Cut to the Bone: A Body Farm Novel

CHAPTER 23

The light at Magnolia Avenue and Cherry Street flipped to yellow, and Satterfield braked for once instead of punching the gas. For one thing, he was moving at a crawl anyhow, trolling for the woman who’d slipped from his grasp a few hours before; for another, he wasn’t in the Mustang, but in the van, with its anemic engine and sissy automatic transmission. The camo paint was gone, scrubbed off; anybody who bothered to glance his way would see an ordinary work van — a painter’s van — with a pair of battered, spattered aluminum ladders clattering on the roof racks.

At the far right corner of the intersection was a Family Dollar store, and Satterfield eyed it through the windshield. The Magnolia Avenue hookers tended to congregate there, or at least cross paths there. Maybe it was because Magnolia and Cherry was a high-traffic intersection, or maybe simply because Family Dollar was a cheap place to get snacks or nail polish or stockings or other tools of the trade. Does Family Dollar sell rubbers? he wondered idly. Lube? Ironic, that hookers were regulars in Family Dollar. He noticed a bail-bonding company conveniently located in the next block, and, across Magnolia, a run-down motel, probably a hot-sheet motel. Hell, if there was a Waffle House and a beer joint and a VD clinic, you could just live right here, he thought sardonically. He snapped to attention when a leggy woman in a short skirt strutted out of Family Dollar, a blond wig swaying as she walked. The strut was right and the skirt was tight, but the skin was wrong — it was black skin. As he scanned the fringes of the store’s parking lot, Satterfield’s jaw muscles throbbed, pulsing like venom glands. He’d spotted two or three other hookers along Magnolia in his first pass out and back, but not the one he wanted to find. The one he really, really needed to find.

He’d made a mistake. It was the only one he’d made — the only one, at least, since that beginner’s mistake, with that first woman. That one had cost him dearly; had cost him a career and a future. This one might be as bad. Would she go to the cops? Probably not, he told himself, for the hundredth time. Hookers hate cops. He drummed his fingers on the wheel. Then again, he fretted, hookers don’t fight back. And they damned sure don’t win. Don’t get away. Not from me, they don’t. But she did; she had. So clearly she wasn’t like most hookers. And even if she didn’t go to the cops, she could put the word out on the street about him, warn the others against him, and sooner or later that could circle back to bite him in the ass. If he didn’t spot her by midnight, he’d have to start asking around, loosening some lips with some cash or some crack. The girl — shit, he hadn’t even bothered to ask her street name — was a serious loose end, one that had to be tied up, fast and tight. This is not good, the voice in his head shouted again. Not good.

Behind him, a horn honked — he hadn’t noticed the light turn green — and Satterfield thrust his arm out the window and gave the guy the finger. The gesture was answered by the squawk of a police siren and the strobing of blue lights. “Shit,” he hissed. Distracted and distraught, he hadn’t even noticed the KPD cruiser come up behind him at the red light. “Shit, shit, shit.” He eased the van forward and turned into the Family Dollar lot so he wouldn’t block traffic. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” He slapped the right side of his face so hard he saw stars. “Stupid.” The stinging pain helped focus his mind.

Keeping his eyes locked now on the outside mirror, he watched the cruiser pull into the lot behind him. Satterfield tugged his wallet from his back pocket and flipped it open, removing the driver’s license from the clear sleeve and laying both items on the dash, the license on top of the wallet. Then he reached behind him and tucked his hand into the deep pocket on the back of the seat. There, his searching fingers closed around the serrated slide of the Glock, and he slid out the pistol, which felt heavy and reassuring in his hand. He racked the slide to chamber a round and laid the gun across his lap, the muzzle pointing at the center of the driver’s door. Then he covered it with the wrapper from the Hardee’s burger he’d just eaten. The shreds of lettuce littering the wrapper were still crisp, the smears of ketchup still bright as blood.

In the mirror, he watched as the door of the cruiser opened and the cop got out — a red-faced kid, probably no more than a year out of the academy, Satterfield guessed. He was already porking up, his blue shirt straining and bulging over his belt from a surfeit of sausage biscuits or Krispy Kremes or Coors; a few years from now, by the time he was Satterfield’s age, the porky kid would probably be on blood-pressure and cholesterol meds. Was his face flushed because he had a drinking problem, too, on top of the eating problem? Or was that just sunburn, or maybe a rookie’s anger at being flipped off?

Satterfield was on high alert — coiled — debating between playing it cool and striking preemptively. Maybe all he’d need to do was grovel. Gosh, officer, I am so sorry, he rehearsed. Some punk was tailgating me a couple blocks back, and I thought… But what if the girl had already gone to the police? What if all the patrol units already had his description? And what if this guy, eager to prove himself, had memorized the description — had seen Satterfield trolling for her and had recognized him?

Satterfield’s finger tightened as the blue uniform loomed closer and larger, now filling the mirror. If he fired through the door, Porky would never even see it coming. His piglike eyes and jowls would open wide in surprise, and then — just as the sound of the shot registered in his brain — he’d crumple to the asphalt. Shooting him through the door might require a second shot to finish him, though — time-consuming and riskier, potentially exposing Satterfield to more witnesses. What if he held on to his license when the cop tried to take it? Would that distract the guy long enough for Satterfield to raise the gun and take a clean headshot?

“Sir, I need to see your license and registration,” Porky said, peering through the window at Satterfield’s face.

“Officer, I am so sorry,” Satterfield began, reaching for the license with his left hand, shaking his head in a show of embarrassment and contrition. “I had no idea that was you behind me.” He picked up the license by one corner, gripping it tightly as he extended it toward the window. “My father was a police officer,” he added, laying it on thick as syrup. “I respect the hell out of you guys.”

Instead of taking the bait — and instead of taking the license — the cop said, “Sir, would you remove your sunglasses, please?”

Satterfield hadn’t expected that. Shit, now what? he thought. Do I put down the license, or let go of the gun? Or do I shoot now? He stalled for time. “Excuse me?”

“I said take off your sunglasses, please.”

Fuck. Is he just seeing if I’m stoned, or does he have a description? The day was cool, but Satterfield felt a crown of sweat beading his scalp, felt moisture gather under his arms and trickle down his sides. The Glock had a six-pound trigger pull, and Satterfield’s finger pressure was already pushing three pounds, easy — maybe four — and climbing.

Suddenly the cop’s face swiveled toward the cruiser, and Satterfield heard a radio call blaring through the loudspeaker. “All units, all units. Armed robbery in progress, Home Federal Bank, 3001 East Magnolia.”

Without a word, the cop spun and lumbered away. Slamming the cruiser into gear, he whipped it around, almost clipping the van’s bumper, and fishtailed out of the Family Dollar lot, tires smoking and siren shrieking.

Satterfield took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, then bent forward and rested his head on the steering wheel. After three more such breaths, he straightened up. Lifting the hinged lid of the console, he took out a pack of unfiltered Camels and a lighter. With shaking hands he tapped out a cigarette and lit it, taking a deep drag and holding it, forcing the nicotine into his bloodstream as he replaced the pack and the lighter and closed the lid. Then, expelling a tight plume of smoke, he turned his right palm upward on the console. “You stupid piece of shit,” he whispered, in a voice that he hadn’t heard in years.

The flesh hissed and smoked as he pressed the burning cigarette to his palm. Satterfield flinched, but he did not whimper or cry out. He hadn’t whimpered since he was twelve, and he’d be damned to hell if he’d ever whimper again.

CHAPTER 24

Kittredge frowned, rubbing his left hand across his mouth, the stubble on his upper lip and chin rasping like sandpaper across his fingers and palm. The stubble rubbing was the detective’s version of a worry stone; the sound and sensation distracted his mind, turned down the distracting, unhelpful inner chatter. Kittredge rubbed his chin religiously, ritualistically, the way a baseball player might tap dirt from his spikes with the bat before stepping into the batter’s box, focusing on his shoes instead of the cowhide-covered cannonball about to come screaming in at ninety-five miles an hour — and by distracting himself from it, giving himself a better shot at hitting the damned thing.

“I’m having a little trouble here, Ms…” Kittredge stole a glance at the complaint form on his desk. “Ms. Mayfield. You’re saying this man raped you. But you also say you got into his car with him. Agreed to have sex with him. For money. You see my problem here? How am I supposed to arrest a man for raping a woman who agreed to have sex with him?”

The woman looked away, appeared to be wavering. Probably deciding to cut her losses, Kittredge figured — just get up and walk out, knowing she was lucky to be alive. Instead, she turned and looked him in the eye. “But I unagreed,” she said. “I canceled the deal. I said no.” Now her gaze did not waver. “Look, Detective, I know I’m just a whore,” she said bluntly. “I sell my body on the street. I let strangers screw me for fifty bucks — twenty if I’m desperate.” She pressed on. “It’s not much of a life, and you probably think I’m scum. I sure as hell do, lots of the time. But there’s one tiny little scrap of dignity I still cling to, and you know what that is, Detective?” He could tell she didn’t expect him to answer — didn’t even want him to answer — so he waited. “It’s that I get to decide. I get to say yes — and God knows, I say yes just about every chance I get. But every once in a great while, I say no. Out there today, I said no, and you know what happened when I said no? That sick sonofabitch damn near broke my arm, and then he busted my face open with a belt. And then he forced me to strip naked and kneel down at his feet and take his dick in my mouth. After I said no. After.”

She stared at her hands, which had started to tremble on the table, as silent tears rolled down her cheeks and plopped onto the metal surface. Kittredge expected to see sadness in her face, but what he saw instead was fury. Fury at what had happened to her out in the woods? Fury at how her life had gone off the rails so badly? Fury at her own complicity in annihilating goodness and grace from her life? “I said no,” she repeated through clenched teeth, still looking down, as if speaking to her quaking fingers. Then she looked up at Kittredge again and resumed speaking, her voice clear and strong now: “Tell me, Detective. If some strange man did that to you — knocked the shit out of you, and made you strip and kneel down and suck his dick, and tell him you loved it — how would you like it?”

Kittredge had never thought about it, and didn’t want to think about it now, but there it was, the unwelcome and disgusting image in his mind, like some sort of brain STD he’d just caught from her. “I wouldn’t like it,” he finally said. It was a vast, absurd understatement. Kittredge felt something shifting inside him — something besides the contagion of the image. Kittredge felt something opening up, making room to accommodate this woman’s sense of injustice, enough to admire her for not giving up and just taking what the guy had done. “Honest truth, Janelle? I’d hate it like hell.”

“So,” Kittredge said as they took the Asheville Highway exit off I-40, “left here?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Cross the river, then take the first right.”

Kittredge slowed to thirty crossing the Holston. The river was spanned here by a steel truss bridge, fifty years old if it was a day. The bridge was narrow and rickety, but Kittredge liked the angles and rivets, liked the way the emerald-green paint matched the color of the river below. He also liked being able to see through the railings and down to the water. Modern bridges, like the I-40 bridge that spanned the river a half mile downstream from here, blocked your view of the water; all you could see was the concrete sides. When Kittredge crossed a river, he wanted to see the river.

“They’re tearing this bridge down next year,” he said to her, partly just to break the silence, but partly to make up for the way he’d treated her earlier. He’d been stingy with his humanity at first. He’d been unintentionally cruel, forcing her to expose herself to him, too — expose her pain and her shame — before he started treating her like a crime victim, like someone deserving of respect and compassion and at least some attempt at justice.

She glanced out at the antiquated girders strobing past. “If they want to tear this thing down, they better hurry. Looks like it might collapse before they get to it.”

“Naw,” he scoffed. “Keep this thing painted, it’ll last another hundred years. The new one’ll be wider and stronger. Safer, sure. But nowhere near as interesting.” He surprised himself then, stopping the car midway across. She seemed surprised, too — her head snapped around in his direction, her expression a mixture of puzzlement and alarm, her right hand edging toward the door latch. He pointed out her window. “See that little dip in the railing right there?”

She studied his face for a moment before turning to look. “Yeah?”

“I jumped off of there once. A long damn time ago. Night I graduated from high school.”

“You jumped from there? That’s a long ways down. You drunk?”

He chuckled. “Shit-faced. Wouldn’t’ve done it sober. Never did, anyhow — not before, not since. Glad I did it the once, though.” He let out a low hnh, a monosyllabic grunt. “If the Lord looks out for fools and drunkards, I had double coverage that night.” He glanced in the mirror and saw a truck coming up behind them, so he nudged the Crown Vic on across the bridge. He signaled and took the right onto John Sevier for a half mile, following the river downstream a ways before turning off the highway; before turning on to the back road that the map showed leading to Cahaba Lane, where she said he’d taken her. “This guy took you off the beaten track, that’s for sure,” he said. “Was he just wandering around, looking for someplace private to park?”

“No. He knew right where he was going.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“He knew the roads. I could tell by the way he was driving. He knows his way around out here. Maybe he lives out here somewhere.”

“Could be,” Kittredge said. “I’ll check with the gas stations and quick-stops around here, see if anybody knows the car. You said it’s a Mustang, kinda old?”

“A ’67,” she said. “Third year of production.”

“He told you that?”

“Didn’t have to. I knew it.” He glanced a question at her. “I had one, once upon a time,” she said. “A long damn time ago.” Her words—“a long damn time ago”—were an echo of his. Is she making fun of me? he wondered. Couldn’t blame her. But maybe she’s deciding to trust me. “They widened the radiator grille on the ’67,” she went on. “That’s how you can tell it from the ’65 and the ’66. Made those fake air scoops on the sides bigger, too.” She took a long breath; blew it out. “It wasn’t really mine. It was my stepfather’s. I stole it when I ran away from home.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen? Jesus. You must’ve wanted to get away from home mighty bad. How come?”

“Take a wild guess, Detective.” He winced, cursing himself for his stupidity, but didn’t say anything; didn’t want to risk interrupting her story again. “My mama worked nights,” she said. “He started in on my sister first. She was two years older than me, and she protected me. Took the bullet, so to speak. At the time, I didn’t realize what a sacrifice that was. ‘Greater love,’ and all that. But after a while she couldn’t take it anymore. She ran away at fifteen; tried to talk me into going with her. I should’ve. Would’ve, if I’d known what it would be like once she was gone. Once I was home alone with him.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Took some guts to steal his car. How far’d you get?”

“Not far.” She laughed, surprising Kittredge. “I wrapped that car around a telephone pole about five miles down the road. Wasn’t far, but it was far enough — I knew I couldn’t go back. Not after what I did to his precious Mustang. That damn car was the only thing he loved in this world, far as I could see.” Kittredge nodded. “I crawled out through the busted windshield — neither door would open — and looked at what I’d done. The radiator was spewing steam; the gas tank was dripping gas. I had a pack of matches in my pocket, and I struck a match and threw it under the car—whoomph—and walked away. Just kept going. I burnt my bridges but good that day.”

“I guess you showed him,” Kittredge said, and she laughed again.

“I guess so; don’t know, though. I hitchhiked to Miami, and never saw the bastard again.”

“Why Miami?”

“Why not? Warm all year. Pretty beaches. Men with money.”

“Why’d you come back, then?”

“My mom.” She looked out the window before turning back to him. “She got sick while I was in Miami. Ovarian cancer, fast and mean. By the time they tracked me down, she was just about dead. My asshole stepfather was long gone, of course — he split soon as she got sick. ”

They passed beneath I-40, where a pair of long concrete bridges spanned the Holston River and the road they were on. Just after they emerged from the underpass, they turned left. The small green street sign — CAHABA LANE — was dwarfed by a big white sign that announced SUNNYVIEW BAPTIST CHURCH and pointed down the road. “This look right?” She nodded grimly. “And you think you can find the spot in the woods where he took you?”

“Be hard to miss, won’t it? The spot with a pile of my clothes laying there. Can y’all get fingerprints off of fabric?”

“We’ll ask the crime-lab guys. If your stuff’s still there. Don’t you think he might’ve taken it, though?”

“What, a souvenir? To remind him of our special first date?”

“Some guys do. The really creepy ones. But I was just thinking he might’ve taken it to cover his tracks.”

She shook her head. “Not unless he came back for it later. That dude was haulin’ ass out of the woods, same as me. Chasin’ me, at first. Gaining fast. But then those truckers stopped to help, and he jumped in his car and got the hell out of Dodge.”

He eased the car to a stop at the end of the lane, the tires crunching shards of broken bottles. Overhead loomed a faded COMFORT INN billboard, supported by rusting I beams, their bases like trash magnets, fringed with coffee cups, beer cans, and other debris. Kittredge narrowly missed stepping on a used condom that lay crumpled on the ground. Nice, he thought. Her door swung open before he got there to open it for her. She stepped out, glancing down at the condom, an expression of weary disgust on her face.

As they started up the narrow path that led through the posts and up the wooded slope, Kittredge felt a chill. He touched the holster on his belt, making sure his weapon was still there.

CHAPTER 25

Walking up the wooded slope, Janelle felt almost like two people; two Janelles. A TV ad from her childhood started playing in her mind—“It’s two, two, two mints in one!”—and it wouldn’t stop. Two Janelles in one!

Janelle Number One was scared shitless, remembering the feel of the path under her feet, remembering the pain of the bent wrist and the twisted arm; remembering the humiliation of what he’d made her do after that.

Janelle Number Two, though, was mad as hell. Was something else, too. Brave? Strong? Those weren’t words she felt entitled to use — not about herself, anyhow. But whatever the feeling was, she recognized and welcomed it; it was the same feeling she’d had the afternoon she’d run off in her stepfather’s Mustang, the same feeling she’d had when she’d tossed the match beneath the car, when she’d decided to keep going instead of slinking back home, tail between her legs, to shut up and lie down and just take it, the way her life and her sack-of-shit stepdaddy had tried to teach her to do.

It helped that the cop, Kittredge, was treating her like an actual human being, not like some piece of shit that deserved whatever was done to her. Helped, too, that he was nervous out here, same as her — not that he said anything, but she saw him reach back and touch his gun when he thought she wasn’t looking. See, she told herself, you’re not so pathetic. Big badass cop with a gun, and he’s scared, too.

She was walking in front, the way she had a few hours before. She found the view disorienting, so she bent down, looked down, the way she had earlier in the day, when her arm had been twisted behind her. Looking down helped her remember. She felt the trail level off briefly — that felt right — then turn upward again. A memory floated slowly up toward the surface of her consciousness, like a bubble in hot pancake batter on a griddle; just as the memory bubble popped and her eyes and her mouth were opening, she stumbled — again — on a fat root that snaked across the trail.

“Careful,” said Kittredge from behind her.

“There,” she said, pointing down. “I tripped on that same root before. Right after that, we went thataway.” She turned to her left and struck out sideways, across the slope, her head up now, her gaze ranging far and wide.

“You sure?”

Instead of answering, she stopped and gasped, raising both hands in front of her, as if to ward off something; as if to ward off the ghost of Janelle Number Three. A hundred yards ahead of them — fifty yards beyond the clothing Janelle had scattered on the ground a few hours before — lay a dead woman. She was sprawled faceup, but much of her face was gone, and her legs — splayed on either side of a tree — had no feet.

CHAPTER 26

Det. Kittredge, I scrawled on the notepad beside the telephone, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising as Detective Kittredge described the death scene where he was standing.

“Excuse me,” I said, interrupting him. “The tree — it’s a sapling, isn’t it.” I was telling him, not asking him. “Three, four inches thick. Her crotch is pressed right up against the trunk.”

A silence, then: “What makes you think that?”

“What makes me think that is the fact that I’m looking at a photograph of it right now, Detective.” As I said it, I slid the picture the rest of the way out of the envelope. It was the manila envelope that had arrived in the mail a week or so before, traumatizing Peggy her first day on the job.

“Could you please say that again, sir?”

“I said I’m looking at a photograph of the death scene right now. The dead woman in the woods. The tree she’s pressed up against.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you here, Dr. Brockton. How could you possibly be looking at a crime-scene photo? The photographer isn’t even here yet.”

“Somebody mailed it to me a week or so ago,” I said. “Probably right after he killed her.” A thought struck me, and I added, “Killed her and cut off her feet.” I was still embarrassed that I’d failed to recognize that the photo hadn’t come from the case files of Sheriff Cotterell or Bubba Hardknot; that the image was fresh, taken no more than a few days before it had arrived in my office.

“This picture you say somebody mailed you.” The detective’s wording was careful and conditional — almost accusatory — as if he were cross-examining me in court. “Did you contact the police when you received this, sir?”

“No. Well, sort of.” I felt flustered suddenly. Stupid suddenly. “But I mentioned it to a TBI agent a day or two later.”

“Mentioned it? You see that a woman has been murdered and dismembered, and all you do is mention it?”

“I thought he’d sent me an old crime-scene photo,” I tried explaining. “From a case he and I worked a couple years ago, up in Morgan County. It looks exactly like it. Well, almost exactly like it. As close as a killer could get, I guess, without waiting a month or two.”

The detective was silent for several long seconds. “Doctor, I don’t mean to sound dense,” he said, “and I don’t mean to sound disrespectful — my colleagues at KPD speak very highly of you — but what you’re saying isn’t making much sense to me.”

“It’s not making a lot of sense to me, either, Detective, but bear with me for half a minute, and I’ll try to help us both make better sense of it.” Stretching the phone cord as far as it would go, I rolled my chair across the office to a battered filing cabinet and opened the drawer that held my slides. Thumbing back through the tabs of the file folders, I stopped at 90–11—my eleventh forensic case of 1990—and tugged the fat folder free. I opened the file, which contained clear plastic sleeves of 35-millimeter slides, along with a few eight-by-ten enlargements. “Back in December of 1990,” I said, pulling out one of the enlargements, “Sheriff Jim Cotterell, up in Morgan County, called me out to a death scene. A TBI agent, Wellington Meffert, was there, too. You know either of those guys?”

“No, sir, I don’t. I’m still not quite—“

“Hang on,” I said. “I’m getting there. A woman’s body was found there in the woods. She was naked, and her feet had been chewed off by dogs or coyotes, and her crotch was jammed up against a tree. I’m looking now at one of the photos from that case — the December 1990 case — and the trees are all bare. In the picture somebody sent me last week — the picture of the woman I think you’ve just found — all the trees still have leaves, and they’re just starting to turn. I didn’t look closely at this picture last week — I thought it was just an extra print from that 1990 case — but I’m sure looking now.” I took a magnifying glass from the center drawer of my desk and inspected the woman in the photo. “Hard to say for sure, but it doesn’t look like this woman’s feet were chewed off. Looks more like they’ve been severed.” He didn’t respond, so I went on, talking about what I saw, now that I was finally looking. “The tree she’s up against — looks like a maple.” I moved the lens to focus on the nearest cluster of leaves; they were shaped like five-pointed stars, but with no other serrations. “No, not a maple,” I amended. “A sweet gum, I think, now that I look closer.” Detective Kittredge still wasn’t saying anything, and I wondered if I should just shut up. Instead, I plowed ahead. “Looks like the bottom branch is snapped, but in this picture, the leaves aren’t dead yet. So I’m guessing it got broken just before the picture was taken.”

A pause. Finally, as if he’d made up his mind about something — as if he’d made up his mind that I wasn’t crazy, or a killer — he said, “Yes, sir, she’s up against a sweet gum. And the leaves on the bottom branch are withered now. All the other leaves are turning, and some have already fallen, but these withered on the branch.” Another pause. “Could you tell me a little more about that other case? Morgan County, you said?”

