The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (24 page)

“Kathleen, stop talking like that,” I said. “We’ll fight this. We’ll beat this.”

“We can’t, Bill. It’s not beatable. It’s too far along. The CT scan at Vanderbilt showed cancer all over my abdominal cavity. It’s already in my lungs, too. Spitzer said radiation and chemo might—
might
—give me an extra few months—”

“Can we do it here, or do we need to go to Vanderbilt?”

“No,” she said.

“No, what? No, we don’t need to go to Vanderbilt?”

“No, we’re not doing it. Either place.
Any
place.”

“What are you talking about? Of course we are. How soon can we start?”

“
No
.” Her face was no longer slack; it was now set, as hard as I’d ever seen it. “You don’t get to decide this, Bill. This isn’t
we,
this is
me,
and I say no.” She shook her head, her expression resolute. “Listen to me. Spitzer said the treatment would be brutal, and any extra time it gave me would be pure hell.” I started to argue, but she cut me off again. “Pure hell. Those were his words. I won’t put myself through that, Bill. And if you love me, you won’t try to make me.” She gave a wry half smile. “Funny, I was always so sure you’d be the one to die first. I figured some ex-convict would come gunning for revenge, or maybe you’d have a heart attack from working so hard. I never once thought I’d go first. And I sure never thought it’d be so soon.”

“Tell me this isn’t happening, Kathleen,” I pleaded. “Tell me this is a bad dream.”

“I can’t, honey. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

“Don’t leave me, Kathleen. Please. I can’t bear it.”

“Yes, you can.” She gave me an appraising glance. “It won’t be easy for you, though. You’re going to miss me when I’m gone.”

I knew she was right, because I could already feel a deep, black fissure cracking open within me—a fault line zigzagging down to depths I could not even begin to fathom.

KATHLEEN HAD FINALLY PERSUADED ME TO LEAVE
her office—“I have a lot of things to take care of,” she’d said as she propelled me gently into the hallway—and I’d made my way in a daze back to the dark quietude of my private office, where I sat staring out the window at the stadium’s crisscrossed scaffolding of gritty, rusting girders. My own scaffolding—the underpinning of my life—suddenly felt old and rusty, too, though in hindsight the rust had been eating away at it for quite some time.

Through the grimy window, a faint flicker of movement caught my eye: a small, oblong shape twitching slightly atop a grayish-white lump. I stood up and walked to the window for a closer look. On the other side of the glass, six inches from my face, a paper wasp was scrabbling around, atop a small nest suspended beneath an I-beam. The wasp’s antennae and mandibles and forelegs twitched as it bustled across the shallow structure. The nest, about the same size as the face of my wristwatch, contained several dozen open hexagonal cells. Inside the nearest cells, I saw small, glistening
larvae, and as the wasp moved from cell to cell, it darted its head briefly inside cell after cell, dispensing tiny taste treats: a dollop of chewed-up caterpillar, perhaps, or a masticated maggot—maybe even a maggot plucked from a corpse across the river, at the Body Farm. To one side of the nest, a dozen other wasps sat motionless, like airplanes parked on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Just beyond the small nest—no more than six inches from it—hung the prior year’s nest, empty and abandoned, like some entomological version of a blighted suburban strip mall. As I watched, I heard a sharp hissing sound, and suddenly a powerful jet of water shot up from somewhere below, swooshing and fanning across my window. Every few years, the university’s maintenance crews pressure-washed the windows of Stadium Hall, and today, it seemed, was the appointed day. The stream made several passes back and forth, sending sheets of muddy water cascading down the glass and off the sills. As the view cleared, to the extent that the view from these windows ever cleared, I looked out at the girder I’d been studying minutes before. The wasps—along with their new nest—were gone: swept away in the blink of an eye. Six inches from the obliterated construction site, the old nest hung, dripping but undamaged. In my mind, I seemed to hear the words of some Old Testament prophet, his voice as harsh as wormwood and gall and my own bitter heart:
Vanity, vanity—all is vanity—and we are as dust in the wind.

