Cut to the Bone: A Body Farm Novel

CHAPTER 1

Tugging the battered steel door of the office tight against the frame — the only way to align the lock — I gave the key a quick, wiggling twist. Just as the dead bolt thunked into place, the phone on the other side of the door began to ring. Shaking my head, I removed the key and turned toward the stairwell. “It’s Labor Day,” I called over my shoulder, as if the caller could hear me. “It’s a holiday. I’m not here.”

But the phone nagged me, scolding and contradicting me, as if to say, Oh, but you are. I wavered, turning back toward the door, the key still in my hand. Just as I was about to give in, the phone fell silent. “Thank you,” I said and turned away again. Before I had time to take even one step, the phone resumed ringing. Somebody else was laboring on Labor Day, and whoever it was, they were damned determined to reach me.

“All right, all right,” I muttered, hurrying to unlock the bolt and fling open the door. “Hold your horses.” Leaning across the mounds of mail, memos, and other bureaucratic detritus that had accumulated over the course of the summer, I snatched up the receiver. “Anthropology Department,” I snapped. The phone cord snagged a stack of envelopes, setting off an avalanche, which I tried — and failed — to stop. I’d been without a secretary since May; a new one was scheduled to start soon, but meanwhile, I wasn’t just the department’s chairman; I was also its receptionist, mail sorter, and answering service, and I was lousy at all of those tasks. The envelopes hit the floor and fanned out beneath the desk. “Crap,” I muttered, then, “Sorry. Hello? Anthropology Department.”

“Good mornin’, sir,” drawled a country-boy voice that sounded familiar. “This is Sheriff Jim Cotterell, up in Morgan County.” The voice was familiar; I’d worked with Cotterell on a murder case two years before, a few months after moving to Knoxville and the University of Tennessee. “I’m trying to reach Dr. Brockton.”

“You’ve got him,” I said, my annoyance evaporating. “How are you, Sheriff?”

“Oh, hey there, Doc. I’m hangin’ in; hangin’ in. Didn’t know this was your direct line.”

“We’ve got the phone system programmed,” I deadpanned. “It puts VIP callers straight through to the boss. What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

“We got another live one for you, Doc. I mean, another dead one.” He chuckled at the joke, one I’d heard a hundred times in a decade of forensic fieldwork. “Some fella was up on Frozen Head Mountain yesterday, fossil hunting — that’s what he says, leastwise — and he found some bones at a ol’ strip mine up there.”

I felt a familiar surge of adrenaline — it happened every time a new forensic case came in — and I was glad I’d turned back to answer the phone. “Are the bones still where he found them?”

“Still there. I reckon he knew better’n to mess with ’em — that, or he didn’t want to stink up his jeep. And you’ve got me and my deputies trained to leave things alone till you show up and do your thing.”

“I wish my students paid me as much mind, Sheriff. Have you seen the bones? You sure they’re human?”

“I ain’t seen ’em myself. They’re kindly hard to get to. But my chief deputy seen ’em yesterday evening. Him and Meffert — you remember Meffert? TBI agent? — both says it’s human. Small, maybe a woman or a kid, but human for sure.”

“Meffert? You mean Bubba Hardknot?” Just saying the man’s name — his two names, rather — made me smile. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent assigned to Morgan County had a mouthful of a name — Wellington Harrison Meffert II — that made him sound like a member of Parliament. His nickname, on the other hand—“Bubba Hardknot”—sounded like something from a hillbilly comic strip. The names spanned a wide spectrum, and Meffert himself seemed to, also: I’d found him to be intelligent and quick-witted, but affable and respectful among good old boys like Sheriff Cotterell. “Bubba’s a good man,” I said. “If he says it’s human, I reckon it is.”

“Me and Bubba, we figured there weren’t no point calling you out last night,” Cotterell drawled on. “Tough to find your way up that mountain in the damn daylight, let alone pitch dark. Besides, whoever it is, they ain’t any deader today’n what they was last night.”

“Good point, Sheriff.” I smiled, tucking away his observation for my own possible future use. “Couldn’t’ve said it better myself.” I checked my watch. “It’s eight fifteen now. How’s about we — my assistant and I — meet you at the courthouse around nine forty-five?”

“Bubba and me’ll be right here waitin’, Doc. ’Preciate you.”

Tyler Wainwright, my graduate assistant, was deep in thought — figuratively and subterraneanly deep — and didn’t even glance up when I burst through the basement door and into the bone lab.

Most of the Anthropology Department’s quarters — our classrooms, faculty offices, and graduate-student cubbyholes — were strung along one side of a long, curving hallway, which ran beneath the grandstands of Neyland Stadium, the University of Tennessee’s massive temple to Southeastern Conference football. The osteology laboratory lay two flights below, deep beneath the stadium’s lowest stands. The department’s running joke was that if Anthropology was housed in the stadium’s bowels, the bone lab was in the descending colon. The lab’s left side — where a row of windows was tucked just above a retaining wall, offering a scenic view of steel girders and concrete footers — was occupied by rows of gray, government-surplus metal tables, their tops cluttered with trays of bones. A dozen gooseneck magnifying lamps peered down at the bones, their saucer-sized lenses haloed by fluorescent tubes. The lab’s cavelike right side was crammed with shelving units — row upon row of racks marching back into the sloping darkness, laden with thousands of cardboard boxes, containing nearly a million bones. The skeletons were those of Arikara Indians who had lived and died two centuries before; my students and I had rescued them from rising river reservoirs in the Great Plains. Now they resided here in this makeshift mausoleum, a postmortem Indian reservation beneath America’s third-largest football stadium.

Tyler laid down the bone he’d been scrutinizing and picked up another, still not glancing up as the steel door slammed shut behind me. “Hey, Dr. B,” he said as the reverberations died away. “Let me guess. We’ve got a case.”

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“A,” he said, “it’s a holiday, which means nobody’s here but me and you and a bunch of dead Indians. B, any time the door bangs open hard enough to make the stadium shake, it’s because you’re really pumped. C, you only get really pumped when UT scores a touchdown or somebody calls with a case. And D, there’s no game today. Ergo, you’re about to haul me out to a death scene.”

“Impressive powers of deduction,” I said. “I knew there was a reason I made you my graduate assistant.”

“Really? You picked me for my powers of deduction?” He pushed back from the lab table, revealing a shallow tray containing dozens of pubic bones, each numbered in indelible black ink. “I thought you picked me because I work like a dog for next to nothing.”

“See?” I said. “You just hit the deductive nail on the noggin again.” I studied his face. “You don’t sound all that excited. Something wrong?”

“Gee, let’s see,” he said. “My girlfriend’s just moved four hundred miles away, to Memphis and to med school; I’ve blown off two Labor Day cookouts so I can finally make some progress on my thesis research; and now we’re headed off to God knows where, to spend the day soaking up the sun and the stench, so I can spend tonight and tomorrow sweating over the steam kettle and scrubbing bones. What could possibly be wrong?”

“How long’s Roxanne been gone?”

“A week,” he said.

“And how long does medical school last?”

“Four years. Not counting internship and residency.”

“Oh boy,” I said. “I can tell you’re gonna be a joy to be around.”

The big clock atop the Morgan County Courthouse read 9:05 when Tyler and I arrived in Wartburg and parked. “Damn, we made good time,” I marveled. “Forty minutes? Usually takes an hour to get here from Knoxville.”

Tyler glanced at his watch. “Sorry to burst your bubble, but it’s actually nine thirty-seven. I’m guessing that’s one of those clocks that’s right twice a day.”

“Come to think of it,” I recalled, “seems like it was nine oh five two years ago, too, when I was here on another case.”

The stuck clock seemed right at home atop the Morgan County Courthouse, a square, two-story brick structure built back in 1904, back when Wartburg still hoped for a prosperous future. The building’s boxy lines were broken by four pyramid-topped towers — one at each corner — and by a graceful white belfry and cupola rising from the building’s center. Each side of the cupola — north, south, east, and west — proudly displayed a six-foot dial where time stood still. I suspected that it wasn’t just eternally 9:05 in Wartburg; I suspected that it was also, in many respects, still 1904 here. Sheriff James Cotterell, who stood leaning against the fender of the Ford Bronco parked behind the courthouse, would certainly have looked at home perched on a buckboard wagon, or marching in a Civil War regiment. Special Agent Meffert, on the other hand — one foot propped on the bumper — was a different matter. I could picture Meffert wearing a Civil War uniform, too, I realized, but Bubba’s eyes somehow had a 1992 knowingness to them; a look that — Civil War uniform notwithstanding — would have branded Bubba as a modern-day reenactor, not a true time traveler.

I made the briefest and most perfunctory of introductions: “Sheriff Cotterell, Agent Meffert, this is my assistant, Tyler Wainwright”—and then Tyler and I followed the lawmen out of town and up a winding mountain highway, parking on the shoulder at a narrow turnoff. There, we transferred our field kit into the back of the sheriff’s Bronco, a four-wheel-drive vehicle with enough ground clearance to pass unimpeded over a knee-high tree stump. The road to the strip mine was far too rough for my UT truck, Cotterell had assured me, and Meffert had agreed. Once we turned off the winding blacktop and into the pair of ruts leading up to the mine, I realized how right they’d been: I saw it with my jouncing eyes, and felt it in my rattling bones.

Cotterell and Meffert rode up front; Tyler and I sat in the back like prisoners, behind a wire-mesh screen, as the Bronco lurched up the mountain. “Last time I had a ride this rough,” Tyler shouted over the whine of the transmission and the screech of clawing branches, “I was on the mechanical bull at Desperado’s, three sheets to the wind. I hung on for twenty seconds, then went flying, ass over teakettle. Puked in midair — a comet with a tail of vomit.”

“If you need to puke now, son,” Cotterell hollered back, “give me a heads-up. You ain’t got no window cranks nor door handles back there.”

“I’m all right,” Tyler assured him. “Only had two beers for breakfast today.” He was probably joking, but given how morose he seemed over his girlfriend’s move to Memphis, he might have been telling the truth.

Eventually the Bronco bucked to a stop beside a high, ragged wall of stone, and the four of us staggered out of the vehicle. The shattered surface beneath our feet might have been the surface of the moon, if not for the kudzu vines and scrubby trees. “Watch your step there, Doc,” Cotterell warned over his shoulder as he and Meffert led us toward the looming wall. The warning was absurdly unnecessary — not because the footing was good, but because it was so spectacularly bad. The jagged shale debris left behind by the strip-mining ranged from brick-sized chunks to sofa-sized slabs.

“I’m glad y’all are leading the way,” I told the backs of the lumbering lawmen.

“Be hard to find on your own,” said the sheriff.

“True, but not what I meant,” I replied. “I figure if anybody’s going to get snakebit, it’ll be the guy walking in front. Or maybe the second guy, if the snake’s slow on the draw.”

“Maybe,” conceded Meffert. “Or maybe the two crazy fools sticking their hands down in the rocks, rooting for bones.”

“Dang, Bubba,” I said, wincing at the image he’d conjured. “That’ll teach me to be a smart-ass.”

“Man,” muttered Tyler after a hundred slow yards. “Every step here is a broken ankle waiting to happen.” The gear he was lugging — a big plastic bin containing two cameras, paper evidence bags, latex gloves, trowels and tweezers, clipboards and forms — couldn’t have made it easy to see his footing or keep his balance. The trees were too sparse and scrubby to serve as props or handholds; about all they were good for was to obscure the footing and impede progress.

“Bubba,” I huffed, “you came out with the guy that found the bones?”

“Yup,” Meffert puffed. The TBI agent appeared to be carrying an extra twenty pounds or so around his middle.

“He said he was hunting fossils,” I went on. “You believe him?”

“Seemed believable. Name’s Ro-chelle. Some kind of engineer at the bomb factory in Oak Ridge. Environmental engineer. Maybe that’s why he likes poking around old mines. Fossils plus acid runoff — a twofer for a guy like that, I guess. There’s damn good fossils right around the bones. You’ll see in just a minute.” He paused to take a deeper breath and reach into a hip pocket. “Yeah, I believe him,” he repeated, mopping his head and neck with a bandanna. “He came into the sheriff’s office and then brought us all the way back up here. No reason to do that, except to help, far as I can see. Hell, that shot his Sunday right there.”

“You never know,” I said. “Sometimes a killer will actually initiate contact with the police. Insert himself in the investigation.”

“Return to the scene,” grunted the sheriff.

“Sometimes more than that, even,” I said. “An FBI profiler I worked with a few years back told me about a California killer who spent a lot of time hanging out in a cop bar, making friends, talking about cases. Ed Kemper—‘Big Ed’—was the guy’s name. When Big Ed finally confessed to a string of murders and dismemberments, his cop buddies thought he was joking.”

Meffert shrugged. “This Rochelle guy seemed okay,” he said. “He’s got a high-level security clearance, for whatever that’s worth. But like you say, you never know.”

Fifty yards ahead, I saw yellow-and-black crime-scene tape draped around an oval of scrubby foliage and rugged shale. “Did somebody actually stay out here overnight to secure the scene?” I asked.

Cotterell made a guttural, grunting sound, which I gradually realized was a laugh. “Secure the scene? Secure it from who, Doc?”

Meffert was right about the fossils. Just outside the uneven perimeter of crime-scene tape lay a flagstone-sized slab of black shale, imprinted with a lacelike tracery of ancient leaves. Beside it, angling through the rubble, was a stone rod the length of a baseball bat. Its shape and symmetry made it stand out against the random raggedness of the other rocks, and I stooped for a closer look. Diamond-shaped dimples, thousands of them, dotted the entire surface of the shaft. “I’ll be damned,” I said to Tyler. “Look at that. A lepidodendron.”

“A what?” Tyler set down the bin and squatted beside me. “Butterfly fossil?”

I nudged it with my toe, and it shifted slightly. “Close, but no cigar. Your Latin’s rusty.”

He snorted. “My Latin’s nonexistent.”

“Butterflies are Lepidoptera—‘scaly wings.’ This is a lepidodendron—‘scaly tree’—a stalk from a giant tree fern. Ferns a hundred feet tall. Carboniferous period. That plant is three hundred million years old if it’s a day.”

Tyler grasped the exposed end of the fossil and gently tugged and twisted, extricating it in a succession of rasping clinks. He sighted along its length, studying the intricate geometry of the diamond-shaped pattern. “You sure this is a scaly stem? Not a scaly snake?”

“Those scales are leaf scars,” I said. “Also called leaf cushions. But they do look like reptile scales, for sure. Actually, circus sideshows used to exhibit these as fossilized snakes. You’re a born huckster, Tyler.” I stood up, scanning the ground ahead and catching a telltale flash of grayish white: weathered bone. “But enough with the paleo lesson. We’ve got work to do. Let’s start with pictures.” Tyler laid the fossil aside and opened the equipment bin.

A few years before — when I’d first started working with the police on murder cases — a detective at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation had taught me a crucial forensic lesson: You can never have too many crime-scene photos, because working a crime scene requires dismantling it; destroying it. The KBI agent’s approach to crime-scene photography sounded like something straight from Bonnie and Clyde’s bank-robbery playbook: “Shoot your way in, and shoot your way out”—start with wide shots, then get closer and closer, eventually reversing the process as you’re finishing up and leaving the scene. Tyler had been quick to master the technique, and even before we stepped across the tape at the strip mine, he had the camera up and the shutter clicking. It wasn’t unusual for Tyler or me — sometimes both of us — to come home with a hundred 35-millimeter slides from a death scene, ranging from curbside shots of a house to frame-filling close-ups of a .45-caliber exit wound.

As Tyler shot his way in, so did I, though I was shooting with my eyes and my brain rather than a camera. The pelvis: female, I could tell at a glance; subadult; probably adolescent. The size: small — five feet, plus or minus. As I zoomed in on the skull, I reached out to pluck a seedling that was growing beside it and obscuring my view. As I tugged, though, the skull shifted — bone grating against rock — and I froze. “I’ll be damned,” I said, for the second time in minutes. The seedling, I realized, wasn’t growing beside the skull; it was growing from the skull — from the left eye orbit, in fact — something I’d never seen before. Wriggling my fingers gently beneath the skull, I cradled it, then lifted and twisted, tugging tendrils of root from the rocky crevices below. The seedling was a foot tall, the fronds of tiny oval leaves reminding me of a fern. As I held it up, with Tyler snapping photographs and the sheriff and TBI agent looking on, I felt as if I were displaying a bizarrely potted houseplant. “Bubba,” I said, nodding toward the bin, “would you mind opening one of those evidence bags for me?” Meffert scrambled to comply, unfolding the paper bag and setting it on the most level patch of rubble he could find.

Leaning down, I set the skull inside the bag.

“You gonna just leave that tree in it?” asked Meffert.

“For now,” I said, bending the seedling so I could tuck it completely into the bag. “When we get back to UT, I’ll take it over to a botanist — a guy I know in the Forestry Department — and get him to slice it open, count the growth rings. However many rings he finds, we’ll know she’s been here at least that many years.”

“Huh,” Meffert grunted, nodding. Suddenly he added, “Watch it!”

Just as he spoke, I felt a sharp pain on my wrist. I looked down in time to see a wasp pumping the last of its venom into the narrow band of skin between the top of my glove and the bottom of my sleeve. “Damnation,” I muttered, flattening the wasp with a hard slap. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Yonder comes another one,” Meffert said, “right out of the evidence bag.” Sure enough, at that moment a second wasp emerged from the open bag and made a beeline for my wrist, drawn by the “danger” pheromones the first one had given off. Meffert’s hand darted downward, and by the time I realized what he was doing, he had caught and crushed the wasp in midair, barehanded. “Sumbitches must be nesting in that skull,” he said. I was dubious, but not for long; two more wasps emerged from the bag, both of them deftly dispatched by Meffert. We watched and waited, but the attack seemed to be over.

“You’re quick, Bubba,” I said, rubbing my wrist. “You that fast on the draw with a gun?”

He smiled. “Nobody’s ever give me a reason to find out.”

“Well, watch my back, if you don’t mind.”

I resumed my inspection of the postcranial skeleton, scanning the bones from neck to feet. “Y’all were right about the size,” I said. “Just guessing, I’d say right around five feet. And female,” I added, bending low over the flare of the hip bones. “And young.”

“How young?” asked Cotterell.

I hedged. “Be easier to tell once we get the bones back to the lab and finish cleaning ’em up. But I’m guessing teenager.”

“Any chance this is just some old Indian skeleton?” the sheriff asked hopefully. “Make our job a hell of a lot easier if she was.”

“Sorry, Sheriff,” I said. “She’s definitely modern.”

Meffert chuckled. “Isn’t that what you said about that dead guy over near Nashville a couple years ago? The one turned out to be a Civil War soldier?”

“Well, she’s lying on top of all this shale,” I pointed out. “If she’s not modern, this must be the world’s oldest strip mine.” I said it with a smile, but the smile was forced, and it was contradicted by the deep crimson my face had turned at the reminder of the Civil War soldier.

“Don’t take it so hard, Doc,” Meffert added. “You only missed it by a hunnerd-something years.”

“Too bad that soldier didn’t have a tree growing outta his head,” the sheriff added. “Big ol’ pecan tree, with a historical marker on it? You’da got it right for sure.”

Meffert grinned. So did I, my teeth clenched behind drawn lips.

We rode in silence down the winding mountain blacktop toward Wartburg. Tyler was absorbed in the fossil he’d brought back, his fingers tracing the intricate diamond patterning as if he were blind, examining it by touch alone.

For my part, I was brooding about the parting shots by the TBI agent and the sheriff. They’d been joking, good-naturedly, no doubt, but the conversation had stung, even worse than the wasp, and the sting took me back, in my mind, to the event they were dredging up. Just after my move to Knoxville, I’d been called to a rural county in Middle Tennessee, where a decomposing body had been found in a shallow grave behind a house. The remains were in fairly good shape, as rotting bodies go — pink tissue still clung to the bones — and I’d estimated that the man had died about a year before. In fact, we later learned, the dead man was Col. William Shy, a Civil War soldier killed in the Battle of Nashville in 1864.

In hindsight, there were logical reasons I’d missed the time-since-death mark so widely. Colonel Shy had been embalmed, and until modern-day grave robbers had looted the grave — looking for relics — the body had been sealed in an airtight cast-iron coffin, which had kept bugs and bacteria at bay. But those explanations sounded more like excuses than I liked. They also provided precious little comfort in court, I’d learned, again and again: Hostile defense attorneys in contemporary criminal cases took great delight in bringing up Colonel Shy, rubbing my nose in my blunder as a way of undermining my testimony against their clients.

Colonel Shy wasn’t the only case where I’d been derailed by difficulty in determining time since death. Another murder case — a case I’d consulted on shortly before my move to Knoxville — still haunted me. A suspect in the case had been seen with the victim two weeks before the body had been found — the last known sighting of the victim — and the investigator and prosecutor pressed me hard: Could I testify, with certainty, that the murder had occurred then? “No,” I’d been forced to admit, “not with any scientific confidence.” As a result, the suspect had gone free.

Hoping to fill the gaps in my knowledge — determined to avoid such frustrations and humiliations in the future — I had combed through stacks of scientific journals, seeking data on decomposition. But apart from a few musty articles about insect carcasses — dead bugs found in bodies exhumed from old cemeteries — I’d found virtually nothing. Nothing recent, at any rate, though I had come across a fascinating handbook written by a death investigator in China centuries before, in 1247 A.D. — a research gap of more than seven centuries. The good news was, I wasn’t the only forensic anthropologist who was flying by the seat of his pants when estimating time since death. The bad news was, every forensic anthropologist was flying by the seat of his pants.

The interesting news, I realized now, as Tyler and I reached the base of the mountain, and the road’s hairpin curves gave way to a long, flat straightaway, was that the field was wide open. Time since death — understanding the processes and the timing of postmortem decomposition — was fertile ground for research.

The sun was low in the sky, a quarter moon high overhead, when Tyler and I passed through Wartburg’s town square on our way back to Knoxville. As I glanced up at the courthouse belfry, still pondering ways to unlock the secrets of time since death, I found myself surrounded by markers and measures of time: A frozen clock. A fossilized town. An ancient fern. The bones of a girl who would never reach adulthood.

A girl for whom time had stopped, sometime after wildcat miners had ravaged a mountainside; sometime before a papery seed had wafted from a tree, and a wasp queen had begun building her papery palace in the dark.

CHAPTER 2

Satterfield opened the door and reached into the wire-mesh hutch. Grasping the soft, loose skin just behind the ears, he raised the animal slightly, then cupped a hand beneath the chest and lifted it out of the hutch. The rabbit was young and small — scarcely larger than the palm of Satterfield’s hand — and its large, luminous eyes dominated its face, in the way of all baby mammals. The eyes flitted back and forth, and the animal trembled.

Satterfield crossed the room to a second enclosure, also made of wire mesh. This one was sturdier and larger — as big as a baby’s playpen, though only half as high — and its floor was covered with sandy earth, flat rocks, and good-sized pieces of driftwood. The enclosure was split down the middle by a removable panel of wire mesh, inserted through a narrow slit in the top. Cupping the rabbit to his chest, Satterfield stooped to unlatch the door in the top, then set the animal inside. It sat, motionless except for the tremor. On the other side of the divider, the other side of the cage, Satterfield glimpsed a trace of movement, slow at first, then more rapid: a slender, bifurcated black ribbon of tongue sliding in and out of a mouth, flicking as it sampled the new scent in the air.

The snake — a fer-de-lance that Satterfield had paid a thousand dollars to have imported from Costa Rica — measured four feet long and three inches thick; its broad back was saddled, from neck to tail, by bold, black-and-tan diamonds. The head — a flat-topped triangle with thin black stripes running from the eyes to the back of the jaws — was nearly as broad as Satterfield’s hand.

Satterfield had kept snakes for most of his life, but the fer-de-lance was different from others he’d had. It was fearless, irritable, and aggressive, and that was on its mellow days. Most snakes in the present situation would’ve sat tight, studying the rabbit for a while, maybe even waiting for it to lower its guard, perhaps even wander foolishly toward the jaws of death. The fer-de-lance, though, after a few more confirmatory flicks of the tongue, slid slowly but confidently toward the rabbit. The rabbit emitted a squeal and then leaped away, huddling in the corner of the cage. The snake slithered along the divider, its head reared, its tongue flicking through open squares in the wire mesh one by one as it drew closer.

Driven by some ancient, embedded survival instinct, the rabbit began lunging against the walls and roof of wire. After a few moments, Satterfield threaded a hand through the opening, managing to corner the creature and extract it from the cage. He cradled it against his chest as it panted, its small heart fluttering as fast as a hummingbird’s.

Once the rabbit had stopped quaking, he lowered it into the cage again, both hands gripping tightly as it began to squirm and struggle. The snake had not moved, and when Satterfield released the rabbit — this time setting it practically against the divider — the triangular head darted forward, striking the mesh with enough force to make the cage shudder. Again the rabbit began battering itself against the corner and top of the cage, as the snake’s head, too, lashed against the screen with primitive force and ruthless frustration. After a few moments Satterfield retrieved the rabbit once more. He’d had a rat die swiftly of fright in just such circumstances on a prior occasion, and he did not want a repeat of that premature disappointment.

By the time Satterfield had performed the ritual half a dozen times — insertion and extraction, insertion and extraction — the rabbit’s quaking was constant, even when it was cradled against his chest; any time Satterfield made the slightest movement toward the cage, the creature began to struggle. Satterfield experimented, extending the rabbit toward the cage and then pulling it away several times without actually putting it inside. The creature was now crazed with terror, all sense of safety having been systematically destroyed. Its breathing was ragged and shallow, and the flicker of the heartbeat felt weaker now, less regular against Satterfield’s palm. The rabbit was clearly approaching exhaustion.

Satterfield, too, was reaching a turning point: He could feel the faint but familiar beginnings of boredom setting in. Leaning down again, he set the shivering rabbit in the cage, and this time he latched the door above it. Then, gripping the protruding handle of the divider screen, he slid the panel upward through the narrow slit, removing it from the cage and setting it aside. All the while, he kept his gaze fixed on the two animals.

The snake’s head swayed slightly toward the rabbit, almost imperceptibly, as if it expected the wire screen to materialize out of thin air. When it did not — when the snake’s reptilian brain sensed that no obstacles blocked the path to its prey — it drew its body into a muscular S, the raised head remaining motionless as the body drew up behind it. It held that serpentine shape for only a moment, then, in the blink of an eye, it straightened and shot forward, its jaws gaping and its fangs snapping down from the roof of the mouth.

Two seconds after the bite, the rabbit was convulsing; ten seconds later, the convulsions gave way to small twitches; another half minute and it lay motionless, its eyes already going glassy in death.

By the time the snake stretched its jaws around the rabbit’s head and began choking down the dead animal — its girth as big as the snake’s — Satterfield had already walked away. The feeding was utterly uninteresting to him, and even the death itself had been only mildly entertaining. No, it was the prelude to death — the surges and spikes of terror he’d learned to orchestrate: that was what he found addicting. Exciting. Arousing, even.

CHAPTER 3

Peering out the grimy windows of my office on the second floor of Stadium Hall, gazing through the thicket of steel girders and concrete ramps, I glimpsed the emerald waters of the Tennessee River spooling past downtown Knoxville and the university. Most of the hundred-yard distance between the stadium and the river was covered in asphalt — parking lots and the four lanes of Neyland Drive — and the pavement shimmered in the late-summer afternoon, creating the illusion that the river itself might begin to boil at any moment. The Anthropology Annex, where I needed to go, was a small, freestanding building fifty sweltering yards away.

When I opened the door and stepped outside, exchanging the stadium’s cool, dark corridors for the sun-soaked outdoors, I felt as if I’d entered a blast furnace. Behind me, bricks radiated the pent-up heat like an oven; ahead, the asphalt lay like a sea of lava, and as I swam across through the heat and humidity, my clothes grew wet with sweat, my shirt plastering itself to my back.

A half-dozen rusting air conditioners jutted from the corrugated metal walls of the Annex, their compressors chugging full blast—full steam, I caught myself thinking ironically as I tugged open the balky steel door and stepped inside. The air conditioners did manage to lower the humidity a few notches, but they hadn’t made much headway against the heat, and none at all against the smell.

The Anthropology Department’s main quarters — built by bricking in the wedge of space beneath Neyland Stadium’s grandstands, decades before — weren’t exactly prime real estate; far from it. But Stadium Hall was palatial compared with the Annex. In winter the Annex was an icebox, rattling in the wind; in summer, it was a solar oven, its metal panels creaking and popping in the heat. And no matter the season, it stank inside, for the Annex was where we did the dirty work of processing human remains: simmering and scrubbing; separating flesh from bone; removing life’s lingering vestiges.

One corner of the processing room was taken up by an industrial-sized sink, which was flanked on one side by an immense steam-jacketed kettle — a cauldron big enough to simmer an entire skeleton — and on the other by a wide counter that ran the length of the wall. The counter was covered with blue surgical pads to absorb moisture from damp, freshly scrubbed bones, and when I entered, Tyler was laying out the last of the bones we’d brought back from the strip mine, neatly arranging them in anatomical order.

Normally I began my forensic examinations at the skull, but in this case — a case where the questions of age and sex seemed to converge, to entwine, in a pivotal way — I found my eyes drawn first to the pelvis, which confirmed what I’d thought in the field: female, beyond a doubt. The hip bones flared widely, giving them the distinctive shape that always reminded me of elephant ears; the sciatic notches — openings at the base of the sit bones where major nerves emerged from the lower spine — were broad, unlike the narrow notches of a male pelvis; and the pubic bone curved outward and down to create a concavity in her belly and birth canal, making room for babies that this particular female would never have.

But if her pelvis said “woman,” her mouth whispered a different, sadder word to me: “child.” If she had lived to be my age, the ripe old age of thirty-seven, her maxillary sutures — the seams in the roof of her mouth — would have begun smoothing out and filling in, eventually becoming nearly invisible. But the maxillary sutures in the skull I cradled upside down in my hand were rough and bumpy, the bones barely beginning to fuse. In fact, if I hadn’t known from years of study that the bones were slowly joining, I might have concluded that something had struck the hard palate at its center, creating a cruciform pattern of cracks. But it was her life, not her palate, that had shattered.

Tyler studied my face as I studied the dead girl’s skull. “How old you think she is?”

“Not old enough,” I said. “Fourteen; fifteen, tops. But maybe only twelve or thirteen.”

He frowned and shook his head — not in disagreement, but in dismay. “That’s what I figured, too, but I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”

“Any skeletal trauma?”

“A couple healed fractures in the arms,” he said. “One in the left humerus, the other in the right radius, about three inches above the wrist. And two ribs. But nothing perimortem. Nothing I could see, anyhow. Maybe you’ll spot something I’ve missed.”

I pored over every bone twice — with my eyes and with my fingertips — in search of a fresh, unhealed fracture, or the ragged nick of a knife blade, or a telltale smear of lead from a passing bullet — but there was nothing to be found. Finally, circling back to the skull once more, I shone a flashlight through the foramen magnum and peered inside the cranial vault, in case there was a fracture on the inner surface that might have ruptured one of the meningeal arteries, the arteries carrying blood to the brain. “I’m not seeing anything, either,” I said. “Doesn’t mean she wasn’t killed. Just means that any injuries she had were soft-tissue trauma.” I took a final look into the cranial vault. “Oh, hey, did you find a wasp nest in here?”

