Cut to the Bone (24 page)

“You're welcome. And Bill?” I glanced up, my fork and knife already poised above the plate. “Thanks for not being a shit to women. Or kids. Or animals.” I smiled at her. “You've got a big heart.” She smiled back. “And you
know
what they say about the size of a man's heart.”

“Oh
my,
” I said, as I caught the drift of her innuendo. “Is it true, what they say?”

“Better than true. It's an understatement.”

Beaming, I bowed my head and tucked into the feast.

CHAPTER 35

Satterfield

SATTERFIELD WAS A SHADOW
among shadows, flowing through the night like some coalescence of darkness—like darkness made flesh—along the perimeter of the quarry yard. The night watchman had just made his 1:00
A.M.
circuit, and he wouldn't make another for an hour—maybe longer, if he fell asleep in the guard shack, as he sometimes did.

Satterfield didn't need an hour; didn't need even half an hour. The blasting caps were locked in a windowless steel building—it was called a “magazine,” but essentially it was a vault—tucked into a recess in one of the quarry's limestone walls. The dynamite was locked in an identical magazine in a second recess, fifty yards from the first one. Satterfield had not actually been inside either magazine, but earlier in the day, he'd watched through his spotting scope as a wiry guy had gone into the first structure and emerged a few minutes later with a handful of caps, dangling from their electrical wires like silver firecrackers swinging from long, slender fuses of red and blue. After driving a brief distance along the rim of the gaping pit, he'd gone into the second magazine and then emerged carrying a box covered with warning labels—labels Satterfield had seen many times during his demolition training in the Navy.

Satterfield had been researching lock picking, so he could come and go without leaving a visible trace. He'd seen locks picked in plenty of movies—the long, slender picks, worked into the keyhole, wiggled and twisted in some artful, arcane manner—but as it turned out, it looked like it was going to be easier than that. The prior night, when the watchman had gone to make his rounds, Satterfield had slipped into the guard shack and rummaged around. Sure enough, in the gritty center drawer of a gritty metal desk, he'd found an assortment of gritty spare keys. One of them bore the promising label “demo.” For a moment he'd doubted his luck—had they really been stupid enough to use identical locks on both bunker doors?—but then he realized that yes, of course they had. If they were dumb enough to leave the keys to the whole operation in an unlocked desk—an unlocked desk in an unlocked
guard
shack, for crissakes—they were plenty dumb enough to use identical locks for the blasting caps and the explosives.

The guard's 2:00
A.M
. rounds would take him first to the blasting-cap magazine, so Satterfield started there, to make sure he'd be finished well ahead of time. The building was low and squat, maybe ten feet square by seven feet high, the steel outer walls lined with several inches of hardwood, if the quarry's magazines were built like the Navy's. The door looked like something from a warship: Also made of heavy steel plate, it was low and narrow, mounted on massive hinges.

Satterfield slid the key into the padlock's keyway, feeling the pins bump across the teeth, one by one. When the key bottomed out, he twisted gently. The lock opened grudgingly, grittily, the coating of limestone dust resisting as the shackle slid out of the brass body. It took most of his strength to wrest the door open, and he felt a flash of admiration for the wiry blaster he'd watched through his scope; the guy was several inches shorter than Satterfield, and probably weighed twenty or thirty pounds less.
Not an ounce of fat on that guy,
he thought. The door rasped on the hinges, but the sound was slight—almost as though it were absorbed by the velvet blackness of the magazine's interior.

Once inside, he tugged the door shut behind him, then clicked on the small Mag-Lite. As he scanned the room, he smiled. Three walls were lined with wooden shelves, and the shelves were like a high-explosives candy store. The blasting caps—hundreds of them; hell,
thousands
of them—were stored in wooden bins. Some sported pigtails of bright orange det cord; others—the ones he wanted—trailed electrical leads, the pairs of wires looped and fastened into tight coils.

He slipped three caps into one of the thigh pockets of the black BDUs—no point getting greedy, since he had the key to the store, and he didn't want to risk creating a noticeable shortage in the inventory—then turned to go.

He pushed his way out the heavy door, then closed it behind him, snapping the balky lock shut. Five minutes later he was inside the second cavelike magazine, this one containing cases of dynamite and wooden spools of detonating cord. From an open case of dynamite, he took two sticks—more than he needed—and tucked them into a deep pocket, then turned to go. At the door, though, he hesitated, then turned back, irresistibly drawn to the spools of det cord: Primacord—500- and 1,000- and 2,000-foot spools of linear explosive, in a rainbow of colors: orange, yellow, red, green, purple, in solids and stripes, each color and pattern denoting a different load of explosive inside the bright plastic sleeve. Some of the cord was no thicker than clothesline; on one spool, though, the cord was nearly as fat as his pinky. P
RIMALINE 85
, read the label on that one, which meant that every meter of cord contained 85 grams of high-explosive PETN.

