“ I'm Nancy Willis. I count myself an ass for not checking out that old man in more detail. He told me he was a widower. Told me he was lonely and sad. He struck me as an odd duck, but I didn't think he was a psycho-lunatic!”
Nancy now pulled and cut away at the ties that held Maureen by forehead and neck to the corpse's head and neck, and once this was done, Maureen's savior tugged at and cut away the tape about Maureen's mouth. Whoever this woman was, she was not squeamish about Purdy's desiccated body, which gave her fingers a liberal decay bath. “I got my cell phone in the bag. I'll call 911. We'll have this old wicked son of a-monster's ass in prison before dawn, you can bet. Poor child, poor thing. How utterly awful what that son of a- bastard's put you through.”
Her mouth finally free, Maureen gasped and thought. Call 911 first, but her body and her brain screamed to be free of Jimmy Lee's body now. She pleaded, “Just first… first get me free… of this rotting son of a bitch corpse.”
“ Yes, of course, first things first.”
Nancy Willis continued cutting rawhide with the four- inch blade. It took time, as each strip was thick, and the old man had wound the rawhide several times around his son and his victim. At one point, Nancy's knife nicked Maureen's side, but Maureen dared not cry out. Nancy talked as she worked like a cartoon dwarf out of Snow White, Maureen thought. Then a grim idea began to form in Maureen's head, making her wonder if this woman hadn't been sent in by the old man just to give Maureen false hope. Anything might happen in this horrid storybook she found herself in, an abyss darker than anything in Alice in Wonderland.
Nancy had worked her way down with the knife, going from wrists to back and then waist. When she finished the waist ties, even though still attached by her feet, Maureen twisted and rolled off and inched her upper torso as far from Purdy's body as possible. Nancy next began work on the ankles.
Maureen only half heard Nancy's nonstop words now. “When in doubt, check him out, all that, but he paid cash up front, and he seemed harmless enough, all that spouting off with Bible quotes, you know. Still, some last instinct told me he couldn't be all there, wanting this place, the last hole on the planet, and I was right all along, that nagging little voice inside my head. Still, I never… not all the way out here did I ever… never suspect such an awful result.”
Nancy continued cutting strips of rawhide as she spoke, now freeing Maureen's second ankle from the dead man's, allowing Maureen complete detachment. “Who else has he killed? How many? Some kind of serial mass murderer, isn't he?”
When Maureen pulled completely away, she realized how weak and stiff she felt. But this was masked by a sense of freedom that filled her with hope.
Finally, Nancy stared in the half light at Maureen, gaping at the other woman's wounds. Maureen, shivering in the cold bam, looked the part of a leper, and now Maureen reached up to touch the cheek that had been pressed to the dead man's, and she, too, became more aware of the sores on her body. Nancy removed her thigh-length jacket and placed it around the nude woman, asking her what her name was. “Maureen… Maureen DeCampe,” she managed. “Oh my god! You're the… you're the… you're the… that woman in the news that's gone missing? That lady judge stolen from the parking lot? I saw it on America's Most Wanted.”
“ Dial 911 now, please!”
Nancy shakily dialed 911.
Nothing. Dead air.
She redialed 911 several times.
Still nothing.
Maureen flashed on her body tied to Jimmy Lee's again. She desperately feared the old man might come through the bam doors any second and reclaim her.
Nancy said, “I don't fucking believe this. Damn, I knew I should've recharged this thing, and now way out here in the middle of nowhere. Shit. We'll have to get to my car; I can recharge it there on the way to a safe place. My daughter's house is only ten miles east. We can call authorities from there if we can't get the signal.”
She tucked the phone back into her bag, and with both hands, she tugged at Maureen, trying to get her to stand. “We've got to get to the road, my car, now!” Maureen allowed herself to believe they might have a chance at escape.
But Maureen hesitated at standing, fearful she would simply topple over. Her legs felt like wood.
Nancy Willis didn't skip a beat. “Why didn't I pay heed to my little voice? No, I went straight ahead with the rental, took his money without so much as a… and now this. I shoulda known. He gave me the creeps from the get-go. Something told me I had to come out here and see what he was up to.”
