The Breaking Point

Chapter 17

The black FBI SUV — the one that had whisked me from the press conference to the airport — screeched to the curb of San Diego International at 1:09. I was cutting it close; my flight was at 1:44, but I could see the Delta ticket counter just inside the glass doors, and the line was short. “Want me to wait?” asked the driver, another of Prescott’s seemingly infinite supply of young, well-groomed agents.

“Nah, I’ll be fine. Thanks for the lift.” I hopped out, scurried inside, and got in line with my bag and the plastic bin of teeth and bone shards. Only two people were ahead of me, and three ticket agents were working the counter. Piece of cake, I thought, hoping that the security screeners wouldn’t freak out and waylay me over the remains. One of the agents finished checking in a passenger, but then, instead of calling “next,” he turned and walked through a door, disappearing from view. I glanced at my watch; it was now 1:12. Suddenly nervous, I divided my attention between the two remaining ticket agents on duty, willing them to hurry. One of the agents was a sour-faced older woman who wasted no time on pleasantries; the other, a pretty twentysomething, chatted and laughed with her customer, a lanky young man whose British accent she seemed to find charming. Sour Face quickly dispensed with one of the two people ahead of me; incredibly, Pretty Girl continued chatting with the Brit as if she had the entire afternoon to devote to the conversation. “Oh, I love London,” she gushed. “It’s so much more continental than our American cities.” Oh, please, I thought, and then — checking my watch again—Oh, please hurry! Her colleague, Sour Face, sent another traveler on his way and took the next in line. There was no longer anyone ahead of me, but I was running out of time. I waved my arms to catch the girl’s attention; it took a while, but finally she looked at me, and I tapped my watch. “Sir, I’ll be with you in a moment,” she said, her voice less animated than when she was chatting with the Brit. The man looked around and seemed to have a clearer sense of my problem, or more compassion, for he took his boarding pass, thanked her, and then gestured me toward the counter.

“Sorry to rush you,” I said, handing her my itinerary, “but I’m cutting it pretty close here.”

She studied it, frowning. “Sir, that flight leaves at 1:44,” she said. “That’s less than thirty minutes from now. I’m sorry, but I can’t check you in.”

“My watch says 1:14,” I said. I was fibbing, but only by two minutes. “And I’m not checking baggage. All I have is this carry-on.”

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s 1:15. And the thirty-minute cutoff is a TSA rule. Homeland Security.”

“Come on. Sixty seconds. Besides, I was in line with time to spare. If you hadn’t been flirting with that guy ahead of me, I’d have been standing here two minutes ago.”

She flushed, but she didn’t budge; in fact, her expression hardened. “Look at me,” I pleaded. “Do I look like a terrorist? I’m a college professor.” Fumbling at my waist, I unclipped my TBI shield and laid it on the counter. “Look. I’m a consultant to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I just came from helping the FBI. I’m one of the good guys.”

But she had stopped making eye contact. “Sir, I’m sorry. I don’t make the rules. The best I can do is book you on the next available flight.”

I sighed. “When is that?”

“Tomorrow morning at six-thirty.”

I stared, dumbfounded. “You’re kidding me, right?” The look she gave me indicated that she wasn’t. “It’s still lunchtime. You mean to tell me there’s no way to get to Knoxville — no way even to start toward Knoxville — until tomorrow?”

“That’s correct, sir. Do you want me to book you on that six-thirty A.M. flight?” Her fingers clattered rapidly over the keyboard. “That would get you into Knoxville at… 3:53 P.M.”

Unbelievable, I thought. The idea of hanging around, killing time, for the next sixteen hours seemed unbearable. There had to be a way to get home sooner. “What about Los Angeles?”

“What about it? What is it you’re asking, sir?”

“How far away is L.A.?”

She shrugged, looking as if she might be getting irritated. “Two, two and a half hours by car. Fifty minutes by air.”

“Surely LAX has more flights today. When’s the next plane to LAX? If I caught that, could I get home tonight?”

Her fingers clacked and clattered, with more force this time. “The next flight to Los Angeles is at 1:46.”

“I’ll take it. Get me on it.”

“Sir, it’s now 1:17. That flight leaves in twenty-nine minutes. I can’t put you on it.”

“But I was standing right here at 1:15. Thirty-one minutes before the flight.”

“But you weren’t booked on that flight, sir. You still aren’t. And you can’t be — it’s not possible. Those are the rules, sir.”

I wanted to scream. Instead, through clenched teeth, I said, “And when is the next flight to L.A. that I can be on?”

More furious keyboarding. “Four P.M. Arriving 4:48.”

“And when could I get the hell out of Los Angeles for Knoxville?”

By now she, too, had given up all pretense of cheery politeness. “There’s an eleven P.M. to Detroit, with connections to Atlanta.”

“Come on, there has to be something earlier than that.”

“Yes, sir. There’s a 1:45 flight from LAX to Atlanta. But obviously you can’t take that. Then there’s nothing eastbound until eleven o’clock tonight.”

“Christ,” I muttered. “And what time would I get to Knoxville? If nothing went wrong in Detroit?”

“At 10:31 tomorrow morning.”

I no longer wanted to scream. Now I wanted to weep. Feeling more defeated than I had in ages, I fished out my wallet and sighed, “I’ll take it.”

Exiting the terminal at McGhee Tyson Airport the next morning — after spending what felt like an eternity shoehorned in the last row of seats to Detroit and then again to Knoxville, directly in front of lavatories that seemed not to have been cleaned in weeks — I was stunned when I stepped into the swelter of Tennessee’s summer. On the sauna-dry slopes of Otay Mountain, my sweat had evaporated almost instantly; here, it was as if I had swum into a steam bath. Or a sweat bath. How soon we forget, I thought, hunching a shoulder to mop my brow. But how fast we’re reminded.

Heading toward the parking deck, I suddenly stopped, muttering, “Well, crap.” My truck wasn’t in the parking deck, I’d just remembered; it was parked a half mile away, at Cherokee Aviation, the charter air terminal where the FBI’s Gulfstream had swooped down to fetch me. Looking to my left, across a long ribbon of hot asphalt, I could just make out the truck, shimmering in the distance like a mirage. Slinging the strap of my boxy bag over my sleep-deprived shoulder, I began the trudge.

Ten sweaty minutes later, my sodden shirt plastered to my skin, I unlocked and opened my truck — the rubber weather stripping made a ripping sound as it pulled away from the hot metal of the door frame — and tucked the bag behind the front seat, then cranked the engine and put the air-conditioning on high. Leaving the truck idling, I stepped inside Cherokee to mop off and use the courtesy phone to call Kathleen, as my cell phone’s battery had died somewhere between California and Tennessee. But the courtesy phone appeared to be surgically grafted to the ear of a commercial pilot, a glossy-haired, pretty-boy Casanova type in a pseudomilitary uniform. I tried hovering, hoping he’d take the hint and finish his conversation; instead, he turned his back and cupped a hand around the mouthpiece. Judging by his quiet murmuring and occasional chuckles, the pilot wasn’t filing a flight plan; he appeared to be cooing to a woman he had just bedded or, more likely, hoped to bed, as soon as his next flight was over. Too weary to wait, I returned to my truck and headed toward campus. I would check in at my office, then go surprise Kathleen at hers.

I passed the medical center and crossed the Tennessee River, flowing green and welcoming beneath the high span of the Buck Karnes Bridge. Looking to my right — upstream, between the hospital and a condominium complex — I saw the three-acre patch of woods housing the Body Farm. Across the river, a bit farther upstream, loomed the towering oval of Neyland Stadium, which housed the dingy offices and classrooms and labs of the Anthropology Department.

The river separating these two odd offices of mine was, for reasons I didn’t entirely fathom, a powerful touchstone for me. As I crossed the channel on the high span of concrete, I filled my lungs and exhaled loudly — the sound somewhere between a sigh and a hum — feeling myself only now to have truly landed. Home, I thought. Smiling, I turned onto Neyland Drive and headed upriver, as reflexively and instinctively as some four-wheeled salmon. Making my way to the stadium, I threaded along the one-lane service road at the base of the grandstands and stopped beside the service tunnel that led to the field’s north end zone.

Reaching behind the seat, I unzipped my bag and removed the bin of teeth and bones, then entered the dim, echoing concrete stairwell and headed up one flight of steps: up to my private office, my sanctuary, my hideaway; the place where I holed up when I needed to focus on science and forensics, not bureaucracy. I set the bin on the hallway floor and turned the key in the lock of my door, tugging gently as I twisted, to loosen the deadbolt from the grip of the warped door frame. When the bolt rasped and thunked free, I turned the knob and hipped the door open, then bent down, picked up the bin, and set it on my desk. Then I dialed Peggy, my secretary, who kept watch over the Anthropology Department’s main office, a hundred yards away — all the way at the opposite end of the stadium, beneath the south end zone’s grandstands. Peggy answered halfway through the first ring. “Anthropology,” she said, her voice sounding strange and strained.

“Hi, honey, I’m home,” I joked, hoping to ease the tension I heard in her voice.

“Good God, where have you been?” Over the past dozen years, I’d heard Peggy sound testy many times. But this was beyond testy — miles beyond it; light-years beyond it.

“San Diego, remember?” I was starting to feel some anxiety myself. “You don’t sound too happy to hear from me.”

“Three hours ago I would have been happy to hear from you,” she snapped. “Yesterday you told me you’d be in first thing this morning. I’ve been trying to call you for hours.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “There was a problem with my flight. And my phone died. I just got in. What’s wrong? Should I come up?”

“You mean to tell me you’re on campus?” It sounded more like an accusation than a question.

“Well, I am now,” I hedged. “My flight landed twenty minutes ago. I drove straight here. Came in the back door. Just now. Literally this minute. I’m down in my other office.”

“Would you please come to this office instead? Quickly?” The sarcasm would have dripped from her voice if the iciness of her tone hadn’t flash-frozen it first.

“You’ve got me feeling kinda gun-shy,” I said. “Want to tell me what this is about?”

“There is a television news crew here from Channel Four in Nashville. They have been camped in my office for the past three hours. Please come immediately. If not sooner.”

Chapter 18

As I walked in the door of the departmental office, Peggy glowered at me from behind her desk as an attractive young woman—of Italian ancestry? no, Greek, I guessed — stood up and turned toward me. I put on what I hoped would pass for a courteous smile. “Hello, I’m Dr. Bill Brockton,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

She held out her hand. “Dr. Brockton, I’m Athena Demopoulos, Eyewitness Four News.” Her handshake was firm — aggressively firm, as if she were trying to prove something. She nodded slightly toward a pale young man behind her; his frumpy clothes were a stark contrast to her chic, tailored suit. “This is Rick Walters, my cameraman.” His handshake, like his clothes, was much more relaxed than hers.

“Ms. Demopoulos, I’m sorry I’ve kept you waiting,” I said. “My flight was delayed, and my phone was dead.” Pulling out my pocket calendar, I flipped it open and scanned the current day’s empty page. “Did we have an appointment that I failed to write down?”

“No, we didn’t. We’re investigating a news story that’s breaking now. It has come to our attention that you’re conducting experiments with human bodies.”

“We are indeed,” I said cheerily. “I’m not sure I’d call that ‘breaking news’—we’ve been doing it for more than a decade. I guess news travels slowly from here in the hinterlands.” I smiled again. “You might have gotten wind of my research a little sooner if the prevailing winds blew from east to west instead of west to east.” I winked to make sure she got the joke.

She frowned; I couldn’t tell whether she was confused or upset. “I don’t think you understand the gravity of the story,” she said. “If you’ll let me finish, I can make it clear to you. It has come to our attention that you’re conducting experiments on the bodies of military veterans. Men who put their lives on the line to defend our American way of life. Do you deny that?”

Her question took me totally off guard. “No, I don’t deny it, but I can’t confirm it, either,” I said.

“Don’t be coy, Dr. Brockton.”

“I’m not being coy,” I said. “I’m being blindsided. I have zero information on this. If you’ve got any information at all, you’ve got more than I do. How about you start by telling me what you’ve heard, and where you heard it? How did the story come to you, and why?”

“I can’t reveal my sources,” she said, her voice a mixture of self-importance and smugness. “But they’re quite credible, I assure you. I have the names of at least four veterans whose bodies were sent to you.” She rattled off the names. “Are they here? Yes or no? If they are, please tell our viewers — and the families of these four men — what kind of experiments you’re doing on them, and why?”

Somehow a microphone had materialized in Athena Demopoulos’s hand and had positioned itself directly in front of my face. Meanwhile, the cameraman had hoisted a video camera to his shoulder, and the blinking red light above the lens led me to believe that he was filming. Filming me. I shrugged, shaking my head. “I don’t know if they’re here.”

She gave me a look of disgusted disbelief. “You’re saying you don’t even keep track of whose bodies you’re experimenting on?”

I winced at the phrase experimenting on—it made me sound like Josef Mengele, the Nazi death-camp doctor. “No, I’m not saying that at all. What I am saying is that we don’t refer to our research subjects by name. When bodies come in, we give them case numbers — to protect their privacy — and we always refer to them by those numbers.” She looked puzzled, so I explained. “For example, suppose a funeral home brings over a donated body this afternoon — a TV reporter, let’s say, whose story on the joys of skydiving didn’t turn out quite the way she’d planned.” She looked startled by the scenario, which was okay by me. “She’d be the thirty-eighth body donated to us in 2004. That means we — my graduate students and I — would refer to her, and would think of her, as ‘38–04,’ not as Melissa or Carissa or Athena or whatever her name was.” She no longer looked startled; now she looked angry. “My point,” I said, “is that we do keep track of the bodies we have — very careful track — but we also keep their names confidential. So if you’ll write down the names, I’ll go check our master file.” She eyed me suspiciously, as if I were trying to pull a fast one on her, but then pulled out a small notepad and began scrawling names. “By the way,” I added, “did your secret source give you the dates these bodies supposedly arrived?” She looked up from the notepad, scowling. “Because if you can narrow down the time, it won’t take me as long to check the files. Which means I can answer your question sooner.” She added a year beside each name, then ripped the page from the pad.

Before handing me the paper, she held the microphone in my face again. “You haven’t answered my other question yet,” she said. “Why are you experimenting on these bodies? Have you no respect for the dead?”

“Ms. Stephanopolus—”

“Demopoulos,” she corrected sharply.

“Ms. Demopoulos,” I resumed, “I assure you, I have enormous respect for the dead.”

“You toss them on the ground and let them rot,” she shot back. “You call that respect?”

“I call it research. We don’t ‘toss’ them; we lay them. Carefully. Respectfully. We conduct scientific research on human decomposition during the extended postmortem interval. It’s never been done before.”

“Maybe there’s a good reason for that,” she countered.

“Nobody ever flew before,” I shot back, “until the Wright brothers did. Were they wrong to study flight?”

She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Instead, she looked down, her gaze traveling down to my left hand. Then she locked eyes with me again, her expression now smug. “I see you’re wearing a wedding ring, Dr. Brockton,” she said. “If your wife died, would you take her to your Body Farm? Would you throw her in the woods, for the bugs and the buzzards to eat?”

If she’d been a man, I might have clenched my fist and hit her. Instead I clenched my jaw and silently counted to ten. Then I asked, in as neutral a tone as I could muster, “Are you married, Ms. Demopoulos?”

Her eyes hardened. “That’s a personal question. I don’t discuss my personal life on camera.”

“Neither do I,” I said coolly. I reached out and took the names from her. “Now, if you’ll have a seat, I’ll go check the files.”

I hurried down the long, curving corridor beneath the stadium to my other office, at the far end. The walk did me good — partly because it got me away from the reporter, and partly because it allowed me to let off a bit of steam in a way that was more constructive than taking a swing at a TV reporter. I thought back to the way the Fox 5 reporter in San Diego had ambushed Prescott, and I envied the FBI agent his coolness under fire.

Ten minutes after leaving the news crew cooling their heels in Peggy’s office, I returned and handed the list back to Athena Demopoulos. I had put a check mark beside each of the names, confirming that all four bodies had indeed been sent to us. “Your sources did get the names right,” I told her, “but not the context.” I motioned toward the open door of my office. “Please. Come in, and let me explain a little more about what we do.” She and the cameraman followed me in. He set up a tripod, latched the camera onto it, and gave her a “ready” nod.

She laid a microphone on the desk. “You admit that you’re experimenting on the bodies of military veterans,” she began. “How do you justify that?”

“Let me back up and give you a little background first,” I began. “So you’ll have some context. We get bodies in two ways. From two different sources. About half are donated — in a person’s will, or by their next of kin — in exactly the same way bodies are donated to Vanderbilt Medical School, there in Nashville.” She seemed on the verge of interrupting, but I held up a finger and kept talking. “Others — and this is the category that includes the four veterans you’ve asked me about — are bodies that are unclaimed after death. These come to us from medical examiners all over the state.” As she processed this piece of information, I hurried on. “If a body goes unclaimed — maybe the person is an unidentified John or Jane Doe; maybe they’ve got no relatives; maybe their relatives are estranged — whatever the reason, if a body’s unclaimed, the cost of burying that body falls on the county where the death occurred. Now, bear with me just a minute more. It costs about a thousand dollars to bury a body, and a lot of Tennessee counties don’t have that kind of money to spare. If they send the body to me, it’s a win-win: They save money, and our research program grows. And the more research we do — the better we understand how bodies decay after death — the more help we can give police in solving murder cases.”

“How? How does letting veterans’ bodies rot in the woods help solve murders?”

She wasn’t making this easy. I took a breath to collect myself before going on. “By giving us more data on which to base our estimates of time since death. Our research lets us tell the police, with a high degree of scientific certainty, how long ago someone was killed. By comparing the decomposition of the victim’s body with what we’ve observed in our research — and by taking variables like temperature, humidity, and so forth into account — we can help the police narrow down the time of the murder, to within a matter of days or even hours. Earlier, you sounded distressed when you mentioned bugs. Even the bugs are an important part of our research. By knowing what bugs come to feed on a body — and when, and how fast they grow — we can be even more precise.”

Her cameraman, I noticed, looked interested in this, but her face registered nothing but disgust. “You still haven’t explained why you’re conducting these experiments on the bodies of U.S. military veterans.”

“It’s not like I’m seeking the bodies of veterans. Look, when a funeral home or a medical examiner sends me a body, I don’t do a background check. I don’t investigate whether the deceased was a veteran, just like I don’t investigate whether he was a priest, or a prisoner, or a teacher, or a TV reporter. I say, ‘Thank you very much,’ and I assign a case number and a research question, and I try to learn something from that body.”

“But why don’t you think veterans deserve a dignified burial?”

“I do.” I turned my palms up. “I think everybody deserves a dignified burial. The last thing I’m trying to do is keep a veteran — or anyone else, for that matter — from getting a decent, dignified burial. The thing is, Ms. Demopoulos, when these four men died, no one claimed them. No one tried to arrange a dignified burial for them. If you’ve come across relatives who want these bodies, I’m happy to give them the bodies. They’ll be a little the worse for wear now, but unfortunately, I can’t help that.” I shrugged, trying to read her expression. “Does that answer your questions?”

“It’s a step in the right direction,” she said. “But we also need to see your facility. The Body Farm, that’s what you call it, right?”

I felt myself getting testy again. “That’s what a lot of people call it.”

“And you think that name shows respect for the dead?”

This woman had a knack for nettling me. “I’m not the one who came up with it,” I snapped. “An FBI agent coined the name, and it stuck. So that’s what it’s usually called — by police, by medical examiners, and by reporters. Reporters who — up until now — have been able to understand that our research helps the good guys catch the bad guys.” I shouldn’t have needled her that way, but she’d gotten under my skin, and I was mad. What was it Mark Twain said about journalists—“never argue with people who buy ink by the barrel”? I was battling a person who bought videotape by the truckload, but it was too late to back out now. “As for taking you out there and showing you around — letting you shoot footage — I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a research facility, not a tourist attraction. The work we do there is sensitive. And it’s certainly not fodder for tabloid television.”

She flushed, and I could tell that she, too, felt nettled now. “This is not tabloid television,” she practically hissed. “This is journalism in the public interest. We are investigating a major news story here — the disrespect being shown here to the bodies of American servicemen. I will go to the university’s president or board of trustees if that’s what it takes to get your cooperation.”

“I am cooperating,” I insisted. “I’ve checked our files, I’ve confirmed what you asked me to confirm, and I’ve explained — or tried to explain — what we do, and why. But I can’t let you go roaming around in there with your camera, looking for lurid footage. Because turning you loose in there with a camera and a big chip on your shoulder? That would be treating the dead with disrespect.”

She stood up so suddenly her chair scraped the floor and nearly toppled backward. If looks could kill, the glare Athena Demopoulos shot in my direction would have laid me out like a lightning bolt, and I’d have joined the ranks of the dead — veterans and civilians alike, indistinguishable in death — who were mustered out, and falling apart, behind the fence of the Body Farm. “Cut,” she snapped at the cameraman. “We’re out of here.” Then, to me: “But we will be back.”

Of that I felt sure. Awfully and dreadfully sure.

Pressing the heels of my hands into my temples, I worked my scalp in slow circles, first in one direction, then in the other, trying — but failing — to release the tension. Next I closed my aching eyes and rubbed them with the thumb and fingers of my right hand.

The Nashville reporter had the basic facts correct: We did have the remains of four veterans at the Body Farm. All four had come from Nashville. All four had died, during the prior eighteen months, at the VA Hospital there, and when no next of kin had claimed their remains, Nashville’s M.E. had sent the bodies to me for research. Nothing underhanded or sinister had been done; the men had simply died alone and unloved. In that regard, those four — the Nashville Four — were like too many other veterans, especially Vietnam War veterans.

Vietnam: I myself had been lucky enough — young enough — to stay out of the war. I turned eighteen during the war’s final year; the draft hadn’t yet ended, but I had a high lottery number — high enough that I didn’t get drafted. By that time most Americans seemed to agree that Vietnam had been a foreign-policy failure: an unwinnable fight, and a terrible waste of lives. As a result, our conflicted feelings — our national shame, it might even be called — had created an unwritten but undeniably tragic domestic policy: a policy of pretending that Vietnam had never happened, and of turning a blind, indifferent eye to Vietnam vets and their postwar troubles.

The College of Social Work at UT was large and well regarded. One of the faculty there — a friend of mine — had made a long-term study of Vietnam vets. What he’d found had shocked me. Twenty or more years after returning from Southeast Asia, four out of five Vietnam vets still suffered from chronic symptoms of PTSD, posttraumatic stress disorder. Compared to nonveterans, they also had higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide. And unlike veterans of World War II, who were widely celebrated as national heroes, Vietnam vets tended to be unappreciated, unacknowledged, sometimes even scorned. It was almost as if we were all avoiding eye contact with a homeless beggar — a beggar who might, come to think of it, be a Vietnam veteran.

I didn’t know the specific stories or circumstances of the four veterans who had ended up at the Body Farm. All I knew was that in the end, no one had cared enough to claim them, to arrange for the honor guard and the folded flag and the well-kept grave their service should have earned them.

Who had contacted Channel 4 about the story, and why — and why now, at this particular time? Initially, I’d assumed that the reporter was pursuing the Janus story, and when she’d started talking about veterans, I’d wondered if she was working some sort of angle related to Janus’s Air America stint in Southeast Asia. But her barrage of questions and accusations had quickly made it clear that this was a Tennessee story — a Body Farm story — and a veteran story. For all I knew, we might’ve had dozens of veterans’ corpses at the Body Farm over the past dozen years. Was it really high-minded concern about the treatment of dead soldiers that was behind this, or was there some unspoken subtext — some power play or hidden agenda? The reporter had dodged my question about who her source was. If I pressed the point, I felt sure that she’d bristle and bluster and begin waving the freedom-of-the-press flag as if she were its lone standard-bearer and staunchest defender.

