TWO
I didn't invent the world I write about-it's all true.
The crime scene felt like a cave with an opening at front and back, and the cold Washington, D.C., wind whistled through it with a banshee wail, and still the scene had “abduction” written all over it-but abduction done by a novice, not a trained professional. Although Judge DeCampe had vanished, her car and some personal effects remained behind. Professionals would have seen to the car and any effects; professionals would have created false trails of such personal property. A messy, disorganized crime scene usually meant a first-time offender, a spur-of-the-moment thing, or simply an amateur at work. So what had happened to Judge DeCampe?
The brittle air that bit into the people standing around the crime scene would not say. Still, the question hung in the air like a Pied Piper spirit, tugging at anyone caring to listen to the whisper inside the echoing wind. Authorities had immediately looked for and pulled all camera tapes within a reasonable radius of the scene, but the one most likely to have helped was not in service. They couldn't be so lucky. They wouldn't be handed a gift to uncover the person responsible. In other words, the person who had come for her remained a mystery. Had he admired her beauty, her wit, her abilities from afar? Had he sent her flowers? Offered her compliments? Wooed her and then surprised her with plane tickets to Borneo or the Australian Outback? Was she this moment off on a cruise with a six- foot-four hunk half her age? No… no way, not with the gun and the keys lying here.
God, how Jessica wished it were otherwise, but whoever had the judge had taken her under duress.
“ We've located her purse!” shouted a uniformed officer, coming in from a breezeway that led out into the Washington night where light sent shafts of silver through a delicate icy rain that wasn't enough in this dry season. “Was in a Dumpster just outside. Creep didn't bother taking it, but it's been rifled. Took the cards and cash, left the photos and ID.”
“ We can put out an all points on the card numbers,” suggested Santiva.
“ Get Lew Clemmens on that,” Jesssica insisted. “He's the best we have at tracking credit cards. Trust me.”
“ OK, if you're sure of him.”
“ I insist.”
Santiva got on his cell phone to make arrangements, but again found the phone uncooperative until he walked toward one of the exits. He called for one of the uniformed cops to walk the elder daughter over to him. He would need access to Judge DeCampe's social security number or personal pin numbers.
Kim Desinor lay now in the rear of a van, still reeling from her trance like state. Santiva passed the rifled purse to Kim, asking if she would psychometrically read it. Now with the purse, her keys, the recently fashioned. 45, and the single shoe, the picture of forced abduction came more and more into focus. Everything fit. Yet, some nagging something didn't feel right, didn't fit precisely. Jessica thought it felt like a missing but crucial element in a chemistry experiment or a missing ingredient in a recipe. Then Jessica filled in the blank with an instinctive suspicion that Judge DeCampe had had some dealings with her abductor before tonight.
Judge DeCampe certainly hadn't left the parking garage with anything resembling free will, unless she had reason to stage her own disappearance. But her closest friends and relatives believed this was an absurd possibility. The two daughters almost went ballistic at the suggestion when a pair of D.C. cops had put it to them. The women had screamed that their mother would never do anything to distress them, and certainly nothing of this nature.
One of the two strikingly tall, darkly tanned women rushed to Jessica and said, “Mother loved her life and the fact she'd become a grandmother. She loved every iota of her life here. She didn't for a moment miss Texas. We were all so… so happy with her here with us, finally in the area, you know?”
“ We're going to do everything in our power to locate her,” replied Jessica, while the woman pulled and tugged at her. “I promise you that.”
As to her disappearance, all the family members adamantly parroted the same phrases. “It's totally out of character for Maureen,” and “No one was more excited about her life than Maureen.”
Finally, Santiva swept the family members out of the garage area and talked them into giving Jessica enough space to work. But there was so damned little to work with. She looked up and saw that the garage attendant's island and ticket booth were well within view of the spot where DeCampe's car remained silent and taunting. “Has anyone talked to the attendant?”
“ First on scene took a statement from him. Says he didn't see or hear a thing.”
“ Where the fuck was he?”
“ Claims he had a bad case of the runs-a stomach virus kept him running between here and the men's room just inside the building.”
She stared at J. T. “And Santiva and the rest of you bought into his toilet excuse?”
“ The guy's a slug, Jess. We're not going to get anything from him. I think he's doing roaches.”
“ Roaches? Marijuana?”
“ Maybe crack. Can't be sure. But he definitely has lost some gray matter over the years.”
“ Where is he now?”
“ Shift was over. Santiva set him on his useless way.”
“ Christ,” she moaned.
'Trust me, Jess, he's useless,” J. T. assured her. “He really seemed honestly wanting to help, but he had nothing whatever to contribute.”
“ No one else on board at the time?”
“ Lateness of the hour… one attendant… taxpayer's money, all that.”
“ One of us better check on Kim. See how she's holding up,” Jessica said, lifting from her knees and going to the van to speak with a more lucid Kim Desinor. Jessica had known Kim now for a number of years, and they had worked a number of cases together, their first in New Orleans, where Kim had grown up Catholic in an orphanage, no one knowing of her gift of psychometry-reading objects for psychic impressions.
As Jessica approached Kim in the van where she lay on a cot with a waiting attendant, Kim asked, “How're you doing, Jess?”
Jess thought her friend looked pale and drained, weary and sleepy-eyed. Somehow Kim looked smaller. The word frail filled Jessica's mind.
“ More to the point, sweetie, how're you doing? I hear you had quite a long session.”
Richard stood nearby, lending support and saying hello to Kim, whom he had met through Jessica.
“ What happened during the session? Anything useful?”
“ Mostly a jumble of confused images: darkness, a void, choking feeling, claustrophobic spaces… hands, feet tied.”
As usual, the skeptic in Jessica said, Anyone could say the same, knowing the victim was abducted.
“ Got a distinct odor of decay. Stronger than I have ever read it before.”
Jessica did not know what to say to this. “And did you get anything from the purse?”
“ Purse was handled by someone other than either DeCampe or her abductor. That's all I could get.”
“ The attendant, no doubt,” muttered Jessica. “I want to grill his ass.”
“ As to the fall I took, it was brought on by some sort of flashing pain, like a searing shock.”
“ A shock? What kind of shock?”
“ A sudden zap like I was hit by a lightning bolt, although I have no idea what that must feel like. Scared the hell out of me. Felt it in every cell in my being.”