“ Thank God you did,” muttered Maureen, fearing to look at the itchy patches of skin at her wrists and ankles, her stomach and breasts, where she had lain so long against the decaying man. A part of her wanted to stop Nancy for a mirror from that purse of hers; a part of her wanted to assess the damage done to her face. But another part of her screamed for her to get up and get out of here.
Nancy hadn't stopped talking. “… now this. Honey, we gotta get ourselves outta here before he wakes up. Come on. On your feet. I know it's difficult.”
Maureen stumbled and broke a rickety old stall when she fell against it, sending her back to a sitting position. “O'dear- o'dear-o'dear!” Nancy's flashlight beam now bathed Maureen's features, and Nancy gasped on seeing the lesions on Maureen's face clearly now. Nancy was momentarily silenced, and she stood over Maureen frozen, her hands hesitating now to touch the other woman. The flash had caught the extent of the blue green tint to much of Maureen's skin. “What has that madman done to you?”
“ Slow poisoning… with decay of his… dead son. I… I sent his son to the electric chair.”
“ And that old bastard is wreaking as cruel a vengeance on you as he can imagine.”
“ Something out of his Bible. He's completely insane, and he will kill you, too, if he finds you here.”
“ Don't worry about me. I'm Chicago bred. I can take care of myself.”
“ Chicago? Are we near Chicago?”
“ Heavens no!”
“ Shhh… Turn off that light.”
Nancy did as ordered.
“ I think I heard something. He may be moving around.” Maureen froze, petrified of his getting his hands on her again and trussing her up to Jimmy Lee. In the darkness, she thought she saw a glint in the dead man's eye and a rictus smile shone like an Elvis sneer. “Give me the knife,” she whispered to Nancy.
“ What for?”
“ I'll kill myself before I'll let him tie me back to his son.
Nancy took a deep breath and handed the closed knife to Maureen, who latched onto it as if it were a religious icon, clutching it to her breasts.
From his bed at the farmstead-the bed he had decided to die in-Isaiah Purdy wandered again in a meander of memory, searching for his lost identity: the lost self, the lost man who had been taken over by his dead son and God. One small comer of his mind held a doubt about God in particular. Jimmy Lee was Jimmy Lee, but this here God he traveled with… Isaiah began to wonder about. Maybe this so-called God was something Jimmy Lee had conjured up, and maybe it had to do with the black arts, and maybe it was one of Satan's minions posing as God. But how to tell, how to ferret it all out, what was he to do? Either way, justice was justice, and Jimmy Lee had some modicum of justice coming.
Isaiah snapped out of the ugly thought. Where is my head at? he silently queried. Lately, he'd been asking himself this question a lot. He had no idea of the answer, not when he could question whether or not he'd been in the presence of God or not, in the presence of Satan or not. Perhaps it'd been neither. Perhaps it'd been an angel. An angel, yes. That would put things into a clearer perspective, be a lot easier to deal with. Without this sure knowledge, how could he have wreaked the vengeance he had helped Jimmy Lee to find?
He searched for the man who he had been before Jimmy Lee had gotten hold of his head. Instead, he found only an empty space staring back, a shapeless thing in coveralls, faceless and without distinct form.
He rolled over in
bed. The old box springs screamed in reaction, further disturbing his sleep. A birdlike thought flew through his brain, in and out, that perhaps he ought to end it all tonight, put the bedeviled woman in the bam out of her misery. His former self would have done as much for any ailing animal on the farm. A part of him wanted to leap from the bed and just go do it, the way he might destroy a dog with incurable mange. How much more suffering could he handle? It wasn't easy being Jimmy Lee's eyes and ears.
He questioned who he was… why he was even here on this planet if not to end his life this way, to fulfill a dying son's wish: Jimmy Lee's mother had said neither yes nor no to the idea before she passed, but his son's voice in his head told him that Mother wanted what he wanted. It'd been left on Isaiah's shoulders to make the decision, as with all major decisions involving the family-at least in this life.
“ We're dealing with no less than a miracle,” Eunice had managed to mutter when he'd asked her point-blank what she thought they ought to do about Jimmy Lee's request.
