Unnatural Instinct (Instinct thriller series)

by Robert W. Walker

  Isaiah swerved to avoid the headlights of an oncoming Mack truck that blared its horn at him. He turned hard to avoid the truck, sent up a shower of debris as he hit the shoulder and grass off U.S. 20 outside Sioux City. He'd buried his wife this day and had begun his journey, and now he'd almost joined Eunice in the hereafter. The minivan careened to a full stop, but not before the van rocked to one side, nearly going completely over an embankment, but somehow righting itself with a bounce onto all four Firestone tires.

  He sat there for a moment with the engine idling and the headlights piercing the emptiness of a wall of black trees. For a long moment, he wondered at the fickle hand of fate in a man's life and why he had not been killed. The truck had come within inches of smashing into his left front end. The embankment had been just steep enough to have easily reached out its arms to pull him into the waiting creek twenty feet below. He imagined the van upside down in the creek, him upended with it, unable to free him self, and drowning in the muddy bottom. Maybe it'd been best had it happened that way, he thought, anxious as he was to join Eunice, and besides, it would end this strange, unbidden pilgrimage to Huntsville. Death would have brought an instant solution to his immediate problems and an end to Jimmy Lee's voice in his head, a voice like a bull terrier that had clamped down on his brain, holding firm and taking control, without letup, day and night, night and day, over and again, endlessly tumbling in-out-around-through the pathways of Isaiah's skull.

  “Maybe I best ought to park it right here and get some damn sleep,” he said to the photograph he had pinned to the overhead visor, a picture of himself with an arm draped over Eunice's bony shoulder. The photo had been taken when they had gone to the Jersey shore to see the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. It had been a wonderment of nature the likes of which neither of them could muster words for, and so they had asked a stranger to snap a photo of them with the ocean as backdrop, and Eunice had said that every grain of sand on the beach was special and unique, and that she regretted that they had never found that special uniqueness that seemed buried in their boy, Jimmy. Still, they had smiled for the camera even then, even knowing that their only son had that same day been placed on death row and placed on the schedule for execution. The trip had been Eunice's swan song, he told himself; she had somehow known that her heart would give out, just as the doctors had said: a condition of the heart. Isaiah wondered how much of the condition was brought on by the situation her son now found himself in.

  “Sleep... best to sleep till dawn rise,” he said now to the photograph. Beside the photo of Eunice and himself, a photo of Jimmy Lee stared back. Short-cropped head of sandy blond hair, narrow eyes too close to each other, a beaked nose, and a freckled face. The chin was weak, near nonexistent, while the ears poked out from each side of the head like some strange pair of Brussels sprouts. He'd been a damn homely infant with the look of an opossum, and he'd not improved since.

  One other photograph accompanied Isaiah on the long journey to Huntsville and later to D.C., and that was a photograph ripped from a Houston newspaper, a photograph of Judge Maureen DeCampe, posing with some other fancy judges on the steps of the courthouse.

  Isaiah shut off the van lights. He'd taken a slight blow to the head against the dash. He tried to refocus and found himself staring into the rearview mirror. Behind him, he saw the shell of the van as if it had been carved out with a giant knife. He'd taken out the seats in the rear and had made a pallet of the blankets from his and Eunice's bed. Even if Eunice were alive, she might not be on the trip to see their son executed. But even in death, she was here in the spirit, inside Isaiah, and he took comfort in knowing this. “For a fact,” he muttered as he shut down the engine, locked the doors, and worked his thin, small frame to the back of the van. Once there, he lay down in his clothes and pulled the blankets up around his chin just as he and Eunice had done for forty- four years.

  He lay there on his back, missing her spooning up against him. He lay there, looking out through the side tinted window at stars overhead, thinking out loud. “Eunice... this here universe is too much for me. All them stars... makes me feel so damn small. Wish you was here to see them... to see me through all this.”

