The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  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. “Smoo
th-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.”

  “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.”