After she succumbed to death, Jimmy Lee would not be denied, and he'd given Isaiah strict orders, and very specific details, down to where he could find the judge, but Jimmy Lee had been wrong about that much. When he'd left Huntsville prison in search of Judge DeCampe, he had first looked into a rental property where he could kill the judge right handy there, instead of worrying himself with carting her across the country and back home. As much as he wanted to bury Jimmy Lee at the Iowa farmstead, that was no longer feasible. Meantime, Isaiah had learned the hard way that the judge no longer resided in Houston, Texas. He'd had to investigate where she had gone, and when he found out, he almost quit the entire lunatic plan, but again Jimmy Lee- even more so in death than before-insisted the old man would not live one moment in peace if he did not carry through. Although she had not put it in words, Isaiah had to believe that Eunice had been entirely and wholly for her son's plan.
Jimmy's voice inside Isaiah's head said over and over, “You've got to do just as Mother wanted.” Jimmy Lee never let it rest. Repeatedly, the words flowed like a river through his father's brain.
On the trip back from Houston, Jimmy Lee startled the hell out of his father when he spoke from within the casket, from within the mortal remains, the electrocuted corpse. “Ice, ice, damn you, old man!” Jimmy Lee ordered up, and his voice almost made Isaiah run through a fence, so startled was he to hear his dead son's voice from outside his head and from behind him. “Keep my body fresh until you can locate Maureen.” He always called the judge by her first name.
Jimmy Lee had always wanted to be in charge, and now he was. Mother had simply wanted her boy's remains returned to the farmstead to be buried alongside her, but of course, Jimmy had to complicate matters. He couldn't just go off into whatever eternity awaited him. No, he had to drag this judge lady there with him. It didn't look promising that Mother would ever lie alongside her boy in the grave, at least not without a third party involved. Jimmy Lee wanted far, far more than did Mother. And he had asked far, far more of his papa than anyone had a right to, but somehow, the boy knew that Isaiah would do his utmost to grant him a dying wish.
An alien noise penetrated through the fog of the old man's disturbed sleep. He sensed more than he heard it: some disturbance, a faint noise like the crack of a whip but muffled. At the same instant, he realized that anything large enough to make such a noise as to wake him from this distance-the noise coming from the direction of the bam- that it must be the result of a two-legged beast.
He pushed himself from bed, and in his flannel nightshirt, he crept across the floor. He next grabbed his shotgun but thought better of making such a noise here in the middle of the night. He instead grabbed his pitchfork and the unlit lantern. Not bothering to dress, Isaiah made his way to the bam down a worn path. He saw a moving light through the cracks inside.
Definitely, someone had paid Jimmy Lee and the judge a visit, but who?
Isaiah inched toward the door, kicking an errant bucket and frightening a cat as he did so; he then quietly cursed his clumsiness. Now he had alerted whoever it was to his presence. Inside, all remained silent and dark, the light having been doused. Befuddled and only half awake, the old man wondered if the light might not be Jimmy Lee's doing. The boy had a nasty play fullness for making mischief, something he seemed born with.
What he felt deep inside he had long held in check, and the voice of his son in his head made him put one step ahead of the other to move forward. Jimmy Lee continued to drive him, and now Jimmy, as dead as the boy was, had awakened him, telling him he was needed here, inside, to witness every moment of the judge's suffering. Isaiah thought of how damnably little sleep he'd had since tying the judge to Jimmy Lee. But the next sound he heard was by no means Jimmy Lee's voice in his head. He heard a woman's whisper. Tlie judge? Impossible. Some third party had indeed entered, and Isaiah wondered how long the intruder had been inside the bam with Jimmy Lee and the judge.
He carefully set aside the lantern, lifted the pitchfork's three deadly prongs to eye level, and he inched toward the door, prepared for battle.
Jessica Coran didn't know where she was; her only certainty proved a blue veil through which everything was filtered. She saw a pastoral setting, absolutely peaceful, and serenity poured forth with the waterfall in the distance. Flowers in the foreground, flowers that smelled of life and promise. But the waterfall, grass, and flowers were all tinted blue. The same was true for two figures walking through this land of birdsong and bright sunshine, but again all was gauzy, hazy, enveloped in the blue filter, even the burning sun, softened radiation in blue.
