Cut to the Bone (9 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 10

Satterfield

SATTERFIELD DAWDLED, TAKING HIS
sweet time filling out the deposit slip, allowing two customers to get into the teller queue ahead of him.

“Next, please?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Two.”

“How old?”

“One in high school, one in college.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 11

Brockton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There
you go. That was it.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir.”

“Any sign of sexual assault?”

“None.”

“What about her personal effects?”

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

“Married? What about the husband?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, sir. Never married.”

“Boyfriend?”

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

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

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

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

The detective nodded, chewing her lip.

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

“Yes.”

“Not her boss.”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

“When was she reported missing?” asked Brubaker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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