He reached up and plucked a small gray object from the narrow shelf above the counter, then dropped it into my palm. A dozen or so hollow, hexagonal cells made of dry, papery pulp, it weighed almost nothing. “It’s a little crunched on the sides, from the forceps,” he said. “Getting it out through the foramen magnum was like trying to pull a ship out of a bottle.”

“Any more wasps on board?”

He shook his head. “Nah, I think ol’ Bubba Ray Peckerwood done got ’em all.”

“Careful,” I cautioned. “If you slip up and call him Peckerwood to his face, Special Agent Meffert might just feel obliged to open up a can of whup-ass on you.”

“Ha — let him try,” said Tyler. “I’ll lay some yoga on him. He’ll never even know what hit him.”

“What,” I scoffed, “you’re gonna meditate him into submission?” Tyler was a recent and enthusiastic convert to yoga, for reasons I didn’t fully grasp. “Weren’t you an athlete — a real athlete — once upon a time? Weight lifting or shot putting or some such? One of those manly sports dominated by hulking women from East Germany?”

“Hammer throw,” he said. “The ultimate test of strength and coordination. But by the way, there is no East Germany. The wall came down three years ago, in ’89, remember? ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall?’ Ronald Reagan’s finest moment. You’re showing your age, Dr. B.”

Summoning up my reediest old-man voice, I piped, “Back when I was a boy…”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Save it for the undergrads, Gramps.”

Was he just kidding, or was there a slight edge in his voice? Worse, was there a kernel of truth in his jab? Was I fossilizing even before I turned forty?

Time was much on my mind these days. Time since death was foremost in my thoughts. But time before death — my time; my sense of urgency about creating a research program to fill the gaps in my knowledge — that, too, was tugging at the sleeve of my mind.

“Hang on a second, Doc, I’m fixin’ to put you on speakerphone,” drawled Sheriff Cotterell. I had swum back across the sweltering sea of asphalt to the stadium just in time to catch the call. “Bubba Hardknot’s a-settin’ right here with me, and I know he’ll want to hear whatever you got to say.”

I heard a click, then a hollow, echoing sound, as if the phone had been lowered down a well. “Hey, Doc,” Meffert’s voice boomed, from deep in the depths. “Whatcha got for us?”

“Not much, I’m afraid,” I admitted. “I’ll send you both a written report in the next couple days, but here’s the bottom line. No skeletal trauma, so the bones can’t tell us how she died. All they can tell us is a little about who she was. White female; stature between five foot one and five foot three; age thirteen to fifteen. I estimated the age by looking at the pelvis, the teeth, the epiphyses of the long bones and clavicles, the—”

“Excuse me, Doc,” Meffert interrupted, “the what-ih-sees?”

“Epiphyses,” I repeated. “The ends of the bones. In subadults — children and adolescents — the ends of the long bones haven’t yet fused to the shafts; they’re connected by cartilage, at what’s called the growth plates. That’s how the arms and legs can grow so much when kids hit puberty. Toward the end of puberty, the epiphyses fuse, and the long bones don’t get any longer; you don’t get any taller. This girl’s epiphyses weren’t fully fused yet, so she hadn’t quite finished growing. She had her second molars — her twelve-year molars — so she was probably at least that old. And her pelvic structure had started getting wider, so we know she’d entered puberty. But her hips were still getting wider, so she wasn’t out of it yet.”

“How can you tell that?” asked Cotterell.

“Good question, Sheriff. There’s actually an epiphysis on the outer edge of each hip bone, too — it’s called the iliac crest, and all through puberty, the iliac crest is connected to the ilium — the wide bone of the hip — by cartilage. It’s another growth plate. Somewhere around age sixteen or eighteen, the iliac crest fuses. After that, the hips don’t get any wider.”

I heard a rumbling growl, which even over the speakerphone I recognized as Sheriff Cotterell’s laugh. “Doc,” he chuckled, “you ain’t never seen my wife.”

“Let me rephrase that,” I said. “After that, the bones of the hips don’t get any wider.”

“What else you got?” said Meffert. “You hear back from your buddy in Forestry?”

“I did. That little black locust seedling was two years old. So she’s been dead at least that long.”

“And no more’n how long?” asked the sheriff.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Nothing in the bones to tell us. When did that wildcat mine shut down?”

“Twenty-two years ago,” said Meffert. “In 1970.”

“Then she died somewhere between two years ago and twenty-two years ago,” I said.

“Twenty years? That’s as close as we can nail it?” The frustration in the sheriff’s voice was crystal clear, even though he was forty miles away.

“I’m afraid so, Sheriff. I wish I had more for you, but I don’t. We need better tools and techniques for determining time since death.”

“Got that right,” he said. I was glad he and Meffert weren’t there to see my face redden once more.

CHAPTER 4

He picked up the sheaf of pages and tamped their bottom edges on the kitchen table to align them, then turned the stack sideways and repeated the maneuver to even up the sides. Once the sheets were in perfect alignment, he inserted them into the three-hole punch and swung the lever down slowly. Closing his eyes to concentrate, he savored the slight variations in resistance as the steel posts punched through the five single-spaced pages, sheet by sheet by sheet.

A loose-leaf binder, already half filled, lay open on the table in front of Satterfield. Popping open the gleaming chrome rings, he threaded the freshly punched pages onto the stack, then clicked the rings shut and began rereading the text, twirling a pink Hi-Liter with the thumb, index finger, and middle finger of his left hand as he read. When he came to the description of the cut marks, he uncapped the marker and highlighted the passage: “The bones were severed with a curved tool of unknown type, the cutting edge having a curved shape approximated by the arc of a circle 3.5 inches in diameter.”

A yellow legal pad and a mechanical pencil lay beside the binder. Setting down the marker, Satterfield picked up the pencil and drew a curved line on the pad, then — doubting the accuracy of the drawing — he pushed back from the table and went to one of the kitchen drawers. Rummaging in the drawer, he found a metal tape measure and extended the tape to 3.5 inches. Next he opened the cabinet containing glassware and held the tape across the mouths of various vessels until he found one — a coffee mug — whose diameter fit the description in the forensic report. Setting the mug on the legal pad, he ran the mechanical pencil one-third of the way around the base, then set the mug aside and inspected the neat arc he had traced. The shape puzzled him. Trying to imagine the head of an ax or a hatchet behind the curve he’d traced, he frowned; the arc was too steep to fit either of those tools. Besides, he suspected that both of those implements — certainly a hatchet — lacked the weight required to cut cleanly through bone in a single stroke. Rereading the highlighted passage, he concluded that he’d interpreted the text correctly and had drawn the curve accurately. That meant he simply needed to do more research. Tearing the perforated page from the yellow pad, he folded and tucked it into his pocket. Then, closing the binder, he returned it to its hiding place — the cold-air return of the ventilation ductwork — along with the box of stolen files, the mother lode of material he’d begun to build his plans around. Fitting the slotted grille neatly over the mouth of the duct, he flipped the latches to lock it into place.

He checked his watch. Home Depot would be closing in an hour, but Satterfield figured an hour was plenty of time. It wouldn’t take him long to find just the right tool for the job, if Home Depot had it. Satterfield was a man who believed in having the right tool for the job, whether the job was cutting up a corpse or eviscerating an adversary.

Frowning, he hung the ax back on its pegs — the blade was too tall, the arc of the edge too shallow — and continued down the aisle. Next he picked up a maul, a wood-splitting tool whose wedge-shaped head was like a cross between an ax and a sledgehammer. The tool’s heft was good, promising to strike with tremendous force, but again, the cutting edge lacked the curvature he was seeking. Satterfield took the sketch from his pocket and compared it with the edge of the maul. Could I file it down? he wondered. Reshape it? Probably not, he decided. It’d take forever, even with a bench grinder. He was mildly disappointed, but he was also intrigued; the puzzle — the quest — was challenging and invigorating, and solving it would be hugely satisfying: it would redouble his adversary’s frustration, and underscore Satterfield’s superior intellect.

“Help you, hon?” The question caught Satterfield by surprise. He looked over his shoulder at the questioner, a middle-aged woman in an orange Home Depot apron. Stoop-shouldered and beaten-down looking, she fell somewhere on the spectrum between mousy and hard-bitten. She clearly had never been pretty, and now her face was drooping and folding in on itself, as if she were already losing teeth. He caught a whiff of stale cigarette smoke coming from her, which explained her leathery skin and ashen hue. Satterfield found her not merely unappealing but actively repellent, not that he was shopping for anything but a tool here anyhow.

“No thanks. Just looking.” He turned back toward the display, folding the sketch and replacing it in his pocket, then drifted back toward the axes.

“Gotcha some trees need cuttin’?” she persisted. Christ, he thought, is she working on commission? Trying for Employee of the Month? “We got chain saws, too, next aisle over.”

“No trees,” he said flatly. He glanced over his shoulder again — she was still there — and then he slowly turned to face her. “No trees,” he repeated, cocking his head slightly, as if something about the word itself suddenly struck him. With a slight smile he added, “Just… limbs.”

“Oh, you’re prunin’. How thick are the limbs?”

“Not very,” he said. His eyes drifted from her face to her shoulder and then down her arm, and he reached out and took hold of her left wrist, encircling it completely with his thumb and middle finger. Startled, she yanked her arm, but he had a firm grip. She opened her mouth to protest — maybe even to yell — but he bore down hard, pressing his thumb into the bony side of her wrist, and all she could do was gasp now, her eyes darting in panic, the way the rabbit’s had. “Not thick at all,” he said, smiling, raising her arm for a closer look. “Probably about like this. Maybe not quite so skinny.” He turned her forearm this way and that, examining it from various angles, still bearing down on the bone. Finally he let off, though her wrist remained firmly in his grip. “What do you recommend?”

She cleared her throat. “Well, if you’re just cutting branches,” she said, her voice strained and trembling, “a lopper might be what you want.” She pointed her free hand toward the wall at the end of the aisle. Satterfield noticed that the hand was quaking; he liked that. He raised his eyes to study her face — her eyes downcast, her posture cringing, like a chained dog about to be beaten — and then he glanced in the direction she was pointing. When he saw the assortment of long-handled pruning tools there, he released her and walked wordlessly to the wall. The woman scuttled away, rubbing her wrist, keeping a wary watch over her shoulder.

Satterfield took one of the tools from the wall and spread the handles, causing the metal jaws to gape; then, as he squeezed the handles, the jaws clamped shut. The cutting blade looked powerful and wickedly sharp, but the edge was all wrong — straight as a ruler — and he frowned and hung the tool back on the wall. He was turning to go when he noticed that there was more than one type of lopper. The one he’d inspected and rejected was an “anvil lopper,” according to the shelf tag. Satterfield puzzled over the name for a moment, then noticed that the cutting blade — the straight, sharp-edged blade that wouldn’t serve his purpose — closed against a lower jaw that was broad and flat, like a small steel chopping block. Like a little anvil, he realized. Hanging beside the anvil lopper, though, was another lopper — with a different name, a different design, and a different cutting action. This one was a “bypass lopper,” and it cut scissor fashion — the edges of the two blades sliding past one another as the handles were squeezed together. The blades weren’t straight like scissor blades, he noticed, with growing excitement. The tool’s lower jaw was blunt edged and concave, to encircle and support a branch from beneath as the upper jaw — the sharp-edged, steeply curved, convex upper jaw — sliced into the limb from above.

The bypass lopper came in three sizes. The biggest had handles as long as Satterfield’s arm; in addition, the jaws incorporated a cam to compound the handles’ leverage, multiply their force. Satterfield took the tool down from its pegs and opened and closed the handles a few times. He nodded approvingly at the metallic friction he felt; at the precision and power with which the edges slid past one another.

A selection of rakes and hoes hung on the wall a few feet away, and Satterfield walked toward them, the lopper in one hand, swaying beside his right leg. The handles of the rakes were about an inch in diameter: about the thickness of his thumb, he noticed when he held up a hand to compare. Taking a step backward, he spread the handles of the lopper wide and fitted the jaws around the wooden shaft of a rake. He closed the handles slowly, feeling for resistance — just as he’d done earlier, with the hole punch — as the concave jaw hugged the wood and the sharp edge began to bite into the layers of grain. Once the edges were well seated, he gave a smooth squeeze. The rake’s handle snapped with a dry pop, the amputated portion clattering to the floor as a razor-thin smile etched Satterfield’s face.

He took a step to his right. The hoes had heavier-duty handles: hickory, by the look of it, and nearly twice as thick as the rake handles. Satterfield opened the handles wide and worked the jaws around one of the handles. The blade cut easily at first, but the going got tougher fast, the steel handles of the lopper bending under the strain as he bore down. Just as Satterfield feared the handles might buckle, the hoe’s shaft snapped. The cut piece clattered on the concrete floor with a resonant, musical note, like the ring of a baseball bat colliding with a fastball. Satterfield bent and picked up the severed piece, studying the cross section closely. The cut was clean, but when he held the wood so that the ceiling lights raked across the end at a low angle, he could discern the cut marks, a myriad of ridges and valleys etched in the wood as the jaws had bitten through it. The marks were steeply curved, approximating “the arc of a circle 3.5 inches in diameter.”

Pocketing the piece of wood, Satterfield headed for the front of the store to check out. On the way home, he’d stop at Kroger, whose meat department sold big beef bones for soup, or for dogs. More tests were needed, but so far he had a good feeling about the bypass lopper.

He found a checkout lane with no line, and slid the tool across the stainless-steel counter. The young man working the register said, “Is that it for you today?”

“Only thing I need,” said Satterfield, but then he added, “Whoa, wait, I take that back. One more thing.” He backtracked two steps, to the end cap at the entrance to the checkout lane, and snagged a fat, striated roll of shrink-wrapped silver-gray tape. He stood it on edge and rolled it toward the scanner as if it were a thick slice from a bowling ball. With a broad smile and a worldly wink, Satterfield said, “A man can never have too much duct tape, can he, now?”

CHAPTER 5

Tyler shook sweat from his face, like a wet dog, spattering the ashen ankles of the corpse he and I were carrying toward the pig barn. “Hang on a second,” he said.

I stopped. “You need to set him down, Mr. Yoga Super-Athlete?”

“Naw. I just need to get the sweat and sunscreen out of my eyes.” He shrugged his shoulders and craned his head from side to side, rubbing his face on the sleeves of his T-shirt — like a dog pawing at itchy eyes. The movement made the sagging body sway from side to side, like a guy sleeping in a hammock, except there was no hammock. And the sleeping guy wasn’t ever going to wake up. “Okay, that’s better.”

As we resumed walking, I heard a familiar buzzing. A small squadron of blowflies materialized and began circling the corpse.

“Amazing,” said Tyler. “Those guys can smell death a mile away. Hell, you don’t even have to kick the bucket — just swing your toe toward the bucket — and bzzt, they’re all over you.” He grimaced and sputtered, spitting out a fly that had strayed into his mouth. “Hey, you little bugger, get out of there. I’m not quite dead yet.”

“Maybe your personal hygiene isn’t what it ought to be,” I said. I mostly meant it as a joke, but at the moment, Tyler was trailing a fairly pungent cloud of aroma. For that matter, I probably was, too. “Speaking of flies, though, we need to talk about your thesis project.” I’d been poring through the Chinese forensic handbook the night before — it had been my bedtime reading, much to the dismay of Kathleen, to whom I’d read several graphic passages aloud — and during my sleep, something in the thirteenth-century book had clicked, connecting somehow with the wasp nest and tree seedling we’d found in the skull from the strip mine.

“What do flies have to do with my thesis? I’m making good progress, by the way. Honest. That’s why I was in the bone lab on Labor Day — looking at a bunch more pubic bones.”

“I know,” I said. “I saw the tray of bones. But I’ve been thinking.”

“Crap,” he muttered. “I hate it when you think.”

“What? Why?”

“Because whenever you start thinking, I end up with more work,” he said, glancing over his shoulder as he backpedaled toward the barn. Wafting toward us through the open door came the unmistakable smell of death, mingled with another powerful stench. Tyler disappeared as he backed into the darkness. “Christ, this place stinks,” came his voice from within, floating on the fumes.

I suspected Tyler was stalling, trying to distract me from the thesis discussion. But he was right about the stench; in fact, if anything, he was understating things. Over the course of several decades, countless litters of pigs had been farrowed and nursed in this barn, and every pig — sows and piglets alike — had left a legacy of stink. As the state’s only land-grant university, UT still had a strong agricultural college, but in recent decades the school’s working farms had been scaled back in favor of a more academic orientation for Ag majors. By 1992, the university was largely out of the farming business, with the exception of a few cornfields along the river and a small dairy farm adjoining the hospital.

We laid the body down in one of the empty stalls, the ground soft and slippery underfoot from decades of pig droppings and a half-dozen decomposing corpses donated to me by medical examiners so that I could begin building a teaching collection of modern, known skeletons.

The barn was windowless, but shafts of sunlight angled through gaps in the plank siding. Dust motes drifted and danced in the shafts of light. The blowflies — a dozen or more by now — appeared and disappeared in strobing succession as they traversed the slivers of light.

“Funny thing,” Tyler mused. “I don’t mind the smell of the decomp so much; it’s the pig shit I can’t stand.”

“Anyhow,” I resumed, “I’ve been thinking about your thesis, and I think you need a different research project.”

“What? I’ve spent weeks — months — looking at pubic bones. I’ve looked at hundreds of pubic bones. Maybe a thousand pubic bones.”

“But wouldn’t you rather do something important?”

“You said the pubic-bone study was important, Dr. B.”

“It is. But not as important as this.”

“As what? Never mind — I don’t want to know.”

“Everybody studies pubic bones,” I said. “I’m talking about seminal research, Tyler.”

“You want me to research semen? I’m supposed to write a thesis about spunk?”

“Don’t be so literal. Or so argumentative. This research will be unique. Original. A pioneering contribution.”

“Dammit!” He swatted the back of his neck.

“You need to quit killing the flies, Tyler,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because they’re your new best friends. The stars of your new thesis project.”

“What new thesis project? You keep dropping these veiled hints,” he grumbled. “Veiled threats. Just spit it out, Dr. B.”

“The first detailed study of insect activity in human corpses,” I said. “Our first step toward basing time-since-death estimates on scientific data. One blowfly at a time.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re saying you want me to spend even more quality time out here, crawling around in pig shit?”

“Gathering data,” I said. “Advancing the cause of science.”

“And in your new vision, how much more time do I spend out here advancing the cause of science? How many data trips a day? This is a long damn way from the bone lab.” He had a point there, I had to admit. “Any chance you could get me a transporter beam, so I don’t spend four hours a day shuttling back and forth from campus?”

“I’ll figure something out,” I said, hoping it would prove true. My flash of nocturnal inspiration hadn’t extended to anything so mundane as transportation logistics.

In the darkness a few feet away, I heard the sound of one hand clapping — Tyler’s hand clapping against a fly on the back of his neck. Perhaps he had not yet fully grasped the brilliance of my new research plan. But he would. What choice, after all, did an indentured academic servant have?

CHAPTER 6

Crystal heard the groan of the semi’s brakes close behind her, then the popping and skittering of gravel pinched by the edges of the tires, as a massive cab — no trailer — drew alongside her and stopped, the big pistons of the diesel knocking in its iron heart. The brakes hissed, causing her to jump. The truck was a long-hooded Peterbilt, which loomed over her like a locomotive; its small, divided windshield was shaded by a metal visor, jutting and ominous; the sleeper compartment, grafted behind the cab, looked half the size of Crystal’s house trailer.

Crystal took two more steps forward, into a band of shadow, to avoid being blinded by the sun as she looked up at the driver. The shadow, she realized, was cast by the Baptist Church’s giant cross, and for the first time in hundreds of comings and goings past it, Crystal was glad the cross was there, dispensing a bit of shade along with its monumental dose of disapproval.

The cross, the shade, and Crystal were thirty miles northwest of Knoxville, atop Jellico Mountain. Just beyond the point where I-75 finished its long, slanting climb up the mountain’s flank and leveled out, a handful of buildings clustered at Exit 141: a blue-roofed Comfort Inn; a Pilot truck stop; Redeemer Primitive Baptist Church; and — last but not least — Crystal’s place of employment, XXX Adult World. Adult World was the seamiest and the flashiest of the exit’s buildings: a neon-emblazoned establishment surmounted by a pair of billboards and ringed by a gravel lot capable of accommodating half a hundred tractor-trailer rigs at a time. For efficiency’s sake, Adult World ought to have shared a parking lot with the Pilot truck stop, since truckers constituted most of Adult World’s clientele — and since women like Crystal spent a lot of time shuttling back and forth between the two businesses. But irony had trumped efficiency in this case: The truck stop lay on the opposite side of the interstate, and Adult World instead sat cheek by jowl — or haunch to haunch — with Redeemer Primitive Baptist, a corrugated metal building whose five-story cross did double duty, inspiring multitudes of passing motorists while simultaneously rebuking Adult World’s lusty customers and fallen women.

“Didn’t mean to scare you.” The voice floated down from the cab toward Crystal. “You want a ride?”

She looked up, over her right shoulder, shading her eyes against the glare of the slanting morning sun. All she saw were wraparound shades, the brim of a cap, chiseled cheeks, and a stubbly jaw leaning out the driver’s window. “I don’t care to walk,” she said. “I’m just going over yonder to the truck stop. Thanks anyhow.”

“You fixing to get some breakfast? Come on, I’ll buy.” He took off the sunglasses so she could see his eyes. He was looking at her face, not her tits. She appreciated that, though she knew he’d already had plenty of time to check her out as he pulled up behind her and then drew even. Hell, he’d probably seen her naked not more than twenty minutes before, dancing on the peep-show stage.

She noticed a chrome silhouette of a nude woman on the truck’s mud flaps, as well as a bumper sticker on the sleeper cab, just below the door handle: I ♥ LOT LIZARDS. She had mixed feelings about the sticker. On the one hand, it meant he was willing to pay for sex. On the other hand, it showed that he considered the truck-stop prostitutes he bought it from—“lot lizards,” in trucker slang — to be less than human.

Crystal’s head was pounding and she was seriously pissed off; she’d worked all night for seventeen dollars in tips, and that bastard Bobby T had given her an “attitude adjustment”—a one-week suspension — for sassing a customer who’d looked and groped but never did tip. She’d wanted to sass Bobby T, too — to say, “Hey, man, you try dancing bare-assed all night for a bunch of fat guys with BO and grabby hands, see how chirpy you feel.” But she’d bitten it back, because this was her second attitude adjustment, and she knew Bobby T had a strict three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy. “They’s plenty other crack-whores to take your place in here, princess,” he’d told the last girl he sent packing. Sad truth was, he was right. Seventeen bucks wouldn’t go far, but zero bucks went nowhere. And the night before last had been all right, thirty-something in tips, plus two quick twenty-dollar blow jobs in the parking lot out back. “Sorry; what?” she said, realizing that the trucker had said something to her and was waiting for an answer.

“I said business looked kinda slow in there.” She shrugged by way of a noncommittal acknowledgment. “Wondering if you might like to make a little extra on the side.”

On the side, hell, she thought. On my ass, you mean. But what she said was, “Might. Depends on what you’re lookin’ for. And what you’re offering.” Careful not to say what she’d do, and careful not to ask outright about the money. She’d never heard of an undercover cop driving a semi, but you couldn’t be too careful.

“The no-frills, good old-fashioned way, forty bucks,” he said. “Take me around the world, I could go sixty. Show me something I’ve never seen before, might be worth a hundred.”

She didn’t much like feeling pressured, but she definitely liked the prospect of making a hundred first thing in the morning. Maybe he’d even spring for a room in the Comfort Inn, which would give her a chance to shower and nap before traipsing home to the trailer. “Well then,” she said. “All aboard, I reckon.”

He grinned down at her. “That’s the ticket. Come on around. You need help getting up?”

“Nah, I can manage. I’ve done it once or twice before.”

“Ha. I bet you have, babycakes. I bet you have.”

She walked around the long, looming prow of the truck, the top of the hood a foot higher than her head, the windshield blocked from view by the mammoth engine. When she got to the side, the passenger door swung open for her. Planting her left foot on the thigh-high step, she grabbed the chrome bar running up the side of the cab and swung her right leg up to the floorboard, almost as if she were climbing onto a horse.

“Oh yeah, I’d say you’ve done this once or twice,” he said, grinning.

He was younger than most truck drivers. Better looking, too — good muscles, no gut. Well, that would change soon enough, if he ate and drank and sat on his ass all the time, like every other truck driver she’d ever known. Once she was in, he eased out the clutch and the truck rumbled forward. “Name’s Jake. As in ‘jake brakes.’ What’s yours?”

“Crystal,” she said. It wasn’t her real name — or at least, it didn’t use to be — but maybe by now she’d turned into Crystal. Didn’t matter anyhow. Plus she was pretty sure his name wasn’t really Jake.

“Crystal. Pretty. So how’s about we work up a little more appetite before breakfast, Crystal?”

She was already starving, but she figured she’d best reel him in while she had him on the hook. “Whatever you want. You’re in the driver’s seat.”

He smiled, putting the shades back on. The truck rumbled up to the stop sign where Old Kentucky Road intersected I-75. He turned left, toward the underpass and the Pilot, but then he cut the wheel to the right, turning onto the interstate’s northbound on-ramp instead of heading for the truck stop.

“Hey,” she said, turning in her seat. “What the hell you doing?”

“Just finding us a little privacy,” he said. “You know Exit 144? Three miles up the road? There’s a nice little pull-off there where nobody’ll bother us.”

She thought about opening the door and jumping out onto the ramp, but the truck had already picked up a fair amount of speed, and she didn’t think she could do it without hurting herself pretty bad. She sat back in the seat, her nerves jangling, magnifying every jolt as the truck shuddered over seams and patches in the pavement. Her anxiety lessened a bit when he put on his turn signal and downshifted to take the exit.

“Stinking Creek Road,” he said. “Reckon how come they give it such an ugly name?”

“I reckon it don’t smell too good,” she said. He probably wanted her to say something more clever or funny, but she was feeling hungry and nervous, not entertaining.

“Down near Chattanooga, there’s a stream called Suck Creek. Suck Creek Mountain, too. I’d hate to have to tell people I lived on Suck Creek Mountain.” She didn’t say anything. After a moment he added, “Up in Virginia, I-66 crosses Dismal Hollow Road. That’d be a bad address, too.”

Halfway down the ramp, on the left, they passed a long shed with a Quonset-hut roof. He braked and turned onto the gravel, crossing the far end of the structure. The shed was completely open on the end, and inside she saw an immense mound of salt — the highway department’s stockpile for the coming winter, she supposed. The four-mile grade on Jellico Mountain was a nightmare when it snowed; the lanes were in the shadow of the mountain for most of the day, so stuff was slow to melt. Take a hell of a lot more’n you to thaw that damn mountain, she thought, as if the salt could hear what she was thinking.

Just past the end of the shed, he spun the wheel again, tucking in behind the building so the truck was screened from view. “See?” he said. “Close, but quiet. If it don’t come a blizzard in the next hour, won’t nobody bother us here.” He smiled at his joke. “Aw, relax, darlin’. You changing your mind? Hell, I’ll take you back to the Pilot right now and still buy you breakfast, if you want to call off the deal. I’d be disappointed — who wouldn’t be, a good-looking woman like you? — but I’m a big boy. I reckon I’d get over it. In a year or two.” He grinned and winked.

She shook her head. “Not changing my mind. I just need to… switch gears, I guess,” she said. “My boss was giving me a hard time back there.”

“You want something to take the edge off? Sip of Jack Daniel’s? A little reefer?”

She felt a glimmer of what passed for hope these days. “You gonna smoke?” By way of answering, he took a fat joint and a lighter from the pocket of his denim shirt. He lit it and then handed it over so she could take a hit. She took a long drag and held it; when she exhaled, she seemed to be letting go of not just the smoke but also the stress of the night, the meanness of Bobby T, and the flash of panic she’d felt when the truck had taken the on-ramp instead of ducking under the freeway to the Pilot.

“That looks like just what the doctor ordered,” he said, and she was thinking he was right. Long as she didn’t forget to collect the money, being stoned would make it easier to zone out while he did his business. A good buzz might even help her think of something kinky enough to score the extra forty.

She was feeling pretty good by the time he helped her down from the cab and up into the sleeper. He gave her a hand as she stepped onto the bottom rung of the ladder, then boosted her up the rest of the way by cupping her ass in both palms and pushing, with a little squeeze for good measure.

The inside of the sleeper was like a cave; the compartment had two windows, but both were covered with blackout shades. “Here, let me turn on a light so you can see,” he said, switching on a dim dome light.

The sleeper contained a double-sized mattress along one wall, a galley kitchen in one corner, and a shower in the other corner. “Hell’s bells,” she said, toppling backward onto the mattress, “this is nicer’n where I live.” She spread her arms wide and swung them up and down, like wings. “I ain’t never been in a sleeper this big.”

He smiled. “I don’t expect you ever will be again, angel,” he said.

CHAPTER 7

Tyler locked the bone lab behind him and hustled out the stadium’s lower door. He’d parked his truck right by the door — a prime spot, except for the fact that it was illegal. Just for two minutes, he’d told himself; just long enough to drop off the strip-mine girl’s bones, which he’d carefully boxed after photographing and measuring them. But the two minutes had turned to ten, then thirty. He scanned the windshield, didn’t see a ticket. Whew, he thought. That’s lucky. Then he saw the figure on the far side of the truck. It was a man, standing on the running board, cupping his hands against the driver’s window so he could peer inside. “Hey!” Tyler yelled reflexively, wondering whether he was about to plead with a traffic cop or punch out a thief. The man straightened; the man was… his boss. “Hey,” he repeated, still feeling trespassed against; puzzled, too. “Uh, what’s up, Dr. B?”

“I was just looking to see how many miles you’ve got on this thing.”

“Last time I looked, the odometer was showing ninety-nine thousand eight hundred and change,” Tyler said. Dr. B lifted one eyebrow — his trademark expression of skepticism. The man was no fool. “I thought you had a meeting with the dean today,” Tyler went on, uneasy about Brockton’s interest in the truck — interest that seemed not just intense, but somehow invested. “You said you were gonna ask him for some land closer to campus.”

“I do, but he was running late. I’m headed there now.”

Tyler pointed at the glossy dress shoes trespassing on his running board. “You should be wearing yesterday’s boots to the meeting,” he said, “not that fancy footwear. Grind a little pig shit into the dean’s carpet, so he knows what it’s like for us out here.”

“Good idea, Tyler. Antagonize the boss — always a great strategy when you’re asking for a raise or a favor. You’re wasting your gifts in anthropology. You’d make a hell of an ambassador.” Dr. B stepped down from the running board but lingered by the truck, looking thoughtful. “Automatic or stick?”

