Jessica had stepped away from the window, the sadly anemic rain, and her thoughts. She held her hand against her chest, an acidic pain rising there to threaten her. Her team so far had uncovered nothing new, and the case was stalemating quickly. She walked out of her temporary office and into an adjacent one where Lew Clemmens sat at a state- of-the-art computer, working away.
Jessica joked with Clemmens about the notion of a time- traveling crime fighter, since Lew had earlier talked up a blue streak about some TV program named Time-COP with the same premise.
“ Hell, even Jack-the-Ripper could be discovered with the new technologies,” Lew Clemmens said over his shoulder as he worked at the screen. She thought them finished with the subject then, but Lew kept up chatter about the idea.
Lew, like her, had set up shop in D.C. at Santiva's insistence. She now went to stand over his hefty shoulder, where the young man worked at bringing Jessica caseload information lifted from the courthouse where DeCampe had worked.
“ Old Jack wouldn't stand a chance against the crime- fighting tools we have today,” Lew said.
“ Can't argue with you there,” she agreed, her mind now set on the present, on the DeCampe case, which had seen zero progress so far.
Clemmens continued, adding, “Imagine if we could go back in time and hand over our crime-fighting tools to London authorities when the Ripper was at large and taunting police.”
Jessica knew how Lew's mind raced with two and sometimes three subjects at once, and while he worked on the DeCampe case, he could sit about and talk on another topic as if his brain simply partitioned off the separate jobs needing to be done. He was amazing for this.
Clemmens continued, “Yeah… if even they'd had only a laser blue light to follow the blood trail, they would have caught the guy. History's most infamous serial killer.”
“ Are you kidding?” she finally asked, a bit miffed. 'Today, Jack's career would have been cut extremely short. The man left a slime trail as wide and as obvious as a walrus dragging his ass over a mud puddle.”
Lew looked young enough to be delivering Jessica's newspaper. He hardly looks the part of a fellow whose job touches so many lives, she thought. “Still, if Jack were alive today,” countered Lew, “he'd know to be a hell of a lot more tidy, wouldn't you say? I mean like the creep that got hold of Judge DeCampe?”
Jessica liked Lew's enthusiasm for a subject he warmed up to-war-pathing over it, as Lew professed an Ojibwa heritage along with his flinty Irish looks. As the young man's eyes-reflected in the computer screen-lit up green and luminous, he said, 'Today's serial killer has more readily available information at his disposal about what we know and how we work.” Lew's fingers seemed to operate independently over the keys. “Thanks to the TLC channel. Still, crime makes you stupid; I've heard you say it time and again. Jack isn't necessarily more intelligent today than he was in 1872 when he killed that string of prostitutes in White chapel.”
Jessica smiled at this. “I'm telling you, today the Ripper would be apprehended.”
“ Only because of the poor condition of criminal detection in his day, he was never caught. If he were alive today, Jack would have to bone up big time,” countered Lew.
Jessica snickered and added, “Yeah, you're right. Today's criminal can and sometimes does study criminology right alongside the criminologist. I take your point.”
“ And they gain much of their information off the Internet, from FBI public relations officers, from police bulletins, law enforcement gazettes, Ann Rule and other true crime books, as well as novels and films depicting criminal behavior, police procedure, profiling, and crime-scene detection. Ever read The Handyman or the Decoy series?”
“ Price of a free and open society; price of democracy: freedom and access to information.” Jessica snatched an office chair and wheeled it to a stop beside Lew, and she slipped into it, groaning at a spasm of pain that cut knifelike through her back. “Like a double-edged sword,” she agreed.
Lew glanced at her, wondering if she meant the pain in her lower back, evidenced by Jessica's grimace, or if she meant the double edge of freedom. He snatched at the back of his neck as if to rip some pain of his own from it, and then he continued downloading cases which had been tried by Maureen DeCampe.
The printer was abuzz with information spewing forth. Jessica picked up a stack of papers and said, “Damn, we're going to need an army of readers. I'll have to put together a small task force to review DeCampe's cases.” Still, she began reading, scanning, hoping to light on something useful, a verdict, a name, a clue of any sort.
The phone rang, and Jessica grabbed for it; anything to end her staring at the reams of paper that made up the bulk of DeCampe's cases in just the last month.
The call was for Lew, his wife, sounding pissed off. Jessica handed him the phone and tried not to watch him squirm. Jessica liked Lew, but she thought the man ought to show a little firmness with the woman on the other end of the line.
Clemmens hung up, shaking his head. “Sorry… she has no idea why we have to be in D.C. I had to leave a message at home for her. She wasn't pleased.” Again the phone rang. This time J. T. came on the line, going on about how the newsies had gotten the entire story of Judge DeCampe's disappearance and still no ransom note, nothing whatever, in fact, from the abductor. J. T. sounded as if he might hyperventilate.
“ And everyone's gunning for you, Jess. They think you're not moving fast enough on the case. Can you believe the crap that-”
“ Slow down, J. T. Take it easy, and take a deep breath. I'm working on the case. I've got Lew Clemmens here, and we're searching electronically through old case files that have anything to do with Judge DeCampe. Going to take it back incrementally to her first year out of law school if necessary to find any clue as to what sort of phantom we are chasing. You tell all the whom evers that. Give it to Santiva. He'll kick it upstairs.”
“ Yeah… good thinking. He'll run to the end zone with that. Gotcha. I told them you were on top of it.”
“ Thanks, John. And John-”
“ Yes?”
“ Don't let the bastards wear you down.”
“ Situation normal, all fouled up,” he replied and laughed.
“ And let Santiva know that Lew and I have been at work at HQ for two hours this morning on this.”
“ Right… check… count on it. Lew's with you al-ready?”
“ Picked him up on my way back from Quantico. Tell anyone busting our asses that we are busting our own asses and don't need any help. See you back here when you can get here.”
“ Will do. You did the right thing calling in Lew.”
'Tell them that. I wouldn't trust anyone but Lew with this. He knows the COMIT project like no one else aboard, so if this guy's MO is in any of the files, open or unsolved, that we've poured into the system to date, then we'll get him.”
“ Just a matter of time.”
“ Nice of you to say so, J. T.”
She hung up. Lew stared up at her where she now stood. “Thanks again, Doctor, for the confidence. I'm correlating any unsolved murder cases in the system with the judge.”
“ Who knows? We might get lucky. Meanwhile, I also want you and Steve Conyers to work on/off shifts so there's no slowdown on this info gathering. And Lew…”
“ Yeah?”
“ Do the same for solved cases as you're doing for unsolved cases, and cases that resulted in threats on the judge's life.”
“ Let our fingers do the legwork,” he replied. “Why not?”
“ It's the time element that's crucial here. Guy abducts a woman and does not make a ransom demand… well, you figure it out. Not much hope that time is on our side here. Maybe the computer can even the odds a bit.”
Lew fell silent for a moment. The personal aspect of this case called on them both to work especially hard to locate a female judge whom they both knew from stints at the courthouse. They were at war with the clock. And time had no beginning and no end here; instead it took on the nature of a runaway train.
“ What're we really looking for, Jess?” asked Lew.
“ In the Native American scheme of things, Lew, a wrong done at the beginning of time still festers because it may as well have been done today. Now, all things in nature being cyclical, even human nature and actions are understood as circular, and time is no exception.”
