The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (23 page)

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.”

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.”