“Stick, course. Three on the tree.” The term was archaic — slang for a three-speed gearshift on the steering column, the prehistoric predecessor to four-on-the-floor and five-speed manual transmissions — but Brockton was plenty old enough to know what it meant. “You couldn’t pay me to drive an automatic.”

“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” said Dr. B.

“Huh?”

“Oh, nothing. I’m just having an argument with Kathleen and Jeff.”

“Your son?”

“He just got his driver’s license, and he’s badgered us into helping him buy a car. Me, I didn’t have a car till I was out of college, but that’s a different argument, and I’ve already lost. Anyhow, Jeff and Kathleen are dead set on an automatic. But I say he needs to know how to drive a stick shift. What if he needs to drive somebody else’s car in an emergency, and the car’s a stick shift?”

“Uh, right,” said Tyler. “Or what if a meteorite shower wipes out every automatic-transmission factory on the entire planet?” Brockton frowned, unhappy to have his point undercut, and Tyler figured he’d better throw his boss a conciliatory bone. “But it is a useful skill. Especially if he’s gonna travel overseas — hard to rent anything but a stick, most places. Just the opposite of how it is here.” Dr. B nodded. “Main thing, though — and maybe he’d listen to this — is that you’ve got so much more control with a manual. I want to be the one that decides when to shift. Automatics drive me crazy, especially on hills.”

“Exactly,” said Brockton. “All that downshifting and upshifting, every five seconds? Don’t get me started.” He ran his eyes over the truck again. “Tell me, what year is this?”

“Unless I’m mistaken, this is 1992.”

“Ha ha. Not the calendar, smart-ass — the truck. What year is the truck?”

“It’s a 1950.”

“Amazing. You’d never know. How long you had it?”

“Me, only a couple years. But it’s been in the family from the get-go.”

“No kidding? Since 1950?”

“October ’49, actually. My granddaddy walked into the showroom, pocketful of cash from his corn crop, and drove it home. Drove it for the next twenty years, then gave it to my dad. Dad had it for twenty, too, but some of those, it gathered dust in a shed behind the house.”

Dr. B appraised the truck again. “How many miles you say it’s got?”

“I didn’t. I said it shows ninety-nine thousand and some. True, far as it goes.” He hoped the conversation was over, but his boss waited expectantly. “The whole truth would take another digit — another one on the left side of those numbers.”

“A hundred ninety-nine thousand?”

“Yeah. Back in 1950, Detroit took it for granted a car wouldn’t make it past ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine point nine. If by some miracle it did, all those nines rolled over—”

“Sure,” Brockton interrupted, “to zeros, all of ’em. Back to the beginning. Clean slate. Fresh start.”

Rebirth, or at least the illusion of it, long as you looked only at the numbers — not at holes in floorboards, or rusted-out fenders, or cracking, chalky paint, or rotted upholstery and shredded headliner.

Tyler had been a kindergartner the last time the Chevy’s odometer had racked up so many nines, but he remembered the event with Kodachrome vividness.

It was a summer Sunday afternoon, after church and after dinner, everyone stuffed and sleepy and still in their hot polyester church clothes. The truck was what his dad drove to work, or to the lumberyard or the dump or to Sears to get new appliances; everything else happened in the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, the big station wagon with the skylight windows. But that Sunday, the four of them piled into the sweltering, musty cab — no air conditioner, of course; the seat belts long since lost in the gap between the seat cushion and seat back. His parents perched on either side of the broad bench seat, with Tyler sandwiched between them, his baby sister, Anne Marie, age two, on his mom’s lap. They’d driven the thirty miles from Knoxville to Lenoir City, to the white farmhouse on River Road where Gran and Pop-Pop lived. The whole way down, his father’s gaze was glued to the odometer, and he nearly ran off the road — not once but twice, the second time provoking a gasp and a sharp “Wesley” from his mother. As they turned off River Road and crunched to a stop in the gravel driveway, his father tapped the instrument panel. “Look at that,” he’d said, “ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight point two. Perfect. Plenty of margin.” He’d then commenced to honking, laying on the horn for what seemed like forever, until Gran and Pop-Pop emerged at last, looking nappish and puzzled and maybe not all that thrilled at the surprise visit.

“What are y’all doing here?” Gran had said, then her cheeks turned red. “I mean, in that old thing? That bucket of bolts should have gone to the junkyard years ago.” Her flustered expression brightened when Tyler’s mom handed Anne Marie to her.

“Bucket of bolts? Are you referring to this marvelous machine, Mama? This paragon of mechanical perfection?” Tyler’s father had acted indignant, but even at five, Tyler could tell he was teasing, and he giggled. “Mama dear, we have come all the way from Knoxville to take you two for an old-fashioned Sunday drive. Get in. You’ll like it.” Tyler’s mom reclaimed Anne Marie momentarily, and Gran clambered into the cab, still looking baffled. Pop-Pop resisted, insisting he should ride in the back so Tyler’s mom wouldn’t have to.

“Are you kidding?” she’d said, handing Anne Marie into the cab, back to Gran. “I love riding in the back of a pickup. Makes me feel like a kid again.” She fiddled with the latch, and the tailgate fell open with a screech and a bang. “Tyler and I will be happy as hound dogs back here,” she said, boosting him up onto the tailgate. Tyler could scarcely believe his good fortune. Never — never — had he been allowed to ride in the back of the truck. “It’s a death trap,” his mom would invariably say, any time his dad suggested that maybe, just this once, it might be okay.

With another screech and a bang and a sly wink at Tyler, his dad slammed the tailgate and got behind the wheel once more. Tyler’s mom settled them in the front corners of the bed, frowning at the dirt and the rust. “Now you sit still and hold on tight,” she said, and Tyler nodded eagerly.

Driving far more slowly than usual, Tyler’s dad pulled out of the driveway and headed farther out River Road, along a stretch that ran straight and flat between fields of dark, glossy corn. After a couple of miles, he eased the truck to a stop, right there in the road, and cut the engine. Then he shifted into neutral, pulled the emergency brake, opened the driver’s door, and got out. “Come on around her and take the wheel, Daddy,” he’d said to Pop-Pop. “Ease off that brake and let her coast when I give you the word.” Then, walking to the back of the truck, he’d opened the tailgate and helped his son and his wife hop down. Motioning her toward the truck’s right rear corner, he’d placed Tyler behind the center of the tailgate, then stationed himself at the left rear corner. “Ready, Daddy?”

“What on God’s green earth are y’all doing?” squawked Gran.

“The odometer’s fixin’ to turn over, Mama,” he’d hollered. “One hundred thousand miles! Daddy, let that brake off so we can push this fine machine into its second lifetime.”

“Lord help, you people are nuts,” Gran laughed.

The road must have had a slight downgrade — either that, or the universe joined in the celebration — because the truck rolled easily, and soon the three of them were running just to keep from losing touch with it. As they ran, Tyler’s dad began to sing. “Swing low… sweet chariot… comin’ for to carry me home.” His strong, clear voice rolled out across the fields.

“Swi-ing low,” his mom chimed in, “sweet cha-ri-o-ot… comin’ for to carry me home.”

“Here it comes, here it comes!” shouted Pop-Pop. “Point eight… Point nine… Zero!” His shout was joined by the truck’s wildly honking horn — a trumpeting horn, a jubilant horn; a horn the Angel Gabriel himself would have been proud to blow, if only the Almighty had allowed him to turn in his angel wings and trade up to a 195 °Chevy half-ton: a bug-eyed, bona fide miracle of American engineering and mass production.

Fifteen years later, when Tyler graduated from college, his dad had surprised him by giving him the truck — but the truck as Tyler had never known it: a glorious, ground-up restoration of the truck, with gleaming new paint, leather interior, seat belts, and a stem-to-stern mechanical rebuild that rendered the rings, valves, and gearbox as tight as they’d been the day Pop-Pop had driven it out of the showroom. It was not so much a restoration as a reincarnation: as if everything else — everything but the odometer — had rolled over to zeros this time around.

“Sorry; What’d you say, Dr. B?” Tyler blinked, somewhat surprised to find himself in 1992, standing at the base of the stadium, his boss staring at him, bringing him back to the present — back from the sweet childhood memory to the grim realities of death and decay and unrelenting demands.

“I said, what would you think of selling it?”

“Selling what? The truck?” Tyler looked at Dr. B, who cocked his head, waiting. “You mean to you?” Dr. B nodded. “What, for your son?” Another nod. Tyler was startled by the question; no, more than startled, he was stunned and unmoored. Unhappy, too. He stared at the truck, as if it had suddenly coalesced out of thin air; as if it were some… alien… thing, rather than a steadfast fixture of his entire existence. Was Brockton trying to take over his whole damned life?

Finally he spoke, choosing his words carefully. “This? For a teenage driver? You gotta be kidding. No air bags, no shoulder harnesses, no impact protection. Hell, if he hit something head-on, the steering column would go right through his chest, like a spear. This thing is a death trap.”

Dr. B smiled slightly, looking… what? Wistful? “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’d hang on to it, too, if I were you. Twenty years from now, you’ll be giving it to your son.”

Tyler hoped the subject of selling the truck was closed, but — knowing Dr. B — knew it would come up again. “Maybe not,” he said. Brockton looked hopeful for a moment, until Tyler added, “Maybe I’ll be giving it to my daughter.”

CHAPTER 8

The wand and hose of the pressure washer twitched and swayed in the air like a living creature—like a cobra, Satterfield thought — as the water hissed against the long hood of the Peterbilt. Bright red water sheeted down the side of the truck’s cab, a visual echo of the blood spilled inside the sleeper so recently. Fanning the seething spray back and forth in the morning sunlight, creating airy rainbows and red puddles, Satterfield envisioned the pressure washer’s long, thin nozzle as a magic wand. “Abracadabra,” he murmured, liking the feel of the word in his mouth, liking the sense of power he felt as a sorcerer. “Presto change-o, red to blue-o.” As if in response to the spell he was casting, the Peterbilt was transformed, wand wave by wand wave, the red truck dissolving and melting — molting — to reveal its inner self, its true colors: gunmetal blue, with a fringe of orange flames edging the back of the sleeper.

He’d been watching the news — on television and in the newspapers — but he’d seen nothing about the woman’s body being found. Apparently nobody even missed her yet, as there’d been no reports of a search, either.

He’d be in Birmingham by sundown tonight, and back in Knoxville by morning, his tracks fully covered. The fuel tanks still had a hundred gallons of diesel in them — at six miles a gallon, more than enough to make the trip — and he was ready to roll, as soon as he washed off the last of the paint.

Satterfield felt confident that no one had seen the woman get into the truck; I-75 ran right alongside Adult World, true, but the truck’s cab would have hidden her from the view of the motorists whizzing past. Remarkable, really, how oblivious most people were as they went about their daily business and their little lives. Still, it never hurt to be careful, and if—if—someone eventually came forward to say they’d seen a woman — a trashy, slutty-looking excuse for a woman — climbing into a tractor-trailer cab, the police would start looking for a truck that was red. Water-soluble paint, he thought. Brilliant. Long as there’s no rain in the forecast.

After he’d made two meticulous circuits with the pressure washer, perching on a stepladder to reach the roof of the cab, the water sheeting off was crystal clear, and only traces of red remained in the puddles and cracks around the concrete pad and drain. “Abracadabra,” Satterfield said again, giving the pressure-washer wand a final flourish before releasing the trigger.

Some things wash away easier than others, he thought.

“Boy, you drop them britches and bend over that bed, and I don’t mean in a minute.” His stepfather’s voice was low but menacing, and Satterfield knew better than to protest. “How long you been spying through that peephole? How many times before?”

“None.” The boy’s voice quavered. He wasn’t good at lying, and he already knew what was coming. A hand gripped his neck and hinged him forward onto the bed. “I wasn’t spying,” he pleaded. “I heard noises. I thought somebody was hurt. I was just looking to see if somebody needed help.”

“Somebody’s fixin’ to need help, all right,” the man snarled, unbuckling his belt and yanking it through the loops with seething, snapping sounds. He’d gotten home less than thirty minutes before, his arrival announced by the hiss of the Peterbilt’s air brakes, and he still smelled of the road — a week of diesel fuel and sweat and stale cigarettes and greasy truck-stop food — topped off now with whiskey and something muskier. Satterfield heard the air hiss as the leather strap swung overhead and then down, gaining momentum as it descended. It struck the mattress with enough force to shake the bed. “Don’t you lie to me, boy. That peephole ain’t nothin’ new. You been spyin’ on us a long time, ain’t you? Watchin’ us in the bed?”

“No, sir,” Satterfield whined. “Never.” The belt swung again, and again the bed shook, but this time the belt struck the boy’s buttocks, not the mattress, and he shrieked and began to sob. A few more blows, and suddenly the mattress grew warm and wet against him as his bladder let go from pain and fear.

His stepfather paused, bending over the whimpering boy, and sniffed the air. “Boy, did you just piss yourself?” His free hand slid roughly beneath the boy’s belly. “By God, you did. Twelve years old, and still pissing yourself. You little sissy-boy. You little piece of dog shit. You nasty little faggot.” A pause. “You know what happens to nasty little faggots? I’m fixin’ to show you.”

Satterfield heard the belt clatter to the floor, then heard his stepfather unzipping his jeans, then felt a searing pain. It took the boy two days to begin to recover.

A week later, the Peterbilt had hissed to a stop in the driveway once more, and the man and woman had disappeared into the bedroom and locked the door, and the sound of their groans had drawn Satterfield again to the peephole.

The peephole that his stepfather had made no effort to patch.

Satterfield studied the sunset through the passenger side of the Peterbilt’s windshield — the sky going red-orange and turquoise behind the silhouette of Birmingham’s blocky Civic Center and the I-59 viaduct — as he waited to hear the verdict from the asshole sitting in the driver’s seat.

“Drives okay,” said the asshole finally, but his tone was skeptical, as if what he really meant was “Drives like a piece of shit.”

The asshole — a beer-bellied, dumb-shit redneck of a prospective buyer — slouched behind the wheel, his hand rubbing the gearshift knob as if the truck were already his. They were just back from a twenty-mile test drive out I-59, which skirted downtown Birmingham on miles of elevated roadway, and they now sat idling beside the Sheraton and the Civic Center. To their left, traffic overhead rumbled and clattered across the viaduct’s expansion joints; to their right, the blank end wall of the high-rise hotel echoed every clatter a quarter of a second later, as if, in some parallel universe, identical cars and trucks were rumbling and clattering along an identical viaduct, in almost-but-not-quite-perfect sync.

Satterfield wasn’t staying at the Sheraton. He’d said he was, when he’d arranged the meeting with the asshole, but the moment the deal was sealed and the asshole was gone, Satterfield would jog beneath the roaring roadway to the Greyhound station, six blocks south, huddled beneath the forty-story BellSouth building. The next bus for Knoxville was scheduled to leave in less than an hour, and Satterfield was growing impatient with the slow-talking, slow-witted buyer.

“If it’s so damned good, how come you’re so hot to sell it?”

Satterfield shook his head, his eyes downcast. Don’t you even think about backing out on me, he thought. “It’s my wife,” he said sadly. “She’s sick. Real sick — breast cancer. Doctor says she’s got three months. Six, at the most.” He heaved a deep sigh, loud enough to be heard over the traffic and the clatter of the truck’s idling pistons. “We’ve got a lot of hospital bills. Got a four-year-old, too, that I got to raise on my own pretty soon.” He turned to look at the guy now, his eyes full of ginned-up sorrow and anger, daring the asshole to do anything but sympathize and cough up the cash. “That’s how come.”

The asshole nodded slightly, working the tip of his tongue into the crevice between two top teeth, digging for the bit of food that Satterfield had noticed was caught there. “Hmm,” the guy grunted, “too bad.” Satterfield felt a flash of fury at the lukewarm response. So what, if his tale of familial woe was totally fabricated, his tragic characters spun out of thin air? This guy had no way of knowing that. I got a dying wife and a motherless kid on my hands, and all you got to say is “too bad”? You coldhearted, little-dicked son of a bitch. “And you brought the title?”

“Got it right here,” Satterfield said, opening the glove compartment and removing a fat folder. “Maintenance records, too.” He handed the folder across, and the guy riffled through it, glancing at the receipts. “I haven’t put many miles on it this past year. Not since she got sick.”

The guy pulled out the title and studied the name on it. It was Satterfield’s stepfather’s name; it was the name Satterfield would sign, assuming the guy ever shut up and paid up. “And the title’s clean? No liens?”

“Abso-fuckin’-lutely clean,” Satterfield snapped. “I gave you the damn VIN number. Didn’t you check it? I told you to.”

“Yeah, I checked it. Came back clean. Just askin’. Just makin’ sure.” His tongue began rooting around in his teeth again, fishing for more scraps—Why’s he stalling? wondered Satterfield, and then he realized, Ah, here it comes. “Thirty thousand, that’s a lot of cash,” the guy said. He chewed his lip and shook his head, looking pained — like he really wanted the truck after all but just couldn’t quite scrape up the asking price.

“Thirty’s a damn sight less than forty,” snapped Satterfield. “This truck’s worth forty, easy, and you know it. If you want it, you put thirty thousand dollars cash money in my hand right now. If you don’t want it, get your ass out of my truck and quit wasting my time.” Don’t you dare fuck with me, fat-ass, the voice in his head hissed. I will gut you like a big-bellied hog.

“Easy, hoss,” said the guy. “I want it. But I’m a working man, and that kind of cash don’t grow on trees.” He waited, apparently still hoping Satterfield might cut him a break on the price. Finally, when Satterfield didn’t budge, he reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and brought out a fat manila envelope, as thick as a brick, the top of the envelope wrapped around the money and rubber-banded. Satterfield had already spotted the rectangle hanging heavy inside the coat; he’d considered killing the guy while they were out on the test drive — snagging the cash and dumping his body somewhere on the way back to Knoxville, maybe in Little River Canyon, up toward Chattanooga — but that seemed risky, given that the guy’s wife was waiting for him at a McDonald’s around the corner. No, better to take the money, let the guy drive away, and stay as far under the radar as possible. The truck could tie him to his dead stepfather, if that body was ever found, and it could tie him to the stripper he’d dumped in the ravine. The truck needed selling. Besides, the money would be useful; he could live for a year — two, if he had to — on the thirty grand plus the monthly infusions of cash his mother’s Social Security checks provided.

Satterfield took the envelope in his left hand, reaching into the glove compartment again with his right, this time feeling for his straight razor. Flipping open the blade, he slid the tip lightly across the rubber band to slice it, then laid the razor on his right leg, still open. He pulled the stack of currency — also rubber-banded — from the envelope and riffled through one corner of the stack, as if the bills were a deck of cards. The number 50 fluttered past many times, jerking and shimmying in small movements, like an animated drawing in a child’s flip-book. He tugged one of the fifties free and tucked it into his shirt pocket — he’d be paying cash for his bus ticket, so there’d be no paper trail leading from Birmingham — then tucked the rest between his thighs. He took a pen from his shirt pocket. “Okay, then. Hand me that title and I’ll sign it over.”

“Don’t you want to count it?”

Satterfield looked at him coolly, holding the stare long enough to make the guy squirm. “Some reason I need to count it?”

Even by the last light of the sunset and the first flickers of the streetlamps, he could see the guy flush. Is he insulted, because he wouldn’t dream of shorting me? Or is he worried, because he actually did? “No reason, hoss. It’s all there.”

“Good.” Satterfield picked up the straight razor and angled it toward the light spilling through the driver’s window, sighting along the edge of the blade, inspecting it for nicks. He glanced up from the blade and smiled. “Be a real shame if I had to come back to settle up.”

CHAPTER 9

Tyler and I were thirty miles northwest of Knoxville on I-75, the sun beginning to sink as we began to climb Jellico Mountain. An hour before, I’d gotten a call from the sheriff of Campbell County—“Sheriff Grainger,” he’d said on the phone, without giving his first name — asking if I could come recover a body from a creek bed. “It’s in pretty rough shape,” he’d said. “The TBI agent up here says this is just your kind of thing.”

“The TBI agent up there wouldn’t happen to be named Meffert, would he? Bubba Hardknot?”

“Sure is,” Sheriff Grainger had answered. “He covers Campbell, Morgan, and Scott Counties.”

“Lucky him,” I’d said, then realized the remark might sound offensive. “That’s a lot of ground to cover.” All three counties were mountainous and sparsely populated; coal rich but dollar poor. “Bubba be at the scene?”

“On his way over from Oneida right now. Reckon he’ll be along directly.”

“We’ll get there as quick as we can, Sheriff.”

“Look at that,” I said, pointing out the right side of the windshield. “Nature’s flying buttresses.”

“Huh?” Tyler followed the direction of my point. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. Gotcha.”

“That’s it?” I shook my head. “A miracle of nature, and the best you can manage is ‘Gotcha’?” We were halfway up Jellico Mountain on a crisp, clear afternoon in late September; a hundred yards to the east of the interstate, a series of massive stone pillars — as plumb and parallel as stonemasons could have set them — jutted from the mountainside, each pillar rearing a hundred feet high against the reds and golds of the turning leaves. “Tyler, you have no poetry in your soul.”

“I’ve got no lunch in my belly, either,” he grumbled, “and it’s three o’clock. Hard to hear poetry over the growling of my stomach.”

“Not my fault you didn’t eat at noon,” I pointed out.

“It’s not? Wasn’t it you who told me to finish grading those exams by two?” He did have a point there. “Besides, we’ve passed a dozen fast-food places since we left UT.”

“Yeah, but the sheriff called thirty seconds after you finished grading,” I said. “And we don’t have a lot of daylight left.” I glanced again at the sun, already nearing the ridgeline. “A couple hours, tops, now that the days are getting short.” I did feel bad about dragging him to a death scene unfed, though. “Look in the glove compartment,” I told him. “I think there’s a Snickers bar in there somewhere.”

He pushed the button; the door popped open and a box of surgical gloves launched itself at him, latex fingers twitching in midair. Tyler rooted through the recess. “Papers. Registration, insurance, maintenance records, owner’s manual,” he itemized. “No Snickers.”

“Keep digging,” I said. “I could swear there’s one in there.”

“Oh,” he said after a moment. “Yeah. Down here in the Jurassic stratum, I think I’ve discovered a fossilized candy bar.” He fished out a Snickers, the wrapper rumpled and misshapen, and peeled it open. Inside was a cylinder of graying chocolate, misshapen from numerous cycles of melting and resolidifying. Tyler eyed it with distaste. “Oh, did I say candy bar? I meant coprolite.” I had to admit, the lumpy extrusion did look remarkably like fossilized poop. He chomped down on it and wrestled a chunk free. “Mmm,” he mumbled sarcastically. “Tasty.” He took another bite.

The traffic was crawling. The right lane was slowed by a flatbed trailer hauling a bulldozer up the mountain; I had no idea what a bulldozer’s top speed was, but I suspected it couldn’t be much slower than the snail’s pace at which the truck was transporting it. In the left lane, cars were bunched up behind a coal truck, which was creeping past the bulldozer at what appeared to be half a mile an hour faster.

“Wish they’d warned us about the rolling roadblock,” Tyler mumbled through the caramel. “We could’ve zipped in and out of that Hardee’s back at Lake City without losing any time. Forensic anthropology, NASCAR style.”

“If you want to jump out and run back, go for it,” I said. “You could probably catch up with me by the top of the mountain.” He grunted and popped the last lump of the Snickers into his mouth.

Just as we crept over the lip of the mountain, the coal truck eased into the right lane, allowing the long line of cars to begin passing. As we drew nearer, I noticed both trucks turn and lumber down an exit ramp. “Nice,” Tyler fumed at the coal truck. “Cause a bottleneck for dozens of cars, just so you can get to the exit two seconds ahead of the bulldozer.”

“No point getting mad,” I said. “Doesn’t get us there any faster, and it sure doesn’t hurt the truck driver. Just makes you feel worse. Don’t they teach you that kind of stuff in yoga? Ommmm and all that?”

Tyler turned and stared at me. “Where was that laid-back vibe two hours ago, Mr. Mellow, when you were flogging me to get those papers graded?”

“That’s different,” I pointed out. “Those trucks aren’t in my power. You, on the other hand…” I didn’t need to finish the sentence; Tyler knew better than anyone that “graduate assistantship” was synonymous with “indentured servitude.”

He tapped his window and pointed. “Classy,” he said. I looked out and saw the coal truck and the bulldozer-hauler both turning into the parking lot of a garish, neon-lit store — XXX Adult World — advertising books, videos, novelties, and Live Girls, Girls, Girls. “Also classy,” he said, now pointing to a corrugated metal building that was overshadowed by a gargantuan corrugated cross. “Not exactly Saint Peter’s, is it?”

“Not exactly,” I agreed. “But I suspect the Vatican’s art and architecture budget was a little bigger than these folks’.” Tyler grunted, glancing down at the directions the sheriff had given me.

A mile or so later, Tyler pointed to a road sign. “That’s our exit,” he said. “Stinking Creek Road. One mile.” I passed another lumbering coal truck, then signaled and eased into the right lane, just in time to catch the exit. “Left onto Stinking Creek.”

As we coasted down the ramp, Tyler leaned forward and looked out my window. “I’d like to build a house like that someday,” he said.

I glanced to the left, and then at the outside mirror. “What, a house filled with rock salt?”

“No, a house made from a Quonset hut. Actually, a house made from two Quonset huts, crossing in the middle, like a big plus sign. Like a cathedral, with a nave and a transept. Earth sheltered, for natural insulation; walls of glass at all four ends; a big skylight above the intersection, for plenty of natural light.”

“So,” I said, making a left at the bottom of the ramp, “the floor plan of a cathedral, the elegance of a drainage culvert? Classy. How does Roxanne feel about the idea of living in a burrow?” He frowned, which might have meant that he hadn’t asked, or might have meant that he had, and that she wasn’t wild about the idea.

Just then we rounded a curve and nearly rear-ended a Campbell County sheriff’s cruiser, which was parked at the edge of the pavement with its rear end angling into the road. In front of it was another cruiser and, ahead of that, an unmarked black sedan — Meffert’s TBI-issued Crown Victoria. Just beyond the Crown Vic was a bridge spanning a narrow gorge — a gorge carved, I assumed, by Stinking Creek. Midway across the bridge, a figure I recognized as Meffert leaned over the railing, looking down.

I tucked the pickup behind the cruisers, trying to feel for the margins of the shoulder through the tires. Tyler opened his door and looked down, frowning. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did I not leave enough room?”

“Plenty of room. For a mountain goat.”

The door of the nearer cruiser opened and a uniformed officer got out. “He’s here,” I heard him saying into the mic of his two-way radio, the coils of the cord stretched to their limit. “Just pulled up.” He released the mic, which the cord yanked from his hand, and closed the door. “Dr. Brockton?”

“That’s me.” I extended my hand, walking toward him.

“Sheriff Grainger.” He took a few steps toward me, and we shook hands midway between the two vehicles — a tiny patch of neutral ground. I’d never had any territorial squabbles with law-enforcement officers — any “whose-jurisdiction-is-bigger contests,” as Tyler called such things — but it never hurt to observe a few unwritten rules of courtesy and common sense. Meet in the middle, as equals; don’t kowtow to the cops, but don’t rub their noses in your Ph.D., either.

I introduced Tyler, and then Sheriff Grainger led us toward the bridge. A steady breeze was funneling up the narrow valley of Stinking Creek, spooling across the roadway and humming up the ridge. The temperature was dropping along with the sinking sun, and I was grateful for the sweatshirt I’d added beneath the windbreaker. I sniffed the air and caught the nutty smells of autumn leaves, fall acorns, and a faint, acrid scent that might have been sulfur from the creek. I didn’t pick up any trace of decomp in the air, but unless the two dozen buzzards overhead were badly mistaken, it was there; definitely there. Some of the birds wheeled above the ravine; others hovered, surfing the wind that rippled up the ridge.

Just as we reached the bridge, a shotgun boomed, loud and near. I dropped to a crouch beside the Crown Vic, and Tyler scuttled into the gap behind it. The sheriff laughed. “Sorry, Doc,” he said. “That’s just Aikins, shooing off the buzzards.” He pointed skyward, and I looked up just in time to see the last of the birds hightailing it over the ridgeline. “I should’ve warned you about that. My bad.”

“No harm done,” I said, rising from my crouch. “Y’all sure know how to keep a fellow on his toes. Tyler, you okay?”

“Hoo-eee,” Tyler said, rising and dusting himself off. “Love the adrenaline rush. Hate wettin’ my pants.”

The sheriff turned and yelled toward the far end of the bridge. “Hey. Aikins! Next time you tell us before you do that.”

“Sorry, Sheriff,” came a voice from the shadows across the ravine.

“He’s a good boy,” the sheriff muttered, “but not a whole lot upstairs. Come on out on the bridge, and I’ll show you where she is. You can figure out the best way to get her out.”

He turned and walked toward the bridge, then onto the span. Twenty feet across, just short of the midpoint where Meffert stood, a loop of crime-scene tape hung from the concrete rail. I followed the sheriff, my heart still thudding and my skin prickling from the shotgun blast. Below, I heard the churning of the creek as I walked along the right-hand side of the bridge, peering over the waist-high rail. The creek was fifteen or twenty feet below, a narrow torrent of tumbling water, edged and obstructed by ledges and boulders, by hemlocks and rhododendron. When I reached the yellow tape, I saw why it was there: A wide smear of dark brown covered the top of the rail, and several drips ran partway down the side. In the creek bed below, a few feet downstream from the bridge, lay the body of a woman — or, rather, what had once been a woman. She lay just above the waterline, on the right-hand bank. She was lying, undressed and in several pieces, near a jumble of blood-soaked fabric that was wedged between rocks at the water’s edge.

Tyler joined me at the rail; Meffert stood slightly behind us, not speaking, allowing us to take in the scene on our own. “Tell me what you see, Tyler,” I said. It was my favorite teaching technique — like taking medical students on hospital rounds, but instead of sick patients and puzzling diseases, my rounds revolved around stinking bodies or bare bones.

“What I see is a lot of work getting her up out of there,” he began. I waited, knowing that after mouthing off — partly to stall for time, but also to take the edge off the grim work that lay ahead — Tyler would begin to wheel and spiral in, a forensic version of the buzzard spiral that the deputy’s shotgun blast had interrupted. “Looks like she was dismembered,” he said slowly. “Her limbs appear severed, not gnawed off.” I’d already come to the same conclusion. I also felt sure she’d been dismembered before she was dumped into the creek bed, not after. Tyler glanced down at the rail. “There was lots of blood,” he said, “but there’s not as much on the rail as it looks like.”

“Explain,” I encouraged.

“It didn’t pool up here at all.” I nodded, impressed by how much detail he was noting and interpreting intelligently. Tyler had worked a dozen death scenes with me by now, and he seemed to soak up knowledge the way gauze soaks up blood. He pointed, tracing the margins of the big bloodstain without quite touching it. “And see how the edges are feathered, rather than sharply defined? So it’s mostly just a smear, but a smear from a big, wide area.” He squatted down, studying the few drips there were, and then dropped to all fours, his face just inches from the pavement. I smiled, having a pretty good idea what he’d spotted. “There’s a little spatter down here,” he said, “the drops diverging from the rail. Means she landed on the rail pretty hard. I’d say she fell a ways — maybe a couple feet — before she hit the rail and then tumbled on over the side.”