“Sure,” I said, glad that he seemed to be coming around. “This was about two years ago — twenty-two months, actually — outside Petros, the little town where Brushy Mountain State Prison is. A man kills his unfaithful wife and dumps her body in the woods. A couple weeks later, a hunter finds it and calls the sheriff, and the sheriff calls me. The body’s lying against a tree, one leg on each side, with the woman’s crotch pressed against the trunk. At first we think the killer has posed her that way — some kind of sexual display — but then I notice a dark, greasy spot about ten feet up the hill, and I realize that that’s where he dumped her; that’s where her body started to decompose. Then I saw the tooth marks on her feet — what little was left of her feet — and I realized what had happened. After she got nice and ripe up there on higher ground, she was found by wild dogs, or coyotes, and dragged downhill a ways, until she snagged on the tree and the coyotes couldn’t drag her any farther.”

“Hmm.” Another pause. “I’m still playing catch-up with you here, Dr. Brockton. Are you suggesting that this woman I’m looking at right now was killed by the same guy as the woman in Morgan County two years ago?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. That’s not possible — at least, I don’t think it’s possible. That guy confessed. He’s two years into a ten-year sentence.”

“So… let me try this again,” the detective said. “You’re saying I’m looking at some kind of copycat killing here?”

“Copycat killing?” As I repeated his words, something about them sounded slightly wrong. I laid one of my Morgan County crime-scene enlargements alongside the photo I’d received in the mail. They were strikingly similar; chillingly similar. “I don’t know if it’s a copycat killing,” I said slowly, “but it’s for damn sure a copycat death scene.” My eyes locked on to the broken branch, and I noticed that it had been pulled toward the far side of the sapling. “Jesus,” I said. “That branch was blocking the shot. Whoever took this picture broke the branch to get it out of the way. So his picture would look just like my picture.”

“Come again?”

“Detective, whoever killed this woman staged her body to look just like the crime scene I worked two years ago. And he photographed her from the same angle. It’s almost like he had a copy of my picture with him, out there in the woods.” A realization struck me, swift and forceful as a fist. “Dear God. This is the same guy.”

“But… you just said the guy’s in prison.”

“No,” I said, my heart a cold stone in my chest. “Not that guy. Not the guy in prison. The other guy. It’s the same guy.”

“What same guy?”

“The same guy who killed and dismembered a woman up in Campbell County about a month ago. With a tool that left cut marks he knew I’d recognize.”

I paged Tyler, adding the prefix 999 to my phone number — code for “We’ve got a case; get your butt over here ASAP!” I figured it would take him at least ten minutes to lock the research cage and get back across the river to the stadium. Plenty of time for me to make a phone call. As I dialed the number, I prayed I wouldn’t be routed to a voice-mail box or a secretary. What was the chance that a senior-level FBI profiler was still at his desk at four on a Friday afternoon?

“Behavioral Sciences, Brubaker.” Even over the phone, the FBI agent’s confidence and air of authority were unmistakable.

“Thank God you’re there,” I said. “This is Bill Brockton, at UT — the University of Tennessee.”

“Hello, Doc. What’s up? You sound stressed.” Apparently his psychological insight wasn’t limited to psychotic killers.

“Things have just gotten really strange here,” I said. “Remember the meeting in Nashville, when I said that dismemberment case up near Kentucky looked like one of my Kansas cases?”

“I remember. The cut marks. Curved cut marks. What about it?”

“There’s just been another killing here. Another woman. And it mirrors another one of my cases.”

There was a brief silence before he spoke. “With all due respect, Doc, there are only so many ways to kill a person. Law of averages — sometimes killings resemble other killings. Coincidence is not the same as causality.”

“Damn it,” I snapped, “this is not resemblance, and it’s not coincidence. This death scene is an exact replica. I got a photo of this latest victim in the mail a week ago — a week before her body was found. I thought it was one of my photos, from two years ago. Even the damn camera angle was the same.” The line went silent. Did he just hang up on me? “Are you still there?” I was reaching for the switchhook and the redial button when he spoke.

“Yeah, I’m here. I’m thinking.” More silence. “So let’s say you’re right. Who would do this, and why?” Now I was the one struck silent. “Doc? Are you still there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just confused. Aren’t you the one who figures out the who and the why?”

“I try. But if you’re right — if these killings have some connection to you — then you’re the key. What’s the message he’s sending you?”

The call wasn’t going the way I’d hoped it would. “Well,” I floundered. “Could he be trying to impress me?”

Even from five hundred miles away, the derision in his voice was clear. “Impress you? You’ve been watching too many Hollywood movies, Doc. He’s messing with you, more like. Or threatening you.”

“Threatening me? Why would he be threatening me?” Up to now, I’d felt puzzled and disturbed. Suddenly I felt something much worse.

“I don’t blame you for sounding nervous,” he said. “If any of the creeps I’ve profiled ever hatched a vendetta against me, and were out in the world instead of locked up? Trust me, I’d be nervous as hell. Luckily, I’ve got no prior relationship to any of ’em. No reason for them to come after me.”

Somewhere in a far, dark corner of my mind, I began to hear a low humming sound. “Wait. Wait. Are you saying that this could be someone I know?”

“Possibly. I’m just thinking out loud here, Doc. Maybe somebody you had a connection with; somebody who felt like you betrayed him somehow, did him a grievous wrong.”

“But if that’s the case, why’s he killing these women? If he’s got a grudge, why doesn’t he just come shoot me? Why these murders that echo cases of mine?”

“Dunno. He might be trying to make some sort of grand philosophical statement. Something about the hydra-headed nature of evil.”

“The which-headed?”

“Hydra-headed. Hydra, the mythological monster with all the heads — nine? twelve? A bunch. Hercules was sent to kill the Hydra. Which was supposedly impossible, because any time one of the heads got cut off, a new one grew back.”

“Got it,” I said. “I do remember that myth, now that you mention it. So you’re saying this guy might be trying to make the point that it doesn’t matter if I solve one murder? That another one, just like it, will take its place? But what does that have to do with me?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” he said. “More personal. He’s not broadcasting the message. He’s narrowcasting it.”

“Narrowcasting?”

“Whatever he’s saying, he’s saying it to you, about you. It’s between him and you. We don’t know why.” He paused. “Not yet. But I’m afraid we will.”

His words chilled me. “So I need to conjure up the name of everybody I ever cut off in traffic? Every student I ever flunked?”

“No, it would go deeper than that. Somebody you had some sort of strong connection with. Somebody who feels like you betrayed him somehow. Ruined his life.”

I felt baffled. Angry, too. So this unfolding nightmare — this set of gruesome murders — was somehow my fault? I felt myself flush. “I’m not exactly a treacherous kind of guy,” I said testily. “I’ve never cheated on my wife. I’ve never lied on a job application. I’ve never stabbed anyone in the back, literally or figuratively. Hell, I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket.”

“Easy, Doc. Easy. Let me be clearer. I’m not saying you did betray this guy — this hypothetical guy. I’m just playing What if: What if you had some connection to somebody who ended up coming unhinged? What if he decided, rightly or wrongly — completely, one-hundred-percent wrongly — that you’d let him down, betrayed him, wrecked his life? That sort of scenario, that kind of guy, might fit the facts. Anybody like that come to mind?”

“No.”

“Well, sleep on it.”

“How am I supposed to sleep, with this hanging over my head?”

“You might want to try to engage him,” he mused. “Draw him out. Engage him. Goad him.”

“How would I do that? Put up a billboard by I-40? ‘Hey, serial-killer guy, you stink’?”

“Something like that. Guys like this tend to be very narcissistic. He’s almost certainly reading the newspaper and watching TV, looking for coverage of the killings. He gets off on it — it gives him a sense of power. If the police, or especially you, disparage him to the media — talk about his carelessness, his stupidity — he’ll probably be very agitated. He might respond, maybe get in touch with the paper or a TV station. If he does, that gives us another thread to follow.”

I heard a rap on the doorframe. Tyler stuck his head in, gave me a Let’s roll look. “I gotta go pick up a dead woman,” I told Brubaker. “Another thread to follow. I’m hoping the thread doesn’t end up leading to my door.”

Late that night — after Tyler and I had gathered up the woman’s body from the base of the sweet gum sapling at Cahaba Lane; after I’d talked to a newspaper reporter and a WBIR reporter; after we’d taken the corpse to the Annex; after we’d plucked and pickled the five biggest maggots; after we’d put the remains in to simmer, so we could render them to bare bone; after I’d showered at the stadium and dragged my weary self home and wolfed down a leftover turkey sandwich and crawled into bed beside Kathleen, who’d given up on me for the evening — I finally fell into a fitful sleep.

In my dream, I found myself once more in my backyard, approaching the opening where the gigantic snake lurked. In one hand I held a half-sized garden hoe, a pitifully undersized weapon with which to do battle. Leaning down, I peered into the hole, switching on the flashlight I held in my other hand. The beam of light disappeared into unfathomable darkness.

Straightening, I turned to go, but a movement at the edge of the yard caught my eye. A track of flattened grass led from where I stood to the edge of the woods — the sort of track an immense serpent would create as it slithered across the lawn. Just inside the tree line, where the grass ended and the track disappeared, I saw the body of a woman — a headless and footless woman — her legs twitching and bucking on either side of a tree trunk. In the shadows beyond, I saw more women lying in the woods. All of them splayed against tree trunks; all of them dead; none of them lying peacefully.

I bolted awake, drenched in sweat, my heart racing. The digital clock on the nightstand read 3:47. Slipping out from beneath the covers, I tiptoed from the bedroom and through the living room, my footsteps keeping time with the hollow ticking of the regulator clock on the mantel. The kitchen was lit by the blue-green numerals of the microwave and — once I lifted the telephone from its cradle on the wall — by the faint glow of the keypad. “Nine-one-one,” the dispatcher answered. “What’s your emergency?”

“It’s not an emergency,” I said. “But it’s important. This is Dr. Bill Brockton, at UT. I need to leave a message for a KPD homicide detective. Detective Kittredge.”

“Sir, this is 911 emergency dispatch. We don’t take messages.”

“It’s about the Cahaba Lane murder,” I went on. “Tell Detective Kittredge he needs to search that whole hillside.”

“Sir—”

“Tell Detective Kittredge there are more bodies — more dead women — out there in the woods.”

CHAPTER 27

Satterfield smoothed the newspaper on the kitchen table, taking care not to smudge the ink. The story was briefer than he’d have liked, but it was prominently displayed — at the top of the front page — and it was accompanied by a large photo. He reread the text:

My, my, Satterfield thought. Calling in the cavalry. He took it as a compliment. He stopped reading long enough to look at the photo. It showed four uniformed policemen carrying a stretcher out of the Cahaba Lane woods, threading between the I beams that supported the COMFORT INN billboard. On the stretcher was a misshapen lump, which the photo caption identified as “a body bag containing the mutilated corpse of a murdered Knoxville prostitute.” He was disappointed that the body was covered, though of course he’d seen the woman — he’d had sex with the woman — before she died. Afterward, too.

Satterfield resumed reading the story.

Satterfield stared at the page, wishing the heat of his focused fury could cause the paper to burst into flames. He stared again at the photo. In the background, trailing the policemen with the stretcher, was a now-familiar, very loathsome face: Brockton’s.

An X-Acto knife rested on the kitchen table, to one side of the newspaper, and Satterfield reached for it. Gripping its precisely knurled aluminum handle with the tips of his left thumb and first two fingers, he jabbed the needle-sharp tip of the blade into the newspaper photograph twice — first into Brockton’s left eye, then into the right eye. Then, and only then, did he slit the article from the page and slide it into a clear plastic sleeve, the kind with the reinforced strip along one edge and three holes punched in it, so it could be clipped into a three-ring binder. Clipped into Satterfield’s binder.

He walked into the den, to the big shelving unit that held the television, VCR, and stereo. Just above the wire-mesh terrarium where the snake lay — the thick body draped heavily over a piece of driftwood and a couple of the sandstone slabs — was a bookshelf. As Satterfield reached across the top of the enclosure, the ribbon of tongue slid from the snake’s mouth and flicked, licking molecules of Satterfield from the air — exhalations from his lungs; skin cells sloughing from his scalp and his arms, perhaps even from the scab in his palm; perhaps the snake was tasting the tattoo of its own head and tongue. Satterfield rubbed his palms together, to send a shower of cells wafting down upon the snake, then reached for two volumes from the bookshelf.

Back at the table, he opened the first volume—The University of Tennessee Faculty and Staff Directory—and turned to the dog-eared page where Brockton’s name was highlighted in yellow. Uncapping a pink marker, Satterfield now highlighted another name, the name directly above Brockton’s: Brockton, Kathleen; Nutrition Science. Next, he opened the second volume — the Knoxville telephone directory — and located the family’s phone number and address.

From his scrapbook, Satterfield removed a Knoxville street map, which was tucked into a pocket at the back, and unfolded and smoothed it on the tabletop. Then, scrolling down the street index, he located the Brocktons’ street coordinates and marked their address with a pair of small, neat Xs in red ink. Finally, he sliced the pink and yellow names from the faculty directory and taped them to the map beside the Xs.

Before folding the map and putting it back in its pocket, Satterfield looked at a spot ten miles northeast of the Brocktons’ street: a small, roadless parcel at the end of Cahaba Lane. The parcel was bounded on the north by Interstate 40 and on the south by John Sevier Highway. Within the blank parcel, three small red Xs had been added in Satterfield’s precise calligraphy.

CHAPTER 28

Kittredge watched in silence. Skeptical, discouraged silence. He and Janelle — the prostitute lucky enough to be alive — were huddled in an interview room with a crime-lab tech, who was using an Identi-Kit to piece together a face from Janelle’s description of her attacker.

Janelle peered at the latest assemblage of features, the tech’s third try, and shook her head. “Nothing personal,” she said. “I know you’re trying to help, and I appreciate it. But none of these looks like a real person.” The tech frowned. “They all look like cartoons,” she added. “Of retards.”

Kittredge coughed to cover a laugh, and Janelle and the tech looked up. Kittredge feigned another cough while slipping Janelle a conspiratorial wink, then he shrugged at the tech. It wasn’t the tech Kittredge blamed; it was the Identi-Kit. In theory, it seemed like a good idea: Offer a smorgasbord of predrawn facial features to choose from, so a victim’s verbal description of a suspect — wide eyes or squinty eyes? blue eyes or brown? broad nose or thin, a beak or a ski jump? thin lips or full? — could be translated into an actual face assembled out of transparent overlays, each overlay printed with one specific feature.

That was the persuasive theory behind the Identi-Kit. In flawed practice, though, Janelle’s dubious dismissal was dead-on. Few police departments had the money to hire professional artists — KPD certainly didn’t — and the Identi-Kit didn’t require much in the way of training or artistic talent. Unfortunately, it didn’t deliver much, either, in Kittredge’s experience. The Identi-Kit was made by Smith & Wesson, he’d been surprised to learn a while back. Should’ve stuck to handguns, he’d thought. Still, even though it was a long shot, the Identi-Kit seemed a shot worth taking, given that the stakes had just gone sky-high. Janelle had seen the face of a sick, sadistic killer and had lived to tell about it; that made her description their best hope of finding him before he killed again. But maybe he already has. And what if the anthropologist, Dr. Brockton, was right — what if there were already more bodies out there in the woods around Cahaba Lane? We’ll know soon enough, he thought grimly, checking his watch. He’d be rendezvousing at Cahaba Lane in an hour with a team of cadets from the Police Academy, leading them in a line search. Meanwhile, he desperately needed a suspect sketch.

“Hang in there — don’t give up on it yet,” Kittredge said. He wasn’t sure who needed the encouragement more, Janelle, the tech, or himself.

“Who did that other one?” Janelle asked him.

“That other what?”

“That other drawing. That good one.” Kittredge and the tech looked at each other, puzzled. “A week or two ago,” she said. “Or maybe a month. I saw it on TV. It was a girl, a drawing of a dead girl. They found her in the woods, too — just bones — and one of y’all’s artists drew what she looked like. It was good. It looked like a real person.”

“Oh, gotcha,” Kittredge said to Janelle, then — to the tech—“A cold case up in Morgan County. Skeletal remains from an old strip mine outside Wartburg. The UT bone expert, Dr. Brockton — he’s working on that one, too.” To Janelle: “I think that girl’s sketch came from the bone expert.”

“Well, he’s an art expert, too, then,” she said. “Could we get him in here to work with me?”

“He didn’t actually draw it himself,” the detective clarified. “I think he found an artist to do it. Based on what the skull looked like.”

“Well,” she persisted, “who was that artist he got? Can we get him for me, too?”

Kittredge felt exasperation at her pain-in-the-assedness, admiration for her doggedness.

Kittredge excused himself for a moment, to go call Brockton: to ask for the name of an artist who could do a good drawing. One that didn’t look like a cartoon of a retard.

CHAPTER 29

Janelle felt the air whoosh out of her hopes when the girl walked into the room. She was just a kid, sixteen or seventeen. “You’re the one? You did the picture of that dead girl?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the girl.

Janelle snorted. “Nobody’s ever called me ‘ma’am’ before,” she said, then added, “not unless they were mocking me.” She eyed the girl warily. “Are you mocking me?”

“No, ma’am,” said the girl. “No. No. Why would I mock you?”

“Why wouldn’t you, darlin’,” she said, her voice soft and sad. “Why the hell wouldn’t you.”

The girl laid a hand on Janelle’s arm. “I’m sorry about what happened to you,” she said. “Really, really sorry.”

Janelle moved her arm, reached for a tissue. “Story of my life,” she said. “This damned thing’s just one more chapter.” She blew her nose, then turned away and folded into herself, collecting herself. When she turned back, she saw that the girl had picked up her pencil and pad and started drawing. Janelle frowned. “I haven’t told you what he looks like yet.”

The girl turned the pad to show her the drawing. It was a sketch of Janelle herself, nothing but a few quick lines, but somehow it captured everything that mattered; somehow it revealed Janelle to herself: a worn and wary beauty, her cheek stitched together, her soul pulling apart. “Damn,” Janelle breathed. “You are an artist, girl. What’d they say your name was, hon? Jenny?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m Janelle, and I’m not quite as old and broken-down as I look. So stop calling me ‘ma’am’, or I might have to turn you across my knee. Got it?”

Jenny grinned. “Yes’m,” she said slyly, the m audible enough to be heard but faint enough to deny. Janelle felt the skin of her face moving, tugging at the stitches in her cheek. After a moment, she recognized the movement as a smile.

“Okay, take a look, see if this is anywhere close.” Jenny laid the tablet on the table and slid it across to Janelle.

Janelle hesitated, looking in the girl’s eyes. The girl smiled shyly, shrugged slightly, in a no-promises sort of way. For some reason, Janelle found the gesture reassuring — its combination of helpfulness and humility. She picked up the sketch and looked down, then drew a quick gasp as a wave of panic swept over her, tumbling her in its grip. “Son of a bitch,” she breathed.

CHAPTER 30

I’d barely begun raking — my lawn’s first dusting of red-orange maple leaves — when Kathleen opened the front door and called to me. “Bill, there’s a Detective Kittredge on the phone for you. He says it’s important.” I laid down the rake and hurried inside.

“You were right, Doc,” he said without any preamble. “We just found two more bodies in the woods behind Cahaba Lane. Deeper in. Several hundred yards away from the woman with no feet.” I wasn’t surprised to hear there were more victims, but I was surprised to hear that one of them was a man.

I took no satisfaction in being right; in fact, I hated it. I would much rather have heard that the search was a wild-goose chase, my nightmare not a premonition but simply the product of an overheated imagination. Two more dead, I thought. Please, God, let these be the last. I prayed it, but I didn’t expect it.

Kittredge gave me directions to the scene; this time, we’d go in from the back side, by means of a different road. “Brace yourself, Doc,” the detective added. “It’s bad. The worst I’ve seen. The woman—”

“Don’t tell me,” I interrupted. “I want to see it with fresh eyes. No preconceptions.”

“You got it. See you soon.”

Tyler met me at the stadium; we tucked an extra body bag in the back of the truck and headed east along the river, along Neyland Drive and Riverside Drive. I could have done that stretch of road in my sleep; Riverside dead-ended at the pig farm where I’d warehoused bodies until recently. A mile before the farm, we turned left onto Holston Hills Road, which paralleled the Holston River. We passed a mile of woods and farm fields, then crossed the river at Boyd’s Bridge, zigzagging eastward on a series of progressively smaller roads. Normally I liked back roads; this time, though, the roads seemed to be leading us somewhere sinister. Leading us into the heart of darkness.

Neither of us had spoken since leaving the stadium. “You’re quiet,” I said finally. “You pissed off because we’re working on Saturday?”

There was a pause before he answered. “I’m tired,” he said. “I was up late. Writing up my research notes.”

“Uh-huh. Did your research notes give you that hickey?” Tyler had mentioned that Roxanne was in town for the weekend, and I suspected they’d made the most of their night.

“No comment.” He was pissed off. Not surprising, I thought. He hasn’t seen her in weeks, and I’m dragging him off to a death scene.

We lapsed back into silence, and in the silence, I heard Kittredge’s words echoing: “The worst I’ve seen.” Would it turn out to be worse than the things I’d seen? If so, what adjective could describe it? When the normal progression — bad, worse, worst — couldn’t do justice to the horror, what could? Worst, more worst, most worst?

Even with Kittredge’s directions, I found the route mazy. This time, because of the location of the bodies, we’d be approaching the woods from the east. I’d highlighted the route in my Tennessee Atlas & Gazetteer. Given the propensity for bodies in East Tennessee to wind up off the beaten track, I’d found the Gazetteer indispensable, since it showed not just paved roads and dirt roads, but even major trails and topographic contour lines. During the three years since my arrival at UT, I had put two dozen red Xs in my Gazetteer, each X neatly marking a death scene I’d worked.

I followed the route Kittredge had dictated — Moshina Road, Pine Grove Road, and finally Ratliff Lane. By the time we turned on to Ratliff, Tyler was slumped against his door, his head askew, his mouth open, a string of drool swaying from his chin. I smiled, thinking, Roxanne drove all the way from Memphis for this?

Ratliff Lane started out as asphalt, soon turned to gravel, and finally became a pair of red-clay ruts. It dead-ended at a clearing that was occupied by a rusting mobile home and a rusty Ford pickup, plus two Knox County sheriff’s cruisers, a KPD mobile crime lab, an unmarked Crown Victoria, and a black Chevy Suburban. The Crown Vic, I guessed, was issued to Detective Kittredge. The crime-lab van, I hoped, was brought by Art Bohanan. Art was a senior KPD forensic tech; he was also one of the nation’s leading experts on fingerprints, I’d learned in the course of several prior cases with him. The Suburban, I knew for sure, belonged to Knox County’s medical examiner, Dr. Garland Hamilton. Hamilton’s vehicle was unmistakable, at least from the rear: Prominently positioned alongside the government-issue tag was an ironically apt bumper sticker — a skull wearing a crown of thorns, captioned GRATEFUL DEAD.

A sheriff’s deputy directed me past the other vehicles to the lower side of the clearing, where I shoehorned the truck into a space that would have been better suited to a Honda Civic. Branches snapped and screeched along the passenger side as I bulled my way into the underbrush, waking Tyler with a start. He stared at the fractured twigs clawing across his window, then rubbed his eyes and shook his head, causing the string of drool to twitch and sway beneath his chin. “Wow,” he said. “I guess I nodded off for a minute there.”

“I guess so,” I replied. “Unless you’ve started drooling when you’re awake.”