Still rubbing my temples and eyes with one hand, I used the other hand to call Kathleen. “I’m back,” I told her glumly. “I need you to feel sorry for me for just a minute.”

“I didn’t realize it was such a hardship to come home,” she said, her tone hovering somewhere between teasing and defensive.

“I didn’t either,” I said. “I was really looking forward to it. But then I had the trip from hell. And then things got even worse.”

“Poor baby. What’s wrong? Tell me about it.”

So I did, skipping the trip and going straight to the ambush interview by the TV reporter.

“Sweeps week,” she said scornfully.

“What?”

“Sweeps week. It’s when the networks pull out all the stops. They measure their ratings — their viewers — during sweeps week. The higher their ratings, the more they can charge for ads. So they show blockbuster movies, sensational stories, anything they think’ll get viewers. Don’t take it personally, hon. It’s all about money, not about you.”

“It sure feels like it’s about me,” I squawked. “It’s my work — my facility; my reputation — in the crosshairs of that… that…”

“Language, Bill. Language.”

“That reporter. That mudslinging, muckraking, holier-than-thou reporter. Am I allowed to call her that?”

“Of course, sweetheart — to me. I wouldn’t say it to her, though. Not unless you want every television viewer in Nashville to think you’re a grumpy old man.”

“Grumpy? Me? Hmmph,” I said. “I’ll be nice as pie. She’ll be eating out of my hand.”

“If I catch her lips anywhere near any part of you, her next story can be about her colonoscopy. The one I administer with her own video camera.”

I laughed, in spite of myself. “I should’ve come to your office instead of my office,” I said. “I’m thinking I might have gotten a warmer welcome.”

“I’d’ve been nice as pie,” she cooed. “You’d’ve been eating out of my hand.”

“Hold that thought for a few hours,” I told her. My spousal flirting was cut short by the buzz of my intercom. “Rats,” I said. “Peggy’s buzzing me. Probably more bad news. See you at home.” I pressed the intercom button. “Tell me you’ve good news, Peggy.”

“Can’t,” she answered. “You’ve told me never to lie to you. Do you want door number one, or door number two?”

“Excuse me?”

“You have two callers on hold. The dean’s on line one, and the general counsel’s on line two.”

“The general counsel? As in Amanda Whiting, UT’s top legal eagle?”

“Bingo.”

“Jeez,” I said. “If line three rings, don’t answer — it’ll be the Angel of Death calling.”

“No, he’s coming to see you in person,” she cracked. “He’ll be here in ten minutes.”

“Swell,” I said. “I’ll tell the dean to talk slow — that way maybe I can skip the lawyer altogether.” The truth was, I rather liked the general counsel, but given that the Channel 4 reporter was probably already badgering her, I doubted that she was calling with good news. The dean, on the other hand, had long been a reliable, agreeable ally, from the moment I’d first pitched my unorthodox research program to him, years ago. How many years? Ten? No, twelve, I realized as I pressed the blinking button. That was 1992. Where does the time go?

“Hello,” I said to the dean. “Are you calling to fire me?”

“I can’t,” he said. “You’ve got tenure. Good thing, too, because you’ve stirred up a hell of a hornet’s nest.”

“I didn’t stir it up,” I protested. “I just happened to be standing near the tree. Somebody else took a whack at the hornet’s nest. I don’t know who, and I don’t know why.”

“Actually, I’m calling to make sure you know I’m in your corner,” he said. “You do good work. You’re a credit to the university. Let me know if I can help.”

“You good with a pair of tweezers?”

“How’s that?”

“It might take you and me both to pull all the stingers out of my hide.”

He chuckled. “You’ll be all right. Good luck, Bill.”

“I need it. Amanda Whiting’s on the other line.”

“Ah. You do need it,” he agreed, and for once I wished he weren’t quite so agreeable.

General Counsel Amanda Whiting was less agreeable than the dean had been. “We’ve got one hell of a mess on our hands,” she said. Her words were muddled, and for a bizarre moment I wondered if she was drinking. Then I heard the clatter of a knife on a plate, and I realized she was eating. “How do we clean this up and make sure it never happens again?”

“I’ve offered to give the bodies back,” I told her. “If anybody takes me up on it, I’ll gladly deliver the bodies myself. As to how to make sure it doesn’t happen again, I suppose we can check with the Veterans Administration every time we get a body. But what a pain. We screen bodies for AIDS and hepatitis; I didn’t realize we needed to screen them for prior occupation.”

“We live in litigious times, Bill. We can’t afford to risk lawsuits — million-dollar claims for pain and suffering — filed by relatives of those science-project guinea pigs you’ve got rotting on the ground.”

“What an eloquent description,” I snapped. “Mind if I borrow that? It would give that Nashville reporter a much better grasp of the merit and dignity of our research. ‘Science-project guinea pigs, rotting on the ground’: Have I got that right?”

“Sorry,” she said. “That was out of line. You know that’s not what I really think. I’m looking at it as a lawyer; putting it in the worst possible way — the way a plaintiff’s attorney would, if somebody slapped us with a lawsuit. It could happen.”

“Someone could claim my research caused pain and suffering? Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“What about the pain and suffering of dying alone? Where were these sensitive, caring relatives when these poor guys were staring death in the face, with no one to hold their hand or say how much they’d meant?”

“It stinks,” she agreed. “No pun intended. But we need to tread carefully here. I know you have respect for the dead. We just need to make sure that others know that, too.” She paused, then cleared her throat. “The reporter’s pushing hard to get in.”

“No surprise there.” I sighed. “Look, I think it’s a bad, bad idea. We turn her loose in there with a camera, she’ll crucify us. You’ve never been out to the research facility. It’s not pretty, Amanda, what the body goes through after death. That’s why the funeral industry is so huge — that’s why we spend billions of dollars a year to make the dead look like the living. Because we don’t want to confront the ugly reality of our mortality. The buggy, bloated, putrefying reality.”

“Bill, I’m eating lunch here. Or was.”

“If there’s rice on your plate, make sure it’s not wiggling,” I said. She groaned, and I laughed. “But seriously, we don’t want her in there with a camera. She’s got an ax to grind. And she wants to put our necks—my neck — on the chopping block. Tell her no.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. “We’re in a bit of a bind here, Bill,” she said finally. “We’re a publicly funded institution. We’re responsible — we’re accountable—to the taxpayers of Tennessee. We don’t have the option of concealing what we’re doing with their money.”

“I’m not trying to conceal it,” I said. “I’m just trying not to rub their noses in it. Because frankly, even though this work is important, it’s not real pleasant. You remember that old TV commercial — for shampoo or hair color? — that showed a gorgeous woman running toward a guy? Slow motion, her long blond hair bounding up and down, up and down, with every stride?”

“Yeah, that rings a bell. Vaguely. Your point being…?”

“Remember the tag line? ‘The closer he gets, the better you look’? The Body Farm’s not like that, Amanda. We’re the opposite. The closer you get, the worse we look. And the worse we smell.”

“I get it, I get it,” she said. “But we have to find some way to accommodate this journalist. It’s a legitimate news story. It might be slanted, it might be unfair, it might be unfavorable—”

“No ‘might be’ about it,” I snapped. “It’s a total hatchet job. I wish I knew who put her onto this, and why.”

“I’ve done some asking around,” she said. “Sounds like it was a disgruntled employee at the VA Hospital. They weren’t even going after you — they wanted the hospital to do better by dead and dying vets. It was the reporter who made the story about us.”

“So why do we even have to cooperate?”

“Because now it is about us, Bill. And even if it’s bad news, it’s news, and we’ve got to make a good-faith effort to cooperate. Otherwise, the story snowballs — it’s no longer just about these four dead veterans, it’s about us, about our secrecy and skullduggery. What other dark deeds might be going on behind that fence? We need a solution. How can we meet her halfway — give her something, but not give away the store?”

I sighed, although I’d guessed she might say something of the sort. “Okay,” I said. “There’s a guy in the public relations office. Name’s Buck. He’s done a few press releases about us. About our research, about forensic cases we’ve helped the police solve. Buck used to work for WBIR, and he’s asked me a couple times about shooting footage at the Body Farm. Wants to make a science documentary, for the Learning Channel or National Geographic or some such. How ’bout I take Buck over, let him get some shots, and give the footage to the Channel Four folks?”

“Good idea. Nothing too graphic, though.”

“Lord no,” I assured her. “Very… tasteful.”

“Eating,” she reminded me.

“Sorry. Very discreet. I’m thinking a fresh body — freshest we’ve got, anyhow — and some bare bones. A nice white skeleton.”

“I don’t think we should muddy the water with race,” she said.

“Huh? With what?”

“Race. You said ‘a nice white skeleton.’ I wouldn’t bring up race.”

I laughed. “The bones,” I said, “not the donor. White bones. Bare bones. Sun-bleached bones.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right. I knew that.”

Chapter 19

An hour after my phone calls with the dean and the legal eagle, I crossed the river, looped past the medical center, and threaded through the hospital employees’ parking lot. The lot was nearly full; the only unclaimed spaces were in the farthest corner, beside the high wooden fence surrounding the Body Farm. Those spots were almost never taken; they were the last resorts of hospital workers too late to be choosy — especially on hot summer days like this one, when the research facility gave new meaning — literal, eye-watering meaning — to the phrase “body odor.”

A single vehicle was parked in the normally vacant spots. But it was not parked between the lines, nose to the fence. Instead, it was parked parallel to the fence, straddling three parking places. It was a white Chevy Blazer labeled EYEWITNESS 4 NEWS, and on top of the Blazer was a tripod, and on top of the tripod was a video camera, and peering through the viewfinder was the cameraman from Channel 4. Perched beside him, looking almost comically incongruous in her tailored suit and power pumps, was my nemesis, Athena Demopoulos.

I stopped fifty yards away. Taking out my phone, I scrolled through my contacts to the number of the medical center police and pressed “call.” “Dis-patch,” answered a woman with an East Tennessee twang.

“This is Dr. Brockton,” I said. “There’s a television news crew parked outside the Body Farm. They’re up on top of their car with a video camera.”

“Yes, sir,” said the dispatcher, and to my surprise, she chuckled. “Emmett said he’d be sleeping on the sofa for a week if his wife saw him helping that gal get up there.”

“Emmett? Who’s Emmett? What are you talking about?”

“Emmett. Officer Edmonds. He had to boost that lady reporter up. It took a push to the tush, if you know what I mean.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re telling me that one of your officers has already seen them? And helped them?”

“Well, yes, sir,” she said, suddenly sounding nervous. “She — the lady — she said you were on your way. Told them to meet you here. She told him you’d got snagged on a phone call with the chancellor or some other muckety-muck, but you said to go ahead and get started, and you’d be right there.” She paused. “Are you… not there?”

“I am here,” I said. “Would you please radio Officer Friendly and ask him to come right back?”

“Sir?”

“I need Emmett to escort his new girlfriend off the premises.”

“But she said—”

“I don’t give a damn what she said,” I snapped. “It’s not true. I didn’t tell them to meet me here, and I certainly don’t want them looking over my fence with a TV camera.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir. I’ll send him right away.”

“Thank you.”

I hung up and pulled forward, tucking in behind the Blazer. Athena Demopoulos glanced my way, then muttered to her cameraman, who kept his eye glued to the viewfinder. As I was getting out, I heard the wail of a siren, and a police cruiser lurched to a screeching stop beside the Blazer. The door opened and a stocky young officer got out, his face flaming, his brow beaded with sweat. “Dr. Brockton, I’m so sorry,” he said. “She told me—”

“I know what she told you. She told you a lie.”

He walked to the Blazer. “Ma’am? Sir?” He rapped the rear windshield with his knuckles. “I need you to get down off your vehicle and leave the premises.”

Athena Demopoulos looked down, feigning innocence and surprise. “Is there a problem, Officer?” She was clearly stalling for time, and the cameraman kept shooting.

“Yes, ma’am. The problem is, you don’t have permission to be here filming. I need you to turn off the camera and get down off of there. Right now, please.”

“We don’t need permission,” she said. “This is public property.” Her colleague swiveled the camera slightly and adjusted his focus.

“No, ma’am,” the officer replied. “Technically — legally — UT Medical Center is private property. I’ve asked you, as nice as I know how, to shut off that camera and get down from there. I’m going to ask you one last time, and if you don’t do it by the time I count to three, I’ll arrest you for trespassing. One…” She laid her hand lightly on the cameraman’s shoulder; he held up a just-a-second finger. “Two…” She gave the shoulder a squeeze. “Three.” The officer touched the radio transmitter on his shoulder. “This is Officer Edmonds,” he said, his head angled toward the mike. “We have a trespassing incident at the Body Farm. I need backup.”

The cameraman straightened up and raised his hands. “Hey, everything’s cool,” he said. “No worries. Just takes a minute to power this thing down. We’re leaving right now, aren’t we, Athena?”

“Absolutely,” she said. She looked at Edmonds coyly. “Help me down?” Edmonds folded his arms across his chest and glared. She turned to me, raising her eyebrows. I shook my head slightly. “I guess it’s true.” She sighed. “Chivalry really is dead.”

“That’s right,” I said. “It died right after journalistic integrity gave up the ghost.”

Chapter 20

Waiting for the Channel 4 story to air was like waiting for a firing squad to raise their rifles and pull the trigger. Time seemed to move at a fraction of its normal speed, and I oscillated wildly between wishing the event simply wasn’t happening, and wishing it would just hurry the hell up and be done. I twisted in the wind like that for two days; on the afternoon of the third day, I got a phone call. “Bill, it’s Amanda Whiting,” I heard the general counsel say.

“You’re calling to tell me you’ve gotten an injunction to block the story?”

“Sorry; not possible,” she said. “I’m calling to tell you the story airs tonight. I just got a courtesy call from Channel Four’s attorney to let me know.”

“Courtesy call,” I scoffed. “Well, that call is about the only courtesy they’ve shown. How bad’s the story?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”

“Guess we’ll hear all about it tomorrow from friends in Nashville,” I said. “I’m glad it’s airing there instead of here.” She didn’t reply — she conspicuously didn’t reply — so after the silence dragged on a while longer, I said, “Amanda? What?”

“It is airing here, Bill. Channel Four is NBC. The NBC affiliate here, WBIR, is picking it up, too.”

“Channel Ten?” My heart sank; WBIR was Knoxville’s leading news station, and I’d always enjoyed a good relationship with reporters there. “I thought they liked me.”

“I’m sure they do like you, Bill. But if their sister station in Nashville runs a big news story about you, WBIR can’t ignore it.”

Why not? I heard a voice in my head shrieking. Why the hell not?

As the newscast loomed, Kathleen tried her best to cheer me up, but I wasn’t having any of it. She made one final attempt. “Should I pop some popcorn?”

“Sure,” I grumbled. “But instead of butter and salt, give it some strychnine and arsenic.”

“Oh, good grief,” she said. “Get down off that cross and come sit by me on the sofa. It can’t be as bad as you think.”

During the Knoxville anchor’s lead-in, Kathleen appeared to be right. “The University of Tennessee’s ‘Body Farm’ is making headlines tonight in Nashville,” he began. “The research facility, created by UT anthropologist Bill Brockton, uses donated cadavers to study postmortem human decomposition. The Body Farm’s research helps homicide detectives make accurate time-since-death estimates.”

Kathleen nudged me. “See? Nothing to worry about.”

But the newscaster’s face turned serious as he continued. “But some critics are charging that the Body Farm’s research isn’t just macabre, it’s disrespectful — and possibly even unpatriotic. From Nashville, Athena Demopoulos reports.”

The image switched to a row of neat white headstones in a military cemetery. Then the shot tilted up and widened to show many more tombstones, all identical, and a woman — my new nemesis — walking between them, speaking directly to the camera. “Most veterans rest in peace after death,” she began, “buried with honors in military cemeteries like this one in north Nashville.” The screen showed close-ups of several tombstones, then switched to four photographs of soldiers in uniform. “But for these four Nashville-area veterans — men who were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country — there is no peaceful burial. By rights, they should be here. Instead, after death, their bodies ended up at a gruesome Knoxville facility known as the Body Farm.” The peaceful cemetery images were replaced by sinister-looking shots of the Body Farm’s main gate and fence — wide shots, then close-ups zooming in on the gate’s rusting padlock, the heavy steel chain, and the barbed wire and concertina topping the fence. Then — in a sequence that Buck, the PR staffer had shot — I appeared on-screen. Walking up to the gate, I unlocked it and stepped inside, then closed the gate, vanishing from view. “The Body Farm is the creation of this man, Dr. Bill Brockton,” the reporter continued, “a University of Tennessee anthropologist whose obsession with death and decay drives him to perform macabre experiments on human bodies — including these four Nashville-area veterans. Dr. Brockton refused to allow us inside the grounds of the ghoulish facility.” Once more — this time in slow motion — I stepped through the gate and closed it, as if I were closing it in Athena’s face—“but reliable sources gave Channel Four disturbing details of the indignities inflicted upon the dead. Human bodies are tossed on the ground to rot. The remains are infested with insects, preyed upon by scavenging animals.”

Suddenly the screen filled with the face — the tear-streaked face — of a thirtysomething-year-old man. The shot widened to show him walking across lush, carefully clipped grass, between tidy rows of tombstones at the Nashville military cemetery. “But one man is vowing to set things right, for his grandfather and other veterans as well. Adam Anderson — grandson of Lucius Anderson, one of the four Nashville veterans at the Body Farm — says he’ll do whatever it takes to get his grandfather back and give him the dignified burial he deserved.”

“It ain’t right,” the young man said, shaking his head and wiping his eyes. “He served his country. He deserved better than this. We got to put a stop to this.”

“Anderson isn’t the only one ready to do battle over the treatment of veterans’ bodies,” Demopoulos said. Now the camera showed a portly, glossy-haired man striding into an office lined with law books. “He’s found a powerful ally in Wayne Wilson, a state senator from Jackson, Tennessee.

“I was shocked,” Wilson pronounced, “to hear what’s being done to these veterans — and to other deceased individuals — in the name of science.” He added, “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not antiscience. There’s a place for it. But this isn’t science; this is just morbid obsession. And I believe the people of the great state of Tennessee would want their elected representatives in Nashville to right this grievous wrong.”

I practically leapt up from the sofa. “Grievous wrong!” I sputtered. “What a load of crap! I’ll give you some grievous wrong, all right!”

“Shhh,” said Kathleen. Latching onto my arm, she pulled me back to my seat beside her and patted my leg.

The footage cut to a close-up of Athena Demopoulos’s face, filled with compassion. “Adam Anderson says he’s grateful for Senator Wilson’s vow to help. He just wishes it had come sooner — in time to help give his grandfather dignity in death.”

The shot widened to show Anderson standing beside her in the cemetery. “It just breaks my heart,” Anderson told her, “that they’re allowed to treat him that way…” He wiped his eyes again, and Athena leaned closer, handing him a tissue and giving his shoulder a comforting squeeze. “It breaks my heart they’re allowed to treat anybody this way,” he said, his voice breaking. She nodded earnestly, then — when he put his face in his hands and wept — she enfolded him in a hug. Then she stretched out one hand, fingers raised and spread wide, to block the camera’s view — a gesture the lens captured in loving, lingering detail throughout her final, somber line of voice-over: “Athena Demopoulos, Eyewitness Four News.”

Kathleen had been right: The story wasn’t been as bad as I’d thought it would be. It was worse. Much, much worse.

Unable to sleep, I reached for her in the night. “Tell me you love me,” I said. “Tell me everything will be all right.”

“I do love you, darling,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re home.” But a moment later, as my hand slid up her hip and toward her breast, she laid her own hand over mine, immobilizing it. “I’m still out of commission, honey. I’m sorry.”

I pulled back to look at her in the dim light of the bedroom. “You still have your period? How can that be? It’s been almost two weeks. You need to go to the doctor.”

“I called. Nothing to worry about. But if it keeps on much longer, I’ll go in.” She gave a short, ironic laugh. “Funny way for menopause to start, huh — the nonstop period? Like having a month of monsoons just before a forty-year drought sets in.”

She was trying to be game about it, but her words gave me a sharp pang. Was it hearing her use the word “drought” to describe the change her womanly body was about to undergo? Or was it the combination of images — drought and flood, a pair of biblical-sounding plagues — that suddenly made me feel the grip of cold, bony fingers closing around my heart like some scaly and pitiless claw?

Chapter 21

Is it possible, as priests and mystics believe, to conjure up evil beings simply by speaking their names — out loud, or even silently, in the fearful shadows of the heart and mind? Earlier in my life, I would have scoffed at the suggestion. Yet now, in my hand — my trembling hand — I held powerful evidence to the contrary. Unscientific evidence, yet no less convincing and frightening for all that.

Satterfield read the return address on the padded envelope I had just taken from the mailbox. Nothing more, just the name. But the name was enough. More than enough.

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

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

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

“Deck, it’s Bill Brockton,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

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

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

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

“Okay, I won’t open it.”

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

“You think it’s a bomb?”

“The guy has a thing for explosives.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And the neighbors wouldn’t notice a thing, right?” I pictured the series of scared and angry phone calls we’d get. “She’d be twice as mad at me — first for tricking her, then for upsetting everybody in Sequoyah Hills.”

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

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

“I don’t like this,” Decker grumbled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, yeah,” he groused.

“Besides,” I went on, “y’all can get prints off whatever’s inside, right? And it’s not like Satterfield’s trying to hide — hell, he’s put his name right here on the envelope. He may have licked the flap, too, which gives you DNA. What more do you want — a video of him sealing and mailing the package?”

“That’d be helpful.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that. Okay, I’m signing off. Gotta go in and make my excuses to Kathleen. See you in twenty?”

“Put it in the back of your truck. Hurry up — but drive slow.”

“Deck, you’re talking to a man who’s never gotten a speeding ticket in his whole life.”

“I’m not worried about you getting a ticket. I’m worried about you going kablooey.”

“You’re talking to a man who’s never gone kablooey, either.”

Fifteen minutes later, I eased down a one-lane driveway and parked beside UT Medical Center’s loading dock, which adjoined the morgue and the East Tennessee Regional Forensic Center. Decker was already there, pacing the loading dock. The KPD cruiser he’d arrived in was parked fifty yards away.

“I see you’re not taking any chances with city property,” I teased as I got out of the truck. When I closed the door, he flinched.

“Gently, Doc, gently!”

I gave him a look. “You think I carried it here on a cushion? Hell, I hit a dozen potholes between the house and here. It’s not gonna blow up if we breathe.” Heading to the back of the truck, I opened the cargo hatch and lifted out a small, heavy box — a fireproof document safe where Kathleen and I stored our passports and wills.

Decker gave the safe an approving nod. “Good thinking.”

“Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while,” I said. I set the safe — gently — on the edge of the concrete loading dock. “The machine’s inside. I’ll be right back.”

The portable x-ray camera was tucked in a corner near the roll-up garage door. It had been bestowed on me by the head of the hospital’s Radiology Department several years before, shortly after I had wheeled a particularly ripe corpse — a floater found in the Tennessee River — into Radiology and had asked a tech to check for bullets. To hear the Radiology folks tell the story — and over the years, I had heard most of them tell it, repeatedly — the entire floor had cleared out the instant the floater and I arrived. “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” the department head liked to say. “Everybody — staff, patients, visitors — flat-out hauling ass out of there. It was like a miracle on steroids. The lame didn’t just walk out of there, they sprinted out.”