Meffert stepped closer, unable to hold back any longer, and squatted down for a look. “Huh,” he said. “I missed those spatters. You got better eyes than I do, young man.” He straightened up with a lurch and a grunt. “Better knees, too.”

Tyler squinted down at the remains in the streambed. “Female torso, probably adult, but the soft tissue’s too far gone to tell,” he said. “We can narrow down the age once we get a good look at the bones.” He paused and considered before adding, “That’s about all I’ve got so far.”

“That’s about all there is to get from here,” I said. “Sheriff, you weren’t exaggerating — it’s a mess, all right.”

“Wish the mess had been a couple miles farther north,” the sheriff replied.

“Why?”

Meffert answered my question. “That’d make it Kentucky’s mess, not Tennessee’s.”

I was turning away from the railing when something tugged at the sleeve of my awareness — something I hadn’t even realized I’d seen. I turned back, scanning the concrete.

“What is it?” asked Tyler.

“Not sure,” I said. “Something caught my eye. I thought so, anyhow. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was… ” Just then I saw it, on the inside of the concrete rail, an arm’s length beyond the end of the blood smear. The tiniest flash of light, like a droplet of dew glinting. It was a small fleck of paint — red paint — glinting in the afternoon sun. “I might be wrong,” I said, “but I’m guessing there’s a truck out there somewhere that’s got a little ding in the edge of one door.” I guesstimated the height of the railing. “About thirty-two inches off the ground. Too high for a car door, I’d say.”

“I’ve got a tape measure in the car,” said Meffert. “I can measure it. And I’ll scrape that paint off and get it to the TBI lab. See if they can find a match.”

“Well, shit,” said the sheriff. “If it’s a trucker, could be from anywhere in the country. We get thousands of ’em passing through here on I-75 ever’ damn day.”

I nodded sympathetically. “Hard to know even where to start looking.” I turned to Tyler. “We’d better get on down there. We’ve got an hour of daylight, at best.”

“We can get you some work lights if we need to,” Sheriff Grainger said. “The highway department garage ain’t far away.”

I shook my head. “Even with good lights, it’s just not the same,” I said. “You always miss something. If we can’t finish up by dark, I’d rather come back in the morning.”

Sheriff Grainger shrugged. “Whatever you want, Doc.” He pointed at the trees lining the nearer side of the gorge. “We went ahead and rigged you a rope down through that notch in the bluff. You said y’all have a litter in your truck?”

“We do.” I studied the bluff. Even the notch — a narrow gap in the rock face, threaded by a thin yellow strand — was almost vertical. “Probably best to lower the litter from here on the bridge. Bag the remains and whatever else we find, lash everything to the litter, and hoist it back up.”

“That’s how I figured it, too,” he said. “We’ve got more rope. We’ll rig you two hauling lines and lower the litter, while y’all start on down.”

“How about you tie our gear on the litter and lower it down? Lot easier to shinny down that rope if we don’t have our hands full.”

The sheriff saluted and called the deputy over. Tyler was already halfway back to the truck. I caught up with him as he was laying the litter crosswise on the tailgate. He looked up. “What all you want to take, Dr. B?”

“Both cameras. Body bag, ID tags, a few biohazard bags, box of rubber gloves,” I said. I tucked a pair of leather work gloves into a pocket of my jeans and stuffed a pair into one of Tyler’s pockets, too. “To prevent rope burn,” I said, then, “hmm. Two flashlights and two headlamps, just in case the time gets away from us. Oh, and the hoe.”

“The hoe?” Tyler looked puzzled. “Nothing but rocks and water down there. What for?”

“You never know,” I said. “I was a Boy Scout. Our motto—”

“I know, I know,” he interrupted wearily, probably because he’d heard me say it a thousand times. “Be Prepared.”

We met the sheriff and Meffert at the end of the bridge and handed them the litter and tools — everything except the hoe, which I wanted to carry with me. Tyler shook his head, as if I were crazy; when the two officers looked quizzically at me, I simply smiled. Deputy Aikins pointed. “See that big ol’ hemlock right yonder?” I looked, then nodded. “Rope’s tied to that. Just foller it down. Bring you right to that ledge where she’s at.”

“Either one of you touch anything down there?”

“Nossir, not me,” said Aikins. “Ain’t been down there.”

“None of us have,” said Meffert. “We figured we’d leave the dirty work for y’all.”

The deputy chortled. “Got that right,” he said.

Tyler and I wriggled into coveralls — one-piece jumpsuits made of heavy canvas, the sort worn by mechanics and highway crews — which we wore to keep contamination off our clothes. The temperature was dropping as the afternoon waned, and the extra layer of warmth felt good. Moving fast, we scrambled down the steep shoulder and into the woods at the edge of the ravine. A hemlock, its trunk a full two feet thick, grew from a cleft in the rock bluff, curving outward above the stream to claim as much sunlight for itself as possible. Tied snugly around the trunk was a thin rope of yellow polypropylene. Tyler eyed the knot dubiously. “You think that’ll hold?”

I took a look. “Sure,” I said. “That’s a figure eight on a bight. I recognize that—“

“Yeah, yeah, from your merit badge in knot craft. So it’s got the Woodchuck Seal of Approval, right?”

“Hey, don’t be dissing the Scouts,” I said. “The knot’s fine; the rope’s the problem. I’ve seen a lot of ski ropes break, and that’s basically what this is — polypropylene ski rope. Probably snap if you put more than a couple hundred pounds on it. But long as we’re not both hanging from it at the same time, it ought to be okay.” I eyed him; Tyler was an inch taller than I was, but skinnier. “How much you weigh?”

“One sixty,” he said, his eyes zeroing in on my waistline. “You?”

“One seventy.”

“Okay then,” he said. “Heft before beauty. Think helium-filled thoughts.”

Backing up to the notch in the bluff, I spiraled the rope around my left forearm to create a bit of friction and then clamped my fist around it. Then, with my right hand, I pulled the rope snugly around my butt, gripping it with my right hand at waist level. The skinny plastic rope was lousy for climbing, but I hypothesized — and hoped — that I’d get enough braking power from the combined friction of both hands, the spiral around my forearm, and the detour around my rear end. Leaning back slightly, I tested my theory. The thin rope bit into my forearm and the backs of my thighs, but it didn’t slip through my hands. “Not great,” I said, as much to myself as to Tyler, “but it’ll do. Stick that hoe under my left arm, would you?”

“Why don’t you just chuck it down there?”

“And chip that edge I spent an hour sharpening? No way. Besides, I want it with me. Call me crazy.”

“Crazy,” he said, but he brought me the tool. I raised my left elbow, as if it were a chicken’s wing, and he tucked the handle into my armpit, the blade flat against my chest. Still leaning away from the tree, the handle of the hoe jutting into the ravine, I stepped backward and down, into the crevice, and began my descent. The bluff wasn’t high — only about twenty feet — and the notch offered plenty of footholds, so I made it down with no trouble, despite the awkwardness of the hoe.

Just as I stepped onto the ledge at the base of the bluff, I heard a sound that sent a shock wave of fear coursing through me. It was a dry, hollow buzz: the buzz of a rattlesnake. I froze, trying to pinpoint the source. It didn’t take long. The snake — a big timber rattler, its body as thick as my wrist — was eighteen inches from my right foot. Head up, tail vibrating, the snake was coiled to strike. The rock ledge was catching the last of the afternoon sun, and the snake had been basking in the warmth — possibly the last real warmth for months. No wonder it was mad about the disturbance. Its eyes, I noticed, looked cloudy — a sign it was about to shed its skin. The good news was, that meant its vision was impaired; the bad news was, rattlesnakes get more aggressive when they can’t see well, so the snake might launch a preemptive first strike.

Moving with excruciating slowness, I relaxed my right hand, lowering the loop of rope with what I hoped was enough subtlety to escape notice. Then I eased the hand up and across my chest, grasping the blade and sliding the hoe upward from beneath my left arm. The snake buzzed steadily, its head motionless except for the tongue sliding in and out, in and out, as it sampled and resampled my scent. My scent was changing fast, I suspected, with the flash flood of sweat, adrenaline, and whatever other chemicals were triggered by terror. Fearomones, I thought. When the hoe was halfway out from under my arm, I inched my right hand down the metal neck to the midpoint of the shaft, and then eased my left hand onto the thicker wood near the end.

Twenty feet above me, Tyler’s footsteps crunched on leaves and twigs as he approached the edge of the bluff. “Dr. B?” he called. “You down yet?” I dared not answer. “Dr. B? Are you okay?” I hoped his voice might persuade the snake to crawl away, or at least distract it enough to allow me to move. No such luck — it remained poised, and it continued to buzz its warning. “Shit,” I heard Tyler mutter, and then, loudly, “Hang on, Dr. B, I’m coming down. Don’t worry!”

Suddenly I felt my left arm jerk wildly as the rope — still spiraled around my forearm — was yanked from above. Pulled off balance, I stumbled, and the snake hurled itself at my leg. In desperation I swung the hoe, knowing I was too late, too wild with my panicked swing. But to my astonishment, the snake’s head stopped in midair, as if it had hit a pane of glass, then the body dropped to the ground. The edge of the blade, I saw, had sliced halfway through the snake’s lunging body, pinning the creature to the ground, its jaws snapping an inch from my shin. Pressing down on the handle, I stepped away; then — when I was safely out of reach — I raised the hoe and brought it down on the neck, severing the head.

“Doc?” It was Sheriff Grainger on the bridge. I looked up and nearly fainted: Aikins had the 12-gauge at his shoulder, and the barrel appeared to be pointing straight down. Straight down at me.

“Jesus, Deputy, don’t shoot,” I shouted, and the sheriff pushed the barrel of the gun to one side, then pried it from the deputy’s grip.

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” yelled Tyler, his voice high and strained. “Dr. B? Dr. B? Are you all right? What the hell is going on?”

“I’m all right,” I said weakly, twisting my arm free of the rope. “I’m fine. Come on down.”

Sixty seconds later, Tyler was on the ground. “Why didn’t you answer me before? Why was he pointing a gun at you? What was all that racket you were making down here?”

Wordlessly I nodded in the direction of the snake. The mangled body was still writhing and thrashing, the spinal nerves continuing to send impulses to the muscles, even though the brain had been disconnected. When Tyler saw the snake, he jumped back as though he’d been bitten, then gasped, “God damn, I hate snakes. Hate ’em.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you what the hoe was for.”

“How’d you know this thing would be lying in ambush?”

“Didn’t know. Just knew to be prepared. Knew this is the kind of rocky habitat they like, and this is the kind of weather that brings ’em out.”

“You keep using the plural,” he said, his face ashen. “They and them. Those pronouns are making me really nervous.”

“I was just talking about snakes in general,” I assured him. “The same way I might hold up one human skull but use the word ‘humans.’” I resisted the urge to tell him that in the fall rattlesnakes sometimes converge in dens by the dozens or even the hundreds. If the sight of a single dying snake could spook Tyler so much, I hated to think how he’d react to the notion of scores of writhing vipers; serpentine spaghetti.

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, we’ve got work to do now. Plenty of time for post-traumatic stress later.”

The woman — definitely a woman — lay facedown, the skull misshapen, probably fractured by the fall. The arms and legs had tumbled free of the body and lay at odd, unnatural angles, the knees and elbows bent. The soft tissue of the extremities was largely gone, as were some of the finger and toe bones. Gnaw marks on the remaining bones of the hands and feet, as well as on the distal ends of the long bones, suggested that canine scavengers — coyotes, probably — had been sharing the remains with the buzzards.

We took a series of photos — both of us shooting, in the interest of speed. “Okay, good enough,” I said. “Let’s get her tagged and bagged.” Normally we’d have spent more time observing and interpreting the scene, but time was a luxury we didn’t have in the fading light of the mountain ravine. Tyler unfolded and unzipped the heavy, rubberized fabric of the body bag, and together we worked the big C-shaped opening underneath the torso. As we did, maggots — some of them as small as rice grains, some a half-inch long — wriggled from the corpse and dropped into the crevices between rocks. A thought struck me. “Before you put her in to simmer,” I said, “find the five biggest maggots and put ’em in alcohol.”

“Uh, okay. How come?”

“The biggest ones must’ve been the first to hatch,” I told him. “Next donated body we get, we document how long it takes the maggots to reach this size. Presto — we know how long this woman’s been dead.”

“So, when you say, ‘we document’…”

“I mean you document,” I clarified. “But we both learn something. We start learning to read the bugs like a time-since-death stopwatch. Timing is everything.” He nodded thoughtfully.

Once the torso was inside, we tucked in the limbs as well, then slid the bag onto the litter. Tyler began zipping it shut, sliding the zipper across the bottom, up one side, and across the top.

“Don’t close it all the way just yet,” I said. “We might find a few bones from the hands and feet in the crevices.”

“You want to reach your hand down into snake-land, you go right ahead,” said Tyler. “I’ll start in on this pile of clothes and stuff.” He unfolded a biohazard bag, then began tugging the tangle of fabric from the crevices in the rock. “Looks like some bloody sheets,” he narrated, as I peered down into nooks and crannies beneath the spots where the hands and feet had lain. “Tennis shoes. Bra. Panties. T-shirt. Blue jeans.” He had just finished extricating the blue jeans from the tangle when he gave a low whistle. “Holy shit,” he said, holding up the jeans, “look at this, Dr. B.” I was puzzled at first — the jeans had wider legs than any pants I’d ever seen. Had the woman been morbidly obese? Then I realized what I was seeing: a single layer of fabric, as if one of the seams in each leg had been left unsewn. But that wasn’t the explanation. The explanation was, the legs of the pants had been sliced open, from top to bottom, up the front of each leg. The pants had been removed by cutting them off.

I took a closer look, and suddenly my blood ran cold. The cut edges of the jeans were stained, for their entire length, with blood. Whoever had cut the jeans off hadn’t done it the way I’d have expected — hadn’t put the blade inside the legs of the pants and then sliced up and out, away from the skin. The jeans had been cut from the outside, by bearing down on the blade and slicing inward. The killer had used the victim herself as a cutting board.

We loaded the litter by the last of the daylight, pausing to put on the headlamps we would need for the climb out of the gorge. We had laid the body bag on first, then the biohazard bag containing the shoes and blood-soaked clothing, all of it cut. Last came another biohazard bag, this one containing a blood-soaked sheet and mattress pad. I lashed the bags tightly in place, so that nothing would spill if the litter tipped or even flipped as the officers hoisted it. When I was sure everything was secure, I slid the handle of the hoe beneath the lashings.

Tyler turned to look at me, his headlamp bright enough to be blinding even in the twilight. I held up a hand to shield my eyes, and he angled the headlamp down to lessen the glare. “You’re sending the hoe up? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Look who’s become a believer in the value of the hoe,” I said.

“Hey, if you’d told me why you wanted it in the first place, I’d have believed you,” he said.

“If I’d told you why I wanted it in the first place, there wouldn’t have been a second place — you’d have stayed up on the bridge,” I countered. “Or locked yourself in the truck.”

“Could be. But now that I’ve seen the light, I think we should hang on to the hoe till we’re out of the woods. Figuratively and literally.”

“Can’t. We need both hands free to climb. Besides, the snakes are probably holed up for the night by now.” I didn’t actually know if that was true, but I wanted to reassure Tyler. And myself.

I looked up at the pale line of the bridge, where Meffert, Sheriff Grainger, and Deputy Aikins were silhouetted against the pewter sky. “Okay,” I called. “Take up the slack. Easy does it.” I stepped away from the litter as the lines twitched and grew taut and the litter slowly ascended. Ascended, but not into heaven.

Tyler struggled up the rope first, and I followed. We met the sheriff and Meffert on the bridge, where the litter now lay, and we each took a corner and carried it to the truck in silence. For reasons I couldn’t have explained — because I didn’t fully understand them — the procession had a solemn, almost sacred feel to it, as if we were pallbearers at a funeral. Which, in a way, we were, because this was almost certain to be the most attention and dignity that would attend this woman’s death.

The fuel warning light blinked on just as Tyler and I turned off Stinking Creek Road onto the ramp for I-75 South. “Crap,” I muttered. “We need gas.”

“I think there’s a Pilot station — maybe a truck stop? — at the next exit. Just before we start down the mountain.”

“Yup,” I said. “You want to grab some food there?”

“Not really. Last time we ate at a place like that, I got really sick. Remember those chili dogs in Ooltewah? Woof. They tasted bad going down, and worse coming up. I’ve had bait shyness about truck-stop food ever since.”

“I didn’t realize your digestive system was so delicate,” I said. “You sure you’ve picked the right career path?”

“Hey, I don’t mind the bodies and the bugs. It’s just the snakes and the gut-bombs I hate.”

“Duly noted. I think there’s a Cracker Barrel just down the mountain, at LaFollette. Think you can handle that?”

“Cracker Barrel? Are you kidding?” He made exaggerated smacking sounds. “I could eat there every day. The merchandise is tacky, and the biscuits aren’t what they ought to be, but the food’s great.”

The Pilot truck stop, with its giant glowing sign of yellow, red, and black, loomed out of the darkness two minutes later. The fuel-pump islands were surrounded by a sea of asphalt, much of it occupied by tractor-trailer rigs that seemed settled in for the night. Many of the cabs were curtained off, but the trucks’ running lights remained on, and the air thrummed with a chorus of diesel engines and auxiliary generators, running to keep refrigerated trailers cool and sleeper cabs warm.

As we threaded our way through the rows of parked rigs, I glimpsed a pair of legs — pale, bare, female legs — clambering down from one of the cabs. When she emerged from the narrow gap between two trucks, I was stunned to see that she was naked from the waist down, except for a pair of high-heeled shoes. As she crossed the asphalt to the opposite row of trucks, she tugged at the hem of her shirt, pulling it down enough to cover — or nearly cover — her rear end.

“Jesus,” said Tyler. “Looks like you can get more than chili dogs and indigestion here.”

“Sure does,” I agreed, wondering what sort of desperation would induce a woman to have sex with multiple strangers every night in a truck-stop parking lot. “Looks like you could definitely get diseased here, too.” I thought of the remains in the back of the truck. “Or maybe dead.”

The woman rapped on the cab of a truck that was practically outlined in amber running lights. The door opened, and she climbed up. As she did, the hem of her garment crept up her flanks, as if the very fabric had somehow been programmed by some efficiency expert to shave every possible second and excise every scrap of humanity from the transaction about to be executed.

The big scoreboard-style clock on the Knoxville News Sentinel building read 9:57 P.M. — three minutes shy of my usual bedtime — by the time Tyler and I reached the city and took the exit for Neyland Drive. It was past Tyler’s bedtime already, if his slumped posture and rumbling snores were any indication. I slowed down, savoring the view on the final mile of the drive. The riverfront stretch of Neyland Drive was pretty by daylight, but it was beautiful by night. The lights of the Gay Street and Henley Street Bridges pooled and smeared in the water, like an Impressionist painting of Paris streets after an evening rain.

Neyland Stadium loomed dark and hulking as I threaded the truck down the narrow service lane around its perimeter. Weaving between concrete columns and steel girders to the base of the mammoth oval, I tucked the truck into the narrow dead end of asphalt beside the osteology lab. “Tyler, we’re here,” I said. He didn’t answer, so I shook his elbow, causing him to bolt upright and look around, wild-eyed and disoriented. “We’re here,” I repeated.

“Okay,” he mumbled. “Be right there.” He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “Wow,” he said, sounding slightly more cogent. “I was really out.” He massaged his neck and rolled his head from side to side to work out the kinks. “You want me to start processing the remains now?”

“Nah. Go home. She’s locked in the back.” I thought of the line the Morgan County sheriff had used a few weeks before. “She won’t be any deader in the morning than she is now. But you might be, if you don’t get some sleep.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll get going on it first thing.” He opened the door, but he didn’t get out. “Doctor B?”

“Yeah?”

“How could somebody do that to a woman? Butcher her like an animal and dump her like garbage?”

I shook my head. “I can tell you her race, her stature, her handedness, and her age,” I said. “I might be able to tell you how she died. But why? I can’t answer that one.” I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “What was it the old maps used to say at the edges, out beyond the known territory? ‘Here be monsters’? I don’t understand it — I’ve got no scientific explanation for it — but there’s evil in the world. Hiding around corners, lurking in doorways, coiling underneath rotting logs. Irrational, inexplicable, powerful evil.”

A light was on in the living room when I pulled into my driveway at eleven fifteen, but the rest of the house was dark. Unclipping the garage-door remote from the visor, I clicked the button, eased beneath the rising door, and switched off the ignition. I sat for a moment, the truck’s engine ticking with heat, my heart ticking with disappointment.

After seventeen years of marriage — and a decade of late-night returns from crime scenes — I no longer expected Kathleen to wait up for me; I’d even taken time to call her, when Tyler and I had stopped for gas, to tell her not to. But I’d been harboring hope that she would ignore the suggestion. Bodies and bones didn’t usually bother me; I regarded them as puzzles to be solved — mental challenges, not human tragedies — but tonight I felt skittish and shaken. The brutality of the woman’s slaying had gotten to me; so had the near miss with the rattlesnake. Had the ticking engine somehow reminded me of the snake’s warning buzz? The deputy’s rhetorical question as we’d loaded up—“Did you know that a rattlesnake’s head moves at a hunnerd and seventy-five miles an hour when it’s striking?”—popped into my mind, unbidden and unwelcome, for the dozenth time since dinner.

I stripped off my clothes in the garage — I’d shed the jumpsuit earlier, back at the stadium — and tossed them in the washing machine I’d installed in the back corner, at the end of my workbench. It was the old washer, the one Kathleen had exiled from the laundry room after finding decomp-soaked dungarees in it. Now, banished to the garage, it lived a contaminated and constrained life: no more satin pillowcases, silk blouses, sheer nightgowns, lacy undergarments; nothing but stinking shirts, muddy jeans, ruined towels, mildewed socks. My career had been good for America’s appliance manufacturers, I reflected, dumping in extra detergent and twisting the Maytag’s knobs to the longest, hottest cycle. Besides replacing the washing machine ten years ahead of schedule, I had also replaced a practically new stove several years earlier, after carelessly allowing a simmering skull to boil over: a mistake I’d made early in my career, before I learned not to bring my work home. I’d tried drenching the contaminated stove with Pine-Sol, Lysol, and Clorox, but to no avail; switching on any of the burners or the oven would fill the kitchen — swiftly and powerfully — with the pungent odor of human decomposition.

The garage was already chilly with the night air, and I was shivering by the time I got into the shower in the basement bathroom — my son, Jeff’s, bathroom. I cranked the hot-water valve wide open, adding just enough cold to keep from getting scalded, letting the water pour over me, pummel me, and I hoped purify me. I stood beneath the steaming stream until I’d used every drop of hot water in the fifty-gallon tank. I could have used another fifty gallons and still wished for more.

Wrapped in a towel, I made my way quietly up the stairs, pausing in the living room only to switch off the lamp beside the sofa. At the far end of the darkened hall, the bedroom door was a rectangle of deeper darkness. Even before I reached the room, I heard the deep, sighing breaths of Kathleen’s earnest, steady sleep. I stood in the doorway and listened. Behind me, in the living room, I heard the hollow, metronomic heartbeat of the regulator clock on the fireplace mantel. The clock had once kept time in my father’s law office, and it skipped not so much as a single beat when Daddy opened his desk drawer, took out a pistol, raised it to his temple, and squeezed the trigger. The clock required winding every seven days, and I welcomed the ritual. I remembered watching my father wind it, gripping the key between his broad thumb and the knuckle of his forefinger; I remembered the time, not long before his death, when he let me wind it, my three-year-old fingers engulfed by his big, helping hand. The clock was my most tangible link to my dead father, and the weekly ritual of winding it allowed me to touch him, to be touched by him, in a way that nothing else could. The clock began striking midnight. I lingered in the doorway until the last stroke died away, then tiptoed into the bedroom, draped my towel on the bathroom doorknob, and slipped into bed with Kathleen.

Without waking, she rolled toward me, her head instinctively seeking out its accustomed resting place on my chest, her breasts and belly pressed against my side and hip. Her skin felt cool against mine, and she burrowed into the warmth I’d brought with me from the shower. I synchronized my breathing to hers — a trick I’d learned years before, while doing battle with my dissertation — and as her breath and mine became one, I felt my whirling mind and skittish spirit begin to settle. I heard my father’s clock strike twelve fifteen, and twelve thirty, and twelve forty-five, but I did not hear it strike one.

Deep in my sleep, I heard a groan and a cry of distress, and although they seemed to come from somewhere far away, I knew they had come from me. I felt myself struggling, too, but my limbs were weak and ineffectual.

“Bill. Bill. Honey, wake up. It’s okay.” Kathleen’s voice reached down and took hold of me in the depths, hauling me to the surface of consciousness. Her hands held my wrists; I didn’t know if she was shaking me or restraining me. Both, perhaps.

I drew a deep, shuddering breath and expelled it, then another. She let go of me and switched on the bedside lamp, then slid herself to a sitting position, leaning against the headboard, laying one hand on my heaving chest, another on my head. “You okay?”

“Yes,” I said automatically, and then, a second later, “no,” and by the time the word was out, I found myself sobbing. “Oh, God,” I gasped. “I had a dream. An awful, awful dream.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, pulling me to her bosom, stroking my hair. “I’m so sorry. Tell me.”

But I couldn’t tell her; I couldn’t speak at all, not yet. My breath came in ragged, shuddering gasps — as if it were some separate creature, wild and savage and untamed.

“Shh,” she soothed. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” She rocked and swayed, her fingers cradling my head, her breath washing over me, until bit by bit, breath by breath, my chest rose and fell with hers once more and my fear subsided.

“We were in the backyard,” I said finally. “You. Me. Jeff. Jeff wasn’t a teenager — Jeff was a little kid — but the time was now, somehow.”

“I like that about dreams,” Kathleen murmured. “They make up their own rules as they go along. They don’t always make logical sense, but they make emotional sense. Go on.”

“I was mowing the grass while y’all were kind of milling around,” I said, “and as I was mowing the steep part of the bank, where it angles down toward the ditch, I saw a hole in the ground I’d never seen before. It was big — a foot in diameter — and while I was staring at it, trying to figure out why it was there, I saw a pair of eyes, like glowing red coals, deep inside, and then this immense snake came slithering slowly toward me, slithering out of the hole. It was as big around as the hole, and long — fifteen, twenty feet long.” She held me tighter, running her fingers through my hair and scratching my head to keep me connected to her, to keep me grounded. “It was like the snake knew me — knew all of us. Like he’d been lurking in our midst for a long time, I’d just never noticed him before. And I could tell he was about to do something terrible — to kill one of us, or kill all of us — and I had to stop him. He’d already killed my father — I knew this because the snake’s face looked a little bit like my father’s face — and I knew that he’d been following me ever since he killed my dad. Lurking just out of sight. Biding his time, waiting for the sinister signal or the evil impulse — whatever it was that guided him — to hiss now and cause him to strike. So I ran and got the hoe, and I started chopping him with it. He was coming at me and I was chopping, and chopping, and chopping. I finally managed to cut off his head, but while I was busy chopping off his head, his tail was coiling around me, and by the time the head was off, I was completely trapped in the coils, and the head was looking at me, still alive, the eyes still glowing red. And then I saw more glowing red eyes, deep in the hole in the ground. Another huge snake came slithering out, and then another, and another, and another.”

In the dream’s final scene, the snakes dispersed throughout the yard, scattering and yet somehow moving in concert — a choreography of venomous intent — converging on my loved ones, who remained innocent and unaware of the approaching menace. The father-snake’s eyes watched, the vertical slits narrowing, as I fought to break free, as I struggled to shout a warning, as the tightening coils rendered me immobile and mute, impotent to stop the impending evil.

The horror of the scene gripped me once more as I described it. “God,” I said. “God.”

With the tips of her fingers, Kathleen gently closed my eyelids. Then she covered my face with soft kisses, saying, “Mmm, salty.” Next she kissed my neck and my chest. Then, as I lay on my back, my eyes still closed, she knelt astride me, touching me, taking me in: reminding me that there was goodness and sweetness in the world, too — irrational, inexplicable, and remarkably powerful goodness, too.

CHAPTER 10

Satterfield dawdled, taking his sweet time filling out the deposit slip, allowing two customers to get into the teller queue ahead of him.

“Next, please?”

His timing was perfect; Satterfield’s favorite teller, Sheila, smiled in his direction as she said it. Sheila was a good-looking blonde, not young — hell, she might even be the other side of forty — but she was still hot, and she knew it; she worked it: lots of jewelry, tight skirts, silk blouses, the top two buttons always unbuttoned — enough to flash some cleavage and even some bra if she leaned forward just right.

“Must be my lucky day,” Satterfield said, giving her his best smile as he strolled up to her window.

She smiled back, her eyes flicking downward long enough to check out the black T-shirt stretched tight across his chest and biceps. “What can we do for you today?”

“Well, for starters, you could deposit this. The eagle has landed.” He slid the Social Security check across the counter. She took it and turned it over, glancing at the spidery signature Satterfield had forged on the endorsement line.

“Did you want this in your mother’s account?”

“Sure. Her pension, her account.” In point of fact, it made no difference which account the money went to; Satterfield’s name was on her account, and he’d phone later — to a different branch — and have the money transferred into his. Meanwhile, it served his purposes to appear the doting, dutiful son to Sheila.

“How’s she doing? We haven’t seen her in a while.”

Satterfield shook his head sadly. “She’s really gone downhill since my stepdad died,” he said. “Just can’t get out and about anymore.” Both statements were true. After Satterfield had moved her to Knoxville, filed the change-of-address forms, and brought her into the bank to open the joint checking account, he’d strangled her in her bed, the very night they’d set up the account. “You let that sorry husband of yours treat me like shit,” he’d said, her eyes bugging and her mouth gaping, like those of a fish dying on a dock. “Your own kid. What’s that Bible verse you always loved to quote? ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it’? Well, here I am, Mama, all trained up. I settled up with him, now I’m settling up with you.” There was now only one last account he needed to settle — one other person who’d done him grievous wrong — and Satterfield’s plan for vengeance, which had led him to Knoxville, was already showing much promise for creating intense and prolonged suffering.

Satterfield smiled again at the teller. “I’ll tell Mama you asked about her,” he said. “That’ll cheer her up. She remembers you.” He leaned forward and added in a low, confiding tone, “I always tell her I saw you, even when I don’t. She likes the idea of a pretty woman being nice to her son, you know? Once a mother, always a mother.” She raised an eyebrow, a half smile twitching at one corner of her mouth. She is eating this up, he thought. “You got kids?”

“Two.”

“How old?”

“One in high school, one in college.”

“Get outta here. You?” His eyes slid down her body, then back up. “You’re messing with me. I see twenty-year-olds at the gym who’d kill to look like you.”

She slid his deposit slip across the counter, leaning over farther than she needed to, giving him a peek down her blouse.