He rubbed his mouth and chin, grimacing when he got to the drool. “What the hell?” he squawked. “This isn’t supposed to start happening till I’m, like, your age.”

“I guess you’re precocious,” I said. “You know what they say about drooling, right?”

“Can’t say as I do.”

“Once the drooling starts, impotence and incontinence aren’t far behind.”

“Hey. Don’t even joke about that stuff,” he muttered, making the sign of the cross.

“Joking? Who said I was joking?” I slid from the truck and closed the door before he had a chance to retort.

I opened the back of the truck and tucked the two body bags into the plastic bin that contained our field kit — camera, gloves, trowels, tweezers, paintbrushes, evidence bags, clipboard. Tyler emerged from the underbrush, bits of twigs and leaves in his hair, and I slid the bin across the tailgate to him. Leaning back in, I retrieved a rake and a shovel, which I angled over my shoulder like some outsized, double-barreled farming implement. Swords to plowshares, I thought, shotguns to shovels.

The deputy met us midway across the clearing. “They’re up yonder,” he said, nodding in the general direction of the unmarked Crown Vic that was last in the line of vehicles. “Couple hunnerd yards in. Just follow the blazes of tape.” A pine tree at the clearing’s edge had a strip of crime-scene tape tied around its trunk at shoulder height. Peering farther into the woods, I could see another bright band twenty yards beyond, and a third farther still.

I headed up the gentle incline, my usual surge of adrenaline accompanied by an unexpected topspin of something else — apprehension? dread? Sometimes, walking into a crime scene with a shovel over my shoulder, I would hear myself singing softly: “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go.”

This time, as I followed the blazes deeper into the woods, I did not hear singing. This time, I heard crackling under my feet, thudding in my chest, and alarm bells in my head.

CHAPTER 31

The police scanner was still going crazy as Satterfield turned off Kingston Pike and on to Cherokee Boulevard, looping and swooping along the serpentine road toward the river. Toward the Brockton house.

From the flurry of transmissions on the police scanner, he knew they’d found the two other bodies in the woods. He would love to have seen the face of whoever had found the corpses, especially the woman’s; for that matter, he’d love to see the faces of everyone working the scene. Fools and weaklings, he thought. Most of all, he’d love to see Brockton’s face, now and also later, when the surprise Satterfield had left for him was discovered.

He slowed as he neared the house. The garage door was up, and through the opening, he saw that the Camry — the woman’s car — was still inside. Satterfield eased to the curb and parked in front of the house. He sat for a moment, looking for signs of movement at the windows, then got out, went to the rear of the van, and took two orange highway cones from the back. He placed one ten feet behind the van, the other ten feet in front, the way he’d seen the telephone linemen do. Stupid, he thought. If you can’t see the damn truck without the cones, you’re not gonna see the damn truck with the cones.

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not long. Not quite three years.”

“Added any more lines or jacks since then?”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I got lucky downstairs,” he said. “Loose connection in that bedroom jack. Shortin’ out somethin’ awful.”

She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “That’s it? We’re all set?” She lifted the receiver from the wall phone and held it to her ear, then frowned. “It’s still dead.”

“I just need to run out to your service box and reset the line. Wait sixty seconds and try it again. If it’s not working, holler at me. If it’s working — and it will be — I’m outta here.” He winked. “For now.”

CHAPTER 32

The deeper into the woods we went, the more crime-scene tape I saw. The outer perimeter of the scene took the form of an irregular polygon, its perimeter composed of dozens of straight segments of crime-scene tape, stretched from tree to tree to tree, enclosing an area some fifty feet across by a hundred feet long.

Just inside the nearest segments stood a ladderlike structure — a hunter’s tree stand, I realized — its legs wrapped in spirals of tape, like yellow and black candy canes of crime. Leaning against the lower rungs of the stand was a hunting rifle with a powerful scope. A handful of evidence flags and evidence bags clustered around the base of the tree, but the real action — if the thicket of people was any indication — was at the far end of the scene.

Tyler and I skirted the perimeter, so we’d walk through as little of the enclosed area as possible. As we neared the far end, I saw two smaller ovals taped off within the overall scene — inner perimeters, which I guessed corresponded to the positions of the two victims.

A uniformed deputy whom I vaguely recalled from a prior case stood sentry at the outer edge of the scene. Jenkins, I nearly called him, but I had a flash of doubt, so I snuck a glance at his brass name bar. “Officer… Dinkins. Good to see you again. This is my graduate assistant, Tyler Wainwright.”

“Howdy, Doc. Good to see you. Nice to meet you, Tyler.” Dinkins recorded our names and arrival time on a log of people at the scene, then lifted the tape so we could enter without having to stoop much.

By the time I’d straightened, Kittredge was heading our way to lead us in.

The closer of the two inner scenes was twenty feet away, but even a distant glimpse of the body — a tall, barrel-chested corpse clad from head to foot in camouflage — convinced me that this was the male victim. As we got closer, I saw that he lay faceup on the ground, arms and legs sprawled outward, his body and even his face lightly dusted with red, gold, and brown leaves. His face was largely gone, and his abdomen had collapsed — a sure sign that he’d already passed through the “bloat” phase of decay, when bacteria and enzymes in the gut release gases that inflate the abdomen almost like a balloon, or like the belly of a woman who’s eight months pregnant. Once the bloating is over — once the digestive system has digested itself, after a fashion — the belly deflates and shrivels, as this man’s had. I couldn’t be sure, but my top-of-the-head guess, from the shrunken look of the abdomen, the bony fingers, and the extensive decay of the face, was that the man had been dead for at least a few days, maybe a week or more.

It didn’t take a forensic genius to make an educated guess about the manner of death. Protruding from the man’s chest, slightly left of center, was a foot-long shaft of camouflaged aluminum, topped by three feathered vanes—“fletchings,” if I remembered the archery term correctly from my Cub Scout days — and a notched plastic tip where the arrow gripped the string of a hunting bow.

“Come on over here, Doc,” called a voice that I recognized as the medical examiner’s. Dr. Hamilton and half a dozen other people were clustered around the second of the inner perimeters. As Tyler and I approached, their forms blocked our view of what lay inside the tape. Then, just as we reached the group, they parted — a human curtain — and I heard myself gasp.

“Jesus God Al-mighty,” I heard Tyler say, and then I heard him vomit.

The woman’s body was nude, her arms raised above her head, crossed at the wrists and pinned in place by three arrows: one through each palm and another piercing both the wrists, plus more in her legs. The position of the body and the arrows made me think of Christ on the cross, as well as one of the Catholic martyrs — Saint Sebastian? Was he the one who’d been killed by arrows? Unlike the man lying nearby on the forest floor, the woman’s body showed little decay, most of it confined to her feet, which had been reduced largely to bone by the teeming mass of maggots clustered there. I made a mental note to remind Tyler to collect the largest of the maggots from each body.

The blood from the woman’s wounds — her stigmata, I couldn’t help thinking — was still plainly visible: black streaks coursing down her wrists and forearms, her upper and lower legs, her sides. But why were there no arrows in her chest or belly? Was the killer that bad a shot? Then it hit me like a fist: He was that good a shot. He’d wanted her to die slowly, so he’d aimed for the outer edges of his human target, not the center. There was one horrifying exception: a single arrow protruding from between her thighs. Judging by the angle, I felt sure that arrow had not been fired from the bow, but placed — pushed — by hand, in an ultimate act of sadism and misogyny. The combination of nakedness, helplessness, and savage injury combined to make the woman seem more thoroughly violated and debased than any murder victim I’d ever seen.

No one had spoken as I’d studied the scene from ten feet away, at the edge of the tape. I drew a deep breath and blew it out slowly, then turned from the grisly scene and scanned the faces around me. “What else do y’all need to do before Tyler and I go in?”

“I’ve pronounced her, so I’m done for now,” said the M.E., Dr. Hamilton. “I’ll do an autopsy, although she’s a little far gone for me. Maybe I can pin down the sequence of wounds, not that it matters a lot. She was probably already dead by the time he pushed that last arrow into her.”

“I hope so, Garland,” I replied. “God, I hope so.” I forced myself to look more closely. The insides of her thighs were smeared with blood, but not a copious amount. I checked the arrow and the ground beneath, just to be sure. Blood had trickled down the shaft and dripped to the ground, but it was far from the hemorrhage that would have occurred if her heart had still been pumping during that final assault. I breathed a sigh of relief and a silent prayer of thanks.

I looked away, caught the eye of Art Bohanan, the ranking crime-scene tech. “Art, how about you? You still working it?”

“I’ve taken pictures and gone over it once,” he said. “I’ll take another look once the body’s out. Y’all go ahead.” I noticed several evidence flags and bags on the ground at the base of the tree, as well as a few numbered index cards tacked high on the trunk, behind the woman’s hands. Peering closer, I saw strands of rope or twine snagged in the bark, and I realized the killer must have tied her hands in place before firing the arrows, then removed the ties once she was pinned to the tree.

I looked at Tyler, who was standing beside me again now, ashen but upright. “You okay?” He managed a weak nod. “Okay, let’s go. Start with pictures.”

Art had already taken KPD’s crime-scene photos, but his focus — photographically as well as forensically — always differed slightly from mine, so I wanted my own.

Leaning close to the face, I noticed several contusions, which I assumed indicated that she’d been struck, possibly while fighting back. Her head slumped forward, pressing her chin against the medial ends of the clavicles, but something about the angle of the jaw and shape of the mouth struck me as odd. I’d donned a pair of gloves before stepping inside the tape; now, cradling her face in both hands, I tilted her head upright, allowing her slackened jaw to open. Stuffed inside her mouth was a wadded white rag. Poor thing, I thought, couldn’t even scream. Without turning my head, I said, “Art, looks like she’s got a rag in her mouth. You want it now, or later?”

“Sure, I’ll take it now.”

With my left hand, I pulled the mandible gently to open the mouth wider; with my right, I reached deep inside. Clamping my fingers together to compress the material, I wiggled and tugged gently to remove the improvised gag. “Hmm,” I grunted, surprised at what I’d fished out. “It’s not a rag after all. It’s a big wad of paper.”

“Well, maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Art. “Maybe it’s a signed confession, with the perp’s name and address on it.”

“You want me to unwad it?”

“Better if I do it back at the lab. Probably help if I moisten it a little more.”

Nodding, I turned and held it toward him, then dropped it into the paper evidence bag he opened beneath my hand.

I turned my attention back to the corpse. Up close, focused now on the details, I was able to stop thinking of her as a tortured and violated woman and to begin scrutinizing her as a corpse, a case, and a challenge. Moving downward from the face, I was struck by a number of small, circular marks on her breasts. “Garland, are these what I think they are?”

“They are if you think they’re cigarette burns,” he said.

“I hate it when I’m right that way,” I said. “I’m guessing they’re antemortem, not postmortem?”

“Probably,” he said. “Point of burning somebody with a cigarette is to hurt and humiliate ’em. Doesn’t work as well if they’re dead.”

I nodded, already moving on, focusing on the legs and feet. I’d leave the examination of the mutilated genitals to Garland and his autopsy. I noticed that each thigh was pierced completely and pegged to the tree by a single arrow. An additional arrow jutted from the back of the right thigh, the base of the arrowhead barely visible through the entry wound. That meant, I assumed, that the point was lodged deep in the bone. It reminded me of an Arikara Indian skeleton I’d excavated years before: a robust male who had lived — and limped — for years with a Sioux arrowhead embedded in his femur, the bone healing and remodeling, doggedly but imperfectly, around the flint point. The position of the arrowheads could not have been more similar; the circumstances of the wounds could not have been more different: one received during a battle between warriors, the other as a defenseless woman fled from a sadistic psychopath.

The woman’s feet intrigued me. Actually, what intrigued me was the contrast between her feet and the rest of her body. The decomposition in the feet was consistent with what I’d seen in the face and hands of the dead hunter; consistent with what I’d observed in numerous corpses a week after death. The decay in the rest of her body, on the other hand, was more consistent with what I’d seen in corpses that had been dead only two or three days. It was as if one corpse’s feet had been grafted onto a fresher corpse’s legs. “Tyler, did you notice the differential decay?”

“Sure did,” he said. “Interesting.”

“Be sure you get plenty of pictures.”

“I’m on it,” he said. The click of the shutter, nearly as regular and frequent as the ticking of my mantelpiece clock, confirmed that he was.

“Got a theory?” As I posed the question, I was wondering if I had a theory.

“Gimme a minute to think on it,” he said.

In my mind’s eye, I scanned back through various cases — various corpses — characterized by differential decay, or a dramatic difference in the degree of decomposition exhibited by certain regions of the body. In every case I could think of, the differential decay could be explained by trauma. In one case — a Cocke County man who’d been stabbed to death a week before we found him — the soft tissues of the left hand remained largely intact; the right hand, by contrast, was down to bare bone. When I cleaned and examined the bones of the right hand, I found cut marks in the metacarpal bones and phalanges. In attempting to ward off the attack, the victim had sustained defense wounds in the right hand. Those bloody wounds had drawn droves of blowflies, which had laid countless eggs in the wounds, and the larvae — maggots — that hatched from those eggs had swiftly consumed the soft tissue of the right hand. A similar explanation, I expected, would account for the differential decay I’d seen the day before, in the first of the Cahaba Lane bodies, the one with no feet: Virtually all the soft tissue was gone from the woman’s neck — probably because she’d been strangled, causing bruises and bloody scrapes that attracted blowflies, the way Sung T’zu’s thirteenth-century sickle had; the way my bloody chain saw had.

But the pattern here was different. The feet — which weren’t pierced by arrows, and presumably weren’t bleeding profusely — were far more decayed than regions that had been pierced, that had bled: regions that should, therefore, have been swarming with hungry maggots.

“By the way, Tyler, you did take samples of the maggots from the woman yesterday, didn’t you?”

“Sure,” he said. “The ten biggest ones, just like you said.”

“Good. Be sure you do the same today — from both bodies. If we compare the sizes, we should be able to tell which murder happened first. Let’s compare ’em to the ones out at the research cage, too — might help us pin down the time since death a little closer.”

Kittredge interrupted. “So you use the bugs to tell time? Like a stopwatch?”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Cool.”

Tyler resumed our conversation. “Okay, I have a theory on the differential decay.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Is it possible,” he said, “that she’s in a cooler microclimate over here than the dude over there? Cool breezes eddying up this little draw?”

I turned and stared at him. “A microclimate?” He shrugged sheepishly. “Tyler, that might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

He flushed; at least the color was returning to his cheeks. “It was a reach, I grant you. You got a better theory, Herr Professor?”

“Well…,” I said slowly, stalling for time, searching my memory banks. I recalled the case of a man who’d hanged himself in the woods, and whose body was in remarkably good condition a month after death. Just then my peripheral vision flickered. Something very small and very close had fallen downward through my field of vision from somewhere above. I checked the area around my feet without spotting anything unusual, then I heard myself say, “Hmm. Hmm.” Centered on the glossy black toe of my left boot I saw a single grain of rice. Only it wasn’t a grain of rice; it was a baby maggot — the small, freshly hatched stage called the “first instar.” As I looked at it, pondering its unexpected appearance on the toe of my boot, my eye caught another downward flicker of motion — rather like a shooting star plunging to earth. But it wasn’t a star; it was another first-instar maggot, whose trajectory brought it squarely onto my boot, cheek by jowl with the first one. My eyes instinctively swept upward. If it was raining maggots, there must be a cloud up there somewhere.

It didn’t take long to locate it. My left toe was positioned directly beneath the arrow wound in the right thigh. Peering closely at the wound, I saw a handful of maggots clinging to the bloody tissue there. Even as I watched, another of the maggots lost its grip — its toehold or mouthhold or whatever hold it had — and fell. This one landed slightly to one side, squarely on the exposed bones of the victim’s right foot. “Yes, as a matter of fact,” I said to Tyler, as insight dawned, accompanied by a slow smile spreading across my face. “I do indeed have a better theory. And once you’ve finished your master’s thesis, you can start your dissertation project and prove I’m right. Maggots — like Isaac Newton’s apple — must obey the law of gravity.”

Our job at the scene was complicated by the need to free the woman’s corpse, which was pinned to the tree by deeply embedded arrows. I tried wiggling the arrows while tugging, but to no avail. “Art,” I called, “are you hoping to get prints off these? What I mean is, do we need to handle them gently?”

“I’m always hoping to get prints,” he said. “Expecting, no; hoping, sure.”

“In that case,” I suggested, “we might want to think about cutting the arrows right behind the head. Then the shafts would slide right out of her.” I saw heads nodding in agreement. “One of y’all got bolt cutters in your cruiser?”

The youngest and slimmest of the deputies turned and began jogging down through the woods toward the vehicles. While we waited for him to return, we bagged the man’s body.

Unlike the woman, the man had bled out from a single wound. His camo shirt was soaked, and blood had poured off his chest and pooled on the ground beneath him. “Those arrows mean business,” I remarked.

“I’d rather get gun shot than arrow shot,” said Dr. Hamilton. “You ever taken a close look at a hunting arrow?”

“Depends,” I said. “Do eighteenth-century Arikara Indian arrows count?”

“No comparison,” he said. “We’re not talking a chip of flint tied to a stick. These things are killing machines — engineered to inflict massive, lethal damage on big, big animals. They can shatter bone, rip muscle, shred arteries. Most of ’em have four blades angling back from the point — razor-sharp blades, flaring to an inch or more wide.” He looked around at his audience, seemed satisfied with our attentiveness. “The entry wound from one of these arrows is twice the size of a .45-caliber bullet. Granted, a .45 slug traveling eight hundred feet a second packs more wallop than an arrow at three hundred feet a second. Still, think about the damage done by something that can bore a one-inch hole through a caribou.” He nodded at the corpse. “This guy’s heart virtually exploded. His brain might’ve had time to realize how thoroughly he was screwed. But the screwing itself?” He snapped his fingers. “A nanosecond.”

“So quick bright things come to confusion,” said Kittredge.

“Huh?” I said.

“A line from Shakespeare,” he explained. “It’s just a fancy way of saying you can be screwed in a heartbeat.”

It was only after we cut her down — only as I was zipping the body bag; only as I was moving her left hand out of the path of the zipper — that I noticed: The dead woman’s little finger was missing, amputated at the base so neatly that it left no stump; only a circle of crusty black blood and — within the outer black ring — a small circle of sheared-off bone, like a bull’s-eye in a target. It was a startling contrast with the remaining fingers. The nine nails looked freshly coated with scarlet polish, as if the woman had just come from a nail salon — a manicure to primp for her date with death.

We carried them out together, these two people whom I suspected never actually met in life, only in death. Tyler and I, along with Art Bohanan and Garland Hamilton, carried the woman’s body; Detective Kittredge and three uniformed deputies carried the man’s.

When we reached the clearing where the vehicles were parked, I saw movement at a window beside the trailer’s front door. Fingers curled around a curtain and pulled it aside, and a woman’s face stared out at me. It was the dead man’s widow — Kittredge had told me she was inside. Even through the grimy glass, the bleakness in her expression was unmistakable, and I found myself averting my gaze — out of respect, I told myself, but also, truth be told, out of discomfort. I had nothing to offer her: no comfort, no explanation, no way of setting the world right by her. Judging by the shabby trailer, the shabby truck, and the shabby patch of ground, life had been dealing low cards to her for years now; this one was simply the latest. I didn’t know why the deck seemed to be so thoroughly stacked against some people — and so completely in favor of others — but I’d seen lots of lousy hands dealt to good-hearted people by now. Seen plenty of gold-plated hands go to liars and jerks, too. What was the Bible verse my minister, Reverend Michaelson, had chosen as his text last Sunday? “God sends his rain on the just and on the unjust?” Reverend Mike’s gloss on the text was an uplifting one, a glass-half-full gloss: God’s blessings and grace don’t have to be earned; they’re there, just like the beauty of fall foliage and summer sunsets, freely available to even the most undeserving.

But what about the converse, I couldn’t help wondering: What about the misfortune and suffering — sometimes even black-hearted evil — that seemed to rain down relentlessly on people who were long overdue for some sunshine?

CHAPTER 33

Squinting against the glare from the porch light, Tyler batted a moth from his face and unlocked his front door. “Hey, babe, I’m back,” he called. “Finally. Sorry it took so long.” He switched on the living room light and closed the front door, but not before the moth darted into the apartment with him. “Roxanne? Rox? Are you here?” His voice echoed in the living room, and he felt a flash of fear — that Roxanne was gone, that she’d bolted back to Memphis to study with her classmates. Hell, maybe she was never even here, he thought. Maybe I just dreamed her. A fever dream, born of the loneliness and longing and lust that had been his trio of constant companions ever since she’d moved to Memphis for med school back in August, two months before. Two months going on forever.

“Hey,” a distracted voice answered him. “Here. In the bedroom.”

She was sprawled diagonally across the bed, lying on her stomach, propped on her elbows, her nose buried in one of the half-dozen doorstop textbooks she’d schlepped with her. She was naked. Her slender, graceful back was arched, and the pillow beneath her pelvis had slightly lifted her butt, which was round and firm from years of ballet and jazz classes, displaying it to best advantage, which was considerable. The dimples at the top of her hips—“dimples of Venus”; Tyler loved that name — seemed to be smiling just for him.

She turned her head toward the doorway, where he’d stopped to admire the view, and gave him a smoldering look over her shoulder. “I’m studying anatomy,” she said, arching one eyebrow at him. “The human reproductive system. Come and be my lab partner.” She parted her lips and ran her tongue across the upper lip. “Better yet,” she murmured, “be my lab partner and come.”

She closed the book and shoved it off the mattress. It landed with a thunk that made the nightstand lamp quiver. Tyler stepped toward her, already feeling his breath quicken and his desire stir.

And then it happened. She rolled over onto her back, and raised her arms above her head, displaying herself — offering herself — in all her nakedness and vulnerability and sweetness, and it was his utter undoing. In his mind’s eye, she became the woman in the woods, and for a horrifying moment he envisioned Roxanne’s lovely body bloodied and bristling with arrows. His heart pounded, his head swam, and his legs began to give way beneath him. Stumbling forward and clutching the footboard of the bed, he dropped to his knees and tucked his head, his breath coming in quick, spasmodic gulps.

She scrambled down the mattress and leaned over to stare down at him. “Tyler? Sweetie, baby, what’s wrong?”

He could not answer. Folded in on himself, he shivered and hyperventilated. She scrambled down to his side, wrapped him in her arms, and stroked his head. “Sshh,” she whispered. “Shhh.” She pressed the back of a hand to his cheek. “Are you sick?” Wordlessly he shook his head. “Have you… done something? Something awful? Slept with somebody else? Run over a child?” Another shake of his head. “Then come get in bed, and let me hold you.”

She helped him up, led him to the side of the bed, and eased him onto the mattress, then curled around him from behind. They lay like that for a long time. Muscle by muscle, nerve by nerve, breath by breath, he calmed, and the reality of the room — the warm pool of light from the lamp, the warm skin and soft breath of the woman pressed against him — reasserted itself.

Finally she spoke. “What’s got you so upset? Tell me.”

And so he did. He told it almost as if in a trance; almost as if he were reliving it, or showing her the slides he’d shot at the scene, all 108 of them — three full rolls of gruesome film. He told his way in, and he told his way out. But by the time he was telling his way out, he’d gotten separated from her. Somewhere during the telling in, she’d stiffened, so slightly that he’d failed to notice it at first. Heedless, he’d kept on, describing the woman pinned to the tree, naked and martyred. Meanwhile, the other naked woman — the naked woman in his bed, who had offered herself to him at her most unguarded — had gradually edged away, easing the sheet up her leg and hip and torso. And when at last he revealed the obscenity of the final arrow, Roxanne rolled away and sat on the edge of the bed, no longer touching him, and wound the sheet around herself like a shroud, tucking it tightly beneath both arms.

