Cut to the Bone (16 page)

“I want to ask her out for this Saturday.”

“Fine by me. I wasn't expecting to see much of you Saturday anyhow. Your mom and I'll be at the UT-Florida game.”

“Thing is, I was hoping to take Jenny to the UT-Florida game.”

“Ha,” I said. “Good luck with
that
. That game's been sold out for months. You couldn't find a ticket . . .” A thought struck me—a thought so awful, I knew instantly that it was the truth. “You can't be serious. Tell me you're not calling to ask me what I think you're calling to ask me.”

“
Please,
Dad.”

“You want my tickets to the UT-
Florida
game? You gotta be kidding. Wild alligators couldn't keep me away from that game. You can have my tickets to the Arkansas game,” I said. “Or even the Alabama game. But Florida? You gotta be kidding.” Now Kathleen was desperately trying to catch
my
attention. Frowning, I mimicked her earlier shrug. “I love you a lot, son, but not
that
much.”

Kathleen sighed, shaking her head. Then she reached into the pocket of her bathrobe and fished out a cordless phone. “Jeff?”

“Hey, Mom.”

“Pay no attention to your father. Of course you can have our tickets to the game.”

“
What?
What the hell?” I squawked.

“Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Dad. Late for class—gotta go,” he said, and the line went dead.

“What the hell?” I repeated. “I've been looking forward to that game for a year.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Don't be stingy. Look at it as an investment in Jeff's happiness.”

“What about
my
happiness?”

“Doesn't it make you happy to see him asking out that nice girl?”

“You don't even
know
her,” I blustered. “Now that I think about it, she's not so nice after all. In fact, I think she's a very bad girl. A terrible girl. Dumb, too—she makes Dalmatian-brain look like a genius.”

“Oh, nonsense. Besides, maybe you can find happiness some other way on Saturday,” she said. She opened the front of her bathrobe and gave me a slow, suggestive smile, swaying her hips as she did.

“But sweetie,” I said. “
Darling
.” I felt a powerful surge of conflicting desires. “This is my only chance all year to see UT play Florida. You and I will have
lots
of chances to . . . you know . . . find happiness.”

Still smiling, she wrapped the bathrobe across herself, two layers deep. “If Jeff doesn't get to take Jenny to that game Saturday,” she said sweetly, “football might be the only happiness you find for the rest of the season.” She puckered her lips, mimed a kiss in my direction, and then tied the bathrobe belt. In a knot.

CHAPTER 18

Satterfield

HE BACKED THE MUSTANG
out of his garage and tucked it around back, behind the house and out of sight. Not that there was anything to see, and not that there was ever any traffic on his street anyhow. Still, the fewer tracks you left, the fewer tracks you had to cover. That was one of the survival-training lessons he'd learned during his brief stint in SEAL training. He'd forgotten that lesson once, with that first girl, and he'd paid a steep price. The disgrace of getting discharged—“under less than honorable conditions”—had cut deeply; it had cut to the bone, and it had left him scarred, as surely as his stepfather's cigarettes had scarred him. But scars were like combat medals, etched in the skin and the soul: badges of honor, or at least of survival. Satterfield had survived, and he'd begun settling accounts.

He backed the van out, then eased it back in, centering it on the concrete slab. He'd start with a base coat of olive drab, then finish the camouflage by adding splotches of pale green and muddy brown. He found himself humming as he laid out the drop cloths and taped the glass and poured the viscous paint carefully into the sprayer. He hummed in part because he liked the preparations; liked transforming his meticulous plans into reality. Also, though, he hummed because he enjoyed the joke—found amusement in the ironic absurdity of dressing out a dweeby white work van in hunter's camouflage.

The real joke was that it wasn't really the van that he was camouflaging, though, it was himself: By disguising himself as the sort of dumb shit who believed that a bad camo paint job was cool—
Don't forget to do a shitty job,
he reminded himself—he enabled himself to creep closer to his quarry, to coil around her before she realized that she was the prey.

CHAPTER 19

Tina

TINA AWOKE IN SEMIDARKNESS,
groaning and groggy and disoriented. Naked and cold, too. Her shoulders and hips and knees ached, but when she tried to stretch, she found that she could not move. Her wrists were bound behind her, her ankles tied to her wrists; Tina was hog-tied, she realized, and the realization caused a flood of memory and terror to surge in her. She'd climbed into the van on Magnolia sometime around midnight. It looked like a work van, with metal racks on the roof for ladders or pipes or lumber but with a bad paint job, a stupid paint job—camo paint on a work truck. It didn't make her feel all that impressed with the john—what kind of idiot would try to camouflage a work van?—but business was slow and her hot pants were anything but warm in the chill of the late-September night. Just as the van had pulled away from the curb, she'd glanced down and seen a coil of rope on the floorboards. The guy had caught her looking at the rope, and then at him, and the glint in his eyes—the cold and predatory glint they took on in response to the fear in her own—had set off every alarm in her head. She'd tried to get out of the van then, even though it was moving, but the door was locked, and the lock knob had come off—had been
taken
off, she'd realized with a sudden sick feeling. She'd begun beating helplessly on the glass of the window, like a luna moth battering itself against a windowpane or a streetlight. He'd pulled over fast, and the last thing she remembered was a strong hand seizing the back of her neck, another strong hand clamping a cloth over her nose and mouth, and pungent, sickly-sweet vapors coursing through her nostrils and mouth, down into her lungs, deep into her darkening brain.