Leaving Decker to keep nervous watch on the document safe, I unlocked a steel door, stepped into a dark basement hallway, and pressed a button on the wall to raise the roll-up door. The door rattled and clattered open, like some immense, industrial scale-up of a rolltop desk. My mind flashed to the rolltop desk that had once occupied pride of place in my father’s law office: the lustrous quarter-sawn oak; the small, dark pigeonholes stuffed with fountain pens, inkwells, staplers, magnifying glasses, stamps, sealing wax, whatever. There were no fountain pens or inkwells pigeonholed here, of course, only corpses — as many as half a dozen at any one time — cached in the cooler down the hall, each silently awaiting its turn in the autopsy suite.

Wheeling the x-ray machine out the door and onto the dock, I set a film cassette on the concrete, then opened the safe, removed the envelope, and laid it gingerly atop the film. “You might want to step inside,” I told Decker as I lowered the camera into place. “Unless you want to nuke your boy bits.” He scurried inside, and I set the exposure and the shutter, which had a ten-second delay to allow me to scuttle to safety with my boy bits. Through the doorway, I heard whir-clunk, the distinctive sound of the shutter on the radiation source.

The morgue was in the basement — morgues always are, in accordance with some unwritten law of the universe — so we had nowhere to go but up. After two flights, I could hear Decker laboring to breathe. “Doesn’t this place have elevators?” he panted.

“Man up,” I said. “It’s only four floors. Besides, don’t you have to take a fitness test every year?”

“Every five,” he gasped. “I’ve got three more years to enjoy being fat and out of shape. Then I diet and exercise like crazy for three months, so I can pass the physical. Then I get to eat and lay around for another four years.”

“Knoxville’s Finest,” I teased. Glancing back as we emerged on the fourth floor, I saw him mopping sweat from his brow. “Deck, my friend, you put the hot in hot pursuit.”

Radiology was just around the corner. The receptionist — Jeanette? no: Lynnette — gave me a sunny smile. “Dr. Brockton! Nice to see you again. How’s business at the Body Farm?”

“Pretty lively,” I said. “People are dying to get in. Lynnette, this is Captain Brian Decker, one of Knoxville’s finest.”

“Hi,” she said. “Actually, it’s Shawnette. Nice to meet you.”

Decker gave her a sweaty wave across the counter.

“Sorry, Shawnette,” I said, my face now as red as Decker’s was. “You got a tech back there who might be able to develop a picture for us?”

“Sure,” she said. “Stacy. Go on back. I’ll tell her you’re coming.”

Stacy — a pale, chubby young woman with a strong East Tennessee accent — met us outside the first radiology suite and held out her hand for the cassette. “Lemme guess,” she said. “You’re lookin’ for another bullet in somebody that’s burned up or fallin’ apart?”

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said. “Just trying to see what’s inside an envelope.”

“And you cain’t just open it?”

“Not sure what would happen if I did. That’s why we’re hoping you can give me a sneak peek, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“You know I don’t care to,” she said, which was an East Tennessee way of telling me she didn’t mind at all. She disappeared into the lab, situated between two of the imaging suites.

Decker and I waited in the hallway for a couple of minutes. Then we heard a signal indicating that she had finished developing the image. The signal was Stacy’s voice, emitting a high, loud shriek.

Decker slit the envelope carefully, then tipped the opening down toward the blue surgical pad we’d laid across the tailgate of my truck. A lumpy packet — blue-lined notebook paper, folded several times — slid out. With purple-gloved fingers, Decker eased open the folds one by one until the object inside was revealed.

“Yeah,” he said slowly, “I’d say that’s a human finger, all right.” He picked it up gently and inspected it, then handed it to me.

The finger was small — a child’s finger — severed as neatly at the base as Kathleen’s had been. I stared at it, trying to make sense of it. It had come from Satterfield; I felt no doubt about that. But whose finger was it? How had he come by it? How had he sent it — and why?

The notebook paper wasn’t just a wrapping; it was also a message, in a handwriting that I recognized from prosecution exhibits at Satterfield’s trial. “As token and pledge,” the note read, “I send you this: a finger from my firstborn son. When the time is right, I will bring him to retrieve it, and the two of us will rain down vengeance upon you and your family.”

I handed the note to Decker, the paper rattling from the tremor in my hand. He read it, then looked at me, his face grave. “You ever hear anything about Satterfield having a kid?”

I shook my head, but suddenly I had a sick feeling. “There was a woman,” I said, “at Satterfield’s trial. A weird woman. Most people were looking at him like he was a monster, you know? This woman was different. She was looking at him like he was… her hero or beloved or something.”

He nodded. “I’ve heard about women like that. Like rock-star groupies, but instead of singers or drummers, these gals get obsessed with serial killers. It’s a power thing — they’re attracted to all that dark energy or something. Remember Charles Manson? That whole harem he had? All those creepy women in what he called ‘the family’?”

“I remember,” I said. “And ‘creepy’ is putting it mildly. They all shaved their heads during his trial, right? Carved pentagrams in their foreheads?” I thought for a moment. “Didn’t Ted Bundy have groupies, too?”

Decker nodded again. “Lots. He even managed to marry one of ’em, right in the middle of his murder trial. Pulled some kinda jailhouse-lawyer stunt in the courtroom; conned the judge into pronouncing them man and wife — monster and wife — right there on the spot.” A strange look passed across his face; I could see that he was on the verge of adding something, but then he bit it back.

“What?” I asked. He frowned, looking pained. “What? Spit it out, Deck.”

“He got her pregnant, too. Bundy.”

“What? How? I mean, besides the basic egg-meets-sperm part. Do death row inmates get conjugal visits?”

“Not supposed to,” he said. “But then again, it was in Florida. Crazy shit happens in Florida.” He shook his head — whether about Florida or about the idea of Bundy as a dad, I couldn’t be sure. “One thing you can be sure of, though,” he added. “That snake Satterfield would’ve read about Bundy making a baby. And you know what they say about imitation. Highest form of flattery.”

“Sickest sort of perversion,” I responded. “But Satterfield didn’t manage to get married during his trial. So for sure he wasn’t eligible for conjugal visits.”

“Maybe there was a turkey baster involved,” he mused. “Or a spunk-filled condom. Or a rubber glove.” We looked at each other and grimaced in unison, repelled by the images his words had conjured up.

“He’s a convicted serial killer,” I protested. “He shouldn’t be able to pass a spunk-filled anything to a visitor.”

“You’re right. He shouldn’t.” Decker shrugged. “But prisons are bureaucracies. Systems. And any system can be gotten around or abused, if the price is right. Grease enough guards, do enough favors, gather enough dirt to get somebody under your thumb? You can break any rule — or bend it into any shape you want.”

Glumly I turned my attention back to the finger. The digit was in good condition — slightly shriveled, but not decomposed. “The forensic guys can get prints off that, right?”

Decker plucked the finger from my palm and peered closely at the tip, inspecting the delicate ridges and whorls. He nodded, then shrugged. “Not sure there’s much point, though. I doubt the kid’s gonna show up in AFIS”—I knew he was referring to the FBI’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System. “Not unless he’s some kind of child-prodigy criminal.” Seeing my disappointment, he hurried to add, “I’ll check, though. Like my mama always said, nothing ventured, nothing gained.” He rewrapped the finger and slid it back into the envelope, then said, “So…”

“What?”

He held the envelope toward me. “The fact that this was hand delivered. So to speak. I’m not liking that.” He looked at the KPD cruiser parked fifty yards away, as if it contained the answer to some question he was pondering. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ve got something for you.” He walked back to the cruiser, opened the driver’s door, and laid the envelope on the passenger seat. Then he reached under the driver’s seat and took out a small bundle of black fabric. He brought it to me, offering it up on both palms.

I took the bundle, surprised by its heft. “What is it?”

“Insurance,” he said.

“Feels like a lot of it.” I unwrapped the cloth — velvet, with a thick, soft nap — which was rolled around the object several times; unspooling it made me think of unwinding a burial shroud. And in a way, it turned out, I was unwrapping death, for swaddled within the soft black fabric was a handgun, its precisely machined surfaces lustrous with a thin coating of oil. I stared at it, then at Decker. “Jesus, Deck. What are you doing? I don’t want this. I’ve never had a gun in my life. I hate guns; they scare me.” I handed it back to him.

“I know,” he said, although I doubted that he knew how deep-rooted my aversion to guns was, how painfully personal: my father had shot himself in the head when I was young, and my mother and I had found him. “But Satterfield scares you, too,” he went on. “And he should. You ask me, that guy’s ten times scarier than this thing. Look how close he came to taking out your whole family — and in a really bad way.” I didn’t need Decker to remind me of that terrible night. “The good news is, he’s behind bars. Solid, well-guarded bars. But if he did manage to get out — or to send somebody else gunning for you, some dark night — wouldn’t the odds be better if you had this beside the bed? Tucked in the drawer of the nightstand?”

“I don’t know, Deck.” It was hard to think rationally; the message from Satterfield — the finger from Satterfield — felt like talons tearing into my belly.

“Look, Doc, I don’t know what he’s up to. And I don’t think he can get out of there. And I’ll go pay him a visit, if you want — discourage him, shall we say, from messing with you. But take this, for now, just in case. If not for your own sake, take it for Kathleen’s.” He hesitated, then plowed ahead, into territory I wished he’d stay the hell out of. “He thinks he’s got unfinished business with you. He started with Kathleen last time, and he’d start with her again if he got a chance. And he’d make you watch it all.”

At that moment — the moment I reached out and took possession of the gun — I wasn’t sure who I hated most: Satterfield, Decker, or myself.

Chapter 22

I checked the time as the garage door clattered down behind my truck in the basement of my house. I hadn’t quite made it home within the sixty-minute deadline I’d set for myself, but I’d missed it by only seven minutes. As I climbed the steps to the kitchen, I rehearsed what I would tell Kathleen about the skull fracture that had supposedly required my sudden trip to the morgue.

She met me at the top of the stairs, her face strained. “The phone has been ringing like crazy the whole time you’ve been gone. The house phone. Your cell, too — you left it here. You have a bunch of voice mails.” She handed it to me.

“Oh, hell, I’m sorry, honey,” I began. “I didn’t—”

She cut me off with a shake of the head. “I’m not fussing at you. Sounds like you’ve got plenty of other folks ready to do that.”

“What now? Who called?”

“Amanda Whiting, the UT lawyer. And a TV reporter. And the FBI.”

“Damn that Athena Demon-whatever,” I snapped. “Now she’s dragged the FBI into this veterans thing?”

“No, not the Channel Four woman from Nashville,” she said. “This is some smug, self-important guy from San Diego.”

“San Diego?” As I skipped over the general counsel’s message, my mind flashed back to the intrusive San Diego reporter who had arrived at the crash site by helicopter — and later created a stir at the FBI’s press conference. His cocky, challenging words seemed to echo in my mind, and a fraction of a second later — like the delay in a public-address announcement — I heard the same words, in the same voice, coming from the cell phone at my ear: “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News.” As the message continued to play, I felt the blood rising to my face… and then I felt it draining.

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.

Kathleen looked worried. “What’s wrong? Honey? What’s happened?”

I held up a hand to quiet her as Malloy’s message began to play. I closed my eyes and felt my head sag toward my chest. “No,” I whispered. “No, no, no. Please, no.” I felt Kathleen’s hand on my arm, squeezing and then shaking it to get my attention, but I just shook my head, my eyes still tightly closed. I felt behind me with my free hand and found one of the chairs tucked beneath the kitchen table. Tugging it out, I sat down — or, rather, collapsed into it.

When the third message began — the FBI message — my eyes flew open, and I stared at Kathleen as if I’d seen a ghost. She no longer looked worried; now she looked downright alarmed, and she backed away slightly, as if I myself might be cause for alarm. When the third message ended, the phone fell silent for a moment. Then a robotic voice intoned, “To replay your messages, press one. To save your messages, press two. To delete your messages, press three.”

I cued up the reporter’s message again, put the phone on “speaker,” and turned it toward Kathleen, motioning for her to sit. Her eyes still riveted on me, she sat down across the table, poised on the edge of the seat as if ready to spring up and flee at the slightest provocation.

“Mike Malloy, Fox Five News,” I heard the brash voice again. “Dr. Brockton, I need to ask you some questions about the remains you identified as those of Richard Janus. I have information from a reliable source confirming that Janus is actually still alive. My source tells me that Janus had his teeth pulled and put a decoy body in the aircraft. I’d like to ask you to explain more about how you reached the conclusion you did, and how Janus was able to fool you, since you’re supposed to be one of the world’s leading experts on human identification.”

I felt Kathleen’s hand on my wrist. “Oh, darling,” she said. “Bless your heart.”

“Wait,” I said over the dial tone at the end of the reporter’s message. “It gets better.”

“Dr. Brockton,” the third message began in a tight, clipped tone, as if each word were being bitten instead of spoken. “SSA Prescott, San Diego.” As if I needed to be reminded where Prescott worked. “We have one hell of a shitstorm here, the epicenter of which is your botched identification of Richard Janus. I have two questions for you, which might, at this point, be moot, but I’ll ask them anyway. First, did you check the teeth for tool marks, or other evidence of extraction? Second, why the hell didn’t you ask more questions about that spinal cord stimulator?” There was a pause in the message, and Kathleen opened her mouth to speak, but again I held up a hand to tell her to wait. “We need you to return the teeth and skeletal material immediately,” Prescott went on, “so we can send the teeth to a qualified forensic odontologist.” The phrase—qualified forensic odontologist—practically dripped venom. “Please deliver them to the FBI’s Knoxville field office as soon as you get this message. They’ll be expecting you. Needless to say, you’re not to make any further comments to the media about this case.” And with no further sign-off, he hung up.

“Oh, Bill,” said Kathleen. “I am so, so sorry.”

The fourth and final voice mail was from a blocked number. The message began with what might have been the heavy breathing of an obscene call, but then the breathing became torn and ragged, as if the caller were struggling to regain control. “Please,” said a woman’s voice, hoarse and anguished and barely recognizable. “Do not play games with me. I must know. Is my husband dead, or is he alive? Tell me the truth, please. I beg you. Please.” The breathing grew even more ragged as she gasped out a San Diego telephone number, and then the call ended.

Kathleen stared at me from across the table. One hand remained on my wrist; the other was over her mouth. “My God,” she breathed. “Was that…?”

“Yes.” I nodded. “Carmelita Janus.”

“How awful.” Kathleen’s eyes were wide. “What on earth do you do now?”

I considered my options, not liking any of them. “I give the teeth and bones back to the FBI. But first I spend some time with them.” I heard another voice, and I realized that my cell phone was nagging me to replay, save, or delete my messages. Instead, I simply disconnected the call, and left the phone on the table. “I think the voice-mail system keeps those marked as new messages until I tell it to do something with them,” I told Kathleen. “I’m leaving now, but I’m not taking that with me.”

“Where are you going?”

I was about to tell her — it was my nature to tell Kathleen everything, although I’d made an exception when the finger from Satterfield had arrived — but I just shook my head instead. “If anybody calls looking for me, you don’t know where I am. All you know is, I’m out, and you don’t know where I am, and I forgot to take my phone with me.” A sudden thought struck me — a terrible thought: the thought that Satterfield might send someone to the house while I was gone. “Kath, why don’t you go spend the night at Jeff and Jenny’s?”

“What?”

“Sure! Do it, Kath. I’m likely to get a zillion calls — hell, maybe even people coming to the house looking for me — and that’ll drive you crazy. You could babysit, and let Jeff and Jenny have a dinner date. The boys would love it. You’d love it.”

Her eyes searched my face, and I suspected she could tell I was holding something back besides my whereabouts. If she had to find me in an emergency, she could probably guess where I’d gone, but if I didn’t tell her, she wouldn’t have to lie to anyone.

“How long will you be gone?”

“I’m not sure. Tonight. Probably all day tomorrow. I hope I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

Her eyes flickered with an expression I couldn’t quite read, and I wondered if she was upset about my disappearing act. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I’ll be off the grid tomorrow, too.”

“What’s up?”

“Nothing,” she repeated. “A journal article I’m writing. Tomorrow’s the deadline. I’ve never had such a hard time finishing something. It’s been like pulling—” She interrupted herself.

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” I growled, smiling in spite of myself. Then I raised her hand and kissed it, pushed away from the table, and hurried back to UT — not to the hospital’s loading dock this time, but to the small, grimy office tucked beneath girders and grandstands, a bone’s throw from Neyland Stadium’s north end zone.

Hurrying up the stairs, I turned the balky lock of my office door and dashed to my desk to retrieve a small plastic bin: the bin that contained the mortal remains of Richard Janus — or those of a convincing decoy. Grabbing the bin, I raced back down the stairs, hopped into my truck, and hurried away.

Chapter 23

I didn’t have far to drive. A hundred yards from Neyland Stadium — hunkered in a low spot of the asphalt that surrounded the stadium like an alluvial floodplain — was a dilapidated blue building of corrugated metal, the paint cloudy with age and streaked with rust. The building still bore a sign that read ANTHROPOLOGY ANNEX, but the sign, like the building, was faded and rusting. Years before, until we’d built the Regional Forensic Center, with its high-tech processing rooms, the annex had been the place where our donated bodies had finished shuffling off their mortal coil — or, rather, simmering off their mortal coil — in large, steam-jacketed kettles, to which we added a bit of Biz and a dash of Downy to sweeten the pot.

I parked the truck behind the building, then flipped through my many keys, searching for the one that fit the annex’s garage door. My secretary, Peggy, occasionally scolded me about the jangly mess that was my key ring, but now — as I found the snaggletoothed key that unlocked the garage — I felt vindicated for all the years I’d hauled around this spiky excess baggage of brass and steel. “See,” I said smugly to an imaginary Peggy, twisting the door’s latch. As if by way of an indignant retort, the latch let out a screech that made my fillings shudder in my teeth, and as the door clattered and groaned upward, it unleashed a shower of dust, rust, and crumbled bird droppings.

I didn’t care. I retrieved the truck from behind the building and eased it into the dusty garage bay, then lowered the door and went missing. AWOL. The Invisible Man.

It took five minutes just to remove the many layers of wrapping from the plastic bin of remains. As I snipped and tugged, I felt almost as if I were unwinding a modern-day mummy, this one wrapped not in linen but in Saran Wrap and packing tape — our makeshift maneuver to avoid stinking up not only my carry-on bag — my “carrion bag,” I had jokingly dubbed it — but the entire plane. As I unwound the final layer of plastic, I caught a faint whiff of odor — not the familiar, overpowering smell of decomposing flesh, but the charred aroma of burned meat.

Opening a dusty supply cabinet, I found a disposable surgical sheet — made of absorbent blue paper — and unfolded it on the counter that ran the length of one wall. Then I laid out the teeth and bone fragments in anatomical order, or in as close an approximation of anatomical order as I could achieve, given the high degree of fragmentation. The teeth, being the most intact, were the easiest; they were also of greatest interest and greatest consternation to me. What was it Prescott had asked about? Tool marks or other evidence of extraction? His question had sounded angry, but not merely angry; it had sounded surprisingly specific, too, and I wondered what had prompted such specificity. As far as I knew, none of the FBI agents had reexamined the teeth after we had recovered them and sent them to the medical examiner’s office, along with the bits of burned bone. The morning of the press conference, Prescott had sent one of his subordinates to the M.E.’s office to retrieve the material, which the M.E. was glad to release, the identification having been made — positively and correctly, to the best of everyone’s knowledge at the time. So what had changed since then? What new information, or allegations, or accusations, had come to light to undermine the identification—my identification; my work; my reputation?

An old magnifying lamp, its lens gray beneath a blanket of dust, still hovered over the counter, its articulating arm creaky and arthritic with age. I flipped its switch, not expecting anything, but after a moment, the fluorescent bulb that encircled the lens flickered to life. “Hmm,” I said, then quoted a line from a Monty Python comedy, a scene in which a plague victim is being carried prematurely to a cart of corpses: “I’m not quite dead,” I cracked in my best — or my worst — Cockney accent. Then, after I’d said the words, they took on a new and unexpected meaning, and I imagined them being spoken by Richard Janus. Was Janus quite dead, or was he — like me — merely missing, AWOL, the Invisible Man?

Even after cleaning the magnifying lens and examining the teeth through it, I still couldn’t answer the question. Someone was dead, all right; that much was absolutely clear from the bones: vertebrae; shards of shattered limbs; charred chunks of pelvis; curved cranial fragments. But were those bits and pieces from Richard Janus?

The teeth were his; that, too, was beyond doubt. But other things were now entirely in doubt. Could it be true — as both Prescott and the television reporter indicated — that the teeth had been extracted, then placed in the plane with a decoy body? If so, that meant the decoy’s teeth had been pulled, too, because if they hadn’t, we’d have found two sets of teeth.

The teeth were damaged — their roots almost entirely broken and burned away. At the scene, I’d been surprised at the lack of jawbone surrounding them, but then again, the jaws themselves — both the mandible and the maxilla — had been reduced to fragments. I’d asked Maddox if such extreme fragmentation was normal; he’d shrugged and nodded. “I’m surprised there’s this much left,” he’d said. “A high-impact crash like this? Usually all we find is a smoking hole.” I must have looked surprised, because he’d added, “If it were a helo crash, or a military aircraft, I’d expect more. Those guys wear helmets, so it gives a little protection. Poor bastards don’t have a snowball’s chance of surviving, mind you. The helmets just mean we get to pick up bigger pieces.”

The day before the press conference, I’d told Prescott I wanted to take a second look at the teeth, but he’d resisted the idea. The high profile of the Janus case had put too much pressure on him — pressure from the Bureau’s uppermost level. Now — now that it was too late; now that things were a royal mess — I was finally getting that second look.

I still didn’t see “tool marks”—which I took to mean marks from dental extraction forceps, or perhaps from ordinary pliers — but I wouldn’t really know until I’d cleaned the teeth thoroughly. So what had prompted the question, or the accusation, from Prescott? I could think of only one explanation that fit the facts: Someone had told Prescott — or the Fox reporter, or both — that the teeth had been extracted, and that Janus’s death had been faked. But who? And why?

Hours later — hours of cleaning and scrutinizing later — I still had no idea where the revelation had come from, or what had motivated it. But I had found signs of abrasions and fractures in the enamel of many of the teeth: abrasions and fractures that were more consistent with compressive and torsional forces — gripping and twisting — than with impact. With a heavy heart and sinking spirit, I concluded that the teeth had indeed been extracted before the crash. But I still didn’t see the big picture. In fact, if anything, I was more baffled than ever. Had Richard Janus indeed faked his death? If so, how the hell had he done it?

Chapter 24

I was surprised to find a phone still hanging on the annex wall, draped in Halloween-worthy cobwebs, and I was downright astonished to hear a dial tone when I lifted the dusty receiver to my ear. Digging deep into my wallet, I found the business card — formerly crisp and imposing, now dirty and crumpled — that I’d gotten from Pat Maddox, the NTSB crash investigator, and dialed the number. The phone rang half a dozen times before a deep, gravelly voice rumbled, “Uh… yeah… Maddox.”

“Oh hell, I woke you up,” I said. “Sorry, Pat. I didn’t think about the time change. It’s only, what…” I glanced at my watch.

“Six fifteen here.”

“I apologize.”

