this information between us, please.”
J. T. fidgeted. He had rarely seen Jessica break down, certainly not in a public place. He awkwardly went to her and held her. He promised what he could not possibly deliver. “Kim's going to be all right; don't you worry. She's a fighter.”
“ I've got her under the best care in Quantico. Still, I wish I could do more. If we could locate Maureen DeCampe, put some closure on this case, maybe… it might have a beneficial effect on Kim, but as of now… Kim is slowly dying of wounds she feels are empathetic in nature. They're like the open sores of a leper, J. T. In all my career, I've never seen anything like this before, except-”
“ Except where?”
“ Except on an autopsy slab.”
“ What are you talking about?”
“ I drove down to Quantico to see her, and I tell you, she's exhibiting leprosy-like spots, like we see on decaying corpses. She even smelled of decay. Her whole apartment did.”
J. T. could find no words of comfort now. Instead, he offered her a shoulder and continued to hold his friend. “I got Roy Shoate to see her, and he admitted her to Washington Memorial. He's the best in his field.”
“ He's a rare disease man, isn't he?”
“ Yeah…'fraid so.”
J. T. said no more.
Maureen DeCampe, judge of the First Appellate Court of Washington, D.C., believed her mind had always had a perverse liking for frightening her; it played games all the time. So why should a moment in a darkened underground parking lot be any different?
Her logical left side of the brain told her right side how foolish it was being, and that she was not about to pay heed to the false instinct to flee from the stranger in the parking garage. Such an act would make her appear foolish; in the end, it would amount to twaddle, what her career Navy father called bilge-rot, malarky, drivel, and she would, in the end, senselessly appear nonsensical.
She hated to be embarrassed or made the butt of a joke.
Still, a distinct odor of fright-a thought of horror winging shadowlike out to her car-or was the shadow him? Shadowing in her shadow?
Shadow… such a positively lovely word when properly sounded out; it played melodic over the concave surface of the mind… shadowlike in a shadowed land that smelled of ancient, earthy, red dirt and rotting ears of com and of hay and of more odors than she could enumerate, all commingling here in this place of her captivity.
Something brought her around to a startling realization, an epiphany: What at first had felt like a dishonest emotion was in fact a righteous paranoia, after all. Despite her self- assuredness, her directed and fast gait from stairwell to waiting car, and the fact she was armed and capable of bringing down a tundra yak with her Remington. 45, a sense of vulnerability cast itself over her like a Maine fog. She felt the touch of this blanketing vulnerability; felt it the way an animal at a watering hole knows it is being stalked. Death, the ultimate stalker… She felt the fear of an animal about to be devoured whole and with pleasure.
She'd felt it then, and she felt and feared it even more now. Now that she sensed him close by, observing as before, watching her terror, enjoying her slow spiral into insanity and despair and fainting and recovering and what must come soon-her final death. She'd given little thought to life or the possibility of some savior crashing in to free her.
She willed herself to no longer contemplate long on her family, what they must be suffering. She willed herself to think only of mercy and prayer.
There in the underground lot, she had wheeled and brought her weapon into the stalker's face, but the man's sheer fright lessened her resolve. It was a passing homeless fellow looking for a warm comer to sleep it off in. She scolded him. Told him to get himself together as she pushed a five dollar bill into his hands, turned, and continued to her car, while the tall homeless man ambled off. Then someone tapped on her shoulder, and she reacted, bringing the firearm up to eye level on the white-haired man with the gray-stubbled chin.
“ Please, don't shoooot,” pleaded the little man in the rumpled old suit. He was shorter by a head than she. This old coot must have witnessed her generosity toward the other fellow and wanted some shown him, she had guessed. His skin appeared as rumpled and loose as his clothing. His country drawl made him a simple fellow, and when he'd thrown up a pair of wrinkled hands in the universal posture of defeat, Judge DeCampe almost felt sorry for his having startled her into putting the muzzle of the. 45 in his face. Then she recognized him with a startled shock.
“ Mr. Purdy? James Lee Purdy's father?” she then asked, somewhat amazed to find the man so out of place and time.
“ You couldn't forget the likes of me, now could you?”
“ No… haven't forgotten, no.”
“ Guess that goes a long way to show your guilt, Your Honorable Judgess.” He uttered her tide as if spitting battery fluid.
Still, her recognition of the quiet little man who had sat for almost three months in her courtroom nearly nine years ago, month after month during his son's murder trial, listening to testimony condemning his son to die in a Texas electric chair, told her she had nothing to fear from this sad Iowa farmer. “What the hell're you doing here? In Washington? Wasn't your son's execution scheduled and carried out?”
It came as a surprise to find him here, seeking her out. His son's case had come full circle, the final appeal, and through some strange judiciary coincidence, it had fallen on her desk when she was hearing appeals in Houston. Of course, she'd immediately refused the case on grounds of conflict of interest, since no judge could try the same case twice, even if she had become an appeals judge by then and even if Jimmy Lee Purdy had kept up with her career for some perverted reason. Still, at that time and now, she suspected, the old Iowa farmer must be absolutely confused about the judicial system. A simple Iowa farmer lost amid Houston's court system with its winding, twisting corridors until he found her office.
He had entered her chambers and there he stood the entire time, pleading with her to handle the appeal, that Jimmy Lee wanted it that way, so there could not be any real conflict of interest due to Jimmy Lee Purdy's final wishes. “A man's final wishes are a sacred thing,” the senior Purdy had told her then. Of course, no amount of magical thinking on Purdy's part could convince anyone in the Texas judiciary system to break generations of protocol for “a man's final wishes.”
Now here stood old Purdy again before her in an underground lot in D.C. Part of her mind asked why had he sought her out again, here, now. She knew that his son's execution had occurred over the weekend, and this knowledge only made her clench tighter to her Remington. “I know your son's execution was set for the weekend,” she told him. Colleagues in Houston didn't let her miss much, and besides, it'd made national news and had sparked new debate on the capital punishment issue and the State of Texas's penchant for using the chair often and often again.
She had recalled how the worn-out looking little man had abandoned his crops and life on the farm to be at his son's trial, and it had surely proven an ordeal for the father of the accused and convicted defendant. The fact was that the young defendant had no defense; he'd left enough DNA at the series of rape-murders to convict hundreds of men several times over. He'd been careless and messy, meaning to be, taunting law enforcement to stop him, as if it were all a game, and he killed with the thoughtless abandon and impunity of a natural disaster, and he ought to've been put to death the day after his conviction. Instead, they had run him through all of his civil rights until finally he had no more, and Judge Parker had-just as she'd known on the day she'd handed the case over to him-found Jimmy Lee guilty on top of guilty. He'd just been executed over the previous weekend.
So seeing the father here now did not completely surprise her, yet it did surprise her, all the same.
“ Mr. Purdy, you startled me.”
“ I sure don't want that, ma'am, Your Judgess.”
“ I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. Purdy,” she said without sincerity.
“ I 'predate that… coming from you, Your Judgess.” Aside from this wizened old man, no one gave a whit for Jimmy Lee Purdy. Even the opponents of the death penalty had remained strangely silent on Purdy and his execution, as if to say they'd give the state this one since Purdy was- or appeared by all rights to be-a natural born
