The Breaking Point (Body Farm 9)

Standing there at the end of the driveway—one hand clutching the envelope, the other still holding the tab on the mailbox door, which I’d noticed was ajar when I’d walked out to retrieve the newspaper—I wheeled and scanned in all directions, as if Satterfield might somehow have slipped through the bars of his cell and returned to haunt us.

Apart from the alarms shrieking in my head, it was an idyllic Sunday morning in a pretty, woodsy neighborhood. A few doors down the street, a dad in shorts and T-shirt jogged alongside a small bicycle, which a girl who looked about Tyler’s age was pedaling proudly. “Good job,” the dad praised. “Pretty soon you’ll be too fast—I won’t be able to keep up!” Behind me, in the small park across the street from our house, a young mother—the bicyclist’s mom?—was pushing a swing, evoking burbles of delight from the toddler cradled in the seat. My quiet street, shaded by maples and hemlocks, was the very picture of suburban safety and tranquility. It had been, that is, until I’d seen—until I’d silently said—the name on the envelope in my hand.

Tucking the package back in the mailbox, I fished my cell phone from my jeans. Scrolling through my contacts, I found Brian Decker’s name and pressed “call.” After four rings he still hadn’t picked up, and I began mentally composing a voice mail—one I hoped would sound more rational than I felt—but on the fifth ring he answered. “This is Captain Decker,” he said.

“Deck, it’s Bill Brockton,” I said.

“Hey, Doc. How the hell are you? Haven’t talked to you in way too long.” He sounded pleased to hear from me, but there was an understandable undertone of sadness in his voice, too.

Decker headed the Knoxville Police Department’s SWAT team. We’d met twelve years before, at the end of Nick Satterfield’s string of sadistic serial killings, when Decker arrived at my house just in time to help keep Satterfield from murdering my family and me.

“Deck, can you check on a prisoner for me?” The words rushed out without preamble. “Make sure he’s still in custody?”

“Sure, Doc. City, county, state, or federal?”

“State. South Central Correctional Facility. In Clifton.”

“Ah,” he said. “Prisoner’s name wouldn’t happen to be Satterfield, would it?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

He knew because no one understood Satterfield’s menace better than Decker, whose own brother had died while searching Satterfield’s house for booby traps. I heard a deep breath on the other end of the line. “You sound spooked, Doc. What’s going on?”

“I’m standing at my mailbox, Deck. There’s an envelope here—a padded envelope—with a return address that just says ‘Satterfield.’ Nothing but the name.”

“Shit—don’t open it!” I’d never heard alarm in Decker’s voice before, but I was hearing it now, loud and clear.

“Okay, I won’t open it.”

“Put it down—very gently—and get away from it.”

“You think it’s a bomb?”

“The guy has a thing for explosives.”

“He has a thing for snakes, too,” I reminded him, “but I don’t think this envelope has room for either a bomb or a boa constrictor. Anthrax or ricin, maybe. But it’s probably just a hateful letter. What I want to know—besides is the guy still behind bars—is how the hell he got this to me?”

Decker didn’t speak for a moment; in the background, I heard computer keys clattering. “Hang on. I’m checking on him.” More clattering. “Well, according to this—the state’s Felony Offender Information database—he’s still there. And I sure haven’t heard anything about an escape. Which I would have. And so would you. ‘Serial killer breaks free’? You know the media would go nuts over that.”

He had a point there, I had to admit. “So how was he able to send this to me? Can convicted killers just mail stuff to anybody they please?”

“Unfortunately, yeah,” he said. “There are a few rules, but they’re pretty minimal. Basically, inmates aren’t supposed to send threats to victims or victims’ families.”

“Wait. Did you say ‘rules’? And ‘supposed to’? The system assumes a serial killer’s gonna play by the rules for good mail manners?”

“Sounds lame,” he conceded. “But there’s a safety net, sort of. If the warden thinks a piece of mail poses a threat, he can have it opened. But that requires a bunch of paperwork, and prison wardens probably have enough paperwork already, without creating more for themselves. Still, Satterfield’s no ordinary prisoner, and the warden would know that the two of you aren’t exactly pen pals.” There was a pause, then: “It’s Sunday. Did you not check your mail yesterday?”

“I did,” I said, the realization—no mail on Sundays—hitting me for the first time as I checked for a postmark. “Shit. This wasn’t mailed. This was hand delivered.”

“Listen, Doc, the safest thing would be to get the bomb squad over there.”

“That would freak Kathleen out,” I said. “I don’t even want her to know about this, much less think it’s about to blow our house to smithereens.”

“So take her out for brunch. Stay gone for a couple hours, let the guys check it out, then we give you a call once we’re gone.”

“And the neighbors wouldn’t notice a thing, right?” I pictured the series of scared

and angry phone calls we’d get. “She’d be twice as mad at me—first for tricking her, then for upsetting everybody in Sequoyah Hills.”

“Well, we gotta do something with it, Doc. And you damn sure shouldn’t just tear into it. What do you suggest?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the dad and the girl on the bike looping back toward me, thirty yards away and closing fast. “Hang on just a sec,” I said to him, then took a casual step sideways, putting my body between the envelope and the child. Decker was right; we had to do something, and fast—get the package out of the neighborhood, away from innocent bystanders. “I’ll take it to the forensic center,” I told him after they had passed. “We’ve got a portable x-ray machine; I can wheel it outside, onto the loading dock, and shoot an x-ray. If it shows any wires, I’ll call the bomb guys. If it doesn’t, I can take it inside and open it under an exhaust hood, in case it’s some sort of nasty powder.”

“I don’t like this,” Decker grumbled.

“I don’t like it either,” I said. “But the less fuss the better. Like I said, it’s probably just a hateful letter.”

“Then how come it’s not in a regular envelope?” I didn’t have a good answer for that. “Let me come get you, Doc.”

“Just meet me at the forensic center, Deck.”

“I’m on my way,” he said. “How soon can you be there?”

“I’ll leave right now. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” I thought about how to explain my abrupt departure. “I’ll tell Kathleen the M.E. needs me to come look at a skull fracture.”

“Hurry up, but be careful, Doc. Don’t handle it any more than you have to. I don’t suppose you’re wearing gloves?”

“Come on, Deck. Do you put on gloves when you go to the mailbox? Does the mailman wear gloves? The mail sorters?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he groused.