“I might possibly forgive you,” he growled — still sounding like a balky diesel engine on a cold morning—“if you’ll tell me who the hell this is, and what’s so damn important.”

“Oh, sorry, Pat. It’s Bill Brockton. The anthropologist. From Tennessee. I’m calling about the Janus crash.”

“Oh, Doc,” he said, his voice warming up. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “In fact, I don’t have a clue. Which is the problem, I guess. I got a call — a voice mail — yesterday from Miles Prescott, the FBI case agent.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “I saw him on the news last night. Special Agent Prescott, not looking ’specially happy. Was he calling to say ‘thanks again for the great work’?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “How much news coverage have you seen?”

“Not much. Just the one story last night. Talking about the teeth. By that jerk from Fox News.”

“You mean ‘Mike Mal-loy… Fox Five News!’?”

Maddox gave a dry laugh. “Yeah. That guy. You’ve got him nailed. He called me yesterday — no, day before — fishing around. Sounded like he had some kinda scoop, but he wouldn’t say what. All I gave him was a suggestion about what he should go do to himself. Not politically correct — not anatomically possible, either — but it made me feel better to say it.”

“You think it was Malloy who told Prescott the teeth had been extracted?”

“Dunno,” said Maddox. “Maybe. Probably. He seems to have a real hard-on for this story.”

“But where’d Malloy get the information? I’ve spent all night looking at those teeth, Pat, and he’s right — they were extracted. Pulled. Thing is, I had to clean ’em off and look at ’em under a magnifying glass before I could tell. It’s not like some reporter could take a quick glance and spot the marks. Besides, how could he have even seen them — the teeth, I mean?”

“Well, I’m guessing you didn’t give him a look,” he said.

“Hell, no.”

“Okay, so who could’ve?”

“Nobody,” I said. “The only people who had access to those teeth were us.” Suddenly something occurred to me. “Wait. Not just us. The medical examiner did, too.”

“Just the medical examiner himself? Nobody on his staff?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “All the material went to the morgue — just overnight — so the M.E. could write up the death certificate. Maybe somebody on his staff snuck the reporter into the morgue.”

“But why?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Malloy’s girlfriend — or boyfriend, or cousin, or somebody — works for the M.E.”

“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Any chance somebody wanted to make you look bad, Doc? You done anything to piss off the San Diego medical examiner?”

“Of course not. Not that I know of, anyhow.” I thought for a moment. “Unless he felt like I was stepping on his toes just by being there.”

“You mean, like maybe it was an insult — a slap in his face? Like he wasn’t good enough — smart enough — to make the I.D. himself?”

“Could be, I reckon,” I conceded. “I’ve worked with a lot of medical examiners over the years, and most of them are great. But some of ’em are pretty weird.”

“Hell, Doc, what do you expect from guys who spend all their time with dead bodies?” I felt my hackles begin to rise — being a guy who happened to spend a lot of time with dead bodies myself — but then Maddox added, “Only folks weirder than that would be sickos who get their kicks poking around in plane crashes, right?” He chuckled.

“Right,” I said, almost smiling in spite of myself. Maddox’s wit was one of the things I’d liked about him while we were working the crash.

“So what does Prescott want you to do now?”

“Get lost, basically,” I said. “Stay away from the media. Stay away from the case. I’ve got to take the teeth and bones over to the FBI’s Knoxville field office. Should’ve already done it, but I wanted to take a closer look first — see if it’s true about the teeth.”

“And?”

“It is. The damn Fox guy got it right.”

Maddox didn’t speak for a moment. “So… I’m guessing this puts you in a kinda awkward spot, huh?”

“Kinda awkward. Like the pope is kinda Catholic.”

He grunted a sort of laugh, then said, “Sorry to hear that, Doc.”

“Makes two of us.” I blew out a long breath. “If the FBI was about to come down hard on Janus, I get why he might fake his death. But I don’t get how. How’d he get that plane to crash into that mountainside, carrying a decoy body and his bloody teeth?” Maddox didn’t answer, so I ventured a guess. “The autopilot?”

“The autopilot? How do you mean, Doc?”

“Could Janus program the autopilot to make the plane take off on its own, then turn south and level off?”

“Sure, Doc,” Maddox said, “if this was a Hollywood movie. Or if that Citation was a CIA drone. Otherwise, no way. He had to’ve been at the controls.”

“But how?”

Maddox sighed. “I’m probably not supposed to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“Turns out there might’ve been a way — there was a way — for Janus to jump from the plane in flight.”

I pulled the handset away from my ear and stared at it, as if the phone were Maddox himself. “But you said there wasn’t. You said he’d’ve smashed into the engine right after going out the door.”

“He would’ve — if he’d gone out the cabin door. Which, you may recall, couldn’t be opened in flight. So that’s all true.”

“Then how?” I was starting to sound like a broken record.

“Like I say, I shouldn’t be telling you things. But I can’t keep you from guessing, can I? So think about it, Doc. If he couldn’t go out that door…”

He’d made it easy for me to finish that sentence. “He went out another door — a different door.” I searched my mental data banks and called up an image of the aircraft. “But what different door? You showed us the cutaway. There is no other door on a Citation.”

“Well… not when it rolls out of the Cessna factory, there’s not.” He waited, as if he had given a big enough hint to allow me to solve the riddle.

“Ah,” I said, the light dawning. “Janus had the Citation modified, didn’t he? Bigger engines. Bigger fuel tanks. ‘So he could crash harder and burn hotter’—wasn’t that how you put it?”

“Good memory. Those were among the mods…”

“So he had other changes made, too,” I said. “Like adding another door somewhere.”

“Bingo. And what kind of door might a guy like Janus — a guy delivering stuff to remote villages — want to add?”

“A cargo door. But could that be opened in flight?”

“Depends on the kind of cargo door,” he said. “You know what a clamshell belly door is?”

“Is that like a bomb-bay door on a B-17?”

“Bingo,” Maddox said. “Main difference between a bomb and a cargo pallet is what happens when it hits the ground.”

“And the belly door on the Citation could be opened in flight?”

“That’s the whole point of a belly door,” he said. “Pretty crazy — the Citation can’t carry a lot of cargo, and it must’ve cost a damn fortune to install that door. But I guess it paid for itself the first time he dropped a pallet-load of cocaine.” He paused briefly, as if considering whether or not to tell me something. “You know he had a little private airstrip a few miles from Brown Field, right? Perfect place to do drug drops on his way back from Mexico.”

I was still playing catch-up, but it was all starting to make sense. “So you’re thinking Janus took off, opened the belly door, and bailed out just before the plane hit?”

“Sure looks like it.”

“But he wouldn’t have time to open a parachute, would he? That mountain was coming up fast to meet him.”

“At the end, yeah, but not at first, Doc. I’ve looked again at the terrain profile and the aircraft’s altitude. The airport, Brown Field, is about five hundred feet above sea level, and so is Lower Otay Lake, where he changed course and headed south. We all thought he was turning toward Mexico, you know? But I think he was aiming straight for Otay Mountain all along. If he jumped when he was over his airstrip, he’d’ve been a good fifteen hundred feet AGL.”

“AGL?” The term wasn’t familiar to me.

“Above ground level.”

“Fifteen hundred feet? That’s high enough to jump?”

“If you know what you’re doing,” he said. “And if you’re lucky. Skydivers are required to pull the cord by two thousand feet AGL. Gives ’em time to pop their reserve chute, if the main doesn’t open. Combat jumps can be as low as five hundred feet. But those lunatics that jump off buildings and bridges — BASE jumpers, I think they’re called? Some of them jump from two, three hundred feet. Dumb-asses with a death wish.”

“So he could’ve done it.”

“Hell, yeah, he could’ve done it. Would’ve been pretty fascinating, though.”

“Fascinating?” It seemed an odd word to use.

He chuckled. “Sorry. Slang. Means ‘scary as hell.’ Dark night, rough terrain, fast as he was going? Extremely fascinating. Remember D. B. Cooper — Dan Cooper? Hijacked a commercial airliner about thirty years ago?”

“Vaguely,” I said. “He got money and a parachute, right, and made the plane take off again?”

“Right,” said Maddox. “The plane he picked to hijack was a Boeing 727; damn things had stairs back near the tail that could be lowered in flight. Cooper bailed out around midnight, somewhere over the Columbia River Gorge. To this day, nobody knows whether he survived or not. Maybe that’s where Janus got the idea. In-ter-esting. Fascinating. Risky as hell, though.” He gave a small grunt. “If the Feebies were about to lock him up forever, though, I guess not jumping looked risky as hell, too.”

Two things still bothered me. I asked Maddox about the first. “So how come we didn’t figure this out while we were out there working the scene?” I hoped that the word “we” wouldn’t sound accusatory, but he saw right through my politeness.

“You mean, how come the hotshot crash expert missed something as big as a pair of belly doors in the wreckage?” He sounded surprisingly unruffled by the implied criticism.

“Well, okay. Yeah. How come you missed that?”

He chuckled again. “I dunno. Same reason you missed the tool marks on the teeth, maybe?” He didn’t sound spiteful; he sounded matter-of-fact, or even slightly amused. “For one thing, the fuselage was pretty thoroughly fragmented.”

“True,” I conceded. “Looked like it’d been through a shredder.”

“A shredder plus an incinerator,” he said. “For another thing, the evidence techs — not the ones working with you, but the other four, the ones gathering up the scattered chunks? — they were sending up stuff faster than I could sort through it. I didn’t get a chance to start combing through everything till after the press conference. Two days ago, I saw some parts I didn’t recognize — a couple hinges and latches — so I dug deeper, started asking around. That’s when I found out about the belly door. So I got on the horn to Prescott.”

“What’d he say when you told him?”

“Not much. That’s the weird thing. It was almost like he’d been expecting it; like somebody’d already told him something. He sounded mad when he picked up the phone. First thing he said was, ‘And what’s your good news?’ Like he’d just gotten some other bad news, you know?” He paused. “Maybe he’d just gotten a call about the teeth from Mike Mal-loy, Fox Five News.” He did a pretty good imitation of my imitation of the pushy, self-important reporter.

My second question was one Maddox wouldn’t be able to answer — it was one maybe nobody could answer — so I thanked Maddox and hung up, leaving the question unasked, except in my own frustrated mind: If it wasn’t Janus strapped into the Citation when it hit Otay Mountain, who the hell was it?

Suddenly a third thought struck me. This one wasn’t a question, but an inescapable conclusion, and it was the most disturbing of the three. If he really had faked his death and sent a decoy corpse hurtling into the mountainside, that could mean only one thing: that Richard Janus — a man I had admired deeply — was not just a hypocrite and a drug trafficker, but a diabolical killer, too.

Chapter 25

She answered on the first ring, her voice as flat and expressionless as a computer’s. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Janus?” She didn’t respond, so I went on. “Mrs. Janus, it’s Bill Brockton — Dr. Brockton, the forensic anthropologist — returning your call.”

“Oh, thank you, Doctor,” she said, and it was as if a switch had flipped: Her voice was no longer mechanical and flat; now it was warm, expressive, and deeply sad. “Thank you. I am very grateful. No one else will return my calls — no one except reporters, and I don’t want to talk to them. It is extremely painful, this sudden… not knowing.”

The phrase, not knowing—or, rather, the deep chord it struck in me — took me by surprise. I’d heard the same phrase many times over the years, most often from the parents of abducted kids, runaway girls, or missing young women; I’d also heard it from the families of Vietnam War soldiers who were still, after decades, missing in action. I had pegged Mrs. Janus as different from such simple, open grievers. I had sized her up as cool, calm, and collected — or maybe I had judged her to be complicit and guilty. Now, in response to her comment, I felt my shields lowering and my sympathy rising.

Still, I knew that if not knowing was her problem, I was in no position to solve it. “Unfortunately, Mrs. Janus,” I said, “I probably can’t tell you anything that will help you. The truth is, I don’t know what’s going on. I no longer have any idea whether your husband is dead or alive. I wish I did. And I’ve got your number. If I find out anything, I promise to call you.”

“Wait,” she said, her voice urgent. “Don’t hang up. Please. You are my only hope.”

“Me? But I just told you — I don’t know anything. Really, I don’t. I’ve never been so confused and frustrated by a case.” As I said the words “a case,” I realized they might sound cold and callous to her. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean to sound insensitive or unkind.”

“I understand,” she said. “And you don’t. But tell me, please — at the meeting, you sounded convinced that it was Richard in the plane.”

“At the meeting, I was,” I said. “But now? Now I don’t know.”

“The media and the FBI are saying that it wasn’t Richard,” she said. “That it was someone else. That Richard had his teeth pulled, and he killed someone else, and pulled that man’s teeth, too. But how can this be, Doctor? It cannot be.”

“It might be,” I said, thinking — just as Maddox had, one phone call and five minutes earlier — that I shouldn’t say anything more. But then, just like Maddox, I kept talking. “The only new information I have is this. I just now reexamined the teeth — your husband’s teeth — and it’s true that they had been pulled. Extracted.” I heard what sounded like a soft gasp on the other end of the line. I went on: “I couldn’t see that when I found them in the wreckage, because the teeth were covered with soot and grease. But I just now finished cleaning them. And when I looked at them under a magnifying glass, I could see marks — little scratches and cracks — made by forceps or pliers or some other tool.”

“Dios mío,” she whispered. My God. “But who could have done this? Could… Richard do that himself? Pull all his own teeth, so he could fake his death?”

I hadn’t even considered this grisly possibility. “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I’ve never heard of anybody pulling out all their own teeth. One or two, sure, but a whole mouthful? There would be a lot of pain. And a lot of blood. I suspect the body would go into shock long before all the teeth were out.”

“So if Richard did this — if he faked his death — he would have needed help. An accomplice.”

“I think so,” I said, wondering if she might be the accomplice. I tried to imagine Carmelita Janus — the elegant woman I’d sat across the table from only a few days before — yanking tooth after bloody tooth from her husband’s mangled mouth. I couldn’t picture it. Suddenly I recalled the FBI’s struggle to obtain Janus’s dental records. “He might have had a dentist do it. To minimize the pain and the damage. Even so, it would have been a drastic step.” I recalled stories I’d heard about coyotes and wolves, caught in traps, gnawing off their own legs to free themselves, but I stopped myself from mentioning those to her. Instead, I simply said, “He would have to be very desperate to do that. But it sounds like maybe he was.”

“No. He wasn’t,” she said. Her voice broke, and her breath turned quick and ragged and jerky, like that of a hurt child or an injured animal. “He… was worried, yes. Afraid, even. He had agreed to do something dangerous… to… help someone. But it was almost over, he said, and everything was going to be all right. That was the last thing he said to me. ‘I’ll be back soon, and everything will be all right.’ And then he said, ‘I love you so much.’ And then… he was gone.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet, and she kept sobbing. Finally she spoke again, her voice now thick and gluey. “To think that he was dead — it broke my heart. To think he might be alive — it would make me… happy…” Something about the way she said it — the pause before she said the word; the upward inflection that left the end of the sentence hanging in midair — seemed to contradict her words. “But it also makes me very confused. I thought I knew my husband, Doctor — I thought I knew, absolutely, who he was. Now, I cannot say that, not with conviction. But not to know the truth? That is the worst of all. It will drive me insane. And that is why I beg you to help me.”

Perhaps she was just a practiced liar and a good actress, or perhaps I was reacting out of my own wounded pride, but I found myself believing her — and wanting to ease her pain. “Mrs. Janus, I would help you if I could,” I said. “But frankly, I don’t see how I can. I’ve been taken off the case. The FBI thinks I botched it. And maybe they’re right.”

“The FBI.” Her voice had turned steely. “The FBI wanted Richard dead. Maybe enough to kill him.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “They’re a law enforcement agency. They’re the good guys. They would never do that.”

I heard a sharp exhalation. “I see that you’re an idealist, Dr. Brockton.” There was a note of sadness, or even bitterness, in her words. “Just like Richard. You believe in the goodness of people. And sometimes, yes, that is a gift. A prophecy and a catalyst.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sometimes believing that people are good inspires them to be good. Inspires them to try harder. Maybe they begin to see themselves the way that you see them; maybe they like what they see, and so they try to become it — try to become honest, or kind, or generous; more noble than they have been before. Sometimes.” She paused, then added, “But other times, believing good things about people allows them to take advantage of you. Or deceive you. Or even destroy you.” She drew another breath, this one long and steady. “Be careful, so this doesn’t happen to you also.”

This conversation was not going the way I’d expected it to. “As I said, Mrs. Janus, I’m not at all sure I can help you. But maybe you can help me. I’m very confused, too. I still feel sure that those were your husband’s teeth in the wreckage.”

“Yes, without a doubt,” she agreed. “Even if the rest of the remains were someone else’s, the teeth were Richard’s.”

“But the spinal cord stimulator,” I pointed out. “That’s evidence that the remains—”

“That,” she interrupted, “is evidence that the FBI cannot be trusted.”

“Why do you say that? The FBI now seems to think that it wasn’t Richard in the plane. But the spinal cord stimulator suggests that it was him.”

Again she surprised me, this time with a brief, bitter laugh. “Not at all,” she said. “Richard did not have a spinal cord stimulator.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, more confused than ever. “I saw his medical records. I saw the x-ray. You saw the x-ray.”

“He used to have a spinal cord stimulator,” she said. “But it wasn’t working, so he had it removed. More than a year ago.”

“Then why didn’t his medical records say that he’d had it taken out?”

“Because Richard decided that the doctor who put it in was a quack. He stopped going to that doctor. He had it taken out in Mexico City, when we were visiting my family.”

My mind was racing. “But why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you say something, when I talked about finding the stimulator in the wreckage? When I showed you the x-ray?”

“You were with the FBI,” she said simply. “I did not trust them, so why would I trust you? Why would I tell you anything? If I thought Richard was still alive — hiding somewhere — why would I tell that to the FBI? They would just keep looking for him.”

My next question seemed the obvious one. “Then why are you telling me now, Mrs. Janus?”

“Because I have changed my mind about you, Dr. Brockton.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. First, you told me something about yourself that day — a small but important fact, something easy for me to check, to find out if it was the truth or a lie.”

“What fact?”

“You told me that you give money to support Richard’s work. I checked, and it’s true. That tells me that you’re an honest man, and also a good man. That is one reason I changed my mind.”

“What’s the other reason?”

“Because now the FBI has betrayed you, too,” she said, her voice cold with contempt. “There is an old saying, Doctor, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ You know this saying?”

“I know the saying, Mrs. Janus,” I said, suddenly uncomfortable, “but it doesn’t apply here. I don’t think I’ve been betrayed. And the FBI is certainly not my enemy.”

“Are you sure, Doctor? The FBI seems to consider you an enemy.”

I was just about to answer her — disagree with her again — when the building’s corrugated metal siding boomed and rattled so loudly I nearly dropped the phone.

“Dr. Brockton,” I heard a deep voice calling. “Are you in there?”

What the hell? I thought. And who the hell?

As if in answer to my question, a voice called out, “Dr. Brockton, if you’re in there, I need you to open the door. It’s Special Agent Billings. FBI.”

Chapter 26

Special Agent Cole Billings — a tall, muscled young man in a suit and a hurry — fixed me with a piercing stare when I tugged open the annex’s rusty door. “I’m glad to see you, Dr. Brockton,” he said, but his tight jaw and hawkish eyes looked the opposite of glad. “We were getting worried. Nobody seemed to know where you were.”

“Oh, sorry to cause a fuss.” I gave him my most conciliatory expression. “I’ve been right here since…”—I looked at my watch and gave a vague shrug—“sometime yesterday.”

“You don’t seem to’ve told anybody where you’d be,” he said. “Your wife said she didn’t know. Your secretary, either.”

I shook my head, rolling my eyes in what I hoped would pass for embarrassment at my own incompetence. “You know what they say about absentminded professors,” I told him. “And I’ve got plenty to make my mind especially absent lately. A Nashville TV station has opened a real can of worms. Raising a big stink — pardon the pun — about veterans’ bodies at the Body Farm. You seen any of that coverage?”

“A little.” He said it dismissively, so I’d be sure not to make the mistake of thinking it mattered to him in the least.

“What a mess,” I went on. “I’ve been getting phone calls all hours of the day and night. Reporters circling my office, even coming to my house. Driving me nuts.” His eyes flickered impatiently. “Anyhow. I’m glad it’s you that found me, not that damn woman from Nashville. Channel Four.” I motioned him inside. “I’ve actually been working on something for you guys — your San Diego colleagues. Cleaning the teeth and bone fragments.”

If possible, he looked even less glad than before, possibly even alarmed. Apparently this was something he did care about. “From the Janus plane crash?”

I nodded. “I didn’t get a chance to clean them out there. We were scrambling pretty fast. Now that I’ve got the soot off, I can see things I couldn’t see before. Tool marks on the teeth. They’d all been pulled! Damnedest thing I ever saw.” I pointed toward the counter where the material was spread on blue surgical drapes. “Here, let me show you.”

His expression turned stone-cold, and I knew he wasn’t buying my show of uninformed friendliness. “I’m sure that’d be very interesting, Dr. Brockton, but I don’t have time for that. I’m here to pick up that material from you. I’d better just get it and go.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Of course. It’ll take me a few minutes to pack it up. You can help, if you want to, or just look over my shoulder. Make sure I don’t miss anything.”

His eyes searched my face for signs of sarcasm, and it was quite possible that he found them. As I packed and padded the teeth and bits of bone, giving a verbal accounting of the items, he stood at my side, watching closely, and he reread the evidence receipt three times before signing it, bearing down so hard that the point of the pen almost tore through the paper.

By the time i finished cleaning the annex — not only the slight mess I had made, but also the accumulated dust, dead bugs, and cobwebs of two prior years of neglect — it was six P.M.; I had been holed up for well over twenty-four hours, scrubbing and studying the teeth, my only sustenance the two apples and the three packs of peanut butter crackers I’d brought from home. Even though I was tired, hungry, and dirty, I hated to leave, because leaving meant plunging into the turbulence of the two storm systems swirling around me: the Janus case, where I was being made to look incompetent, and the Channel 4 ruckus—“Vet-Gate,” one newspaper reporter had dubbed it — where I was being portrayed as uncaring and unpatriotic. Not to mention the other problem, which wasn’t just painful but potentially deadly: Satterfield.

Raising the metal garage door, amid another chorus of metallic banshee shrieks, I stepped outside, blinking and stretching in the golden, slanting light. Drawing a deep breath, I smelled something unpleasant — something that I quickly realized must be me. I took a deep, analytical sniff and came to the conclusion that if I had been the subject of a multiple-choice exam question—“Which of the following does Bill Brockton stink of?”—the correct answer would be “(d) all the above.” Suddenly, to my surprise, I detected a delightful aroma amid the malodorous miasma, and my mouth began to water, as reflexively and reliably as those of Pavlov’s dogs. Ribs, I realized, my nostrils dilating, my head swiveling into the breeze like some ravenous, carnivorous weathervane. A quarter mile away, a thin plume of smoke spooled upward from the kitchen of Calhoun’s on the River and wafted my way. Do I dare, I wondered, dirty as I am? I took another deep drag of the divine scent. I do, I do, I decided; I could ask for an outside table, on the patio overlooking the water, and I could duck into the bathroom on my way into the restaurant and do a bit of damage control at the sink. Life was looking up.