  He felt a tug at his old heart. He felt so alone. Still, he knew that he could never truly be alone anywhere, not in this life, not since Jimmy Lee had gotten into his head through some magical projection that had come through Eunice Mae, had somehow leaped full-blown from out of her head and into his, and it was him, Jimmy Lee come a- calling.

  Jimmy Lee had sent him a mental picture, full-blown and frightful, of himself in the death chamber where they meant to throw the switch on Isaiah's boy. Isaiah watched from outside a giant glass jar inside a maximum-security prison where they officially and efficiently killed people.

  Isaiah didn't begin to think he could ever understand how Jimmy Lee's voice got into his head from such a distance, except to say that perhaps it had been something like divination or sorcery; perhaps a kind of witchcraft associated with Christian curses and the Bible, something tangible though, like a cream or a gel or a jam, that oozed from Jimmy Lee's letters to Eunice's hands and then to Isaiah's head. Whatever or however, this power crept unseen and unknown into Isaiah's brain via the cells. After all, Jimmy Lee had miraculously begun reading his Bible, but Isaiah could not be certain just how much the boy had been getting from the Word until that first contact, when Jimmy Lee might as well have been in the rocker across from him on his falling-down old farmstead porch.

  When Jimmy Lee's words came into his brain, only ten minutes after Isaiah had buried Eunice Mae, Isaiah had no hope of denying Jimmy or to not hear his last wish, and certainly to not act on it.

  He'd buried her with a Bible passage suggested to him by Eunice Mae herself, but she might have gotten it from Jimmy Lee, in Jimmy's last letter to home. Eunice could read, and she'd read all his letters to Isaiah, but he knew she'd leave out any unpleasantness. Jimmy's kindness toward his mother and Isaiah in his last letters proved he'd been reborn, proved that his words were sincere, that he had come to that plateau of spirit that would indeed cleanse him in the next life, while the State of Texas made its feeble attempt to do likewise through several hundred thousand odd volts of electricity. Sons a bitches, he thought, one and all, and especially the judge who refused to show a stitch of mercy to my boy.

  “Just go to sleep, old man,” he told himself, there where he'd nearly been killed, there in the ditch alongside the road, his voice thin, bony fingers running over a scrub board of a face. But he'd still remained wakeful. “Get some rest. You'll be needing every ounce a' your energy, so get some damned rest.” He now ordered it, willed it, wishing to end the agitation and unrest that had created of his mind a chaotic whirlwind. His eyes closed on the dark road that lay ahead of him, and they closed on the barn, where he sat on the stool, and they closed on the image of the judge in her bonds. He had done it. He had lashed her to Jimmy Lee's body.

  JESSICA Coran found Washington, D.C., a city of contrasts. The tourists' finds and traps abounded, of course, the city being the so-called capital of the free world, but it also housed crime, poverty, pestilence, and the usual infrastructure problems. This along with its soft underbelly where drugs flowed freely, where an overburdened police and judicial system tolerated prostitution and other crime, and where politics meant everything and public outcry demanded more out of the current White House administration than the latest scandal.

  This time of year, the cherry blossoms all along the main thoroughfares were sadly gone, and the cold chill of a fall that promised a frigid winter left homeless people in doorways within the shadow of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The city had earned the reputation of D.C.—District of Crack.

  FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., was nothing whatsoever like Jessica's country club atmosphere at Quantico, Virginia, where people showed attitudes more positive and goal-oriented. And the pace and stress set here proved mind-boggling, as did the number of ringing telephones. In
order to think, she had to close two doors that led into the office turned over to her.

  Despite the distractions and the vibes here, Jessica had immediately set out to take action. She called in all the D.C. field agents assigned to her, and she ordered them to work closely with local authorities, and to put out a street request for anyone knowing anything about the disappearance of Judge Maureen DeCampe. “Anything coming of such inquiries,” she told them, “gets reported to the task force and posted on the electronic bulletin board in the operations room.”