The two figures, a man and a woman, looking very much like her and Richard, walked with their hands entwined, their bodies wrapped in one another's. Nearing the curtain of blue, she saw a series of looping, binding ties between them, holding them together like so many horse reins. And now she saw that the hands were not naturally wrapped in one another but bound with rough rope.
Am I dreaming? If so, what does it mean? she searchingly wondered.
Jessica heard a roar and saw the waterfall turn into a gaping mouth. Then the blue veil and the land of dream shattered into black-and-white dots as on a dead TV screen. Someone's hand had reached into her dream, shaking her; someone's voice had infiltrated her brain and had set her eyelids fluttering.
At FBI headquarters, Richard Sharpe shook Jessica Coran, waking her from a nap on the sofa in her temporary office. “It's Houston, that Cherokee detective, on the line for you. Says he has something for us. Thought you'd want to hear it firsthand.”
“ What? Oh… yes, of course.”
Jessica listened on one line, Sharpe on a second one, as Detective Stonecoat said, “There's no time to explain, but we have sufficient grounds to issue a warrant for search and seizure at Jimmy Lee Purdy's father's farm home outside Iowa City, Iowa. But getting an Iowa judge and a Texas one agreeing with one another, well that could take some time. We suspect that a federal warrant may be easier and faster to obtain, although Dr. Sanger is at work on Judge Richard Parker as we speak.”
“ Then your visit to Huntsville turned up something about the case, about the old man?”
“ About the son, for certain. It may be that the old man is acting on Jimmy Lee's orders.”
“ Say that again?”
“ From the grave, so to speak. He… we believe Jimmy Lee left strict instructions for the old man to follow through on, and they involved sending Judge DeCampe over with Jimmy Lee to the other side.”
“ Just as we feared.”
“ What about a federal warrant?”
“ We'll get right on it. Send me a full report of your findings out at Huntsville. We'll need every shred of corroboration on this.”
“ Consider it done. I'll fax you a full report. Meanwhile, someone's got to get the Iowa authorities alerted and descend on that farmhouse, and since I'm in Houston and you're in D.C., I don't think we have the luxury of wasting a moment's more time. Fact is, we fear she m
ay be buried already, fighting for her last breath, if she isn't already dead.”
“ Then I take it Goddard was forthcoming with what he knew?”
“ We convinced him it was in his best interest, yes.”
“ I'm saying good-bye now, detective, and thanks for the help. I'm off for that warrant.”
Stonecoat asked to be kept informed. “Judge DeCampe was well liked in these parts.”
“ Yeah… yeah, same here, detective.”
Jessica called in every favor she had outstanding, and she felt certain that a federal warrant for search and seizure of property at the Purdy farmstead outside Iowa City was just a matter of time. She immediately contacted the head of the Highway Patrol in the vicinity of Iowa City, and after a number of frustrating stops and starts, she finally found herself talking to the man in charge, someone who sounded normal.
“ This is Chief of Patrol Virgil Gorman. How can I help you, Dr. Coran, is it?”
“ I'm head of a task force in an abduction case, Chief Gorman, and it involves a Washington, D.C., judge who's become the victim of a vengeful relative. Our investigation has recently shifted toward-”
“ Wait a minute, you talking about the case I saw in the Police Gazette just the other night?”
She covered the phone with her hand and said to Sharpe, “God, he sounds like Andy of Mayberry.”
Sharpe raised his shoulders to indicate he didn't know what in the world she referred to. She then spoke into the phone. “Yes, that would be the case I am referring to, sir, and all evidence is pointing at a one Isaiah Purdy, who maintains some sort of farm outside Iowa City.”
“ Damn, you don't say. These parts are full of Purdys. Isaiah Purdy, huh?”
“ His son was recently executed in Huntsville, Texas, and DeCampe put him on death row.”
“ I see… so you suspect his father of abducting the judge?” The chief stated the obvious.
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