She drew a long, slow breath through her nostrils. She held it for several seconds before exhaling, with equal control, again through her nostrils. In the stillness of the room, the breath seemed deafening. “God damn it, Tyler. Why did you tell me that?”

He rolled to face her. “What do you mean, why did I tell you? Because you asked me to, Rox.”

“I wish I hadn’t. I take it back. Un-tell it, Tyler — I don’t want to know. I don’t want it in our bed. I don’t want it in my head.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t, either.” He held out a hand, hoping that she’d take it; hoping that from their shared distress, they could build a bridge across the chasm that had opened between them. His hand lay open, untaken; Roxanne remained rigid on the edge of the bed, as still as a stone. “Come on, Rox, don’t do this. Give me a break here.”

Without looking, she swung her left arm behind her, striking him in the chest so hard he grunted. “Damn it,” she repeated. “Why are men such shits? Especially to women? I swear to God, Tyler, it makes me sick.”

“I don’t know why,” he said. “You’re right — men do awful, awful things to women. I hate it, too. It makes me sick, too. I puked in the woods out there today. I did. Ask Brockton; he’ll tell you.” She sat, unmoving. Unmoved. He waited, and it became clear that the wait could last forever. “You know what, though, Rox?” His voice took on an edge. “I am not the bad guy. I am nothing like the bad guy. As a matter of fact, I’m the good guy — one of them, anyhow — and I’m doing my damnedest to help catch the bad guy. So cut me some slack here, could you please? Because in case you hadn’t noticed, I had a shitty day. A really, really, really shitty day.”

She softened — some — and came back to him, turning onto her side and laying her head and one hand on his chest. But she did not unshroud herself. The fruit of the knowledge of evil had left bitterness in her mouth and coldness in her body. Hours later, when Tyler twitched and began to snore, she slipped from the bed. By the watery, soundless light of dawn, she dressed and packed and let herself out.

By the time she turned onto I-40 for the four-hundred-mile drive west, the rising sun was blazing red-orange in the rearview mirror, like the flaming sword at the gates of Eden, after Adam and Eve had been cast out for knowing too much.

CHAPTER 34

Leaving the stadium, I turned right on to Neyland Drive, driving slowly beside the emerald waters of the Tennessee, my thoughts spinning like the eddies and whorls spooling downriver as the silent current poured over ledges and pits lurking deep and invisible beneath the surface.

At Kingston Pike I made the left toward Sequoyah Hills and home, but then, to my surprise, I found myself turning in to the parking lot of Second Presbyterian. Two cars were parked in front of the office: an aging Ford Escort, which I seemed to recall belonged to Mary Cowan, the church secretary; and a new Toyota Camry, recently bought by the senior minister, Rev. Mike Michaelson.

Mary — on her way out just as I was headed in — stumbled and nearly fell as I tugged the office door from her grasp. “Oh, sorry,” I said, catching her elbow to steady her. “Didn’t mean to pull you off balance.”

She laughed. “I’ve been klutzy all day today. I would’ve tripped no matter what. I’m just praying I make it home in one piece.” She started down the sidewalk, raising a hand and waving as she walked away.

I paused in the doorway and called after her, “Looks like he’s in?”

“He’s got a finance committee meeting in an hour,” she said over her shoulder. “Go on in — he’d be thrilled to talk about something besides balance sheets and revenue projections.”

Passing through the outer office, I noticed that his door was ajar. Rapping gently with one knuckle on the oak, I said, “Mike?”

“Hello? Come in.” I stepped into a pool of golden light, created by two floor lamps, a mica-shaded desk lamp, and walls of honey-colored sandstone. I couldn’t help smiling at the contrast between the pastor’s warm, elegant study and my own shabby, grimy corner of the Ivory Tower. If I felt a brief twinge of envy, it was good-natured and short-lived envy. Reverend Michaelson looked up from a daunting spreadsheet. “Bill, what a nice surprise. Have a seat. How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said, sinking into a large leather armchair. “Busy. A lot going on.”

He nodded, looking thoughtful. Was that an instinctive response, I wondered, or was it part of his training — Empathy 101? Pastoral Counseling 202? I’d always been impressed by how well he kept current on the activities of his parishioners, so I wasn’t surprised when he said, “Seems like you’ve been in the news a lot lately. I can’t pick up the Sentinel or turn on Channel 10 without coming across you.”

“Yeah. Unfortunately.”

He leaned his head slightly to one side. “Tell me, is it difficult, doing what you do?”

I shrugged. “I had good teachers. And great opportunities to learn — two summers at the Smithsonian, a bunch of summers digging up Indian bones in South Dakota. Sometimes I get stumped, but often I stumble onto the right answer.”

He smiled. “Clearly. But I didn’t mean intellectually difficult. I meant emotionally difficult; spiritually difficult. What kind of toll does it take, doing what you do? Seeing what you see?”

“Huh.” I half laughed, half grunted. “They teach you guys mind reading in seminary?”

“No, it’s probably better they don’t. I’d be afraid of what I’d find out.” He leaned back in his chair, a high-backed swivel rocker, and tented his fingers, the same way my boss, the dean, tended to. “It takes courage to confront the dark side of life on a daily basis. Not many people are up to it. I’m not sure I would be.”

“Thing is,” I said, “some days it’s more daily than others. Lately… ” My words trailed off, and I waited for him to jump in with a question or some shepherdly counsel or comfort. Instead, he just sat there, his eyes attentive above the finger tent. I backed up and took another run at it. “Lately, though, it feels extra daily. And darker. Much darker.” He nodded, still waiting. “I worked a double homicide yesterday in East Knox County. Two bodies in the woods. The man, he died almost instantly; no suffering to speak of, except on the part of the wife he left behind. But the woman? She died slowly. In agony. The guy who killed her did unspeakable things to her.” I paused, unsure where to go next. Surprisingly, I went to Tyler. “My graduate assistant worked the scene with me. Smart, good-hearted kid. Name’s Tyler. Tyler threw up when he saw what had been done to the woman. I’m not sure Tyler’s ‘up to it,’ as you put it.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of, if he’s not.”

“I know he doesn’t owe it to me to follow in my footsteps, though I’ll be disappointed if he doesn’t. But that’s not what’s eating at me.”

“What is eating at you?”

“Tyler said something today that I can’t get out of my head.”

“What’d he say?”

“Actually, it was his girlfriend who said it. Or maybe his ex-girlfriend. Roxanne. After he told her about the woman in the woods, Roxanne left in the middle of the night, while he was sleeping. No note; no phone call. The last thing she said — pardon my French — was ‘Why are men such shits to women?’ Tyler didn’t have an answer. I don’t have an answer.” I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. “Do you have an answer?”

Kathleen was loading the dishwasher when I got in. “We waited for a while, then finally gave up,” she said, not looking up from the dishes. “Where’ve you been? Why didn’t you call?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I got sidetracked on the way home. I thought it would only take a few minutes. Ended up taking an hour.”

“Would’ve been nice if you’d found a way to call. Jeff brought Jenny for dinner.”

“Jenny?”

“Jenny. The artist. His new girlfriend.” Her tone was sharp.

“I know who she is. I just didn’t know she was coming to dinner. I didn’t see them down in the rec room. They’re not making out in his room, I hope.”

“They’re gone,” she said peevishly. “They left ten minutes ago. If you’d called to say you were on your way, I expect they’d have waited.”

“I’m sorry, Kathleen. Really sorry. I didn’t mean to be late.”

“Where were you?” she repeated. “What were you doing?” She turned to face me for the first time, her eyes narrowing. “Are you having an affair?”

I burst into laughter — a mistake, apparently, because she threw the wet dish towel at me. I kept laughing. “I’m sorry, hon,” I said. “I’m not laughing at you. It’s just… I was talking to a minister. I stopped by church on the way home.”

“What church? Our church?” I nodded. “Whatever for?”

“Long story,” I said.

“Obviously.” She hipped the dishwasher door closed — with more energy than the job required — and turned to face me, motioning to a pair of chairs at the kitchen table. “Spill it. I’m all ears.” She was still peeved, but she was intrigued now, and that seemed like progress.

The night before, I’d spared her the grisly details of the death scene in the woods. Now I told her a bit more, and then told her about Roxanne’s sudden departure, and the bitter question she’d posed to Tyler. “It’s been bugging me all day. So I stopped to see if Mike might have some insight.”

She stared at me from across the table. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You were hoping a theologian could solve the conjoined-twin problems of evil and misogyny in a five-minute, oh-by-the-way mini-lecture?” I shrugged sheepishly; I hadn’t gone into his study with such a clearly articulated and clearly ludicrous agenda, but she’d summed it up pretty well. “Honestly, Bill, you do put the idiot in idiot savant sometimes.”

“You know,” I began, in feeble protest. But I didn’t have a leg to stand on, and we both knew it. “It’s true,” I conceded, shaking my head. “You’re right. Absolutely, utterly right.” She smiled then, reaching across the table to give my hand a squeeze. One of the things I appreciated most about Kathleen was her readiness to forgive, to let go of a grievance at the first sign of contrition.

“And what words of wisdom and divine insight did the Right Reverend Michaelson impart while your steak was turning to shoe leather?”

“Steak? I missed steak?”

“On the grill. Grilled potatoes, too.”

“Ah, man,” I moaned. “My favorite dinner? I can’t believe I missed it. Proof positive that the devil is alive and well. Messing with the world in general and me in particular.”

“Maybe it’s not beyond redemption.”

“The world?”

“The steak. I pulled it off while it was still medium rare. Believe it or not, it no longer surprises me when you’re late for dinner.”

“You’re an angel,” I said. “And the age of miracles is not yet over.”

“I’ll fix you a plate if you’ll tell me what Mike had to say.” She scooted back from the table, went to the fridge, and began pulling out Tupperware containers.

“I’m not sure I can remember all the details.”

“Then give me the Cliffs Notes version.”

“Here’s the Cliffs Notes version: ‘It’s complicated.’ ”

She frowned across the plate of steak and potatoes. “I think I’ll give this to the dog next door. Because that’s not complicated; it’s simple, and the dog will adore me.”

“Hang on, I’ll try to give you the gist,” I squawked. “But it is complicated. I asked Mike, ‘Why are men such shits to women?’ and—”

“I hope you rephrased the question.”

“No,” I admitted, “I gave him the unvarnished version.” She shook her head despairingly. “Anyhow, his answer started with the Judeo-Christian concept of the Fall of Man—”

“The Fall of Man? Did he blame it on Eve?” she asked sharply.

“No, actually. Matter of fact, he took a few shots at the early church fathers for painting it as the woman’s fault.”

“Well, praise the Lord,” she said sarcastically. “It’s about time Eve’s criminal record got expunged.”

“Anyhow, after the Fall, he — Mike, not the Lord — veered off into evolutionary biology and primate behavior. Male aggression, territorialism, competition for mates, mate guarding. He knows more zoology than I do. Then we got into psychology and cultural anthropology and sociology and politics: patriarchies, matriarchies, oligarchies, preserving the power structure…”

“All right, you win,” she sighed, popping the plate in the microwave and tapping the one-minute button. “I should’ve let you stop with ‘It’s complicated.’ But did it make you feel better, wandering down those trails with him?”

“Kinda,” I hedged. “But he didn’t really answer the question. Like I said — and like he said — it’s complicated.”

“No it’s not,” she said.

“Wait — you just agreed that it was complicated.”

“I agreed that his answer was complicated,” she said. “But my answer’s simple.” I stared at her. “Men treat women like shit for the same reason they treat children or animals like shit: Because they can. It’s a power trip. ‘I’ll feel stronger and better if I prove that you’re weaker,’ right?”

“Well…”

“Every guy wants to be the big man on campus,” she went on. “Bed the prettiest women; breed with the prettiest woman. It’s like a pride of lions. If you’re not the big lion — if you’re only a medium-sized lion — you take it out on the little lions. Men like that would probably rather be shits to other men, but they can’t be, so they’re shits to women and children and animals.”

Kathleen’s blunt gloss on the issue lacked the intellectual nuance of Reverend Mike’s — no detours down scenic side trails of theology and sociology and anthropology — but what it lacked in sophistication, it made up for in ringing clarity. “So you’re saying it all comes down to pecking order?”

“No. I’m saying it all comes down to pecker order; pecker size. Men who treat women badly are men with small peckers — metaphorically, at least. Probably literally, too.”

I laughed, mildly shocked but mightily impressed. “Next time Mike needs a guest preacher, you should fill the pulpit. The congregation would get some straight talk. And they’d get to Calhoun’s half an hour before the Baptists.” She smiled. “But now I’m puzzled about something else. If Mike didn’t answer the question, how come I came out of there feeling so much better?”

“That’s easy, too,” she said. “It’s in the Gospel According to James.”

“James? There isn’t a Gospel According to James.” I ticked off the four gospel writers: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.”

“I’m talking about the Gospel According to James Taylor.”

“James Taylor? The folksinger?”

“Folksinger and prophet of the human heart. ‘Shower the People’?” She wagged a finger at me and began to sing. “Once you tell somebody the way that you feel, you can feel it beginning to ease.” She cocked her head. “Right? Isn’t that why you feel better?”

“Crap, Kathleen. How’d you get to be so much smarter than I am?”

“Not just smarter,” she said. “Wiser. It’s a woman thing.” She tapped her belly with an index finger. “It’s the uterus. It gives us superpowers of wisdom and insight.” Without looking, she reached behind her back and popped the door of the microwave, cutting off the timer a nanosecond before it began its annoying beeps. “Want salad?” I shook my head. She set the plate down in front of me, singing, “Better to shower the people you love with love, show them the way you feel…”

The steak smelled gloriously of mesquite smoke and marinade, as if it had only that moment been lifted off the grill. Rich, reddish-brown juice seeped from the seared meat, pooling beneath the crisp potatoes. “Perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And Bill?” I glanced up, my fork and knife already poised above the plate. “Thanks for not being a shit to women. Or kids. Or animals.” I smiled at her. “You’ve got a big heart.” She smiled back. “And you know what they say about the size of a man’s heart.”

“Oh my,” I said, as I caught the drift of her innuendo. “Is it true, what they say?”

“Better than true. It’s an understatement.”

Beaming, I bowed my head and tucked into the feast.

CHAPTER 35

Satterfield was a shadow among shadows, flowing through the night like some coalescence of darkness — like darkness made flesh — along the perimeter of the quarry yard. The night watchman had just made his 1:00 A.M. circuit, and he wouldn’t make another for an hour — maybe longer, if he fell asleep in the guard shack, as he sometimes did.

Satterfield didn’t need an hour; didn’t need even half an hour. The blasting caps were locked in a windowless steel building — it was called a “magazine,” but essentially it was a vault — tucked into a recess in one of the quarry’s limestone walls. The dynamite was locked in an identical magazine in a second recess, fifty yards from the first one. Satterfield had not actually been inside either magazine, but earlier in the day, he’d watched through his spotting scope as a wiry guy had gone into the first structure and emerged a few minutes later with a handful of caps, dangling from their electrical wires like silver firecrackers swinging from long, slender fuses of red and blue. After driving a brief distance along the rim of the gaping pit, he’d gone into the second magazine and then emerged carrying a box covered with warning labels — labels Satterfield had seen many times during his demolition training in the Navy.

Satterfield had been researching lock picking, so he could come and go without leaving a visible trace. He’d seen locks picked in plenty of movies — the long, slender picks, worked into the keyhole, wiggled and twisted in some artful, arcane manner — but as it turned out, it looked like it was going to be easier than that. The prior night, when the watchman had gone to make his rounds, Satterfield had slipped into the guard shack and rummaged around. Sure enough, in the gritty center drawer of a gritty metal desk, he’d found an assortment of gritty spare keys. One of them bore the promising label “demo.” For a moment he’d doubted his luck — had they really been stupid enough to use identical locks on both bunker doors? — but then he realized that yes, of course they had. If they were dumb enough to leave the keys to the whole operation in an unlocked desk — an unlocked desk in an unlocked guard shack, for crissakes — they were plenty dumb enough to use identical locks for the blasting caps and the explosives.

The guard’s 2:00 A.M. rounds would take him first to the blasting-cap magazine, so Satterfield started there, to make sure he’d be finished well ahead of time. The building was low and squat, maybe ten feet square by seven feet high, the steel outer walls lined with several inches of hardwood, if the quarry’s magazines were built like the Navy’s. The door looked like something from a warship: Also made of heavy steel plate, it was low and narrow, mounted on massive hinges.

Satterfield slid the key into the padlock’s keyway, feeling the pins bump across the teeth, one by one. When the key bottomed out, he twisted gently. The lock opened grudgingly, grittily, the coating of limestone dust resisting as the shackle slid out of the brass body. It took most of his strength to wrest the door open, and he felt a flash of admiration for the wiry blaster he’d watched through his scope; the guy was several inches shorter than Satterfield, and probably weighed twenty or thirty pounds less. Not an ounce of fat on that guy, he thought. The door rasped on the hinges, but the sound was slight — almost as though it were absorbed by the velvet blackness of the magazine’s interior.

Once inside, he tugged the door shut behind him, then clicked on the small Mag-Lite. As he scanned the room, he smiled. Three walls were lined with wooden shelves, and the shelves were like a high-explosives candy store. The blasting caps — hundreds of them; hell, thousands of them — were stored in wooden bins. Some sported pigtails of bright orange det cord; others — the ones he wanted — trailed electrical leads, the pairs of wires looped and fastened into tight coils.

He slipped three caps into one of the thigh pockets of the black BDUs — no point getting greedy, since he had the key to the store, and he didn’t want to risk creating a noticeable shortage in the inventory — then turned to go.

He pushed his way out the heavy door, then closed it behind him, snapping the balky lock shut. Five minutes later he was inside the second cavelike magazine, this one containing cases of dynamite and wooden spools of detonating cord. From an open case of dynamite, he took two sticks — more than he needed — and tucked them into a deep pocket, then turned to go. At the door, though, he hesitated, then turned back, irresistibly drawn to the spools of det cord: Primacord—500- and 1,000- and 2,000-foot spools of linear explosive, in a rainbow of colors: orange, yellow, red, green, purple, in solids and stripes, each color and pattern denoting a different load of explosive inside the bright plastic sleeve. Some of the cord was no thicker than clothesline; on one spool, though, the cord was nearly as fat as his pinky. PRIMALINE 85, read the label on that one, which meant that every meter of cord contained 85 grams of high-explosive PETN.

God, I love this shit, Satterfield thought. He loved Primacord for what it could do; hell, with that one spool of Primaline 85, he could probably take down every major bridge in Knoxville. He also loved Primacord for its neatness and precision. Dynamite was dirty and messy, though undeniably macho; Primacord was clean and neat. Consistent, too: No matter which spool you unwound, no matter which loading you used, you could be sure that the explosion would rip through the cord at 23,000 feet a second, 16,000 miles an hour: New York to L.A. in ten minutes. He’d done the math during his demo training at Coronado, working the problem three times to make sure he hadn’t misplaced the decimal. How the hell did they do that, extrude high-proof explosives with such perfection that the blast traveled through the cord ten times faster than a bullet, but precisely, reliably fast? You could set your watch — hell, you could set a damn atomic clock — by precision like that.

He wasn’t here for the Primacord, but the temptation was too strong to resist. Slipping the KA-BAR knife from its sheath, he unspooled ten feet of the Primaline 85, sliced it off, and then wound it around his waist, cinching it into three tight coils. He took a moment to imagine what would happen if something set it off while he was wearing it. Shit, he thought, shaking his head and grinning, your head would come down in Kentucky and your feet in Alabama; one hand in Maryland, the other in Oklahoma. Don’t get hit by lightning on the way home.

This bunker’s door was even harder to close than the other. Satterfield made a mental note to bring some WD-40 next time he came, to lube the hinges. Be a damned shame to throw out his back.

CHAPTER 36

Holding my breath to protect my lungs, I jogged into the cloud of smoke that shrouded the entry to the Knoxville Police Department. The air was thick with carcinogens — at least a pack’s worth of secondhand smoke, judging by the throng of smokers loitering outside the grimy glass doors. The KPD was a squat, brooding fortress of putty-colored brick set atop Summit Hill Drive. The police shared the building with traffic court, and I suspected that most of the smokers were speeders and DUI defendants, taking advantage of the noon recess to calm their jitters with a jolt of nicotine.

“Excuse me, sir?” I was accosted by a disheveled young man whose stringy, greasy brown hair had been cut, at some point in the distant past, in a style that was named after a saltwater fish whose name I struggled to recall. I held up my hand to deflect his sob story and request for spare change. Instead of panhandling, though, he simply asked, “Could you tell me the time, please?” Ashamed of my brusque response, I stopped, one hand on the door handle, and checked my watch.

“Ten of one,” I croaked, expending as little of my lungful of air as possible.

“Dude,” he said as I tugged open the door. “What happened to your voice?”

“Throat cancer.” I clutched my larynx as I rasped out the brazen lie. “Smoking.” Before he had a chance to engage me further, I ducked through the door, hurrying toward the smoke-free air inside. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the mullet-head scrutinizing the ashy end of his cigarette, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. Then he dropped it to the concrete and ground it out. Before he did, though, he took one long last drag.

Traffic court occupied a single floor on the left-hand side of the complex; the police department commanded a four-story wing to the right. I signed in with the receptionist, who made a quick phone call and then buzzed me in. “Crime lab. Take the elevator to the second floor.”

In the lab, Art Bohanan sat at a long metal lab table, peering through a magnifying lens at the blood-smeared shaft of a hunting arrow. On a metal tray to one side were the other headless shafts, decapitated with bolt cutters to allow the dead woman’s body to be taken down from the tree. A second tray held the sharp-tipped, razor-edged arrowheads — all except for the one that had lodged deep in the femur. “Hey, Art,” I said. “Any prints?” Without looking up, he shook his head. “In that case, you probably won’t find any on this one, either.” Reaching into the pocket of my windbreaker, I pulled out a clear plastic jar, two inches wide and three inches tall, containing the arrowhead I’d extracted from the femur. “Dr. Hamilton did as much autopsy as he could this morning,” I said, “and he pulled this out. But she was too far gone for him to tell much, so he’s turned her and the man over to me. We’ll start cleaning her bones tomorrow; right now we’re still processing the woman that was splayed against the tree.”

“You think she’ll be done today?” asked Art. I’d worked with him on enough cases to feel sure that his use of the word “done” was a deliberate double entendre. Art had commented, on more than one visit to the Anthropology Annex, that we processed bones exactly the way his wife made beef stock: cut off most of the meat, then put the bones into a big pot to simmer. After my costly lesson about the penchant of unwatched pots to boil, I’d taken steps to ensure that I wouldn’t ruin any more of Kathleen’s stoves: I’d sworn never again to process skeletal material at home, and I’d dipped deeply into the department’s budget to buy the Annex a twenty-gallon steam-jacketed kettle — the kind commercial kitchens used to cook meals for the masses. With the thermostat set at 150 degrees and a bit of meat tenderizer, Biz, and Downy added to the water, the soft tissue — even the brain — softened and dissolved, leaving the bone clean, undamaged, and smelling more like laundry than roadkill.