“Rise and shine, Tina,” said a voice nearby.
His
voice. The voice of the guy who'd picked her up in the stupid van. “Tina? Right? I hope you got a good rest, Tina. You need to be fresh.” He paused. “You ever go hunting, Tina?”

She shook her head. “No,” she whispered hoarsely.

“Not a lot of women do. It's more of a man thing. But we're fixin' to go hunting, you and me.” He sighted along a long, slender shaft, pointing its triangular tip at her, and at the far end, she saw three slender vanes. Feathers. “Actually,” he said, smiling, reaching down with one hand, “
I'm
fixin' to go hunting.” He lifted something from the floor of the van, a shape that reminded her of a half moon: curved on one edge, straight on the other, but empty in between. She began to whimper and shudder, her trembling as rapid and desperate as the luna moth's, its powdery wings flailing and beginning to smoke as they beat against the pitiless glass of a searing searchlight.

The man with the moon was the devil himself, and the moon in his hands was a hunting bow.

CHAPTER 20

Roy Lee

“WHAT THE
FUCK
?!” PERCHED
fifteen feet up the trunk of a pine tree, on the narrow platform of a tree stand, Roy Lee Cheatham blinked and peered again through the scope of his deer rifle, then released his trigger finger, flipped on the safety, and laid the .30-06 across his knees so he could look through his binoculars instead. The binoculars were more powerful than the rifle scope, and they had a wider field of view, too, which made it easier to keep them trained on moving animals.

“Come on, come on, where you at?” he whispered, then, “God a-
mighty
.” Two hundred yards away, moving from tree to tree, was a woman. A buck-naked woman. He stared through the glasses, his vision—frequently blocked by tree trunks—shifting from her face to her bare breasts and flanks and back up to her face. Again and again she looked over her shoulder, as if she were being pursued, and her face looked wild and desperate. She was limping—staggering, almost—and Roy Lee understood suddenly that she was hurt. He got another brief glimpse, and this time he thought he saw blood streaming down her leg. “Holy
shit
.” Laying the rifle flat on the platform of the tree stand, he scrambled down the ladder and ran toward her, calling, “Hey, lady!
Lady!
Hang on—I'm coming to help you.” He ran on a diagonal track that he thought would intercept hers, but it was hard to be sure, as his line of sight was often obscured and his crashing run drowned out whatever sounds she was making. After he'd sprinted a hundred yards, he stopped to look and listen.

The woods were silent. She had stopped, too, he realized. He scanned slowly, his eyes and ears on full alert. Slightly to his left, perhaps thirty yards away, he heard a faint, ragged wheeze, and then he caught a flash of pale skin. “Hey,” he called again, and started in that direction. She burst into view, like a quail flushed from dry grass, and began to run—away from him, not toward. “Wait,” he called. “You look hurt. I'm trying to help.”

She continued to flee, but she was moving far slower than Roy Lee was, so he gained ground on her swiftly. Blood was streaming down her leg, and as he got closer, he was stunned to see the shaft of an arrow protruding from the back of her thigh. He drew even with her within a minute. “Hey,” he panted. “
Hey
. What happened?” She stared at him, wild-eyed, and continued to stumble forward. He took hold of her wrist. “I'm trying to help, can you understand that? We need to get you to a doctor. I'm not gonna hurt you.” She stopped, her chest heaving, her breathing somewhere between gasping and sobbing. “Easy, now.
Easy,
now.” He spoke as if he were soothing a spooked horse. “That's a girl. That's a girl. Don't be afraid. You're okay. Everything is gonna be okay.”

“Is it?” Roy Lee's head snapped up at the words, spoken in a male voice somewhere ahead and off to his right. He scanned the trees but saw nothing. “Never make promises you can't keep, Goober,” the unseen speaker continued. “Didn't your mama teach you that?”

“Git your ass outta your damn hidey-hole and we'll have us a little talk about what my mama did or didn't teach me,” said Roy Lee. He caught a slight movement in his peripheral vision, and he turned just in time to see a camouflaged figure rise from a crouch and pull a compound bow to a full draw.

