Cut to the Bone (Body Farm 8)

Satterfield was counting on the truck being seen — specifically, being seen by the lady of the house. He’d spent hours preparing it to be seen: spraying the horizontal stripes of blue and gold along both sides and across the back — the stripes were the easy part — then, using the stencils he’d cut, adding the BellSouth name and logo. As always, he’d worked meticulously, and although the signage wasn’t perfect, he believed it would fool anyone but an actual BellSouth worker… and he knew it would fool a woman looking out the window of a Sequoyah Hills home: a privileged woman; a woman accustomed to having men in work vans show up to attend to her lawn and her TV cable and her telephone lines.

Angling across the lawn, he headed for the end of the house farthest from the driveway — the end where the phone line ran from the street to the service box on the outside of the house. As he walked, Satterfield glanced occasionally at a clipboard he carried in one hand. In his other hand he carried a telephone — one of the handsets from his cordless home phone — and he pretended to be carrying on a conversation. Every few steps, he nodded his head, as if listening intently, then uttered a terse, technical-sounding phrase, in case the woman in the house was watching and listening. “It could be the capacitor in the sub-relay,” he said into the phone. “It’s not quite up to specs. Voltmeter’s showing only 17 ohms.” He nodded again, striding purposefully, almost to the corner now. “Naw, the junction-box circuits all check out fine. Could be a bad ground, though.” There: He’d rounded the corner of the house, apparently unnoticed. A few feet along the wall, just beyond the electricity meter, was a gray plastic box, not much bigger than a book, its front embossed with the BellSouth logo. Satterfield took a screwdriver from the tool belt he was wearing and unscrewed a single screw, then unsnapped the latch and swung the cover open. Inside was a tangle of thin, brightly colored wires — blue, white, red, yellow, green — just like the ones he’d seen when he’d studied the box on his own house. He left those alone, and reached instead for the wide, flat cable, which he unclipped, disconnecting the house from the outside world — from help — as simply as disconnecting a phone from a wall. So easy, he marveled.

He crossed the grassy front yard to the center of the house and trotted up the brick steps, then rang the doorbell and listened. When he heard footsteps inside, he made a show of flipping through the forms on the clipboard. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the curtain beside the door move slightly, then felt eyes on his face and his clipboard, his counterfeit BellSouth badge, and his counterfeit BellSouth shirt. He assumed the eyes were noticing the counterfeit BellSouth van at the curb, too. They must have, for he heard the snick of a dead bolt, followed by the squeak of rubber weather stripping as the door swung off the sill and opened a foot. “Yes?” Her voice was tight; was she scared, or was she just annoyed at being called to the door on a Saturday morning?

“Good morning…” He glanced down at the clipboard, then back up at her face. No bombshell, but not bad looking at all. “… Ms. Brockton.”

“Yes?”

“Wayne Taylor, BellSouth. Sorry to bother you, ma’am, but we’ve had some reports of rolling service outages along your street. You noticed any trouble on your line today?”

“Today? No. I used the phone an hour ago. It was fine.”

“Hmm,” he said, sounding puzzled. “I just touched base with the central office, and they say the computer says your line’s cutting in and out. Intermittently. Would you do me a favor and just check for a dial tone real quick? I’d hate to have you find out your line’s dead after I’m already gone. Might be Monday or Tuesday before we could come back.” He gave her a friendly, apologetic smile.

“I didn’t even know you guys worked on weekends.” She sounded less guarded now.

“We don’t, in most neighborhoods, you know? Problem like this in East Knoxville? We’d get to it in a month or two.” He chuckled knowingly; conspiratorially; as if to say, Nice to be rich white folks, huh? “I’ll just wait out here while you check it.”

She shrugged, then nodded. “Okay, I’ll be right back.” She closed the door; after a beat, he heard the dead bolt slide into place — slowly, almost sneakily, as if she didn’t want him to know she was locking the door. He smiled at that. Thirty seconds later, her footfalls returned and the door opened again, a little quicker and a little wider this time. “Well, you’re right,” she said. “The computer’s right. There’s no dial tone. Did you say everybody on the street is having problems? Wouldn’t that mean it’s somewhere farther up the line? A substation or transformer or whatever you call it?”