“Might be done today; more likely tomorrow. She had a fair amount of tissue left.”

He nodded at me, then shook his head glumly at the arrow shaft he’d been examining, laying it on the tray alongside the others. “This guy was careful,” he said. “Either he wore gloves, or he wiped everything down pretty well.”

“You said you had something to show me?”

“Couple things, actually. Hang on a sec.” He switched off the lamp and rolled to the other end of the table, where he picked up a phone and punched in an extension number. “Hey, it’s Art,” he said. “I just finished going over the arrows… Nah, nothing. Nada. Zero. Zip.” He glanced at me. “Dr. Brockton just walked in. I’m gonna show him the stuff I showed you this morning… Okay. Bye.” He replaced the handset. “That was Kittredge. He’s on his way down.”

Art rolled his chair back toward the center of the table and picked up a square white card, slightly smaller than the width of a sheet of printer paper. The card was covered with oblong smudges, as if it had been pawed by a jam-fingered child. Even from a distance, I recognized the whorls and loops of fingerprints. There were two horizontal rows of small square boxes — ten boxes in all. Nine of the boxes contained prints; the tenth box was as empty as the space that had once been occupied by the woman’s amputated finger. “I printed her at the scene,” he said, “before you got there.” I nodded; I’d already figured that. “Pretty good, if I do say so myself.”

“Her hands were in great shape, compared to the guy’s,” I said. “His were almost down to the bone.”

Art handed me another card, this one with a complete set of prints from both hands. Holding them side by side, I compared the two cards. The prints on the second card, the complete card, were sharper and crisper than those taken from the woman’s corpse; no surprise there. But even I could tell that both sets of prints — the crisp antemortem prints and the blurred postmortem prints — had been made by the same hand. “You got a match already?” He nodded. “That’s great.” I read the name at the top of the complete card. “Pamela Stone. Who is she? Was she?”

“Thirty-two-year-old hooker. Street name was Desirée. Kittredge is checking with vice and patrol to see what else they know, and when she was last seen.”

As if summoned by the mention of his name, Kittredge entered the crime lab. He nodded to Art and reached out to shake my hand. “Doc. How’s it going?”

“Okay. I brought y’all the arrowhead from the thigh. Dr. Hamilton examined her first thing this morning. I was just telling Art, we’ll start cleaning off the bones tomorrow, soon as the prior victim’s done.”

“Forgive my ignorance,” he said, “but do you have to get the family’s permission for that?”

I shook my head. “As a forensic case, it — she — is now in the medical examiner’s system. Processing the remains, getting them down to bone, is standard investigative protocol.”

He nodded. “What’d the M.E. find? Anything helpful?”

“I’m not sure how helpful this is,” I said, “but it’s interesting. She lost a lot of blood, but not enough to kill her. He thinks she died of a coronary.”

“A heart attack?” Kittredge looked puzzled.

“Yeah. The M.E. thinks she died of fright.”

He whistled softly. “That’s a first, for me. But I can believe it, considering what the guy was doing to her. Anything else?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I want to take a closer look at the right hand once it’s cleaned up. Something about that missing digit bugs me, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. No pun intended.”

Kittredge nodded slowly. “I’d like you to take a look at what was in her mouth,” he said. “I don’t know what to make of it. Maybe you’ll have an idea.”

“I’ll try. Always happy to help, if I can.”

Kittredge leaned across the table and picked up a flat plastic sleeve, holding it up to display one side. Inside the sleeve was a sheet of what had been crisp white paper in a past life, but was now stained and smeared and wrinkled. In addition to what appeared to be random blotches, the sheet bore numerous fingerprints, these etched in bright purple, a hue somewhere between raspberry and grape jelly. I turned to Art. “You got prints off that wad of paper? Damn, you’re good.”

Art shrugged modestly. “Ninhydrin. Binds to the amino acids in proteins. Any time you handle something, you leave behind a few skin cells, and there’s protein in those cells. A quick spritz”—he nodded toward a spray bottle on the table—“and presto.”

“Presto indeed,” I said. “That’s a lot of prints.”

“At least three different sets,” he said. “Two men and one woman, looks like.”

“And good enough to run through AFIS?” I was proud that I knew the acronym for the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

“Good enough to give us a match already,” Kittredge interjected. “One of the men.”

“You’re kidding.”

The detective shook his head. “Nope. Dead serious.”

“Amazing.”

“What’s even more amazing,” said Kittredge, “is that the guy’s name is right here on the page.”

“His name?”

“Yep. Full name. Signature, too.”

“He wrote a note and actually signed it?”

“Not a note, exactly. Take a look, tell me what you think.” The detective handed me the plastic sleeve.

I flipped it over, and my heart nearly stopped.

Neatly typed on a sheet of UT letterhead, the name — and the scrawled but familiar signature beside it — read “William M. Brockton.”

I stared at the stained and rumpled piece of paper — the first page of a forensic report I’d written and submitted — its edges thick with purple fingerprints. My fingerprints. I looked from Kittredge’s face to Art Bohanan’s and back again. “How the hell,” I finally said, “did that end up in the mouth of a dead woman?”

Art said nothing; Kittredge said, “My question exactly, Doc. I was hoping you might be able to answer it for me.” Still reeling from shock, I nodded numbly, then drew a deep breath and took another, longer look.

I had recognized the format the moment I’d glimpsed the page. It was a forensic report, the kind I’d written and signed dozens of times, in dozens of cases. This particular report, I saw upon closer inspection, was addressed to a state trooper in Alaska — Corp. Byron Keller — and the subject line read “Re: Forensic case 90–02.”

I remembered the case well; in fact, I’d mentioned it to Tyler, though not by number, less than twenty-four hours before, as we’d driven back to the morgue with the two bodies from the woods. Keller’s case had begun when a pair of Alaska hunters had found a skeleton, half buried in a gravel bar at the shore of a river. Keller had initially thought the skeleton might be that of a hiker who’d gotten lost and starved to death, or perhaps been killed by a bear. But there’d been no reports of missing hikers in the area; in addition, there were no traces of backpacking equipment or apparel: no boots, and in fact, no clothing of any kind.

Corporal Keller had contacted me after reading a newspaper story about one of my early Kansas cases — the Sawzall dismemberment case, the one where I’d teamed up with an FBI profiler — and called to ask if I’d take a look at the bones from the gravel bar. Intrigued by the lack of clothing or other contextual clues—taphonomy, in technical terms — I’d agreed, and two days later, a FedEx courier had delivered the bones to Neyland Stadium. The bones, as my report to Keller had detailed, were those of a twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old white female, approximately five feet five inches tall. Three amalgam fillings in her teeth indicated that she’d been born sometime after 1950, and that she’d received good dental care during her youth; two unfilled cavities in her third molars suggested that she’d stopped going to the dentist as an adult, probably because she lacked the money. “Based on prior, similar cases,” I’d written, “it is possible that the victim was a prostitute, one whose disappearance might never have been reported.”

The memorable feature of the case, and the reason I’d mentioned it to Tyler, was that the victim — eventually identified as a missing Anchorage prostitute — had been abducted and flown to the wilderness by a local man who was both a hunter and a bush pilot. “An X-ray of the remains reveals a smear of lead on vertebra T-7,” I wrote, “indicating that she had been shot.” After receiving the report, Corporal Keller had returned to the riverbank with a metal detector, and found a gray bullet nestled in the gray gravel. Had she been transported to the wilderness and released as prey? The suspect denied it, but on the basis of the remains I’d examined — plus three more shallow graves that had been marked by Xs on an aviation chart in the man’s airplane — he’d been convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

The details of the Alaska case had come back to me in a flash, the moment I’d seen Corporal Keller’s name on the report; indeed, it was almost as if the sun-bleached, river-rinsed bones of 90–02 were hovering in the air before me like a hologram. Then the hologram shimmered and shifted, the skull becoming a face, the empty eye orbits morphing into the piercing gaze of KPD Detective Kittredge. “So, Doc,” he prompted, “what can you tell me?”

“I can tell you I’m stunned,” I said. “As baffled as you. Maybe more.” He waited, his eyebrows raised to make sure I knew that he expected more. I racked my brain.

“The first time we talked,” Kittredge said slowly, “you described the crime scene at Cahaba Lane perfectly, before you’d ever been there. You had a picture of it in your hand before our photographer was even at the scene.”

“I got that photo in the mail,” I reminded him. “The killer sent it to me.”

“So you said. That night, you called 911 to say there were more bodies in the woods there.”

“It was a hunch,” I said, “not a confession.”

“Now, one of your reports — signed by you, handled by you — turns up in the mouth of one of the other bodies you said we’d find in the woods.”

“And I’m the one that found it in her mouth,” I pointed out. “Fished it out and handed it to Art. Remember? Why the hell would I hand over something that incriminating, if I were the one who’d put it there?”

He shrugged. “You own a hunting bow, Doc?”

“God no,” I said, relieved to be able to answer with a simple, unequivocal negative.

“So if we searched your house right now, we wouldn’t find one?”

“Are you kidding? I haven’t shot a bow and arrow since Cub Scouts. You’re welcome to come search the house. Let’s go, right now. Talk to my wife and son. They’d laugh if you asked them if I was a crack shot with a bow and arrow.” I held out my hands, palms up. “Do these look like fingertips that spend a lot of time on a bowstring? Feel them.” I stretched my hands toward Kittredge, and he probed my white-collar, desk-job fingers. “Hell, my wife has more calluses than I do,” I said.

Kittredge drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “So who would have had access to that report? That’s not a copy, that’s the original. You signed it, and you handled it. Who could’ve gotten hold of that? And why would he wad it up and stuff it in a woman’s mouth before using her for target practice?”

Glancing again at the report I held in my left hand, I shrugged, turning my right palm upward, empty-handed. “I sent the original to Keller at the Alaska State Police. I would’ve handled that one, because I signed it.” I glanced at the one in my hand. “But this isn’t the original,” I added. “It’s a copy.”

“How do you know it’s a copy?”

“Because my signature here is black. I sign the originals in blue.” I looked again at the smudges. “Art, you say there are three sets of prints on here — mine and two others?”

“At least three. Possibly more, but if I were a betting man, I’d say three.”

“And you’re sure one set is mine?”

“I’m sure one set matches what we’ve got on file as yours.”

“Then they’re my prints. If you say they’re mine, they’re mine. So this has to be a copy I handled.” I looked at the distribution list on the report. Often I sent copies of reports to several recipients — multiple investigators, the coroner or medical examiner, one or more prosecutors. This one had gone only to the state trooper. I felt another wave of surprise and confusion, bordering on panic. “This is my copy. Has to be. This came out of my own filing cabinet.” I stared at the page, as if the answers to my swirling questions might somehow materialize in the margins, superimposing themselves on the purple fingerprints — mine and the two mystery sets. Suddenly, it was almost as if an answer did materialize. “My God,” I breathed. “She was telling the truth.”

Kittredge and Art looked at me as if I’d gone over the edge, off the cliff of madness.

“She?” said Kittredge.

“The temp.” The detective still looked puzzled and dubious. “I had a temporary secretary for a month last spring,” I explained. “Trish, my regular secretary, was on medical leave. Ended up taking early retirement. But I had a temp for a few weeks, and while she was there, we did some office shuffling. The day the files got moved I was gone all day, giving a talk over at the TBI lab, near Nashville. The temp — Darla? Darlene? Charlene? — she boxed up all my case files and stacked them in the hall. I would never have let her put them there. Anyhow, the next day, she came to see me, all upset; said one of the boxes had gone missing, gotten lost somehow. I reamed her out, accused her of throwing ’em out by mistake, but she cried and cried, swore she’d packed and stacked everything really carefully. I didn’t believe her. Sent her back to Human Resources with a bad reference.”

“How many files did you lose?”

“Dozens,” I said. “All the forensic cases I’d worked since I came to UT. Not the photos, luckily — I keep those in a separate filing cabinet, in a different office — but all the written reports. Took all semester to rebuild those files — I had to call and get copies of those reports from everybody I’d done cases for.” I shook my head, remembering the tedious effort. “Oh, including Keller, the Alaska state trooper. I called to ask him for a copy. He’ll probably remember that, much as I bitched and moaned over the phone.”

Kittredge nodded. “Any guess who might’ve taken the files? And why?”

I remembered what Brubaker, the FBI profiler, had said two days before: “Somebody who thinks I ruined his life.”

CHAPTER 37

Tyler leaned back in the rusting metal chair, his head pressing the chain-link fence, the mesh grating slightly as it bowed outward from the pressure. Overhead, low clouds scudded across a gray sky, and Tyler felt coldness seeping into his core — coldness that included, but was not limited to, the chill in the air.

There was a strange stillness and quietude in the cage; an absence so intense, it was almost a presence. Looking down at the increasingly skeletal corpse on the wire cot, he realized what it was: The maggots — most of them — were gone. A wide trail, brown and greasy, led from the concrete pad into the woods and across the ground before disappearing amid and beneath the fallen leaves. The Exodus, he thought in a flight of bizarre, blasphemous fancy. Some Moses maggot has led them to the Promised Land to pupate. “Follow me, and you shall be transformed. You shall be winged, like the angels, and take to the heavens…” Even more bizarre than his blasphemous fantasy was the bleak realization that he would miss the maggots.

Tyler turned to the back of his lab notebook — most of its pages now crammed with figures documenting time, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, maggot length, and the myriad of other minutiae he’d immersed himself in for weeks now — and began to write. He filled this page not with data, but with desolation.

That evening, after scrubbing bones from the steam kettle, then scrubbing his skin until it was raw, Tyler put on exercise clothes and slipped into the back row of a yoga class — a room filled with bodies more limber than his, minds less troubled than his. During Tree Pose, he looked at the woman directly ahead of him and shuddered: For a moment, as she clasped one foot and folded her leg, Tyler thought her leg had been severed at the knee; thought the droplets falling from the knee were blood, not sweat.

At the end of the class, he lay on his back — Corpse Pose — and felt droplets falling from his face: not sweat, but tears. Then pressure on his fingers — the woman beside him had reached out, taken his hand, offered a comforting squeeze. He could not return the squeeze. Corpses cannot return kindness.

At the end of class, he rolled onto his side: Rebirth Pose. By the time he opened his eyes, the room was empty and he was alone.

CHAPTER 38

She gave the office door an exploratory nudge, then — when it moved — she hipped it open with a practiced bump. She was mildly annoyed that the latch still hadn’t been fixed, but at the same time, she was grateful that she didn’t need to set down her briefcase or coffee to open it.

Kathleen wanted to believe that Bill was being coy at breakfast: that he hadn’t mentioned their anniversary because he was planning to surprise her with a romantic dinner at Regas or, better yet, the Orangery — closer to home and much more elegant, though twice as expensive. Despite her hopes, though, she suspected that he’d simply forgotten the date. It wasn’t that Bill was a thoughtless husband — not compared with most of her colleagues’ husbands, at any rate, not if their reports were accurate. But lately he’d been busy, preoccupied, and tense.

She felt a commingled rush of surprise, delight, and guilt, therefore, when she saw the vase of roses and the gift-wrapped box on her desk. Sweet man — he hadn’t forgotten. She plunked down her briefcase and picked up the phone to call him. While she waited for Bill’s secretary to transfer the call — the girl was new, and not terribly efficient yet — Kathleen shouldered the phone to her ear and plucked the box from the desktop. It was small — the size of a pack of cigarettes — and she gave it a shake, listening for the telltale rattle of earrings or a necklace. She untied the gold foil ribbon, then used a fingernail to slit the tape on one of the end-flaps of blue wrapping paper.

“Hello there,” Bill said breezily when he came on the line. “To what do I owe the pleasure? Did you just hear from the tenure committee, or did Jeff just get expelled?”

“You sneak,” she said. She tilted the package, and the box slid slowly from its tight paper cocoon. “You fooled me completely. I was sure you’d forgotten.” Still clutching the paper, she lifted the box by its lid, allowing the lower half to drop into the upturned palm of her left hand. The box’s contents were cushioned and concealed by a puffy rectangle of cotton batting.

“Forgotten what?” he asked as she laid down the lid and paper and plucked out the batting to unveil the gift.

Kathleen’s scream rose, the handset falling from her shoulder and clattering to the floor.

Inside the jewelry box, resting on another bed of white batting, were two objects. One was an antique pocketknife — Bill’s pocketknife, the one he’d inherited from his father. The other object was a slender human finger, its severed base black with crusted blood, its nail bright with scarlet polish.

CHAPTER 39

Kathleen’s shaking had finally stopped, but mine was just starting. The difference was, my wife had been shaking with fear; I was shaking with fury. I stared at Kittredge. “What do you mean,” I snapped, “you’ll ‘put in the request’? That’s not nearly good enough, Detective.” Kittredge opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off angrily. “A killer — a sadistic serial killer — has just delivered a human finger to my wife, and the best you’ve got to offer is ‘I’ll put in the request’?” Kittredge and I were huddled in the hallway outside Kathleen’s office, and we weren’t alone; uniformed officers guarded each end of the hallway, and they could probably hear every angry word I spoke, but I was too distraught for diplomacy. “You should be saying to me, ‘We will guard her night and day until we catch this guy.’ What the hell would he have to do to get that kind of response, instead of ‘I’ll put in the request’?”

“I know you’re upset, Dr. Brockton,” Kittredge began.

“You better believe I’m upset,” I interrupted. “This is my wife he’s threatening now. You’ve seen what this guy can do. You’ve seen what he’s already done.”

He nodded. “I know. I know. Look, if I were in charge of patrol, I’d give the order in a heartbeat. But I’m not in charge of patrol, so I have to run the request up the chain of command. Please understand that. I feel sure everybody up the line will agree it’s important. But that’s the protocol I’ve got to follow.” I wanted to break something, possibly Detective Kittredge’s neck. “Look, let me call it in right now. You and your wife can stay here while we wait to hear back. There’s a dozen KPD and UT cops here now. Hell, that’s as much protection as the president gets.”

While we waited, Kittredge interviewed Kathleen in a vacant Nutrition Science classroom. I paced the hall outside, but not for long. After two laps of the hall, I knocked on the door, then entered the room. “Sorry to interrupt,” I said to Kittredge. “Any idea how long this’ll take?” I saw surprise and annoyance in the detective’s eyes.

“Probably not more than half an hour,” he said in a level voice, “but I want to make sure we don’t miss anything — some little something that might give us a lead. I’m sure you can appreciate the need to be thorough.”

“I’m not rushing you,” I said. “Just checking. I need to dash back to Anthropology for a few minutes. I just wanted to make sure I’d have time.” He nodded. “I’d like to see you again before you leave,” I added. “I’d like an update on what the plan is.” He nodded again — curtly this time — as I turned to go.

I jogged back to the stadium and scurried down the outside stairs, between the crisscrossed steel girders, then entered the basement and unlocked the door of the bone lab. The lab was empty — empty of the quick, that is, though full of the dead. The newest arrival was the freshly scrubbed skeleton of the woman whose photograph — arriving in the mail shortly after her death — had been a message that I had failed to grasp. A message from a killer who seemed to be lurking just around the corner of my subconsciousness, and drawing closer all the time.

There was something else significant about this woman, something lurking around another corner of my mind, just out of conscious reach — some other sign or message. I knew it was there, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I’d realized this while pacing the hall as Kathleen and Kittredge had talked. Whatever the message was, it was not printed on photographic paper; this one was written on the woman’s bones. It had to be.

The bones were laid out in anatomical order on the long table beneath the windows — Tyler had brought them up from the Annex early in the morning, before heading across the river for another day of bug watching — and as I crossed the lab, I noticed that the angled slats of the Venetian blinds cast lengthwise shadows on the bones, creating the illusion that the dead woman was behind bars. Sentenced to death without parole, I thought grimly.

The emptiness at the distal ends of the lower legs was striking — even more striking now than when I’d seen her lying on the ground, legs splayed around the sapling. The absence there was almost palpable, in the same way that a sudden, unexpected silence seems loud. But it wasn’t the missing feet, or even the cut marks at the ends of the legs, that had brought me hurrying back. What had brought me hurrying back was the neck; specifically, the hyoid, the thin, U-shaped bone from the throat.

By the time we’d found the body in the woods, the soft tissues of the neck had already decomposed extensively — far more than other regions, except for the ankles, where the feet had been severed. The differential decomposition told me that there’d been trauma to her neck. Unlike the thirteenth-century Chinese villager killed by a sickle, this woman had not had her throat cut; I knew that from the photograph I’d gotten in the mail, which showed no sharp trauma to the neck. That meant her neck had sustained a more subtle injury, yet one serious enough to scrape or bruise the skin there — and therefore to make it especially attractive to blowflies. The day we’d recovered the remains from Cahaba Lane, I’d told Tyler to look closely at the hyoid when he cleaned the material. “I bet you anything that bone is fractured,” I’d said. “I bet she was strangled.”

I’d been right about the fracture; I’d confirmed it a few hours before, when I’d taken my first look at the processed skeleton. But I’d barely begun my examination — in fact, I had just picked up the hyoid and taken a cursory glance at it — when Peggy had transferred Kathleen’s call to me. Seconds later, I’d dashed out of the lab, the dead woman forgotten in my urgency. But as I’d paced the hall outside the conference room where Kittredge was interviewing Kathleen, my mind had strayed back to the bone lab. Back to the dead woman. Back to the fragile, broken bone from her throat.

In life, the hyoid — a support for the muscles and ligaments of the tongue and larynx — had helped give this woman a voice, had helped her speak. Now, in death, I prayed that the hyoid could tell me not only how she’d died, but also who had killed her.

The hyoid was gone.

I stared at the skeleton — at the cervical spine, where the bone should have been; where the bone had been, only a few hours before. It was gone.

I felt myself break into a sweat. Had he been here — the killer? Had he forced the bone lab’s lock, recognized the mutilated skeleton somehow, and made off with the hyoid — the evidence that he’d strangled her? The scenario seemed far-fetched, but what other explanation could there be? I picked up the phone from the desk and dialed the departmental office two flights above me. “Peggy,” I said without preamble, “do you know if Tyler’s been back to the bone lab since this morning?”

“Tyler? Not that I’ve seen. Why? Do you need me to track him down?”

“I do,” I said. “I need to know if he came back and took the hyoid from this skeleton.”

“What’s the hyoid?”

“A bone from the neck. Thin. Arched. Shaped like a short, wide version of the letter U.”

“You mean that little bone you had in your hand when your wife called?”

“Exactly,” I said. “That bone’s gone missing, and I’ve got to find it. It’s…” I paused, suddenly confused and spooked. “How did you know I had it in my hand when she called?”

“Right after I transferred the call, I saw you go tearing up the steps. You had something in your hand. Check your pockets.”

“What?”

“Check your pockets,” she repeated. “I bet you put it in one of them.”

“That’s absurd,” I said, reaching my right hand to my shirt pocket, then — more to myself than to Peggy—“I’ll be damned.” I’d had it with me all along.

“You’re welcome,” I heard her saying as I hung up the phone.

Plucking the bone gingerly from my pocket, I took it to one of the magnifying lamps and switched on the light. The fluorescent ring flickered on, and I held the bone beneath the lens, my hand looming, large and momentous, through the glass.