A stocky middle-aged woman — possibly no older than Sheila, but packing a lot more weight and a lot less heat — bustled up beside the teller, her face a mask of officiousness and disapproval. Her nametag read MELISSA PEYTON, HEAD TELLER. What she said was, “And how are you today, sir?” What she meant was, “Stop it, both of you.”

“I’m just fine, Melissa,” Satterfield crooned. “Your staff is always so nice. You’ve obviously done a good job training them. Leadership by example, we called that in the Navy.” He flashed her the smile, then nodded and lifted a hand in farewell to both women as he turned to go. Once he was sure Sheila’s boss couldn’t see, he gave Sheila a private wink, which she returned.

He’d parked the Mustang on the far side of the parking lot, the side closest to Blockbuster Video, where the bank’s employees were required to park so that customers could have the good spaces. He’d parked next to Sheila’s car, a red Celica fastback—hot woman, hot car—and as he walked behind it, he stroked the rear spoiler with his fingertips, leaving tracks in the dust. Through the tinted windows he glimpsed the beads hanging from her rearview mirror, five strands of cheap iridescent beads, shimmering pink and purple in the light. Bet she goes wild at Mardi Gras, when she’s someplace where nobody knows her.

A couple of months before, after depositing his mother’s check, Satterfield had hung out at Blockbuster until the bank closed, watching and waiting for Sheila to emerge. He’d trailed her, watching her drive, her right hand draped loosely on the wheel, her left arm — tanned and toned — resting on the windowsill, a cigarette slanting suggestively between the flashing rings and crimson nails of her long fingers. She lived in a condo complex, one populated mostly by single twenty-somethings looking for hookups around the pool. He’d gone back a few times on weekends; had seen her sunbathing, nursing a beer in a foam sleeve, lighting a series of cigarettes that she mostly just let dangle, sending up smoke signals of languor and availability. Usually she only hit the pool when her daughter was staying at the ex-husband’s, though once he saw them both out there, both in bikinis. The daughter was hot, too. Satterfield had sensed friction between them. Not surprising, he guessed — the girl just starting to claim her sexual power, the mom clinging desperately to hers as it began to wane. Once Satterfield saw Sheila make a play for one of the young studs sunning his abs, asking him to rub suntan oil on her back, going mmm as he worked his way down to her hips, then up the backs of her legs. That night, after dark, the guy had shown up at her condo, a bottle of something in one hand, and she’d met him at the door wearing a short silk robe. The guy had stayed until midnight, and Satterfield had listened to their sounds through his parabolic microphone, which he aimed at the bedroom window like a weapon. A weapon of listening.

Satterfield had already checked the calendar, and he’d seen that October’s Social Security check would likely arrive on Thursday or Friday. Maybe Sheila would get off work Friday afternoon and discover that she had a flat tire. Wouldn’t she be grateful if Satterfield just happened to be coming out of Blockbuster with a few videos at that very moment; if he happened to see her distress and offer to help — change the tire and then follow her home, because those little donut spares are notoriously unreliable? Surely she’d invite him in for a drink.

If she invited him in, she was opening the door to what would come next. If she didn’t invite him in, she was an ungrateful bitch, and she would deserve whatever she got.

Satterfield’s left arm angled across the corner of the metal table, his open palm turned upward, fingers spread wide, as the man with the shaved head clasped Satterfield’s hand in both of his and bent forward. The movement exposed the back of the man’s head and neck, and Satterfield studied the tattooed tongues of red and yellow flame that licked the man’s broad neck and the base of his skull.

The man straightened, eyeing Satterfield’s face now. “You sure that’s what you want?”

“Sure I’m sure,” said Satterfield. “Why? Lots of people get stuff like this.”

“I don’t mean the design,” the guy said. “I mean, you sure you want me to put the head in your palm? All those nerve endings, that’s gonna hurt like hell.”

Satterfield held the guy’s gaze before answering. “Some guys get their dicks tattooed,” he said. “Gotta be a lot more nerve endings down there. Besides, I’m pretty tough.”

“Yeah,” mused the guy, peering now at the constellation of small circles of pale scar tissue dotting Satterfield’s forearm. “Yeah, I guess you are.” His gaze shifted to the ink on Satterfield’s right arm. “You a SEAL?”

“Was,” Satterfield said tersely. “Not now. Not anymore.”

The guy nodded; took the hint and didn’t ask more questions. Then he looked again at the photograph Satterfield had laid on the table — the thick-bodied serpent, its tapered neck flaring to a broad, triangular head — and picked up the electric needle. As the hollow steel fang bit the flesh of his palm, striking again and again to inject the image, Satterfield’s nostrils flared, and his eyes glittered with a cold, reptilian light.

CHAPTER 11

I was five minutes late getting to TBI headquarters in Nashville, but luckily I wasn’t the only late arrival: I stepped into an elevator just as the door was closing, and found myself riding up with Special Agent Meffert. “Bubba,” I said, shaking his hand, “how are you? Any leads yet?”

He gave a noncommittal shrug. “Some progress,” he said. “We’ve ID’d her, but no real leads yet. I’ll tell you more inside.”

“Okay,” I said. “Anything on the strip-mine girl, up in Morgan County?” He shook his head morosely.

The elevator stopped and we got out, heading down the hall to the TBI’s main conference room.

A men’s-room door in the hall opened and Carson Wallace, the TBI’s deputy director, emerged. “Hey, Bubba. Dr. Brockton, thanks for coming.” His handshake was wet, and it took some effort not to grimace in distaste. “I don’t suppose y’all brought the feds with you?”

“Not unless they were hiding in the back of my truck,” I joked.

“You never know, with them,” Wallace said. “Those guys can be pretty stealthy.” He opened the door of the conference room, then added, “See what I mean?” Already seated at one end of the table were two men wearing the dark suits and confident expressions of FBI agents. At the other end were two lesser lights — local police, I guessed, from the lack of razor-sharp creases in their sleeves and the fact that they each had a hair or two out of place.

I knew one of the FBI agents — Jim Brodsky, assigned to the Nashville field office — and greeted him with a handshake. My hand was still damp from Wallace’s grip, and I saw Brodsky glance down in surprise, a look of faint distaste on his face. Then he and I both wiped our hands on our pants in unison. “Dr. Bill Brockton,” he said, “meet Supervisory Special Agent Pete Brubaker.” Brubaker held out a hand and gave mine a competitive squeeze. “Doc, Pete runs our Behavioral Sciences Unit up at Quantico. The profilers. You’re familiar with them?”

“Sure,” I said. “Who isn’t, since Silence of the Lambs?” Brubaker gave me a tight, tolerant smile — a sign, I took it, that the Hollywood gloss on their work had worn a bit thin. “Actually, though,” I added, “I worked with one of your colleagues back before Hollywood discovered y’all. Mitch Radnor and I both looked at those three dismemberments out in Kansas, back about five years ago.”

A bigger, more genuine smile replaced the polite, cool one. “Oh, right,” he said, “I remember that, now that you remind me. Great case. What was it the guy used to cut up the victims? Some kind of power saw. Not a chain saw, though. Not a circular saw, either.”

“A Sawzall,” I supplied. “A reciprocating saw with a demolition blade. Ten teeth per inch, if memory serves.”

“That’s right,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Guy who did it was a contractor — a roofer, wasn’t he?” I nodded. “I couldn’t believe he was carrying that saw around in the back of his truck. Still had blood on the blade, didn’t it?”

“From all three of his victims,” I said. “Never trust a guy who doesn’t clean his tools.”

He shook his head. “Amazing, how you pegged that tool exactly.”

“Not exactly,” I corrected. “Just approximately. I couldn’t tell what brand the saw was, just what type. And what kind of blade.”

“How’d you do that?” asked Wallace, the TBI honcho. The two local cops listened, but made no attempt to elbow their way into the conversation.

“I just looked at the skeletal material,” I said. “There were these perfect, uniform little zigzags carved in the bone. Lots of short, even strokes, so it was clearly a power saw. The zigzags meant the blade was going back and forth, not spinning. I illuminated the cut marks, at a really low angle, to highlight all the zigs and zags, and took a bunch of pictures. Then I went to Home Depot and compared the pictures with saw blades till I found one that matched.”

“Radnor had a quote up on his wall for a while after that,” said Brubaker. “Something you said about the difference between flesh and bone. What was it?”

“Was it ‘You have to chew harder if it’s bone’?” I said it deadpan, and he ruminated for a moment before getting the joke and smiling. “Or maybe ‘Flesh forgets, bone remembers’?”

“There you go. That was it.”

“Gentlemen,” said Wallace, “I hate to interrupt the lovefest, but we’ve got some work to do here. We’ve got three unsolved murders in the past twelve months — three dead women, all of them dumped near rural interstate exits. The question is, are they unrelated? Or do we have a serial killer on the loose? Let’s take the cases one by one.”

The first case, from Memphis, was the murder of a forty-two-year-old Alabama woman, whose body was found in late spring in an industrial area along the banks of the Mississippi River. “She was half a mile from Interstate 55,” said the Memphis detective, flashing through a series of visuals that began with a map of the city, then zoomed in to aerial views of the exit and the nearby industrial park. “She was stabbed in the neck. The knife cut the jugular vein and she bled out.”

“Any defensive wounds?” asked Brubaker, the profiler.

“Both hands,” the detective said, flashing through slides of the body at the scene and also during the autopsy.

“Back up,” Brubaker said, then — at the photo showing the woman’s bloody body sprawled on the ground—“Okay, stop. She’s fully clothed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any sign of sexual assault?”

“None.”

“What about her personal effects?”

“Her money and jewelry were gone. Wedding ring, diamond engagement ring gone.”

“Married? What about the husband?”

“He’s clean. He was at home with the kids in Birmingham; she was in Memphis at a sales convention. Husband reported her missing the next day, when one of her coworkers called him to say she hadn’t shown up for a presentation she was scheduled to give. Her driver’s license and credit cards were gone, too, but so far nobody’s used the cards. Last transaction was an ATM withdrawal of two hundred dollars on Beale Street the night she disappeared.” He flipped forward through the slides again until he came to a grainy security-camera image of the dead woman.

“So she’s alone,” Brubaker said, receiving a nod in reply, “and she doesn’t look scared. But what she does look is drunk.”

“We do have witnesses who say she’d been drinking at one of the bars for a while.”

“Anybody see her leave with someone?” The detective shook his head. “Any reason to think this was something other than a robbery that went bad when she resisted?” A shrug. “Any other armed robberies and stabbings in the past two years?”

“Sure,” conceded the detective. “It’s Memphis. We have a homicide every four days. A robbery every three hours. An aggravated assault every eighty minutes.”

“Sounds like a swell place to live,” said the profiler. “And an even sweller place to die. Okay, let’s move on.” He turned to the woman from the Chattanooga Police Department. “Tell us about your case.”

“Twenty-nine-year-old white female,” she began, “single, living alone. Reported missing by a coworker on June nineteenth when she didn’t show up for work for a week, didn’t return phone calls, didn’t answer her door. She was found two days later, in the woods off I-24, about twelve miles southwest of Chattanooga.”

Brubaker drummed his fingers on the table. “How was she killed?”

“Blunt-force trauma. Somebody beat her brains out.” The Chattanooga detective slid packets of photos to all of us around the table. I heard a few grunts — including my own — as people reached the photos showing how thoroughly her cranium and face had been reduced to a bloody pulp. “Murder weapon was a cast-iron skillet.”

“Excuse me?” interrupted the TBI’s Carson. “Did you say a skillet?”

“Yes, sir,” the detective replied. “If you’ll flip a few more pages back in your packet, you’ll see several photos of it.” Like everyone else, I flipped, and I marveled at what I saw: a six-inch cast-iron skillet, the bottom and sides of it covered with a paste of blood, hair, and bits of bone and brain matter. The skillet was in two pieces. “As you see,” the detective said, “at some point the handle snapped off at the rim from the force of the blows. The medical examiner was able to match the shape of the skillet with several of the fractures in the skull. There are pictures of that, too.” Fascinated, I flipped forward until I came to a photo of a defleshed cranium, its shattered vault marked with distinctive curved lines. In one photo, someone with latex gloves held the skillet just above one of the curved indentations in the bone, and the arcs matched exactly.

“You said she was single,” said Brubaker, and the detective nodded. “Ex-husband?”

“No, sir. Never married.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Not at the time. And not for a while. Not in the prior two years.”

He frowned. “Could there have been a new boyfriend, one she hadn’t told anybody about?” The detective looked uncertain. “I think this is domestic,” Brubaker explained. “Crime of passion. Look at the overkill — lots more violence than necessary, but it’s not sadistic violence; it’s just plain rage. Hell, she was probably dead after the first hit, but he just kept whaling away with that skillet till he broke the damned thing.” He drummed his fingers again. “Was she killed at home?” The detective shook her head. “Where? Not in the woods, I’m thinking.”

“Not in the woods, best we can tell,” the detective said. “Somewhere else. We don’t know where.”

“She was killed in a kitchen, that’s where,” Brubaker said. “Where else can you lay your hands on a cast-iron skillet when you’re mad as hell? Maybe the new boyfriend invited her over, then told her to cook dinner, and she refused — again — because she’d decided he was a loser and a jerk and a chauvinistic pig. I’m just making this up, obviously, but whatever it was, something set him off and he went ballistic.”

The detective nodded, chewing her lip.

“You said she was reported missing by a coworker?”

“Yes.”

“Not her boss.”

“No.”

“The boss — a man, right?” She nodded. “Middle-aged? Married, I’m guessing?”

Her brow furrowed as she thought, and I could picture her trying to remember the boss’s left hand. She looked up at Brubaker, surprised. “Yeah, now that you mention it, he was wearing a ring.”

“Be interesting to know if the boss’s wife was away when this happened,” Brubaker said. “Also be interesting to check his kitchen for blood.” Her eyes narrowed, and as they did, I could see wheels begin turning behind them.

We ended with the new case Meffert and I were working in Campbell County. Meffert started with an overview of the case, and with the update of the ID. “The victim was a twenty-six-year-old white female from Covington, Kentucky. Melissa Mahan; went by Crystal.” He flashed a picture — a mug shot — showing a pretty but world-weary young woman. “She had a couple of arrests for soliciting. She worked part-time as an exotic dancer here”—he showed a slide of Adult World, the seedy establishment at the I-75 exit, a few miles from where we’d recovered her body. Next he showed the nearby truck stop. “She could have been picked up at either Adult World or the truck stop. Lotta truckers visit the porn palace; lotta hookers work the truck stop. She was a familiar face at the truck stop, I’m told.”

“When was she reported missing?” asked Brubaker.

Meffert frowned. “She wasn’t. Her last day of work at Adult World was September seventh. Over two weeks ago. But she wasn’t scheduled to work again until September fourteenth, because her boss had suspended her for a week. So we don’t actually know when she got picked up.”

“You got anything that links her to a trucker?”

“Nothing definitive,” said Meffert. “We found a fleck of red paint on the railing of the bridge she was dumped from. High on the rail — probably too high to have come from a car door. We’ve got the crime-lab guys analyzing it now, seeing if they can match it to a brand of paint or a brand of truck.”

Brubaker turned to me. “Dr. Brockton, what can you tell us about how long she’d been dead?”

“Not enough,” I said truthfully. “Obviously she was killed sometime after September seventh. And she was pretty badly decomposed by September twenty-third. I’m guessing she’d been there for a week, maybe close to two, before we found her. But whether she’d been dead for six days or sixteen days, I can’t say for sure. There’s just not much scientific basis for estimating time since death — not after the first few days, anyhow.”

He drummed his fingers three times. Was he just thinking, or was he impatient; frustrated? Maybe all of those. “How many trucks a day pass by the strip joint or the truck stop?”

Meffert shrugged. “Lots. A hundred? Two hundred?”

“So if it was a trucker, and the time-since-death estimate has a ten-day range, your suspect pool could be as high as two thousand truckers.” He shook his head. “That’s a hell of a lot of truckers.” He looked at me sharply. “Ten days? You really can’t pin it down any tighter than that?”

I felt my face redden, and I wished I’d thought to begin studying maggot growth and development earlier than I had. I glanced at Meffert, remembering how he’d teased me about misjudging Colonel Shy’s death by more than a century. Meffert was looking down at his notes — studying them with extreme attentiveness, it seemed to me.

Brubaker shifted gears. “What about the dismemberment? What was used to cut her up? Power saw? Hand saw? Hunting knife?”

“Don’t know yet,” I said, but I felt better about this line of questioning. “We put the bones in to simmer yesterday morning. I expect my assistant’s cleaning them just about now. Ask me tomorrow, after I’ve had a chance to take a close look at the cut marks.”

After another ten minutes of discussion — most of it focusing on the Stinking Creek woman, though with some follow-up Q&A about the Memphis and Chattanooga cases — Brubaker summarized his conclusions. The three murders were unrelated, he said. All three victims were women, true, and all three bodies had been found near interstate exits, but the similarities ended there.

“Well, thank God we’re not looking for a serial killer,” said Wallace, the TBI honcho, putting words to the relief that I imagined all of us around the table were feeling.

That relief was short-lived. “Oh, but you are,” said Brubaker. “I guarantee it.” All heads turned in the direction of the FBI profiler.

“I don’t understand,” countered Wallace. “I thought you just agreed that these killings are unrelated.”

“I did. They are.” We stared at him. If he was hoping to get our attention, he’d succeeded. “These three are unrelated. But one of them’s the work of a serial killer.” I knew which one he meant even before he said it; in fact, at some level, I’d known since I’d first seen her bloody body. “The hooker who was cut up and dumped in the creek — she was almost certainly not that guy’s first victim. You don’t start with something like that. And she sure as hell won’t be his last victim. Not unless he’s caught very quickly.”

Meffert raised his hand. “We’ve got another dead female in East Tennessee. Unidentified. Unknown cause of death.”

Brubaker turned to him. “Killed when?”

“Don’t know,” said Meffert. “Doc, you want to jump in here?”

“An adolescent,” I said. “Fourteen, fifteen. Dead at least two or three years, maybe lots more. Maybe as long as twenty years. Bare bones, bleached by the sun.”

Brubaker’s gaze swiveled between me and Meffert. “Was she dumped near an interstate?” Meffert shook his head. “Some other easily accessible spot?”

“No, sir,” said the TBI agent. “Way the hell off the beaten track. At an abandoned strip mine up in the mountains. ’Bout as hard to access as it gets.”

Brubaker shrugged. “Hard to say, if we don’t know how or when she was killed. But unless something turns up that links the scenes, I’d guess it’s unrelated.”

Just then the door opened halfway. A woman caught Wallace’s eye and beckoned to him; he pushed back from the table and stepped into the hallway. A moment later, he returned and tapped me on the shoulder. “Doc, you’ve got a phone call. Your assistant — Tyler somebody? He says he’s found something you need to know ASAP.”

Startled, I excused myself and followed the woman to a nearby office. On the desk was a phone with a blinking light indicating a call on hold. She pressed the button and handed me the receiver.

“Hello? Tyler?”

“Hey, Dr. B. Sorry to interrupt you. But you asked me to let you know if I found anything significant when I cleaned the bones.”

I felt my senses go on high alert. “What is it?”

“I was just looking at the left humerus. It was cut about midway between the shoulder and the elbow?”

“I remember. Go on.”

“Well, I looked at it in the dark, the way you showed us, with a flashlight beam skimming it at a really low angle.”

The wait was killing me. “For Pete’s sake, Tyler, just spit it out. What’d you see? Saw marks? Knife marks? An image of the Virgin Mary?”

“Well, cut marks, for sure,” he went on, with maddening indirection, “but not saw marks or knife marks, best I can tell. I compared ’em to all the examples we’ve got in the reference file. I finally found one photograph that matched the pattern.”

“So what was the tool?” I looked down and found myself drumming my fingers on the desktop, unconsciously aping Brubaker’s gesture of impatience.

“It was labeled ‘Unknown.’ From a case you worked in Alaska two years ago.”

“Sexual serial killers don’t do that,” Brubaker said, with an assurance born of a quarter century of experience studying violent, twisted murderers.

“But why else would he cut her up that way,” I persisted, “with a tool that I would recognize — that only I would recognize — if he’s not trying to taunt me, or threaten me?”

“You said it yourself,” he went on. “Even you don’t know what the cutting tool was — not in this case; not in that Alaska case.” He was pummeling not just my hypothesis but my confidence, too. “And you said the Alaska killer hung himself in prison, so we know he didn’t kill this stripper. Not unless you missed the time-since-death estimate here by a lot more than ten days.” That felt like a low blow, and it stung. When did the conference table turn into a boxing ring — and how had my forensic colleagues been transformed into spectators, watching me take a drubbing? “How the hell would some truck driver in Tennessee know about this cutting tool that’s so mysterious even you can’t figure out what it was?” I had no answer to that.

“Serial killers don’t go after cops,” he went on, “and they damned sure don’t go after anthropologists. They go after their dream victims. Bundy? He went after brown-haired women who looked like the girlfriend that dumped him. Gacy? Boys and young men. The Green River Killer, up near Seattle? Forty young women so far, nearly all in their teens and twenties.” I nodded, grudgingly.

“Look,” he added in a more conciliatory tone, “there are only so many ways to kill somebody. Put a hundred million killers at a hundred million crime scenes for a hundred million years, and sooner or later two of them will pick up the same cutting tool.” I liked the reference — a riff on the old saying about monkeys and typewriters and the works of Shakespeare, which was really a saying about how random genetic variation eventually, inevitably, turned primordial slime into human beings — but I disliked the swiftness and certainty with which he’d rejected my idea: my suggestion that the Stinking Creek killer was somehow — somewhy—echoing one of my prior cases.

“You’re the expert,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t convey the sullenness I was feeling.

“These guys go after victims that feed their sexual fantasies,” he repeated. “Don’t take this the wrong way; I mean, I do find you a very attractive man, Doctor”—he said it with a sly grin and a wink, to let everyone know it was a good-natured olive branch of a joke, as well as a signal that the discussion was over—“but I doubt that this guy’s fantasies extend to you.”

I prayed to God he was right. I hoped like hell he wasn’t wrong.

CHAPTER 12

She was leaning against a streetlight — one foot propped on the post, the knee raised and her back arched, accentuating her curves — when the blue Mustang sidled to the curb and stopped. She waited until the passenger-side window came down, then pushed off from the post and sauntered to the curb. Music spilled from the car window — Elton John pleading “Don’t let the sun go down on me”—then the volume ramped down, and she heard the guy inside call out, “Hey, good-lookin’. What’s your name?”

“Desirée. What’s yours?” He didn’t answer.

Desirée was her street name, the name she donned along with the clothes; it made it easier to be who she had to be, to do what she had to do. She was wearing her Friday night outfit: a slinky gray top, worn off one shoulder; black spaghetti-strap bra peeking out from underneath; spiky red heels; fishnet thigh-highs; and a denim skirt so short it left an inch of toffee-colored skin exposed above the tops of the fishnets. Both stockings were torn — the front of the left thigh, the back of the right knee. She had two pairs of new ones in her dresser, but she’d noticed that she turned more heads — turned more tricks — looking like this. Men liked the ripped stockings; they seemed to get turned on by the idea that she’d been pawed or manhandled by other guys already. Made the sex seem dirtier; kinkier, she guessed.

Still standing on the curb, Desirée leaned down, forearms on the windowsill, giving the guy a good view of the lacy bra and the pale brown breasts. It was dark inside the car — a blue car with tinted windows — and the driver was wearing mirrored shades, so his eyes were hidden. But from the small reflections of herself dead center in the lenses, she could tell that he was eyeing her, or at least part of her. After she’d given him a long eyeful, she purred, “So, baby, you just lookin’, or you want a date?”

“How much?” His voice all cool, like he didn’t really care if he got any or not.

“Twenty if all you want’s a quick hand job. Forty for oral. A hundred for a full-on, un-for-get-able ride.”

He looked away briefly, then back at her, his fingers drumming the steering wheel in time to the music. “I’ll give you fifty.”

“Aww, don’t lowball me, baby,” she cooed. “Let me show you what I am talkin’ about.” She straightened, turned her back to the car, and planted the high heels wide, then slowly folded forward and put her hands on her knees, shimmying her legs and causing the skirt to creep up her thighs and buttocks. It was a trick she’d learned when she was dancing at the Mouse’s Ear, the strip bar in West Knoxville where the suburban guys with money went when their wives were away or their big-spender customers were in town. Once the skirt was riding high and she knew he had a good view of her thong and her business, she began to undulate, rotating her head and her hips in opposite directions. Her hair radiated from her head in shimmering golden spokes — an ironic, hypnotic halo, one befitting a fallen saint seeking a paying partner in sin. Stopping mid-sway, she arched her back and blew a pouty kiss over her shoulder into the cavelike interior of the car. “Best hundred you will ever spend, lover boy.”

“You remind me of somebody special,” he said.

“I am somebody special.”

“A girl in San Diego. My first time. A night I’ll always remember.” Desirée felt her hopes rising. “So I’ll go sixty,” he added.

She breathed a quiet sigh and clambered into the Mustang, the skirt still riding up as she settled into the low bucket seat. “Two blocks up, on the right, there’s the Magnolia Inn. Go around back and pull in behind the Dumpster.”

He turned toward her and shook his head. “No way, sister. I am not doing it behind a Dumpster in back of some hot-sheet motel.”

“It’s not about the Dumpster, baby,” she cajoled. “It’s nice and quiet back there. Dark. Private. Five minutes from now you will be in heaven.”

“Forget it.” The car wasn’t moving. A bad sign.

She needed the sixty. Really, really needed the sixty, and if she didn’t have it by midnight, she’d be headed down the rabbit hole of withdrawal. She tucked her hands under her thighs so he wouldn’t see that she already had the shakes. “You wanna get a room, honey?” Trying to keep the desperation out of her voice. “That’s cool. I’ve got a deal there. Twenty bucks for an hour. King-size bed. Clean sheets. I can do a lot more for you on a nice big bed.”

He shook his head. “Naw. I got someplace better. Five minutes from here. No cops, no drunks, nobody. Just me and you. I got some pot, if you want to get high. Got some blow, too, if you’re into that.”

She felt a tingle of excitement mixed with relief. Sixty bucks plus a ride on the white horse? That was as good as a hundred in cash. Nearly, anyway. “Customer’s always right,” she said. “I need payment up front, though.”

He laughed. “So you can snort the coke, snatch the dough, and run for it? Nice try, darlin’.”

“Show me the money, honey. I need to know you’ve got it.”

“Suspicious little thing, aren’t you? You’re hurting my feelings.” He reached into a back pocket and fished out a wallet. Flipping it open, he riffled through the bills for her. She saw four or five twenties, maybe more; shit, she shouldn’t have settled for sixty. But maybe she could squeeze another twenty out of him, once she had him revved up. All johns had a special itch, she’d found, and they’d usually pay extra to have it scratched. The trick was to find the itch without giving away the scratch. He plucked a twenty from the wallet, held it in front of her face. “Here. Earnest money. I’ll give you the blow — the blow’s what you want, right? — once we get there. You get the other forty bucks once you’ve made me happy.”

He wasn’t bad looking — not bad at all — and built, too. Strong looking, clean-cut. But that worried her: muscles and a short haircut. “You aren’t a cop, are you? You look like a cop. How do I know you’re not a cop?”

“Search me,” he said, and laughed at his joke. “Too late, anyhow — you’ve already offered me sexual services for money. If I was a cop, you’d be busted already. But I’m not; I’m a soldier. Navy SEAL, just back from Iraq. Operation Desert Storm.” He showed her his right forearm, which was tattooed with what looked like a bird of some sort — an eagle, she guessed — clutching a three-pronged spear. His other arm had a tat, too — what was that, a snake? God, she hoped not; Desirée hated snakes. “You oughta do me for free,” the guy said. “One patriotic service person to another.” He laughed again, and acted like he might take away the twenty.

“You serve your country for free, soldier boy?” She plucked the bill from his fingers and tucked it into her bra, then settled back in the seat and closed her eyes, anticipating the hum of the cocaine. She needed it — not just to quiet the jangle in her nerves, but to dull the ache in her tooth, too: a big abscess at the base of a molar, getting bigger and hurting like a sonofabitch. Jamming a bit of blow into the hole—down the hatch, that’s what she thought now every time she tamped in the powder — would put out the fire in her jaw. Dull the jagged, broken-glass edge of the pain, at least for a while.

It was a long five minutes. She felt the car make a couple of stops and a few turns, but mostly it was thrumming along a straightaway, the tires singing and the exhaust pipes purring like a big cat. When the car stopped, she opened her eyes. Straight ahead she saw tree trunks and leaves, the greens and browns washed-out looking in the glare of the headlights. Closer, between the car and the woods, rusting I beams reared from the ground; leaning forward, she saw a billboard looming over them. COMFORT INN, the fading letters read, but there was no hotel in sight. Off to the left, through the driver’s window, she saw four lanes of cars and semis whizzing along a freeway, their headlights and taillights dimmed by the window’s deep tint. Through a glass darkly, she thought. Bible verses still popped into her head sometimes, even after all these years. Always in her daddy’s voice, big as God’s, booming down from that pulpit. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. She turned to see his face. “Where we at?”

“Cahaba Lane.”

“Where the hell’s Cahaba Lane?”

“Right here, darlin’. Right here. Come on, let’s go.” He opened his door, and the rushing sounds and harsh lights of the freeway traffic pressed in upon her — hundreds of people streaming by, close at hand yet worlds away, oblivious within the cocoons of their cars and trucks. He got out and came around to her side of the car and opened her door, almost like he was her real boyfriend. But she felt a chill — maybe the coolness of the night, or maybe something else — and she didn’t move. “Come on,” he said again, not so cheerful sounding this time. “Let’s go.” He reached in and took hold of her elbow, pulling and lifting. He was strong. Her hand slid out from under her thigh, and her shirt rode up, exposing her lower ribs and the tuck of her waist and, below that, the jutting hipbone and shadowy hollow where her hip curved into her belly. “You want that other forty, don’t you, darlin’? And that snowflake, too. I know you want that.” He reached his left hand toward her, too — shit, the tattoo was a snake, and the head of the snake was in the hand that opened its jaws and then clamped down on her arm. He was pulling her with both hands now — dragging her — with a strength she was helpless to oppose. She came out of the car sideways, her knees and the fishnets raked by the pavement and a few shards of glass, before he raised her up, set her on her wobbly heels, and led her up a path that threaded between the I beams and up the slope.

Up into the woods.

Down into the darkness.

CHAPTER 13

I was probing the carpeting in the dean’s outer office with the toe of a shoe — a clean, pig-shit-free shoe — and trying to estimate the thickness of the pile: an inch? inch and a half? I wasn’t delighted to be cooling my heels here; he’d delayed and then canceled our meeting the prior week, so I was feeling low on the dean’s priority list. Would he stand me up again today? Glancing up, I noticed Carissa, the dean’s secretary, watching me, the phone in her hand, amusement on her face. “He’s ready to see you now, Dr. Brockton.”

I stood up and headed for the dean’s doorway. My left toe snagged in the divot I’d pressed into the plush pile, and I stumbled briefly. Carissa worked to stifle a laugh, and I shrugged sheepishly. “Smooth,” I said. “Do I know how to make an entrance, or what?” She smiled and to my surprise blushed. Hmm, I thought as I entered the dean’s inner sanctum.