“You’d think so, but it’s not that simple. You get trouble in one house — a short, some kind of interference — and it can run right up the line, cause a ripple effect, knock out a whole block.” He shook his head in an expression of good-natured exasperation. “You mind if I run a quick check on your wiring?”

She frowned. “How long will it take? I need to leave in half an hour.”

“Oh, I should be long gone by then,” he said. “I don’t need much time. Five minutes, maybe ten.”

“Okay, come on in.” She stepped back and swung the door wide.

That’s right, Satterfield thought, stepping across the threshold and into the living room. You have to invite me in the first time. “Do you know where all your jacks are, ma’am?”

“There’s probably one in every room, isn’t there?”

“Not necessarily, a house this old. How long have y’all been here?”

“Not long. Not quite three years.”

“Added any more lines or jacks since then?”

“No.”

“Well, show me the jacks you know about, and I’ll see what I find.”

She nodded, then pointed to a cordless-phone base station on an end table beside a sofa. “The jack for that’s behind the sofa.” She turned and went into the dining room, scanning the baseboards. Satterfield watched her walk. She was wearing sweatpants — baggy in the legs, but snug across her ass. Nice ass, for a woman pushing forty, he thought. Running? StairMaster? She disappeared around a corner. He followed, and found himself in a large kitchen, with a wooden table and four chairs. On the table was a dirty plate — crusts of toasted bread, smears of jam, a few bits of egg, a greasy knife and fork. “There’s one,” she said, pointing to a wall phone with an extra-long cord, its coils kinked and twisted together.

Next, she led him down a hallway to a pair of bedrooms — a sparsely furnished guest room first, then what was clearly the master bedroom, big and lived-in and rumpled. The doorway faced the bed, which was loosely made; a quilt was pulled up crookedly, and four pillows were piled against the headboard. A pair of nightstands flanked the bed. One, obviously hers, was crammed: a stack of books, another of magazines; bottles and tubes of lotion; a fragile-looking antique lamp, trimmed with teardrops of crystal, its frilly shade made of something that looked like silk. The other nightstand held a digital alarm clock, a pair of toenail clippers, a simple wooden lamp with a paper shade, and a phone in a charging cradle. “That’s another cordless,” she said, “but there’s a jack down in that corner.”

He nodded, then glanced around the room, taking in the details: a tall chest of drawers and a low, wide dresser, its marble top strewn with bracelets and necklaces. In the far corner stood a tall wooden coat tree, a half-dozen hooks hung with jackets and bathrobes — a big robe of navy-blue terrycloth, a smaller one of powder-blue satin, with a matching satin belt hanging from one loop of the robe, stretching almost to the floor. “Any other jacks in this room?” Satterfield strolled toward the coat tree as he said it, pretending to check the baseboards. “Sometimes a big room like this’ll have a couple jacks in it.” His eyes were locked on the belt

. So easy, he thought again.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But there are a couple in the basement. I’ll show you those, then I’ll get out of your way and let you work.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll check the basement first, work my way back up. Basements cause a lot of the problems I see. Basements and squirrels.” He turned away from the shimmering robe. It would still be there when he returned. Meanwhile, he could imagine ways to put the satin belt to good use.

As he followed her to the bedroom door, he reached out and snagged an object off the tall chest of drawers — a pocketknife. He could put that to good use, too.

* * *

Satterfield was directly beneath the master bedroom, in what appeared to be a teenage boy’s room — piles of jeans and socks and T-shirts strewn everywhere; the bed unmade; posters of swimsuit models on the walls. He could hear the woman overhead, opening drawers and walking around her bedroom, as he poked idly through the boy’s belongings. He imagined her changing clothes: tugging off the sweatpants and the shirt, naked underneath; slipping on panties, cupping her breasts into a bra. Victoria’s Secret, or granny panties and a boob-sling? Probably somewhere in between, he guessed, based on her body — tight, but not flashy.

When he heard the sound of her footsteps leaving the bedroom, he headed upstairs, taking time for a quick look at the basement rec room and garage, so he’d have the entire layout in his head. Jogging up the stairs toward the kitchen, he called out, “Ma’am? Hello?”

“Yes?” She was at the sink, rinsing the bits of egg and toast into the garbage disposal. A tennis racket lay on the wooden table, and she was wearing a sweater and a short skirt and tennis shoes. Her legs looked freshly shaved, and the muscles in her calves and thighs looked chiseled—cut, he thought, pleased by the double entendre.