Robert Walker - Unnatural Instinct

They stepped into a private conference room, where Richard Sharpe stood and pulled out a seat for Jessica and then for Shannon.

O'Brien introduced himself and his city editor, a man named AL Cirillo, and he then proceeded to introduce them all to Carolyn Nagby, who might have looked comfortable behind a desk at any library. She was O'Brien's expert handwriting analysis person, a graphologist. Using a magnifying glass, she was scanning the letter still under glass. “No one's been allowed to touch the letter, not since the moment I realized what I had,” O'Brien told them.

On viewing the letter, both the one under glass and its blowup counterpart thrown against a wall by an overhead projector, Jessica learned the author wanted to say a good deal more than how dare they. Keyes wryly said, “Says here, Jessica, that you're a harlot, a jezebel, the daughter of Cain, a coward who wouldn't dare call him a sex pervert to his face.” The letter threatened that Jessica Coran would be his next victim for slandering him, for making him out to be a sexual deviant.

In the letter, the writer revealed a great deal of himself, Nagby told the others. Then the expert in graphology added, “He makes a number of biblical references before getting down to his immediate message: an eye for an eye, and a notation on Romans 7:24-5.”

“ Romans 7:24-5. Somebody get me a Bible, now!” said Jessica.

“ We've already run it down,” said O'Brien. “Having been raised on the Bible, I thought I recognized it. Let me tell you, it's scary to contemplate what this woman must be going through with this guy as her keeper.” He lifted a large Bible and pushed it down the length of the table to Jessica. “I keep it at the office for just such occasions.”

Jessica and Shannon saw that it was opened to Romans, and each found the passage, and O'Brien said in his most booming voice, sounding like a minister, “This is from the epistles of Paul, written to the saints in Rome around a. D. 57.”

“ I know the passage,” said Shannon Keyes. She then read it aloud: “ 'Oh unhappy and pitiable and wretched man that I am! Who will release and deliver me from this body of death that is my shackle? Oh, thank God! Whose will is won through Jesus Christ, the Anointed, our Lord! So then indeed I, of myself with the mind and heart, serve the Law of God, but with the flesh, the law of sin.' “

“ What the hell does that mean?” asked Jessica. “Serve the law of sin?”

Keyes explained its significance and meaning. 'It seems benign enough,” she began, “but it has had conflicting interpretations.”

“ I'll say,” added O'Brien.

“ Most interpretations sugarcoat it,” agreed Shannon.

Jessica repeated the last phrase, “ '… but with the flesh, the law of sin.' What is the literal meaning of that? What does that mean. Shannon?”

“ Render unto Caesar.”

“ Yeah, I get it, but I thought they were talking about taxes.”

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.”