He stood behind his desk — a big walnut desk in a big walnut-paneled office — and reached across to shake my hand. “Good to see you, Bill,” he said. “I was just looking at the fall class enrollments. Looks like Anthropology’s booming.”

“We’re holding our own,” I said, trying to sound modest, but betrayed by a proud grin. Our numbers had doubled during each of my three years at UT; my 1991 session of Anthropology 101—the intro course — had moved from a classroom to a small lecture hall. This fall’s section of Human Origins was meeting in a three-hundred-seat auditorium, and all three hundred seats were taken.

“What can I do for you? Wait, let me guess — you want to put a dome over the stadium and move your Intro class into the grandstands?”

“Hmm. Now that you mention it, that sounds like a great idea,” I said. “Extend my office across the hall, punch a hole through the wall, and build me a little balcony over the south end zone. I could be like the pope, talking to his flock down in Saint Peter’s Square.”

“The Pope of Neyland Stadium. I like it. I’ll need to run it by the Athletic Department — probably Religion, too — but I can’t see why they’d object, can you?” His eyes flicked to a spot over my right shoulder — to the spot on the back wall where a clock ticked loudly — and I knew the banter was over. “So what brings you here today? Usually I only see you when I have to haul you in and slap your wrist for telling off-color jokes that make the freshman girls blush. I don’t think I’ve had a complaint so far this fall. Of course, we’re not far into the semester.”

“I need some land,” I said. “To put dead bodies on.”

“I already gave you some land,” he said. “Up at the Holston farm. Land, and a barn, too.”

“You did, and I appreciate it. Really. We’ve got a good start on the skeletal collection — we’re up to a dozen already — and the medical examiner in Johnson City just sent me another body the other day. Thing is, the location’s a problem.”

“How so?”

“Well, it’d be fine if all I wanted to do was store bodies while they skeletonized.”

“But?”

“But I want us to start a research program.” I pointed a finger at him, in what I hoped he would see as a good-natured manner. “You want us to start a research program, remember?” He nodded slightly; noncommittally. “And now I’ve got a plan.”

“What kind of plan?”

“To study human decomposition in the extended postmortem interval. What happens to bodies after death? When does it happen? How do variables affect the process — variables like temperature, humidity, placement of the body, grave depth, insect activity, all sorts of things?”

“How is that anthropology?”

“It’s forensic anthropology,” I said. “Every time the police call me out to look at a decaying body, they want to know how long the person has been dead. It helps focus their search. Helps narrow the field of suspects. Helps confirm or refute alibis. Thing is, I usually can’t tell them how long somebody’s been dead. Nobody can tell them. Not with any scientific confidence.”

His eyes narrowed a bit. “Is this about that Civil War colonel? The one you thought had been dead only a year? Are you still smarting about that?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “Do I hate having my nose rubbed in that when I’m on the witness stand in another case? Sure. But I’m a scientist. The takeaway message, besides the reminder that I’m not infallible, is that we need to do more research. A lot more research. And to do that, we need land close to campus.”

“Why? What’s wrong with the pig farm?”

“Besides the pig crap? It takes half an hour to get out there. If my graduate students have to drive all the way out there two or three times a day to get research data, it’ll take ’em ten years to do their dissertations. We need someplace close.” I pointed over his shoulder, out his window. “Look at all that empty space behind your office. We could put twenty, thirty bodies out there, easy.” He looked alarmed. “Or,” I quickly went on, “you could give me that patch of junk land near the hospital instead.”

“What junk land near the hospital?”

“Right across the river — behind UT Medical Center — there’s a place where the hospital used to burn their trash, back when medical waste could be dumped in an open pit and burned. There’s two or three acres there. Plenty of room for what I’ve got in mind.”

“Are you talking about the dairy farm? That’s the Ag school’s pride and joy.”

“No, I’m not making a grab for the dairy farm. That’s on the north side of the hospital. This is on the east side. At the far corner of the employees’ parking lot. It’s mostly woods, except for a little clearing where the burn pit used to be.”

He tented his fingers, a gesture that I knew meant he was giving the matter serious thought. “Well,” he mused, “that would certainly give the hospital a unique position in the world of medicine. There can’t be another university medical center that’s bordered by cows on one side and corpses on the other. A dairy farm and a body farm.” He gave his head a slow shake and smiled wryly. “This is not exactly how I envisioned my contribution to higher learning, back when I was writing my dissertation on the decline and fall of the British Empire.” He pressed his index fingers to his lips, and then flexed and straightened the tented fingers rhythmically, like a spider doing push-ups on a mirror. After half a dozen push-ups, he nodded and laid his hands on the desk. “Okay, I’ll make some calls. On one condition.”

“What’s that?” Now it was my turn to feel nervous.

“No more tawdry jokes during class.”

“Deal,” I said, standing and making tracks for the door before he could change his mind. “I’ll save them for afterward.”

As I hurried through the outer office, I heard his voice behind me. “Hey, wait…” Without turning, I waved good-bye to Carissa and kept moving.

The bone lab was empty and locked. Peering through the small glass window in the steel door, I saw two trays of bones — pubic bones — sitting on a lab table, but no signs of life. Crap, I thought, he’s probably at the Annex. I’d dialed the extension there and gotten no answer, but I knew that if Tyler wasn’t in the bone lab, the odds were good that he was at the Annex. That meant another trek across the scorching parking lot, but my mood was too ebullient for me to care. Besides, I’d be totally drenched in sweat before long anyhow.

Tyler looked up from the sink, surprised, when I walked in. “Hey, Dr. B. Was that you that called a few minutes ago?”

“It was.”

“Sorry I didn’t pick up.” By way of explanation, he held up a femur and a scrub brush. The femur — like the two hundred other bones still in the steam kettle — was from the guy we’d taken out to the pig barn two weeks before. In the space of just fourteen days, bacteria and bugs had consumed virtually all the soft tissue, leaving behind nothing but bare bones, a greasy stain in the dirt of the barn floor, and another body’s worth of stench. Fortunately, my sense of smell was fairly poor — it was one of my best qualifications for my work — so the odors of death and decomposition didn’t bother me as much as they bothered most people.

Tyler turned his attention back to the bone. “This guy must’ve had a hell of a limp,” he said, giving the bone a final rinse. “This femur’s two inches shorter than the other one. I thought he felt lopsided when we were carrying him. Here, take a look.” He patted the bone dry with a surgical pad and handed it to me. It was warped and had a thick knot at mid-shaft, like a tree branch that’s been cracked and has healed with a prominent and permanent deformity.

“Looks like he had a comminuted, displaced fracture,” I said, “and never got it set. Must have been years ago, though. See how much the bone has remodeled to try to smooth out that discontinuity and those sharp edges?” He nodded. “Must’ve hurt for the rest of his life, though,” I added. “Even with the remodeling, that had to interfere with the muscles and tendons.” I handed the bone back to him, and he laid it on the counter, alongside the longer, straighter femur. I waited, expecting a question, but he seemed preoccupied with the bones. “Aren’t you even going to ask?”

He glanced over his shoulder at me. “Ask what?”

“Why I’m here.”

He shrugged. “So, Dr. B, why’re you here?”

“Excellent question. Two reasons, actually. One, good news. I met with the dean earlier today, and he just now called me to let me know: We’ve got the land behind the hospital.”

“Hey, that’s great. When can we start setting things up?”

“Another excellent question. Today.”

“Great. Wait. Today?” I nodded. “You mean today today?” I nodded again. “Today, when it feels like mid-August, not late September? With a heat index of 103?”

“We’ve got to get started before the bureaucrats come to their senses and change their minds,” I said. “Strike while the iron’s hot.”

“Hot? The iron’s gonna be molten out there today,” he groaned.

“Quit whining. This is important. We’re embarking on our research program. Here.” Reaching a hand behind my back, I extricated the small paperback book I’d tucked into my belt. It was limper and damper than it had been before I’d made the sweltering walk from the stadium to the Annex.

Tyler took it and studied the cover, his face growing more puzzled by the moment. “Uh, thanks?” he said finally. “The Washing Away of Wrongs. Theology?” I shook my head. “And what’s with the Sumo-wrestler cartoon on the cover? And all the Japanese symbols?”

“It’s a forensic investigation manual,” I said. “The world’s first. Written in China, not Japan. In the thirteenth century.” Tyler was starting to look interested. “And that’s not a sumo wrestler, that’s a dead guy. It’s a coroner’s diagram. From seven hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Cool.”

“Check out page sixty-eight—‘The Case of the Bloody Sickle’—it’s directly relevant to your thesis project. Your new thesis project. We can talk about it after you lay some yoga moves on the trees and underbrush out at our lavish new research complex.”

The strength in my forearms was gone — I could scarcely hold up the chain saw — so I released the throttle trigger and the engine wound down to idle as the saw dropped. But the oiled chain continued to spin, the teeth still coasting, as the bar of the saw swung down toward my left leg. Almost as if I were outside my own body, I watched as the chain tore through the canvas of my coveralls and ripped into the flesh of my thigh. The teeth had nearly stopped by the time they reached the skin — the chain slid only a few more inches — but the chain was new and sharp, and my hide wasn’t as tough as tree bark. For a few seconds I saw the clean edges of pink flesh — as if the tissue itself were as surprised as I was by the sudden turn of events — and then the blood welled up, filling the gash and oozing out, seeping into the fabric. “Well, damn,” I muttered. I didn’t feel any pain yet; for the moment, all I felt was stupid.

Setting down the saw, I shucked off my leather gloves and fished a sweaty bandanna from my back pocket to blot the cut so I could see how much damage I’d done. Not too bad, I thought with relief — scarcely more than a nick, in fact: an inch long and maybe an eighth-inch deep. I’d gotten off lucky. Very, very lucky. Rolling the bandanna diagonally into a long, flat band, I tied it snugly around my thigh to stanch the bleeding, then flexed and stretched my fingers prior to resuming my assault on the deadfall pines — a tangled half-dozen trees killed by pine beetles and then toppled by a storm. My thigh was now starting to ache, but we needed to finish what we’d started, and fast; I’d arranged for a concrete truck to arrive the next morning at nine, and unless we finished clearing the trees out of the way, the truck wouldn’t be able to reach the site and pour the pad.

I reached down for the chain saw. As I tugged it off the ground, I noticed movement: blowflies — a dozen or more — taking flight from the blood-smeared chain. I smiled; it was a twentieth-century reminder of the thirteenth-century case I’d just told Tyler to read about.

One of the benefits of having offices in Stadium Hall, a former dormitory, was the abundance of showers. One of those showers was located in my own private bathroom in my own private hideaway: a second office, located a hundred yards — literally, the length of the football field — from the bustle and distractions of the main Anthropology Department offices. After Tyler and I had finished clearing and leveling the patch of ground that would become the new Anthropology Research Facility — a big, fancy name for a small, primitive place — I’d gone to my hideaway to shower and to glue my leg back together with Super Glue.

Just as I sat down on the toilet and picked up the tube of glue, my phone rang. “Oh, hell,” I muttered, clutching a towel around me and scurrying to my desk. “Hello?”

“Howdy, Doc, is that you?”

“Sheriff Cotterell?”

“That’s me. How are you, Doc?”

I caught my reflection in the mirror that hung on the bathroom door: practically naked, wrapped in an undersized and sodden towel, my face and neck crimson with sunburn, my thigh throbbing and bleeding again. I smiled, with a topspin of grimace. “I’m just fine, Sheriff. How about you? Any luck identifying that girl from the strip mine?”

“Not a goddamned bit, Doc, if you’ll pardon my French. That’s why I’m calling — see if maybe you could help us some more. Bubba and me was talking, and he asked me did you still have that girl’s skull. I said, ‘Well, I sure as hell hope so — he ain’t never give it back to me.’ ” The sheriff paused.

I scanned my desktop for the skull, but it wasn’t there. I felt a flash of panic — had someone made off with it? — but then I saw it sitting on my windowsill, and I vaguely recalled having moved it out of the way a few days before. Or was it a few weeks before? Out of sight, out of mind, I thought guiltily. “Of course I’ve still got it, Sheriff. Do you want it back?”

“Oh, hell no, Doc. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Thing is, Bubba was telling me about a TBI training he went to a while back. They had somebody from the FBI there talking about putting faces back on skulls — makin’ ’em out of clay. Showing what the dead person looked like. Bubba ’n me was wondering if maybe you might know how to do that.”

“I’ve tried it a time or two,” I said, “but to be honest, I’m no good at it, Sheriff. My clay heads look like a fourth grader’s art project. I’d only make it harder to ID the girl.” I’d hoped that might draw a laugh from him, but instead, he sighed.

“Well. I figured it didn’t hurt none to ask. We’ll keep knocking on doors and asking questions. Thing is, Doc, we’re running out of doors to knock on.”

“That’s the way sometimes with forensic cases,” I commiserated. “Especially old ones. People forget. Out of sight, out of mind,” I added, feeling another pang of guilt for having nothing helpful to offer him. I wished him luck and hung up, but I felt the dead girl’s eyes — her vacant eyes — staring at me in reproach, her silent voice clear and accusatory in my head: What about me? she seemed to say. Have you forgotten me, too? So soon?

Wiping the blood from my thigh with the damp towel, I blotted the wound with tissue, then applied a thin line of super glue to the edges of the skin and pressed them together. The glue — cyanoacrylate, said the label, which also warned that the chemical was a carcinogen — burned my nostrils and stung like a sonofabitch. Serves you right, I heard a voice in my head sniping. But whether it was the dead girl’s voice or my own this time, I didn’t know.

CHAPTER 14

“Your first time is special.” People said it about all kinds of shit, Satterfield reflected, and maybe it was true — maybe every first was special. First kiss. First love. First killing.

Its specialness to Satterfield wasn’t the way he’d done it; in truth, he’d done it clumsily, and far too swiftly. Its specialness lay in the fact that he had done it. The killing had been spontaneous — as surprising to him as it was to her — but it had been an epiphany, a life-changing revelation.

Three years had passed, but the images of it remained vivid. Indeed, the more times he replayed them, the more vivid they grew.

She was small and pretty — half Jap, half round eye, with a slender, finely chiseled face and thick, red-black hair. Satterfield saw her dancing in one of the skin bars near the base, and he liked what he saw. Before he knew it, he’d dropped fifty bucks on overpriced, watered-down drinks, and then another fifty on a lap dance that left him wild with want. “Can we go somewhere?” he begged when she sat down beside him, her thigh pressing against his. “Can you take the rest of the night off? Or even just take a break and come outside with me?”

She laughed. “You want some private time with me? VIP room.” She pointed a glossy red nail — her pinky finger — toward an unmarked black door set into a black wall. “Hundred dollars. Ten minutes.”

He stared at her. “A hundred bucks? For ten minutes? That’s robbery!”

She smiled coyly. “That not what other men say.” She stood up and began undulating in time to the music, backing slowly away from his table, her face mirroring the lust that was coursing through him. A Marine at a neighboring table turned his chair toward her and slid another chair, an empty, in her direction. She glanced at the chair and then looked at Satterfield, smiling and cocking her head inquiringly.

He could stand it no more. Scrambling to his feet, he seized her by the wrist and pulled her close. “Three hundred,” he said, “if you meet me in the parking lot in ten minutes.”

The girl hooked her thumbs through the elastic of her G-string and shimmied out of it, then lay back on the rear seat of his car, raised her arms over her head, and opened her knees.

Satterfield stared. Her body was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen — far more beautiful than anything in the skin magazines his stepfather kept in the sleeper cab of the semi. Beneath the red-orange glow of the streetlight filtering through the car’s tinted glass, her skin shone like molten copper. Her muscled legs testified to the strength and grace that hours of dancing each night had created. Her belly — flat when she was standing — was concave now that she lay on her back, and the strands of the golden tassel that hung from the piercing in her navel fanned out in the same way her hair fanned on the leather upholstery behind her head. “Okay, sailor boy,” she said, fingering one of her nipple rings, “show me.”

Satterfield was unmanned. Inside, when she’d been seductive but unavailable, he’d been about to explode. Now, though — the teasing done, replaced by a command to perform — he felt himself beginning to panic, to sweat, and to shrink. Mortified, he began rubbing his crotch, slowly at first, then with increasing desperation and fury.

She raised herself onto her elbows. “What? You not want me? Why you act like you want me, if you not want me?” Her eyes flitted from his face to his crotch and back up again. “You never been with woman, sailor boy?” Her lips curled into a smile — a smirking, scornful smile. “You scared, sailor boy? You a sissy, sailor boy? You wet bed at night, sailor boy?”

He was on her in an instant, delivering a backhanded slap, then a forehand slap. She opened her mouth to scream, but he clamped one hand over her mouth, and clamped the other around her throat. Her eyes bugging wide, she thrashed and bucked beneath him, but she was no match for him, and gradually her struggles lessened. He removed the hand from her mouth and loosened his grip on her throat. She gasped like a drowning victim surfacing from underwater; he allowed her a few sips of air, then bore down on her neck again. Her eyes were desperate and pleading now, and he felt himself growing aroused.

His orgasm came when her eyes rolled back in her head.

He was interrogated by the local cops but he was never charged. Nobody’d seen her leave with him, and she’d been seen doing lap dances for a lot of men around the time she went missing.

The military police had their suspicions, too — just routine lead checking at first, but then, once the bone detective got involved, they’d zeroed in on Satterfield. In the end, the Navy chose not to court-martial him, but it also chose not to keep him in its ranks. There’s the right kind of killing and the wrong kind of killing; the kind that solves problems, and the kind that creates them.

Two years after enlisting — two years after he walked away from his mother and his stepfather and finally embarked on what felt like a life of power and prestige — Satterfield found himself unmoored. Two years of basic training and special-forces training were shot. His two-week career as a SEAL — two weeks of training, before he’d been washed out — was memorialized in a tattoo on his right forearm. He’d gotten the tat the day he’d heard he’d been accepted for SEAL training — a moment of overconfidence or of hope or even of gratitude. He’d gotten the celebratory tattoo that afternoon, then gone to the strip club that night.

Administrative discharge, “under circumstances other than honorable,” with nothing to show but the tat. It made him a decorated veteran in his own ironic way. By the end of his military service, he’d acquired skills in stealth, survival, and attack — with bare hands, knife, pistol, rifle, even explosives.

He’d also acquired even more valuable things: insight and self-knowledge, which he’d gained in those moments when he first tasted the fruit of the tree of power — the power unleashed by the convergence of pain, sex, and fear. Especially fear.

Last but not least, he’d acquired a new nemesis: the man who’d focused the Navy investigator’s suspicions on Satterfield. The man who’d ruined the life Satterfield had finally, against all odds, begun to create for himself.

The man whose reciprocal, retaliatory ruination Satterfield had come to Tennessee to set in motion.

CHAPTER 15

“Art department.” The female voice in my ear sounded young, alert, and amused, as if she’d heard the punch line of a joke just before she picked up the phone.

“Good morning,” I said. “This is Dr. Brockton, in Anthropology. Is Dr. Hollingsworth in?”

“Dr. Hollingsworth?” There was a puzzled pause, followed by a suppressed snort of laughter. “Oh, you mean Joe?”

Flustered, I glanced at the campus directory again. Art Department: Chair, Joseph Hollingsworth. I’d probably met him at some faculty function or other, but if I had, I didn’t remember. “He — Joe — he’s the department chairman, right?”

“Right,” she said, her amusement tinged with sarcasm now. Joe’s department, I gathered, marched — or boogied? — to a different, hipper drummer than mine.

I backed up to take another run at it. “So. Joe — my main man, Joe — is he around?”

She wasn’t buying. “One moment, Dr. Brockton. I’ll see if Dr. Hollingsworth is available.” Ouch, man, I thought as the receiver clicked me onto hold.

A moment later, it clicked again and the call was transferred. “Hel-lo, this is Joe,” a cheery voice singsonged.

“Good morning,” I said. “This is Dr. — ” I halted, my formality sounding stuffy now even to me. “Sorry. Joe, this is Bill Brockton, over in Anthropology?”

“Yessir, Mr. Bill. What can I do you for?”

“I’m looking for somebody who’s good at portraits. Nothing fancy; just a sketch, really. Pencil or pen is okay; color or black and white. What matters is that the artist has a good feel for anatomy, musculature, facial features. I need something realistic, not…,” I hesitated, “not like Picasso, you know?”

“I think I get your drift,” he said. “Thing is, ’bout everybody over here thinks even Picasso is old school, you know what I mean?” I suspected I did; I’d walked through the cavernous atrium of the Art and Architecture building a time or two, and I could make neither heads nor tails of most of the abstract paintings and sculpture on display. “Sounds like what you need,” he went on, “is one of those guys that draws tourists at the beach, you know? Pay him five bucks, and five minutes later, he hands you a pretty decent caricature of yourself.”

“Hmm,” I mused. The nearest beach was eight hours away. “Well, but I don’t want something cartoonish. Like I said, I need something realistic. Serious, too.”

“Let’s back up a little,” he said. “A portrait, you said. Who’s the subject?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come again?”

“I don’t know who it is,” I repeated. “That’s the problem. Here’s the thing, Joe. I’ve got a dead girl’s skull in my lab. Thirteen, fourteen years old. Her bones were found at an old strip mine up near the Kentucky border. She’s been dead a while; we’re talking years, not months. I’d like to find somebody who could look at that girl’s skull — see it through the eyes of an artist — and then sketch what that girl may have looked like when she was alive.”

He was silent for a moment. “Wow,” he said. “Y’all don’t mess around over there in Anthropology, do you?” Another pause. “You know, it’s not exactly Life Drawing — matter of fact, I guess it’s the opposite of Life Drawing — but I had a girl in my class last spring who was damned good at the human figure. Faces, too; especially faces. Most folks just draw what they see on the surface, but her drawings? You could tell what was under the skin, too, you know? I don’t know if she can do it the other way around — start with the inside and add what’s on the outside — but I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“She sounds worth a try. What’s the best way to get in touch with her?”

“Hmm. She wasn’t an art major; come to think of it, I wanna say she was a high-school student. Her name… her name… oh, hell, I’m blanking on her name. Hang on.” I heard a rustle as he covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Hey, Rachel,” I heard his muffled voice calling. “What the hell’s the name of that high-school girl that took Life Drawing last spring? Tall. Lanky. Blond. Went barefoot all the time, even in February. Amelia something?” I heard the young woman’s voice in the background, muffled and indistinct. “Ha! That’s why I wanted to call her Amelia.” Another rustle as he unmuffled the mouthpiece. “Her name’s Jenny Earhart. She goes to Laurel High School — you know it?”

“That hippie private school? In the run-down house up on Laurel Avenue? Long-haired stoner kids hanging out on the front porch all the time?”

“Sounds like you know it. If you talk to her, tell her Joe-Joe said hey.” He laughed. “Don’t tell her the old coot forgot her name.”

“Laurel High. Peace.” The young man who answered the phone sounded thoroughly sincere. And more than a little stoned.

“Uh… peace,” I replied. “I’m trying to get in touch with a student there.”

“Heyyyy, man, I’m a student. Troy.”

“Uh, hi, Troy. Actually, I’m trying to get in touch with another student. A student named Jenny. Jenny Earhart. Is Jenny there?”

“Nah, you’re out of luck, dude. Jenny’s not here. Jenny’s gone.”

Luckily, Jenny hadn’t gone far, according to the sheepish school administrator who took the phone from Troy. “Jenny’s doing an art internship this semester,” the woman told me. “She’s working afternoons at a graphic-design agency in the Old City.” She gave me the agency’s name, and when I phoned, Jenny herself answered the call, sounding perfectly poised and not at all stoned.

The aroma of roasting coffee hung heavy and pleasant in the air, like wood smoke on a winter’s day, as I parked my truck and stepped out onto the treacherous footing of Jackson Avenue. The street was brick, and the bricks were chipped, cracked, and in places altogether missing, thanks to a century of heavy traffic and chronic neglect. That was finally changing — the gritty warehouse district known as the Old City was finally, in the last decade of the twentieth century, being gentrified with bars and boutiques and loft apartments — but the change was slow and uneven. Especially underfoot.

The coffee aroma permeating the Old City came from the JFG Coffee Company, whose headquarters and roasting plant occupied most of a five-story building on Jackson Avenue. The building’s ground floor had been rented out to newer, hipper tenants. One of these was the design agency where Jenny was interning; the other was the JFG Coffeehouse, where she’d suggested we meet.

Joe Hollingsworth had described her as tall, blond, and rangy; he’d also described her as perpetually shoeless. I didn’t spot any bare feet in the café, but I did spot a young woman who was tall and blond, leaning over a sketch pad, finishing a pastel sketch of the JFG Coffee Building. The sketch portrayed the old building honestly: A couple of windows in the façade had been boarded up, and vestiges of an adjoining building remained, in the form of bricked-up openings and cut-off staircase supports that no longer supported anything. But the building’s age and imperfections were offset by the youth and vitality of the people she’d shown enjoying themselves at café tables out front. I leaned in for a closer look at the faces, and even though the figures were small, their features were detailed and lifelike.

“Professor Hollingsworth — Joe — said you were good with faces,” I told her. “I agree. And like I said on the phone, I need a good face.” I’d set a hatbox on our table. Now I removed the lid, then reached in and lifted out the skull, which was resting upside down on a doughnut-shaped cushion, surrounded by Bubble Wrap. I righted the skull, rotating it toward her.

“Oh, my,” she whispered. She inclined her head this way and that, studying the skull from multiple angles. “She looks so young. And so… vulnerable. What else can you tell me about her?”

“Not much, unfortunately. All we have is the bone, and there’s a limit to what it tells us. She’s been dead for at least two years, maybe more.”

“How do you know?”

“Because when we found her, she had a two-year-old black locust growing in her left eye orbit.”

“What?”

“Eye orbit. Eye socket, most people call it.”

“No, I mean, what did you say was growing there? A locust?”

“A black locust. A tree, not a bug.” I turned the skull toward the ceiling of the coffeehouse. “See what a nice little planter that makes? Just add a seed, a little dust, a little rain, and voilà.” I shifted the skull so she had a better view into the eye orbit. “See that slot, way in the back?” She nodded. “That’s where the optic nerve runs from the eyeball to the brain. The roots grew through that opening into the cranial vault.”

“Wow.”

“But wait, there’s more. We also found a wasp nest in there, inside the cranium. Her skull was becoming its own little ecosystem.”

“Amazing. That’s beautiful. But heartbreaking, too. You said she was, what, fourteen?”

“Fourteen, thirteen, fifteen — one of those, almost certainly. White. Right-handed. No dental work, so the family was probably poor. Her bones are slight and the muscle markings aren’t prominent, so I expect she was thin. Maybe even malnourished. She…” I hesitated.

She turned and looked at me. “She what?”

“I suspect she’d been abused.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she searched my face. “Sexually abused? How can you tell?”

“I meant physically. Wouldn’t surprise me if she was sexually abused, too, though. Her left arm was broken at some point, and it wasn’t set properly, so it healed with a little kink in it. Maybe they just didn’t have money for a doctor, but maybe they didn’t want anybody to know about the injury. Lots of boys break their arms, but not many girls. She had a couple broken ribs, too. More recently than the arm, but still a good while before she died.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because all the fractures had healed, and the bone had remodeled.”

“Remodeled?”

“It means the repair job has blended in, recontoured over time. Like the rough edges have been filled in with putty and sanded smooth. Lots of recontouring in the girl’s arm, not as much in the ribs. Just guessing, I’d say she was six or eight when her arm was broken, nine or ten when her ribs were busted.”

“Jesus.” She turned back to the skull, shaking her head. “Sounds like she had a really awful life.”

“I’d say she had a bad death, too, however she died.” I glanced at the pastel drawing beside the skull. In the foreground, healthy, happy people smiled at one another. “Truth is, Jenny, I don’t think anybody ever gave a damn about this girl.”

She looked up from the skull, looked me in the eye with a directness and frankness I found startling in a teenager. “You do,” she said. “And now I do. It’s not much, but maybe it’s a start.”

CHAPTER 16

Tyler slid the body bag halfway out of the truck, then paused. “Ready, Dr. B?”

Dr. B leaned over the tailgate and grasped the corners at the bag’s other end. “Ready.”

“Okay, on three. One, two, three.” As Tyler walked backward, the bag slid; just before it dropped off the edge of the tailgate, Dr. B hoisted the end, and together they trudged to the chain-link cube in the woods.

The cube — a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot cage, with a concrete floor and a chain-link roof — wouldn’t win any architectural prizes, that was for sure. But they’d designed and built it themselves, for a few hundred bucks, and it would do the job it was designed to do: keep out raccoons and coyotes and buzzards, but let in blowflies and other bugs… and let in Tyler, to observe and document the insects’ arrival, activity, and departure in the days and weeks to come.

The corpse — the unclaimed body of a seventy-year-old white male who’d committed suicide — had come from the medical examiner in Nashville. Most male suicides used firearms—“Men love guns, even when they hate themselves,” Dr. B had said to Tyler once. Men preferred guns and nooses to kill themselves; women went for poison. This man, though, had cut his own throat, an act that spoke to Tyler of fierce determination and deep despair. Slashed wrists were often survivable, especially if the cuts were shallow and crosswise, rather than lengthwise and deep enough to shred arteries. But taking a straight razor to the neck, like this guy had done? No turning back, long as you nicked the jugular vein or the carotid artery.

They squeezed through the narrow gate, Tyler first, moving backward. “Walk softly,” Dr. B reminded him. “The concrete’s only been curing for forty-eight hours.” Dr. B had wanted to wait a week before putting any load on the concrete, but as Tyler had pointed out — repeatedly — fall was coming, and if he didn’t start the project before the weather turned cold, the only insect activity he’d be able to record for quite a while could be summed up in one word: hibernation.

By the time they laid the body bag on the wire-mesh rack Tyler had built — a cot, basically, made of two-by-fours and quarter-inch wire mesh — the bag was swarming with flies, and as he tugged the long, C-shaped zipper open, the eager insects began squirming through the gap to get at the body.

The blowflies’ eagerness was no surprise to Tyler, nor were their numbers; he’d seen them plenty of times before, at death scenes and at the pig barn. What was new to him was that this time — with this corpse—the flies were not simply a nuisance to be endured, a buggy cross to be borne. This time, the flies were the stars of the show, the subjects of scientific scrutiny, their comings and goings and ages and stages to be attentively observed and meticulously chronicled.

Dr. B watched, and then posed, as Tyler took photos: the first photos of the first research study at the world’s first laboratory focused on human decomposition. Then, satisfied or bored, he departed, leaving Tyler alone in the cage with the corpse. “I’ll give you two some time to get acquainted,” he’d joked as he headed toward the parking lot. “Keep in touch. And take plenty of pictures.”

By the time the sound of Dr. B’s truck had faded away, dabs of white, grainy paste were already appearing on the corpse. The dabs, whose appearance and timing Tyler duly recorded on film and in his field notes, were deposits of blowfly eggs, and by mid-afternoon the eggs had already begun to hatch, releasing thousands of tiny, wiggling, ravenous little maggots, whose miniature feeding frenzies Tyler watched through a magnifying glass and photographed with a close-up lens. The hatching eggs were clustered at the edges of the eyes, the nostrils, the mouth, the ears, and also — especially — along the bloody slash across the neck.

