The door opened a crack, and Jessica saw that the interior was semi dark, the drapes pulled against any Virginia sunlight that might dare attempt to enter the room. Kim's normally bright and cheery surroundings appeared to have been turned into a mortuary or mausoleum. Uncharacteristically inhospitable, Kim held Jessica at the door, where she grimly stood; Kim also tilted her head to show only her left side. “Are you going to let me in or do I have to-”
“ Go away, Jess. I'm not feeling well, and I'm not receiving visitors, and I certainly don't… feel sociable right now.”
“ Eriq said you want off the case.”
“ Wanted off, past tense. I choose my cases carefully. I have to. I don't have the luxury of psychological distance, not like you and the others have, and at the close range I am at, I can't as easily maintain a mental balance in the face of such horror, Jess. Now, if you don't mind…”
Jessica sensed there was more to it than what Kim had to say, far more. But Kim didn't wish to confide, and in an impulsive move, she pushed the door closed, but Jessica just as impulsively shoved her foot in and pushed back, knocking the door open. It stood wide open now, sunlight pouring through as the two friends glared at one another. The sunlight created a halo around Jessica where she stood in the doorway. Jessica's action had surprised Kim, revealing that the psychic's right cheek appeared badly bruised. “What the hell's happened to you, Kim?”
“ I walked into a door,” she bitterly replied. “Now, please, leave.”
“ Who the hell's struck you? That cop boyfriend of yours, Sincebaugh? I'll kick his-”
“ No one's battered me, Jess!” Kim wrapped her head and face in a large scarf, revealing an area on each wrist that looked like age spots or the spots of leprosy. “You've got no right storming in here like some savior. I want you to leave now, Jess.”
“ My God, Kim, tell me what's going on! Your hands, your face are-”
“ Despicable, I know.” Kim's eyes swelled, and tears flowed. She turned away. “You're stating the obvious, Jess.”
Jessica grabbed hold of her friend's shoulders and stared at the awful discoloration on her right cheek. She gasped when realizing what she stared at was diseased tissue-^decay, even. She helplessly shrank back, recoiling for a split second as she might with a leper. But how had Kim contracted leprosy?
Kim recoiled away as well, flailing her way to a chair, her shoulder hurting from where Jessica had touched it. “I'm decaying, Jess. Literally decaying.”
“ My God, has it been diagnosed? Who're you seeing?”
“ I'm seeing DeCampe! She's decaying, Jess; she's somewhere fucking decaying, and I can't go near her, not… not again, not ever.”
Jessica stepped closer to Kim, one hand extended, yet fearful of touching her friend. “Are you telling me that your symptoms are due to-”
“ My only hope, if it's not too late, is to rid my mind of this goddamn case, to rid my mind of DeCampe and her condition.”
“ I've never known your psychic wounds to be so… this severe, Kim. I absolutely agree. I just need to understand. Are you saying that DeCampe is in the process of decaying and that you somehow tapped into her dead body and-”
“ Yes, damnit. DeCampe is decaying, by the hour in some hellish grave.”
“ She's buried somewhere? But where? Have you got a location, Kim?”
“ She feels buried alive but decaying at the same time. I see her in a coffin.”
“ Decaying alive,” Jessica repeated.
“ I don't know… it makes no sense… but she just doesn't feel dead… rather she feels like she wants to be dead.”
“ But she's not dead yet.”
“ Nor am I, Jess.” She turned and faced Jessica. “I keep sensing that she is somehow being tortured with her own flesh.”
“ My God,” Jessica gasped once more at seeing the discoloration on Kim's cheek, and now at her wrists.
“ That's all I know about DeCampe. Now you've got the information you came for, so please go.”
“ I appreciate your insights on the case, Kim, but I came here out of concern for you. No one's seen you.”
“ I know that you came out of concern, but now that you have seen me, please, go!” Kim fell into a chair.
“ You know I can't just walk away from you and leave you here in this condition.”
“ Leave, please.”
“ I love you, and I want what's best for you. Have you seen a doctor for… what kind of medication you can use?” Jessica had gone to her knees before her friend, reaching out, caressing her forearms, careful to avoid any malignant spots.
“ Medications don't work on mind-altered states, Jessica. You know that as well as I. All I can do is keep away from Maureen DeCampe, wherever she is.”
Jessica sighed heavily. “I'm so sorry, Kim. I had no idea.”
“ No one does, and please, I would like to keep it that way.”
Jessica reached out and embraced her. Kim tried to hold back the tears, but in a moment, she erupted, her body quaking against Jessica's, until she pulled away and rushed from Jessica, shouting, “Go-get away from me. For all we know, this psychic leprosy could be contagious.”
Kim now firmly took hold of Jessica's arm and ushered her to the door, and there put her out, closing the door between them.
Jessica called out. “Let me know if there is anything- anything-you need, Kim. If you need someone, let me know.”
Silence. No answer.