Reflexively I reached for my cell phone to call Kathleen. She probably wouldn’t want ribs again so soon (had our anniversary dinner really been less than two weeks ago? It seemed like months). But my hand came up empty, and I remembered that I’d left my phone on the counter at home, so that Kathleen and I could both truthfully say that I didn’t have it with me. What was the phrase the CIA had coined back in the 1960s — when they were hatching political-assassination plots they didn’t tell the president about? Plausible deniability: the I-didn’t-know legal loophole. I’d left my cell phone at home so I could say I didn’t know that the FBI was looking for me, but now plausible deniability was circling back to bite me in the butt — or at least to make it hard to score a dinner date with my wife. “Crap,” I muttered, ducking back inside to call her from the annex phone.

Kathleen didn’t answer her cell or the house line. Finally I remembered that she’d mentioned being off the grid today, too — something about a journal article she desperately needed to finish writing. I dialed her office on campus, on the off chance that she was holed up there, now that everyone else had likely left for the day. No luck. “Crap,” I repeated, not wanting to eat alone. Deflated again, I backed my truck out of the corrugated cave, wrestled down the screeching door and locked it, heading for home and for leftovers in lieu of ribs by the riverside.

On an impulse, instead of heading directly home, I detoured to Kathleen’s building, hoping for a chance to tell her about my conversations with Maddox, Mrs. Janus, and Special Agent Billings. I didn’t see her car in the parking lot, though, and her office window looked dark. Only then did I remember that she had planned to hole up in the library.

I parked in a fire lane outside the library’s main entrance on Melrose Avenue, switching on the truck’s flashers in hopes that they might ward off a ticket or a tow truck. I took a quick spin through the coffee shop and the study areas on the main floor without spotting her, then peered through the doors of several study rooms, before it occurred to me that she might be downstairs in Reference. I didn’t see her there, either, but I did see a librarian I knew slightly, peering at a computer screen. Thelma? Velma? Neither of those names seemed quite right. “Hello there,” I said to her. “How long before actual books are a thing of the past?”

She looked up, reflexively smiling when she recognized me. Then something flickered in her eyes, and she looked slightly embarrassed, as if she’d remembered something unseemly about me. “Oh. Dr. Brockton. Hello.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen my wife in here this evening,” I said.

“No, but I’ve been staring at this screen pretty hard. Feel free to take a look around.”

“I already did. Didn’t see her. She’s working on an article, so I thought she might’ve needed help finding something.”

“Well, not that I know of, but if I see her, I’ll tell her you were looking for her.”

“Thanks.” I nodded and started away, but then stopped and turned back. “Oh, long as I’m here… is, uh, Red working tonight?”

“Who?”

“Red. That’s her nickname. I don’t know her actual name. Young woman. Smart. Sarcastic, but in a fun way.” Thelma/Velma/what’s-her-name was giving me a blank stare. “You know, Red,” I repeated. “I think that’s the color of her hair.”

“I can’t think of anybody who fits that description. Not in Reference, anyway. Maybe she’s in Periodicals?”

“No,” I said, feeling embarrassed and awkward — stupid, even — but also stubborn, not quite ready to give up. “Reference. I’ve talked to her two or three times. She was working the late shift one night a couple weeks ago when I called. June… twentieth, I think. Just before midnight. You could check the staff schedule.”

“I don’t need to,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t need to check the staff schedule to tell you that there was nobody named Red working late that night. Nobody named anything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The library’s open till midnight during summer session,” she said, “but the Reference Desk is only staffed until ten.”

I stripped in the garage, tossed my clothes into the washing machine, and stepped into the shower in the basement bathroom. I stayed there, slumped under the spray, until the water turned cold. I was physically exhausted — I hadn’t slept in almost forty hours — but I was unmoored and off kilter, too, from the roller-coaster ride of all the recent revelations, confrontations, implications, and miscommunications: Prescott’s angry message, Maddox’s new information, Mrs. Janus’s mistrust of the FBI. The last two backbreaking straws had been my unsuccessful search for Kathleen, followed by the disquieting discovery that “Red”—to whom I had confided about the Janus case — was a stranger and an imposter of some sort, someone whose motives and machinations were utter mysteries to me.

Shivering as I stepped out from under the chilly water, I dried off, wrapped the towel around me, and trundled upstairs, where I found Tupperware containers of baked beans and potato salad deep in the fridge: the remains, I realized, of our anniversary dinner. The beans looked and smelled fine; the potato salad was slightly suspect, with a gauzy layer of mold floating above the chunky surface. It seemed more like a layer of ground fog than a deeply established colony of fungus, so I commenced a culinary version of an archaeological dig, removing the top stratum and setting it aside before excavating in earnest, shoveling it into my mouth.

By the time I’d finished the potato salad and baked beans, my whole body was buzzing with fatigue. Shuffling back to the bedroom, I pulled on a soft, ragged pair of sweatpants and a paint-spattered T-shirt, then returned to the living room and settled onto the sofa to watch a bit of the History Channel until Kathleen came home. Outside, the summer light began to fade. Inside, the sights and sounds of World War II filled the room. Within minutes, the menacing growls of warplanes and the lethal clatter of machine-gun fire lulled me into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I awoke to daylight — bright morning daylight — streaming through the living room windows. Surfacing from fathomless depths, I felt disoriented, staring around the room as if it were unfamiliar territory. The television screen was dark and silent, so evidently Kathleen had come in at some point during the war and switched it to peacetime mode. But why hadn’t she waked me, even if only to lead me to bed?

“Kathleen? Kathleen! Are you here?”

“I’m in the kitchen, honey. About to leave.”

Swinging my feet onto the floor, I levered myself into a sitting position and pushed myself off the couch. Rounding the corner into the kitchen, I saw Kathleen rinsing her coffee cup, her briefcase already slung over one shoulder. Still groggy, I moved toward her, hoping for a kiss. “Why didn’t you wake me up? What time did you get in?”

“Really late,” she said. “Midnight, maybe? You were really out of it — I could hear you snoring from down in the garage, as soon as I got out of my car — so I figured I should just let sleeping dogs lie.”

“I wish you’d woken me up. I really wanted to see you.”

“Sorry, hon. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep if I woke you up. And I was desperate to get to sleep by the time I got home last night. After you left yesterday — no, day before yesterday; God, I’m so tired — the phone started ringing off the hook. Reporters and FBI agents calling all afternoon and half the night. So I didn’t get much sleep Sunday night. And yesterday was… well, intense.” She picked up her keys from the counter.

I glanced at the microwave clock. It read 8:15—later than my usual departure time, but earlier than hers. “Do you have to go right now?” I heard a note of petulance in my voice, and I realized that my feelings were hurt.

“I have a meeting at eight-thirty, darling.” She came and gave me a peck on the cheek, then slid off and headed downstairs for the garage. “I’ll talk to you this evening,” she called up the stairs. “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” I murmured to the empty doorway, my unheard voice a mix of wistfulness and resentment.

Chapter 27

Peggy glowered when I entered the Anthropology Department office at nine on Tuesday — not because I was an hour later than usual, but because I’d been AWOL for all of Monday, hunkered down in the abandoned annex. I knew she was about to light into me, but I held up a preemptive hand and shook my head. “Not now, Peggy. Messages on my desk?”

“A few dozen.” Her tone was as biting as a pair of fingernail clippers.

“Thank you.” I headed through the doorway into my administrative office — the one where I met with struggling students, frustrated faculty, and bean-counting bureaucrats — and gathered up the mound of pink messages. If anything, Peggy had understated the number. Curling them into a haphazard scroll, I cinched them with a fat rubber band and headed back out through Peggy’s office.

“You’re already leaving?”

“No. Just heading down to my other office to sort through all this. Buzz me if Kathleen calls. Or the dean. Or the FBI.” I sighed as a bleak thought occurred to me. “Or the general counsel, I guess. But reporters? I’m in an all-day meeting.”

“What meeting? You don’t have a meeting on your schedule.” It wasn’t like Peggy to be dense, so I suspected that she was subtly gigging me, slightly punishing me.

“The meeting between my butt and the chair at the far end of the stadium. The quiet end of the stadium.”

She opened her mouth, but — perhaps seeing the warning in my eyes — shut it and simply nodded.

I made it to the north end of the stadium without encountering another soul in the long corridor that curved beneath the grandstands. Breathing a sigh of relief, I unlocked the door of my private sanctuary, hung out the DO NOT DISTURB sign, and locked myself inside.

Ten minutes later, there was a knock at the door. I knew it wasn’t Peggy; in twelve years as my secretary, she had made the long, dark trek to this end of the stadium only twice — both times in her first week on the job. I considered who it might be. The last thing I wanted to do right now was talk to a graduate student. Or a colleague. Or anyone else, I realized, with the exception — the possible exception — of Kathleen. I ignored it. After a pause, the knocking resumed, louder this time. Again I ignored it. “Hello? Dr. Brockton? You in there?” I recognized the voice of Brian Decker, and I considered him friend, not foe.

“Oh, just a second, Deck,” I called, hurrying to open the door. “Hey. Sorry to keep you waiting. I was preoccupied”—I pointed an accusatory finger at the heap of phone messages—“trying to figure out which of these alligators is gonna take the biggest bite out of my ass. What’s up?”

“The plot thickens,” he said. “You were right.”

“Well, that’s not something I’ve heard much lately,” I said. “About what?”

“About running the print from that finger. That kid’s pinkie. I got a hit.”

“No kidding? The kid’s already got a record? He is a prodigy.”

“Not a criminal record,” he said. “An I.D. record.”

“I’m not following you,” I said.

“There’s been a big push, the last few years, to put kids’ prints on file,” he said. “So if a kid goes missing, we’ve got something besides photos to work with.”

“You mean if a body turns up?”

He frowned; nodded. “Yeah, but not just that,” he said. “Also, if the missing kid — or someone who might be the kid — turns up years later.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “Like putting a computer chip in your dog’s neck, right?”

He nodded. “Like that. The new version of that is DNA — parents can buy DNA kits now — collect a cheek swab and send it off to a company that’ll run the profile and store it.”

“For a fee,” I said.

“For a fee. But fingerprints are free.”

“But we’re talking about Satterfield’s kid here,” I said. “So putting the kid’s fingerprints in a database seems like the last thing Mom and Dad would want to do.”

Decker raised his eyebrows. “Like I said, the plot thickens,” he repeated. “This isn’t Satterfield’s kid.”

“How do you know? And if it’s not his, whose is it?”

“It’s Tim and Tammy Martin’s kid,” he said. “And I know because I talked to them.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. “And their kid’s missing a finger?”

“Unfortunately, their kid’s missing a lot more than that,” he said. “Their kid’s dead.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Murdered?”

He shook his head. “Accidental death. Two weeks ago. Riding his bike. A seventeen-year-old girl ran over him. She was dialing her cell phone.” I frowned, partly because I was appalled by the senseless death, partly because I couldn’t imagine how these puzzle pieces fit together. Decker reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out an index card, which he handed to me.

Except it wasn’t an index card, it was a photo: a headshot of a woman looking — scowling — directly at the camera. The woman was five feet seven inches tall; I could tell this from the inch-by-inch measurements stenciled on the wall behind her. I looked from the photo to Decker, puzzled. “This looks like a mug shot,” I said. “But if she’s seventeen, I’m not a day over twenty.”

“She’s not. Take another look.” I studied it again. She looked familiar, but I was having trouble placing her. Decker raised his eyebrows, watching me closely. “Recognize her? From Satterfield’s trial?”

I felt a mixture of excitement and dread rising in me. “My God, it’s her! The weird groupie woman?”

“Give that man a cigar,” he said. “Or a finger.”

I stared at him, baffled. “I still don’t get it, Deck. Connect the dots for me.”

“Think about it,” he said. “I’ll give you a hint. The kid still had the finger when he was hit by the car.”

I was about to snap at him — about to tell him I didn’t have the time or energy for guessing games — when I realized that playing twenty questions with Decker was probably the most fun I would have all day. All day? Hell, maybe even all week, I thought, glancing again at the pile of angry, insistent messages.

“So the parents,” I mused. “I’m guessing they’re not connected to Satterfield, or the package — that they had nothing to do with cutting off their son’s finger.”

He shook his head. “They were horrified when I told them about it. And furious.”

My mind sorted through various possibilities. “So the girl runs over the boy. Somebody calls 911. The EMTs and the police — city, or county?”

“County. Sheriff’s deputies.”

“The EMTs and the deputies arrive. Is the kid alive or dead when he goes into the ambulance?”

“Alive. Dies on the way to the hospital. Head trauma — no helmet — and internal injuries.”

“Poor kid. But his finger’s still attached, you say.”

“Right.”

“And then he’s taken to the morgue. Is that where the parents first see him?”

“Yes. Took a while to track them down.”

I could feel the picture coming into focus. “So they I.D.’d the body at the morgue. And the finger must’ve still been on his hand then. Because if it wasn’t, they’d have noticed and started asking questions. And anyhow, Garland”—Dr. Garland Hamilton, the Knox County medical examiner—“would’ve pounced on that. An amputation that clean? He’d have been on that like a duck on a June bug.” Decker nodded, smiling slightly, and I continued, on a roll now. “So the boy still had the finger when he was in the morgue. But unless somebody dug up his body”—I felt almost as energized now as when I was working a death scene—“the finger must’ve been amputated between the time he left the morgue and the time he was buried.” Decker was beaming now. “My God,” I said, “so Satterfield’s groupie-woman works at the funeral home? She cut off the finger while she was embalming the boy’s body?”

“See,” he said, “I knew you could figure it out.”

“He must’ve told her to be on the lookout for a finger to send me. A woman’s or a kid’s. They’re pen pals, right?”

“Pen pals, and more,” he said. “The mailroom says they swap letters two, three times a month. And she visits once or twice a year.”

I looked again at the mug shot. In addition to her name, the placard in the image bore a calendar date.

I looked up. “She was arrested yesterday?” He nodded, looking pleased, and I pressed on. “For this?”

“Yup. Desecrating a corpse.”

“Any evidence? Besides circumstantial?”

“We got so lucky on this one,” he said. “There was a big scandal, couple months back, about a Memphis mortician who was having sex with female corpses.”

“I remember that. Really disgusting.”

“No kidding, Doc. Anyhow, the guy that owns the funeral home handling this boy’s burial? He got spooked by that Memphis stuff. Had hidden cameras installed in all the embalming rooms. So when I showed up yesterday, asking who had access to the kid’s body, he puffs up, all proud, and says, ‘Here, let’s take a look.’ He calls up the footage on his computer with me sitting right there. Doc, you should’ve seen that man’s face when it showed this gal — his employee, mind you — slicing off the kid’s finger. That man was shitting bricks. Probably still is. I’m guessing the kid’s parents are gonna sue the pants off him.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about his pants,” I said. “Most funeral homes have huge insurance policies. That’s one reason funerals cost so damn much.” I looked again at the mug shot. “So she’s in custody. She talking? About Satterfield?”

He made a face. “Nah, she’s all lawyered up. My guess is, she’ll end up trying to cut a deal. And maybe the D.A. will require cooperation as part of that.” I frowned, and he went on. “Meanwhile, I’m thinking I might take a little road trip over to Clifton. South Central Correctional Facility.”

“To see Satterfield?”

“See him. Talk to him. Rattle his cage a little. Have a frank, man-to-man chat in a private interview room.” He began to nod slowly, a dark glint in his eyes, his fingers clenching and unclenching rhythmically. “Suggest that it’s not a good idea to bother you and your family.”

For a moment, I allowed myself to imagine what I suspected Decker himself was imagining: Decker, built like a linebacker, beating the crap out of Satterfield. I imagined it, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. I felt myself yielding to the idea, being taken over by it. It was as if I were spellbound, enchanted by the siren song of violent vengeance. It almost seemed as if I myself were the one slamming Satterfield’s face against a cinder-block wall, kicking Satterfield’s splintering ribs. Suddenly my fantasy took an unexpected and horrifying turn. During a split-second pause in the carnage, Satterfield managed to turn his face toward me, and through the bloody lips and the broken teeth, he grinned at me: a mocking, malicious, complicit grin. “Gotcha,” the grin seemed to say. “How do you like it, becoming me?”

“No!” My voice — my shout — startled me from my waking dream. Was I shouting at Satterfield, at myself, or at Decker? I had no idea.

Decker stared at me. “Doc? What’s wrong?”

I felt a shudder run through me. “Nothing. Sorry. Just… probably not a good idea to go see Satterfield. But, Christ, that guy is still under my skin. Like some dormant virus, or a cancer cell — lurking, biding its time, you know?” He nodded. A thought struck me. “Know much about shingles?”

“Roofing shingles?”

“Medical shingles. The disease.”

“Not much,” he said. “Old people get it, right? Very painful, I’ve heard.”

“Ever have chicken pox, as a kid?”

“Sure. Itched like crazy.”

“The virus that caused it? You’ve still got it,” I said. “When your immune system kicked in, it killed most of the virus, but not all. Some of it survived; it’s hiding at the base of one of your spinal nerves, coiled up like a snake. One day when you’re fifty or sixty or seventy, something reactivates it — nobody really knows how or why — and it comes slithering out.”

Suddenly Decker grabbed the edge of my desk with both hands. He went pale and began to breathe in quick, sharp pants; sweat beaded on his forehead and began to run down his face. His eyes were wide and wild, staring with an expression of utter horror at something that was either miles away from my office, or deep within himself.

“Deck? What’s the matter?”

“Kev,” he whispered, then — louder: “Kevin! No!”

I leaned across the desk and squeezed one of Decker’s forearms. The muscles were clenched so tightly, his arm felt like a bar of cast iron. Then I realized what must have happened. Decker’s younger brother, Kevin — a bomb-squad technician — had died while searching Satterfield’s house for explosives: killed not by a booby trap, but by a deadly snake, a fer-de-lance, that had been set loose in the house. Comparing Satterfield to a lurking virus — and then comparing the virus to a snake — must have taken Decker back to the scene of his brother’s death. It was as if I had poured gasoline on Decker’s memory, then held a lighted match to it, and I cursed myself for my stupidity. “Hey, Deck,” I said, squeezing his arm tighter. “Deck, can you hear me? It’s Bill Brockton, Deck. We’re here in my office at Neyland Stadium.” I waved my other hand in front of his staring eyes, but it had no effect. Trying to get his attention, I began snapping my fingers near his face, moving the hand slightly from side to side, all the while calling his name. His body was now trembling, as if shivering hard, and I had visions of his heart giving out or an aneurysm in his brain bursting. I’ve got to get him out of this, I thought, and in desperation, I began tapping his cheekbone with my fingertips. He seemed not to notice, so I tapped harder, still to no effect, and then I began to slap him gently—the sound of one hand clapping, I thought absurdly — still calling his name and telling him mine. I was beginning to despair — wondering whether to call 911 or someone in the Psychiatric Department at UT Medical Center — when he reached up and seized my wrist, with a grip that felt like a vise, and brought my hand down to the desk. “Deck,” I said, struggling not to cry out. “Deck, it’s Bill Brockton. Can you hear me, Deck? I need you to hear me. I need you to stay with me, Deck. Come back from wherever you’ve gone. Come back to Neyland Stadium, to my office by the north end zone.”

At that moment my phone rang. With my free hand I reached to answer it, but just before I did, I noticed that Decker’s eyes had flickered at the sound, so I decided to let it keep ringing, in hopes that somehow the phone would manage to reel him back from wherever he’d gone. Keep ringing, I prayed, and it did: two times; three; four. By the fourth ring, his eyes seemed to be coming into focus, searching for the source of the sound. “That’s the phone on my desk ringing,” I said. “It might be Kathleen, my wife, calling me. You remember Kathleen, don’t you, Deck? Remember that lunch we had at Calhoun’s?” I caught myself just in the nick of time — just before saying “right after Satterfield’s trial?”—and changed course to say, “You remember that huge pile of rib bones we left on the table?” The phone was still ringing. “You wouldn’t believe how much my phone’s been ringing lately, Deck. The FBI thinks I screwed up a case in San Diego, and I have about fifty reporters wanting to interview me about what a dumb-ass I am.”

He blinked and seemed to be trying to get his bearings. I kept talking. “I have another fifty wanting to tar and feather me for disrespecting veterans — using them in our research at the Body Farm.” He blinked again, then turned to look at me, his expression suggesting that he vaguely remembered me but couldn’t quite place me. I plowed ahead, encouraged that he seemed to be heading in the right direction, namely, the direction of sanity. “I’m afraid they might try to shut down the Body Farm, Deck. I know the police understand how important our research is. So do prosecutors. But bureaucrats and politicians? I’m not sure they know or care. What should I do, Deck? How do I protect the work I care about?”

“I don’t know,” he said, then: “Sorry, what? I think I spaced out for a second there. What were we talking about?”

“Beats me, Deck,” I said. I nodded at the phone — still ringing, now for at least the twentieth time — and added, “That damned thing just won’t quit ringing. Made me forget whatever it was I was saying.” He nodded, looking almost normal now, so I ventured, “Hey, Deck?”

“Yeah, Doc?”

“You reckon maybe you could turn loose of my wrist? I’m starting to lose the feeling in my fingers.”

An hour after Decker left — finally sounding sane but still looking haunted and harrowed — my fingers were still tingling from his viselike grip on my wrist. Before he departed, I had nervously circled back to the subject of Satterfield, urging Deck not to go to the prison and “rattle his cage,” as he’d put it. “If you do,” I said, “he’ll know he’s getting to me.” Deck had grunted, then nodded — conceding, apparently, that cage rattling might not be a brilliant idea. I appreciated the concession. I just wished it had seemed more convincing.

After Decker’s departure, I had begun scaling the mountain of messages — the Everest of Insistence — that Peggy had left for me. I started by sorting them into three categories: Not Important, Urgent, and 911. After leafing through the first ten messages, I saw that the Not-Important stack contained no messages; all ten had ended up in the 911 stack. I redefined the categories — Bad, Worse, and Worst — but the outcome was similar, with all the messages landing in Worst. Next I briefly considered (and swiftly rejected) Worst, More Worst, and Most Worst, then settled on Oh Shit, Holy Shit, and Somebody Shoot Me. Still no change.

Clearly a paradigm shift was required. Instead of sorting by urgency, I decided to categorize by caller: Media Meddlers, UT Honchos, and Other. This time, the results were different, and though I certainly didn’t think I had conquered, I had, at least, divided: The callers were split almost evenly between two categories, Media Meddlers and UT Honchos, with only a few outliers in Other. Many of the messages were duplicates, I noticed: UT’s general counsel, Amanda Whiting, had called four times; the dean had dialed me twice; my newswoman nemesis, Athena Demopoulos, had tried me three times; and one persistent caller — the record holder — had left me seven messages, each of which bore the same San Diego number, followed by the words “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News!!!” I tossed the duplicate messages — and all of Malloy’s — and found to my relief that I actually had only a dozen callers chasing me, rather than two or three dozen. Better yet, I decided I could safely ignore most of the reporters, though not, alas, my Nashville nemesis.

The one caller whose name stood out as a pleasant surprise was Wellington Meffert, a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent who was better known, to lawmen and lawbreakers in the mountainous East Tennessee counties he covered, as “Bubba Hardknot.” Meffert had left me only two messages, but because I actually looked forward to talking with him, I moved Bubba to the head of the line. I was reaching for the phone to call him when the intercom buzzed. “Well, crap,” I muttered to myself, then — picking up the handset — answered with, “Yes, Peggy. Which particular pain in my ass is about to flare up?”

“Two of them, actually,” answered an echoey female voice that sounded familiar but didn’t sound like Peggy. My heart sank and my face flushed as the voice continued, “It’s Amanda Whiting, Dr. Brockton. The dean and I decided to drop by for a visit. Peggy was kind enough to put us on speaker when she paged you.”

