The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (26 page)

IT WASN’T EASY, TAKING MY MIND OFF KATHLEEN
and refocusing it on my work. But she was right, and I owed it to her—and to my own sanity—to try.

I’d been taken off the Janus case by Prescott, cut off from everyone in the FBI’s San Diego field office. It was possible, though, that Mac McCready would still talk to me. I dialed his Quantico number, and he answered on the third ring. “McCready here.”

“Mac, it’s Bill Brockton, in Knoxville. Are you still speaking to me, or is the entire Bureau shunning me?”

“Still speaking, but I’m not sure I’m much of an asset to you. I’m not exactly the golden boy around here, either. Prescott’s pretty pissed at me, too. Hard to blame him—he’s been getting chewed up pretty bad himself, by big dogs with sharp teeth.”

I hadn’t taken time to consider the awkwardness of Prescott’s position—he was, after all, the public face of the troubled case—but whatever compassion I felt for him was offset by my slight resentment of the time pressure he’d applied
. . . and by the powerful sting of feeling like the scapegoat. “Not fun for any of us,” was the best I could muster. “Listen, Mac, I’m still trying to figure out who told Prescott about the teeth. Do you know?”

“It was that reporter. Malloy. Guy’s a prick, but you gotta hand it to him—he was a giant step ahead of
us
.”

“But how’d he get there, Mac? Who told Malloy the teeth had been pulled? Who
knew
? I sure didn’t. Not till I cleaned ’em off the other day—
after
Prescott called to fire me.”

“Had to’ve been somebody who was in on it,” McCready mused. “Maybe it was the guy with the pliers. Hell, maybe it was Janus himself.”

“Why? Why would whoever faked the death—Janus or his DIY dentist—put a bug in a reporter’s ear?”

“Good question, Doc. Figure that one out, and you’re nearly there.”

“You think Janus wanted to embarrass the Bureau?” As soon as I said it, I decided it was highly unlikely, given that the Bureau wouldn’t just be embarrassed; the Bureau would be gunning for vengeance. “Nah, not that,” I said. “Janus would know that the FBI would move heaven and earth to catch him if he’s humiliated y’all. Maybe he promised the dental assistant a big payoff, but stiffed the guy instead.”

“That could work,” he agreed. “Listen, I gotta go—I’m teaching a fresh batch of recruits at the Academy about one of your favorite topics today: bugs. ‘Trust the bugs,’ right? Keep the faith, Doc. It’ll get better.”

As I hung up, I couldn’t help wondering,
Will it? How? And when?

AMONG THE MANY MEAN SURPRISES THAT ACCOMPANIED
the Ultimate Mean Surprise—Kathleen’s death-sentence surprise—was the secretarial surprise: the mountain of insurance forms, financial forms, legal forms, and other forms of forms to be scaled. In a perverse corner of my mind, I imagined the grim reaper, twenty-first-century style, no longer mowing down mortals with a scythe, but simply burying them alive beneath truckloads of paper.

In the seven days since our telephone conference with Dr. Spitzer, Kathleen and I had come to an unspoken agreement, an uneasy détente. We distracted ourselves from the bigger issues of mortality and grief by focusing on what we began calling “the business of death and dying.” We dealt with the business—the bureaucracy—at the kitchen table, sorting papers into stacks and categories that sometimes covered every square inch, despite the fact that we’d added a leaf to the table. There was a certain amount of apt irony, Kathleen noted early on, in dealing with death at the kitchen table, where she had almost perished at the hands of Nick Satterfield years before. “Not with a bang, and not with a whimper,” she’d joked, “but with a notarized signature in triplicate.” At moments like that—moments of understated heroism—I admired the hell out of her and wondered how on earth I’d be able to bear losing her.

I was doing a surprisingly good job of not falling apart—even Kathleen commented on it—until she slid me an official-looking form headed with the logo of the Tennessee Department of Health and Environment. “What’s this?” I asked.

“An advance directive. It’s the state’s new version of a living will.” I felt a jolt of fear shoot through me as I scanned down the page. Near the top, directly beneath her own name,
Kathleen had designated me as her “Agent”—the person authorized to make health-care decisions for her—but in a series of boxes beneath my name, she had systematically tied my hands, checking the “No” box beside every possible treatment option: No cardiopulmonary resuscitation. No defibrillation. No life support. No surgery, antibiotics, or transfusions. No tube feeding or IV fluids.

I stared at the form—its grim specifics, the litany of life-extending options she was refusing—and then looked up. She was watching me closely; it was all I could do to meet her gaze. “Looks like you’ve got your mind made up,” I said, trying to keep the pain—sadness and also self-pity—out of my voice. “Nothing here for me to do.”

“Yes, there is,” she said. “You make damn sure they abide by this. I’ve heard of too many cases where hospitals ignored these things—jump-starting people’s hearts, putting people on respirators or feeding tubes—even when the patients had living wills on file. If anything like that starts to happen, you fight tooth and nail to stop it, you hear me?” I nodded. “I need you to say it. Out loud. Promise me you won’t let them keep me alive.”

I felt tears running down my cheeks. “God, Kathleen.”

“
Promise
me.” Her voice was like steel.

“All
right,
dammit. I promise.” It was all I could do to choke out the words.

“Thank you.” She pulled a handful of paper napkins from the holder and passed them across to me.

I wiped my eyes and blew my nose, with a wet, honking blast.

“Nice,” she said. “It’s your table manners I’ll miss most in the afterlife.”

“Something to look forward to, while you’re waiting
for me.” I gave another Gabriel-worthy trumpet blast, then flipped to the form’s second page. “So I just sign down here, as a witness?”