“I've got no interest in talking to you about your hillbilly mama,” said the man with the bow. As he said the word
mama,
he relaxed the first two fingers of his right hand. Roy Lee heard a dull twang and a brief seething sound—the snap of a bowstring, followed by the whisper of feathers as the arrow flew toward him at 300 feet per second. Then he felt himself shoved against the naked woman as the razor-tipped arrow penetrated his chest, and his heart opened in a bloom of crimson to receive its thrust.

CHAPTER 21

Brockton

“DIS
-PATCH. CAN I HEP
you?” From the woman's voice—flat but twangy, like an out-of-tune banjo—I guessed that she'd lived in Wartburg, or at least somewhere in the hills of East Tennessee, all her life.

“Sheriff Cotterell, please.”

“I'm sorry, sir, Sheriff Cotterell is away right now. I can probably track him down on the radio, if it's urgent.”

I felt a twinge of disappointment. “No, it's not urgent. Could you give him a message, please?”

“I don't care to,” she said, and even though I'd lived in Tennessee for three years now, it still took me a moment to translate her spoken words—which sounded like a refusal—into her actual meaning:
I don't mind.

“I'd appreciate that. This is Dr. Bill Brockton, at the University of Tennessee.”

“Yes, sir, Dr. Brockton, how are you? This is Mae. We met when you was up here awhile back, working that Donnelly woman's murder. I hear you're back with us on another'n now. That girl's bones, found up on Frozen Head. I seen her pitcher on the TV news th'other night.”

“I hope a lot of other people up that way saw it, too,” I said. “That's one of the reasons I was calling Sheriff Cotterell—to see if he's gotten any leads since”—I caught myself just before parroting the words “her pitcher”—“since the sketch came out.”

“No, sir, I'm sorry to say we haven't. Not a peep. But us'n the TBI's takin' copies all over ever'where—churches, grocery stores, gas stations, Health Department, you name it. I made a prayer request at church last Sunday, too, that the Lord'll lay it on somebody's heart to come forward and tell us who she is and what happened to her.”

“Well,” I said, “between the sheriff's office, the TBI, and the Lord, sounds like y'all have all the jurisdictions covered.” I waited for a laugh, but I didn't get one. “Other reason I was calling was to see if Sheriff Cotterell needed something from me on the Donnelly woman's murder.”

“Denise Donnelly? What kind of follow-up? Sonofagun husband that killed her don't come up for parole for another eight years. He ain't filed any kind of appeal, far as I know, and I'd prob'ly know, since he's my cousin.” A pause, then: “How come you to ask?”

“Oh, it's nothing, really,” I said. “I got one of the Donnelly crime-scene photos in the mail the other day. No letter or anything with it—just the picture.” As I spoke, I walked to the bookcase where I'd tucked the envelope a few days before, after snatching it from Peggy's trembling hands.

“You say the
sheriff
sent it to you?”

“Well, I
think
so,” I said. “First I thought Bubba Hardknot sent it—Agent Meffert?—but Bubba says he didn't. So then I figured it had to've come from the sheriff. Figured maybe y'all were cleaning out your files.”

“I'll ask him about it when he gets in,” she said. “But I'd be real surprised if he sent you that pitcher. He ain't mentioned that case to me in a year or more. And he
sure
ain't give me nothing like that to mail.”

“You reckon he might've mailed it himself?”

“Who? The
sheriff
? Well, they do say there's a first time for ever'thing.” Now she laughed. It was a hearty, good-natured laugh, but as I slid the crime-scene photo from its envelope, the laugh seemed to turn mocking and sinister, and then it seemed to turn to shrieks: first, the echoes of my secretary's frightened scream; then the warning sirens in my own head; finally, the cries of the dead woman whose image I held in my hands.

A dead woman who was not Denise Donnelly. A dead woman whose crime scene had not yet been worked, because her body had not yet been found.

As I stared at the photo, I finally noticed things I'd overlooked the day I'd snatched it from Peggy and shoved it back in the envelope. I noticed that the trees were tinged with gold and orange and red—September trees, not December trees.
Right now
trees, I thought. I noticed that although the woman's feet were missing, her body showed no signs of decomposition, and her blood was fresh and bright. Last but not least—far, far from least—I noticed that the photo had a small time stamp in the lower right corner. Unless the camera's internal clock was wrong, the photo had been taken—and the woman's life had been taken—just three days before my new secretary reported for work and opened the envelope.

“Hello? Hello? Are you still there?” The voice of the dispatcher seemed to come from far away, and I stared at the telephone receiver dumbly, seemingly baffled to find it in my hand.

“Please ask the sheriff to call me when he gets in,” I said, then hung up and called the TBI, leaving a similar message for Meffert. All I'd be able to tell them was that somewhere out there—somewhere in the millions of acres of Tennessee woods—another woman lay dead and decomposing. And that somewhere out there, a killer might already be stalking his next victim—a victim whose body would end up bearing an uncanny and inexplicable resemblance to one of my prior cases.