“ I'll be damned.” A wide smile replaced her glum features.
“ He did leave some serious bills and confused people in his wake, but he's not wanted for murder or anything like that, thank God.”
They all had a light laugh over the Marsden story.
“ But Jess, there's something else you need to know.”.
She stared at J. T. “Lay it on me. What is it?”
“ It's about the Claude Lightfoot case.”
“ Go on.”
“ Hosea Crooms, our guy in the field asking all the ques-tions, phoned in.”
“ OK… and what'd Hosea say?” Jessica pictured the enormous black agent.
“ Seems our snitch, the guy who's been feeding us information about the Lightfoot case, is dead… apparent overdose of J amp;B Scotch and quaaludes.”
“ Malcolm McArthur, dead?”
“ One and the same.”
“ Only one who was talking in the whole damned county.”
“ 'Less I miss my guess, someone decided he'd already talked to Hosea long enough.”
“ Murdered?”
“ Yeah, Hosea suspects murder. The scene was a foul mess. It could've been he tore up the place in a drunken stupor like the M.E. wants to believe, but he spilled an awful lot of the J and B.”
“ How many bottles?”
“ M.E. said he consumed three 1.5-liter bottles of the stuff along with enough quaaludes to choke an elephant.”
“ Sons a bitches silenced him.”
“ That'd be my guess.”
The phone rang, and Keyes caught it. “Jessica, it's Iowa calling back.”
“ Put it on the con,” she replied. In a moment, she asked, “Chief Gorman, what news have you?”
“ We got a new wrinkle here, Dr. Coran.”
“ Shoot.” 'Two things, actually. A note left with the wife with a biblical injunction we're all familiar with: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. “We'll want it sent here for analysis, Chief.”
“ Got it.”
“ And the other thing?”
Gorman breathed deeply before speaking.
“ One of my cruisers was sitting atop a For Sale sign, doctor.
A RE/MAX sign. They didn't discover it until they backed off it. Sorry, but that means Purdy unloaded the place before he left.”
“ How long?”
“ The Purdy farm has been sold for a little over a month, according to our local realtor.”
“ He sold the place? Over a month ago?”
“ 'Bout how long the wife has been under the ground, according to our M.E.”
“ Think I'm getting the picture.”
“ You can rest assured we'll check every possible lead here locally. Let you know anything else we uncover as we get it. My guess is the wife's death pulled out some sort of linchpin in the man's head, probably about the time his son was to be executed. Losing both of them at once like that…but then I'll leave that sort of guesswork to the shrinks. Still, I imagine he lit out for Huntsville just after burying his wife and selling the old place.”
“ So he'd been planning this for at least a month, the abduction, all of it.”
“ Appears so, yes.”
“ He must've been disappointed to learn that Judge DeCampe was no longer in Houston,” she replied. “He went there to pick up two pine boxes and one body. He meant to find her and abduct her in Houston.”
“ But he had to detour and delay, come back entirely across the country to D.C. to find her and attack her there.”
Keyes, listening in, said, “The man's a walking textbook definition of obsessive-compulsive behavior.”
“ Stalking with a capital S, yes,” agreed Sharpe, “but it's not for sexual motives.”
Gorman cleared his throat. “Well… seeing as how he sold the place, he never intended using it again, so he will have had to hole up somewhere else. We're going to be on any relatives in the area, you can be certain.”
“ Wait a minute,” Jessica said, a flash of light illuminating the darkness. “We all agree that it stands to reason-given his selling his property-that he planned to abduct DeCampe in Houston, right? And if he had abducted her there, she'd be close to where he picked up his son's remains.”
Richard picked up on her thread. “Which stands to reason he'd then do it here, in or around D.C.”
“ Sounds logical,” said Gorman from Iowa. “Following that logic,” said Keyes, “hell… yes, if he means to bury her with his son, an eye for an eye, then it damn well may be in our own neck of the woods, Jessica. Somewhere in the vicinity of where he abducted her-in the D.C. area.”
“ And all this time we've been digging in the wrong place…” muttered Gorman, sounding disgrunded.
“ Literally diggin' in the wrong place,” added J. T. with a shake of his chopsticks. “What do you do when you need a place to stay, but you don't know the area?” asked Jessica. 'Talk to the locals,” replied Gorman.
“ Yeah… like the local realtors.
You said he sold it through RE/MAX?”
“ Yeah, right, RE/MAX.”
“ Make the max of your real estate with RE/MAX.” She thanked Vigil Gorman and hung up.
J. T. stared at her, knowing her mind was racing. “Whata- ya think, Jess?”
“ I think if you're satisfied with a service provided in Iowa, you're likely to look for the same service provider in the District of Columbia.”
“ RE/MAX?”
“ RE/MAX!”
J. T, picked up another ringing line and after a moment said, “Hey Jess, it's your reporter friend O'Brien on the line.”
“ Not now!”
“ Says he has something pertains to the case.”
Jessica reluctantly took the call. She had to bite her lip to keep from cursing O'Brien out. Reporter O'Brien's story, in which Jessica had been quoted as calling the killer a sexual pervert, had by now made several of the wire services, and it had also traveled the continent and back again via television newscasts.
“ You asshole, O'Brien,” she burst out. “Do you have any idea the light your asinine story has put me in with my superiors?”
“ If you'll stop barking long enough, I have a bone to throw your way, Agent Coran.”
Jessica closed her luminous eyes and willed her anger down. She again bit her lip and fumed a moment in silence, saying nothing in return for now, knowing that if she did, she would explode.
“ Aren't you going to ask what I have?” O'Brien teased, and she pictured his smug, leprechaun grin. All he needed was a green hat and vest.
“ O'Brien, I've been ordered to not speak with the press whatsoever during the duration of the DeCampe Missing Persons case. Do you understand that?”
“ Your boss put a gag order on you?”
“ Do not characterize this as a gag order, and nothing I say to you from now on is for public record unless I say so, O'Brien. Is that clear?”
“ Perhaps not clear but… but it is interesting.” If she could reach through the line, she'd strangle him. She never knew when he was kidding and when he was serious. She wondered if it were an Irish trait. “All right, damnit, what's this bone you're so generously sharing?”
“ It's a doozy-do, believe me! You sitting down?”
“ Spill it or get off the line, O'Brien! I'm working here.”
“ All right, all right… I have a letter purporting to be from the creep that abducted Judge DeCampe postmarked Nokesville, Virginia.” She dared not breathe; she felt stunned, as if slapped. “You what?”
“ You heard me. And I came directly to you with it.”
“ What's it say? No, never mind. I want to see it; it's got to be authenticated.”
“ I think it's authentic, all right.”
“ How can you tell? Does the letter make demands?”
“ Some, yeah, but not a single reference to money.”
“ What kind of demands does he make?”
“ He wants us to retract some of the things we've said about him based on your FBI profile of him.”
“ I didn't give you a profile, O'Brien. I gave you a handful of words. Words that anyone who's read your paper could repeat verbatim. So don't waste my time. Time is a commodity I don't have much of right now.” She thought of how time was running out for Kim Desinor and DeCampe.