MY CELL PHONE RANG FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME OF
the agonizing afternoon, and for the umpteenth time I reached for the “ignore” button. A moment earlier, I had ignored a call from Carmelita Janus—I felt bad about that, since I had promised to try to help her, but I also felt as if I were drowning in a
sea of my own troubles, unable to haul her to safety. I glanced at the display, to see if Mrs. Janus had hit “redial,” but the display showed me a different name: “KPD Decker.” I had already ignored two calls from Decker shortly before lunchtime; I didn’t think I should ignore a third, given how precarious his mental state had seemed the last time I’d seen him. Feeling edgy, I answered the call. “Hey, Deck. How you doing?”

There was a brief silence on the other end, then a male voice I didn’t recognize said, in an oddly businesslike tone, “Hello? Who is this, please?”

“This is Dr. Bill Brockton,” I answered. “At the University of Tennessee. Who are
you,
and why are you calling me on Captain Decker’s cell phone?”

“Dr. Brockton, did you speak with Captain Decker this morning?”

The question seemed to come out of nowhere. “Excuse me?”

“I asked if you spoke with Captain Decker this morning.”

“No, I didn’t. Why?” I felt confused, and in the back of my head, an alarm was beginning to sound.

“His cell phone shows that he called you twice. First at 10:23 Central Time, for twenty seconds, and again at 10:54, for five minutes.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, feeling testy now. “
Who
are you? Why are you calling me? And what business is it of yours who calls me, and when?”

There was another silence, then: “Dr. Brockton, this is Special Agent Henry Fielding with the TBI. I need to know whether you spoke with Captain Decker this morning.”

“No,” I said. “I think he tried to call me, but we didn’t talk. I have a backlog of voice mails I haven’t listened to yet. There might be one from him. I can check, and call you back, if you want.”

“Not right now,” he said. “Right now I need to ask you a few questions.”

The alarm bell in my head was almost deafening now. “Tell me what’s happened,” I demanded. “Is Deck hurt? Has he been in an accident?” The word “suicide” flashed into my mind, but I didn’t want to say it, because the act of saying it might somehow make it real. Suddenly a phrase the TBI agent had used connected with a circuit in my brain, and I felt a jolt that was almost electric. “You said ‘Central Time.’ Decker was calling me from Middle Tennessee this morning?” I prayed that it wasn’t so, but deep down, I knew that it was.

“Yes, he was.”

“Jesus. Please tell me he wasn’t calling me from Clifton,” I said. “Please tell me he didn’t go to the prison.”

“What do you mean, Dr. Brockton?” The agent’s question—and his tone of voice—couldn’t have been more casual if he’d been asking about the weather. And that told me, beyond a doubt, that something was badly wrong.

“Is Deck hurt? Is he in some sort of trouble?” The agent didn’t answer, and I snapped. “Goddamnit, Fielding, what the
hell
is going on? Quit playing games with me. If something’s happened to Captain Decker, tell me what it is, and tell me how I can help.”

I heard the agent take a long, deep breath, and then I heard him exhale it. “Captain Decker’s in the ICU at Vanderbilt Hospital,” he finally said. “He’s lost a lot of blood. They’re not sure if he’s going to make it.”

“Oh dear God,” I said. “He did go to the prison, didn’t he? This happened to him there.”

“What makes you say that, Dr. Brockton?”

“Because he mentioned it a couple days ago, when I saw him. He’s working a case involving an inmate there. Nick
Satterfield. The serial killer. Satterfield’s . . . girlfriend, his groupie—I don’t know what to call her—she helped Satterfield send a threat to me. A threat and an amputated finger. Decker came to see me a few days ago, to tell me they’d arrested her. While he was here, he said something about paying a visit to Satterfield.”

“What, exactly, did he say?”

I hesitated; I didn’t want to create more problems for Decker, but I didn’t see any clear alternative to the truth. “He said he might go see Satterfield, might rattle his cage a bit.”

“Did he use those words? ‘Rattle his cage’?”

“I think so. Would you please just tell me what’s happened?”

“Bear with me, Dr. Brockton. Was it Captain Decker who suggested rattling Satterfield’s cage? Or was it you?”