“That was kind,” I said drily.

Sitting in the leather swivel chair behind the oak desk in my administrative office, I occupied the seat of power, at least furniture-wise. But looking across at the grim faces of the dean and the general counsel, perched on the ladder-back chairs normally occupied by failing students, I knew that my position was tenuous, at best. Amanda Whiting, UT’s top legal eagle, seemed ready to tear me to shreds with her Harvard-honed talons, and the dean — long one of my staunchest supporters — was relegated to the role of onlooker and sympathetic spectator as the shredding commenced and the blood began to flow. “Dr. Brockton, I appreciate the contribution that your research facility has made to forensic science,” Whiting was saying for at least the third time.

Methinks thou dost protest too much, I thought, but what I interrupted her to say was, “Not just ‘has made,’ Amanda.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said ‘has made.’ We’re still making contributions. Present tense, and future tense. We’ve got a dozen studies under way right now, and more coming down the pike, some of them really exciting.”

Whiting responded with a nod that acknowledged what I’d said and yet somehow, at the same time, dismissed it as utterly irrelevant. “I understand,” she said, and then proceeded to demonstrate that she didn’t, in fact, understand and also didn’t care. “But surely you can understand that the university needs to prioritize risk management and damage control.”

“Can I?” I could feel my blood pressure ratcheting up. “My understanding has always been that the university’s priorities are the pursuit of knowledge and the education of students. When did those get replaced by playing it safe and covering our asses?”

She flushed, not from embarrassment but from anger. “Don’t play the simpleton,” she snapped, and I felt my own color rising. Before I could retort, she barreled on. “How much of our funding comes from the state?”

“A lot.”

“You’re damn right, a lot. A hundred fifty million dollars this year, give or take a few million. And if the state decided to take a few million — or more than a few — how do you propose that we fund the pursuit of knowledge and the education of students? You ready to teach for free?”

“What’s your point, Amanda? You want to cut off my salary?”

“No, dammit, but the legislature might.”

“Oh, please,” I said. “Now who’s playing the simpleton?”

The dean shifted in his chair, scraping the legs across the floor, as if the chair were clearing its throat for attention. “Hang on, both of you. Can we maybe dial this back a notch or two?” Whiting and I continued to glare at each other, and he tried again. “We’re all on the same side, remember? And you’ve both got a point. Amanda, Bill’s research has made the Anthropology Department one of the best in the country.” I felt better, but only until he added, “But, Bill, the hornets that the Channel Four story stirred up might be about to sting us bad.”

I turned my full attention on him. “Sting us how? What do you mean?”

He frowned. “You remember that state senator in the story?”

“That grandstanding dummy from Jackson? What about him?”

“Apparently he wasn’t just grandstanding. He’s drafted a bill for the next legislative session. If you don’t shut down your research program, it would cut the university’s state funding.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, but I could tell by his expression that this was no joke. “Cut our funding? By how much?”

Amanda Whiting answered for him. “By one hundred percent,” she said. She no longer sounded angry; now she sounded demoralized and defeated. “Every damn cent.”

Chapter 28

The next morning I got up at five, an hour before my alarm was set to go off, and slipped from bed. Kathleen lay motionless, her breathing steady, and I decided not to wake her — if, indeed, she was sleeping, though I half suspected she was not.

We had been off kilter and cross all through the prior evening, to a degree that was rare and perhaps even unprecedented for us. I still hadn’t told her about Satterfield’s threat, and withholding that information meant that I couldn’t tell her about Decker’s meltdown in my office, either. My secrecy almost certainly contributed to my testiness — partly because withholding anything from Kathleen ran deeply counter to my nature. I had tried several times, on the other hand, to talk about both the Janus case and the political assault on the Body Farm. But Kathleen, usually so solicitous and sympathetic, had seemed distant and preoccupied. By bedtime, our conversation had cooled to curt monosyllables, and we had slept, to the degree that either of us succeeded in sleeping, with our backs to each other.

Threading my way through our neighborhood in the predawn darkness, I turned onto Cherokee Boulevard, which was flanked on one side by mansions and on the other by a long ribbon of riverfront parkland. A low layer of fog, only a few feet thick, blanketed the fields and river; as I drove, my headlights created a luminous oval pool within the fog, but the air above the lights — the air up where I sat — was clear, so I had the odd sensation that my truck had been transformed into a boat, and that I was not so much driving as navigating, finding my way through a channel whose margins were outlined by the familiar hedges and streetlamps rising from the depths and piercing the surface. At the boulevard’s roundabout, the big, illuminated fountain — normally spouting from a waist-high round basin — had been transformed into a marine geyser, jetting up through the fog as if from some undersea vent or fault line. As I curved past it, I slammed on the brakes. A solitary runner, visible only from the chest up, was rounding the fountain. The bizarre image — a human-headed sea monster swimming past a waterspout in the ocean — haunted me for the remainder of the drive to campus. Signs and omens, I thought, but of what?

I parked my truck in the cool dark beneath the stadium’s south end, down beside the basement door leading to the bone lab. In the quiet of dawn, I could hear the truck’s engine ticking with heat, and the sound seemed to echo some ominous interior ticking I sensed but couldn’t pinpoint: the ticking of something about to explode. Satterfield? The Janus debacle? The backlash over the veterans? None of the above? All of the above? I couldn’t shake the feeling that in some soft blind spot, a creature with claws was clutching at me. Another unsettling image flashed into my mind, displacing that of the sea-monster man swimming through the fog: a naked man chained to a rock, a ragged wound in his side, a sharp-beaked eagle tearing at his liver. Prometheus, I remembered. But Prometheus — an immortal — had stolen fire from the gods. Had I committed some great transgression? Was I guilty of hubris, the arrogant pride that went before a fall, in both Greek mythology and Christian teaching? In seeking to unlock the secrets of death, was I guilty of overweening ambition — of trespassing in divine realms where mere mortals were not allowed?

The ticking — of the truck’s engine or of the more ominous cosmic machinery — seemed to grow louder, and just as I recognized the sound of footsteps, a face loomed in front of me. I jumped, and then realized, with a mixture of fear, relief, and embarrassment that the last, loudest ticking I’d heard — a split-second afer the footsteps — had been the sound of someone tapping on my window to get my attention. “Dr. Brockton?” I blinked, disoriented, then recognized the face of Steve Morgan, a former student who now worked for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

“Steve?” I rolled down the window. “You scared the crap out of me. Am I under arrest?” I said it as a joke — or thought I did — but in my skittish, spooked state of mind, it came out sounding more paranoid than humorous. I tried to smooth over the awkwardness with another joke. “Looks like I could learn a trick or two from the TBI. I never could motivate you to get to class by eight.”

This one didn’t fall quite so flat. He smiled, though in the watery light now coming from the eastern sky, the smile looked faint. “Doc, could I talk to you about something? A personal matter?”

I felt a rush of sympathy and relief. “Sure, Steve. I’m always happy to help a former student, if I can.” Rolling up the window and opening the door, I got out and shook his hand. For the first time I noticed the black Crown Victoria parked fifty yards away. “You been staking me out? Or did you just know I’d be up with the chickens?”

“I remembered you were an early bird,” he said. “But also, I couldn’t sleep. Figured I might as well come on down and wait for you.”

“You are in a state. Come inside.”

He frowned. “Mind if we stay outside? Walk and talk? I don’t want to bring this into your office.”

“Sounds serious. Sure, let’s go.” I clicked my key fob to lock the truck, then we started out along the narrow service road that circled the base of the stadium, weaving in and out of concrete footings and angled steel girders. We walked in silence a while; I didn’t want to press him, and he was in no hurry to begin.

When we reached the other end of the stadium — where an access tunnel led through the base of the grandstands to the playing field — I noticed that the chain-link gate was unlocked and standing open. Pointing to it, I walked through. We emerged at one corner of the north end zone. The transition — from the dark, narrow passageway to the vast bowl of the stadium opening before us — seemed to free up something in Steve.

“I don’t know much about marriage,” he began, stopping and leaning against the padding around the base of the goalpost. “Sherry and I have only been married three years. I’m still trying to figure out how it works.”

“Me, too,” I said, giving his shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. Sherry, his wife, had been my student, too; in fact, my osteology class was where they had met, and where Steve had first asked her out. “I’ve been married thirty years now, and sometimes I still find myself scratching my head, wondering what the hell just happened.” His only response was a ruminative grunt, so I went on. “What’s got you worried, Steve? Your marriage in a rough patch?”

“No, sir,” he said. “I think maybe yours is.”

I took a step back. “Excuse me?”

He turned to face me. “Do you know where your wife was day before yesterday, Dr. Brockton? What she was doing?”

I stared at him, baffled and filled with a sense of dread. “She was in the library at UT. Writing a journal article.”

“No, sir,” he said again, shaking his head with what appeared to be deep sadness. “She was in Nashville. At the Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I saw your wife in Nashville that day, Dr. Brockton. At the Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel. With a man. They were having lunch. He was holding her hand.”

I felt confused. I felt sick. And I felt mad as hell at Steve. “You’re mistaken,” I said angrily. “Kathleen was here — on this campus, in the library — all day and most of the evening.” He shook his head, and I wanted to hit him. “You barely know her, Steve — you’ve seen her, what, two or three times in your life? I can’t believe you’d accuse her of something like this.” I spun and walked away, across the goal line, toward midfield.

“BDK 643,” he called after me.

I stopped in my tracks, then turned to look at him. “What did you say?” It was a reflexive question, one I needn’t have asked.

“BDK 643,” he repeated. “That’s the tag of the car she drove away in. Toyota Camry with a Knox County plate. I ran it. It’s registered to you.”

“I know,” I said. My knees had gone weak. I motioned to a bench by the sideline and sat down heavily. I felt as if someone — someone big, like a UT defensive lineman or cornerback — had just knocked me flat. “Tell me what you saw. Start at the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”

Thirty minutes later, Kathleen opened her office door. When she saw me sitting behind her desk, she dropped her keys. They clattered to the floor with unnatural loudness. “Bill. You scared me to death. What are you doing here?”

“Who is it, Kathleen?”

“What?”

“Who is it? Who is he? You’re having an affair. I want to know who the sonofabitch is.”

She gave me an odd look. There was no shame in it, as I’d expected there would be; instead, I saw… what? Grimness? Sorrow? Disappointment? “No,” she said after a moment. “I’m not having an affair.”

“Dammit, Kathleen, stop lying to me. You said you were in the library all day Monday. Writing. Trying to meet a submission deadline. That’s a lie. You were in Nashville.” Her eyes narrowed and her chin lifted slightly — a warning sign, one that might have given me pause under any other circumstances. “You were with a man at the Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel. Don’t even think about telling me you weren’t, because I know.”

“You’ve been spying on me?”

“No, I have not been spying on you,” I said. “Steve Morgan saw you there. Saw you holding hands with some man. He thought I deserved to know.” I shook my head. “I told Steve he was wrong — told him it couldn’t’ve been you, because you were here at UT, working in the library. But then he showed me a picture of your car, and your license plate. And then he showed me a picture of you and your boyfriend.” I had expected to stay furious—intended to stay furious — but I felt my anger crumbling, and I felt tears rolling down my face. “Why, Kathleen? You’re always talking about what a good life we have. What a good marriage we have. Why would you risk throwing all that away?”

“And you,” she said. “Why would you be so quick to doubt me?” Her briefcase fell to the floor and she slumped backward against the door, then hung her head, putting her face in her hands. I heard her breath grow ragged, and by the time she dropped her hands and looked up — only a few seconds later — she had aged a decade, her face slack and bleak. “Oh, honey,” she whispered. “I’ve been needing to talk to you. But I’ve been afraid to tell you… because it’s really hard… and I knew… it would make you… so sad.” She fought for breath, shaking her head slowly. “It’s not… what you think.”

I slapped the top of the desk, so hard it sounded like a rifle shot, and she flinched so hard the door rattled in its frame. “Jesus, Kathleen, don’t give me that crap,” I began, but she held up a hand, and the haunted expression in her face stopped me.

“It’s not… an affair,” she said. “It’s worse. Much worse.” She stared straight at me now. “All that cramping and bleeding I’ve been having? The nonstop period? I thought it was just menopause and fibroids, or maybe endometriosis. But it’s not. It’s cancer, Bill. A fast, mean kind of uterine cancer.” She drew a shuddering breath and held it for a moment, but when she breathed out, the exhalation sounded oddly steady; calm, even, as if saying the dreaded word had freed her from something. Meanwhile, as she regained her equilibrium, I began to lose mine. The room seemed to spin, the floor — the abyss — to open beneath me. “It’s called leiomyosarcoma,” she went on. “Smooth-muscle tumor. I’d never heard of it. Have you?” I just stared, and she suddenly smiled an ironic, heartbreaking smile. “That man in Nashville — my ‘boyfriend’? That was Dr. Andrew Spitzer, from Vanderbilt. He’s a gynecologic oncologist — a specialist in cancer of the lady parts. That hand-holding over lunch? That was when he gave me my test results. Gave me my death sentence.”

“What are you talking about? Stop,” I said, struggling to catch up, struggling to keep it together. “Tests can be wrong. We need to get a second opinion.”

She shook her head. “Spitzer was my second opinion. I saw my regular ob-gyn while you were out in San Diego. She referred me to Spitzer; got him to work me in on an urgent basis. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to worry you with it.”

“I’m your husband, Kathleen. I want to be worried, if you’re worried. But this can’t be right.”

“It might not be right,” she said, “but it’s real. Remember last year, when I had that fibroid cut out?”

“Sure,” I said. “Power… power something-or-other?”

“Power morcellation,” she said. “Remember the tool the surgeon used? Looked like my handheld blender, the one I call the ‘Wand of Power’?” I stared, not quite following the thread. I was miles behind, but she didn’t wait for me to catch up. “Turns out power morcellation wasn’t such a great technique. The blade chopped up the fibroid, like they said it would. But it wasn’t just an ordinary fibroid. And they didn’t get out all the pieces — all the morcels — when they flushed me out afterward.”

“But the pathology report came back clean,” I reminded her. “Not cancer.”

“Not in what they looked at,” she said. “But there must have been tumor cells hiding in there somewhere. That’s what Spitzer thinks, anyhow. And the tool they used to cut up the fibroid — the power morcellator? It scattered those cells like seeds.” She shrugged. “And now, those seeds have taken root, all over the place, and I’ve grown a bumper crop of tumors.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Funny thing,” she said. “That surgery was supposed to help me, but instead, it killed me.”

“Kathleen, stop talking like that,” I said. “We’ll fight this. We’ll beat this.”

“We can’t, Bill. It’s not beatable. It’s too far along. The CT scan at Vanderbilt showed cancer all over my abdominal cavity. It’s already in my lungs, too. Spitzer said radiation and chemo might—might—give me an extra few months—”

“Can we do it here, or do we need to go to Vanderbilt?”

“No,” she said.

“No, what? No, we don’t need to go to Vanderbilt?”

“No, we’re not doing it. Either place. Any place.”

“What are you talking about? Of course we are. How soon can we start?”

“No.” Her face was no longer slack; it was now set, as hard as I’d ever seen it. “You don’t get to decide this, Bill. This isn’t we, this is me, and I say no.” She shook her head, her expression resolute. “Listen to me. Spitzer said the treatment would be brutal, and any extra time it gave me would be pure hell.” I started to argue, but she cut me off again. “Pure hell. Those were his words. I won’t put myself through that, Bill. And if you love me, you won’t try to make me.” She gave a wry half smile. “Funny, I was always so sure you’d be the one to die first. I figured some ex-convict would come gunning for revenge, or maybe you’d have a heart attack from working so hard. I never once thought I’d go first. And I sure never thought it’d be so soon.”

“Tell me this isn’t happening, Kathleen,” I pleaded. “Tell me this is a bad dream.”

“I can’t, honey. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

“Don’t leave me, Kathleen. Please. I can’t bear it.”

“Yes, you can.” She gave me an appraising glance. “It won’t be easy for you, though. You’re going to miss me when I’m gone.”

I knew she was right, because I could already feel a deep, black fissure cracking open within me — a fault line zigzagging down to depths I could not even begin to fathom.

Chapter 29

Kathleen had finally persuaded me to leave her office—“I have a lot of things to take care of,” she’d said as she propelled me gently into the hallway — and I’d made my way in a daze back to the dark quietude of my private office, where I sat staring out the window at the stadium’s crisscrossed scaffolding of gritty, rusting girders. My own scaffolding — the underpinning of my life — suddenly felt old and rusty, too, though in hindsight the rust had been eating away at it for quite some time.

Through the grimy window, a faint flicker of movement caught my eye: a small, oblong shape twitching slightly atop a grayish-white lump. I stood up and walked to the window for a closer look. On the other side of the glass, six inches from my face, a paper wasp was scrabbling around, atop a small nest suspended beneath an I-beam. The wasp’s antennae and mandibles and forelegs twitched as it bustled across the shallow structure. The nest, about the same size as the face of my wristwatch, contained several dozen open hexagonal cells. Inside the nearest cells, I saw small, glistening larvae, and as the wasp moved from cell to cell, it darted its head briefly inside cell after cell, dispensing tiny taste treats: a dollop of chewed-up caterpillar, perhaps, or a masticated maggot — maybe even a maggot plucked from a corpse across the river, at the Body Farm. To one side of the nest, a dozen other wasps sat motionless, like airplanes parked on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Just beyond the small nest — no more than six inches from it — hung the prior year’s nest, empty and abandoned, like some entomological version of a blighted suburban strip mall. As I watched, I heard a sharp hissing sound, and suddenly a powerful jet of water shot up from somewhere below, swooshing and fanning across my window. Every few years, the university’s maintenance crews pressure-washed the windows of Stadium Hall, and today, it seemed, was the appointed day. The stream made several passes back and forth, sending sheets of muddy water cascading down the glass and off the sills. As the view cleared, to the extent that the view from these windows ever cleared, I looked out at the girder I’d been studying minutes before. The wasps — along with their new nest — were gone: swept away in the blink of an eye. Six inches from the obliterated construction site, the old nest hung, dripping but undamaged. In my mind, I seemed to hear the words of some Old Testament prophet, his voice as harsh as wormwood and gall and my own bitter heart: Vanity, vanity — all is vanity — and we are as dust in the wind.

My cell phone rang for the umpteenth time of the agonizing afternoon, and for the umpteenth time I reached for the “ignore” button. A moment earlier, I had ignored a call from Carmelita Janus — I felt bad about that, since I had promised to try to help her, but I also felt as if I were drowning in a sea of my own troubles, unable to haul her to safety. I glanced at the display, to see if Mrs. Janus had hit “redial,” but the display showed me a different name: “KPD Decker.” I had already ignored two calls from Decker shortly before lunchtime; I didn’t think I should ignore a third, given how precarious his mental state had seemed the last time I’d seen him. Feeling edgy, I answered the call. “Hey, Deck. How you doing?”

There was a brief silence on the other end, then a male voice I didn’t recognize said, in an oddly businesslike tone, “Hello? Who is this, please?”

“This is Dr. Bill Brockton,” I answered. “At the University of Tennessee. Who are you, and why are you calling me on Captain Decker’s cell phone?”

“Dr. Brockton, did you speak with Captain Decker this morning?”

The question seemed to come out of nowhere. “Excuse me?”

“I asked if you spoke with Captain Decker this morning.”

“No, I didn’t. Why?” I felt confused, and in the back of my head, an alarm was beginning to sound.

“His cell phone shows that he called you twice. First at 10:23 Central Time, for twenty seconds, and again at 10:54, for five minutes.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, feeling testy now. “Who are you? Why are you calling me? And what business is it of yours who calls me, and when?”

There was another silence, then: “Dr. Brockton, this is Special Agent Henry Fielding with the TBI. I need to know whether you spoke with Captain Decker this morning.”

“No,” I said. “I think he tried to call me, but we didn’t talk. I have a backlog of voice mails I haven’t listened to yet. There might be one from him. I can check, and call you back, if you want.”

“Not right now,” he said. “Right now I need to ask you a few questions.”

The alarm bell in my head was almost deafening now. “Tell me what’s happened,” I demanded. “Is Deck hurt? Has he been in an accident?” The word “suicide” flashed into my mind, but I didn’t want to say it, because the act of saying it might somehow make it real. Suddenly a phrase the TBI agent had used connected with a circuit in my brain, and I felt a jolt that was almost electric. “You said ‘Central Time.’ Decker was calling me from Middle Tennessee this morning?” I prayed that it wasn’t so, but deep down, I knew that it was.

“Yes, he was.”

“Jesus. Please tell me he wasn’t calling me from Clifton,” I said. “Please tell me he didn’t go to the prison.”

“What do you mean, Dr. Brockton?” The agent’s question — and his tone of voice — couldn’t have been more casual if he’d been asking about the weather. And that told me, beyond a doubt, that something was badly wrong.

“Is Deck hurt? Is he in some sort of trouble?” The agent didn’t answer, and I snapped. “Goddamnit, Fielding, what the hell is going on? Quit playing games with me. If something’s happened to Captain Decker, tell me what it is, and tell me how I can help.”

I heard the agent take a long, deep breath, and then I heard him exhale it. “Captain Decker’s in the ICU at Vanderbilt Hospital,” he finally said. “He’s lost a lot of blood. They’re not sure if he’s going to make it.”

“Oh dear God,” I said. “He did go to the prison, didn’t he? This happened to him there.”

“What makes you say that, Dr. Brockton?”

“Because he mentioned it a couple days ago, when I saw him. He’s working a case involving an inmate there. Nick Satterfield. The serial killer. Satterfield’s… girlfriend, his groupie — I don’t know what to call her — she helped Satterfield send a threat to me. A threat and an amputated finger. Decker came to see me a few days ago, to tell me they’d arrested her. While he was here, he said something about paying a visit to Satterfield.”

“What, exactly, did he say?”

I hesitated; I didn’t want to create more problems for Decker, but I didn’t see any clear alternative to the truth. “He said he might go see Satterfield, might rattle his cage a bit.”

“Did he use those words? ‘Rattle his cage’?”

“I think so. Would you please just tell me what’s happened?”

“Bear with me, Dr. Brockton. Was it Captain Decker who suggested rattling Satterfield’s cage? Or was it you?”

“What?” He didn’t respond. “No, it wasn’t me,” I said. “It was Decker who mentioned it, but he wasn’t serious. He was just talking, you know?”

“No, sir, I don’t know,” he said. “What I do know is that Captain Decker went to see Mr. Satterfield. And there was a violent confrontation in the interview room. And Captain Decker nearly bled out on the floor.”

I had a terrible sense of déjà vu — of Satterfield uncoiling and striking down a good man, out of pure malevolence and unadulterated evil.

“I don’t understand how that could happen,” I said. “Aren’t the prisoners behind glass, or bars, or a wire screen, or something? Aren’t they shackled, or cuffed? Or at least guarded?”

“Captain Decker requested a private interview,” the agent said. “In a room. And he asked the guard to remove the prisoner’s restraints.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Jesus. Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know, sir. I thought maybe you could tell me.”

“But what happened? You said Decker lost a lot of blood. Did Satterfield have a knife? A shiv — is that what it’s called?”

“He had a razor blade,” said Fielding. “Hidden in his mouth. He must’ve been expecting trouble.”

“He was causing the trouble,” I snapped. “He sent that finger, and he waited. It was a trap. Bait. And how the hell did he get hold of a razor blade?”

