whiz, looked in on Jessica to see how she was holding up and to offer his apologies that things in Iowa had not worked out as everyone had hoped. “Something good did come out of our liaison with Houston, however.”
“ Oh, and what's that?” she asked, accepting the cup of steaming coffee he had brought as a gift.
“ I hooked up with this guy named Randy Oglesby, Houston PD's civilian computer genius, and together we managed to uncover some interesting cyber facts on the case.”
She indicated the chair, and he sat down, getting comfortable. “Go on,” she said, after sipping at her coffee.
“ Well it was mostly Oglesby. He has inroads to the Houston court system. He's kind of a legitimatized hacker, if you ask me. Any rate, he tapped into the fact that Judge DeCampe had recused herself on a case recently, and this caught his full attention, and it led him to search back for a nine-year-old case, and guess who it involved?”
“ Jimmy Lee Purdy?”
“ Exactly, a case in which she put a man on death row: James Lee Purdy.”
“ But she recused herself from his appeal nine years later… makes sense. Conflict of interest.”
“ Yeah, Purdy's case had come up for appeal and oddly, it had fallen on her desk.”
“ Snafu?”
“ Snafu or greased hands? Hard to tell. But coincidence, I find hard to buy.”
“ What're you saying, Lew?”
“ From the way the papers were drawn up, Jimmy Lee asked for her, specifically requested Judge DeCampe to oversee the appeal. I know that's stupid, but people chalked it up to Jimmy Lee's having an idiot for a lawyer and a fool for a client.”
“ Don't tell me, he was acting as his own lawyer?”
“ Yeah, and as it appears to Randy, he was orchestrating a rendezvous with DeCampe. He definitely had an unhealthy interest in her. DeCampe turned the appeal over to a Judge Parker, same one that got a warrant out for Purdy's farm.”
The phone rang, and Jessica heard a man introduce himself as Judge Raymond Parker in Houston. “I have issued a warrant for search and seizure to go ahead in Iowa. Anything else I can do, please let me know.”
She covered the mouthpiece a millisecond to gather her thoughts. Clearing her throat, she replied, “Yes, your honor, we received word via fax about… a while ago.” She had had her secretary forward Parker's warrant and the federal warrant on to Virgil Gorman's office, which ought to satisfy Iowa authorities and cover her earlier lie-her jumping the judiciary gun.
“ Did they find anything? Is there any news?” Parker asked.
'Their search has uncovered nothing of significance so far, and I am afraid, sir, that Judge DeCampe is not at the Iowa location.”
“ Have they located Purdy?”
“ No, sorry once again, but should the search of the property yield any useful information, well… one never knows, sir.”
“ We appear to be back at square one, as they say.” Parker then apologized for the time it had taken to draw up the warrant. “Due process… takes time; we rushed it through as best we could the moment I learned of your suspicions.”
She again thanked him. “I understand you were the judge who handled Jimmy Lee Purdy's appeal, and that you saw the senior Mr. Purdy in your courtroom.” Her last conversation with Lucas Stonecoat had provided a lot of useful information.
“ That's true; I gave authorities here a few items to add to the artist's sketch you're circulating. Hope it helps catch this maniac. Frankly, it could just as well have been me targeted rather than Maureen, I suppose.”
“ Hard to tell. Seemed his son was fixated on her.”
“ If I could take her place in this nightmare… well, I would in a heartbeat.”
“ Brave of you to say so, sir.” Easy to say, she thought. “Do you have any idea where next you will look?”
“ I've kept in touch with Houston PD and the FBI there.”
“ There? You mean Iowa?”
“ In Iowa, yes, but also there-in Texas.”
'Texas?”
“ Everywhere within a fifty-mile radius of Huntsville is being closely looked at, thanks to HPD, Dr. Sanger, and Stonecoat. We're doing the same in the D.C. area, but frankly, other than that, we've come to a standstill.”
“ Stalemate, I see. If there is anything this office can do…”
“ You can be on twenty-four-hour alert, should we need another warrant in the Huntsville-Houston area. And thank you, Judge Parker.”
“ There's something else you should be clear on, Agent Coran.”
Bored by now, she said a sleepy, “Yes?”
Judge Raymond Parker recounted how DeCampe turned over the Purdy case to him, telling him that all she wanted was to see Purdy die in the chair. While she had to recuse herself from his appeal as a matter of course, since she'd tried him originally, she made it clear that in her opinion, there was no room for appeal of the death sentence in Purdy's case.
“ She was clear on that?”
“ Expressly. She said that all his Bible-thumping, born- again crap was just that: crap.”
“ Anything you can tell me about the old man?”
“ I'd've sworn the old geezer to be, you know, harmless, but who knows these days anymore? He carried a Bible into the courtroom every day; read passages from it. Lips moved as he read. Used his fingers to help him read. Never a peep.”
Another line rang. “I'm afraid I have to go, Judge Parker. Another line, and I'm hoping it will be Iowa with some good news.”
“ Yes, I do hope you can salvage something out of this.”
“ Yeah, me, too,” she said to herself, after she had hung up the phone.
“ What's that?” asked Clemmens who had remained seated across from her.
“ Gotta get this other call, Lew. Could be important.”
Lew Clemmens nodded, raised his hands, and indicated he would leave her in peace. He made his way to the door and back down the hall.
Jessica took a deep breath and prayed for good news from Iowa, that her patience would be rewarded. She could hardly stand working like this, feeling as if her hands were tied. She'd rather be in a lab or in the field. Working out of a task-force operations room was killing on the nerves.
“ It's Iowa,” said her secretary.
“ Give me half a second to get into the ops room, and put it through there. I want this on the speakerphone for the task force to hear.”
“ Not a problem.” Jessica saw that Lew had disappeared, likely with a sense of feeling like the proverbial third wheel. She didn't want him or anyone else to feel that way, not on account of how she worked or failed to work. She raced after Lew, grabbed his arm, and said, “Come on, Iowa's back.”
“ Virgil, you mean?”
“ Yeah, think so. I've got it on speaker in ops.”
“ Let's hear what Virgil has to say.”
She nodded, and when they stepped into the ops room, she shouted for everyone's attention. “Iowa's on line one.” She pressed the button, and everyone fell silent, anxious to hear if Virgil and his small army of men had come up with anything at all remotely worthwhile down on the farm.