Unnatural Instinct (Instinct thriller series) Page 22

They examined the passage further, and O'Brien said, “I've sent for a Bible scholar, a real expert, a priest to verify this, but God help me if I don't believe this madman has not only buried her alive but buried her strapped to his decaying son, likely in the same coffin.”

  “Christ, how do you get that from this biblical passage?” asked Jessica, feeling ill at the mental image O'Brien had created in her brain, Kim Desinor's sores flashing like red flags in her mind's eye.

  “It comes out of my interpretation of the passage.”

  “Well let's hope you're entirely off base.”

  A knock at the door, and they were joined by a man in the priesthood, a Father Joseph Pinwaring. He looked like the actor Max Von Sydow, and he also looked completely lost and out of place here at the Washington Post. “I am here, Tim, just as you requested,” he said, taking O'Brien's hand and firmly shaking it.

  O'Brien thanked the minister profusely for coming so quickly. They obviously had some history between them. After introductions, the Bible scholar set immediately to work, his dark, piercing eyes instantly fascinated with the selection of Romans 7:24—5.

  “It's a highly unusual citing, even for a clergyman, much less a lay person.”

  He hemmed and hawed and read and reread the selection, trying to place it in the context of the letter, and what he knew of the case from the papers, and from his young friend, O'Brien. “Highly unusual,” he repeated, looking dumbfounded, snatching his wire-rimmed glasses off and cleaning them with a handkerchief. “I'm surprised. It's a passage usually... that is normally left alone... a sleeping dog in the literature, you might say. One of those footnotes we'd all as soon forget.”

  “Really, no kidding, Father. Why do you think I called you down here? None of us knows what to make of it.” O'Brien's remark must have sounded more caustic than he'd intended, as it made the white-haired clergyman stare at him and half grin. “Tim, you were always the boy in the choir I worried most about.”

  Jessica said, “We're all on edge, sir.” She could not believe she was making apology for O'Brien. “You can imagine the frustration since the abduction. It has taken a terrible toll on Tim's pleasant side.”

  Laughing lightly at this, Father Pinwaring seemed to take no offense. He continued on, while nervously pulling at his bearded chin and caressing his throat. He stood as tall as Jessica and had piercing black eyes with multicolored specks that looked like shards of broken glass meant to surprise and dazzle as they reflected any color. “Little is spoken about it,” he softly began, “but the Romans, well known for creating horrid ways to destroy any enemy to the state, refined various methods of impaling and crucifixion. That much is general knowledge, yes?”

  The others nodded almost in unison.

  “But the Romans reserved one method for convicted murderers,” Pinwaring added with a sad shake of the head, his luminous eyes now downcast, taking on a deep sorrow.

  Jessica asked, “And you believe this is what the passage is about?”

  “I do indeed.”

  “And that method of punishment?” asked Jessica.

  “They would strap the murderer to his victim.”

  'Tie the dead man to the living?”

  “Precisely, usually onto the back. Why? So that the poor devil could not possibly undo the decaying dead man or woman from his flesh, and once the dead flesh began to eat away at the living flesh, believe me, the murderer made every attempt to free himself of the 'monkey on his back' because not only did his life depend upon it, so did his sanity and level of pain.”

  “He was literally eaten alive by decay,” added O'Brien.

  “Can't imagine a more horrible way to die,” said Keyes, going pale. She exchanged a look with Jessica, both of them realizing what Kim had been saying all along.

  Jessica, who had seen every kind of evil imaginable, now tried to imagine how Old Man Purdy might exact such a price from Judge Maureen DeCampe. The thought made her want to vomit, but she pushed on, considering O'Brien's take: Bury her alive with Jimmy Lee's rotting corpse. Obviously, O'Brien thought no one would believe him unless his interpretation of the passage was in sync with and supported by a man of the cloth.

  “But then... why did the old man take two coffins from the Huntsville Penitentiary?” Jessica asked.

  “Perhaps he's dug a hole for himself as well, for when it's over,” suggested Keyes.

  O'Brien disagreed. “A hole for himself. Not likely if he's threatening to make Jessica his next victim.”