After shooting an entire roll to document the corpse’s initial state, Tyler dug a collapsible tripod out of his backpack and positioned it beside the corpse, screwing a second camera on top — a camera with a built-in timer, set to take one photo every hour, day and night. Then, and only then, did he take time to unfold the metal chair he’d brought over from the stadium. Reaching into his backpack once more, he took out the Chinese forensic handbook Dr. B had given him, The Washing Away of Wrongs, and settled into the chair. He opened the book to a dog-eared page and read — aloud, as if the corpse could hear the story, and would appreciate its relevance — about a crime that a clever investigator had solved some seven and a half centuries before:

There was an inquest on the body of a man killed by the roadside. It was first suspected that he had been killed by robbers. At the time when the body was checked, all clothing and personal effects were there. On the whole body there were ten old wounds inflicted by a sickle. The inquest official said, “Robbers merely want men to die so that they can take their valuables. Now, the personal effects are there, while the body bears many wounds. If this is not a case of being killed by a hateful enemy, then what is it?” He then ordered those around him to withdraw, summoned the man’s wife and said, “In the past what man was your husband’s worst enemy?” She replied, “Hitherto my husband had no enemies. But only recently there was a certain X who came to borrow money. He did not get it. They had already fixed on a definite date and they discussed that. But there were no bitter enemies.” The inquest official secretly familiarized himself with the victim’s neighborhood. He thereupon sent a number of men separately to go and make proclamations. The nearest neighbors were to bring all their sickles, handing them in for examination. If anyone concealed a sickle, they would be considered the murderer and would be thoroughly investigated. In a short time, seventy or eighty sickles were brought in. The inquest official had them laid on the ground. At the time the weather was hot. The flies flew about and gathered on one sickle. The inquest official pointed to this sickle and said, “Whose is this?” One man abruptly acknowledged it. He was the same man who had set the debt time limit. Then he was interrogated, but still would not confess. The inquest official indicated the sickle and had the man look at it himself. “The sickles of the others in the crowd had no flies. Now, you have killed a man. There are traces of blood on the sickle, so the flies gather. How can this be concealed?” The bystanders were speechless, sighing with admiration. The murderer knocked his head on the ground and confessed.

By sundown the flies had dissipated: gone to ground, or to the trees, or to wherever they took their night’s rest. But within the cage, upon the corpse on the wire-mesh cot, the maggots remained, restless and ravenous, their labors unceasing; their appetites insatiable.

The drone of the flies — so constant over the past two days that it had become white noise, soporific in its regularity and monotony — suddenly grew louder and more singular, as an intense tickle in his left nostril caused Tyler to leap from the folding chair and paw at his nose. “You little bastard,” he said to the retreating blowfly, which narrowly avoided being crushed by the pinch Tyler gave his itching nose. He pointed down at the corpse, which rested on the cot of wire mesh, already beginning to drip with greasy effluvia. “Him, dumbass, not me.”

Tyler had been observing blowflies for two days now — observing, photographing, and occasionally swatting, despite Dr. B’s admonition to the contrary. Penned in the new research enclosure with the first corpse in his entomology study, he was beginning to feel like a prisoner, though his sentence was a self-imposed one: bug bites and a chain-link cage, for the sake of science.

He stepped outside the cage and locked the door behind him, then stripped off his fly-spotted clothes there in the woods, a stone’s throw from the hospital employees’ parking lot, too weary to care if any orderlies or nurses or janitors caught a glimpse of his pale ass shining through the trees. Funny thing, how tiring it was to sit in a chair for twelve hours, rising only to take photos, or take a piss in the woods, or scarf down a sandwich.

He bundled the clothes — stinking of sweat and decomp — into a plastic trash bag, hoping he wouldn’t forget to put them in the washer when he got home. Then he hosed off, using the spigot that Dr. B had somehow cajoled a maintenance guy into installing beside the enclosure. He filled his palm with shampoo and worked it into his hair, over his face, under his arms, across his chest and belly, and into his crotch, scrubbing with fingertips and fingernails, scrubbing away fly tracks and fly eggs, real and imagined. The water was warm at first, the afternoon’s heat still stored in the serpentine coils of the hose. Coil by coil it cooled, and by the time he was finished, he was shivering. Opening a second trash bag, he took out a threadbare beach towel and dried himself briskly, rubbing warmth back into his skin before slipping into ripped, velvety Levi’s, a faded sweatshirt, and floppy leather moccasins.

As he wadded the towel and added it to the laundry bag, he found himself blindsided by a wave of loneliness and longing and tenderness. The towel was one of two that he and Roxanne had found at a beach — at what he thought of as their beach.

Plum Island, Massachusetts, August of ’91—their first trip together, to visit Roxie’s sister in Newburyport. They’d borrowed bikes and started pedaling, no plan or destination in mind, and after a while they found themselves on Plum Island, following their noses and the signs to the wildlife refuge that occupied most of the island. Refuge Road: surprisingly hot and buggy, walled off from the Atlantic’s breezes by a ridge of dunes and scrub. Six sweaty miles down Refuge Road, they finally reached the southern tip of the island, Sandy Point, astonished to find that the small parking lot was empty. “I wish we’d thought to bring stuff to swim,” Roxanne had said, but Tyler had smiled and pointed to the towels: two of them, neatly folded at the edge of the asphalt — obviously forgotten by other beachgoers, but seemingly placed there just for them.

“Come on,” he’d said, grabbing the towels and running toward the water, shucking clothes as he ran.

“Tyler!” she’d shrieked. “We can’t — what if we get arrested?” He’d simply turned, arms spread wide, a goofy grin on his face, unabashedly delighted to be free of his clothes and headed for the water. Dropping the towels at the high-tide line, he’d bounded into the water until it was up to his thighs, then plunged headlong into a breaker. By the time he’d surfaced and stood, his back to the surf, she was naked and prancing into the water, high-stepping like a Tennessee walking horse, her breasts and belly and the dark thatch of her pubic hair catching the golden afternoon light in a way that took his breath away. She’d shrieked a second time as a wave reared up and broke against her, toppling her backward. When she stood up, laughing, she flung her head back, whipping her hair over her shoulders and sending a shower of droplets skyward. For a fraction of a second, the droplets created a rainbow around her, and Tyler knew that he’d remember that fraction of a second for the rest of his life.

A few minutes later they were lying on the warm sand and the found towels. “Tyler, we can’t,” she’d said again, this time in a husky whisper. “We could get arrested.”

“It’s a wildlife refuge,” he’d murmured, nibbling her neck. “We’re just part of the wildlife. And you are my sweet refuge.”

“Oh, my,” she’d breathed. Then, as his hand slid slowly down her body, simply, “Oh. Oh. Oh.”

He returned to the cage and the corpse at daybreak, arriving — as best he could tell in the pale light — before the first of the flies. During the night, as Tyler had drifted in and out of dreams of Roxanne, the temperature had dropped to 57 degrees, according to the bare-bones weather station he’d installed at one corner of the enclosure: a warm night for late September, but not warm enough, apparently, to hatch more of the fly eggs. Meanwhile, the prior day’s maggots — mere specks, as of sundown — had grown visibly, thanks to their unceasing efforts during the night. The graveyard shift, he thought. The head start meant that they and their progeny — the generations they would swiftly beget — already had a leg up in the Darwinian race to survive and thrive, to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and consume it.

As the first rays of sunlight slanted through the trees and slipped through the woven wire, Tyler caught a flash of iridescent green in the air, followed swiftly by another, another, and a hundred more.

And the evening and the morning were the third day, he thought, wondering what it was that he and Dr. B were creating here. Not exactly the Garden of Eden. More like Lord of the Flies.

The Garden of Eden: The words rattled around in his mind, knocking loose another memory of Roxanne, and of the Edenic week they’d spent house-sitting for the Brocktons, shortly after the Plum Island trip. They’d spent most of their time in bed, crawling out only for brief forays into the bathroom and the kitchen. Tenderness, awe, lust, hunger, thirst, elimination: the sublimest of emotions and the rawest of physical needs, coexisting not just peacefully but joyously and powerfully, during the heady days and nights of new love. Tyler and Rox had broken one of the bed slats during a final, frenzied coupling on their last afternoon there. The board had snapped with a crack like a rifle shot, and as the mattress gave way beneath them, their cries of passion gave way to gales of laughter. Rox had washed the sheets and towels while Tyler had dashed to Home Depot for a new slat, skidding into the store’s parking lot just minutes before closing time. On a whim, as he was leaving — exiting through the store’s lawn and garden section — he’d bought a small concrete statue for the Brocktons’ back patio: a waist-high angel, its wings spread high and wide, a sword pointing heavenward. “To guard the gates of Paradise,” he’d explained to Rox as he tucked it beside an azalea bush by the sliding-glass door.

They were wedging the new slat beneath the bedsprings when the whir of the garage-door opener signaled the Brocktons’ return. “I think our guardian angel’s already sleeping on the job,” Roxanne had teased, leading him out of the bedroom — but not before giving his bruised lips a final kiss.

He’d learned his lunchtime lesson the day before, when he’d found himself sharing his sandwich with a bevy of blowflies in the cage. Some of them — hell, probably all of them — had doubtless checked out the corpse before coming to sample his salami-and-cheese sub. Did it count as micro-cannibalism, he wondered, if dead-guy molecules on a fly’s feet rubbed off onto his sandwich? Better — less repulsive — to play it safe; today he’d dash back to the bone lab for lunch.

Before leaving, he took another round of photos — a few wide shots of the entire body, followed by medium shots of the face, neck, torso, and limbs, and then close-ups and macro shots of the various maggot colonies. Virtually all the prior day’s eggs had hatched by noon — all except for one dab of grainy white, which a less-than-brilliant fly had laid in the desert, cadaverously speaking: She’d deposited them on the parchment-dry skin of the left shin, where the eggs — lacking moisture — had shriveled instead of hatching. Location, location, location, thought Tyler, snapping close-ups of the eggs that would never hatch. Meanwhile, in the more desirable real estate — the moist and bloody parcels of flesh — fresh dabs of eggs were appearing, shoehorned in amid the teeming larvae. Did maggots feed on smaller maggots, he wondered — was it a bug-eat-bug world? Or did harmony and understanding prevail in the midst of such abundance, such manna from heaven? It was the age-old story of research: You set out to answer one or two questions — what bugs show up to feed on corpses, and when? — and pretty soon, a thousand more questions rear their wriggling heads.

He finished a 36-exposure roll of slide film and stashed the camera in his backpack. Then, just before leaving the cage, he removed a one-pint glass jar from his pack and unscrewed the lid, then swept the open jar back and forth in a series of rapid figure eights above the body. Clapping the lid back on, he inspected his catch: a dozen or so puzzled and frustrated flies. He wedged the jar into the pack, where it nestled against today’s sandwich, which he would not be unwrapping until he was safely indoors. “Eat your hearts out — your hollow, tubular little insect hearts,” he goaded the flies. “Because the sweet, succulent sandwich? Today she is mine! All mine! Ha-ha!”

Jiminy Cricket, he thought, I’m talking to flies now? I am totally cracking up.

Leaving the enclosure, he latched and padlocked the chain-link door. “Yeah, right,” he muttered, snapping the lock shut. “As if someone might want to steal a stinking corpse swarming with maggots.” He’d parked a ways from the trees — hotter than the shade, but a lot less likely to get bombed by the birds.

The truck was on a slight incline, facing downhill, so instead of cranking it, he floored the clutch, put the transmission in second gear, and coasted down the slope. Just before he reached the bottom, he switched on the key and popped the clutch to roll-start the engine. The truck lurched as the clutch caught, and then the cylinders fired up. He used to tell himself he did this to lessen the wear and tear on the starter, but the truth — the real reason he did it — was that he got a kick out of it. Every single time. He hummed, then began to sing: “Back in nineteen fifty-eight… We drove an old V-8… And when it’d gone a hundred thou we got out and pushed it a mile…”

He was licking the last of the mayonnaise and mustard off his fingers when Dr. B walked into the bone lab, looking surprised. “Tyler — I thought you were in lockdown across the river.”

“I tunneled out,” Tyler said. “Actually, I’m about to do an experiment.” He reached into his backpack and fished out the jar. “These are my guinea pigs. I mean, my rigorously screened research subjects.”

“What’s the research question? What’s your hypothesis?”

“The question is, how far away can blowflies smell a corpse? My hypothesis is, if I release these little guys over here, they’ll follow their noses and show up over there again. Maybe even before I do.”

“Hmm. Interesting.” Brockton took the jar from him and peered through the glass, scrutinizing the bugs. “How will you know? I’m sure their mommas can recognize ’em, but to me, they look just like every other blowfly I’ve ever seen.”

“Maybe now, but in five minutes, I bet that anybody — even you — can pick these flies out of a lineup.”

“You’re on,” said Brockton. “I need to run upstairs and check the mail. When I come back, we’ll put your recognition hypothesis to the test.” He ducked out the steel door of the basement lab, and Tyler heard his footsteps jogging up the two flights of stairs to the Anthropology Department’s main office.

Ten minutes later he heard footsteps jogging back down, and the steel door banged open. “Time’s up. You ready?”

“One. More. Second. Okay, ready.” Tyler straightened and rolled his chair sideways, so Dr. B could get at the jar. “There’s been a slight revision to the research protocol,” he added with exaggerated academic pomposity, “due to attrition in the study sample size. The original cohort was eleven. Now the n is five.”

“Five?” said Brockton. “Out of eleven? Good God, your research subjects are dropping like flies.” Tyler groaned, as Brockton had surely hoped he would. “Remind me never to be one of your guinea pigs.” Dr. B picked up the jar and carried it to the large bank of windows lining the lab’s south wall. Holding it up to the light, he tilted it, turned it, and then grinned at it. Six flies lay dead or dying in the bottom of the jar, but the other five were buzzing or crawling, vigorously and vividly. Each of them sported a small but prominent dot on its thorax: a distinctive dab of UT orange.

“God damn it,” Tyler muttered, pinching the sides of his nose fiercely. He had scarcely settled back into his folding chair after his lunch break, and already his nostrils were being invaded again. The first fifty times it had happened, he’d puffed air out his nose to blast the intruder loose without inflicting damage. By now, though, he was in a murderous mood, and was more than happy to turn his nasal passages into death chambers. Releasing the nostril that had been violated, he blew, and the crushed fly shot out and landed on the concrete. Tyler leaned down, the nail of his middle finger circling to the tip of his thumb, coiled to flick the fly through the fence and into the woods. Then he froze, staring, and burst into a laugh. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

The dead fly was wearing UT orange.

CHAPTER 17

“Excuse me?” I said into the telephone handset.

“I said, ‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ ” the dean repeated, the edge in his voice growing even sharper.

“I heard what you said,” I told him, “and I even know it comes from a poem, but I don’t quite get what you mean by it.”

“I mean what the hell were you thinking?”

“I’m sorry,” I floundered, “but I still don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean I just spent half an hour on the phone with one of the groundskeepers from the Medical Center,” he snapped. “He’s trimming weeds at the edge of a parking lot, and he steps into the woods to take a leak. Guess what he sees?”

I had an uneasy feeling that I knew, but I decided to play innocent, in hopes that I was wrong. “Uh… a marijuana patch?”

“No. Wait—what? Are you growing pot in the woods now, too?”

“No!” Perhaps I should’ve chosen my alternative scenario more carefully. “No, of course we’re not growing pot in the woods.”

“Well, thank God for small favors,” he said. “So this poor, unsuspecting bastard goes behind a tree to pee and nearly craps his pants instead, because he suddenly finds himself face-to-face with a human corpse. A very nasty-looking, nasty-smelling human corpse.”

“Ooh,” I managed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You’ll be even sorrier if he files a lawsuit. Which he’s threatening to do.”

“Ouch,” I said. “I’m really sorry to hear that.” That was no exaggeration, though I said it not so much from contrition as from a sense of foreboding. “Reckon it’d help if I go see him? Grovel awhile — apologize a lot — and explain how important the research project is?”

“Try the groveling on me, first,” he grumbled. “And while you’re explaining, don’t forget to explain the fence project.”

“What fence project?”

“The new fence you’re going to build around that whole patch of ground. Eight feet high. Wood, and solid — so nobody else gets traumatized.”

Christ, I thought, where do we get the money for that? Fencing in the wooded area would cost far more than building the chain-link cube had cost. I was about to make that point to the dean — before embarking on the groveling and apologizing he’d demanded — when I heard a bloodcurdling shriek just outside my office door. This did not bode well as a first-day experience.

Ten feet away, my new secretary, Peggy something-or-other — Williams? no: Wilhoit — had settled into her chair and begun scaling the months-high mountains of mail, memos, and other departmental detritus that had accumulated over the past several months. For the past hour I’d heard her clucking and sighing her way through the task, lobbing an occasional question across the divide and through my open door. “Do you want to order personalized pocket protectors for all the faculty?” she lobbed. I didn’t. “Do you want this catalog from the Edmund Scientific Company?” I did. “Do you already know about the faculty meeting next Tuesday?”

“What faculty meeting?”

That was when she shrieked: a full-throated, long-lasting scream. Hastily hanging up on the dean, I leaped up and rushed through the door to the outer office. My new secretary had pushed as far away from her desk as she could get, the back of her chair pressed against the windowsill. Her arms were extended in front of her, her fingers spread, her hands shaking. In front of her, in the small, semicircular clearing of desktop she’d managed to create, I saw an oversized manila envelope, an eight-by-ten photograph pulled halfway out of the opening. I didn’t need to see the rest of the photo to recognize it — or to know why it had prompted such distress.

The photo showed a nude woman — a nude dead woman — lying on a hillside in the woods. Her legs, which had no feet, were opened wide, splayed on either side of a small tree; her crotch was jammed tightly against the sapling’s trunk, in what appeared to be a shocking pose of sexual violation.

I snatched the envelope from the desk and quickly slid the picture back inside.

“Why?” whispered Peggy hoarsely.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. Reaching behind me, through the doorway, I tucked the envelope into the bookshelf just inside my office.

“Why?” she repeated. “Why would someone send you that? And what kind of sick person would take such a picture?”

I winced. “Actually, I took it,” I told her. “It’s an old crime-scene photo, from a murder I worked up in Morgan County a couple years ago. December twenty-fourth, 1990. Christmas Eve.” I sighed. “I don’t know why this copy just came in the mail. I guess the sheriff’s office or the TBI is cleaning out old case files. That, or they misread a request I sent out a few months ago, for copies of my forensic reports. A bunch of my files got thrown out last spring by mistake — by a temporary secretary, matter of fact.” I frowned at her reflexively, as if the missing files were somehow her fault, then inwardly scolded myself. “I’m sorry you ran across that with no warning,” I said. Pulling the envelope from the bookshelf, I looked to see whether it had been Sheriff Cotterell or Bubba Hardknot who’d scared the bejesus out of my new secretary, but there was no return address, and I tucked the envelope away again. She drew several deep breaths, each one sounding steadier than the one before. “Most of what we do here’s pretty boring,” I said, “but some of it’s strong stuff — not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.”

She exhaled slowly through pursed lips, her cheeks puffing out as she did. “Well, you did warn me — sort of — when you interviewed me. I just hadn’t expected something like… this… my first day on the job. ‘A mean surprise’—that’s what my mama would call it.”

I smiled at the phrase. “Well, I’m sorry for the mean surprise, Betty.”

“Peggy,” she corrected.

“I’m sorry for the mean surprise, Peggy.” I smiled in a way I hoped was reassuring. “Around here, you’ll get used to things like that.”

She didn’t return the smile. “No offense, Dr. Brockton,” she said, “but if I ever get used to things like that, it’s time for me to look for a different job.”

Suddenly I realized that I’d hung up on the dean in mid-scolding. “It might be time for me to look for a different job,” I said ruefully, reaching for the phone and preparing to grovel.

“Hello,” I barked, snatching the handset from the cradle with a dripping, slippery hand.

“Uh… hello? Is this Dr. Brockton?” The caller sounded tentative and timid, as if she hoped I were someone else.

“Yes, this is Dr. Brockton,” I snapped. I’d just returned from helping Tyler haul a fresh body from the morgue to the research facility. He now had two research subjects in the cage—“Double your data, double your smell,” I’d joked — and I’d brought some of the aroma back with me. I’d ducked into the shower to wash it off, and the phone had begun to ring just as I’d lathered up. I’d ignored the first dozen rings, but finally the insistent jangling had gotten to me. For the second time in as many weeks, water pooled beneath my bare feet on the grimy concrete floor, the grime turning to slime.

There was silence on the other end of the line, and my annoyance ramped another notch higher. “I said, this is Dr. Brockton. How can I help you?”

“It’s… it’s Peggy.”

“Peggy? Peggy who?”

“Peggy Wilhoit.” The hesitancy and fear in her voice faded, displaced by what sounded like indignation. “Your new secretary Peggy.” Oops, I thought. “Peggy, who opens your gruesome, disgusting mail.”

“Oh, Peggy,” I gushed. “Sorry, I couldn’t quite hear you,” I fibbed. “There’s a leaf blower right outside my hideout.” I waited for a response — a No problem or That’s okay or other phrase of forgiveness — but instead, I heard only silence. Deafening, damning silence, on her end of the call and also on mine: no droning leaf blower backing up my story. I cleared my throat. “How are you settling in by now, Peggy?”

“Well, the backlog’s a bit overwhelming, but I can see most of the desktop now. And I haven’t come across anything else that’s made me scream. Yet.” She paused. “Where did you say you are?”

“In my hideout. My sanctuary. My secret office, up at the north end of the stadium. I only use the one next to yours when I’m being a bureaucrat,” I explained. “Pushing papers, counseling students, chewing out junior faculty. I use this one when I need to get real work done.”

“Ah. Well, perhaps you’ll be so good as to show me where it is sometime. Meanwhile, you have a visitor here at Bureaucracy Central.”

Oh, hell — not a visitor, I thought, but then I checked my watch: eleven thirty. “Ah,” I said. “Tell him to meet me here.”

“Him who?”

“Him Jeff,” I said, sighing at the woman’s denseness. “My son. My visitor.”

“Could this be a different visitor? A young woman?”

“You’re asking me if it’s a woman? Can’t you tell the difference?”

“Yes, of course I can…” She paused, and when she resumed speaking, I felt frostbite nibbling my ear. “Let me start over. You have a visitor, Dr. Brockton. She is a young woman. Her name is Jenny Earhart.”

“Oh — the artist?”

“I don’t know, Dr. Brockton; I didn’t ask her about her talents. But I’ll do so now.” I heard a murmured exchange, then, “Yes, Jenny Earhart, the artist.”

“Does she have a sketch for me?”

Another murmured exchange. “Yes, she says she has a sketch for you.”

“Excellent! Send her my way.”

“Which way would that be, Dr. Brockton?” Clearly I had gotten off on the wrong foot with my new secretary.

“Oh. Right. Tell her I’ll be right there. Thank you, Peggy.” Without waiting for a reply, I hung up the phone, toweled off, and yanked on clean clothes, which snagged and dragged on my damp skin. Then I jogged through the curving concrete corridor beneath the stadium, skidding to a stop outside Peggy’s door just in time to avoid colliding with my son.

“Jeff. What are you doing here?”

“Gee, try to contain your excitement, Dad. It’s a teacher-training day at school. You invited me to lunch, remember? Ribs at Calhoun’s?”

“Sure. I knew that. I meant, what are you doing here now? Is it lunchtime already?” I brushed past him, squeezing through the doorway into the outer office. Behind the desk sat the new secretary, Peggy the Frosty, eyeing me coolly. In front of her, sitting sideways, wedged into the narrow gap between the desk and the doorway to my inner office, was Jenny, a leather portfolio and a skull-sized hatbox on her lap.

“Good morning,” I said, taking the box off her lap and setting it on the corner of Peggy’s desk. “Don’t open that,” I warned Peggy. “You won’t like what’s inside.” I gave Jenny a conspiratorial smile. “That was quick,” I said to her. “I figured it’d take you at least a week.”

She shrugged. “I got really caught up in it — stayed up all night working on it. It was like she was… I don’t know, trying to reach out to me.” She blushed. “Sounds silly, I know.”

“Actually, not at all,” I assured her. “I sometimes imagine I hear the dead when I’m looking at their bones. Hear them whispering — telling me what happened.”

“Yes, yes. Like that. Like… communing with the dead, almost. Amazing.”

“Sounds amazing.” Jeff’s voice came from just behind me. He’d followed me into Peggy’s office, and he leaned around me now, into Jenny’s field of view, waving. “Hi. I’m Jeff. His son.”

“Jeff, this is Jenny Earhart,” I said. “An artist. She’s doing a facial sketch for me — that girl whose bones we found on Labor Day up at the strip mine.” I turned back to her. “Why don’t you come into my office, where there’s a little more room, and show me what you’ve got?” I nodded toward the doorway, and she stood. “Give us a few minutes, son.”

“Why don’t we take her to lunch instead?” Jenny stopped in the doorway and turned to look at him. “You’re an artist,” he said. “That means you’re starving, right? Metaphorically speaking,” he added, flashing her a smile. I stared at him; was my son flirting with my forensic artist? And since when did he say things like metaphorically speaking? It must have worked, because she smiled back at him. “We’re walking over to Calhoun’s on the River,” he hurried on. “You got time to go with us?” She looked at me; all I could do was shrug, leaving it up to her. “I’m super-interested in art,” Jeff added. He caught my dubious glance. “Forensics, too, of course.”

“That’s good to know, son,” I said. “We’re putting a big wooden fence around the Body Farm. You can come help me paint it.”

Calhoun’s on the River was a five-minute walk from the Anthropology Department. Jeff, Jenny, and I took the stairwell down to the bone lab, exited at the base of the stadium — down at field level, near the south goal line — and angled across parking lots and four lanes of Neyland Drive to the big, barnlike restaurant perched on the north bank of the Tennessee River.

Calhoun’s was a Knoxville landmark, noted for its barbecued ribs, its unsurpassed view of the river, and its proximity to Neyland Stadium; the place was nearly always hopping, but on days when the Vols — the Tennessee Volunteers — were playing at home, it was mobbed. People arrived by car, on foot, even by boat. A small wharf adjoined the restaurant, and on home-game weekends, boats would begin arriving days ahead of time, some chugging upriver all the way from Chattanooga or even Alabama. The tradition had begun with a single small boat back in 1962, but in the thirty years since, it had taken off, turning into an immense, floating block party: tailgating, Knoxville style. The first few boats would tie up to the wharf; subsequent arrivals would tie to them, and so on. By kickoff time, a vast flotilla — yachts, houseboats, pontoon boats, even runabouts — extended halfway across the river. To get to and from the shore, people clambered from vessel to vessel, bobbing and weaving from the combined effects of the river and the revelry. “The Vol Navy,” this ad-hoc armada had been christened, and as an anthropologist, I found it a fascinating case study in social structure and cooperation.

On this day — three days before a much-anticipated match against the Florida Gators — a half-dozen early arrivals rocked gently in the water. Dangling high off the stern of one of the vessels, the reptilian eyes Xed out with black electrical tape, a ten-foot-long inflatable alligator swayed from an oversized hangman’s noose. Here’s hoping, I thought. The Vols looked promising this year.

The hostess seated us at a corner table overlooking the river — overhanging the river, in fact, as part of the restaurant extended above the water, supported by pilings. The windows on the river side extended from the floor to the ceiling; we sat down just in time to see a towboat and a load of empty barges, riding high in the water, making their way upriver. The headwaters of the Tennessee were only a few miles beyond, at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad Rivers. Both tributaries were navigable beyond Knoxville, but not for long, at least not for heavy traffic. A limestone quarry lay just above the confluence, on the French Broad — half a mile upstream from the UT pig farm — and my guess was, the barges were headed up there to take on a load of gravel. As the wake from the churning towboat reached the advance squadron of the Vol Navy, the boats rocked and heaved in the water.

“So,” Jeff intoned dramatically, “you two are probably wondering why I called you here today.”

“What?” I said, turning from the window. Jenny laughed.

She opened the portfolio slowly, dropping her gaze and fumbling with the latch on the leather case as if it were a complicated mechanism. It might have been my imagination, but her fingers appeared to be trembling a bit. Reaching inside, she took out a sheaf of papers and slid them onto the table. On top was a photograph — actually, a photocopy of a photograph — showing a frontal view of the dead girl’s skull, printed in high contrast to bring out the contours of the bone. “I wasn’t sure how to do this, so I started by taking pictures,” she said. She slid the frontal view aside; beneath it was another photocopied picture, this one showing the skull in three-quarter profile. “I used these as templates, underneath the paper I was drawing on, to make sure I didn’t change the shape or proportions.”

“Smart idea,” I said. “So then you put tracing paper on top of these and drew on that?”

She shook her head. “I tried that, but I could see the skull too well through the tracing paper. It was overwhelming, and I couldn’t visualize the face. Then I tried drawing on regular printer paper, but the skull was too faint through that — all I could see were the edges and the eyes. So finally I decided to try working on a light box, illuminating the skull and my drawing paper from underneath.”

“Third time’s the charm,” said Jeff, who was leaning in — more closely than necessary, it seemed to me — from her other side. “Just like with Goldilocks and the three bears. It was just right.” It was the cheesiest flirting I’d ever seen. I looked at Jenny, expecting to see her rolling her eyes in scorn.

Instead, she was beaming.

“Something like that.”

She slid the second skull image aside, and I felt a jolt almost like electricity. Staring up at me from the table was a teenage girl — a skinny, ashen-faced girl who looked as if she hadn’t had a good meal or a glimpse of the sun in months. Her hair hung straight, limp, and greasy looking. Her lips were thin and pursed. But it was the girl’s eyes that gripped me; they locked onto mine, or so it seemed, and wouldn’t let go.

“Wow,” I said. “You’ve put a lot of despair in those eyes.” Jenny looked at me for the first time since she’d slid the papers onto the table, and I saw concern in her eyes. “Don’t worry,” I hurried to assure her. “It’s fine. It’s better than fine; it’s really good. From what I see in the bones — from what I imagine they’re whispering — I’d say she had cause to despair, every day of her life. I’m just surprised you were able to convey that with a pencil and a piece of paper.”

“I can’t really take credit for that,” she said. “I borrowed that.” Seeing my puzzled look, she went on, “I’ve got a big book of photographs by Dorothea Lange. Do you know her work?”

“I do. She took a lot of portraits of hardscrabble folks during the Great Depression, didn’t she?”

She nodded. “Tenant farmers. Migrant workers. Appalachian families. I was looking through that book, and I saw a picture of a farmer’s wife holding their baby. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty, but she was totally beaten down by life already. You could see it in her eyes.” She paused to clear her throat. “If this girl had made it to twenty and had a baby, I bet she’d have looked like the farmer’s wife in that photo. So I borrowed that woman’s despair. She had plenty to go around.”

