Jessica and the others were in radio contact with the helicopters. Once given a report as to where the warm bodies were, they would simultaneously hit the lights and kick in doors.
Everyone was aware of the risk of booby traps.
Jessica and Santiva were in constant contact with the helicopters. Santiva insisted on leading the team at the house, Jessica at the bam. Keyes remained close at Jessica's side, J. T. and Sharpe with Santiva.
Jessica gave the nod to the factory boss, who called his man to let loose with the enormous noisemakers. Jessica and the others had ready earplugs. In the allotted ten seconds, the helicopters moved into place to begin scanning the structures for signs of life. Meanwhile, Jessica and the others, backed by SWAT teams, descended on the farmstead like an army seeking out its front lines. They moved rapidly to encircle both structures, and they had been able to do so efficiently, given the location of the chemical firm from which they poured. In less than forty seconds, with the helicopter lights now creating an eerie daylight scene outside the bam and homestead, Jessica got word through her earphones that the only signs of life were coming from the bam. The copilot shouted, “Possibly two life forms of any size.”
Jessica knew that Santiva had gotten the same message, but his force still meant to enter and secure the house before joining the second squad at the bam. They proceeded there with caution, being alert for any traps the old man might have laid for them.
J. T. went straight in behind Eriq Santiva, followed by Richard and the others. At the same time, the first strike force was entering the house, Jessica signaled for more men to go around to the rear of the bam to secure any exits there. When Eriq Santiva had learned of their plan to move on the two locations simultaneously, he knew there were inherent risks, but Jessica's argument that tonight was DeCampe's last night of life if they did not act had persuaded him to climb down the throat of a reluctant federal judge who had given the warrant to move on the Iowa location. The judge, understandably, wanted far more to go on than they had, but Eriq put on all the pressure of his office, and finally the warrant came through some twenty minutes after they had arrived within sight of the chemical factory abutting the targeted farmstead.
“ The realtor was right to be suspicious of anyone willingly paying up front cash money for this place,” Jessica noted in Shannon's ear.
Still, they had found no sign of Nancy Willis's car or the woman. If she had come out here to learn more about the man to whom she'd rented the property, there was no evidence of it. The infrared had, however, picked up two living people inside the bam. Perhaps the realtor was being held hostage alongside DeCampe. But that still left Purdy. Was he one of the red flares on the infrared, or was he gone from this place already? His van was then spotted, parked to the rear of the house, beneath a stand of trees. Jessica got the report from Richard, who broke into her frequency.
They inched forward. The decision had been made to blast the place with the alarms and sirens, and to turn the place from pitch black to daylight; nothing was held back now. Their cards had been laid on the table. Still, Jessica feared the crazed old man might in a moment of panic kill DeCampe outright. Shannon Keyes had warned that if he felt cornered, threatened even, she believed he might well strike out at DeCampe, “to assure her death before he is taken alive.”
For that reason, they had come on foot, equipped with earphone radios. Now they had reached their objective, coming up on the old man to take him by surprise.
Just back of them where the road had risen up to meet them, an ambulance awaited Maureen DeCampe, but no one knew if it would be used to comfort her or merely to cart away her remains.
Jessica had left nothing to chance; inside the ambulance, she had both a minister of DeCampe's faith and one of D.C.'s leading physicians dealing with gangrene. Everyone was on standby. Inwardly, Jessica prayed for a good outcome tonight. She prayed for Kim Desinor and Maureen DeCampe, and she prayed for them all.
The air around them had filled with an electric energy. A storm of dry lightning strikes occasionally lit up the terrain. It felt like a scene out of All Quiet on the Western Front.
Everybody, it seemed, wanted to be in on the kill.
Everybody was itching to get their chance at Purdy.
Everyone knew the stakes.
They stood under the glare of the helicopters, the chemical factory alarms still ringing out, the atmosphere like that of a war zone that masked a sky above that had gone from clear and filled with stars only moments before to an ominous gray confusion of swirling clouds.
The old man, if he were inside the bam with the dying judge, must be freaking out by now, expecting a rain of gas and fire. Jessica took some delight in terrifying the old bastard.
All this under a suddenly angry, moonless night, the sky again filled with lightning bolts and clouds, yet no rain. Still, Jessica picked up the scent of ozone in the air. Rain could come at any time, and she hoped it would be a cleansing shower. Or would it be a mourning shower, a rain wake for Maureen?
EIGHTEEN
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, but swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly and foul contagion spread…
“ Isaiah Purdy! Federal agents!” shouted Jessica over the I noise they'd created. “Step outside! You are surrounded!” Jessica's order to Isaiah Purdy brought everyone's gun up and ready. “Come out with your hands held high.”
No response.
“ We know you are inside, Purdy!” shouted Keyes.
“ And we know you have the judge,” added Jessica.
“ She has suffered long enough. It's over.”
No response.
Jessica ordered the men beside her with the battering ram to take down the door. They charged it but were repelled, not by bullet fire or resistance, but by give and take. The door was loosely fastened, making a ramming effort nearly impossible.
“ We've wasted too much precious time,” Jessica told Keyes.
“ What're you going to do?” She could see in Jessica's eyes that she meant to do something now.
“ The door is lashed together with some sort of pliable binding. I'm going up and over,” she said, pointing to the window loft overhead. One of the SWAT leaders, seeing what she wanted, without a word sent a grappling hook overhead, and it secured itself to the wood around the loft window, biting into it. “I'll go first,” he said.
Jessica agreed, following up the rope behind the man whose nameplate had read Luther Pratt. Three-fourths of the way up the rope, Jessica felt the vibration of the explosive that sent Luther hurling into her and almost knocking her off the rope. Luther fell to the ground in agony, his face splintered by the homemade device that meant to keep them out. The device seemed to have touched off a fire as well, for now the cracks all about the doorway and the walls were alight with a blazing interior.
Jessica pulled herself up and up. Keyes cried out to her, “Be careful! There's a fire inside!”
Jessica only half saw an explosion at the house, where the second team, led by Santiva, stormed the home. The house had been booby-trapped, and the men had rushed in too quickly, the result a blazing inferno. Wherever Isaiah Purdy was at this moment, it looked as if the old man meant to go out in a blaze of glory, to die in a fire of his own making, taking Jimmy Lee's and Maureen DeCampe's and possibly Nancy Willis's remains with him.