The Breaking Point (Body Farm 9)

“Besides,” I went on, “y’all can get prints off whatever’s inside, right? And it’s not like Satterfield’s trying to hide—hell, he’s put his name right here on the envelope. He may have licked the flap, too, which gives you DNA. What more do you want—a video of him sealing and mailing the package?”

“That’d be helpful.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that. Okay, I’m signing off. Gotta go in and make my excuses to Kathleen. See you in twenty?”

“Put it in the back of your truck. Hurry up—but drive slow.”

“Deck, you’re talking to a man who’s never gotten a speeding ticket in his whole life.”

“I’m not worried about you getting a ticket. I’m worried about you going kablooey.”

“You’re talking to a man who’s never gone kablooey, either.”

FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, I EASED DOWN A ONE-LANE driveway and parked beside UT Medical Center’s loading dock, which adjoined the morgue and the East Tennessee Regional Forensic Center. Decker was already there, pacing the loading dock. The KPD cruiser he’d arrived in was parked fifty yards away.

“I see you’re not taking any chances with city property,” I teased as I got out of the truck. When I closed the door, he flinched.

“Gently, Doc, gently!”

I gave him a look. “You think I carried it here on a cushion? Hell, I hit a dozen potholes between the house and here. It’s not gonna blow up if we breathe.” Heading to the back of the truck, I opened the cargo hatch and lifted out a small, heavy box—a fireproof document safe where Kathleen and I stored our passports and wills.

Decker gave the safe an approving nod. “Good thinking.”

“Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while,” I said. I set the safe—gently—on the edge of the concrete loading dock. “The machine’s inside. I’ll be right back.”

The portable x-ray camera was tucked in a corner near the roll-up garage door. It had been bestowed on me by the head of the hospital’s Radiology Department several years before, shortly after I had wheeled a particularly ripe corpse—a floater found in the Tennessee River—into Radiology and had asked a tech to check for bullets. To hear the Radiology folks tell the story—and over the years, I had heard most of them tell it, repeatedly—the entire floor had cleared out the instant the floater and I arrived. “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” the department head liked to say. “Everybody—staff, patients, visitors—flat-out hauling ass out of there. It was like a miracle on steroids. The lame didn’t just walk out of there, they sprinted out.”

Leaving Decker to keep nervous watch on the document safe, I unlocked a steel door, stepped into a dark basement hallway, and pressed a button on the wall to raise the roll-up door. The door rattled and clattered open, like some immense, industrial scale-up of a rolltop desk. My mind flashed to the rolltop desk that had once occupied pride of place in my father’s law office: the lustrous quarter-sawn oak; the small, dark pigeonholes stuffed with fountain pens, inkwells, staplers, magnifying glasses, stamps, sealing wax, whatever. There were no fountain pens or inkwells pigeonholed here, of course, only corpses—as many as half a dozen at any one time—cached in the cooler down the hall, each silently awaiting its turn in the autopsy suite.

Wheeling the x-ray machine out the door and onto the dock, I set a film cassette on the concrete, then opened the safe, removed the envelope, and laid it gingerly atop the film. “You might want to step inside,” I told Decker as I lowered the camera into place. “Unless you want to nuke your boy bits.” He scurried inside, and I set the exposure and the shutter, which had a ten-second delay to allow me to scuttle to safety with my boy bits. Through the doorway, I heard whir-clunk, the distinctive sound of the shutter on the radiation source.

THE MORGUE WAS IN THE BASEMENT—MORGUES always are, in accordance with some unwritten law of the universe—so we had nowhere to go but up. After two flights, I could hear Decker laboring to breathe. “Doesn’t this place have elevators?” he panted.

“Man up,” I said. “It’s only four floors. Besides, don’t you have to take a fitness test every year?”

“Every five,” he gasped. “I’ve got three more years to enjoy being fat and out of shape. Then I diet and exercise like crazy for three months, so I can pass the physical. Then I get to eat and lay around for another four years.”

“Knoxville’s Finest,” I teased. Glancing back as we emerged on the fourth floor, I saw him mopping sweat from his brow. “Deck, my friend, you put the hot in hot pursuit.”

Radiology was just around the corner. The receptionist—Jeanette? no: Lynnette—gave me a sunny smile. “Dr. Brockton! Nice to see you again. How’s business at the Body Farm?”

“Pretty lively,” I said. “People are dying to get in. Lynnette, this is Captain Brian Decker, one of Knoxville’s finest.”

“Hi,” she said. “Actually, it’s Shawnette. Nice to meet you.”

Decker gave her a sweaty wave across the counter.

“Sorry, Shawnette,” I said, my face now as red as Decker’s was. “You got a tech back there who might be able to develop a picture for us?”

“Sure,” she said. “Stacy. Go on back. I’ll tell her you’re coming.”

Stacy—a pale, chubby young woman with a strong East Tennessee accent—met us outside the first radiology suite and held out her hand for the cassette. “Lemme guess,” she said. “You’re lookin’ for another bullet in somebody that’s burned up or fallin’ apart?”

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said. “Just trying to see what’s inside an envelope.”

“And you cain’t just open it?”

“Not sure what would happen if I did. That’s why we’re hoping you can give me a sneak peek, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“You know I don’t care to,” she said, which was an East Tennessee way of telling me she didn’t mind at all. She disappeared into the lab, situated between two of the imaging suites.

Decker and I waited in the hallway for a couple of minutes. Then we heard a signal indicating that she had finished developing the image. The signal was Stacy’s voice, emitting a high, loud shriek.

DECKER SLIT THE ENVELOPE CAREFULLY, THEN tipped the opening down toward the blue surgical pad we’d laid across the tailgate of my truck. A lumpy packet—blue-lined notebook paper, folded several times—slid out. With purple-gloved fingers, Decker eased open the folds one by one until the object inside was revealed.

“Yeah,” he said slowly, “I’d say that’s a human finger, all right.” He picked it up gently and inspected it, then handed it to me.

The finger was small—a child’s finger—severed as neatly at the base as Kathleen’s had been. I stared at it, trying to make sense of it. It had come from Satterfield; I felt no doubt about that. But whose finger was it? How had he come by it? How had he sent it—and why?

The notebook paper wasn’t just a wrapping; it was also a message, in a handwriting that I recognized from prosecution exhibits at Satterfield’s trial. “As token and pledge,” the note read, “I send you this: a finger from my firstborn son. When the time is right, I will bring him to retrieve it, and the two of us will rain down vengeance upon you and your family.”

I handed the note to Decker, the paper rattling from the tremor in my hand. He read it, then looked at me, his face grave. “You ever hear anything about Satterfield having a kid?”

I shook my head, but suddenly I had a sick feeling. “There was a woman,” I said, “at Satterfield’s trial. A weird woman. Most people were looking at him like he was a monster, you know? This woman was different. She was looking at him like he was . . . her hero or beloved or something.”

He nodded. “I’ve heard about women like that. Like rock-star groupies, but instead of singers or drummers, these gals get obsessed with serial killers. It’s a power thing—they’re attracted to all that dark energy or something. Remember Charles Manson? That whole harem he had? All those creepy women in what he called ‘the family?

??”

“I remember,” I said. “And ‘creepy’ is putting it mildly. They all shaved their heads during his trial, right? Carved pentagrams in their foreheads?” I thought for a moment. “Didn’t Ted Bundy have groupies, too?”