God, I love this shit,
Satterfield thought. He loved Primacord for what it could do; hell, with that one spool of Primaline 85, he could probably take down every major bridge in Knoxville. He also loved Primacord for its neatness and precision. Dynamite was dirty and messy, though undeniably macho; Primacord was clean and neat. Consistent, too: No matter which spool you unwound, no matter which loading you used, you could be sure that the explosion would rip through the cord at 23,000 feet a second, 16,000 miles an hour: New York to L.A. in
ten minutes
. He'd done the math during his demo training at Coronado, working the problem three times to make sure he hadn't misplaced the decimal. How the hell did they do that, extrude high-proof explosives with such perfection that the blast traveled through the cord ten times faster than a bullet, but precisely, reliably fast? You could set your watch—hell, you could set a damn atomic clock—by precision like that.

He wasn't here for the Primacord, but the temptation was too strong to resist. Slipping the KA-BAR knife from its sheath, he unspooled ten feet of the Primaline 85, sliced it off, and then wound it around his waist, cinching it into three tight coils. He took a moment to imagine what would happen if something set it off while he was wearing it.
Shit,
he thought, shaking his head and grinning,
your head would come down in Kentucky and your feet in Alabama; one hand in Maryland, the other in Oklahoma. Don't get hit by lightning on the way home.

This bunker's door was even harder to close than the other. Satterfield made a mental note to bring some WD-40 next time he came, to lube the hinges. Be a damned shame to throw out his back.

CHAPTER 36

Brockton

HOLDING MY BREATH TO
protect my lungs, I jogged into the cloud of smoke that shrouded the entry to the Knoxville Police Department. The air was thick with carcinogens—at least a pack's worth of secondhand smoke, judging by the throng of smokers loitering outside the grimy glass doors. The KPD was a squat, brooding fortress of putty-colored brick set atop Summit Hill Drive. The police shared the building with traffic court, and I suspected that most of the smokers were speeders and DUI defendants, taking advantage of the noon recess to calm their jitters with a jolt of nicotine.

“Excuse me, sir?” I was accosted by a disheveled young man whose stringy, greasy brown hair had been cut, at some point in the distant past, in a style that was named after a saltwater fish whose name I struggled to recall. I held up my hand to deflect his sob story and request for spare change. Instead of panhandling, though, he simply asked, “Could you tell me the time, please?” Ashamed of my brusque response, I stopped, one hand on the door handle, and checked my watch.

“Ten of one,” I croaked, expending as little of my lungful of air as possible.

“Dude,” he said as I tugged open the door. “What happened to your voice?”

“Throat cancer.” I clutched my larynx as I rasped out the brazen lie. “Smoking.” Before he had a chance to engage me further, I ducked through the door, hurrying toward the smoke-free air inside. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the mullet-head scrutinizing the ashy end of his cigarette, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. Then he dropped it to the concrete and ground it out. Before he did, though, he took one long last drag.

Traffic court occupied a single floor on the left-hand side of the complex; the police department commanded a four-story wing to the right. I signed in with the receptionist, who made a quick phone call and then buzzed me in. “Crime lab. Take the elevator to the second floor.”

In the lab, Art Bohanan sat at a long metal lab table, peering through a magnifying lens at the blood-smeared shaft of a hunting arrow. On a metal tray to one side were the other headless shafts, decapitated with bolt cutters to allow the dead woman's body to be taken down from the tree. A second tray held the sharp-tipped, razor-edged arrowheads—all except for the one that had lodged deep in the femur. “Hey, Art,” I said. “Any prints?” Without looking up, he shook his head. “In that case, you probably won't find any on this one, either.” Reaching into the pocket of my windbreaker, I pulled out a clear plastic jar, two inches wide and three inches tall, containing the arrowhead I'd extracted from the femur. “Dr. Hamilton did as much autopsy as he could this morning,” I said, “and he pulled this out. But she was too far gone for him to tell much, so he's turned her and the man over to me. We'll start cleaning her bones tomorrow; right now we're still processing the woman that was splayed against the tree.”

