“ It's what ya might call imprinting from birth for some. Why, the Lord don't have any more use for rats than we do, son. Still, the rats among us flourish, and it's a damn rare moment in this life when a man gets even a whiff of real home-grown justice.”
“ I 'spose you're right, old man.” The security guard hadn't seen DeCampe or heard her pleas. A radio played from a nearby doorway, a loud medley of Johnny Cash tunes. The old man secretly thanked Johnny Cash.
But now the guard stepped closer to the fence, closer to Purdy, and he would see DeCampe crumpled at his feet. The idiot was actually interested in the gibberish Purdy had concocted to put him off! Shit.
Closer and closer he came. Purdy stiffened his hold on the cattle prod, gauging his reach through the gate; exactly at what point would he be able to stab the beefy man with it, to render him unconscious? He would not get a second chance. The man was not wearing a side arm, but he had a nightstick and a huge flashlight, which thus far, he had seen no use for. But this meant he had good eyes, and with each step, those good eyes came closer to discovering the woman lying prone at the old man's feet.
One more step, and there'd be hell to pay, but then someone at the door called out the name Frank several times. Frank stopped and turned, waved and shouted across forty yards to his boss at the door. “Be right there, Mr. Wainwright.” He then muttered under his breath for Purdy's sake, “Now you wanna talk about rats? That SOB has incisors longer'n any rat's gonna have.”
Frank the watchman then looked over his shoulder and said to Purdy, 'Talk to you again, old-timer. Gotta go. Duty calls, and ain't that a bitch. Some fifteen-minute break, huh?” Cigarette smoke trailed after the man as he sauntered off.
Purdy waited for the man to disappear through the factory door, taking his flashlight, nightstick, his eyes, and radio with him.
Purdy kicked the woman at his feet for making him sweat and for shaming him, as Jimmy Lee's taunts continued in the old man's brain. She'd shamed him good, breaking free like this; even if she were recaptured without incident, it was incident enough to give him ulcers. Not to mention how things looked to Jimmy Lee. Jimmy Lee would be laughing in his ears for weeks over this.
Purdy bent and placed DeCampe's limp form over his shoulder and started back with his prize toward the safety of the bam. “Some big rat you are, Your Judgess. Had yourself a nice little runabout, but now it's time to go back and nest down with Jimmy Lee, like two mice nestled in a burrow.”
With no one to see her, with no one watching him, with the watchman gone and sirens in the distance not finding this place, Isaiah Purdy returned his unruly charge to the safety of the old farmstead. He returned Maureen DeCampe to the hell he meant at all costs to inflict on her.
Reaching the interior of the bam, stepping over the realtor lady, he dropped DeCampe's unconscious body hard on the earth beside Jimmy's still grinning corpse.
“ A couple few bruises now. You brought 'em on yourself, dearie,” he began. “Ought to speed up the process some, like a bruised apple-jump-start this death by decaying, huh? Whataya think, Jimmy Lee?” he asked the corpse and cackled, pleased with his own words, even though only Jimmy could hear them.
He paused a moment to study Jimmy Lee's badly spaced, badly cracked, yellowed teeth just back of the bloated, mottled lips that'd been pulled by death into the familiar dead man's smile. Isaiah said to the empty bam, “Always had to fight the boy to brush his damned teeth. The one thing I hated seeing was the boy's bad teeth. If only the fool had listened, but guess it don't matter nary a bit now. Once't you're dead, good teeth, bad teeth's all the same by then, huh, Jimmy Lee?”
Isaiah turned from the corpse and its now-decayed eyes and stepped back to the heavy bam doors, creaking now in a growing night wind that had turned the tops of pine trees into giant brushes that painted the underbelly of the crushing gray clouds that had rolled in. He latched the doors with a makeshift latch that he must replace with something stronger-a cord of hemp wasn't going to do it. Miss High and Mighty Realtor Nancy proved that much. He'd have to go to work on the latch, use his Iowa ingenuity, his Yankee know-how.
For now, he pulled the doors tight with the cord and closed out the world to him, the judge, and Jimmy Lee. Then he went to fashion some new leather straps. It would cost more time, but at least his father had taught him how to cut a tanned hide into useful strips, a job his father learned from his father and so on down the branches of the family tree. Those strips were usually used to beat an unruly child, but Isaiah had found a better use indeed.
Lew Clemmens, FBI computer whiz, looked in on Jessica to see how she was holding up and to offer his apologies that things in Iowa had not worked out as everyone had hoped. “Something good did come out of our liaison with Houston, however.”
“ Oh, and what's that?” she asked, accepting the cup of steaming coffee he had brought as a gift.
“ I hooked up with this guy named Randy Oglesby, Houston PD's civilian computer genius, and together we managed to uncover some interesting cyber facts on the case.”
She indicated the chair, and he sat down, getting comfortable. “Go on,” she said, after sipping at her coffee.
“ Well it was mostly Oglesby. He has inroads to the Houston court system. He's kind of a legitimatized hacker, if you ask me. Any rate, he tapped into the fact that Judge DeCampe had recused herself on a case recently, and this caught his full attention, and it led him to search back for a nine-year-old case, and guess who it involved?”
“ Jimmy Lee Purdy?”
“ Exactly, a case in which she put a man on death row: James Lee Purdy.”
“ But she recused herself from his appeal nine years later… makes sense. Conflict of interest.”
“ Yeah, Purdy's case had come up for appeal and oddly, it had fallen on her desk.”
“ Snafu?”
“ Snafu or greased hands? Hard to tell. But coincidence, I find hard to buy.”
“ What're you saying, Lew?”
“ From the way the papers were drawn up, Jimmy Lee asked for her, specifically requested Judge DeCampe to oversee the appeal. I know that's stupid, but people chalked it up to Jimmy Lee's having an idiot for a lawyer and a fool for a client.”
“ Don't tell me, he was acting as his own lawyer?”
“ Yeah, and as it appears to Randy, he was orchestrating a rendezvous with DeCampe. He definitely had an unhealthy interest in her. DeCampe turned the appeal over to a Judge Parker, same one that got a warrant out for Purdy's farm.”
The phone rang, and Jessica heard a man introduce himself as Judge Raymond Parker in Houston. “I have issued a warrant for search and seizure to go ahead in Iowa. Anything else I can do, please let me know.”
She covered the mouthpiece a millisecond to gather her thoughts. Clearing her throat, she replied, “Yes, your honor, we received word via fax about… a while ago.” She had had her secretary forward Parker's warrant and the federal warrant on to Virgil Gorman's office, which ought to satisfy Iowa authorities and cover her earlier lie-her jumping the judiciary gun.
“ Did they find anything? Is there any news?” Parker asked.
'Their search has uncovered nothing of significance so far, and I am afraid, sir, that Judge DeCampe is not at the Iowa location.”
“ Have they located Purdy?”
“ No, sorry once again, but should the search of the property yield any useful information, well… one never knows, sir.”
“ We appear to be back at square one, as they say.” Parker then apologized for the time it had taken to draw up the warrant. “Due process… takes time; we rushed it through as best we could the moment I learned of your suspicions.”
She again thanked him. “I understand you were the judge who handled Jimmy Lee Purdy's appeal, and that you saw the senior Mr. Purdy in your courtroom.” Her last conversation with Lucas Stonecoat had provided a lot of useful information.
“ That's true; I gave authorities here a few items to add to the artist's sketch you're circulating. Hope it helps catch this maniac. Frankly, it could just as well have been me targeted rather than Maureen, I suppose.”
“ Hard to tell. Seemed his son was fixated on her.”
