Cut to the Bone (Body Farm 8)

Kittredge reached beneath the pages of the yellow pad on which he’d been taking notes and pulled out a folded piece of newsprint — the front page of the News Sentinel.

I felt the ground open beneath my feet when I saw the face in the sketch. I felt the darkness engulf me totally when I heard Kathleen gasp, saw the horror of recognition on her face, and felt her body begin to quake once more.

CHAPTER 40

Satterfield

Soon, thought Satterfield, gripping the tan, waxy cylinder of dynamite with his right hand as he bore down with his left, sliding the serrated blade back and forth with neat, measured strokes across the middle of the eight-inch stick. They’ll be coming soon. Maybe not today, maybe not even tomorrow. But soon.

The News Sentinel lay faceup on the kitchen table beside the cutting board, and Satterfield’s face — only a sketch, but a good likeness, no question about it — stared up at him from the front page. Above it, a headline in inch-high type shrieked, “KPD SEEKS SERIAL-KILLER SUSPECT.”

The one that got away: She’d gone to the cops, all right, and now the net was closing. He’d cursed himself a hundred times for the carelessness and stupidity that had allowed the girl to get away. In addition to the cigarette burn in his palm, he now had a dozen more, on various parts of his body. But when he’d unrolled the newspaper and seen himself — seen that the final clockwork had been set in motion — he’d felt something shift inside himself, and he’d thrown away the cigarettes. Burning himself was a trivial and self-indulgent gesture; it was a waste of time, and he had no time to waste.

He eased up on the blade as the sharp tips of the serrations began grazing the cutting board, etching a razor-thin line across the grain of the maple. A few more feather-light strokes — one, two, three — and the dynamite parted. A few shreds of the waxy wrapping clung to the blade, and Satterfield wiped the knife on his leg to brush them off, careful not to snag the denim.

He laid the knife aside and picked up one of the pieces of dynamite, holding it up to the light to inspect the cross-section. The cut was clean, the small zigzags from the blade’s serrations etched neatly in the soft, glistening explosive, which had the consistency and the sheen of sausage. Holding the half stick to his eye, he sighted along it, as if it were the barrel of a weapon; as if he were taking aim at someone or something — something very near in space or time. Then, reaching across the table with his left, he picked up a slender silver cylinder — an electric blasting cap, the size and shape of a firecracker, with a pair of thin, insulated wires projecting from one end. Centering the blunt, wireless end of the cap on the freshly cut face of the dynamite, he pressed, twisting slightly. As the cap penetrated, Satterfield felt a thrill, as he always did when handling dynamite. The very name — coined by Alfred Nobel himself, from the Greek word “dynamis”—meant “power.” Nobel was a man who understood power — destructive power — and devoted decades to mastering it. Satterfield considered him a role model: a man who’d triumphed through intelligence, vision, and sheer will.

Satterfield pushed back from the kitchen table and stood, then walked into the den and settled into the leather recliner in the center of the room, facing the television. A slight movement caught his eye; in the wire-mesh terrarium, the broad, triangular head of the snake had swiveled in his direction, and the black ribbon of tongue was testing the air, tasting his presence in the room. As the snake’s unblinking, ancient eyes watched, Satterfield lifted the half stick of dynamite and stared at it, then opened his jaws and took it in, wrapping his lips around it as it slid across his tongue and deep into his mouth. When he felt it against the back of his throat, he closed his eyes and lifted his other hand to his face. Clasped them both across his mouth, he imagined the force that would be unleashed when the current raced from the 9-volt battery into the blasting cap, the cap’s small explosion setting off the dynamite’s large one.

This wasn’t how he’d planned or wanted it to end: forced into a corner, his back to the wall. Still, he had to admit, there was relief in knowing that it would be over soon. And there was power in ending things on his own terms; on terms that were — to borrow Nobel’s word — dynamic.

CHAPTER 41

Decker

“Lieutenant! We’ve got a vehicle passing our position, headed toward the house.” The voice, from a spotter positioned at the mouth of the dead-end road, was an urgent whisper in his earpiece, and Lt. Brian Decker, commander of KPD’s SWAT team, snapped to alertness.

“Vehicle’s approaching the suspect’s residence,” added a second voice a half-minute later. Even through the tiny, tinny speaker, there was no mistaking the tension in the whisper from McElroy, the spotter watching the front of the Satterfield house. “Turning into the driveway.”