“You’d be amazed what inmates can get hold of. Drugs. Phones. Weapons. Women. Anyhow, by the time the guards got in and broke up the fight, Decker was cut pretty bad. Satterfield went for the neck — he cut the jugular vein, and he was still cutting when they pulled him off. Almost got the carotid artery, the ER docs said.”

“That sick sonofabitch,” I said. I didn’t know whether to weep or scream. “I guess he just wants to take as many people down with him as he can.”

“That’s not the way he tells it, Dr. Brockton,” said the agent.

“What do you mean?” I was echoing the question Fielding had asked two minutes earlier, but my tone — unlike his — was anything but casual.

“Satterfield says it was self-defense. Says Decker was trying to kill him. Says Decker came there to kill him.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “That can’t be true.”

“No? That’s not all he says, Dr. Brockton. He says Decker was doing it for you.”

“Oh, bullshit,” I snapped.

“For you and your wife,” the agent went on. “Decker told Satterfield you and your wife promised him ten thousand dollars.”

“How dare you?” My voice sounded both loud and muffled — as if I were shouting, but shouting from somewhere far away. “Do you even know who Satterfield is, and what he’s done?”

“Yes, sir, actually, I am familiar with Satterfield’s record.”

The words “Satterfield’s record” seemed a mockery to me.

“Do you know what he did, actually, to the four women he killed?”

“I’ve seen the autopsy reports, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s only a small part of what I mean,” I snapped. “Can you imagine the pain and the terror he put those women through, on their way to those autopsy reports?”

“No, sir, I guess I can’t.”

“I guess not. And do you know that he cut off my wife’s finger — in front of me, and our son, and his girlfriend — just for kicks? Just to give us a little taste of what he had in store for us?”

“I am aware of that,” he said. “And I certainly don’t condone it.”

“Don’t condone it?” I was practically roaring now. “Well, that’s mighty big of you, Agent Fielding, not to condone it.”

“Dr. Brockton? Sir? I need you to take a step back and calm down. I’m sorry if my choice of words offended you. No doubt about it, Satterfield’s done terrible things. But those things aren’t the issue right now. The issue right now is, he’s alleging crimes have been committed, by Captain Deck—”

“Give me a break,” I interrupted. “You’re going to take a convicted serial killer’s word over a police officer’s?”

“Let me finish,” he said. “He’s alleging crimes were committed by Captain Decker, and by you and your wife. Attempted murder by Captain Decker, and conspiracy to commit murder, by you and your wife.”

“My wife,” I spat, “is dying. And frankly, Agent Fielding, in light of that, I don’t give a good goddamn what Satterfield says. If you’ve got an ounce of decency in you, neither will you.”

Whatever response he had to that, I didn’t hear it. I had already hit “end.”

Chapter 30

After the call about Decker, I left campus — as if by leaving my office, I could leave my worries — and headed toward home. But as I turned west onto Kingston Pike — toward the mansions that signaled the boundary of Sequoyah Hills — I felt myself slowing, and then turning into the parking lot of Second Presbyterian Church. Our church: the church where Kathleen and I had worshipped for years, first as young marrieds, then as young parents, then as youth-group leaders for Jeff and his friends.

The church, a soaring neo-Gothic structure of tan sandstone, sat high on a green rise, looking timeless and serene. Blessedly, the sanctuary was both unlocked and empty, its stained-glass windows ablaze with afternoon light. Slipping into a pew near the back, I bowed my head and prayed — or tried to pray. But the words felt lost in space; they echoed in my heart as loudly as they might have echoed in the vault of the nave, had I shouted them at the top of my lungs.

Tucked into racks on the backs of the pews, alongside well-worn copies of the Presbyterian Hymnal, were copies of the Bible, not so worn. Slipping a Bible from the nearest rack, I flipped through it until I came to the Book of Job. I’d never actually read it, but I’d heard the story countless times over the years: Job was a good and pious man, brought to the breaking point by an onslaught of misfortunes. Through it all — tragedy upon tragedy, all of them undeserved — Job’s faith held firm, and in the end, God rewarded him. Maybe I could learn something from Job, I thought, as I began to read. Maybe Job could help me make sense of what was happening, or at least help me face it with faith and peace. Maybe Job could even teach me how to do the real trick: to snatch True Happiness from the bloody jaws of tragedy.

The story’s opening was much as I had expected: God praises Job’s piety to Satan, and Satan responds by taunting God — challenging God. “He’s rich and happy,” Satan sneers. “Of course he’s pious.” And so begins a contest, a wager, between God and Satan; a tug-of-war, with Job as the rope, tested by a torrent of tragedies. In the space of a single chapter, a series of messengers arrives, one on the heels of another, reciting loss upon loss — all Job’s possessions—7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 teams of oxen, 500 female donkeys — as well as the demise of all of his farmhands, shepherds, and servants.

But worse — far, far worse — is yet to come. Another messenger arrives immediately, informing Job that his seven sons and three daughters, feasting together in a son’s house, have all perished in a fierce, house-leveling windstorm. Like each of the prior bearers of bad tidings, this one concludes by saying, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

The litany of his losses complete, Job stands up, rips his clothes, and shaves his head. Then, a sentence later — to my astonishment — Job gets over it. In what struck me as the world’s swiftest resolution of grief, he simply shrugs it off. “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb,” he says, “and naked thither I shall return: The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Baffled, I reread that passage — reread it several times, in fact; it didn’t take long. I stared and squinted at the page. “Them’s the breaks,” Job seemed to be saying. “Easy come, easy go.” By the time I’d read his words enough times to memorize them, I was no longer just puzzled; I was also, I realized, angry. I could understand, and I could admire, Job’s tranquility in the face of material losses. Stuff, after all, is only stuff, if you ignore the countless corpses of servants and livestock littering Job’s property. But to suffer such slight, offhand pain — a torn robe, a shaved head, and an “oh well”—at the death of his children? His ten children? I didn’t get it. I didn’t believe it. Was Job a man — an actual flesh-and-blood father? Or was he something else, some colder-blooded creature masquerading as a man?

I decided to give Job the benefit of the doubt, or at least to try. After all, I’d read only the first chapter. Maybe Job would get more real; more believable; more human.

Instead, Job got clobbered again.

In round two, God gives Satan permission to ruin Job’s health. Before you can say “Jack Robinson,” Job breaks out in boils from head to toe. Sitting in a pile of ashes, he’s reduced to scraping his scabrous, oozing skin with a shard of pottery.

It was there, midway through Chapter Two, that I came to an electrifying expression of humanity — but not from Job himself. From his wife. “Curse God and die,” she tells him, practically spitting the words through her tears. As I read those bitter words again and again—“Curse God and die”—it dawned on me that the bitterness must have poured directly from the fissure in her heart: a heart broken not just by her children’s deaths, but also by their father’s offhandedness and aloofness. In just four words, Job’s wife expressed deep, primal pain. Facing the loss of Kathleen, the person I loved best in all the world, I understood and liked and believed Job’s wife, in a way that I didn’t understand or like or believe Job.

And what is Job’s response to his anguished wife? He tells her to shut up. And then he begins to talk. And talk. And talk. For forty chapters, Job and four other guys talk. They argue about God, about suffering, and about Job himself. Why do the righteous suffer? Why do the wicked get off scot-free? How come God’s being such a jerk when I, Job, have played by all the rules?

As I read the debate — as Job kvetched ad nauseum about his undeserved suffering and his spotless conscience (“I’m pure gold,” he says at one point) — I found myself getting madder than ever.

Eventually even the Almighty has had enough of Job’s self-righteous whining. Speaking from a whirlwind in a mighty voice, God puts Job in his puny place, pointing out in no uncertain terms what a tiny, trivial, know-nothing Job is compared to God, the creator of the universe. Job apologizes, and at that point God rewards him: God cures Job’s pox, makes him richer than ever, and gives him a passel more kids. All’s well that ends well.

I closed the Bible, still confused, and still mad — furious, in fact, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Tucking the book back into the rack alongside the hymnals, I stood up, stretched my back, and looked around at the magnificent architecture: the high, vaulted nave; the mighty stone columns; the graceful arches; the stained glass, its blues deepening to indigo in the waning light, its reds darkening into wine and blood.

I stepped outside and let the sanctuary door sigh shut. As it closed, I heard a latch snapping into place with a metallic click. Reaching back, I gave the handle a tug. The door, which had been open when I’d arrived, was now locked tight. Was it an omen? A punishment — banishment — for my cynical response to Job? Or was it simply a spring-loaded piece of steel popping into place, as it was designed to do?

It was after six when I pulled into the garage at home, but Kathleen’s space was still empty. I called her cell, but the call went straight to voice mail, which meant either that she was on a call or that her phone was switched off. She hadn’t left a note on the kitchen table, the usual place for notes; when I checked for messages on the home phone, I found voice mails from half a dozen reporters — including Athena Demopoulos of Nashville’s Channel 4 and Mike Malloy, Fox 5 News! — and, at the end, a message from Kathleen: “Hi, honey. I’ve gone to a meeting at the Wellness Community. A support group for people with cancer. I’ll call you when I get done.”

I listened to the message three times. Its matter-of-factness baffled me; from the brevity and the tone, she might just as easily have been telling me that she was at the grocery store, or swinging by the public library to return a book. I hung up the phone and wandered back to the bedroom, thinking, How did this happen? How did we become the cancer family? I half expected the doorbell to ring, and to find myself face-to-face with a neighbor delivering a casserole and pity.

Sitting on the bed to take off my shoes, I noticed the nightstand drawer slightly ajar. I reached out to close it, but then — instead — I slid it open. Nestled deep in the drawer, hidden beneath a wavy, outdated telephone directory, I found it: the nine-millimeter pistol loaned to me by Decker — Decker, who had foolishly, and perhaps fatally, put himself within striking distance of Satterfield’s fangs.

Contrary to her message, Kathleen did not call; she simply came home, unannounced, sometime after nine. “Tell me about the support group,” I said, anxious — desperate, perhaps — to reconnect with her; to feel that I was somehow a part of the experience, a part of her experience, a partner.

“I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” she said, and I felt hurt and excluded. “I’m exhausted. What I’d really like is to take a shower and go to bed. Can we do that? Could we just curl up and go to sleep?”

“Of course,” I said. “Whatever you want.”

But I’d promised more than I could deliver. I lay awake for hours, trying to sort out the tailspin that was now our life. When at last I fell asleep, I dreamed of Job — a pair of cynical, sacrilegious dreams, both of them set at the end of Job’s tribulations.

In the first dream, God bent down and ruffled Job’s hair, scratching him behind the ears as if he were a dog, cooing, “Who’s a good boy? Job’s a good boy! What a good boy!” Then God lobbed a treat into the air, whereupon Job leapt into the air and caught the morsel in his mouth.

The second dream was even stranger than the first. In this one, God looked like a TV game-show host — specifically, like the host of Let’s Make a Deal—and Job was a contestant who had just won. To celebrate Job’s victory, the angel Gabriel gave a loud blast on his trumpet, and the Almighty beamed beneficently as the heavenly hosts clapped and cheered. When the applause subsided, God commanded, “Gabriel, tell Job what he’s just won!” The angel lowered his horn and said, in a silky announcer’s voice, “God, Job’s Grand Prize package starts with one thousand fertile female donkeys. But that’s only the beginning. To work the fields, Job gets a thousand teams of oxen — a total of two thousand oxen!” A woman in a skimpy robe led a donkey and an ox out to stand on the cloud beside Job. “To travel the deserts in style,” Gabriel went on, “Job receives six thousand new top-of-the-line dromedary camels! And to round out his livestock portfolio: how about fourteen thousand fluffy sheep!” As another woman led out a camel and a sheep, Job raised his arms exultantly, and the angels cheered again. “But that’s not all, God,” continued Gabriel. “To make sure he has plenty of time to enjoy his new prosperity, Job gets another one hundred forty years of life!” More ecstatic applause ensued, along with a chorus of strumming harps; Job gasped and wiped away tears of gratitude with the sleeves of his robe. “Last but not least, Lord, Job gets a fabulous new family—ten new kids, twice as smart and good-looking as the old ones!” As the children appeared, all ten of them, Job whooped and hollered, pumping his fists in the air triumphantly.

I woke up at that, shocked from sleep by the irreverent image. As I got my bearings — lying beside Kathleen, outwardly in the same way I had for the past three decades, but with everything between us now changed — I found myself thinking about the one key character who had not appeared in my sacrilegious dreams: the same character who hadn’t, I suddenly realized, appeared in the Bible story’s happy ending. Job’s wife, I thought. Where’s the woman with the broken, bitter heart? I also thought of the ten new children. Were the new children conceived and carried by the same old wife? Did they fill the void left by the ten dead ones? Or are some losses beyond recompense or redemption?

I lay still, listening — listening for a whirlwind, and a Voice within it offering eloquent answers — but all I heard were crickets and cicadas, and the waning wail of a freight train keening somewhere in the distant dark.

Chapter 31

I didn’t pressure Kathleen to drop her opposition to treatment — not overtly, at least — but I did persuade her, through a combination of cajoling and browbeating, to let me speak with Dr. Spitzer, the Vanderbilt specialist who had diagnosed her cancer. At the appointed time, we called him from our living room, sitting together but listening and talking separately, each on our own cordless phone. Kathleen spoke first, sounding oddly formal and slightly embarrassed to be imposing — or to have me imposing — on Spitzer’s time. Brushing aside her apology, he asked how she was feeling. “Pretty good, I guess, for a dying woman,” she said, and her matter-of-fact fatalism made me wince. “I get short of breath when I go up stairs. Also, I feel really bloated now, as you predicted, and I can’t eat more than a few bites before I feel stuffed.”

“I’m not at all surprised by any of those things,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked him. “What do they mean?”

“The bloating is ascites,” he said. The word — it rhymed, in some slantwise, cruelly ironic way with the festive-sounding “invitees”—was familiar to me. A few years before, I’d witnessed a murder victim’s autopsy — an alcoholic who would have soon died of liver disease, if his son hadn’t crushed his skull with a cinder block first. That man’s belly had been grotesquely distended, as if he were eight months pregnant. “The peritoneal cavity — that’s the abdominal cavity, but you probably know that…?”

“I do,” I said.

“In advanced leiomyosarcoma,” he resumed, “the peritoneal cavity fills with cancerous fluid.” I looked at Kathleen in alarm, but she was looking out the window, carefully avoiding eye contact with me. “Kathleen, you might want to consider having that drained,” Spitzer added. “It won’t change the course of your disease, but it might make you more comfortable.”

“Would I have to be at Vanderbilt for that?”

“Oh, certainly not,” he said. “It’s an outpatient procedure. You could have it done in Knoxville. Think about it, and let me know if you want a referral.”

“I will,” she said. “Thank you.”

“What about the shortness of breath, Dr. Spitzer?” I asked. “Is that also caused by the fluid? Pressure on the diaphragm or lungs?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” he answered. “What it means is that the tumors in the lungs are blocking or crushing the bronchii. Closing off the airway. Kathleen, are you coughing up any blood?” I stared at her, horrified.

“A little,” she said. “Is that going to get worse?”

“It’s possible. You could start to hemorrhage,” he said. “Or you could throw a clot.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What do we do, if one of those things happens?”

“Frankly? Unfortunately, Dr. Brockton, there’s not much that can be done, if that happens. As I’m sure Kathleen has told you, her disease is quite advanced, and it’s not amenable to treatment.”

I stared across the room at her, her face in profile and silhouetted against the window, and said, “How the hell did this get so far before we found it?” I wasn’t sure which of them I was asking — both, perhaps — and the question sounded almost like an accusation. But if either of them took offense, they did a good job of masking it.

“Thing about the uterus,” said Spitzer, “is that you don’t need it to live.” I was puzzled by the statement. “It’s not essential to staying alive,” he explained. “Not like the heart or the brain or the lungs. The only time it’s essential is during pregnancy, right?”

“Right,” I said, suddenly struck by how ironic it was that Kathleen’s uterus — the organ whose sole purpose was to nurture life — had become the agent and angel of her death. “But I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“Well, because it’s not essential,” he went on, “it’s not immediately apparent when something’s going wrong. Women tend to overlook things like bloating or unusual bleeding. Some of that just goes with the territory.” After thirty years of Kathleen’s monthly cycles, I recognized the truth of that. “Even if the bloating is fairly severe,” he said, “they might think they’re just gaining weight. Also, uterine leiomyosarcoma is pretty rare. Some ob-gyns never see a single case. I’ve seen a lot, but that’s because patients get referred to me from all over the country.”

“Dr. Spitzer,” I asked, “are you married?” For the first time, Kathleen turned toward me, looking startled and possibly angered by the question.

“I am,” he said. “I’ve been married to a lovely woman for thirty-two years.”

“If your wife got this diagnosis, what would you do? What kind of treatment would you want her to get?”

He thought for a moment. “The best treatment I could give her,” he said. “I’d make sure she knew how much I loved her. I’d make the most of whatever time we had together. And I’d get ready to grieve like hell.”

“You can’t just sit around and wait for me to die,” Kathleen said finally. We were still sitting in the living room long after the call had ended. She had been looking out the window, into the fading light; I had been looking at her, watching as her features softened and grew less distinct in the gloom. “I need you not to hover,” she went on. “Hovering over me — tiptoeing around, watching me like a hawk for any little signs and symptoms? That would drive me crazy. It’d be the worst thing you could do for me.”

The comment stung, and I started to object, but Kathleen knew me too well — it would be my way to hover. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll try not to.”

“Thank you.”

“It won’t be easy for me, Kath.”

“It won’t be easy,” she agreed. “But it’ll be important.” After a moment, she added, “Don’t shut down after I’m gone. You’ll probably want to, but you can’t. Or shouldn’t, anyhow. And don’t pull away from Jeff and Jenny and the boys. You’ll need them.”

“I need you,” I told her. “You’re the one I need.”

“Well, we can’t help that,” she said. “You’ll need to keep busy, too.” I started to protest, but she held up a hand to keep me from interrupting. “Don’t get discouraged about these setbacks you’ve had lately. The politics. The grandstanding and game-playing. Stand up for yourself. Stand up for your work. Stand up for the Body Farm.”

“They can have the damn Body Farm if they want it, Kathleen.”

She shook her head. “You don’t mean that. You’d better not mean it. You’ve put too much into that place. And so have I.”

I didn’t quite follow that last bit. “I’m not… How do you mean?”

She turned, and even in the dim light, I could see the impatience in her eyes. “All those nights and weekends you spent working — at the Body Farm and in the morgue — instead of home with me? You think those didn’t cost me anything?” The words felt like a knife in my chest, but she waved her hand to shoo away my guilt. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad, honey. I know I wasn’t always gracious and generous about it, but I tried, because I knew it mattered so much to you. It must’ve mattered to me, too, or I wouldn’t have put up with it. So don’t you dare give up on it. If you do, I swear I’ll come back and haunt you.”

She forced a smile, and I tried to laugh at the brave joke, but the laugh got tangled up somewhere between my heart and my throat.

“One more thing, while we’re on the subject,” she said. “I see how miserable this Richard Janus thing has made you. You’ve had this cringing, hangdog look ever since the FBI and Fox News made it sound like you’d screwed up. Get over it, Bill. That, or get back into it.”

“I can’t get back into it,” I said. “They’ve shut me out.” I held out my hands, palms up, and gave a shrug.

“See?” The sharpness of her tone startled me. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. What on earth has happened to your backbone?”

In spite of myself — in spite of wanting to be so kind and loving that I could somehow magically keep Kathleen alive and well — I felt a flash of anger. “Gee, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I lost my backbone out there on that mountainside. Or maybe it’s tied to the whipping post.”

“Well, untie it, then,” she snapped. “Or go find it. Or grow another one, if you have to. ’Cause being without it sure doesn’t become you. I’m the one who’s dying, Bill. Quit acting like it’s you that’s nailed to the cross.” I drew back, stunned, but then she reached over and squeezed my hand. “You’ve always made me so proud, Bill. Don’t stop now. Don’t stop when I’m gone. That would just make it sadder, don’t you see?”

We sat a while longer; by now the room was growing dark around us, but something had shifted — eased, at least for a moment — and we sat in a sort of companionable isolation, each absorbed in our own thoughts and feelings.

When the streetlights outside came on, Kathleen leaned over to the end table between us, took a box of matches from the drawer, and lit the thick white candle — her wine-drinking candle, she sometimes called it. “One more thing,” she said. I braced myself for more scolding, but she smiled, her face glowing in the warm light of the flame. “I wouldn’t consider it hovering if you brought me a glass of wine.”

Chapter 32

It wasn’t easy, taking my mind off Kathleen and refocusing it on my work. But she was right, and I owed it to her — and to my own sanity — to try.

I’d been taken off the Janus case by Prescott, cut off from everyone in the FBI’s San Diego field office. It was possible, though, that Mac McCready would still talk to me. I dialed his Quantico number, and he answered on the third ring. “McCready here.”

“Mac, it’s Bill Brockton, in Knoxville. Are you still speaking to me, or is the entire Bureau shunning me?”

“Still speaking, but I’m not sure I’m much of an asset to you. I’m not exactly the golden boy around here, either. Prescott’s pretty pissed at me, too. Hard to blame him — he’s been getting chewed up pretty bad himself, by big dogs with sharp teeth.”

I hadn’t taken time to consider the awkwardness of Prescott’s position — he was, after all, the public face of the troubled case — but whatever compassion I felt for him was offset by my slight resentment of the time pressure he’d applied… and by the powerful sting of feeling like the scapegoat. “Not fun for any of us,” was the best I could muster. “Listen, Mac, I’m still trying to figure out who told Prescott about the teeth. Do you know?”

“It was that reporter. Malloy. Guy’s a prick, but you gotta hand it to him — he was a giant step ahead of us.”

“But how’d he get there, Mac? Who told Malloy the teeth had been pulled? Who knew? I sure didn’t. Not till I cleaned ’em off the other day—after Prescott called to fire me.”

“Had to’ve been somebody who was in on it,” McCready mused. “Maybe it was the guy with the pliers. Hell, maybe it was Janus himself.”

“Why? Why would whoever faked the death — Janus or his DIY dentist — put a bug in a reporter’s ear?”

“Good question, Doc. Figure that one out, and you’re nearly there.”

“You think Janus wanted to embarrass the Bureau?” As soon as I said it, I decided it was highly unlikely, given that the Bureau wouldn’t just be embarrassed; the Bureau would be gunning for vengeance. “Nah, not that,” I said. “Janus would know that the FBI would move heaven and earth to catch him if he’s humiliated y’all. Maybe he promised the dental assistant a big payoff, but stiffed the guy instead.”

“That could work,” he agreed. “Listen, I gotta go — I’m teaching a fresh batch of recruits at the Academy about one of your favorite topics today: bugs. ‘Trust the bugs,’ right? Keep the faith, Doc. It’ll get better.”

As I hung up, I couldn’t help wondering, Will it? How? And when?

Among the many mean surprises that accompanied the Ultimate Mean Surprise — Kathleen’s death-sentence surprise — was the secretarial surprise: the mountain of insurance forms, financial forms, legal forms, and other forms of forms to be scaled. In a perverse corner of my mind, I imagined the grim reaper, twenty-first-century style, no longer mowing down mortals with a scythe, but simply burying them alive beneath truckloads of paper.

