Unnatural Instinct (Instinct thriller series)

by Robert W. Walker

  As Jessica approached Kim in the van where she lay on a cot with a waiting attendant, Kim asked, “How're you doing, Jess?”

  Jess thought her friend looked pale and drained, weary and sleepy-eyed. Somehow Kim looked smaller. The word frail filled Jessica's mind.

  “More to the point, sweetie, how're you doing? I hear you had quite a long session.”

  Richard stood nearby, lending support and saying hello to Kim, whom he had met through Jessica.

  “What happened during the session? Anything useful?”

  “Mostly a jumble of confused images: darkness, a void, choking feeling, claustrophobic spaces... hands, feet tied.”

  As usual, the skeptic in Jessica said, Anyone could say the same, knowing the victim was abducted.

  “Got a distinct odor of decay. Stronger than I have ever read it before.”

  Jessica did not know what to say to this. “And did you get anything from the purse?”

  “Purse was handled by someone other than either DeCampe or her abductor. That's all I could get.”

  “The attendant, no doubt,” muttered Jessica. “I want to grill his ass.”

  “As to the fall I took, it was brought on by some sort of flashing pain, like a searing shock.”

  “A shock? What kind of shock?”

  “A sudden zap like I was hit by a lightning bolt, although I have no idea what that must feel like. Scared the hell out of me. Felt it in every cell in my being.”

  “Electricity?”

  “Yeah, I think so... but as you know, it could be symbolic.”

  “Or it could be literal? If he used some sort of electric tensor gun on her, that would explain her being so taken by surprise. He calls out to her, and she stops before unlocking her car, turns, sees she knows him, relaxes her grip on the gun she has already revealed when zap—she's surprised a second time by a shock of some sort.”

  “That's a pretty good line of suppositions,” replied Kim.

  “They'll have to serve us for now. So, what about when you were under? Before the shock? Were you getting anything else unusual?” Jessica persisted. “Did you see anything that might help guide us? Anything at all?”

  “Nothing else, save that strange odor... like the odor of death and decay mixed with earthy odors left by vermin, mildewy stuff, like the smell of a bad mushroom, which when I get... well, it usually ends in finding the victim dead, Jess,” Kim reiterated. “My God,” Jessica moaned, her eyes closed as she pictured die grieving family.

  “I'm sorry... but I don't hold much hope for DeCampe.”

  “Are you saying that you have absolutely no hope? That you believe she is dead already?”

  “No, no! Never any absolutes in this... I don't get that sensation, but I do get the sensation that this will end in her death, and that she will die a most unpleasant death.”

  Jessica frowned and held Kim's hands in hers. “Thanks, Kim. And if you have any of those flashback moments coming to you, I'm sure you'll keep me apprised.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “In the meantime, rest up. We may need you again and again on this one. Obviously, the clock is ticking fast here.” Jessica started to leave the rear of the van where Kim now sat upright, gathering back her scattered energies. But something stopped Jessica in her tracks.

  Kim realized that Jessica stood staring at her with an intensity she hadn't felt before. “What is it?”

  Jessica stepped back toward Kim. She stared at a strange speck of discoloration on her friend and colleague's cheek. It looked like a beauty spot on her right cheek, but Kim had never had a beauty spot there before. “Just noticed for the first time this pinpoint of a freckle you have,” she explained.

  “I haven't a single freckle on my entire face,” replied Kim. “What're you talking about?”

  Jessica then reached out to touch it and wipe away the mark. “It's likely something you picked up when you fell.” Jessica smiled even as she realized the mark didn't wipe away.

  Kim smiled in return, thinking the gesture a kindness toward her, a show of sincere concern. The words about a blemish just an excuse for Jessica Coran to show a bit of genuine affection. They said their good-byes, and Jessica marched back toward the garage, stopping short of the structure.

  Jessica then snatched out her cellular phone and called Lew Clemmens back at Quantico. For some time now, Lew had been Jessica's favorite contact in the computer support division of the FBI. No magician on the planet could do what Lew did. He was literally the best computer geek a girl could have—a consummate information gobbler. She'd barked out what she needed to Lew without so much as a how're you doing or how's the wife, but Clemmens, like everyone in law enforcement, knew what was going on. In fact, Santiva had already reached him with the credit card numbers he was to track.

  “I've already got it going, Jess. I put out an all points on anyone using the judge's credit cards. The family readily gave up both Visas and the MasterCard.”

  Jessica gave a fleeting thought to the family—how their privacy became public the moment a crime was committed against them. The family had to give up all pretense to privacy for a safe and hopefully speedy return of a loved one gone missing. Lew continued his nonstop tirade about the judge. “Didn't waste a moment. Someone's got her cards, and we need to catch this guy before... well... ASAP, before it's too damned—”

  “Shut up for a minute, will you, Lew?” She pictured Lew at his computer, his stomach spilling over his keyboard, a broad smile generally streaking across his face.

  “What? Oh, sure.”

