“ If I could take her place in this nightmare… well, I would in a heartbeat.”
“ Brave of you to say so, sir.” Easy to say, she thought. “Do you have any idea where next you will look?”
“ I've kept in touch with Houston PD and the FBI there.”
“ There? You mean Iowa?”
“ In Iowa, yes, but also there-in Texas.”
'Texas?”
“ Everywhere within a fifty-mile radius of Huntsville is being closely looked at, thanks to HPD, Dr. Sanger, and Stonecoat. We're doing the same in the D.C. area, but frankly, other than that, we've come to a standstill.”
“ Stalemate, I see. If there is anything this office can do…”
“ You can be on twenty-four-hour alert, should we need another warrant in the Huntsville-Houston area. And thank you, Judge Parker.”
“ There's something else you should be clear on, Agent Coran.”
Bored by now, she said a sleepy, “Yes?”
Judge Raymond Parker recounted how DeCampe turned over the Purdy case to him, telling him that all she wanted was to see Purdy die in the chair. While she had to recuse herself from his appeal as a matter of course, since she'd tried him originally, she made it clear that in her opinion, there was no room for appeal of the death sentence in Purdy's case.
“ She was clear on that?”
“ Expressly. She said that all his Bible-thumping, born- again crap was just that: crap.”
“ Anything you can tell me about the old man?”
“ I'd've sworn the old geezer to be, you know, harmless, but who knows these days anymore? He carried a Bible into the courtroom every day; read passages from it. Lips moved as he read. Used his fingers to help him read. Never a peep.”
Another line rang. “I'm afraid I have to go, Judge Parker. Another line, and I'm hoping it will be Iowa with some good news.”
“ Yes, I do hope you can salvage something out of this.”
“ Yeah, me, too,” she said to herself, after she had hung up the phone.
“ What's that?” asked Clemmens who had remained seated across from her.
“ Gotta get this other call, Lew. Could be important.”
Lew Clemmens nodded, raised his hands, and indicated he would leave her in peace. He made his way to the door and back down the hall.
Jessica took a deep breath and prayed for good news from Iowa, that her patience would be rewarded. She could hardly stand working like this, feeling as if her hands were tied. She'd rather be in a lab or in the field. Working out of a task-force operations room was killing on the nerves.
“ It's Iowa,” said her secretary.
“ Give me half a second to get into the ops room, and put it through there. I want this on the speakerphone for the task force to hear.”
“ Not a problem.” Jessica saw that Lew had disappeared, likely with a sense of feeling like the proverbial third wheel. She didn't want him or anyone else to feel that way, not on account of how she worked or failed to work. She raced after Lew, grabbed his arm, and said, “Come on, Iowa's back.”
“ Virgil, you mean?”
“ Yeah, think so. I've got it on speaker in ops.”
“ Let's hear what Virgil has to say.”
She nodded, and when they stepped into the ops room, she shouted for everyone's attention. “Iowa's on line one.” She pressed the button, and everyone fell silent, anxious to hear if Virgil and his small army of men had come up with anything at all remotely worthwhile down on the farm.
THIRTEEN
Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
The call was indeed from Iowa State Patrol Chief Virgil
Gorman, who asked if he were speaking to Agent Jessica Coran.
“ Yes, this is Dr. Coran, Chief Gorman. Everyone in my command is listening in on speakerphone. Go ahead, please.”
“ You sound tired, Doctor. You may want to take this news sitting down.”
Jessica looked across at Richard, whose expression was meant to cheer her and encourage her. She was glad to have his support. “The better part of the team is in the room, Chief Gorman,” Jessica replied. “We've all been anxiously awaiting news, so what have you got for us?” She fully expected him to say that he had located DeCampe's lifeless body.
“ I've got some good news… some bad,” he came back.
“ Go on.”
People in the ops room looked about at one another. “We've hit a box… pine wood box, Dr. Coran.”
“ Inside the freshly dug grave, I presume?”
“ Yes, buried out back of the farmstead.”
“ Bastard…” Jessica muttered.
“ Prying it open now. He's nailed it but good. Don't imagine we're going to find anyone alive…”
“ Oh, Jesus,” groaned Jessica. Jessica saw the horror of the others in the conference room, each imagining the terror of being buried alive. Had that been the price exacted of Maureen DeCampe? Jessica tried to imagine the ordeal of such a fate. No one deserved to die in such a fashion. The entire team had been affected by the news that Gorman had brought them. With Gorman's voice gone silent, a wrenching metal sound reverberated all the way from Iowa though the wires and around the ops room: the sound of prying metal, the irritating noise of men struggling painstakingly, panting as they did battle with a coffin lid.
“ Thought you'd want to be in on the opening,” said Gorman. “That noise you hear is crowbars.”
Then everyone in D.C. heard a collective, “Ohhh, Jeeeez- uuus” float through the line. Jessica promptly asked, “What is it? She's dead, isn't she? That son of a bitch's succeeded.”
“ No, Dr. Coran… At least not yet, he hasn't.”
“ No? Is she-”
“ We have a body, and yes, it's a woman all right, but she's seventy if she's a day, and our collective thinking says it's Mrs. Purdy, Isaiah's wife. Apparently she died out here, and he buried her without any fanfare, and certainly without bothering authorities.”
“ One more charge to level at the old devil,” she replied. “We're taking the body in for an autopsy, just to be certain it's death from natural causes.”
“ It's what I'd do if I were there, I can assure you,” she replied.
“ Could be what set Purdy off,” suggested Richard Sharpe, now standing alongside Jessica. “You know, loss of a lifetime partner? Does strange things to people's heads,” finished Richard.
Jessica asked, “No sign whatsoever of another burial site? We had assumed he'd return to safe ground to bury his son and the judge on his farmstead.”
“ Maybe you're assuming too much. Or like one of my boys here said, maybe the suspect's still on his way. It's a long way for an old man to drive alone with two coffins in the rear of his van, all the way to Huntsville, then he's gotta detour to D.C. to abduct the judge. That's a g'damn marathon in itself, and this guy's no spring chicken.”
“ Which means he could still be on the road back to the farm. So you will keep an eye on the place,