She shook her head. “You can’t.” She reached across and pointed at a block of fine print that excluded relatives, by blood or marriage, as witnesses. “I guess the powers that be want to make sure you’re not trying to get rid of me.”

“Good for them,” I said. I glanced up at the organ-donation section of the form and saw that she had specified only her corneas. I glanced up at her.

“My organs can’t be used,” she said. “They might give cancer to somebody else. The corneas are safe, though.”

I nodded. “Well, I know that’s important. Be a shame if you couldn’t donate those, after all your work to help people’s vision.”

“I’m glad you brought that up,” she said. “I want to do more, if you’re willing.”

“Like what?”

“Well, it looks like we’re in pretty good financial shape, right?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call us rich, but yeah, looks like we’re not in any danger of going belly-up. Especially since you’re refusing expensive treatments like Band-Aids and aspirin.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she said, but I caught a twinkle in her eye, and I managed a half smile. “That life-insurance policy we took out on me years ago, when Jeff was a baby?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he’s still listed as the beneficiary,” she went on. “Seems like he doesn’t need it now. His accounting practice is growing like crazy.”

“You want to change it so the boys are the beneficiaries? Set up college funds for them?”

“I want them to get half of it,” she said. “Twenty-five thousand apiece. Enough to help, but not enough to make them lazy.”

“Seems Solomonic of you,” I said. “What about the rest?”

“I want to give it away, Bill. To charity. Do a little good on my way out.” She reached across and took my hand. “I want to give twenty-five thousand to my foundation, to hire a part-time director and fund-raiser. So Food for Sight can keep going—and start growing—instead of just limping along, or dying with me.”

Her generosity touched me; her foresight astonished me. I rubbed my thumb across the back of her hand. “Do you have any idea how much I admire you?”

“You’ve mentioned it once or twice.” She gave my hand another squeeze.

“That leaves another twenty-five thousand,” I said. “Who’s that for? UT?” She shook her head, so I guessed again, mentally reviewing her list of favorite causes. “League of Women Voters?” Another head shake. “Doctors Without Borders?”

“No. Airlift Relief International.”

I blinked. “Airlift Relief? Janus’s thing?”

“Yes.”

“But . . .”

“But what, Bill?”

“Well, for starters, he’s dead.”

“So? I hope people keep giving to my ‘thing’ after
I’m
dead.”

“But you’re not a drug trafficker, Kathleen.”

“Neither was he. I don’t believe it, Bill. I think he was set up.”

“You think he was framed? By the
FBI
? Come on, Kathleen.”

“Maybe not the FBI. Maybe somebody else—some other
agency, or the real drug traffickers. I don’t know who. But I do know that a lot of poor people in Central and South America will die in disasters if people don’t step up and keep that outfit going.”

“I think we need to think about this some more,” I said.

“I don’t. It’s done. I mailed the beneficiary-change form today.”

I stared across the table at her, my thoughts and emotions swirling. As they swirled, three questions kept rearing their unsettling heads: What would the FBI think, if they learned of my wife’s big gift in memory of an accused drug smuggler? What if the money ended up, directly or indirectly, in the pockets of narco traffickers and killers? Last but not least—in fact, worst of all—was it possible that I was resisting the idea because I was actually jealous of a dead man?

Suddenly Kathleen clutched my hand, and for a moment I wondered if she had somehow read my ungenerous thoughts. Then I heard her gasp—a ragged, wrenching effort to draw a breath—and saw the expression of terror on her face.

“Kathleen? Honey, what’s wrong?” She jerked her hand from mine and gripped the table, pushing upward with both arms, as if to keep herself from being pulled underwater. “Oh God,” I said. “No. Please, no.”

Her eyes opened wide, and then wider and wider still—impossibly wide—and she reached across the table, her hands scrabbling, searching for mine. Her gaze remained locked on me, and as I stared, frozen with horror, the fear in her eyes gave way to something else—dawning awareness, perhaps, followed swiftly by sorrow and then—at the last moment—by something I would have sworn was gratitude.

               
Knoxville News Sentinel
July 13, 2004

               
Kathleen Walker Brockton, Ph.D.
Scientist, teacher, humanitarian, wife, and mother

               
Kathleen Walker Brockton died Tuesday after a brief bout with cancer. She was 50. A native of Huntsville, Alabama, Dr. Brockton earned her B.S. degree from the University of Alabama and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Kentucky.

               
Dr. Brockton was a professor in the University of Tennessee’s Nutrition Science Department, where she taught for fourteen years. Before moving to Knoxville in 1980, she taught at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. A respected scholar as well as a popular teacher, Dr. Brockton’s research interests focused on the health effects of nutritional deficiencies in children. Her 1997 journal article “Vitamin A Supplements: Saving Sight, Saving Lives” brought widespread attention within her field to the problem of vitamin A deficiency, a problem that causes blindness
in an estimated 500,000 Third World children every year and kills approximately half of those children within a year after losing their sight. Chosen as “Author of the Year” by the journal’s editorial board, Dr. Brockton used the award’s monetary prize to establish a nonprofit foundation, Food for Sight, to provide vitamin A supplements to Third World children. During its first three years, Food for Sight provided vitamin A supplements to more than 100,000 children in Asia and Africa. “It costs fifty cents to keep a child from going blind,” Dr. Brockton was often heard to tell prospective donors. “Fifty cents. Who couldn’t—who wouldn’t—give the gift of sight to a child?”

               
A woman of exceptional intelligence, vision, and compassion, Dr. Kathleen Brockton is survived, mourned, and missed by her husband, Dr. William Brockton; their son, Jeff; their daughter-in-law, Jenny; and two grandsons, Tyler and Walker.

               
Arrangements are still pending, and a memorial service will be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Food for Sight Foundation.