The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (19 page)

“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.

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.