“You think she'll be done today?” asked Art. I'd worked with him on enough cases to feel sure that his use of the word “done” was a deliberate double entendre. Art had commented, on more than one visit to the Anthropology Annex, that we processed bones exactly the way his wife made beef stock: cut off most of the meat, then put the bones into a big pot to simmer. After my costly lesson about the penchant of unwatched pots to boil, I'd taken steps to ensure that I wouldn't ruin any more of Kathleen's stoves: I'd sworn never again to process skeletal material at home, and I'd dipped deeply into the department's budget to buy the Annex a twenty-gallon steam-jacketed kettle—the kind commercial kitchens used to cook meals for the masses. With the thermostat set at 150 degrees and a bit of meat tenderizer, Biz, and Downy added to the water, the soft tissue—even the brain—softened and dissolved, leaving the bone clean, undamaged, and smelling more like laundry than roadkill.

“Might be done today; more likely tomorrow. She had a fair amount of tissue left.”

He nodded at me, then shook his head glumly at the arrow shaft he'd been examining, laying it on the tray alongside the others. “This guy was careful,” he said. “Either he wore gloves, or he wiped everything down pretty well.”

“You said you had something to show me?”

“Couple things, actually. Hang on a sec.” He switched off the lamp and rolled to the other end of the table, where he picked up a phone and punched in an extension number. “Hey, it's Art,” he said. “I just finished going over the arrows. . . . Nah, nothing. Nada. Zero. Zip.” He glanced at me. “Dr. Brockton just walked in. I'm gonna show him the stuff I showed you this morning. . . . Okay. Bye.” He replaced the handset. “That was Kittredge. He's on his way down.”

Art rolled his chair back toward the center of the table and picked up a square white card, slightly smaller than the width of a sheet of printer paper. The card was covered with oblong smudges, as if it had been pawed by a jam-fingered child. Even from a distance, I recognized the whorls and loops of fingerprints. There were two horizontal rows of small square boxes—ten boxes in all. Nine of the boxes contained prints; the tenth box was as empty as the space that had once been occupied by the woman's amputated finger. “I printed her at the scene,” he said, “before you got there.” I nodded; I'd already figured that. “Pretty good, if I do say so myself.”

“Her hands were in great shape, compared to the guy's,” I said. “His were almost down to the bone.”

Art handed me another card, this one with a complete set of prints from both hands. Holding them side by side, I compared the two cards. The prints on the second card, the complete card, were sharper and crisper than those taken from the woman's corpse; no surprise there. But even I could tell that both sets of prints—the crisp antemortem prints and the blurred postmortem prints—had been made by the same hand. “You got a match already?” He nodded. “That's great.” I read the name at the top of the complete card. “Pamela Stone. Who is she?
Was
she?”

“Thirty-two-year-old hooker. Street name was Desirée. Kittredge is checking with vice and patrol to see what else they know, and when she was last seen.”

As if summoned by the mention of his name, Kittredge entered the crime lab. He nodded to Art and reached out to shake my hand. “Doc. How's it going?”

“Okay. I brought y'all the arrowhead from the thigh. Dr. Hamilton examined her first thing this morning. I was just telling Art, we'll start cleaning off the bones tomorrow, soon as the prior victim's done.”

“Forgive my ignorance,” he said, “but do you have to get the family's permission for that?”

I shook my head. “As a forensic case, it—she—is now in the medical examiner's system. Processing the remains, getting them down to bone, is standard investigative protocol.”

He nodded. “What'd the M.E. find? Anything helpful?”

“I'm not sure how helpful this is,” I said, “but it's interesting. She lost a lot of blood, but not enough to kill her. He thinks she died of a coronary.”

“A heart attack?” Kittredge looked puzzled.

“Yeah. The M.E. thinks she died of fright.”

He whistled softly. “That's a first, for me. But I can believe it, considering what the guy was doing to her. Anything else?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I want to take a closer look at the right hand once it's cleaned up. Something about that missing digit bugs me, but I can't quite put my finger on it. No pun intended.”

Kittredge nodded slowly. “I'd like you to take a look at what was in her mouth,” he said. “I don't know what to make of it. Maybe you'll have an idea.”

“I'll try. Always happy to help, if I can.”

Kittredge leaned across the table and picked up a flat plastic sleeve, holding it up to display one side. Inside the sleeve was a sheet of what had been crisp white paper in a past life, but was now stained and smeared and wrinkled. In addition to what appeared to be random blotches, the sheet bore numerous fingerprints, these etched in bright purple, a hue somewhere between raspberry and grape jelly. I turned to Art. “You got prints off that wad of paper? Damn, you're good.”

Art shrugged modestly. “Ninhydrin. Binds to the amino acids in proteins. Any time you handle something, you leave behind a few skin cells, and there's protein in those cells. A quick spritz”—he nodded toward a spray bottle on the table—“and presto.”

“Presto indeed,” I said. “That's a lot of prints.”

