Robert Walker - Unnatural Instinct

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.

Jessica got right to the point, telling Dr. Fielding what they were faced with in the DeCampe kidnapping. He was appalled at the idea of someone being strapped to “one of those bodies we have in the field in advanced stage of decay.”

“ We fear the worst for good reason, sir. I need to know what kind of time we have left. If I bring you everything we have on when she disappeared and where we suspect she is, and the distances, times for both her and the body she's strapped to, maybe we can have some idea how much time she has left.”

“ Of course, we'll do all that we can here. You know if it has to do with decay, this is the place to ask your questions. How soon can you be here?”

“ I have a helicopter standing ready and have been cleared for the trip ASAP.”

“ We'll keep the facility open late then; you'll want to come to the main building. The pilot will know where to land.”

They hung up, and Jessica rushed to the waiting helicopter atop FBI headquarters. She'd hugged and kissed Richard good-bye, asking him, “Please, keep me abreast of any new developments, Richard. Don't hesitate to call.”

She then waved to Keyes and J. T., who had walked up with them. The trio stood on the shoulder of the helipad and waved her off.

An hour and a half later, Jessica heard the pilot's voice break into her sleep; having had no sleep for twenty-four hours, she'd nodded off to the hum of the rotors. “We're on approach for the Body Farm. Thought you'd want to be awake now,” he told her. “There.”

She shook off the drowsiness and saw that Pilot Marks was pointing ahead of them. She followed his gesture down to die ground, to a two-acre patch of dense woods-mostly thick oak, maple, and sycamore-the canopy thick and impenetrable. It was all one big swelling or hillside, bracketed on all sides by a stockade-style fence, large even from here, likely ten feet high. Overlaying the spikes of this stockade, a razor wire mesh meant to keep the dead in and the living out.