  “Hence death on my shoulder,” Pinwaring now said. Pinwaring, a stoop-shouldered, once tall man had been made slighter by age. His large chin and long jaw set him apart. He replaced his glasses and again studied the letter and the reference from the Holy Book. He next snatched the glasses off again and punctuated his remarks with the pointed ends. “It's where the phrase monkey on my back originates—the black monkey being the decaying corpse—a euphemism for the most cruel of capital punishment man has ever devised. I mean compare this slow cruelty to a lethal injection or the electric chair. There is no comparison.”

  “But Dr. Keyes here says the passage was about rendering that pound of flesh unto Caesar—that which is his, taxes, all that,” Jessica countered, wanting to believe the old minister wrong.

  “Well... yes.... And that has been a time-worn and I suspect more easily palatable interpretation; unfortunately, the truth of the matter is this is a direct reference to the Roman method of just retribution for murder—an ancient concept even to the Romans—to punish in the manner most fitting.”

  “How's that?” asked Richard Sharpe.

  “In murdering someone, you consign him to the worms— decay. So how should you be punished but by decay? Most people are far more agreeable to the kinder interpretation of this passage, but this version is quite within the realm of the Roman world. Notice it does not refer to it as the law of men nor the law of man, but rather the law of sin.”

  “Yeah, that's what struck me,” agreed Jessica, finding that she liked Pinwaring.

  “Given what I know of original texts—I've studied in Rome—I have to disagree with those who soft-sell the passage. My take on the passage makes the most hardened criminal grimace with the thought of such a horrid punishment: being killed by the decay of a rotting corpse from which you have no hope of escape until you, too, rot to death, but you do it alive. Trust me, being buried alive, able soon to die of asphyxiation, while horrible in itself, is a cakewalk to this sort of end.”

  “God, and I thought all the really bad and horrible stuff was caused by modem-day stressors, the times, alienation, disenfranchisement, big cities, isolation in an uncaring, jaded modern world,” said Sharpe.

  Pinwaring vigorously shook his head. “Those who fail to understand the lessons of the past are doomed to commit its errors over and over, and perhaps those who do understand the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them as well. I'm not sure. Jury is still out on that one, but in the Roman mind, the laws governing murder—the most inescapably despicable act on the planet—were quite simple, really: If you bring on someone else's decay—the pollution of the temple of the soul of another human being—then you repay murder in exact kind. In fact, they believed a murderer paid over and over throughout eternity; that there was no forgiveness for a capital crime, and there was no escaping one's punishment for the greatest crime man can commit.”

  “A far cry from our judicial system today,” complained O'Brien. “Christianity's influence.”

  “Perhaps we need a little more Roman thinking in our courts today,” Jessica agreed. “Can I quote you on that, Jessica?” asked O'Brien. “No, you may not. I've got enough problems left over from the last time you quoted me.”

  “Hey, that story brought our man out, didn't it?” asked O'Brien. “Just as you had hoped, if I don't miss my guess.”

  “No comment.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You realize that if this madman from Iowa is reading his Bible literally, he will interpre
t the passage in the same sense that I have,” said Pinwaring.

  A silence fell over them all. They were left alone with a terrible image and their thoughts.

  Pinwaring added, “While this epistle has been interpreted in various ways throughout biblical history, the particularly pernicious interpretation that troubles you all so greatly now is a viable one for anyone reading the passage. It is perhaps a most twisted version of 'render onto Caesar that which is his'—your very flesh if you are found guilty of the law of ultimate sin. In other words, when convicted of murder in Rome, Caesar exacted a horrifying price. The Roman authorities saw to it that a killer's sinful flesh was baptized in the decay of his victim, and to assure this, the convicted was lashed hand to hand, foot to foot, cheek to cheek, if not to the back. Believe me, the Romans experimented with every conceivable position—some quite crude, to be sure.”

  “Where was this done?”

  “Always out in the sun, in an arena or plaza as an object lesson for the populace.”

  “So barbaric,” said Richard Sharpe.

