The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  “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.

  A DOZEN YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE I’D LAST SAT IN this particular chair, in this particular role: in the role of troubled parishioner, seeking counsel from the senior minister at Second Presbyterian. At the time of that visit, I’d been working a series of sadistic sexual murders—murders committed by my nemesis Satterfield. What had brought me here, back in 1992, was a question that had been raised, crudely but powerfully, by a young woman infuriated by the cruelty Satterfield had inflicted on his victims. “Why,” she had raged, “are men such shits to women?”

  The minister on that prior occasion was the same as the minister on this occasion: the Right Reverend Michael Michaelson, D. Div., more often (and more simply) referred to by most of his flock as Rev. Mike. I still remembered Rev. Mike’s answer to the memorably crude question about men, women, and the problem of evil. On that occasion, he had responded with a disquisition that was long, learned, and fascinating, one that viewed the issues through a half-dozen different lenses: theology, of course, but also evolutionary biology, sociology, and abnormal psychology. In the end, though, Rev. Mike’s learned comments had proven to be far less illuminating than Kathleen’s brutally efficient explanation: “Why? Because they can be.”

  In the years since that counseling visit, I’d worked a hundred homicides, give or take a dozen—none as brutal as Satterfield’s misogynistic butcherings—and that particular “why?” had drifted into one of the distant, dusty corners of my mind, displaced by other questions that were less rhetorical and more immediate, as well as more answerable: “Doc, what made that checkerboard crosshatching on that punched-in circle of skull?” (Answer: The milled head of a framing hammer.) “Doc, how come them maggots to look burnt?” (Answer: Because the killer left the body in the woods for a week, then came back and torched it.) “Doc, did that dude get blowed up by a bellyful of dynamite?” (Answer: No, the abdomen burst from the buildup of decomposition gases in the gut.)

  This time, sitting in the pastor’s study, I asked a question not on behalf of countless suffering women, but on behalf of just one woman. How could an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent God, I asked—the kind of God we heard about again and again in the stained-glass sanctuary of this majestic church—allow health-conscious, humanity-helping Kathleen Brockton to be stricken down, in the prime of life, with an aggressive, untreatable cancer?

  The right reverend sat silent, his eyes on me—not looking at me so much as looking toward me, somehow, his gaze seeming to send compassion in my direction. Kathleen and I had known him, and had liked him, ever since he’d arrived at Second Presbyterian fresh from seminary, as an energetic young assistant pastor. After a long while, he gave a sorrowful shake of his head. “I won’t pretend I have a good answer for you,” he said. “This is one of the toughest questions of all. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God allow suffering—undeserved suffering, in particular? Why do some people—even terrible people—lead charmed lives, while others—including wonderful people like Kathleen—get dealt brutally bad cards? That’s the central question, as you probably know, of the Book of Job.”

  I made a face. “I don’t buy it. Job.”

  “How do you mean?”

  I told him how I’d sought solace in the story of Job, and how unsatisfying and infuriating I had found it. I also confessed my two sacrilegious dreams about Job: Good-Boy Job and Game-Show-Winner Job.

  Instead of looking shocked, he actually smiled slightly. “That’s an interesting spin on it,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve come across that in any of my Old Testament textbooks. I might just use that in a sermon someday, if I really want to rile people up.”

  “Be my guest,” I said. “While you’re at it, tell folks how offensive it is to say things like ‘Everything happens for a reason’ or ‘His will be done.’ Kathleen’s secretary actually said that to me when I went in to clean out her office. I had to walk away to keep from hitting her.”

  He winced. “My secret name for that is the ‘God’s Perverse Plan’ doctrine. If you take it to its logical extreme, you end up arguing that God planned the pain of every battered woman, every molested child, every black man strung up by a lynch mob, every Jew sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.” He clasped his hands, his fingers interlaced and his index fingers extended, and I couldn’t help thinking of the nursery rhyme Here is the church, and here is the steeple . . . “A poet I like a lot once put it this way: ‘If God is God, he is not good; if God is good, he is not God.’ Strong words, but they do get at the heart of the problem.”

  “I’m not sure I follow. I never was good with poetry.”

  “He’s saying that if God’s omnipotent, he must be a jerk, to allow so mu
ch innocent suffering. And if God’s not a jerk, then he must not be all-powerful, because if he were, he’d protect people.”

  Amen, brother, I caught myself thinking.

  DOES SUICIDE RUN IN FAMILIES? THAT WAS THE question I found myself pondering after I had left Rev. Mike’s study and returned to my empty, echoing house.

  The answer, I well knew, was of course it does. Over the years, I’d read scores of books and articles about suicide; its dark causes, and the long shadow it could cast on the lives of the loved ones left to clean up the mess, literally and figuratively. I also, though, knew the answer in a deeper, darker way: I had felt its tug on occasion, during my adolescence; had heard its sinister siren song, calling me toward the rocks of doom. But adulthood—the twin rudders of a career and a family—had steered me into safer waters.