  “We need to look closely at the cases she was working on at the time of her disappearance. I seem to recall some racketeering case, involving the D.C. Mafia. Then there's that nasty business with the Wainwright case, where the guy may or may not have murdered his sister's husband, after the husband was found innocent of murdering the sister. We need to work back from her most recent cases—things she's involved in now, yesterday's verdicts, last week's, last month's, since she's been in D.C. You got that?”

  “Just since she's been in D.C. Got it. Nothing before that?”

  “No... she was abducted here. Not likely some pissed- off Texan is going to cross the continent to settle a score.”

  “Unless he happens to be in town, or unless it's a guy with a Texas-sized vendetta,” countered Lew.

  “Points taken, but—”

  “But we can't waste time down a blind alley, so let's begin with her D.C. cases,” Lew finished for her.

  “Agreed, and thanks again, Lew.”

  “Gotcha... will do.”

  Jessica hung up, and the click resounded in her ear like the closing of a tomb. Something about what Lew had said, about the judge's cases before she had moved to Washington, D.C.... about someone stalking her clear from Texas ... something about the finality of not finding the right information in time. It all made Jessica ill, to think what might be happening to Judge DeCampe at this moment.

  JESSICA had returned to the crypt like area of the parking garage where court authorities this morning had begun to show up in search of their usual parking spaces. Disgruntled judges and clerks of court and attorneys gave varying degrees of cold stares, some demanding to know the reason why. All of them had been rerouted to another area set aside for them until the FBI—and Jessica in particular—chose to release the crime scene.

  Every time a crime scene like this, out in the open, subject to the elements and the traipsing of man and dog was released, it seemed to Jessica an inevitable loss to forensic investigators. No matter how long a crime scene like this was held cordoned off, there was always a need to have kept it whole and intact longer than authorities generally allowed. End result, something was missed. But pressure to resume things as normal always won out, and so losing the crime scene to time demands normally meant tying investigative hands.

  However, as it stood and in all outward appearance, she expected that very little else of any use might come of this place. Still, she combed t
he area for fibers, hairs, anything that might, under a microscope, lead to a clue or even a DNA match with the abductor once they located him.

  Even as her hands worked to gather the minuscule evidence that might or might not have been left by the attacker, Jessica's mind flashed over a deep-seated fear that she had been pushing off since Richard's arrival in the states. Dare not drag it into the light was a phrase that kept repeating in her head over this. She only dared to now look at it in a waking dream, a kind of half-life existence that took her back to London, England, where she had met Richard Sharpe. So much time had gone by while she had awaited Richard's arrival at Dulles International for their reunion, and finally the day had come, and finally they were together— truly together. Only apart since then for the time it took to shower and dress and do all the routine things of life. She sensed a horrid dread come over her whenever she thought of separating from him for any length of time, as if to do so meant to lose him. Even now, here, with him nearby, as she did her work, she felt an irrational fear of losing him somehow to her other world, her work. And so she found herself pacing about the corridors of her subconscious, second-guessing every word, every action she'd taken with Richard. How long would he stand for this, for her work being more important than him? What man did she know on the planet who willingly stood second place to a woman's work? A woman's other passion? Pacing the corridor of memory... pacing the corridor of old regret, past the foyer and into recent remorse. Pacing even in her soul, her heart turning slowly into a garrison, like a sad and empty room made of mortar and stone. Lonely echoes against walls filled with chinks born there out of past pains. God, the fear of losing Richard now that she had found him might paralyze her.

  Then Jessica imagined again the nightmare that was no dream. She imagined the disappearance of Maureen DeCampe. She journeyed down each path of the labyrinth to examine the myriad possibilities. She had already tossed out the one path, a wild, romantic fling with a secret suitor who had whisked her off to some beach shore or cabin retreat. Now she must explore the darker possibilities. Perhaps some sociopathic fiend held her hostage for lust-torture-murder in that sequence. She imagined horrible decapitation and mutilation of various body parts; she imagined wood chippers and blood sent to the heavens, of postmortem defilement, and of shallow graves and animal finds.

  She'd seen it all too many times in too many situations. She suspected the worst had happened to the judge; she expected to find her dead in some ditch somewhere along some abandoned highway. Friends and relatives would hold out hope till the end, like a twisting hand cloth that comes to tatters in the end, the stress and horror of it all taking its toll on all those who loved the victim. Jessica's own friends had told her how jaded she'd become after over two decades of chasing monsters. Still, something different about this case mercilessly nagged at her gut, tearing at it the way a vicious animal might rip apart a beautiful bird caught in a snare. Past villains she had known—their features and their crimes played inside Jessica's head. Violins also played inside her head—a song of sadness so deep and abiding that it created a black, empty hole where life ought to be. The violins played for the victims, always the same refrain, one that spoke of an endless well of pathos for the human condition, a condition that often created angels but just as often created monsters. The violins played for a world in which mankind did so much good and yet so much evil in the same breath, a world in which fast-moving clouds in a moon-and-star-filled 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.