“At least three different sets,” he said. “Two men and one woman, looks like.”

“And good enough to run through AFIS?” I was proud that I knew the acronym for the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

“Good enough to give us a match already,” Kittredge interjected. “One of the men.”

“You're kidding.”

The detective shook his head. “Nope. Dead serious.”

“Amazing.”

“What's even more amazing,” said Kittredge, “is that the guy's name is right here on the page.”

“His
name
?”

“Yep. Full name. Signature, too.”

“He wrote a note and actually
signed
it?”

“Not a note, exactly. Take a look, tell me what you think.” The detective handed me the plastic sleeve.

I flipped it over, and my heart nearly stopped.

Neatly typed on a sheet of UT letterhead, the name—and the scrawled but familiar signature beside it—read “William M. Brockton.”

I stared at the stained and rumpled piece of paper—the first page of a forensic report I'd written and submitted—its edges thick with purple fingerprints.
My
fingerprints. I looked from Kittredge's face to Art Bohanan's and back again. “How the
hell,
” I finally said, “did that end up in the mouth of a dead woman?”

Art said nothing; Kittredge said, “My question exactly, Doc. I was hoping you might be able to answer it for me.” Still reeling from shock, I nodded numbly, then drew a deep breath and took another, longer look.

I had recognized the format the moment I'd glimpsed the page. It was a forensic report, the kind I'd written and signed dozens of times, in dozens of cases. This particular report, I saw upon closer inspection, was addressed to a state trooper in Alaska—Corp. Byron Keller—and the subject line read “Re: Forensic case 90-02.”

I remembered the case well; in fact, I'd mentioned it to Tyler, though not by number, less than twenty-four hours before, as we'd driven back to the morgue with the two bodies from the woods. Keller's case had begun when a pair of Alaska hunters had found a skeleton, half buried in a gravel bar at the shore of a river. Keller had initially thought the skeleton might be that of a hiker who'd gotten lost and starved to death, or perhaps been killed by a bear. But there'd been no reports of missing hikers in the area; in addition, there were no traces of backpacking equipment or apparel: no boots, and in fact, no clothing of any kind.

Corporal Keller had contacted me after reading a newspaper story about one of my early Kansas cases—the Sawzall dismemberment case, the one where I'd teamed up with an FBI profiler—and called to ask if I'd take a look at the bones from the gravel bar. Intrigued by the lack of clothing or other contextual clues—
taphonomy
, in technical terms—I'd agreed, and two days later, a FedEx courier had delivered the bones to Neyland Stadium. The bones, as my report to Keller had detailed, were those of a twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old white female, approximately five feet five inches tall. Three amalgam fillings in her teeth indicated that she'd been born sometime after 1950, and that she'd received good dental care during her youth; two unfilled cavities in her third molars suggested that she'd stopped going to the dentist as an adult, probably because she lacked the money. “Based on prior, similar cases,” I'd written, “it is possible that the victim was a prostitute, one whose disappearance might never have been reported.”

The memorable feature of the case, and the reason I'd mentioned it to Tyler, was that the victim—eventually identified as a missing Anchorage prostitute—had been abducted and flown to the wilderness by a local man who was both a hunter and a bush pilot. “An X-ray of the remains reveals a smear of lead on vertebra T-7,” I wrote, “indicating that she had been shot.” After receiving the report, Corporal Keller had returned to the riverbank with a metal detector, and found a gray bullet nestled in the gray gravel. Had she been transported to the wilderness and released as prey? The suspect denied it, but on the basis of the remains I'd examined—plus three more shallow graves that had been marked by
X
s on an aviation chart in the man's airplane—he'd been convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

The details of the Alaska case had come back to me in a flash, the moment I'd seen Corporal Keller's name on the report; indeed, it was almost as if the sun-bleached, river-rinsed bones of 90-02 were hovering in the air before me like a hologram. Then the hologram shimmered and shifted, the skull becoming a face, the empty eye orbits morphing into the piercing gaze of KPD Detective Kittredge. “So, Doc,” he prompted, “what can you tell me?”

“I can tell you I'm stunned,” I said. “As baffled as you. Maybe more.” He waited, his eyebrows raised to make sure I knew that he expected more. I racked my brain.

“The first time we talked,” Kittredge said slowly, “you described the crime scene at Cahaba Lane perfectly, before you'd ever been there. You had a picture of it in your hand before our photographer was even at the scene.”

“I got that photo in the mail,” I reminded him. “The killer sent it to me.”

“So you said. That night, you called 911 to say there were more bodies in the woods there.”

“It was a hunch,” I said, “not a confession.”