It felt like the silence of a cavern behind the thick white door, the silence of suffering. Jessica felt angry with herself at having involuntarily recoiled at first sight of Kim's cankerous facial sores. She could not take that back, but the surprise and shock were understandable. It had only been a day since she had last seen a healthy Kim Desinor, and now this.
Agitated, pacing at the doorstep, not wanting to abandon Kim, Jessica saw that Richard was staring at her, that he must wonder what was going on. Her eyes returned to the blank door, which stared back, and she heard the soft crying of the woman inside. The sound made Jessica weak and angry with herself that she'd allowed Kim to manhandle her out the door. She now wondered what she ought to do. She then shouted through the door, “You know me, Kim. I'm going to meddle. I'm going to call Dr. Roy Shoate-best physician in the city. He'll make a house call on my say- so. There's got to be something we can do.”
Again silence.
Jessica felt a twinge of fear; she didn't want to leave Kim alone, but she also knew how fiercely proud the woman was, and she must respect her wishes. She stepped away from the door, feeling as if she were letting Kim down, that she and the FBI family had already let her down. She feared Kim might do something to harm herself.
Halfway back to the waiting car and Richard, she dialed Dr. Shoate on her cellular phone.
SIX
Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.
— William Shakespeare
Jessica had learned never to discount Kim Desinor's visions or suspicions, and never to read one of her visions literally. If she said Judge DeCampe was in some place of decay, this could have many interpretations, that there were many rivers to the ocean. Decay had many connotations and images attached to it, and the place where DeCampe was being held might simply be a “place of decay” such as a cemetery or burial plot or even a cold storage meat packing company. The fact that her abductor had “confined” her could point to a decay of movement as in wither, ebb, crumble, dwindle, fade, fall off. In the most hideous sense, however, it meant spoil, corrupt, perish, degenerate, decompose, deteriorate, disintegrate, putrefaction, and adulteration. Then again, adultery came out of adulteration, so the association could go on endlessly, and therein lay both the strength and the weakness of the psychic and psychic imagery. The psychic vision might not in and of itself be useful, but in the psychic's interpretation, a use might often come of psychic information. Kim had proven herself time after time as an able and capable interpreter of her own vision
s. If she said that Maureen DeCampe was “in a state of decay,” there was some truth to this, but it could well mean that she was in a state within the contiguous United States that was in a state of decay, such as a farm state in a nation that no longer valued the private farm and its family of caregivers. Or it might be taken literally, that DeCampe might well be buried alive in a coffin this moment. Decay meant decline, decadence, failure-all adjectives perhaps better applied to DeCampe's abductor. Decay stood for collapse, for waste, breakdown, and breakup, dissolution, corruption, and mold, blight, and rot-perhaps the condition of a man gone mad. All these horrid images Kim had internalized, and the result was disease overtaking Kim's own body-a strange psychic malady somehow connected to DeCampe's circumstances. Psychosomatic illness taken to the tenth power, Jessica imagined.
Dr. Roy Shoate had contacted Jessica to tell her that he had never seen a healthier person exhibiting signs of Ebola virus. That's what it looked like to him. He had run no tests, but he said she was literally being eaten up, and it was ongoing unless they could find some way to arrest it.
“ She submitted to your examination without a fight?” Jessica had asked.
“ She has little strength left. She is dying, Jessica.”
Tears welled up in Jessica. “Do all you can to arrest it. Dr. Shoate.” Jessica did not confide in the doctor that Kim's condition was psychically induced. She knew that no doctor could completely stop it until Jessica brought an end to the DeCampe case, the case Kim had been so diligently working on when the strange malady overtook her.
“ This appears a public health issue to me, Dr. Coran. Will you be notifying Atlanta?” Jessica had no intention of alerting the CDC or anyone else about Kim's condition. “I'll take every step necessary, Doctor, and thank you,” she lied.
“ Meantime, we have her sedated and isolated. We will proceed under the assumption it is the Ebola but will administer no meds until we have isolated the virus itself, to be certain. That's the best we can do for now-hospital policy-now that we live in such a litigious society.”
“ How long will further tests take?”
'Twenty-four hours for initial tests, forty-eight to be certain.”
“ Thanks for all you've done, Dr. Shoate.”
“ Absolutely. I know you have your hands full. I've been reading the papers.”
Jessica hung up, her friend's life very much on her mind. She paced the office and stared out the window, weighing the news from Dr. Shoate. The ante had been significantly raised now, with Kim's life in the bargain.
J. T. stepped in, shouting, “The parking attendant has been found dead in Detroit, Michigan, as far as he got.”
“ How?”
“ Killed in a flophouse.”
“ Christ help us. We'll never know the extent of his in-volvement.”
“ What's up with Kim Desinor, Jess? I couldn't help but overhear. Is she ill?”
“ She's somehow contracted some sort of bad case of… not sure what it is, but she believes it came directly from her psychic journey into Judge DeCampe's mind. She's… she's not good.” Jessica began to cry. “But J. T., keep 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.<
br />
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.
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