  “Where's that? The ops room?” one of the agents asked. “Where you're standing.” It was a room that hadn't seen use in at least a decade, but the ancient furniture was enhanced by state-of-the-art phones and computers for the operation. The room stood adjacent to the office they'd given Jessica to work from, and the moment she had stepped into the room, she had felt something, a kind of ghostly history to the place that had seen no use in such a long time. In her mind's eye, she saw a busy, frenetic office with old- fashioned furniture and dated telephones and a teletype machine in the comer. No computers. A lot of noise and movement, all in an empty room. The room begged to be put to use, and since every other room in the building that might serve was already in heavy use, she had selected this one to be outfitted for their needs, and an army of technicians had made it so.

  “Secondly,” she added to her task force people, “I want a complete rundown on everyone Maureen DeCampe would have or could have come into contact with on the day of her disappearance. Add to that anyone she came into contact with on a daily basis.”

  “A judge comes into contact with a lot of people in any given day,” said George Marks, a tall, clean-shaven agent, hand-picked for his knowledge of D.C. streets and street life.

  “We're hauling in the usual suspects,” Jane Cardinal, his younger partner, added.

  “We need to focus on specific suspects. That means we don't have the luxury of interrogating useless suspects for hours on end,” she countered. “We need to zero in on someone we like for the crime or someone we catch in a lie and to quickly focus our search. We need to think clearly about what comparison points to use to narrow the field.”

  “I'm not sure I follow you,” replied the young female agent named Cardinal. She'd been selected to be on the team due to her expertise in Missing Persons cases.

  “Which of the usuals has proven violent? Which is or has been capable of abduction in the past? Twenty questions, people, will reduce the numbers. Those who forced themselves on another person reduce the pile by one-third. Which of the usuals has ever used a weapon in the commission of a crime? We know that the judge showed her assailant a .45 but was overpowered or outgunned. This reduces the pile further. So who is left? Which of the usuals has ever threatened the judge?”

  “That just might tend to increase the pile,” said Cardinal, drawing a laugh from the others. For a moment, Jessica recognized a little of herself in the younger agent. Give her ten years, and if she continues as an agent, she might have learned something, Jessica thought.

  “Look,” began Jessica, “I know that DeCampe is relatively new to D.C. and that she didn't waste any time creating enemies here, and that she's not everyone's favorite D.C. judge, but she deserves our best effort, same as anyone else abducted off our streets. As things stand, we have zero ideas on how to proceed, people. Get me some leads; if you can do this through your snitches, it may save us more time than collaring and interrogating the array of lunatics you call the usual suspects. That's all I'm saying.”

  Richard Sharpe stood to put in his say. Everyone's eyes turned to the tail, handsome Englishman. Everyone knew that he'd retired from New Scotland Yard and had come on as a consultant to the FBI. Everyone also knew that he and Jessica were seriously involved with one another. “Where I come from, the usual suspects are called the street nasties, but in either case, they're called the usual suspects for good reason, but we don't believe this is the usual case. Besides, this is D.C., and the list of perverts in this city is endless, not unlike London.”

  “So, your thinking is that we'd be wasting our time with the street nasties, as you call them?” asked Agent Marks.

  Sharpe paced the room as he spoke. “Canvassing them all... well, we just don't feel the judge has that kind of time, and we fear it would be a waste of time, energy, and manpower, you see. We believe the judge's assailant knows her in some capacity, and that this is about what you Yanks call payback of some sort. Otherwise, ransom demands would have long since been made by now.” 'To that end, we're electronically canvassing court documents and records,” added Jessica.

  “In the meantime, what do we do?” asked a second female agent taller than any man present.

  “As I said, put out feelers with your usual snitches. There has to be something on the street about the case, something useful.”

  “We need to know where this rat is holed up,” added Sharpe.