The thicker, central body of the bone — its ends defined by a pair of toothlike processes, the “lesser horns”—was intact. The damage was confined to the junction where the body met the thinner, more fragile ends of the arch — the “greater horns,” the ends were called. But only one of them was damaged: the left one, folded inward, almost at a 90-degree angle to its normal position, the ligamentous joint splintered. My right hand trembling slightly, I walked back to the skeleton and held the bone in position above the neck. Then, with my left hand, I reached down and closed my fingers partway, encircling the neck without quite touching it. If I had tightened my grip, my left thumb would have pressed on the greater horn, folding it inward, creating exactly this fracture.

A wave of dread and panic crashed over me. I’d seen a woman’s hyoid broken exactly this way once before: three years earlier, in 1989. That woman had died in California, and this one had died in Knoxville. But though two thousand miles separated them, I felt sure the two women had died by the same hand.

The words of Brubaker, the FBI profiler, came shrieking into my mind. At the time he’d spoken them, I’d shrugged them off; now, they cut me to the bone. “You’re the key,” Brubaker had said. “It’s personal between you and him.”

This time, I didn’t even pause to knock when I burst into the classroom where Kittredge and Kathleen were talking. They looked startled by my entrance; they looked stunned by my announcement: “I know who,” I said. “And I know why.”

Kittredge was rubbing his chin. He’d been rubbing it for the past five minutes — ever since I’d burst into the room — and the skin was starting to look red and raw. “And you’re saying you know this guy — Satterfield, you say?” I nodded. “Knew him before these bodies started turning up.”

“Didn’t actually know him,” I clarified. “Knew of him. He was a suspect in a woman’s murder out near San Diego three years ago — a woman who was a stripper and a prostitute. He was in the Navy, and a naval investigator asked me to consult on the case.”

“Why was that?”

“The investigator — with the NIS, the Naval Intelligence Service — had been a student of mine in Kansas in the mid-eighties. He worked a couple summers with me, digging up Indian bones. He knew I’d seen a lot of skeletal trauma there, and knew I’d starting working forensic cases, so he arranged to have the woman’s bones sent to me.”

“And what did you find?”

“I found that she’d been strangled,” I told him. “With just one hand.”

He looked puzzled. “How could you tell that?”

“The medical examiner hadn’t been able to determine the cause of death,” I said. “No obvious trauma, to the soft tissue or the bones. But male killers often strangle women, so I took a closer look at the hyoid — put it under a scanning electron microscope — and I found microfractures in the left side of the arch.” He still looked puzzled. “May I demonstrate? Do you mind if I put my hand on your throat?” I’d considered asking Kathleen, but she was already spooked, and the last thing I wanted to do was add to her fear.

He shrugged. “Sure, go ahead. If I start turning blue, do let go.”

“Deal.” I reached out and gripped his neck with my left hand. “See how my fingers reach around behind your neck, but my thumb’s closer to the front, on the left side?”

“Uh-huh.” His response sounded slightly strained.

“So now, if I squeeze”—I tightened my grip—“it puts more pressure on the left side of the windpipe, and on the left side of the hyoid bone.” I moved my thumb up and down slightly, sliding it repeatedly across the thin arch of bone. “The California woman was young — early twenties — so the hyoid hadn’t fully ossified. It wasn’t brittle enough to snap, which is why the medical examiner didn’t notice the damage. But the killer squeezed hard enough to suffocate her; hard enough to bend the bone and tear the ligament.” I gave my thumb a final twitch, then let go. “The investigator had a list of seven sailors who’d been with the woman around the time she went missing,” I went on. “I told him to rule out right-handed suspects. ‘The killer’s left-handed,’ I said. That left only one suspect. This guy Satterfield.”

Kittredge cleared his throat several times before speaking. “Okay,” he rasped, then cleared his throat again. “Got it.”

Kathleen spoke up. “Detective, are you all right? You look a little flushed.”

“Yes ma’am, I’m fine,” he croaked. “But just for the record? I’m glad your husband wasn’t teaching me about stab wounds.” He looked back to me. “So this guy Satterfield — he was court-martialed? But not convicted?”

“Wasn’t even court-martialed,” I said. “The investigator was sure he’d done it. He was left-handed; he’d been seen with the stripper, about a week before her body was found. And Satterfield was kind of a head case. A couple of the guys in SEAL training with him said he was really edgy—‘a ticking time bomb,’ one of ’em said.”

“Wait, wait,” Kittredge said. “This guy’s a Navy SEAL?”

“Not quite, but almost,” I said. “He’d gotten into the training program, but when the NIS flagged him as a murder suspect — a week or two in — the SEALs dropped him like a hot potato. He went back to his regular unit — the Special Boat Unit, it’s called. Those guys get a lot of the same training the SEALs get. Explosives, martial arts, survival, all that macho stuff.”

“Shit,” said Kittredge. “Sorry, Mrs. Brockton. But why the hell wasn’t he charged?”

“Not enough evidence,” I said. “He’d been seen with the woman the night after he got tapped for SEAL training — celebrating, I guess. But like I said, her body wasn’t found until a week or so after that. I… ” My voice trailed off.

“You what?”

“The prosecutor asked me if I could prove that she died the night Satterfield was seen with her. I told him I couldn’t. All I could say was that I believed she’d been dead for three days or more. ‘I can’t get a conviction based on that,’ he said.” I shook my head. “I’ve felt bad about that case for three years now.”

“And so Satterfield just walked?”

“Not entirely. I was told the Navy discharged him.”

“Honorably?”

“No. I forget the term. Administratively? With some note about ‘less than honorably,’ I think. Apparently you lose your benefits, and there’s a big black mark on your record forever.”

Kittredge had resumed rubbing his chin. “And he knew you were involved in the case?”

“I don’t know,” I said, but as I said it, I knew it was wrong. “He must have. He had a lawyer, and I guess he was entitled to know the evidence against him.”

“So he could have found out that you focused the investigation on him. That you made him the prime suspect. That you played a big part in getting him booted out of SEAL training, and then booted out of the Navy. With an indelible stain on his record.” I nodded, feeling sick. The detective added a grimace to the chin rubbing. “Shit,” he repeated, this time with no apology for the language. He shook his head. “Okay, I promise you, we’ll get more protection for you and your family. You got a gun?”

I shook my head. “Never needed one. Any time I’m working a death scene, I’m surrounded by cops. Besides, I’m usually on my hands and knees with my butt in the air. Makes it kinda tough to get the drop on an assassin.”

He looked from me to Kathleen and back again. “Might be a good time to get a gun,” he said. Then, as if the thought had just struck him. “And you say the bone — the hyloid—”

“Hyoid,” I corrected.

“You’re saying the hyoid from that Cahaba Lane body is what made you think of this guy?” I nodded. He looked puzzled. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why didn’t the sketch make you think of him? Don’t you know what this Satterfield guy looks like?”

“What sketch?” Now I was the puzzled one.

“The sketch the Earhart girl did for us.”

I felt a rush of… what? Confusion? Embarrassment? Anger at being left out of the loop? “Why didn’t you tell me you had a sketch?”

“Jesus, Doc, I’ve been a little busy, you know? Trying to find witnesses. And I didn’t figure you were likely to be one, since he seemed to spend his time with the hookers on Magnolia Avenue.” He narrowed his eyebrows at me. “Didn’t you see the sketch in the paper?”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “When?”

“This morning. Page one.”

“We didn’t get a paper this morning,” I said, glancing at Kathleen. She shook her head — she hadn’t seen it either.

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

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

CHAPTER 40

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 41

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not yet, Deck.” Hackworth sounded as frustrated as Decker felt. “I told you, you’ll hear the minute I hear.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lieutenant?”

“Go ahead, Mac.”

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

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

“He’s ringing the doorbell now,” McElroy narrated. “Front door’s opening.” Led Zeppelin’s volume ratcheted up a notch. “I see the suspect. Talking to pizza guy. Pizza guy’s going inside. Door’s closing.” The music softened and blurred again.

“Can you hear anything?”

“Nah. The music’s drowning ’em out.”

Decker cursed their lack of gear. If they had parabolic microphones, McElroy would be able to pick up every word that was spoken, even from across the road. “Okay, keep watching, Mac. Tell me everything you see.”

“Roger that.”

Two faint songs later—“The Battle of Evermore” and “Stairway to Heaven”—Decker radioed Hackworth again. “Cap? Deck here.”

“Go ahead, Deck. What’s happening?”

“That’s the thing, Cap — nothing’s happening. Pizza guy’s been in there a long damn time.” Decker checked his watch. “Eight minutes. Shouldn’t take but two, three minutes to pay for a pizza, right? Five, tops.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Hackworth said. “What if our guy couldn’t find his wallet? What if he’s writing a check, and the Domino’s dude has to get a license number? What if they’re just feeling chatty?”

“What if this creep swings both ways?” countered Decker. “What if he’s killing the pizza guy right now?”

“I never heard of a sex killer who went after women and men,” said Hackworth. “They like one or the other. Women, nine times out of ten. Anyhow, we got nothing on the suspect that suggests the pizza guy’s at risk.”

It wasn’t what Decker had wanted to hear, but it was what he’d expected to hear. He was pretty sure, even before he radioed, what Hackworth would say. He was also pretty sure, despite his chafing impatience, that the watch commander was right. A moment later, McElroy’s whisper proved it. “Lieutenant? Pizza guy’s coming out.” A minute later, the Bondo-patched, primer-splotched car was gone.

At three, Decker radioed Hackworth again. “Before you ask,” the captain said, “the answer’s no—we still don’t have the warrant. How much longer is the chain saw plan workable?”

“Not much. Thirty minutes, tops. There’s only an hour of daylight left. Besides, when’s the last time you saw a tree-trimming crew start work at four? That’s quittin’ time, boss.”

“Don’t give up on it,” said Hackworth. “We’ll get that warrant yet. Maybe you can take him down first thing in the morning. Wake him up with a chain-saw serenade — that might knock him off balance even more.”

“If we have to stay out here all night, Cap, tree branches might not be the only limbs we go after with the chain saw.”

“Ha. Steady on, Deck. You’ll know the second we’ve got the warrant. Stay sharp. And stay safe.”

When four o’clock came and went without the warrant, Decker sighed and shelved the tree-trimming plan, then gave the order to break out the night-vision gear — one rifle-mounted scope for each team leader and each sniper, plus one for McElroy. The scopes were big and heavy—1960s technology, military surplus leftovers from Vietnam — and the image they gave was grainy as hell. Still, grainy night vision was better than no night vision, when lives were on the line. Decker was constantly lobbying for newer, better gear, and constantly being shot down, but he owed it to his guys to try.

Things had remained quiet at the house; the rock music had stopped once the Led Zeppelin album ended, and a light had come on in a room at the back of the house, according to the rear spotter, Cody. Judging by the light’s random flickering — and the audio Cody could hear smatterings of — the suspect was watching the local news.

Decker’s two best options, as he saw it, were to storm the house sometime after Satterfield went to bed, or to sit tight till morning and send in the tree trimmers then. He hated the thought of waiting another fourteen hours, but he also hated the thought of sending a team into a pitch-black house to capture an ex-soldier, even with night-vision gear. Better to wait it out, much as he despised waiting.

He was just about to radio this assessment to Hackworth when his earpiece erupted. “Lieutenant! It’s Cody! I hear a woman in the back of the house — in the den or whatever that room with the big window is. She’s screaming her head off!”

“I’m hearing it, too, Lieutenant,” said McElroy. “She’s screaming bloody murder.” Even Decker could hear it: a series of shrieks that made his stomach lurch — shrieks that combined fear and pain like he’d never heard.

Decker snapped his fingers to get the attention of the emergency team. “Guys, let’s go!” he said. “Front door. Go go go.” He turned and pointed to one of the men. “E.J.,” he said. “You haul ass around back. When you hear us hit the front door, you put a flashbang through that big rear window.” He headed around the front corner of the house at a crouch, three of the men following close on his heels, as E.J. peeled off toward the back of the house.

Decker took the four front steps in two strides. “Fireplug, you ready?”

“Ready,” came the answer from one step behind him. Fireplug was a squat, burly former Marine; he carried the team’s forty-pound battering ram as easily as Decker could have carried a baseball bat.

“In five,” Decker counted, “four, three, two, one!” Fireplug had begun his windup on “three,” rotating his torso away from the door, swinging the battering ram like a pendulum. Then, as the arc reversed, he spun toward the door, his entire body — two hundred pounds of muscle and sinew — pivoting into the swing. The broad, flat head of the ram slammed into the knob, punching it through the wooden door and across the room to the opposite wall. The door crashed open and Decker scurried through, moving in a half crouch, the H&K submachine gun sweeping the room in tight arcs that tracked the direction of his gaze. He’d have felt safer with the short-barrel shotgun, but in a potential hostage situation, the shotgun’s swath of devastation was too broad and indiscriminate.

When Decker was two steps in, the foyer lit up as brightly as if a camera flash had just fired in the next room, and the house shuddered from the concussion of the flashbang — the stun grenade — that E.J. had thrown through the rear window, right on cue.

Without even having to think, Decker began mentally ticking off the seconds: one Mississippi, two Mississippi… If the suspect had been within ten feet of the stun grenade, the flash and the concussion would have blinded and stunned him, and Decker would have five seconds or so to find him and overpower him.

Three Mississippi. Decker risked a quick look through the doorway where the flashbang had gone off, then withdrew his head swiftly, so he wouldn’t be exposed during the split second it took his brain to process the images his eyes had captured.

Four Mississippi. He’d glimpsed a wall-sized entertainment center filling one wall, the big TV shattered by the flashbang. Shredded curtains dangling beside the missing window. Five Mississippi. A human figure — a man! — sitting in a recliner in the center of the room. At six Mississippi, Decker made his move. “Police! Don’t move!” he shouted, pivoting into the doorway, the H&K up and trained on the seated figure.

Seven Mississippi: The fist of God slammed into Decker, knocking him back, hurling him across the foyer, slamming him against the front wall. Stunned but still running on reflex, he reset his mental stopwatch: One Mississippi, two Mississippi… The cadence seemed slow and irregular, he noticed with an odd, detached objectivity, as if he were somehow outside himself as well as inside. Gradually he became aware of a second voice in his head — this one his as well — shrieking, What the hell? Why did E.J. use two flashbangs instead of one? Then: Shit. That wasn’t a flashbang. That wasn’t us. That was him. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs, struggling to piece the fragments into a picture that would explain why he was lying here in a heap against the wall. Either the flashbang hadn’t fully incapacitated the guy — had it landed behind him? Did the recliner shield him? Or Decker had screwed it up — counting too slow, moving too slow, giving the guy time to recover? Time to recover and do what, though? Had he fired a weapon? Was Decker shot — thrown across the room by a bullet or a shotgun blast slamming into his vest? No, not a shot, he realized. A blast. An explosion. But what — a grenade? Not the flashbang, but a real one, a frag? “Fall back, fall back,” Decker shouted. “Take cover.”

He took inventory: I’m alive. I can see. He wiggled fingers. Toes. Everything seemed to be there, unless he was already feeling phantom pain in missing limbs. He glanced down, saw arms and legs where they belonged, still attached. A chunk of splintered wood, three inches long and a quarter-inch thick, jutted from his right deltoid. Decker reached across with his left arm — not easy to do, as bulky and confining as the flak jacket was — and gave an exploratory tug. A flash of pain seared his shoulder, but the wood slid out, wet and shiny with blood.

Decker heard more words, muffled and faint, and he realized these were coming from outside his own head, not inside. “Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” It was Fireplug, crouching against the foyer’s inside wall. “Hang on — I’m coming to get you.” Decker held up a hand to stop him, but Fireplug was already scuttling across the room, and Decker felt strong hands gripping the shoulder straps of his vest, then felt himself being dragged backward, back toward the front door. “Holy fuck,” Decker heard Fireplug say. Just before the wall blocked his view, Decker managed to turn his head and catch a quick glimpse through the doorway and into the room beyond.

“Holy fuck,” Decker echoed.

The man was still seated in the recliner, arms dangling. The man no longer had hands. The man no longer had a head.

The woman was screaming — again, or still? Decker didn’t know which. Her shrieks filled the air, piercing the smoke that clouded the rooms, piercing the haze that clouded Decker’s brain.

Decker winced as he eased his butt onto the low wall at the end of the garage, leaning back gingerly against the suspect’s house. Inside, the bloodcurdling shrieks continued — emanating, E.J. had reported, from a pair of stereo speakers. A goddamn recording, Decker had realized the moment E.J. had relayed this information. A trick. A trap. A lure. And Decker had gobbled down the bait, the hook, the line, and the sinker. In the distance, as if answering the screams, two sirens — no, three — wailed louder as they approached.

Decker took inventory of his aches. Ringing ears. A couple sore ribs, cracked or possibly broken; maybe a mild concussion, too. And an oozing puncture wound in his right deltoid, where the sliver of splintered wood had burrowed into him. One of the sirens was probably an ambulance, but Decker was damned if he’d leave the scene except under his own steam, with his own team. The bomb squad was on the way, too, or would be soon, but they moved slow; Kevin’s team had even more crap to carry than the SWAT team did.

God, he thought suddenly, almost sick with fear. Kev. Please not Kev. Please let Kev be off today.

The bomb squad’s truck lumbered into the driveway. Decker stood, and the instant he saw the driver’s face — his brother Kev’s face — he knew that his prayer had been ignored.

The truck lurched to a stop and Kevin Decker—“Boomer,” to his bomb-squad colleagues, “Kev” to his big brother Brian — leaped out and ran to him. “Jesus, Bry, you okay?” Before Decker could answer, Boomer wrapped him in a hug. Decker grunted from the pain in his ribs, and Boomer released him. “Shit, you’re hurt?”

“It’s nothing. Bruised ribs. But my head hurts like a sonofabitch.”

Kev sniffed Deck’s face and hair. “Bang head, I bet,” he said.

“I don’t remember whacking it on anything.”

“Not a banged head,” said Kev. “Bang head. I get it all the time.”

“What the hell’s bang head?”

“A nitroglycerin headache,” Boomer explained. “Means the device was dynamite. Nitroglycerin — the explosive in dynamite? — makes blood vessels dilate. You can get a headache just from handling the stuff, absorbing it through the skin. The fumes are the worst, though — they go up your nose, into the capillaries, and straight to your brain.” He frowned at the house. “Guess that means I’ve got a vise-clamp headache with my name on it waiting for me in there, too, huh?” He looked back at Decker. “God, I’m glad you got out okay. Sounds like a close one.”

“Closer than I liked.”

From inside the bomb-squad truck came a series of short, sharp barks. Kevin’s head snapped around. “Izzy. Quiet,” he commanded. The barks were replaced by high-pitched whines. “Izzy.” Izzy, named after a character on Miami Vice, was Boomer’s dog, a big German shepherd whose job — whose passion; whose very reason for living — was sniffing out explosives. Until recently, the bomb squad had relied mainly on a robot, which sounded great but worked like crap, always getting stuck or running out of battery power, requiring somebody to go in and retrieve it. The robot was so unreliable, in fact, that Decker’s SWAT team — the ones generally tapped to go fetch the malfunctioning machine — had acquired a nickname that was all too accurate: the “Robot Rescue Team.” Decker generally hated seeing the robot get hauled out and sent in; today, though, he would welcome it.

“You starting with R2D2?” he said hopefully.

“Nah. If there’s already debris, the robot would get snagged for sure. Faster and better to go right in with Izzy.”

“How’s his nose today?”

“Awesome. As always.”

Decker gave Kev’s shoulder a squeeze. “Y’all be careful in there.”

Kev nodded reflexively, but he didn’t answer, and Decker noticed that his brother looked distracted, as if he were listening to something other than the words of brotherly love and caution. “Is it true? The guy’s still sitting in there?” Decker nodded. “Head blown off? No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Good,” snapped Boomer, with a vehemence that surprised Decker. “I just wish he’d died slower. Sick son of a bitch.”

“Hey, now,” Decker said. “Don’t make it personal. Forget about me; forget about him. Just do your job. What’s that thing you’re always saying, about how the dog knows when you’re off kilter?”

“What, ‘The dog is only as good as the handler’?”

“No, the other thing you’re always saying.”

“Oh, you mean ‘Shit flows down the leash’?”

Deck nodded. “Yeah. That. You stay focused in there, so Izzy can, too.”

Shit flows down the leash. The words were stuck in Decker’s mind now, replaying like a broken record. Like a premonition. Or maybe, he preferred to think, like a mantra, a message he was sending to Kev via brother-bond ESP.

He pictured the dog sniffing its way around the walls of the foyer and toward the blasted den; pictured Kev casting furtive glances over his shoulder at the headless, handless corpse slumped in the La-Z-Boy. Shit flows down the leash, bro, he messaged. Keep your head in the game.

Decker couldn’t stand it. Ducking under the crime-scene tape Fireplug had stretched across the front sidewalk, he climbed the stairs and positioned himself in the open front door. The interior still reeked of explosives, though the smoke had dissipated. Boomer and Izzy had made it halfway across the foyer by now, working their way along the front wall of the house, when suddenly the dog’s head snapped up and he stood on his hind legs, his front paws on the wall, his nose homing in on something. Decker leaned in and saw a dark smear on the wall. Blood, Decker thought, touching his shoulder. My blood. Did the dog know the blood was Decker’s? Could he smell the kinship with Kevin? Hell, yeah, he thought. Blood brothers. Brother’s blood. Thicker than water. For sure he knows it’s mine. “Leave it,” he heard Kev say, saw Kev give the leash a twitch. “Keep working.” The dog resumed snuffling, following the baseboard around the room, to the doorway of the den. “Good boy,” Kev praised. “Good work.”

The dog disappeared through the doorway, into the den, and Kev followed, a leash-length behind. The den would be a bigger challenge for them to check and clear, Decker knew. For one thing, it was a bigger, more complex room, with chairs and tables and lamps and other mangled furniture, plus the smells and soot from the SWAT team’s flash grenade and the dead guy’s dynamite. Then there was the stink of the dead guy himself — seared flesh and vaporized hair and leaked-out shit and piss — not to mention the creepy presence of the guy, too. Despite the lack of eyes, or even a head, for crissakes, Decker somehow imagined the dead guy watching, tracking Boomer and Izzy as they made their way along the wall. “Check,” Decker heard his brother say in a low voice every few seconds, and even at a distance — even through the residual ringing in his ears — Decker could hear the strain in his brother’s voice. C’mon, Kev, he messaged. Focus.

Suddenly he heard the dog yelp with pain and fear — fear, from a creature trained to hurl himself without hesitation at a 250-pound thug. A split-second later, he heard Boomer shout, “No!” Decker braced for a blast, but there was none; only shrieks from both the dog and the man.

Ignoring protocol, Decker raced into the house and across the foyer, skidding around the corner and into the den. There he saw a surreal nightmare unfolding. Kev and Izzy were on the far side of the room, near some kind of splintered cage of wood and wire. Rearing up on his hind legs like a horse, the dog was thrashing wildly, whipping his head back and forth, struggling to shake something off his snout. A snake, realized Decker. A huge fucking snake! The triangle of the reptile’s head was like some awful reflection of the dog’s own angular head; the long, thick body disappeared beneath the edge of the broken cage. “No!” Deck heard Kevin scream again over the dog’s howls. “Izzy!” As Decker lunged across the room to help, he saw Boomer drop to his knees, hands scrabbling up the back of the snake, tugging at the neck, then — desperate to free the terrified dog — grabbing hold of the jaws themselves. He had just managed to pry the reptile loose when the dog — finally free to fight back — bit blindly, the powerful jaws closing on Boomer’s right hand. Now it was Boomer howling, first as the bones of his right hand snapped, then as the fangs of the snake sought and found his left wrist, piercing the pale skin and then the ropy blue vein. The vein that carried blood up Kev’s arm and into his lungs.