“
What?
” He didn’t respond. “No, it wasn’t me,” I said. “It was Decker who mentioned it, but he wasn’t serious. He was just talking, you know?”

“No, sir, I don’t know,” he said. “What I do know is that Captain Decker went to see Mr. Satterfield. And there was a violent confrontation in the interview room. And Captain Decker nearly bled out on the floor.”

I had a terrible sense of déjà vu—of Satterfield uncoiling and striking down a good man, out of pure malevolence and unadulterated evil.

“I don’t understand how that could happen,” I said. “Aren’t the prisoners behind glass, or bars, or a wire screen, or something? Aren’t they shackled, or cuffed? Or at least
guarded
?”

“Captain Decker requested a private interview,” the agent said. “In a room. And he asked the guard to remove the prisoner’s restraints.”

“Jesus,” I said. “
Jesus.
Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know, sir. I thought maybe you could tell me.”

“But what
happened
? You said Decker lost a lot of blood. Did Satterfield have a knife? A shiv—is that what it’s called?”

“He had a razor blade,” said Fielding. “Hidden in his mouth. He must’ve been expecting trouble.”

“He was
causing
the trouble,” I snapped. “He sent that finger, and he waited. It was a trap. Bait. And how the hell did he get hold of a razor blade?”

“You’d be amazed what inmates can get hold of. Drugs. Phones. Weapons. Women. Anyhow, by the time the guards got in and broke up the fight, Decker was cut pretty bad. Satterfield went for the neck—he cut the jugular vein, and he was still cutting when they pulled him off. Almost got the carotid artery, the ER docs said.”

“That sick sonofabitch,” I said. I didn’t know whether to weep or scream. “I guess he just wants to take as many people down with him as he can.”

“That’s not the way he tells it, Dr. Brockton,” said the agent.

“What do you mean?” I was echoing the question Fielding had asked two minutes earlier, but my tone—unlike his—was anything but casual.

“Satterfield says it was self-defense. Says Decker was trying to kill
him
. Says Decker came there to kill him.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “That can’t be true.”

“No? That’s not all he says, Dr. Brockton. He says Decker was doing it for you.”

“Oh, bullshit,” I snapped.

“For you and your wife,” the agent went on. “Decker told Satterfield you and your wife promised him ten thousand dollars.”

“How
dare
you?” My voice sounded both loud and muffled—as
if I were shouting, but shouting from somewhere far away. “Do you even know who Satterfield is, and what he’s done
?
”

“Yes, sir, actually, I am familiar with Satterfield’s record.”

The words “Satterfield’s record” seemed a mockery to me.

“Do you know what he did,
actually,
to the four women he killed?”

“I’ve seen the autopsy reports, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s only a small part of what I mean,” I snapped. “Can you imagine the pain and the terror he put those women through, on their way to those autopsy reports?”

“No, sir, I guess I can’t.”

“I guess not. And do you know that he cut off my wife’s finger—in front of me, and our son, and his girlfriend—just for kicks? Just to give us a little taste of what he had in store for us?”

“I am aware of that,” he said. “And I certainly don’t condone it.”

“Don’t
condone
it?” I was practically roaring now. “Well, that’s mighty big of you, Agent Fielding, not to
condone
it.”

“Dr. Brockton? Sir? I need you to take a step back and calm down. I’m sorry if my choice of words offended you. No doubt about it, Satterfield’s done terrible things. But those things aren’t the issue right now. The issue right now is, he’s alleging crimes have been committed, by Captain Deck—”

“Give me a break,” I interrupted. “You’re going to take a convicted serial killer’s word over a police officer’s?”

“Let me finish,” he said. “He’s alleging crimes were committed by Captain Decker, and by you and your wife. Attempted murder by Captain Decker, and conspiracy to commit murder, by you and your wife.”

“My wife,” I spat, “is dying. And frankly, Agent Fielding, in light of that, I don’t give a good goddamn what Satterfield says. If you’ve got an ounce of decency in you, neither will you.”

Whatever response he had to that, I didn’t hear it. I had already hit “end.”