Decker held up a hand, and the air around him grew electric, the slack boredom on the men’s faces replaced by nervousness and excitement. Like all the men in the SWAT unit, Decker detested waiting — not just because he preferred action, but because waiting dulled a man’s edge, and a dull edge was more dangerous than a sharp one. Decker’s men — two teams, a primary and an emergency, plus a couple of snipers with scoped rifles — had slipped into their positions at 11:00 A.M., expecting to serve the high-risk warrant and take the suspect into custody by noon; one, at the latest. The five-man Primary Team, which would execute the takedown plan once the warrant was signed, lay concealed in the woods just across the road from the residence. Decker and the four others on the Emergency Reactionary Team had crept into closer positions, in the bushes at the east end of the house, so they could storm the front door if the situation suddenly went to shit for some reason.

But things wouldn’t go to shit. Decker felt confident about the takedown plan. A quarter-mile up the road, a truck — a bucket truck labeled KNOXVILLE UTILITIES BOARD, with big KUB logos on the doors — was parked at the mouth of a dirt side road, beneath a power line and transformer, awaiting the green light from Decker. On his signal, the two men in the truck, wearing KUB coveralls, would pull up to the house in the bucket truck and fire up the chain saws, then start hacking branches off the best-looking tree near the power line. If Decker’s own behavior as a property owner was typical — and he felt pretty sure it was — the suspect would come racing out the door, mad as a hornet, by the time the first limb hit the ground. The Primary Team would swarm out of the woods and take him down before he had any inkling what was happening.

The plan was rock solid; bureaucracy was the problem. Noon had come and gone without the warrant, and so had another two hours, as Decker’s spotters had kept watch on a curtain-shrouded house on a dead-end street, where nothing moved except falling leaves, plunking acorns, and a few squirrels. The one consolation was that they had music to pass the time: 1970s rock-and-roll wafted faintly from inside the house — Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon first, followed by Led Zeppelin. Even so, as the autumn leaves had corkscrewed down, Decker’s boredom had spiraled upward. So had his stress, the two contradictory moods rising side by side, like a pair of vultures carried aloft on powerful, parallel updrafts.

The arrival of a vehicle, therefore, was welcome news. It meant that finally something was happening, even if it was just some lost driver turning around at the end of the cul-de-sac.

“Talk to me, Mac.” Decker radioed the spotter, wishing his view wasn’t blocked by the corner of the house. “What kind of vehicle?”

“A piece-of-shit Ford Escort,” McElroy answered. “Held together by pink Bondo and gray primer and Domino’s Pizza signs.”

“He’s ordered a pizza?” Decker rolled his eyes in disgust. He saw his afternoon and evening — his whole life—stretching before him, a vast, unbroken plain of boredom and inactivity. Then he had an inspiration, and switching frequencies, he radioed Captain Hackworth, the watch commander, with a question to which he already knew the answer. “Hey, Cap, has that warrant come through yet?”

“Not yet, Deck.” Hackworth sounded as frustrated as Decker felt. “I told

you, you’ll hear the minute I hear.”

“Question, Cap. We’ve got a pizza delivery going down right now. Can we go in? Call it ‘exigent circumstances’?” It was a legal loophole, an end run around the requirement for a warrant.

There was a pause before Hackworth answered. “Who’s delivering it?”

Decker was puzzled by the question. “Uh, Domino’s,” he said. “What the hell’s that got to do with it?”

“Not the brand, Deck; the person. Man or woman?”

“Oh, sorry. Dunno. Let me find out.” Switching to the team’s frequency, Decker called McElroy. “Hey, Mac. The pizza guy — male guy or female guy?”

“Can’t tell yet,” the spotter replied. “Still in the car. Bad glare and dirty windows.”

Decker switched back to Hackworth. “Don’t know yet, Cap.”

“If it’s a woman,” said Hackworth, “and she goes inside, she might be in imminent danger. That would let you go without the warrant. Risky, though — might turn into a hostage situation. Or worse.”

“Got it.” He switched back to McElroy just as he heard the faint thud of a car door slamming.

“Lieutenant?”

“Go ahead, Mac.”

“The pizza guy? Definitely a guy. Or a chick with one hell of a beard.”

“Got it,” said Decker, feeling both relieved and disappointed at the knowledge that they’d have to sit tight until the warrant came through.