The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  “Besides,” I went on, “y’all can get prints off whatever’s inside, right? And it’s not like Satterfield’s trying to hide—hell, he’s put his name right here on the envelope. He may have licked the flap, too, which gives you DNA. What more do you want—a video of him sealing and mailing the package?”

  “That’d be helpful.”

  “Yeah, well, good luck with that. Okay, I’m signing off. Gotta go in and make my excuses to Kathleen. See you in twenty?”

  “Put it in the back of your truck. Hurry up—but drive slow.”

  “Deck, you’re talking to a man who’s never gotten a speeding ticket in his whole life.”

  “I’m not worried about you getting a ticket. I’m worried about you going kablooey.”

  “You’re talking to a man who’s never gone kablooey, either.”

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, I EASED DOWN A ONE-LANE driveway and parked beside UT Medical Center’s loading dock, which adjoined the morgue and the East Tennessee Regional Forensic Center. Decker was already there, pacing the loading dock. The KPD cruiser he’d arrived in was parked fifty yards away.

  “I see you’re not taking any chances with city property,” I teased as I got out of the truck. When I closed the door, he flinched.

  “Gently, Doc, gently!”

  I gave him a look. “You think I carried it here on a cushion? Hell, I hit a dozen potholes between the house and here. It’s not gonna blow up if we breathe.” Heading to the back of the truck, I opened the cargo hatch and lifted out a small, heavy box—a fireproof document safe where Kathleen and I stored our passports and wills.

  Decker gave the safe an approving nod. “Good thinking.”

  “Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while,” I said. I set the safe—gently—on the edge of the concrete loading dock. “The machine’s inside. I’ll be right back.”

  The portable x-ray camera was tucked in a corner near the roll-up garage door. It had been bestowed on me by the head of the hospital’s Radiology Department several years before, shortly after I had wheeled a particularly ripe corpse—a floater found in the Tennessee River—into Radiology and had asked a tech to check for bullets. To hear the Radiology folks tell the story—and over the years, I had heard most of them tell it, repeatedly—the entire floor had cleared out the instant the floater and I arrived. “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” the department head liked to say. “Everybody—staff, patients, visitors—flat-out hauling ass out of there. It was like a miracle on steroids. The lame didn’t just walk out of there, they sprinted out.”

  Leaving Decker to keep nervous watch on the document safe, I unlocked a steel door, stepped into a dark basement hallway, and pressed a button on the wall to raise the roll-up door. The door rattled and clattered open, like some immense, industrial scale-up of a rolltop desk. My mind flashed to the rolltop desk that had once occupied pride of place in my father’s law office: the lustrous quarter-sawn oak; the small, dark pigeonholes stuffed with fountain pens, inkwells, staplers, magnifying glasses, stamps, sealing wax, whatever. There were no fountain pens or inkwells pigeonholed here, of course, only corpses—as many as half a dozen at any one time—cached in the cooler down the hall, each silently awaiting its turn in the autopsy suite.

  Wheeling the x-ray machine out the door and onto the dock, I set a film cassette on the concrete, then opened the safe, removed the envelope, and laid it gingerly atop the film. “You might want to step inside,” I told Decker as I lowered the camera into place. “Unless you want to nuke your boy bits.” He scurried inside, and I set the exposure and the shutter, which had a ten-second delay to allow me to scuttle to safety with my boy bits. Through the doorway, I heard whir-clunk, the distinctive sound of the shutter on the radiation source.

  THE MORGUE WAS IN THE BASEMENT—MORGUES always are, in accordance with some unwritten law of the universe—so we had nowhere to go but up. After two flights, I could hear Decker laboring to breathe. “Doesn’t this place have elevators?” he panted.

  “Man up,” I said. “It’s only four floors. Besides, don’t you have to take a fitness test every year?”

  “Every five,” he gasped. “I’ve got three more years to enjoy being fat and out of shape. Then I diet and exercise like crazy for three months, so I can pass the physical. Then I get to eat and lay around for another four years.”

  “Knoxville’s Finest,” I teased. Glancing back as we emerged on the fourth floor, I saw him mopping sweat from his brow. “Deck, my friend, you put the hot in hot pursuit.”

  Radiology was just around the corner. The receptionist—Jeanette? no: Lynnette—gave me a sunny smile. “Dr. Brockton! Nice to see you again. How’s business at the Body Farm?”

  “Pretty lively,” I said. “People are dying to get in. Lynnette, this is Captain Brian Decker, one of Knoxville’s finest.”

  “Hi,” she said. “Actually, it’s Shawnette. Nice to meet you.”

  Decker gave her a sweaty wave across the counter.

  “Sorry, Shawnette,” I said, my face now as red as Decker’s was. “You got a tech back there who might be able to develop a picture for us?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Stacy. Go on back. I’ll tell her you’re coming.”

  Stacy—a pale, chubby young woman with a strong East Tennessee accent—met us outside the first radiology suite and held out her hand for the cassette. “Lemme guess,” she said. “You’re lookin’ for another bullet in somebody that’s burned up or fallin’ apart?”

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said. “Just trying to see what’s inside an envelope.”

  “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.