  “Someone collects his rent.” Jessica paced toward Richard, and together they stood as a united front before the agents assigned to her. The usual protocol would be to put the entire team on the track of known offenders—kidnappers and rapists. But Jessica and Richard had discussed this fact and found such an exercise wanting. “So, get your noses to the pavement and get me something I can use.”

  After the others left, Richard asked, “What about that pending case you were looking into, that Native American thing?”

  “All other pending cases will just have to pend longer,” she replied.

  “If it works... fix it anyway.” Richard stated the oft- repeated, unofficial motto of the division, a phrase she had shared with him one evening when he'd been asking questions about how the bureau worked or failed to work in some cases.

  Jessica found a chair and fell into it, squishing the air from its cushions. “It doesn't appear to be or even feel like the judge's disappearance was a random act of violence.”

  “Agreed.” He joined her, placing a hand on her hair, stroking it. “Everything points to a premeditated plan, although the crime scene was a bit messy.”

  “A bit messy, yes, but the perpetrator collected up what he wanted.”

  “Her, yes.”

  “Her—and vanished without a trace. What does that say about him?”

  “That tells me he made exacting plans.”

  “Right. Whoever did this staked out the judge's home, her office, stalked her, knew her habits, and took her at her most vulnerable.”

  “You think he knew she was in the habit of eating in chambers and working late every second Thursday of the month? asked Richard. “Only her family knew that.”

  “And her working family,” Jessica countered, “including the parking attendant. It was no big secret, after all.”

  “Do you think the parking lot fellow had something to do with it?”

  “No, too stupid.”

  “Stupid might be why we ought to look closer at him,” countered Richard. “Sometimes you can learn a great deal from a stupid man.”

  “What's that? Shakespeare?”

  “Scotland Yard.”

  “OK, explain.”

  “Just suppose the attendant spilled some details of when and where someone might catch the judge, thinking the guy just wanted to talk to her.”

  “And suppose he took a few bills for the information? Then the judge turns up missing, possibly raped or killed...”

  “Now he's shitting his pants.”

  She agreed. “He's got to be thinking it's his fault and that he's an accomplice to the crime.”

  Sharpe went to a coffeepot that had been burning too long, poured himself a cup, and asked if she'd like one. She declined with a wave of the hand. He returned to her, sipped at his steaming cup. A well-proportioned man, he had an easy, rolling gait. He continued pacing the room. “We need to send a patrol car around to bring the parking attendant in for questioning.”

  “Do it.”

  Sharpe made the call. After he hung up, he said to Jes
sica, “Maybe it's a jealous old suitor who's nabbed the judge.”

  “How old?” asked Jessica. “How old you think this suitor is, Richard?”

  “I'm not talking old as in age; I mean, an old boyfriend.”

  “Yeah, but how old? How many boyfriends do we have to go back to? Besides, the family is adamant that she was not involved with anyone who could be construed as violent or obsessive, and you met her current boyfriend. Nothing there. From everything we could turn up along those lines, we suspect that if the motive is an obsessive fixation on the judge, it's come from a source the family and likely the judge herself knew nothing of.”

  “You mean like someone who saw her in the media, maybe,” he replied.

  Leaning across her desk, her hands going through her auburn hair as if to assist her thinking, Jessica said, “My suspicion is that either he knew her, so she let her guard down, or he looked harmless.”

  Richard considered this for a moment, his chin propped up by his right hand and elbow on the chair where he now sat across from her in the operations room, the conference table separating them. “But no one she would have had a personal relationship with.”

  “Agreed. The abductor may think he has a relationship with the judge, that in his head, he does have a full-blown relationship with her. Get into that.”

  “You're right on about the media, Jess,” he replied, toying with a pen as he spoke. “They have a name for that sort of thing.”

  “It's called a media fixation,” she filled in. “Some Joe gets it in his head he has a special connection to a news anchor or other TV personality, movie star, or other public figure. Listen, Richard, get hold of any old tapes we have of the judge from media sources.”

  “What'll you be doing in the meantime?”

  “Praying.”

  “Praying?”