In the seven days since our telephone conference with Dr. Spitzer, Kathleen and I had come to an unspoken agreement, an uneasy détente. We distracted ourselves from the bigger issues of mortality and grief by focusing on what we began calling “the business of death and dying.” We dealt with the business — the bureaucracy — at the kitchen table, sorting papers into stacks and categories that sometimes covered every square inch, despite the fact that we’d added a leaf to the table. There was a certain amount of apt irony, Kathleen noted early on, in dealing with death at the kitchen table, where she had almost perished at the hands of Nick Satterfield years before. “Not with a bang, and not with a whimper,” she’d joked, “but with a notarized signature in triplicate.” At moments like that — moments of understated heroism — I admired the hell out of her and wondered how on earth I’d be able to bear losing her.

I was doing a surprisingly good job of not falling apart — even Kathleen commented on it — until she slid me an official-looking form headed with the logo of the Tennessee Department of Health and Environment. “What’s this?” I asked.

“An advance directive. It’s the state’s new version of a living will.” I felt a jolt of fear shoot through me as I scanned down the page. Near the top, directly beneath her own name, Kathleen had designated me as her “Agent”—the person authorized to make health-care decisions for her — but in a series of boxes beneath my name, she had systematically tied my hands, checking the “No” box beside every possible treatment option: No cardiopulmonary resuscitation. No defibrillation. No life support. No surgery, antibiotics, or transfusions. No tube feeding or IV fluids.

I stared at the form — its grim specifics, the litany of life-extending options she was refusing — and then looked up. She was watching me closely; it was all I could do to meet her gaze. “Looks like you’ve got your mind made up,” I said, trying to keep the pain — sadness and also self-pity — out of my voice. “Nothing here for me to do.”

“Yes, there is,” she said. “You make damn sure they abide by this. I’ve heard of too many cases where hospitals ignored these things — jump-starting people’s hearts, putting people on respirators or feeding tubes — even when the patients had living wills on file. If anything like that starts to happen, you fight tooth and nail to stop it, you hear me?” I nodded. “I need you to say it. Out loud. Promise me you won’t let them keep me alive.”

I felt tears running down my cheeks. “God, Kathleen.”

“Promise me.” Her voice was like steel.

“All right, dammit. I promise.” It was all I could do to choke out the words.

“Thank you.” She pulled a handful of paper napkins from the holder and passed them across to me.

I wiped my eyes and blew my nose, with a wet, honking blast.

“Nice,” she said. “It’s your table manners I’ll miss most in the afterlife.”

“Something to look forward to, while you’re waiting for me.” I gave another Gabriel-worthy trumpet blast, then flipped to the form’s second page. “So I just sign down here, as a witness?”

She shook her head. “You can’t.” She reached across and pointed at a block of fine print that excluded relatives, by blood or marriage, as witnesses. “I guess the powers that be want to make sure you’re not trying to get rid of me.”

“Good for them,” I said. I glanced up at the organ-donation section of the form and saw that she had specified only her corneas. I glanced up at her.

“My organs can’t be used,” she said. “They might give cancer to somebody else. The corneas are safe, though.”

I nodded. “Well, I know that’s important. Be a shame if you couldn’t donate those, after all your work to help people’s vision.”

“I’m glad you brought that up,” she said. “I want to do more, if you’re willing.”

“Like what?”

“Well, it looks like we’re in pretty good financial shape, right?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call us rich, but yeah, looks like we’re not in any danger of going belly-up. Especially since you’re refusing expensive treatments like Band-Aids and aspirin.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she said, but I caught a twinkle in her eye, and I managed a half smile. “That life-insurance policy we took out on me years ago, when Jeff was a baby?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he’s still listed as the beneficiary,” she went on. “Seems like he doesn’t need it now. His accounting practice is growing like crazy.”

“You want to change it so the boys are the beneficiaries? Set up college funds for them?”

“I want them to get half of it,” she said. “Twenty-five thousand apiece. Enough to help, but not enough to make them lazy.”

“Seems Solomonic of you,” I said. “What about the rest?”

“I want to give it away, Bill. To charity. Do a little good on my way out.” She reached across and took my hand. “I want to give twenty-five thousand to my foundation, to hire a part-time director and fund-raiser. So Food for Sight can keep going — and start growing — instead of just limping along, or dying with me.”

Her generosity touched me; her foresight astonished me. I rubbed my thumb across the back of her hand. “Do you have any idea how much I admire you?”

“You’ve mentioned it once or twice.” She gave my hand another squeeze.

“That leaves another twenty-five thousand,” I said. “Who’s that for? UT?” She shook her head, so I guessed again, mentally reviewing her list of favorite causes. “League of Women Voters?” Another head shake. “Doctors Without Borders?”

“No. Airlift Relief International.”

I blinked. “Airlift Relief? Janus’s thing?”

“Yes.”

“But…”

“But what, Bill?”

“Well, for starters, he’s dead.”

“So? I hope people keep giving to my ‘thing’ after I’m dead.”

“But you’re not a drug trafficker, Kathleen.”

“Neither was he. I don’t believe it, Bill. I think he was set up.”

“You think he was framed? By the FBI? Come on, Kathleen.”

“Maybe not the FBI. Maybe somebody else — some other agency, or the real drug traffickers. I don’t know who. But I do know that a lot of poor people in Central and South America will die in disasters if people don’t step up and keep that outfit going.”

“I think we need to think about this some more,” I said.

“I don’t. It’s done. I mailed the beneficiary-change form today.”

I stared across the table at her, my thoughts and emotions swirling. As they swirled, three questions kept rearing their unsettling heads: What would the FBI think, if they learned of my wife’s big gift in memory of an accused drug smuggler? What if the money ended up, directly or indirectly, in the pockets of narco traffickers and killers? Last but not least — in fact, worst of all — was it possible that I was resisting the idea because I was actually jealous of a dead man?

Suddenly Kathleen clutched my hand, and for a moment I wondered if she had somehow read my ungenerous thoughts. Then I heard her gasp — a ragged, wrenching effort to draw a breath — and saw the expression of terror on her face.

“Kathleen? Honey, what’s wrong?” She jerked her hand from mine and gripped the table, pushing upward with both arms, as if to keep herself from being pulled underwater. “Oh God,” I said. “No. Please, no.”

Her eyes opened wide, and then wider and wider still — impossibly wide — and she reached across the table, her hands scrabbling, searching for mine. Her gaze remained locked on me, and as I stared, frozen with horror, the fear in her eyes gave way to something else — dawning awareness, perhaps, followed swiftly by sorrow and then — at the last moment — by something I would have sworn was gratitude.

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

A dozen years had passed since I’d last sat in this particular chair, in this particular role: in the role of troubled parishioner, seeking counsel from the senior minister at Second Presbyterian. At the time of that visit, I’d been working a series of sadistic sexual murders — murders committed by my nemesis Satterfield. What had brought me here, back in 1992, was a question that had been raised, crudely but powerfully, by a young woman infuriated by the cruelty Satterfield had inflicted on his victims. “Why,” she had raged, “are men such shits to women?”

The minister on that prior occasion was the same as the minister on this occasion: the Right Reverend Michael Michaelson, D. Div., more often (and more simply) referred to by most of his flock as Rev. Mike. I still remembered Rev. Mike’s answer to the memorably crude question about men, women, and the problem of evil. On that occasion, he had responded with a disquisition that was long, learned, and fascinating, one that viewed the issues through a half-dozen different lenses: theology, of course, but also evolutionary biology, sociology, and abnormal psychology. In the end, though, Rev. Mike’s learned comments had proven to be far less illuminating than Kathleen’s brutally efficient explanation: “Why? Because they can be.”

In the years since that counseling visit, I’d worked a hundred homicides, give or take a dozen — none as brutal as Satterfield’s misogynistic butcherings — and that particular “why?” had drifted into one of the distant, dusty corners of my mind, displaced by other questions that were less rhetorical and more immediate, as well as more answerable: “Doc, what made that checkerboard crosshatching on that punched-in circle of skull?” (Answer: The milled head of a framing hammer.) “Doc, how come them maggots to look burnt?” (Answer: Because the killer left the body in the woods for a week, then came back and torched it.) “Doc, did that dude get blowed up by a bellyful of dynamite?” (Answer: No, the abdomen burst from the buildup of decomposition gases in the gut.)

This time, sitting in the pastor’s study, I asked a question not on behalf of countless suffering women, but on behalf of just one woman. How could an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent God, I asked — the kind of God we heard about again and again in the stained-glass sanctuary of this majestic church — allow health-conscious, humanity-helping Kathleen Brockton to be stricken down, in the prime of life, with an aggressive, untreatable cancer?

The right reverend sat silent, his eyes on me — not looking at me so much as looking toward me, somehow, his gaze seeming to send compassion in my direction. Kathleen and I had known him, and had liked him, ever since he’d arrived at Second Presbyterian fresh from seminary, as an energetic young assistant pastor. After a long while, he gave a sorrowful shake of his head. “I won’t pretend I have a good answer for you,” he said. “This is one of the toughest questions of all. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God allow suffering — undeserved suffering, in particular? Why do some people — even terrible people — lead charmed lives, while others — including wonderful people like Kathleen — get dealt brutally bad cards? That’s the central question, as you probably know, of the Book of Job.”

I made a face. “I don’t buy it. Job.”

“How do you mean?”

I told him how I’d sought solace in the story of Job, and how unsatisfying and infuriating I had found it. I also confessed my two sacrilegious dreams about Job: Good-Boy Job and Game-Show-Winner Job.

Instead of looking shocked, he actually smiled slightly. “That’s an interesting spin on it,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve come across that in any of my Old Testament textbooks. I might just use that in a sermon someday, if I really want to rile people up.”

“Be my guest,” I said. “While you’re at it, tell folks how offensive it is to say things like ‘Everything happens for a reason’ or ‘His will be done.’ Kathleen’s secretary actually said that to me when I went in to clean out her office. I had to walk away to keep from hitting her.”

He winced. “My secret name for that is the ‘God’s Perverse Plan’ doctrine. If you take it to its logical extreme, you end up arguing that God planned the pain of every battered woman, every molested child, every black man strung up by a lynch mob, every Jew sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.” He clasped his hands, his fingers interlaced and his index fingers extended, and I couldn’t help thinking of the nursery rhyme Here is the church, and here is the steeple… “A poet I like a lot once put it this way: ‘If God is God, he is not good; if God is good, he is not God.’ Strong words, but they do get at the heart of the problem.”

“I’m not sure I follow. I never was good with poetry.”

“He’s saying that if God’s omnipotent, he must be a jerk, to allow so much innocent suffering. And if God’s not a jerk, then he must not be all-powerful, because if he were, he’d protect people.”

Amen, brother, I caught myself thinking.

Chapter 35

Does suicide run in families? That was the question I found myself pondering after I had left Rev. Mike’s study and returned to my empty, echoing house.

The answer, I well knew, was of course it does. Over the years, I’d read scores of books and articles about suicide; its dark causes, and the long shadow it could cast on the lives of the loved ones left to clean up the mess, literally and figuratively. I also, though, knew the answer in a deeper, darker way: I had felt its tug on occasion, during my adolescence; had heard its sinister siren song, calling me toward the rocks of doom. But adulthood — the twin rudders of a career and a family — had steered me into safer waters.

Until now.

In the blink of an eye — the catch in a throat — my mind traveled back almost half a century. I was four years old. I was trundling up the stairs to my father’s law office, a few steps ahead of my mother, who climbed slowly so that I could be the one to burst through the door crowing, “Daddy, Daddy, we came to s’prise you!” Only we were the ones, she and I, who were surprised: surprised by the figure slumped sideways in his swivel chair, the eyes vacant and clouding; surprised by the dark splotches and smears fanning across the wall behind him; surprised by the odors of brimstone and blood and bleakness in the air.

We never spoke of it, my mother and I — not once in the next forty years; not once before her own death. And so, because it was never spoken of, it was never really laid to rest.

And now, here it was again — suicide, my unseen, lifelong shadow — sitting beside me on my bed. On our bed: the bed I’d shared for thirty years with Kathleen. Young, willowy Kathleen. Pregnant, rotund Kathleen. Dough-bellied, big-breasted, nursing-mom Kathleen. Weary working-mother Kathleen. Midlife, tennis-toned Kathleen. Swiftly cancer-stricken Kathleen.

I reached for the drawer of the nightstand and slid it open, then wormed my hand once more beneath the phone directory. Closing my fingers around the pebble-textured grip, I pulled upward and outward, removing the pistol Decker had loaned me a lifetime ago, back when I had mistakenly believed that what I needed to fear was a malevolent man, not a microscopic murderer called cancer.

I turned the weapon over slowly in my hands, inspecting its angles and contours, its meticulously milled surfaces. Pulling back the slide, I noticed the smoothness of the action, the precision and solidity of the metallic click as the weapon cocked. I turned the barrel toward me and studied the small round opening, a darkness as black and deep as my despair.

The siren song grew louder, accompanied by the sound of blood roaring in my head, roaring like the sea. Then I heard something else: I heard voices. Children’s voices. “Grandpa Bill! Grandpa Bill! Where are you, Grandpa Bill?” I heard two pairs of small feet running down the hall, running toward my bedroom. I hid the gun, tucking it behind my back, sliding it surreptitiously beneath my pillow.

Tyler was the first to reach the bed. Without breaking stride, he launched himself like a missile, soaring upward in a graceful, gleeful arc, then belly-flopping onto the mattress with enough force to rattle the headboard against the wall. Walker, smaller and slower, tried to emulate him, but barely cleared the edge of the mattress, landing like a spent fish — but giggling as exuberantly as his aerobatic brother. When I reached out and gathered them in my arms, holding them hard, Tyler squirmed halfway free and looked up at me. “Are you crying, Grandpa Bill?”

“No, honey,” I lied. “I just have something in my eyes.”

Walker snuggled against me. “I didn’t see Grandmommy in the kitchen,” he said. “Where is she?”

“Grandmommy’s gone, buddy,” I said hoarsely.

“Where did she go?”

“To heaven, stupid,” said Tyler.

“But when will she come back?” There was a new note of urgency in his voice.

“She’s not coming back, buddy,” I whispered. “She can’t.”

I could not have said who felt the worst: the yearning three-year-old, the heartsick fifty-year-old, or the tough-guy five-year-old, who was perhaps just big enough to reach the bitter fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and to grasp that something precious to him was lost beyond all finding, broken beyond all mending.

We ate the take-out pizza Jeff and Jenny had brought as a surprise, or a gesture of kindness, or an act of pity. Sitting around the kitchen table, we made awkward small talk, all the adults careful not to look at Kathleen’s chair, which loomed monumental in its emptiness. I took a bite, but the crust felt and tasted like cardboard in my mouth, and I laid the wedge on my plate. The boys, on the other hand — their tears dried, their upset trumped by their hunger and the pizza’s aroma — wolfed down two slices apiece, then bolted from the table and ran squealing down the hall.

Jeff nodded at my virtually untouched food. “No dessert unless you clean your plate,” he said with a wink, echoing a line he’d heard from me a thousand times growing up.

I shook my head. “It’s good — and y’all were sweet to bring it. But I’ve got no appetite tonight.”

Jenny reached across the table and laid a hand on my arm. “I’m worried about you,” she said. “You’re skin and bones — like one of your skeletons.” She looked me up and down. “I’ve seen coat hangers fill out a shirt better than you do these days.” It was a good line, and I did my best to give her a smile, but it felt more like a grimace.

Down the hall, the rhythmic creak of bedsprings ceased, and the boys’ chatter changed tone, shifting from giggling to squabbling. Jenny noticed it first, of course. “I founded it,” protested Walker. “Give it back. Give it back!”

“You’re too little,” scoffed Tyler. “You’re just a baby.”

“Boys,” Jenny called toward them. “Cut it out!”

“Give it back!” wailed Walker. “Give it back!”

Suddenly a terrible realization hit me. “Oh dear God,” I gasped, leaping up so suddenly my chair toppled backward. “Please no.” I ran from the kitchen, my feet scrabbling on the tile as I made the turn into the dining room and dashed down the hall.

“Let go. Let go!” yelled Walker. I heard a growl like that of some wild, angry animal, and then a howl of pain.

My feet seemed mired in mud or concrete, moving in excruciating, exhausting slow motion. “Boys,” I called out desperately. “Stop! Don’t move!”

“Dad? What’s going on? Dad?” Behind me, as I ran toward the bedroom, I could hear panic in Jeff’s voice.

“Jeff, go,” I heard Jenny saying, her voice panicky. “Hurry! Something’s wrong!”

“Boys, don’t move!” I shouted again. I reached the bedroom doorway and froze in horror. My grandsons, on my bed, were wrestling over a nine-millimeter handgun, the weapon seesawing back and forth in their hands as they fought for possession. “Boys! Stop it! Put it down!”

But they were too caught up in the struggle to hear or to heed. I hesitated, afraid to grab for the gun but terrified not to. Jeff and Jenny lurched against my back, then craned to see what was happening in the bedroom. Then came a jolt and a scream as Jenny hurtled past me. An instant later a gunshot cracked, and voices around me and within me began to shriek.

Chapter 36

The Emergency Department at UT Medical Center was surprisingly quiet, the waiting room empty except for the three of us. Jeff, Tyler, and I sat without speaking. I sat hunched over, my elbows on my knees, my chin in my hands. Jeff cast occasional glances at me, his expression a mixture of confusion, anger, and sorrow.

Jenny emerged from the treatment area, shaking her head, and sat down beside Jeff and Tyler, ignoring me. Tyler crawled into her lap, and she wrapped her arms around him, enfolding him to her breast, one hand over the ear that wasn’t pressed against her. She drew a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Well,” she said to Jeff. “They just finished splinting the fingers. Luckily, the breaks weren’t bad. And kids heal fast.” She gave a quick, almost imperceptible smile. “Walker’s in love with the nurse. He’s listening to her heart through a stethoscope. She said she’d bring him out in a minute.”

Jenny looked at me for the first time, and I braced myself against the anger I saw in her eyes. “The doctor asked me how it happened,” she went on. “I told him the boys were fighting over a gun, and Walker’s fingers got twisted in the trigger guard.” I nodded grimly; the police were probably on their way to arrest me, and I deserved it. Leaving a loaded handgun lying around where kids could find it — what would the charge be, criminal neglect? Reckless endangerment? She held my eyes, then, after an uncomfortable pause, added, “I told him it was a cap gun.” I stared at her, dumbfounded. She shrugged, though her eyes still glittered with anger. “Now, why the hell was that thing laying right there where the boys could get ahold of it?”

How could I explain? “Decker — Captain Decker, from KPD — loaned it to me,” I said lamely, “when Satterfield sent me…” I trailed off, not wanting to say too much in front of Tyler. “When Satterfield sent me that package. Decker thought I might need it.”

Jeff frowned. “But what was it doing on the bed?” he demanded. “You said Satterfield’s in solitary, and his girlfriend’s in jail.” I nodded but didn’t offer any other explanation; I was too ashamed to tell them the truth, and I didn’t have it in me to conjure up a plausible lie. Jeff’s eyes bored into me. “Tyler told me you were crying when we showed up.”

“Well, I’m pretty sad these days, son, you know?”

“Well, yeah, Dad, I do know,” he snapped. “I am, too. Mom’s gone, and it hurts like hell. Hurts you most, maybe, but hurts me, too. And Jenny. And the boys, even though they don’t really understand it. But here’s the thing you don’t seem to get. If something happened to you — if we lost you, too?” He was speaking low now, in an angry whisper, so Tyler couldn’t hear. “Do you have any idea how damaging that would be for these boys?” I blinked, blindsided by the turn the conversation had taken. “You lost your dad when you were a kid,” he went on, “and that sucks, and I’m sorry,” he said, though he sounded more fierce than sympathetic. “But you had your grandparents — all four of ’em, all good as gold, the way you tell it. Tyler and Walker just lost one. Don’t you dare take another one from them.” With that, he stood up and strode to the far side of the waiting room, staring out the window at the ambulance parked outside.

Jenny lifted Tyler from her lap and stood him up. “Why don’t you and Daddy go look at the ambulance,” she said. “There’s a helicopter out there, too. I bet he’d take you to see that, too.” He scurried off, and she shifted into the chair beside me. She gave me a long, long look, shaking her head slowly. Her cheeks were splotchy and her eyes brimming. “I am so mad,” she said quietly, “that I want to slap the bejesus out of you. You put my kids in terrible danger. It’s a miracle one of them’s not dead.” I nodded miserably. “But goddamnit, I love you, and we need you. So how ’bout you cut the crap, quit feeling sorry for yourself, and rejoin the land of the living?” While I was still taking in this wide-ranging message, she leaned over and kissed my cheek. At the same time, she reached across and gave my other cheek a quick slap — a slap that was half playful, half serious. Before I had time to respond, I saw a door opening, and a pretty young nurse led Walker into the lobby, two of his fingers taped into a splint, an x-ray clutched in his other hand.

He came running over. “Grandpa Bill,” he said, holding up the injured hand, “Tyler broke this finger and this finger. Look — they took a picture of the bones!” He handed me the x-ray proudly.

“Yup, those are broken, all right,” I said. “But you know what? Soon they’ll be good as new. Even better — stronger than before.”

“I know,” he said. He beamed up at the nurse. “She told me. It’s a miracle!”

“I guess it is, buddy,” I said. “I guess it is.”

It was dark by the time I left the hospital and headed for home. Crossing the Tennessee River, I stopped on the bridge at the center of the span. The shoulder was wide — they’d built the bridge optimistically broad, big enough to accommodate two or three additional lanes at some point in a prosperous future — so by parking close to the concrete guardrail, I had a good ten feet of clearance between my door and the nearest lane of traffic. Standing by the front bumper, I put my hands on the rail and leaned over, peering at the water. The great river, black and silent, spooled past far below, unaware and indifferent to me and my recent troubles; indifferent to my past joys, too, for that matter. It flowed onward, ceaselessly southward, called by the sea — or blindly bound by the laws of gravity and fluid dynamics. In the swirling water, I had no reflection and no significance. The realization was humbling, but it was liberating, too. What did it matter, really, if I lived or died — or, more accurately, what did it matter when I died?

The nine-millimeter pistol — which I had taken from the house and locked in my glove box when we’d hurried to the hospital — hung at my side, dark and heavy, as if a piece of the night itself had condensed and crystallized in my hand. If I leaned over the concrete railing of the bridge, I reflected, I could blow my head off without leaving a mess for anyone to clean up. If I sat on the railing and leaned backward as I pulled the trigger, I could topple into the water and sink beneath the surface. Or do a backflip off the railing first, I thought, and pull the trigger on the way down. That way, even if my nerve failed me, I was still committed. If the bullet don’t get ya, the water will, I told myself, in a hillbilly twang. It sounded like a parody of a country music tearjerker, and it brought an ironic smile to my lips.

I remembered Jenny’s parting words to me in the ER’s waiting room. “You owe these boys now,” she’d said to me. “If you do something stupid and self-destructive, they’ll think it was their fault somehow. Just like you thought that your dad’s death was your fault.” Had I told her that in an unguarded moment, or had she intuited it? Either way, she was right. “Don’t you do that to these boys,” she’d added, punctuating her final four words by jabbing a fierce finger at me. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Shifting my grip to the gun’s barrel, I cocked my arm and flung the weapon into the darkness — a sidearm throw that sent it spinning out across the black water like some small, lopsided boomerang. Don’t come back, I silently ordered it. A moment later I heard it hit: plunk; the sound seemed faint and far away, as fleeting and insignificant — as unexpectedly miraculous, too — as if a fish had just leapt from the water to launch itself, for one brief and exuberant moment, headlong into the air.

Standing at the rail in the darkness, I fished out my cell phone and dialed a number I knew by heart. “Book a flight,” I told the computer that answered Delta’s phone. “A new reservation… San Diego, California.”