  The graphologist, Nagby, began to squirm and hold back her last meal. Finally, she jumped up and rushed from the room, threatening to vomit, no doubt in search of the ladies' room.

  “Before there was Nazi Germany, there was Rome,” commented O'Brien. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  Pinwaring sadly added, “I'm afraid your worst fears may be ongoing as we speak, that Judge DeCampe's abductor means to make his victim slowly, painfully, and torturously decay to death via the decaying remains of his son.”

  “It fits with every step he has taken.” Jessica admitted aloud what they were all hopefully thinking: “If she is alive, she must be going insane.”

  Everyone pictured DeCampe still alive, still enduring this horrendous torture. It had only been two days since the abduction.

  The thought of Kim learning the truth frightened her now more than ever. How soon would Kim come to the truth? That DeCampe was indeed alive, yes, but also strapped to a decaying corpse.

  “God, I hope we're wrong,” moaned Shannon Keyes, whom Jessica guessed to be thinking in the same direction as she. “I mean, since the guy's kid was electrocuted in the Texas chair, why wouldn't the old man retaliate in kind? I mean Marsden said the old man had a cattle prod, right? And... and he did use it, didn't he? Used electricity to overpower her. She's likely already been zapped and fried by this SOB.”

  “It would be a merciful alternative to... to slowly decaying to death, lashed to a corpse,” Jessica agreed. Still, she could not get Pinwaring's words out of her head long enough to believe in Keyes's alternative theory, and she guessed that not even Keyes was buying it.

  'To carry out his plan, he has to have a place where he feels safe, at some distance from the rest of the world,” Jessica said aloud. “He's had to vacate Iowa, and he was wily enough to know that it would be the first place we'd descend upon once we learned about his son's recent execution and the part DeCampe played in it, his going there for the body, and taking away two coffins with him. So he's had to have planned out carefully where he is holding Judge DeCampe, and it will have to be an isolated piece of real estate.”

  “Real estate somewhere in the vicinity of D.C.?” asked O'Brien.

  “We suspect so. Listen, we've got to get back to the command post, O'Brien, Father Pinwaring. Give our regards to Dr. Nagby.” Jessica ushered Richard and Shannon out, whispering in Keyes's ear, “No wonder Kim is still suffering psychic hurts.”

  Keyes replied, “DeCampe is still alive and still suffering.”

  “Undergoing Roman justice, I should say,” added Richard.

  “Vengeance.”

  “Unnatural revenge if ever there was.”

  They made their way back to the waiting car. Jessica said, “This means Kim's going to continue to weaken along with DeCampe, should she find out the truth, and perhaps even if she doesn't.”

  “I fear you're right,” Keyes agreed.

  Jessica explained to Richard what had occurred at the hospital with Kim. “Has she any chance of pulling out of it?” he asked.

  “There's always a chance,” she replied.

  Keyes added, “I'm sorry about your friend.”

  “People can die from so-called psychosomatic wounds, can't they?” asked Sharpe.

  “They can... and they have,” replies Keyes.

  Jessica had read of documented cases. Her heart felt like the proverbial dead lump of coal so often referred to—cold and hard. She feared to allow herself to feel, and she feared what her mind proposed.

  FIFTEEN

  Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends.

  —NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

  WHEN Jessica, Richard, and Shannon returned to the operations room, Jessica called the task force together, saying, “It's a new game, people.” Jessica paced the ops room. She told them what had come of the visit to the Washington Post newsroom, cursing under her breath as she finished. “This SOB sold his house through RE/MAX, they tell us from Iowa. The letter to the Post was mailed from Virginia. We're going to concentrate our search in the D.C. area and all around D.C. That's every state surrounding us: Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York. We canvas every RE/MAX realty in the book within a hundred mile radius of D.C.”

  “What about other realtors?” asked one of the team.

  “RE/MAX RE/MAX! That's our connection. Get hold of the 800 RE/MAX number, and put them to work. Chief Gorman in Iowa said his guys had run over a For Sale sign, said it was RE/MAX. Suppose he shopped RE/MAX for his safe location? Suppose he has one of those telephone book-sized available listings through RE/MAX, which he planned to use in Houston but then had to use in our area instead. Suppose the g'damn old fox never left the D.C. area?”

