The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (18 page)

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?

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.”