they were less interested in her ability with a weapon and even a microscope than in being assured 100 percent that she had overcome all of the emotional pain brought on when one's life amounted to chasing monsters. She had convinced her superiors anew that she was psychologically fit to continue doing what she did best-only a partial lie, for truth be told, she knew that the mental anguish would pursue her to her grave, despite the bravest effort on her part. It was for this reason that she so empathized with Kim Faith Desinor, whenever Kim faced down a killer inside her visionary readings of crime scenes and objects and photos associated with a murder investigation.
She had learned to appreciate Kim's gift and the inherent dangers associated with it. She was not far removed from the same dangers herself. But she had learned also to appreciate the best efforts put forth by her friends and coworkers to help her. She also felt good about working with the new FBI shrink with whom she'd had an instant rapport. All of these people she allowed close knew her for the liar that she was when it came to her own well-being, and there was comfort in that; comfort in the fact that others knew how deep she had traveled into the abyss and had managed to keep her sanity intact and her priorities in focus.
Still, the superiors worried about Jessica becoming a crack-up case, so from time to time, they saddled her with duties that kept her pinned down to either the lab or more recently to a computer. The restoration of dead files, to keep her both busy and off field duty for a period, was when she came across the Lightfoot file.
Dealing with the COMTT plan on a national level primarily meant a desk job, a prison to a woman of her nature. But then the DeCampe thing happened, and her superiors couldn't help themselves. They knew her as the best. They demanded she take charge of the case, despite any earlier misgivings about Jessica's sanity or loss of humanity or any such thing. DeCampe had people in high places, friends and family alike. Her case demanded the best and the brightest.
THREE
A man whose blood
Is very snow broth; one who never feels
The wanton stings and motions of the sense.
Normally speaking, everyone but Jessica was happy about her taking time off the job, of her slowing down, her periods of personal leave, but now with Richard and their plans going forth, she was the happy one, and she didn't particularly want to be bothered by any other reality, especially the job of hunting down monsters. But the FBI was like a force of nature-a mindless chaos unto itself- and the force had come to her again. They had strongly encouraged her to take on the DeCampe case, but she comforted herself in believing she could, if she wished, decline the case, that she did in the final analysis have the strength of reputation and power within the “family,” as many called the FBI, to have the last word. But she wasn't so vain as to truly believe that if push came to shove, she could win against the top echelon in such a disagreement. And besides, with Richard's encouragement, she did find the case important and tugging at her. So once again, she was heading up perhaps the most important case of the year, as it were.
At least she had had the last say as to how they would proceed and with whom she would be working, and she was pleased with the speed with which Santiva had arranged everything. “Good to be needed,” she'd confided to J. T. at a moment when she had first come on board.
She kept no secrets save those of the heart from J. T. Only one other person understood her anger and resentment at her superiors, and that was her new shrink, Patricia Phelan. Patricia knew her to be a ticking bomb if she felt unduly cooped up or hog-tied. Pat daily proved to be a no-nonsense, fiery-tongued petite redhead who had skillfully worked around FBI officials to arrange for real investigative work for Jessica, assuring Santiva and other higher ups that it was just precisely what the “patient” needed: work. No one else knew it, but Jessica certainly did know how influential Pat Phelan had been in Jessica's decision of whether to take on the case or not. Jessica knew herself well enough to know that she did indeed need to work. Work was like breathing for her. So she was, after all, glad to have been called up to bat on the DeCampe case.
While Jessica's first curse was the painful realization that she was as obsessed about finding the facts and ending the careers of murderers as Ahab was with the whale, her second curse was also a simple one: She simply could not abide injustice of any kind, but especially injustice toward the helpless and the weak.
She thought of the Claude Lightfoot case. She'd been obsessed with it before Richard had arrived in America. She and Lew Clemmens had been digging up the bones around that old case.
“ Where do you begin to search for such Gila monsters?” Lew Clemmens had asked her when he had brought the twenty-year-old case to her attention. “Under the nearest rock,” she'd replied. Jessica had been poring over the file since Lew had programmed the computer to red-flag hate crimes-anything smacking of a racially motivated crime. This was his job, but he was also looking for anything that might rival the ferocity of this murder, anything similar in the least that might point them toward a suspect or suspects, first within the same geographical location and then expanding from there.
It took time, but they'd found two men who had served time at Folsom State Prison for hate crimes similar to what had occurred in the Lightfoot case. The two had discovered the Aryan Brotherhood in prison, where they'd also found one another, and when one was released, they stayed in touch until the second stepped out of prison. Together, they went to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, ostensibly following a job, working day labor on a construction site. Joseph Ireland and Montgomery Nestor had become Jessica's primary targets as a result of computer snooping.
Jessica had not left her Quantico, Virginia, office for Sioux Falls, but with Lew's ingenious help, she had put out an ever-widening electronic eye on the two former convicts with ties to the Aryan Nation. But they needed eyewitness information, and so they began building information from acquaintances, a Malcolm McArthur in particular.
Jessica knew just the right man to call, a field agent in the Sioux Falls area. She had made some calls and had sent the perfect man for the job: a very scary, huge black man named Hosea Crooms, who would frighten a bounty hunter. Crooms was told to look under all the rocks and to ask some tough questions of McArthur, and early reports back said that McArthur was definitely in the know and was willing to talk for immunity and a place in witness protection and for a hefty sum. Negotiations had gotten under way.
It was a hate crime Jessica still wanted very much to do something about. She was well aware of the foolish debate going on nationally over the semantics of the phrase hate crimes', some people believed all crimes of a violent nature were inherently crimes of hatred. But law enforcement people knew better. Hardly a country on the face of the planet was unaffected by racism, bigotry, and all its courtiers of ignorance and stupidity. Hate crime in the legal sense implied a premeditation to harm another based on his race, religion, sexual preference, or cultural heritage, and this “evil intent” ultimately meant a judge or a jury could add more time onto a convicted man's sentence for his display of hatred on the basis of dislike for a whole population of people. A hate crime on the books, whether before or after hate crime legislation, looked and smelled like violence directed at an individual because of the color of her skin, or his sexual orientation or religious preference. The spirit of hate crime legislation meant to more severely punish those ape men still involved in clubbing to death anyone who did not appear to squat about the campfire in the exact fashion of everyone else seated around the campfire.
Hate crime legislation intended, like laws made since men began making laws, to end fear, ignorance, intolerance, and hatred based on fears. Regardless, fear continued as the great leveler of mankind, despite all his technological accomplishments, and part of his growing fear was inculcated now through his own technological wonders, such as neo-Nazi cyber domains, where hatred and bigotry were preached to whole new generations and whole new populations of people via the Internet. Any crackpot with a laptop… Jessica mused. Anyone could set himself up as a guru of truth or religion with the push of a few key strokes in cyberspace, where none of the rules of decency or even laws of ethics and tolerance applied. So hate crime legislation came into being as perhaps a futile act, an attempt to muzzle the human race. The law of mankind, especially in a democratic society, was indeed an ambitious creature. So, using key search words, the computer had obliged with the Light- foot case and hundreds