  “Else he had a place here all along,” suggested Keyes. “We should call Iowa back, have them run down if the family had any land holding in the D.C. area.”

  “We'll do that; in the meantime, we have to contact every realtor in the area.”

  “That's a lot of real estate offices to cover,” replied J. T.

  “Lew, get on the police band and ask after any crimes that might have a connection with real estate in any way, shape, or form in the past, say, seventy-two hours.”

  “He could be in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York. We've got to alert authorities in all the surrounding jurisdictions,” said Keyes.

  “Then let's do it. DeCampe is dead if she spends one more night in this man's control. As it is, if Father Pinwaring is correct, she may have already gone insane.”

  “I hope your hunch is right then,” Keyes said, their eyes meeting.

  “I know I'm right. Logically, if he's sold the farm in Iowa, purchased a brand-new, wide-bodied van for the express purpose of committing this crime, then he had no plans to return to Iowa. He had to've taken time to familiarize himself with some close by 'safe place' to take her.”

  “Then we need to check out realtors and real estate sales and rentals—yes, rentals most of all,” Richard Sharpe concurred. Tim O'Brien stood in the doorway and shouted, “We've got experts in real estate on the paper, Jess.”

  “What the hell're you doing here? This is a secure area, O'Brien.”

  “I only want to help.”

  “You only want a story.”

  “Damnit, Jess, don't you think I feel for this woman? After what Pinwaring said? Look, our guys in real estate know the territory from here to Nokesville, believe me. I can get them looking into it. They'd have some good ideas on just how to proceed, who to start with, where to go from there. I can call them. Tell them to concentrate attention on RE/MAX, if you'll let us help. Maybe our guys can unearth something. Who knows? Maybe this guy Purdy put in an ad a month ago in search of a secluded place, or perhaps he saw one in the realty section of the Post.”

  Jessica sighed in response, and saying nothing but saying everything with her body language, she went to Lew Clemmens, who had gone to a computer and was furiously keying
in a search of RE/MAX listings in remote areas around D.C. Meanwhile, all the others, including O'Brien, had taken to the phones, talking to every realtor and realty expert in town.

  “Lew,” Jessica said in her friend's ear, “what about the check on any violence done to anyone in the real estate business the past seventy-two hours?”

  “Our guys at Quantico are running it. Promise to get back pronto.”

  She nodded, breathed heavily, and collapsed in the seat next to Lew, waiting for a hit. “Just on the off chance, have them search for anyone in the realty business who has turned up as Missing Persons, as well.”

  “Gotcha, boss.” Lew gave her a teddy bear smile.

  SOME things no one wanted to ever contemplate, such as the process of decay in one's own body, and so it was with Jessica, but she had to face it if she were to help Judge DeCampe and Kim Desinor. She called on an expert on decay, a forensic anthropologist who stood at the top of the profession, also on the FBI payroll.

  The man was the head of the most bizarre scientific research facility on the face of the earth, a one-of-a-kind place officially called the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, but unofficially known as the Body Farm. And while they did not grow bodies there, they did grow maggots and decay. Everyone in the forensic community knew of the gruesomely genuine “back to nature” open air laboratory created by Dr. Will Bass, who at seventy-two still showed up for work to oversee training of young forensic scientists in the art and science of discovery through time of rot. A lot of jokes abounded about the farm and its creator, who at an early age had felt so incompetent at the task of determining time of death when faced with a corpse that he determined instead to devote his life to the question of how to read decaying bodies for clues. In a case that had embarrassed him, he'd been off time of death by 113 years, when it was determined the body was that of a Civil War veteran whose coffin had been disturbed in error during a disinterment.

  Jessica telephoned the facility only to learn that Bass was in Zurich, lecturing; not surprised by this, she asked for whoever had been left in charge of the farm. Syd Fielding replied that she was talking to the right man. Fielding was one of Bass's disciples. There were some sixty forensic anthropologists who specialized in human degeneration, and Bass had trained two-thirds of them.