As Decker reached his brother’s side, he saw the knotty glands at the base of the snake’s head pulsing — once, twice, three times. “Kevin!” shouted Decker. “No!” Now it was Decker grabbing the snake’s jaws, prying ferociously, ripping tendons and ligaments with the force of his fear and fury. Gripping the reptile’s head with both hands, he smashed it to the floor, again and again and again, reducing it to a bloody, bony pulp.

On the floor beside him, the dog began to convulse, blood foaming from his mouth and nose, and Decker saw his brother lift the dog and clasp it to his chest, sobbing. “Izzy,” Kev gasped. “I’m sorry. Oh, God, Izzy, I’m so, so sorry.”

Then — as if stricken with guilt at his failure to repay the dog’s devotion with diligence and vigilance and safekeeping; as if the two were joined by bonds even stronger than family — Decker’s brother began to froth blood as well. Decker watched, paralyzed and helpless, as his younger brother toppled forward onto the twitching body of the dog.

Death crawls up the leash.

CHAPTER 42

I was running overtime in my four o’clock Human Origins class, delivering a lecture on evolutionary changes in the human skull. “How many of you have seen the Coneheads, on Saturday Night Live?” I asked. Half the three hundred students raised their hands. “In another twenty thousand years,” I said, “if the cranium keeps getting taller and narrower, you and I will look just like the Coneheads.” The students were still laughing when a uniformed KPD officer came through the double doors at the back of the auditorium. Most anthropology courses were taught in the small, shabby classrooms in Stadium Hall, but the three big intro classes — Human Origins, Archaeology, and Cultural Anthropology — required a bigger venue, which I’d found in McClung Museum, a pleasant quarter-mile walk from the stadium.

The officer, a patrolman named Maddox, had been assigned to watch my back until Satterfield was safely in custody. Another officer was watching Kathleen, and a third was keeping tabs on Jeff. “So our brains have gotten bigger,” I continued, “as our jaws have gotten smaller—because our jaws have gotten smaller, in fact. Thirty-two used to be the normal number of teeth for adults, but as a species, we’re gradually losing our third molars, our wisdom teeth. So if you don’t have wisdom teeth, it doesn’t mean you’re dumb; it actually means just the opposite — it means you’re more highly evolved than some moron with a mouthful of teeth.” From the back of the auditorium, Maddox beckoned to me.

“Excuse me, class,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted. “It appears that the long arm of the law has finally caught up with me.” Heads swiveled, faces curious. “Y’all start counting your teeth. If you’ve had any pulled, or lost any, count those, too.” I beckoned to a girl seated in the front row. “Rebecca? Would you come up to the board and take a tally for us? In this sample of three hundred humans, how many have thirty-two teeth, and how many have only twenty-eight? What’s the breakdown, by number and by percentage?” As I started up the aisle, I saw students tooth counting — some using the tongue-probe method, others running a fingertip inside their mouths.

Maddox led me out of the auditorium and into the hallway. I searched his expression for some hint of what he had to say. “What’s up, Officer?”

“Got some news,” he said in a low voice. He glanced around the wide hallway, which was empty but exposed. “But let’s go someplace a little less public.” I took him down a narrow side hallway that led to the museum’s offices, stopping in a corner that offered privacy, as well as a good view of anyone approaching from either direction.

“From the look on your face,” I said, “whatever the news is, it isn’t good.”

“Some of it’s good, some bad. The good news is, the SWAT team went in, and the suspect’s dead.” The words sent a flood of feelings coursing through me: blessed relief, grim satisfaction, and guilt.

Suddenly my heart clenched as I realized just how bad the bad news might be. “Dear God,” I said, clutching his arm. “Has something happened to Kathleen? Or Jeff?”

He shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that,” he assured me. “But the scene turned into a total cluster-fuck, if you’ll pardon my language. Sumbitch had the place booby-trapped — that, or he ate a stick of dynamite. Blew his own damn head off. Nearly took the SWAT team out with him.”

“That’s awful.”

He made a face. “That ain’t the bad part. The SWAT guys are okay. But there was some kind of damn snake loose in the house, too — rattlesnake or cobra or who the hell knows what. Bomb-squad guy was in there with his dog, sniffing for more explosives. Damn snake bit the dog. Handler, too. Dead, both of ’em. Died quicker’n you can say Jack Robinson.”

“God in heaven. What kind of monster keeps killing even after he’s dead?” Maddox shook his head in sorrow and bafflement. “Do you know if my family knows about what’s happened at the scene? My wife and my son? If they don’t, I’d rather be the one to tell them. In person.”

Maddox radioed the officers who were keeping watch over Kathleen and Jeff. “No sir, they don’t know it yet. Your wife’s in a meeting, and your boy’s at cross-country practice.”

I nodded gratefully. “Could you relay a message to them? Ask them to be home by six?” He nodded. “And Officer? Please make sure they know I’m fine.”

I didn’t feel fine; I felt like I might be sick. But it seemed important to say it — to my family, and to myself. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.

CHAPTER 43

Kittredge frowned at the driver’s license the forensic tech, Bohanan, was holding between a gloved thumb and forefinger. Nicholas Eugene Satterfield, said the license, which had come from the dead man’s wallet. The face in the photo bore a strong resemblance to the artist’s sketch of the Cahaba Lane rapist — the Cahaba Lane killer. The frown-inducing problem was that Kittredge couldn’t match the face on the license or the face in the sketch to the face of the dead guy slumped in the La-Z-Boy, because the dead guy slumped in the La-Z-Boy had no face.

Bohanan tucked the license into an evidence bag. “We got dental records on Mr. Satterfield?”

“Not yet,” said the detective. “Military does, but we don’t. I’m still trying to find out who’s got ’em — the Navy, or the Military Personnel Records Center, in St. Louis.” The detective leaned in and peered at the bloody stump of spine. “Ick. What good will dental records do us, anyhow? We got no teeth.”

“O ye of little faith,” said Bohanan. “Just because his teeth aren’t in his head anymore—”

“His head’s not in his head anymore,” Kittredge pointed out.

“Teeth are tough,” Bohanan persisted. “They might be somewhere in this mess. Some of ’em, anyhow. Parts of some of ’em. A bit of bridgework, maybe, or a weird-shaped filling.”

“What about DNA?” said the detective. “Everything I read these days goes on and on about how great DNA is. Genetic fingerprints, no two alike. The future of forensics, supposedly.”

“Exactly,” said Bohanan. “The future. Sure, it’s possible, in some fancy-schmancy genetics lab. But routine forensic casework, in Knoxville, Tennessee? That’s five years down the road. Maybe ten.” Bohanan rocked back on his heels, studying the corpse. “We got anything else to base an ID on? Anything that doesn’t require, you know, a head or hands? Surgical scars, tattoos, six toes, anything?”

Kittredge snapped his fingers. “Damn. Yeah — he’s got tats. Both forearms. A snake on one. A devil’s pitchfork on the other.”

Bohanan lifted the handless right arm and slid the shredded sleeve up to the elbow. On the inside of the forearm was a crudely inked image of an eagle, its wings spread, its talons clutching a ship’s anchor and a three-pronged spear. “Not a pitchfork,” Bohanan said. “A trident. Symbol of Neptune — god of the sea. I’ve got an uncle with one kinda like this. He was a SEAL during the Vietnam War.”

“That fits,” said Kittredge. “Let’s see the other arm.”

Bohanan reached across the recliner and raised the left arm. Stretching upward above the shredded remnants of the wrist was a snake. Like the man, the reptile had been decapitated by the blast.

“Bingo,” said Kittredge, reaching for his radio. “Cap? It’s him… ID in his wallet, tats on his arms… Yeah, both tats, exactly like she described.” He glanced again at the snake. Burn in hell, asshole, he thought.

CHAPTER 44

Two police cars were idling outside my house when I arrived — the officers who’d kept watch over Jeff and Kathleen — and I stopped in the street and got out to thank them. Behind me, my watchdog, Maddox, eased his cruiser to the curb and parked. As I eyed the three police cars, I wondered what the neighbors must be thinking. Quite a fight, I pictured the crone across the street murmuring as she peered out her window. Mind your business, woman, I imagined her withered husband admonishing from the couch, then adding, I told you that Brockton fella had a mean streak in him, didn’t I?

My family’s guards, whom I hadn’t met, got out and walked toward me in the twilight, greeting me by name and extending their hands to shake mine. “I sure do appreciate y’all keeping an eye on my wife and my son,” I said. “I can’t tell you how much that helped my peace of mind.” Behind me, I heard Maddox’s door open and close, then heard his footsteps on the darkened asphalt.

“Glad to do it,” said the one who’d been assigned to Kathleen. “That dude was some bad business.” The other two nodded.

“I just got an update,” Maddox said. “They’ve got a positive ID on him now. It’s over.”

I didn’t know whether to cheer or weep. Instead, I asked, “How?”

“Driver’s license,” he said. “And tattoos.”

“And burns? Seems like I remember hearing that he had scars on his arms from cigarette burns as a kid.”

He shrugged. “I guess, but I’ll ask, if you want. They said it was positive, so if he had ’em, they must’ve seen ’em.”

“I trust y’all,” I said. “So I reckon we’ve seen the last of y’all for awhile?” He nodded. “Y’all can call your wives, tell ’em you’ll be home for supper after all.”

Maddox glanced at the other two, then back at me. “Actually, some of us are getting together at Patrick Sullivan’s Saloon,” he said. “That was Boomer’s favorite hangout. Come join us, if you want to.”

“I appreciate the invitation,” I said, lifting my hand in farewell and turning to go. “But I ought to stay here, be with my family. They need me right now.”

Was that true? I didn’t actually know, I realized as I clambered back into my truck and turned into the driveway. What I did know was that I needed them.

“Dammit, Jeff,” I muttered, threading between the Toyota and the shrubbery. “Don’t take your half in the middle.” The driveway was sixteen feet wide — more than enough for two vehicles to pass, with room to spare — but Jeff had parked the old Corolla we’d bought him smack in the center. If I detoured around him on the right, I’d make ruts in the lawn; hugging the left side of the driveway, as I was doing, meant raking the fingernails of the boxwoods down the side of the truck. The screeching set my teeth on edge and sent involuntary shivers up my spine.

My irritation gave way to relief, though, as the garage door ratcheted upward to reveal Kathleen’s Camry tucked in the near bay of the garage. I eased in alongside and hopped out, feeling gladder to be home than I could remember feeling in… when? Forever? As I trudged up the basement stairs and into the kitchen, I said a prayer of thanks.

Kathleen was at the sink, pouring pasta from a steaming pot into a colander. Jeff was at the stove, stirring sauce; to my surprise, Jenny Earhart was at the table, setting places for four. “Hello, hello,” I said, “Jenny, how nice to see you.”

The pot clattered into the sink as Kathleen whirled toward me. “Bill. Oh, thank God. Are you all right?” She wiped her hands on her apron, then wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands as she hurried to me and folded against my chest.

“Oh, honey, I’m fine,” I said, taking her in my arms. “Didn’t your watchdog tell you I was okay? He was supposed to.”

“He did,” she said, “but I didn’t believe him. The way he said it—‘Don’t you worry, ma’am, your husband is fine, just fine’—it sounded like the opposite of fine. Like you were alive, but paralyzed or something. He wouldn’t tell me anything else. I thought about turning on the news, but I was afraid to.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Still holding her in my arms, I stroked her head to soothe her. “I’m so sorry you worried. Things got bad — not for me, but for the police, at his house. Satterfield’s house.” I squeezed her tightly. “The good news is, he’s dead.”

She leaned back to look at me, her eyes wide. “The police shot him?”

I shook my head. “He killed himself.”

“Good.” Her quick vehemence surprised me.

“But he did some damage on his way out. He was holding a bomb or a hand grenade or something. He set it off when the SWAT team went in. Blew himself up.”

Her hands flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God! He killed the SWAT team?”

“No. No, not them. It was stranger than that. Bizarre. Like a nightmare.” I led her to the table and motioned for all of them to sit, partly so I could see them all while I told the story, but also so that I could sit down, too. I drew a breath and began to tell what I knew, or at any rate what I’d heard — possibly at third hand, possibly at thirteenth hand — about the blast, and the bomb squad, and the snake and the dog and the dog’s dead handler. About how Satterfield had reached up from the grave, or from hell itself, to take more innocent people down with him.

CHAPTER 45

Satterfield reached up to scratch an itch on his head, and the dial of his watch swam past his face in a smear of luminescence. Beneath the cargo hatch, the space was low and pitch black, and it smelled faintly of death. Like a coffin, he thought. A family-sized coffin. On wheels. Should he put them in here, once he was finished with them? No. Leave them out — on display — for all the world to see. He raised his left hand, the luminous dial floating upward a few more inches in the blackness, until his fingers brushed the lid, eighteen inches above his face.

It had been easy—so easy, he thought — but then, he’d had a big advantage: He had known they’d be coming, but they hadn’t known he knew. Fools. They should have known better. They should have done better.

The pizza guy, on the other hand — no way that poor bastard could have known better. A quick, lethal snap of the neck, administered by someone who ordered pizza once or twice a week, and always tipped five bucks? No way to see that coming. Swapping clothes, slapping on the fake beard, stenciling the tats on the arms, tightening the trip wire on his way out the front door, tripping the timers on the lights and TV and the recording of the woman’s screams — all that had taken less than ten minutes. Practice makes perfect, he praised himself.

Driving away from the house in the kid’s piece-of-shit Escort, he’d checked the rearview mirror repeatedly, smiling every time he looked and found it empty. Half an hour after answering his front door and beckoning the unsuspecting pizza guy inside, Satterfield had parked the Escort near the stadium, jimmied the latch on Brockton’s cargo hatch, and clambered in, pulling the hatch closed above him.

Now — after three hours of patiently lying in wait in the pitch-black bed of Brockton’s truck — Satterfield was ready to emerge from the coffinlike blackness; ready to rise from the dead and rejoin the land of the living. Ready to take Brockton and his family out of it.

How long should he wait? Part of him wanted to draw it out. The longer he waited, the more times and more ways he could envision it, savor it, play out in his mind the infinite permutations that were still possible for now, before the fact. Once it was done, only one version would remain in his head: the real version — one finite actuality, which would sweep away all the manifold and intricate and pleasant hypotheticals.

But waiting increased the chances that something might miscarry. Satterfield had bought time — hours, at least; possibly even days — with the explosion and the decoy corpse, but the longer he waited, the greater the risk that the police would unravel his ruse.

He ran a thumbnail beneath the hinge of his jaw and scraped at the edge of the rubber cement. Once he’d pried away a bit of the glue-matted hair, he tugged off the beard and flicked it into the corner of the pickup’s bed. The insulated pizza bag lay beside him, and Satterfield slowly opened the Velcro straps, the ripping-apart almost deafening in the close darkness, and then opened the flap. With his fingertips, he took inventory of the contents once more, though he already knew the items by heart and by touch: the four-cell Mag-Lite, blindingly bright and heavy as a club; the straight razor; a small, orange ball of baling twine; the twelve-inch zip ties; the flattened roll of duct tape; and a small pair of pruning shears. The 9-mm Glock was already out of the bag, tucked into his waistband.

Satterfield’s eyelids bloomed red-orange, crisscrossed by a spiderweb of dark veins, when he clicked the switch and the Mag-Lite blazed to life. Squinting against the glare, he propped the flashlight against the truck’s wheel well and reached overhead for the long, thin rods that held the cargo hatch closed. Gripping each rod at its midpoint, he pulled downward, bending them both enough to free their ends and unlock the cargo hatch. He pushed gently, and the hatch pivoted upward, opening like a vast maw to disgorge Satterfield. To unleash him upon them.

He lay still and listened before moving. A few faint tickings from the engine of the truck and from the Camry parked beside it. The dull whir of the furnace blower. The gurgle of water draining from a sink. The murmur of a voice — indistinct words, but distinctly Brockton’s voice — filtering down through the joists and the flooring above the garage.

Moving fluidly and noiselessly, he rolled onto his side and curled his legs to his chest — coiling — then pivoted into a crouch and eased over the tailgate. By the light of the flashlight, still propped against the wheel well, he sorted his gear, tucking the razor and the pruning shears into his right hip pocket, the coil of baling twine into his right front pocket, the zip ties into his left front pocket, and the fat, flattened roll of duct tape into his left hip pocket.

Once the items were stowed within easy reach, he picked up the flashlight and started around the end of the truck, heading for the front of the garage. Then, on an impulse, he leaned into the bed of the truck once more to retrieve the Domino’s cap and the empty insulated bag. Tucking the bag under his left arm, he donned the cap, twisting and tilting it slightly—a jaunty angle, he thought.

Metal edges and handles glinted as he played the flashlight across the garage’s back wall, where tools were neatly arrayed on pegboards, one on either side of the door that led into the basement. Household tools occupied the pegboard to the left of the door: a Dustbuster, three sizes of pipe wrenches, an assortment of pliers, a set of screwdrivers, rolls of electrical tape, coils of insulated wire. Woodworking tools and lawn-care implements filled the other side: saws, hammers, clamps, planes, chisels, pruning shears, a hatchet, an ax, a sledgehammer, splitting wedges. Christ, Satterfield thought, the fucker’s a one-man Home Depot. He played the flashlight along the knee-high shelf beneath the workbench lining the wall, the beam lingering on a belt sander, a circular saw, and a chain saw. Hell, if he’d known there’d be such a wealth of implements to choose from, he’d have brought fewer things with him. His hands were already full, and he didn’t want to deviate from his initial plan, but he made a mental note to return to the garage in a few hours and pick a few choice items to liven things up, to stave off boredom.

He checked the wall beside the door that led into the house. There was a switch plate with three light switches, plus a doorbell-style button beneath it — the garage-door opener, probably. No keypad, so no security alarm, which he already knew from his scouting trip a few days before, when he’d “fixed” the telephone line.

The basement door was metal, with a dead bolt as well as a lock in the knob. Switching off the flashlight, Satterfield tried the knob. It turned, and when he pushed lightly, the door opened a crack. Idiots.

The large room inside the door — a basement den — was faintly lit by the blue clock of a VCR. Beyond, a hallway bisected the far half of the basement, leading, he recalled, to a bathroom, the kid’s bedroom, and a spare bedroom jammed with junk. Easing down the dark hall, he found all three doors ajar, all three rooms empty. Retracing his steps, he returned to the stairwell and started up, testing each step for any hint of a squeak before committing his full weight to it.

A line of golden light showed beneath the door at the top of the stairs, the sound of voices mingling with the clink of cutlery on ceramic. “Jeff, mind your manners,” he heard the woman say. “Leave a little for the rest of us.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

He conjured up his mental picture of the layout. The door from the basement opened directly across from an exterior door — a sliding-glass door — that led to a patio and a garden in back of the house. To the right of the stairwell was the dining room; to his left, the kitchen. Judging by the direction of the sounds, they were eating in the kitchen.

Satterfield slipped the Mag-Lite into the pizza bag and pulled the pistol from his waistband. Hanging the pizza bag from his left wrist by the nylon strap, he took tender hold of the doorknob and twisted, his thumb moving as slowly as the second hand on a clock. The door opened inward, into the stairwell — much better for him than if it swung outward, into view. He eased it open an inch, then waited and listened. “Bill, have some more salad,” the woman said.

Another careful inch.

“Thanks, hon, but I’m not really hungry.”

A foot this time.

“I’ll take some more,” the boy said.

Satterfield swung the door fully open.

“Please?” prompted Brockton.

“It’s okay, Dad — you don’t have to beg me.” A half second later: “Hey, come on. That was funny.”

“No, not really,” Satterfield said, taking two quick steps — through the doorway and then around the corner, into the kitchen. “Who wants pizza?” Their faces, startled and stupid with surprise, swiveled toward him. Four startled faces, not three. A girl. Who the hell’s the girl? Brockton, seated at the near end of the table, started to his feet, the look of surprise on his face giving way to anger and fear as his gaze shifted from the Domino’s shirt and pizza bag to the face of the man. The face of Satterfield.

Satterfield swung the pizza bag sideways by its strap, the heavy rectangle slicing through the air and smashing into Brockton’s face, the weight of the heavy flashlight inside adding to the force. Brockton toppled backward, knocking over his chair as he fell, and then struggled to rise from the floor. Satterfield kicked him to put him back down, then took a step back and waved the pistol. “I’m sorry to have to break it to you,” he said, “but I lied — I don’t really have pizza for you.”

CHAPTER 46

Decker knew that the detective and the forensic techs didn’t want him there — he was lurking and watching, radiating anguish and rage — but nobody wanted to get in his face about it; nobody wanted to be the jerk that told a guy whose brother had just died to get the hell out of the way. The detective, Kittredge, was squatting beside Bohanan, the senior forensic tech, who was kneeling near the feet of the headless corpse, using tweezers to pluck filaments of wire from the floor.

“Detective?” The voice came from behind Decker — from the direction of the kitchen, where one of the junior forensic techs was taking photos — and floated past him, into the living room, to Kittredge.

“Yeah?” Kittredge looked up, past Decker, toward the kitchen doorway.

“You just want pictures of the garbage? Or do you want me to bag it up and bring it back to the lab?”

“What’s in it?”

“A bunch of pizza, mostly.”

“How much pizza?”

“A lot. Looks like a whole pie.”

“Uneaten?” Decker saw Kittredge frown, furrow his brow, reach up and rub the stubble on his chin. Bohanan glanced up, too, his tweezers poised in midair.

“If it were eaten, it wouldn’t be here. You hungry, detective?”

“Hang on. I’m coming to take a look.” Kittredge didn’t head straight to the kitchen, though; Decker watched as the detective detoured to the near side of the den and squatted beside a battered Domino’s box. Using the tip of a pen, Kittredge lifted the lid. Decker leaned in far enough to see what Kittredge saw: that the box contained three ragged pieces of pizza crust. Kittredge picked up one with a gloved hand. On his way into the kitchen, the detective edged passed Decker, avoiding eye contact.

The tech was right, Decker saw when he followed Kittredge into the kitchen — there was a lot of pizza in the trash. Enough to feed everybody working the scene, and then some. The detective plucked one of the slices from the can — a slice that had no crust — and held the fragment from the box alongside it. The edges fit together perfectly, like pieces of a puzzle. “What the hell?” he heard Kittredge mutter, and then: “Oh shit. No, no, no. Please no.” Drawn by the stir of activity, Bohanan joined Decker in the doorway.

As Decker and the two techs watched, Kittredge reached into the trash can and fished out a navy-blue magic marker, along with a thin piece of cardboard stained with ink. The cardboard had been delicately and precisely incised with two stencil patterns. One was a bird — an eagle — its wings spread, its talons clutching an anchor and a three-pronged spear. The other stencil was a snake with a broad triangular head.

“We’ve got a problem here,” said Kittredge.

“A big problem,” said Bohanan.

Decker didn’t say anything. He was already gone, sprinting for the front door.

“Lieutenant!” Decker heard Cody’s voice from the direction of the SWAT truck. “Hey, Lieutenant! Everything okay? What’s going on in there?” Decker didn’t stop to talk; he didn’t even turn to look; he just lifted a hand and kept running.

