sky, or a full moon rising over a silver ocean, stood shoulder to shoulder with child molestation and cruelty of all sorts. The sound of it was something she felt more than heard-vibrations on a tuning fork-and they disturbed her core being more than she dared admit until a near mental breakdown had sent her to Dr. Donna LeMonte for psychotherapy some years back. Even so, even today, after several years of professional help, the tuning fork continued to disturb her more than she understood.
She hadn't felt so much unleashed fear since the night she'd been trapped and strung up by her hands and feet to die in the manner of Christ on the cross in an underground cavern below London. And while that fear had been for her self, this new, awful fear was for Maureen DeCampe.
Jessica's knees now began to hurt where she had been kneeling over the few clues left them. She stood to straighten her legs, and she looked about the cold institutional gray walls of the underground parking garage. There seemed a solitude here that felt eternal. “This fucking place feels like a goddamn mausoleum.”
Richard appeared next to her and squeezed her hand, whispering, “It must feel like a horror chamber for a woman alone at midnight.”
While she squeezed Richard's hand in return, Jessica's eyes registered the quiet, thoughtful faces surrounding her. She simply said, “We're done here.” It came out as a statement of fact, as if to say there was nothing whatever left to examine at the scene. “Anything else we do here this morning will add up to a complete waste of time and energy.”
“ We're done asked J. T.
“ There's nothing more here that's going to talk to us, John.”
“ But we still haven't dusted the car or-”
“ Do it if you like, but he never touched her car. Neither did she, for that matter.”
“ Yes, from the look of it, she never got that far,” Richard added.
“ So there's absolutely not a damned thing left for us. The answers to this one aren't going to be found in the fibers or the prints or the dust.”
J. T. only stared at her, wondering what was going through Jessica's mind. She knew he could not imagine the terror of a woman alone with her captor.
The next day, Jessica stared out the window of the spartan office turned over to her at FBI headquarters in D.C., where she could remain in close proximity to the case. Her office overlooked a section of the D.C. Beltway, now that some old tenements had been demolished and reduced to ashes to make way for construction of more new high-rise upscale apartments. If you lived inside the Beltway, you likely worked for one of the many companies supplying services and goods to the government. Jessica could see a strip of Beltway bandits, companies that lined the Beltway and did almost exclusive business with the U.S. government. Scam in D.C. was a way of life.
As a result of having to take up temporary residence in D.C., she'd had to say good-bye to Richard and her new Quantico farmstead, at least for now. She'd driven back to the apartment with him, and they'd talked about the situation as well as the Missing Persons case that had so suddenly changed their plans.
“ Circumstances like these can't be ignored,” Richard said at one point on the drive back.
“ Santiva and his special cases always seem to screw with my life.”
Richard puzzled over the remark for a moment before saying, “Oh, yes… as in screw up.”
“ Yeah, you've got that right, darling.”
They both laughed. Richard's response was one of interest in the case. He encouraged her instinctual response to the lack of any evidence of a struggle pointing to either a surprise grab or that the woman did not fear her attacker. He also agreed that the lack of concern on the abductor's part in leaving her keys and the. 45 lying there was an act of defiance against authority, likening it to the criminal who defecated at the scene just to piss cops off.
“ And what sort of bugger uses a cattle prod to control his victims?” Richard had asked. “I mean if your psychic is right, then he's using a stun gun or a bloody cattle prod of some sort, don't you think? That might make 'im either a farmer or a cop himself… maybe.”
“ Nowadays anyone could get hold of a stun gun, Richard. Doesn't have to be a cop.”
“ So true,” he'd agreed.
“ Anyone with a computer can order any damn thing that might come to mind these days.” They'd arrived at her Quantico apartment, and they promptly went up and inside. Richard hadn't any of the reserve of fear she had felt well up inside when she thought of how much time away from him this case meant.
“ It's your work, dear, and who does it better? Just promise me one thing.”
“ What's that?” she mirthfully replied.
“ That you'll come back to me… home safe.”
“ Promise.”
They had made passionate love then, and afterward, she packed a bag and returned to D.C. All of the evidence- gathering and lab work would be handled out of the D.C. field offices and crime lab. Until the case was solved, she'd be living in a D.C. apartment at taxpayers' expense. To complicate her life, it appeared D.C.'s dry season had ended. The rain had come down the night before in a steady, calm downpour, leaving the streets awash, sewers drinking it in. And now Jessica watched the light rain that J. T. had exaggeratedly characterized as “The Flood.” It barely washed clean the windows. She had gotten six hours' sleep, and she continued to work at clearing her mind of the overwhelming fear growing by the hour that Judge Maureen DeCampe would not be found alive. To fend off this negative and depressive thought, she abandoned it long enough to count the now evaporating raindrops on the windowpane of her temporary D.C. office in a building filled with files on missing persons. Jessica couldn't clear from her mind that creeping, familiar sense of clawing claustrophobia overtaking her. The room filled with a thousand dead voices and dead stories-all the innocent women and children who had ever disappeared without a trace, all seemed to cry out with the rhythm of the raindrops against the windowpane. And yet the cry was all of one voice.
And all the voices had one other thing in common: Here in the city resided countless unexculpated murders. The files of victims that lay silent and unanswered in D.C., as with each major American city in the nation, finding voice, would drown out the living, she imagined. Hardly a new story- not enough manpower to begin to do the job.
However, Jessica had been working with Lew Clemmens on an electronic answer to give true voice to the dead of D.C., and if successful, to carry the plan to other major cities throughout the country and possibly abroad. She had modeled her idea on a Houston Police Department program called COMIT, run by a Cherokee Indian detective named Lucas Stonecoat with whom her friend Kim Desinor had successfully worked a case. As a result, Jessica felt confident that very soon ancient necrofiles nationwide would be placed on computer files, and any one of them could be accessed from anywhere in the country. This would save countless hours and manpower.
However-and there always was a however-it had proven a tedious process, and still some 60 percent of D.C. 's cold files had as yet to be revived in this fashion; the 40 percent that had been scanned to disk and transcribed onto the Washington Police mainframe database under USA- COMIT had not been read by anyone human, except for Lew Clemmens. For the time being, it had been for electronic eyes only. Today they could plug in key words to flag any cases that might now be solved via DNA evidence, new fingerprinting techniques, photographic imaging, or any other new technology. In many ways, the tide was turning in favor of the crime fighters and away from the criminals, thanks to modem scientific police and forensic detection. Once the old file transfers were completed, anyone anywhere in the world who might be working a cold case could conceivably do searches for unsolved murder investigations, which might now be reassessed on grounds of new technologies designed to combat crime.
The trouble was the sheer number of cold cases. Any death investigation with moss on it could benefit from current scientific knowledge and techniques not available to earlier law enforcement-an unpleasant fact shared by every police agency in the world. Jessica imagined a time- traveling modern medical examiner who might go back to significant moments to unravel mysteries surrounding deaths that, at the time, could not be solved, from Jack-the- Ripper to Lizzie Borden. The thought recalled a fascinating book that her mentor, Dr. Asa Holcraft, had insisted she must read when only a fledgling student in his classes. The book was Century of the Detective by Jurgen Thorwald, a fascinating attempt to survey the history of crime detection and the science that had built up around it. The book put a great deal into perspective, not the least being the question of guilt or innocence of a man convicted at a time when animal blood and human blood could not be separately identified, a time when there was no microscopic evidence since there was no microscope, a time before fingerprinting was discovered as a viable crime-fighting tool.