She set the frontal sketch aside to show me the next one, a three-quarter profile. It, too, was excellent — the girl’s gauntness was emphasized by the deep hollows in her cheeks, which showed up more prominently in this one. “I really like it,” I said slowly, “but the first one grabs me more. I’m not sure why.”

“It’s the eyes,” Jeff chimed in, surprising me. “In this one, she’s not looking at us.”

“You’re right,” I agreed, impressed that he’d nailed it so fast. I picked up the frontal view for another look. “The way those eyes stare at you? It’s like she’s challenging you, saying, ‘Hey, look at me. Do you know me?’ You can’t ignore that look.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Jenny said. “So next I did this one.” She unveiled another drawing — another three-quarter profile — but in this one, the girl’s gaze was locked on mine once more.

“Wonderful,” I said. “That’s the one to use.”

“If you think so. But there’s one more. I took a little artistic license with it, though. Maybe too much.” She uncovered the final drawing. She’d gone back to the frontal view for this one. The eyes, as I’d come to expect, were arresting and haunting. But underneath one, she’d added a detail — an unexpected bit of shading that hit me like a punch in the gut: She had given the girl a black eye, and in the process, she’d somehow given the girl a story, given her a life. I remembered Jenny’s assessment of the girl’s life, as we’d sat at the table in the coffee shop—“Sounds like a pretty awful life,” she’d said — and somehow she’d captured that in her sketch. As I held the soft nap of the drawing paper in my hand, I found myself staring into that life — even as I felt myself being stared into by the haunted, haunting eyes of the dead girl.

I could smell onions and potatoes frying even before I got to the top of the basement stairs and opened the kitchen door. “Yum,” I said. “Smells great.”

Kathleen looked over her shoulder, her spatula still stirring the sizzling contents of the cast-iron skillet. “How was your day?”

“Good. Interesting. I’ll tell you about it, but not right now.” I switched on the portable television that we kept on the kitchen counter and switched it to WBIR, the NBC affiliate, which dominated the local news. “I think they’re doing a story about that Morgan County case I’m working. The strip-mine girl.”

The newscast led off with a story about Saturday’s football game between the Vols and the Gators. Even though the Vols’ head coach, Johnny Majors, was still recuperating from a quintuple bypass, the Vols had won their first two games, including an upset win over fourteenth-ranked Georgia. This week, though, the Vols were taking on an even tougher opponent. The Gators were ranked number four in the nation, and they’d beaten UT the year before. Even though UT was a 10-point underdog, the story ended with a string of Vol fans professing their confidence. “Gator season is open!” yelled the final fan, an orange-clad man swaying on the rear deck of a houseboat. Behind him, I saw the familiar shape of Calhoun’s in the distance, and — directly over the man’s shoulder — the inflatable alligator hanging from its noose.

“Authorities in Campbell County are investigating the mysterious death of a teenage girl,” said Bill Williams, WBIR’s longtime news anchor. “The bones of the girl, whose age is estimated at twelve to fifteen years, were found on Labor Day beside an abandoned strip mine. Dr. Bill Brockton, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, says the girl’s body was dumped at the mine at least two years ago, possibly longer.”

The camera shifted to Williams’s coanchor, a woman named Edye Ellis. “Investigators today released an artist’s conception of what the girl may have looked like.” The screen filled with two of Jenny’s sketches — the three-quarter profile and the frontal view that included the black eye — while Ellis continued, “Authorities have not been able to determine the cause of death.” Now the image switched to a two-shot, with Ellis turning solemnly to Williams. “And Bill, investigators are treating this case as a homicide.”

Williams nodded gravely. “Anyone with information about the girl’s death or her identity is urged to call the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office or the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.” The sketches flashed on the screen again, this time with phone numbers for the sheriff’s office and the TBI.

The next story was a heartwarming piece about a fuzzy, adoptable puppy at the Humane Society shelter. “Cute dog,” I said.

“Adorable,” Kathleen agreed. “Sad thing is, there’ll be more calls about the puppy than about the girl.”

“Lots more calls,” I agreed, switching off the set. “What’d you think of the sketches?”

“Good,” she said. “Really good. Much better than usual. Those drawings of suspects they put out? Terrible.”

“That’s my doing,” I preened. “The good ones, not the bad ones.”

“Get out of here,” she said. “You couldn’t draw your way out of a paper bag.”

“No, but I found an artist — a good artist — and I loaned her the skull to work from. The chairman of the Art Department recommended her. Cute girl. Amelia somebody; no, wait — Jenny, not Amelia. Earhart. Jenny Earhart. I think maybe Jeff’s gonna ask her out.”

“Jeff? Our Jeff? Ask out a college girl?”

“No, she’s still in high school. She goes to Laurel — you know, that hippie school? She took a drawing class at UT last spring, knocked the socks off the professor.”

“What makes you think Jeff might ask her out?”

“He came by to have lunch with me today, right about the time she showed up with the sketches. So he invited her to Calhoun’s with us. Flirted with her the whole time. I kept expecting to look under the table and see his hand on her thigh.”

“Bill!” She turned and waved the spatula at me reprovingly. “You’re incorrigible.”

“What? I seem to remember putting my hand on your thigh under the table a time or two, back in the day.”

“Back in the day? More like last week, at the provost’s dinner.”

I took a step toward her, pressing against her from behind, and slid my hands down to her thighs, giving them a fond squeeze. She swatted my hands away, but not immediately.

“You don’t want me to burn the potatoes,” she said. “Besides, Jeff will be upstairs any second now.” She leaned back and rubbed her hair against my cheek. “But hold that thought.” So I did.

I heard the clock striking eleven as Kathleen lay curled against me, her head on my chest. “Bill?” Her voice was low and drowsy.

“Hmm?”

“Wouldn’t it be great if Jeff found some nice girl?”

“He’s got a girl,” I pointed out. “Good old what’s-her-name. Tiffany? Brittany?”

“Madison. Oh, please. That girl has the brains of a Dalmatian.”

“True. But I’ve seen her in a bikini, and that girl has the body of a centerfold.”

“That’s the reason he’s going out with her. The only reason he’s going out with her.”

“Seems like a damn good reason to me,” I chuckled. I felt a sudden pain, as the point of an elbow gouged my ribs. “Ow.”

“Beauty’s only skin deep,” she murmured. “Stupidity goes all the way to the bone.”

“You talking about the Dalmatian, or about me?”

Her only answer was a soft, sighing breath, which ruffled the hair on my chest, like breeze ruffling a Kansas wheat field.

The phone rang the next morning at seven thirty, just as I got back from my weekly trim at the barbershop. I snatched up the receiver, hoping to hear Sheriff Cotterell or Bubba Hardknot on the line; hoping that someone had ID’d the girl after seeing the sketches on WBIR or in this morning’s News Sentinel.

My hopes were quickly dashed. “Hi, Dad.”

“Jeff? Why aren’t you in school?”

“I am in school. I’m calling from the pay phone in the hall.” In the background, I heard the clamor of boisterous young voices.

“What’s wrong? Are you sick? Are you in trouble?”

“No, no, I’m fine. I just didn’t see you this morning. You’d gone to get a haircut when I came up for breakfast.”

“Did you need to see me this morning?”

“Mom said you told her about Jenny last night.”

“About Jenny? Yesssss,” I said slowly, turning to look at Kathleen. She was stirring her coffee with unusual attentiveness. “We did talk about Jenny. Why?” Stretching the phone cord to its limit, I leaned in Kathleen’s direction, into her field of view, and raised my eyebrows at her. She shrugged, as if she had no clue why Jeff was calling me. I took the gesture as proof positive that she’d put him up to it. To something.

“Quit beating around the bush, son. What’s on your mind?”

“I want to ask her out.”

“Go for it,” I said. “You don’t need my permission to ask a girl out.”

“I want to ask her out for this Saturday.”

“Fine by me. I wasn’t expecting to see much of you Saturday anyhow. Your mom and I’ll be at the UT-Florida game.”

“Thing is, I was hoping to take Jenny to the UT-Florida game.”

“Ha,” I said. “Good luck with that. That game’s been sold out for months. You couldn’t find a ticket…” A thought struck me — a thought so awful, I knew instantly that it was the truth. “You can’t be serious. Tell me you’re not calling to ask me what I think you’re calling to ask me.”

“Please, Dad.”

“You want my tickets to the UT-Florida game? You gotta be kidding. Wild alligators couldn’t keep me away from that game. You can have my tickets to the Arkansas game,” I said. “Or even the Alabama game. But Florida? You gotta be kidding.” Now Kathleen was desperately trying to catch my attention. Frowning, I mimicked her earlier shrug. “I love you a lot, son, but not that much.”

Kathleen sighed, shaking her head. Then she reached into the pocket of her bathrobe and fished out a cordless phone. “Jeff?”

“Hey, Mom.”

“Pay no attention to your father. Of course you can have our tickets to the game.”

“What? What the hell?” I squawked.

“Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad. Late for class — gotta go,” he said, and the line went dead.

“What the hell?” I repeated. “I’ve been looking forward to that game for a year.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Don’t be stingy. Look at it as an investment in Jeff’s happiness.”

“What about my happiness?”

“Doesn’t it make you happy to see him asking out that nice girl?”

“You don’t even know her,” I blustered. “Now that I think about it, she’s not so nice after all. In fact, I think she’s a very bad girl. A terrible girl. Dumb, too — she makes Dalmatian-brain look like a genius.”

“Oh, nonsense. Besides, maybe you can find happiness some other way on Saturday,” she said. She opened the front of her bathrobe and gave me a slow, suggestive smile, swaying her hips as she did.

“But sweetie,” I said. “Darling.” I felt a powerful surge of conflicting desires. “This is my only chance all year to see UT play Florida. You and I will have lots of chances to… you know… find happiness.”

Still smiling, she wrapped the bathrobe across herself, two layers deep. “If Jeff doesn’t get to take Jenny to that game Saturday,” she said sweetly, “football might be the only happiness you find for the rest of the season.” She puckered her lips, mimed a kiss in my direction, and then tied the bathrobe belt. In a knot.

CHAPTER 18

He backed the Mustang out of his garage and tucked it around back, behind the house and out of sight. Not that there was anything to see, and not that there was ever any traffic on his street anyhow. Still, the fewer tracks you left, the fewer tracks you had to cover. That was one of the survival-training lessons he’d learned during his brief stint in SEAL training. He’d forgotten that lesson once, with that first girl, and he’d paid a steep price. The disgrace of getting discharged—“under less than honorable conditions”—had cut deeply; it had cut to the bone, and it had left him scarred, as surely as his stepfather’s cigarettes had scarred him. But scars were like combat medals, etched in the skin and the soul: badges of honor, or at least of survival. Satterfield had survived, and he’d begun settling accounts.

He backed the van out, then eased it back in, centering it on the concrete slab. He’d start with a base coat of olive drab, then finish the camouflage by adding splotches of pale green and muddy brown. He found himself humming as he laid out the drop cloths and taped the glass and poured the viscous paint carefully into the sprayer. He hummed in part because he liked the preparations; liked transforming his meticulous plans into reality. Also, though, he hummed because he enjoyed the joke — found amusement in the ironic absurdity of dressing out a dweeby white work van in hunter’s camouflage.

The real joke was that it wasn’t really the van that he was camouflaging, though, it was himself: By disguising himself as the sort of dumb shit who believed that a bad camo paint job was cool—Don’t forget to do a shitty job, he reminded himself — he enabled himself to creep closer to his quarry, to coil around her before she realized that she was the prey.

CHAPTER 19

Tina awoke in semidarkness, groaning and groggy and disoriented. Naked and cold, too. Her shoulders and hips and knees ached, but when she tried to stretch, she found that she could not move. Her wrists were bound behind her, her ankles tied to her wrists; Tina was hog-tied, she realized, and the realization caused a flood of memory and terror to surge in her. She’d climbed into the van on Magnolia sometime around midnight. It looked like a work van, with metal racks on the roof for ladders or pipes or lumber but with a bad paint job, a stupid paint job — camo paint on a work truck. It didn’t make her feel all that impressed with the john — what kind of idiot would try to camouflage a work van? — but business was slow and her hot pants were anything but warm in the chill of the late-September night. Just as the van had pulled away from the curb, she’d glanced down and seen a coil of rope on the floorboards. The guy had caught her looking at the rope, and then at him, and the glint in his eyes — the cold and predatory glint they took on in response to the fear in her own — had set off every alarm in her head. She’d tried to get out of the van then, even though it was moving, but the door was locked, and the lock knob had come off — had been taken off, she’d realized with a sudden sick feeling. She’d begun beating helplessly on the glass of the window, like a luna moth battering itself against a windowpane or a streetlight. He’d pulled over fast, and the last thing she remembered was a strong hand seizing the back of her neck, another strong hand clamping a cloth over her nose and mouth, and pungent, sickly-sweet vapors coursing through her nostrils and mouth, down into her lungs, deep into her darkening brain.

“Rise and shine, Tina,” said a voice nearby. His voice. The voice of the guy who’d picked her up in the stupid van. “Tina? Right? I hope you got a good rest, Tina. You need to be fresh.” He paused. “You ever go hunting, Tina?”

She shook her head. “No,” she whispered hoarsely.

“Not a lot of women do. It’s more of a man thing. But we’re fixin’ to go hunting, you and me.” He sighted along a long, slender shaft, pointing its triangular tip at her, and at the far end, she saw three slender vanes. Feathers. “Actually,” he said, smiling, reaching down with one hand, “I’m fixin’ to go hunting.” He lifted something from the floor of the van, a shape that reminded her of a half moon: curved on one edge, straight on the other, but empty in between. She began to whimper and shudder, her trembling as rapid and desperate as the luna moth’s, its powdery wings flailing and beginning to smoke as they beat against the pitiless glass of a searing searchlight.

The man with the moon was the devil himself, and the moon in his hands was a hunting bow.

CHAPTER 20

“What the fuck?!” Perched fifteen feet up the trunk of a pine tree, on the narrow platform of a tree stand, Roy Lee Cheatham blinked and peered again through the scope of his deer rifle, then released his trigger finger, flipped on the safety, and laid the .30–06 across his knees so he could look through his binoculars instead. The binoculars were more powerful than the rifle scope, and they had a wider field of view, too, which made it easier to keep them trained on moving animals.

“Come on, come on, where you at?” he whispered, then, “God a-mighty.” Two hundred yards away, moving from tree to tree, was a woman. A buck-naked woman. He stared through the glasses, his vision — frequently blocked by tree trunks — shifting from her face to her bare breasts and flanks and back up to her face. Again and again she looked over her shoulder, as if she were being pursued, and her face looked wild and desperate. She was limping — staggering, almost — and Roy Lee understood suddenly that she was hurt. He got another brief glimpse, and this time he thought he saw blood streaming down her leg. “Holy shit.” Laying the rifle flat on the platform of the tree stand, he scrambled down the ladder and ran toward her, calling, “Hey, lady! Lady! Hang on — I’m coming to help you.” He ran on a diagonal track that he thought would intercept hers, but it was hard to be sure, as his line of sight was often obscured and his crashing run drowned out whatever sounds she was making. After he’d sprinted a hundred yards, he stopped to look and listen.

The woods were silent. She had stopped, too, he realized. He scanned slowly, his eyes and ears on full alert. Slightly to his left, perhaps thirty yards away, he heard a faint, ragged wheeze, and then he caught a flash of pale skin. “Hey,” he called again, and started in that direction. She burst into view, like a quail flushed from dry grass, and began to run — away from him, not toward. “Wait,” he called. “You look hurt. I’m trying to help.”

She continued to flee, but she was moving far slower than Roy Lee was, so he gained ground on her swiftly. Blood was streaming down her leg, and as he got closer, he was stunned to see the shaft of an arrow protruding from the back of her thigh. He drew even with her within a minute. “Hey,” he panted. “Hey. What happened?” She stared at him, wild-eyed, and continued to stumble forward. He took hold of her wrist. “I’m trying to help, can you understand that? We need to get you to a doctor. I’m not gonna hurt you.” She stopped, her chest heaving, her breathing somewhere between gasping and sobbing. “Easy, now. Easy, now.” He spoke as if he were soothing a spooked horse. “That’s a girl. That’s a girl. Don’t be afraid. You’re okay. Everything is gonna be okay.”

“Is it?” Roy Lee’s head snapped up at the words, spoken in a male voice somewhere ahead and off to his right. He scanned the trees but saw nothing. “Never make promises you can’t keep, Goober,” the unseen speaker continued. “Didn’t your mama teach you that?”

“Git your ass outta your damn hidey-hole and we’ll have us a little talk about what my mama did or didn’t teach me,” said Roy Lee. He caught a slight movement in his peripheral vision, and he turned just in time to see a camouflaged figure rise from a crouch and pull a compound bow to a full draw.

“I’ve got no interest in talking to you about your hillbilly mama,” said the man with the bow. As he said the word mama, he relaxed the first two fingers of his right hand. Roy Lee heard a dull twang and a brief seething sound — the snap of a bowstring, followed by the whisper of feathers as the arrow flew toward him at 300 feet per second. Then he felt himself shoved against the naked woman as the razor-tipped arrow penetrated his chest, and his heart opened in a bloom of crimson to receive its thrust.

CHAPTER 21

“Dis-patch. can i hep you?” From the woman’s voice — flat but twangy, like an out-of-tune banjo — I guessed that she’d lived in Wartburg, or at least somewhere in the hills of East Tennessee, all her life.

“Sheriff Cotterell, please.”

“I’m sorry, sir, Sheriff Cotterell is away right now. I can probably track him down on the radio, if it’s urgent.”

I felt a twinge of disappointment. “No, it’s not urgent. Could you give him a message, please?”

“I don’t care to,” she said, and even though I’d lived in Tennessee for three years now, it still took me a moment to translate her spoken words — which sounded like a refusal — into her actual meaning: I don’t mind.

“I’d appreciate that. This is Dr. Bill Brockton, at the University of Tennessee.”

“Yes, sir, Dr. Brockton, how are you? This is Mae. We met when you was up here awhile back, working that Donnelly woman’s murder. I hear you’re back with us on another’n now. That girl’s bones, found up on Frozen Head. I seen her pitcher on the TV news th’other night.”

“I hope a lot of other people up that way saw it, too,” I said. “That’s one of the reasons I was calling Sheriff Cotterell — to see if he’s gotten any leads since”—I caught myself just before parroting the words “her pitcher”—“since the sketch came out.”

“No, sir, I’m sorry to say we haven’t. Not a peep. But us’n the TBI’s takin’ copies all over ever’where — churches, grocery stores, gas stations, Health Department, you name it. I made a prayer request at church last Sunday, too, that the Lord’ll lay it on somebody’s heart to come forward and tell us who she is and what happened to her.”

“Well,” I said, “between the sheriff’s office, the TBI, and the Lord, sounds like y’all have all the jurisdictions covered.” I waited for a laugh, but I didn’t get one. “Other reason I was calling was to see if Sheriff Cotterell needed something from me on the Donnelly woman’s murder.”

“Denise Donnelly? What kind of follow-up? Sonofagun husband that killed her don’t come up for parole for another eight years. He ain’t filed any kind of appeal, far as I know, and I’d prob’ly know, since he’s my cousin.” A pause, then: “How come you to ask?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, really,” I said. “I got one of the Donnelly crime-scene photos in the mail the other day. No letter or anything with it — just the picture.” As I spoke, I walked to the bookcase where I’d tucked the envelope a few days before, after snatching it from Peggy’s trembling hands.

“You say the sheriff sent it to you?”

“Well, I think so,” I said. “First I thought Bubba Hardknot sent it — Agent Meffert? — but Bubba says he didn’t. So then I figured it had to’ve come from the sheriff. Figured maybe y’all were cleaning out your files.”

“I’ll ask him about it when he gets in,” she said. “But I’d be real surprised if he sent you that pitcher. He ain’t mentioned that case to me in a year or more. And he sure ain’t give me nothing like that to mail.”

“You reckon he might’ve mailed it himself?”

“Who? The sheriff? Well, they do say there’s a first time for ever’thing.” Now she laughed. It was a hearty, good-natured laugh, but as I slid the crime-scene photo from its envelope, the laugh seemed to turn mocking and sinister, and then it seemed to turn to shrieks: first, the echoes of my secretary’s frightened scream; then the warning sirens in my own head; finally, the cries of the dead woman whose image I held in my hands.

A dead woman who was not Denise Donnelly. A dead woman whose crime scene had not yet been worked, because her body had not yet been found.

As I stared at the photo, I finally noticed things I’d overlooked the day I’d snatched it from Peggy and shoved it back in the envelope. I noticed that the trees were tinged with gold and orange and red — September trees, not December trees. Right now trees, I thought. I noticed that although the woman’s feet were missing, her body showed no signs of decomposition, and her blood was fresh and bright. Last but not least — far, far from least — I noticed that the photo had a small time stamp in the lower right corner. Unless the camera’s internal clock was wrong, the photo had been taken — and the woman’s life had been taken — just three days before my new secretary reported for work and opened the envelope.

“Hello? Hello? Are you still there?” The voice of the dispatcher seemed to come from far away, and I stared at the telephone receiver dumbly, seemingly baffled to find it in my hand.

“Please ask the sheriff to call me when he gets in,” I said, then hung up and called the TBI, leaving a similar message for Meffert. All I’d be able to tell them was that somewhere out there — somewhere in the millions of acres of Tennessee woods — another woman lay dead and decomposing. And that somewhere out there, a killer might already be stalking his next victim — a victim whose body would end up bearing an uncanny and inexplicable resemblance to one of my prior cases.

CHAPTER 22

Goddamned waste of time, Janelle thought, glancing over her shoulder at the empty mile of Magnolia Avenue stretching between her and downtown. All four lanes were empty, except for scattered trash: wadded-up burger wrappers, smashed French fries, crushed paper cups and aluminum cans and plastic hubcaps.

Sometimes Janelle did good business at lunchtime on Fridays — white-collar guys cruising for a nooner; construction workers clocking out early, cashing their paychecks before the ink was all the way dry; family men looking to unwind before heading west to the burbs for a weekend of soccer coaching and honey-do chores. Today, though, Magnolia Avenue was looking like the main drag of Ghost Town, USA. Was there a wreck somewhere blocking traffic? Road work somewhere between here and downtown? Didn’t appear to be. She kept walking east, her back to downtown — her swaying ass to downtown, more to the point — but the six-inch heels on her boots were better for posing than for walking, especially on the broken, glass-littered sidewalks of East Knoxville.

She was on the verge of giving up, heading back to her room for a nap — might as well rest up for the night ahead, when surely business would be better, please God—when she heard a rumbling engine and the quick toot of a horn. The car passed her slowly, then cut into the parking lot of the Dollar store, pulling up right alongside her. A nice ride: an early Mustang—whoa, a ’67, she realized — with no dents or rust. Recent paint job, too, by the look of it, though Janelle didn’t like the garish shade of orange; for her money, black or red would’ve been lots classier. Lots sexier.

The driver looked well kept, too, and maybe about the same age as the car: twenty-five, plus or minus. Close-cropped hair, form-fitting black T-shirt, good biceps and pecs: gym muscles, not ditch-digging muscles. He should be good for at least fifty. Maybe more, if she played him right. “I like the car,” she cooed. “Whatcha got under the hood?”

“A big-bore slant six,” he said, winking to make sure she caught the double meaning.

She raised her eyebrows and smiled, to signal that she did. “And is that an auto-matic, or do you prefer… manual?” She flashed him a naughty smile and cocked one leg out to the side. Play it cool, she told herself.

“You know it’s a straight stick,” he grinned. “You good with a clutch?”

Janelle knew cars, and she could play this game with the best of them. “Baby,” she said, “when my master cylinder starts to working, your hydraulic pressure is gonna go sky-high, and your slave cylinder will explode.”

He laughed. “You win. Hop in, I’ll give you a test ride.”

“Where we goin’?”

“Far as you want,” he said. “How ’bout we go all the way?” The passenger door opened. “Come on.”

She sashayed toward the car, feeling the seam in the jeans cleaving her in a way that he couldn’t help but notice; feeling her breasts swaying in the filmy top; feeling his eyes roaming all over her. She was looking good today, long as he didn’t look at her face too close — the lines and the dark circles were getting harder to hide in the daylight. It had been her experience, though, that most johns weren’t all that interested in her face.

Stopping at the open door, she put one boot up on the sill. The boot came to the top of her calf, and the jeans — tight as second skin — were tucked in, giving her a leggy look that generally made men’s heads turn when she walked down a sidewalk. She didn’t lean down to talk to him; she kept her head above the roofline, so he’d focus on her body. “It takes some cash to fill up my tank. I got to keep the chassis nice and lubricated.”

“How much cash?”

“You want the turbo package, baby?”

“Come on. I’ll give you a hundred — fifty for you, fifty for the car lingo.”

She slithered down into the bucket seat, the jeans forming taut, fan-shaped creases at the crotch as she did. “That might be the tightest pair of jeans I ever saw,” he said. “Have much trouble gettin’ out of those?”

“I don’t have trouble gettin’ out of these,” she said, “I cause trouble.”

“You just don’t quit, do you, sister?”

“Brother, I am only just getting started.”

He parked the car under the billboard and shut off the engine. She stared out the windshield at the traffic whizzing past on the interstate, then she swiveled in the seat to face him. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Nope. I’m dead serious.”

“This is where you want to do it? A hundred feet off I-40, in broad daylight? No offense, but what the hell, man?”

“I got a nice little love nest right up that path there,” he said. “You’re gonna love it.”

“No, I am not gonna love it. You want me to do it in the woods, laying on sticks and leaves? Take me back. This is some kind of fucked up.”

He opened his door and came around to her side of the car. She reached for the lock, but there was no lock, and she thought, Shit shit shit, as the door opened wide. “Let’s go, darlin’,” he said, reaching for her hand. “Time for you to show me that turbo package you were braggin’ about. You are gonna love my hot rod.”

She slapped at his hand, but he reached in with the other one and grabbed her by the wrist. “Play nice, now.” He folded her thumb forward, down toward the inside of her forearm, torquing her wrist to a right angle, twisting her arm out to the side. The pain made her cry out, and she leaned forward in the seat, then leaned out of the car to ease the pressure. “That’s right, come on out. Unless you want me to break it.” He increased the pressure, and she gasped, expecting a bone to snap. “We’re gonna walk up into those woods together, and you’re gonna act real nice, to make up for being rude to me just now. Remember, darlin’, I am the customer. And the customer’s always right. Am I right?” He gave another quick squeeze, and she whimpered, clenching her teeth to keep from screaming. “Tell me: Am I right?” He bore down slowly this time, increasing the torque with excruciating precision.

“Yes. Yes,” she whispered.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, you’re right.”

He was squatting down now so his face was level with hers, watching her closely as he twisted again. Smiling as he saw the agony in her eyes. “Say ‘Yes, sir, you’re right.’ ”

“Yes, sir, you’re right.” She was starting to cry now, involuntary tears of pain and fury rolling down her cheeks. God, she hated being so helpless to resist, but more than that, even, she hated to cry — hated it for the weakness it showed; hated it, too, because she knew this asshole was getting off on it.

“Get out of the car, nice and easy. Here, I’ll help you.” He added some upward force, and she staggered out, almost vomiting from the pain in her thumb and her wrist. “That’s it. Now up that little path there.” He walked behind her, using the shrieking thumb and torqued arm to steer her, as if her arm were the tiller of a small boat.

Fifty yards up the trail he stopped and turned her to face him. “All right now, show me how you wiggle out of those jeans.” She glared at him, arms at her sides, not moving. He unbuckled his belt — a wide leather strap with a heavy brass buckle — and yanked the buckle. The strap seethed and snapped through the belt loops like an angry snake, then popped free of the final loop and writhed in the air between them, nearly hitting her in the face. “Don’t make me tell you again,” he said. Doubling the strap, he slapped it lightly against his thigh. Hands shaking, she fumbled with the button in her waistband, finally got it, and then unzipped the jeans and began pushing them down over her hips. “Not like that,” he said. “Work it. Make it good. Put on a show for me.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” she hissed.

The backhanded swing of the doubled belt caught her on the right ear and cheek; the force of the blow knocked her to the ground, laying her cheek open and causing her to black out briefly. When she came to, he was dragging her to her feet. “Let’s try this again,” he said. “Show me how you wiggle out of those. Slow and sexy. Put some shimmy in it. You need to put the ‘service’ in ‘customer service,’ sweetheart.”

Her breath coming in jerky gasps, she began to twitch her hips and sway. He kept time with both hands: his left hand flipping the belt against his leg, his right hand rubbing himself to an erection. His eyes feasted on the fear she knew was showing in hers.

Naked now, she squatted in front of him, twigs and rocks jabbing the soles of her feet. His left hand encircled her throat; his right gripped the back of her head, his fingers entwined in her hair, so he could push or pull with equal ease. “Open up and say ‘ah,’ ” he ordered. “And show me how much you want it. Suck it like your life depends on it.”

His final words were accompanied by a steady tightening of the pressure on her windpipe. The pressure eased, but only slightly, when she gasped, “I want it. So much. Give it to me, baby. Please.”

Wrapping her right hand around him, she opened her mouth, sizing him up, wondering, Could I bite it off? As she guided him in, between her lips, past her incisors, across her tongue, she imagined it all — the swift, savage clamp of her strong jaws, the gasp and then the howl of pain, the gratifying geyser of blood pulsing from his severed stump, the spurts diminishing until there was no more blood to be shed. He’d still kill me, she realized — a quick clench of the hand around her throat, first as a reflexive response to the pain, followed by the full force of his vengeful fury. But he’ll kill me no matter what. Unless I get away. But how?

Fighting for breath, fighting back the need to gag, Janelle began cooing and moaning — softly at first, then steadily louder — feigning the desire he demanded. With her left hand, she caressed the front of his thigh, her nails lightly raking the skin. He seemed to like that — his thrusts grew more insistent, and his right hand kept time, slamming her face against his crotch harder and harder.

Releasing the shaft of his penis, Janelle now reached both hands behind him and squeezed his clenching buttocks, drawing a low groan from him. That’s right, asshole, she thought, you just think about gettin’ off. Slowly she ran her fingernails down the backs of his thighs, his knees, his calves, until her hands reached his ankles, where his pants were bunched. Taking the crotch of his bunched-up pants in both hands, she gripped it tight, then — drawing momentum from the next forward yank of the hand entwined in her hair — she drove her head into his belly. At the same instant she straightened her legs and yanked the pants toward her, turning all her terror into strength. The man grunted and toppled backward, arms flailing, whacking his head on the trunk of a fallen tree.

Janelle didn’t wait to see if he was hurt. Oblivious to the damage being done to her bare feet, she ran down the trail, out of the woods, and then — stark naked — darted across the dead-end lane, up the grassy embankment, and onto the shoulder of Interstate 40, frantically waving her arms for help.

Two cars whizzed by, horns blaring, but then a tractor-trailer rig smoked to a stop just beyond her, and another tucked in behind the first. The astonished truckers clambered down from their cabs and converged on her just in time to see a neon-orange Mustang fishtail up the dead-end lane, skid around a corner, and vanish up a serpentine road into the backwoods of east Knox County.