As he’d hoped, the keys were still in the ignition of Kittredge’s unmarked Crown Vic. You’d think a detective, a guy who’d probably spent years investigating robberies and auto thefts, would be careful with his keys. Or maybe, Decker thought as he slid across the ripped upholstery and cranked the balky engine, he’s hoping somebody will actually steal this piece of shit. Jerking the gearshift into reverse, he smoked down the driveway, nearly backing over a startled uniformed officer, who was half sitting on the hood of the patrol unit parked in the street. Decker gave a brief wave of apology and roared away, his right hand reaching for the radio as soon as he was traveling straight. “Dispatch, this is Lieutenant Decker. Can you give me a physical address for Dr. Brockton? Bill Brockton — William, maybe? The UT bone doc?”

“Stand by, Lieutenant.”

Decker was hurtling north, which was the only way it was possible to head from the dead end where Satterfield lived. In less than a mile, though — thirty seconds, at the rate he was going — he’d reach an intersection and have to choose: west, toward downtown and UT and most of the Knoxville suburbs, or east, toward Holston Hills and Seymour and Strawberry Plains. “Come on, come on,” he muttered as the stop sign loomed a hundred yards ahead. He considered stopping at the intersection and waiting for the answer, but if he was right — if Satterfield was alive and gunning for Brockton — there wasn’t time. Guessing, Decker took the left turn in a power slide, aiming the car west, envisioning its eight cylinders firing like the barrels of a Gatling gun.

“Dispatch to Decker.” Finally.

“Decker. Go ahead.”

“That address is 3791 Clifton Drive. That’s in Sequoyah Hills.”

“Can you give me directions from Kingston Pike and Neyland?”

“Stand by.”

Decker was less impatient this time; it would take five minutes to reach downtown, and another five from there to Sequoyah. By the time the dispatcher radioed back with directions, the Crown Vic was wailing along the river on Neyland, past the stadium and the basketball arena and the sewage plant. He killed the siren and the blue lights when he turned off Kingston Pike on to Cherokee — not out of respect for the fancy neighborhood’s peace and quiet, but to avoid announcing his arrival. He was swooping down the curving boulevard toward the riverfront when the dispatcher called him. “Lieutenant Decker, do you need backup? Is there a situation at Dr. Brockton’s residence?”

“Negative,” he replied at once. Backup and bureaucracy were the last things he needed. “I just need to drop something off. Hey, is there a patrol unit posted there?”

“Not anymore. Was, anyhow, till a few minutes ago. The watch commander pulled the plug once they got the ID on the suspect’s body.”

“Makes sense.”

A moment later, the radio intruded on him. “Deck, this is Hackworth. Where the hell are you, and why? Am I to understand that you’re no longer at the Satterfield house? That you’re en route to the Brockton house?”

This was trickier. Being evasive with the dispatcher was one thing; lying to the captain was another, far bigger thing. “Yes sir, I am en route there.”

“You? The whole team? What the hell are you doing, Deck? You’re supposed to be guarding the perimeter of the Satterfield house.”

“Yes, sir. My men are still on that. All over it.” He kept talking, improvising, not wanting to give the captain an opening. “It’s a personal errand, sir. Kevin took a class from Dr. Brockton a couple years ago.” That much was true. “The Doc was one of Boomer’s idols.” Also true. “I’m taking something over there, to the Doc. A memento, sort of. Something I think Kevin would’ve wanted me to do.” It was lame, but even that had some truth to it: safety; protection; justice — Kevin would certainly have wanted his big brother to deliver those things.

“Stand by, Deck.”

Shit, thought Decker. He’s calling Kittredge. If Kittredge tells him the ID’s no good, he’ll figure it out. He’ll know what I’m doing, and he’ll tell me to stand down. “Shit.” He said it aloud this time. He didn’t want to stand down; didn’t want to wait for backup. Wouldn’t stand down; wouldn’t wait.

Careening down the final curve, he saw the river glittering through the trees on his left, separated from the road by a ribbon of shoreline park. He slung the car around the traffic circle; around the big, lighted fountain with its geyser of glowing water. Then he reached out and switched off the radio, so he would not hear the order that he was about to violate.

CHAPTER 47

Slumping back against the streetlight, Tyler pressed two fingertips to his neck and checked his watch: 30 heartbeats in 10 seconds; 180 beats per minute. Not his max, but damn good. So why didn’t he feel better? Normally a run this hard — five fast miles, pounding up Cherokee Boulevard to Kingston Pike and then back along the riverfront — would clear his mind completely, put him into a zenlike state of blissful exhaustion. Tonight, though, all he had was the exhaustion, not the zenlike bliss. Zenlike bliss? What the hell was that? He couldn’t even remember it, let alone feel it.

Shit, he thought, I have to do it. He’d been fighting it, resisting it for three days, even though he knew it was the right thing. He pushed off from the lamppost and found himself jogging — slogging, more like — up a side street, away from the gravel lot at the end of the boulevard where his truck was parked. Away from his truck; toward Dr. B’s house. Sweaty and sticky though he was, he couldn’t put it off any longer; he had to tell Brockton he was quitting. There was no guarantee that quitting the program would make it possible to fix what had gone wrong between him and Roxanne; what was going wrong within himself. But staying in the program — walking through the valley of the shadow of death, again and again — would almost certainly wreck things forever. “You might think it’s hypocritical of me,” Rox had written to him in her last note. “After all, as a doctor, I’ll spend decades keeping company with death. But I’ll be pushing against it — opposing it, not embracing it.”

Tyler had tried to figure out how Dr. B did it: The guy was up to his elbows in death and dismemberment, yet he had one of the sunniest dispositions Tyler had ever seen. How did he do it? How did he keep from being dragged down by the cases, by the oppressive weight of evil? Damned if I know, he thought.

The Brocktons’ house was two blocks off the boulevard, in a pocket of houses that were much smaller and less showy than the mansions along Cherokee. The house was tucked deep in the lot, surrounded by maples and hemlocks. From the curb Tyler wasn’t sure anyone was home — the front windows were dark — so he jogged down the driveway and toward the back, to check for lights in the kitchen, dining room, den, or master bedroom. Tyler had fond memories of the master bedroom — of the seven Edenic days and nights he and Roxanne had spent there, ostensibly keeping an eye on the place, but in reality having eyes only for one another. Lotta water under the bridge since then, he thought — most of it muddy and malevolent, or so it seemed at the moment.

Parked halfway down the darkened driveway was an old Corolla; was that what Dr. B had ended up buying for Jeff, after Tyler refused to sell the truck? Tyler stopped and peered through the driver’s window. A five-speed; good, he thought.

Now that he’d stopped moving again, his legs turned leaden, and a sharp pain began gnawing at the meniscus cartilage on the inside of his left knee. He thought about turning tail, waiting until tomorrow, catching Dr. B in his office first thing. But the prospect of leaving things hanging for another night — another sleepless night — was unbearable, so he turned toward the house again, limping past the garage and up the stairs to the backyard and the patio off the kitchen. Pitiful, he thought. Not just the limp, but the whole sorry mess he’d made of things, first with Roxanne and now with Dr. B.

Golden light poured through the windows of the kitchen and back door, pooling on the flagstones of the patio, and Tyler suddenly felt himself drowning in that pool of light and warmth, drowning with longing and loneliness. A figure — Jeff? — emerged from the stairwell and turned toward the kitchen. He listened for voices, but the sounds inside the house were drowned by the noise of the heat pump, its compressor whooshing in the shrubbery beside him.

A picnic table flanked the near side of the patio, and Tyler sat on one of the benches to compose his thoughts, compose his verbal resignation. He considered and rejected half a dozen different opening lines.

Quit stalling, he berated himself. Just knock, and get it over with.

CHAPTER 48

Satterfield glanced from face to face, reveling in how well things were going — better, even, than he’d imagined they would. The three Brocktons and the girl were seated around the kitchen table in a bizarre variation on family dinner: four half-finished plates of pasta and salad in front of them, duct tape over their mouths, zip ties cinching their ankles and wrists to the frames of the ladderback chairs.

The girl had been a surprise. “She has nothing to do with this,” Brockton had tried arguing. “Neither does Kathleen or Jeff. This is just between you and me. Let them go.” Satterfield had cocked his head, pretending to consider the stupid request; then he’d smiled, shaken his head, and yanked the tape tight across Brockton’s mouth. The girl was a juicy little bonus; a windfall apple. Manna from heaven, he thought.

Brockton would be the last to die, of course. A big part of his suffering — though far, far from all of his suffering — would be to witness the agonies of the others, knowing that he himself was to blame. Utterly and solely to blame.

Laying the gun on the end of the table, Satterfield reached into his back pocket for the gardening shears. He held them toward the light, squeezing the spring-loaded handles, admiring the tight precision with which the blades closed and opened. Their curved edges — the upper blade convex, the lower one concave — reminded him of a cartoon fish, grinning with its oversized mouth. The coiled spring that pushed the handles apart made a soft, musical squeak each time the cartoon-fish mouth opened or closed. Pointing the tool toward each of them in turn, he recited, “Eeny meeny miny mo…” He paused and looked at Brockton again. “Or do you want to choose? Tell me — shall I start with the girl?” He smiled as Brockton grunted and shook his head frantically. “No? With your son, then?” He leaned across the table, the shears opening in his hand as he dropped the jaws below the table and toward the boy’s crotch.

“Nnnnhhh,” shrilled Brockton, struggling and thrashing so hard that his chair threatened to tip.

“No? Not him? Okay, whatever you say.” Satterfield stepped to Kathleen’s side and snipped the zip tie binding her right wrist to the chair. “I don’t know who I’ll send this one to,” he said, taking hold of her hand, lifting it by the little finger. “But I’ll think of someone.” He squeezed, and the handles of the shears came together, and the grinning fish closed its jaws on her finger.

CHAPTER 49

Quit stalling, Tyler berated himself again, and forced himself to stand and walk to the patio door. He was raising his hand to knock when he froze, his knuckle an inch from the door. On the other side of the glass, Jeff had reached out and taken hold of a small, slender hand — Kathleen’s hand, Tyler assumed — and clasped the pinky finger between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Then he turned slightly — a few degrees, no more — but it was enough for Tyler to see that it was not Jeff at all. As his brain scrambled to interpret the data and identify the face, he felt a rush of panic. A moment later, his conscious mind caught up with the faster circuitry of his subconscious, and he recognized the face: the murder suspect, Satterfield! Just then he saw Satterfield reach toward Kathleen’s finger with his right hand. Light glinted on steel, and then Kathleen’s arm swung free, arced toward the floor, slinging blood as it dropped. Satterfield still clasped her little finger in his left hand, a pair of bloody gardening shears in the other. Her head jerked, and through her nostrils and the tape across her mouth came a muffled, whinnying scream.

Tyler gasped and staggered backward as if he’d been struck. He fought back the impulse to scream and the need to vomit, knowing that revealing his presence was almost certain to trigger a massacre inside. Think, he commanded himself. Think! God, why hadn’t he gotten a cell phone when Roxanne had suggested it? He spun, scanning in vain for the glimmer of lights in neighboring houses. Should he run back to the street and start banging on doors? Was there even time for that? How long would it take for the police to get here in force — ten minutes? half an hour? The image of the arrow-pierced bodies flashed into his mind — two brutal deaths in quick succession — and he knew that the Brocktons might not have ten minutes. It’s up to me, he thought. I have to stop it. But how? Jesus God, how? Satterfield surely had a gun — maybe more than one. Tyler had nothing, not even a set of keys. Sweaty running clothes and his bare hands, that was all he had. It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough.

CHAPTER 50

I heard a chorus of muffled screams, including my own, when Satterfield cut off Kathleen’s finger. My heart was racing and my chest was heaving; with the duct tape over my mouth, I couldn’t get enough air, and felt close to blacking out. Calm down, I commanded myself. Calm down. Breathe. Think. If you panic instead of thinking, everybody dies. At death scenes — even gruesome ones, like the woman’s body pinned to the tree by arrows — I was generally able to distance myself from the horror; to look at the scene as a puzzle. Could I do that now? I didn’t know, but it seemed our only hope.

Satterfield laid Kathleen’s finger on the table, along with the gardening shears, and picked up his gun again. I forced myself to observe his face, his movements, his surroundings, as if he were a research subject.

Over his shoulder, I suddenly glimpsed movement — a reflection in the sliding-glass door? No, I realized with a shock. Something — someone — outside the door, out on the patio. I waited and watched, tuning out the sights and sounds and horrors closer at hand. There it was again — a face! My God — Tyler’s face! Perhaps there was a glimmer of hope.

But it was faint, and it was fleeting. We didn’t have much time — maybe not even time for Tyler to go next door and call the police. If the police did come, and if Satterfield heard them, he’d kill us swiftly, before they could stop him.

It’s up to Tyler, I thought desperately, and then thought despairingly, How? It would take a miracle. The word itself—miracle—gave me an idea. It was an absurd idea, but it was the only idea I had.

I shifted my focus back to Satterfield. I had to get his attention; I had to persuade him to take the tape off my mouth. I grunted his name, as best I could through the tape: Nnn-nn-nnn. NNN-nn-nnn. He looked at me quizzically. NNN-nn-nnn!

Now his expression changed to amusement. “Are you speaking to me?” I nodded, praying. “You have something important to say?” I nodded again. “What could you possibly say that would interest me now? ‘I’m sorry?’ Too late. ‘Kill me first?’ Not a chance.” I shook my head firmly. “You really mean it, don’t you? You actually think you have something to say.” I nodded. Don’t look desperate, I urged myself. Look strong. Look smart. Look like you know something he needs to know. “Tell you what,” he said finally. “We’ll play a game. I’ll let you talk for ten seconds. If you scream, I shoot your wife. If you bore me, I shoot your son. Deal?”

I nodded again. It was an easy deal to make; we were all dead anyhow.

With his left hand, he pressed the muzzle of the gun to my temple. With his right, he picked up the gardening shears and brought the tips of the blades to my face. For a moment I expected him to cut off my nose, but he turned the tool sideways and slit the duct tape. I drew a deep breath — the air felt precious — and then I began to speak, softly at first, then gradually louder: “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, with knowledge of good and evil. And the Lord looked at the garden, and he drove them from it.” Satterfield stared at me as if I’d lost my mind, and perhaps I had. I wasn’t counting the seconds, but he hadn’t shot anyone — not yet, at least. The next part was the important part. Please be out there, Tyler, I prayed. Please listen. Please understand. “And in the garden he placed an angel,” I went on, with rising fervor, like an old-time preacher. “An angel with spreading wings and a mighty sword. So that if any evildoer should come therein, the angel could fly at him with the sword, and smite the evil one, like the whirling hammer of the Lord God Almighty.”

CHAPTER 51

Jesus God, thought Tyler, his mind racing and his heart pounding as Brockton’s ravings — his coded message — sank in. How many years since Tyler’s last track meet? Three? No, four: his sophomore year of undergrad. Could he even do it anymore? No point worrying about it; given the situation, it was do or die. More like try and die, he thought grimly.

Squatting beside the concrete angel in the garden — this had to be what Brockton meant — he curled his fingers beneath the wings and hoisted the statue a few inches off the ground, swinging it slowly back and forth like a pendulum, getting the feel of it. It didn’t feel right: The wings were too wide; his hands were too far apart, and the angel’s head was pressing into his belly. Worse, he could tell that if he released one wing before the other — even a microsecond before the other — the statue would tumble out of control and miss its mark. Frowning, he laid it down and studied it, circling it like a wary dog. Halfway around, he had an idea. Squatting again, he gripped the angel by the thin, circular base beneath the feet and straightened, then swayed to set it swinging, this time head down. Better, he thought. Much better. The mass and balance weren’t exactly the same as the hammer’s — the statue felt much heavier; maybe thirty pounds rather than sixteen — but he wouldn’t be throwing for distance, only for accuracy. It would do. It had to do.

He shifted his grip slightly, propping the statue on the patio as he did, the tips of the wings and the sword forming a temporary tripod. The fall of Lucifer, he thought; then — straightening and lifting once more—Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

He did a test throw in slow motion, mentally coaching himself through the movements: the swaying windup, then the four-and-a-half spins — the accelerating dervish dance needed to power the flight of the angel, the hammer of God. Halfway through the practice spins, he stumbled and nearly fell, regaining his balance just in time to avoid a noisy crash. Who are you kidding? he asked himself scornfully, but then he heard another voice — a kinder voice: his high-school coach’s voice wafting across a decade, cheerfully scolding him in exactly the same words he’d used a hundred times or more at practice: Turn off your brain, Tyler. It’s like making love, son — if you’re thinking, you’re not doing it right.

The remembered admonition calmed Tyler; it even made him smile briefly. He drew a long, slow breath, feeling and hearing the air: rushing through his nostrils, flowing down the back of his throat, filling his lungs. He drew another, and a familiar, distinctive mixture of oxygen and adrenaline made its way into his muscles, awakening sensations and skills that lay deep and dormant within him. Turning his back on the window, he began to rock, swinging the statue to and fro, in pendulum arcs that gradually rose higher and higher: left, right, left, right, the wingtips and sword almost grazing the ground at the bottom of each arc. After half a dozen swings, the arc reached shoulder height on each side, and Tyler boosted the angel over the top: above his left shoulder, over his head, and then swooping down to the right. As it swooped he began to spin, shifting the plane of the statue’s motion from vertical toward horizontal. It swung outward now, angling away from his body as he spun. Whirling faster and faster, he leaned back, leaned into the turns, he and the angel counterbalancing one another like skaters or dancers in a dizzying duet — two turns, three turns, four — the winged figure straining to take flight.

As Tyler completed his fourth turn, the back of his left shoe came down on a pea-sized pebble. Pinched between his heel and the patio, the pebble shot free, pinging against the glass of the sliding door. It hit just as Tyler came out of the turn, whirling toward the house, toward his release point — the point where he would relax his fingers and release the statue; where he would let the angel take flight.

At the edge of his whirling field of vision, Tyler suddenly saw Satterfield spinning, too: spinning toward Tyler, a nightmarish reflection of Tyler’s own motion.

Time slowed; Tyler’s vision narrowed, tunneled, excluding all but three things: the sheen of the glass door, the malice on Satterfield’s face, and the pistol in the outstretched, tightening grip.

CHAPTER 52

As I watched in horror, Satterfield spun toward Tyler, raised the pistol, and fired.

The glass exploded — the room itself seemed to explode — and then Satterfield was lifted off his feet. He flew backward, slamming against the far wall of the dining room, hurled there—pinned there — by the angel from the garden. The wing tips pierced his wrists, pinning him to the wall like Christ on the cross, like the woman against the tree. The angel’s head was pressed tightly against Satterfield’s chest, the tip of the sword nestled in the hollow of his throat.

I glanced across the table at Kathleen, who was staring at the bizarre tableau, her shock at losing her finger momentarily forgotten, it seemed. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed more movement outside. A man — his running shorts and T-shirt seeming surreally out of place here amid the carnage — stepped through the jagged, glass-fringed opening where the sliding door had just exploded. It was Tyler, looking as startled and stunned as I felt.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he gasped. “You’re gonna be okay.”

“Tyler, thank God,” I said. “Are you hit? Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

He knelt beside Kathleen and lifted her dangling, dripping hand. “Jesus. Jesus, Mrs. B, I can’t believe he did that.” He snatched a napkin from the floor and wrapped it around the stump of her finger, then raised the hand and angled it across her chest, resting it on her left shoulder. “Can you hold it here?” She stared, wild-eyed and confused. “Can you hold your hand up like that — just for a minute? — while I find something better to stop the bleeding?” Slowly her eyes focused on his face, and she nodded. “Good. That’s really, really good, Mrs. B. Hang in there. You’re gonna be just fine.” Standing, he scanned the kitchen, then headed to the freezer. He opened the door, and I heard ice clattering as he rummaged in the bin.

Satterfield groaned and twitched. I was surprised that he was alive; I had thought — and hoped — that the statue had struck him with enough force to crush his chest and stop his heart. But no: Satterfield shook his head and opened his eyes, staring at the angel that pinned him to the wall. I saw him wince as he strained to free his arms, then — to my horror — I saw him lift his feet from the floor, flexing his legs to bring his feet up to the base of the statue, working them underneath it for leverage. “Tyler!” I yelled.

Tyler turned, the freezer door still open. “Shit,” he said, skidding back across the kitchen in a trail of ice cubes. He scooped up the gun that had flown from Satterfield’s hand when the statue slammed into him. “Stop,” he ordered, raising the gun. Satterfield froze, but he didn’t lower his legs. “I will totally shoot you, asshole,” Tyler added. “Put your feet down—now—or I will gladly shoot your balls off.”

Satterfield’s feet slid from the statue and his legs eased down to the floor. Tyler kept the pistol trained on him, his hand shaking.

Suddenly I saw another flicker of movement in the back doorway — a face appearing and quickly withdrawing. Then a man in green military fatigues — a soldier? a cop? — stepped into the opening, dropped into a shooter’s crouch, and aimed a pistol at Tyler’s head. “No!” I screamed again. Tyler stared at me in confusion. I flung my head and shoulders backward, rocking the front legs of my chair off the floor, then jerked forward with all the strength I possessed. The chair bucked onto its front legs; I hung there, balanced at the tipping point, then — with agonizing slowness — toppled forward: toppled toward Tyler, falling against him, my head slamming into his belly just as I heard a gunshot from the doorway, and another, and three more in quick succession.

Tyler doubled over and collapsed onto me. Facedown on the floor, I could not see if he was alive or dead.

CHAPTER 53

Decker stepped through the doorway, the gun still raised, wondering what the hell had just happened; wondering what the hell was happening still. Brockton and Satterfield lay tangled together on the floor, thanks to Brockton spoiling his shot, knocking Satterfield down, the guy’s head snapping downward just as Deck was squeezing off the shots. All five rounds had missed; all five had burrowed instead into — what the fuck? — an angel, a goddamned angel, which was holding someone, was pinning someone, against the back wall of the dining room. Someone who had tats on both of his raised forearms; someone who had the face of the suspect, Satterfield. Christ, Deck realized, nearly throwing up when it hit him, I almost shot the wrong guy.

He stepped to the far end of the table and pressed the muzzle of his weapon against Satterfield’s forehead: the right guy’s forehead this time, no doubt about it. As he did, he heard the keening of sirens, faint at first, their pitch and volume rising as they drew nearer. “This is for Kevin,” Deck said softly, his finger pressing the trigger once more. “My dead brother.”

“Wait,” urged a voice. Brockton’s voice, from the floor. “Don’t shoot him. That’s not the way.”

“An eye for an eye,” said Decker. “A life for a life. He owes lots of lives.”

“It’ll ruin you if you do it,” said Brockton. “It would make you a murderer, too. Just like him.”

“Not just like him,” said Decker, the gun still on the guy’s forehead.

“He’ll go to prison for life,” said Brockton. “Maybe get the death penalty. Let the court do that. It’s too big a load for you to carry.”

“I’m willing to take that chance,” Decker answered, his finger tightening.

“Deck?” He heard another voice speaking now — the voice of the watch commander, Captain Hackworth, calling his name softly from the shattered glass door. “Hey, Deck, I’m coming in,” Hackworth said evenly. “How about you let me take your sidearm now, okay?” Decker felt a hand on his shoulder, then saw another hand reaching in, fingers encircling the barrel of the gun. “You got him, Deck,” the captain said as he gently raised the barrel and then freed the gun from Decker’s grasp. “You got him. It’s over.”

“It’s not over till I say it’s over,” Decker heard Satterfield hiss. “I’ll be back to finish this.”

Decker felt his fingers clench, and wished the gun were still in his hand; still pressed to Satterfield’s forehead.