Robert Walker - Unnatural Instinct

The old man, if he were inside the bam with the dying judge, must be freaking out by now, expecting a rain of gas and fire. Jessica took some delight in terrifying the old bastard.

All this under a suddenly angry, moonless night, the sky again filled with lightning bolts and clouds, yet no rain. Still, Jessica picked up the scent of ozone in the air. Rain could come at any time, and she hoped it would be a cleansing shower. Or would it be a mourning shower, a rain wake for Maureen?

“ Isaiah Purdy! Federal agents!” shouted Jessica over the I noise they'd created. “Step outside! You are surrounded!” Jessica's order to Isaiah Purdy brought everyone's gun up and ready. “Come out with your hands held high.”

No response.

“ We know you are inside, Purdy!” shouted Keyes.

“ And we know you have the judge,” added Jessica.

“ She has suffered long enough. It's over.”

No response.

Jessica ordered the men beside her with the battering ram to take down the door. They charged it but were repelled, not by bullet fire or resistance, but by give and take. The door was loosely fastened, making a ramming effort nearly impossible.

“ We've wasted too much precious time,” Jessica told Keyes.

“ What're you going to do?” She could see in Jessica's eyes that she meant to do something now.

“ The door is lashed together with some sort of pliable binding. I'm going up and over,” she said, pointing to the window loft overhead. One of the SWAT leaders, seeing what she wanted, without a word sent a grappling hook overhead, and it secured itself to the wood around the loft window, biting into it. “I'll go first,” he said.

Jessica agreed, following up the rope behind the man whose nameplate had read Luther Pratt. Three-fourths of the way up the rope, Jessica felt the vibration of the explosive that sent Luther hurling into her and almost knocking her off the rope. Luther fell to the ground in agony, his face splintered by the homemade device that meant to keep them out. The device seemed to have touched off a fire as well, for now the cracks all about the doorway and the walls were alight with a blazing interior.

Jessica pulled herself up and up. Keyes cried out to her, “Be careful! There's a fire inside!”

Jessica only half saw an explosion at the house, where the second team, led by Santiva, stormed the home. The house had been booby-trapped, and the men had rushed in too quickly, the result a blazing inferno. Wherever Isaiah Purdy was at this moment, it looked as if the old man meant to go out in a blaze of glory, to die in a fire of his own making, taking Jimmy Lee's and Maureen DeCampe's and possibly Nancy Willis's remains with him.

From Jessica's vantage point at the window loft now, she saw someone being carried out of the flaming house and across the yard. Keyes looked to where Jessica's eyes had gone, and now she, too, took in what Jessica had witnessed. It appeared someone in the second team had been as hurt as Luther, if not more so. Below her, Jesssica saw that Luther appeared stunned, the wind knocked from him, bums on hands and face, but the man was fending off any help-a good sign.

Keyes shouted, “The old monster's not going down without a battle.”

Jessica clawed her way through the window loft, and for a moment, feeling the growing heat inside, she felt paralyzed on hearing a scream that made her blood solidify. The scream wafted across from the house, the sound shattering Jessica's nerve as it sounded like Richard Sharpe's voice-a second injury at the house. Jessica hoped she was wrong.

“ Damn… booby traps everywhere,” Shannon cursed. Keyes now stared up at the frozen Jessica, and she paced in a little circle, unsure what to say, how to begin to urge her friend and colleague on, fearful Jessica might be hurt next.

When Jessica disappeared from the window, making her way into the interior of the loft, Shannon Keyes racked her brain for how to keep the maniac in the bam distracted, to hopefully help Jessica out. Other SWAT team members took Luther Pratt's place, climbing up after Jessica.

There were no guarantees, but for now, Jessica needed all the help she could get. Maybe some noise at this point would help greatly, so Keyes loudly said, “We know you're in there, Mr. Purdy! And it's time you gave it up. I'm a doctor with the authorities, and we know you are in need of help. Now, I'm not discounting how brilliant, how ingenious you must be, to execute the abduction and this plan of vengeance. Fact is, I admire your cunning, your superior intelligence, but I know it all started when your wife died.” She paused for an answer, but none came.

“ We know how you so lovingly buried Eunice with a biblical passage, Mr. Purdy… Mr. Purdy…” She worked to play on the old man's last, perhaps final concern in this life. “We know you want to do right by your son, Jimmy Lee, sir.”

Keyes feared she was getting nowhere, and that time was running out along with her delaying strategies. Words came more haltingly as her nerves increased. Still, she somehow kept speaking extemporaneously through the stout wooden doors, continuing to engage the old man's attention, to direct it at her and away from Jessica.

“ I mean, you have devised the perfect punishment for Judge DeCampe-let her rot! Great idea, Mr. Purdy. I'd love to talk to you about where you got the idea of strapping your victim to your son's rotting corpse.”

Finally, a response came back in a gruff male voice from the other side of the door. “You people know about how Mother died? She pined away for years. Died a broken woman, died over what they done to Jimmy Lee, her only child.”

Keyes took in a deep breath of air, realizing she had struck a nerve. “We know everything, Mr. Purdy. It's our job. But we don't know why you chose such a… this method of punishment for Judge DeCampe. Tell me, was it your idea, or was it Jimmy Lee's?”

“ You said you knowed everything, ha! Whataya really know?”

“ I know the passage in the Bible that told you what to do. Did Jimmy Lee stumble on it while he was in prison? Please, it's personal with me now. I gotta know, Mr. Purdy… I just have to know.”

“ You the one wrote them awful things about me in the newspapers?”

“ No, no, that was a colleague of mine, and she was taken off the case. Now, tell me, Mr. Purdy… was it Jimmy Lee who told you to do all this? Did he come up with the idea after he-you know-got religion, right?”

“ He come across't it, yes… but was guided to it, actually. Guided by God's own hand, he was.”

Figures, she thought, but she said, “God… really? Can you tell me, sir, exactly how God contacted Jimmy Lee?” How did He find him in a Texas prison? she wondered.

The old man began to elucidate loudly and sternly, sounding like an Iowa preacher now. She had gotten the desired effect, hoping he would be distracted from the movement of the SWAT team and Jessica now in the loft overhead.

Jessica had by this time cautiously moved across the loft overhead. She could clearly hear the old man spouting off about God's will be done… thankful that Keyes had engaged Purdy so thoroughly. Still, she could not see the old man from her vantage point. She cautiously moved forward, now coming into a line of vision that clearly informed her as to exactly what had happened to the realtor, Nancy Willis. The dead woman lay like wood in the middle of the bam with a three-pronged pitchfork nailing her to the ground; a purplish pool of blood discolored the hay-littered ground around her. Neither movement nor sound came from her, but a sickening, animal keening began to rise in crescendo, coming from somewhere out of Jessica's sight, no doubt