  Until now.

  In the blink of an eye—the catch in a throat—my mind traveled back almost half a century. I was four years old. I was trundling up the stairs to my father’s law office, a few steps ahead of my mother, who climbed slowly so that I could be the one to burst through the door crowing, “Daddy, Daddy, we came to s’prise you!” Only we were the ones, she and I, who were surprised: surprised by the figure slumped sideways in his swivel chair, the eyes vacant and clouding; surprised by the dark splotches and smears fanning across the wall behind him; surprised by the odors of brimstone and blood and bleakness in the air.

  We never spoke of it, my mother and I—not once in the next forty years; not once before her own death. And so, because it was never spoken of, it was never really laid to rest.

  And now, here it was again—suicide, my unseen, lifelong shadow—sitting beside me on my bed. On our bed: the bed I’d shared for thirty years with Kathleen. Young, willowy Kathleen. Pregnant, rotund Kathleen. Dough-bellied, big-breasted, nursing-mom Kathleen. Weary working-mother Kathleen. Midlife, tennis-toned Kathleen. Swiftly cancer-stricken Kathleen.

  I reached for the drawer of the nightstand and slid it open, then wormed my hand once more beneath the phone directory. Closing my fingers around the pebble-textured grip, I pulled upward and outward, removing the pistol Decker had loaned me a lifetime ago, back when I had mistakenly believed that what I needed to fear was a malevolent man, not a microscopic murderer called cancer.

  I turned the weapon over slowly in my hands, inspecting its angles and contours, its meticulously milled surfaces. Pulling back the slide, I noticed the smoothness of the action, the precision and solidity of the metallic click as the weapon cocked. I turned the barrel toward me and studied the small round opening, a darkness as black and deep as my despair.

  The siren song grew louder, accompanied by the sound of blood roaring in my head, roaring like the sea. Then I heard something else: I heard voices. Children’s voices. “Grandpa Bill! Grandpa Bill! Where are you, Grandpa Bill?” I heard two pairs of small feet running down the hall, running toward my bedroom. I hid the gun, tucking it behind my back, sliding it surreptitiously beneath my pillow.

  Tyler was the first to reach the bed. Without breaking stride, he launched himself like a missile, soaring upward in a graceful, gleeful arc, then belly-flopping onto the mattress with enough force to rattle the headboard against the wall. Walker, smaller and slower, tried to emulate him, but barely cleared the edge of the mattress, landing like a spent fish—but giggling as exuberantly as his aerobatic brother. When I reached out and gathered them in my arms, holding them hard, Tyler squirmed halfway free and looked up at me. “Are you crying, Grandpa Bill?”

  “No, honey,” I lied. “I just have something in my eyes.”

  Walker snuggled against me. “I didn’t see Grandmommy in the kitchen,” he said. “Where is she?”

  “Grandmommy’s gone, buddy,” I said hoarsely.

  “Where did she go?”

  “To heaven, stupid,” said Tyler.

  “But when will she come back?” There was a new note of urgency in his voice.

  “She’s not coming back, buddy,” I whispered. “She can’t.”

  I could not have said who felt the worst: the yearning three-year-old, the heartsick fifty-year-old, or the tough-guy five-year-old, who was perhaps just big enough to reach the bitter fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and to grasp that something precious to him was lost beyond all finding, broken beyond all mending.

  WE ATE THE TAKE-OUT PIZZA JEFF AND JENNY HAD brought as a surprise, or a gesture of kindness, or an act of pity. Sitting around the kitchen table, we made awkward small talk, all the adults careful not to look at Kathleen’s chair, which loomed monumental in its emptiness. I took a bite, but the crust felt and tasted like cardboard in my mouth, and I laid the wedge on my plate. The boys, on the other hand—their tears dried, their upset trumped by their hunger and the pizza’s aroma—wolfed down two slices apiece, then bolted from the table and ran squealing down the hall.

  Jeff nodded at my virtually untouched food. “No dessert unless you clean your plate,” he said with a wink, echoing a line he’d heard from me a thousand times growing up.

  I shook my head. “It’s good—and y’all were sweet to bring it. But I’ve got no appetite tonight.”

  Jenny reached across the table and laid a hand on my arm. “I’m worried about you,” she said. “You’re skin and bones—like one of your skeletons.” She looked me up and down. “I’ve seen coat hangers fill out a shirt better than you do these days.” It was a good line, and I did my best to give her a smile, but it felt more like a grimace.

  Down the hall, the rhythmic creak of bedsprings ceased, and the boys’ chatter changed tone, shifting from giggling to squabbling. Jenny noticed it first, of course. “I founded it,” protested Walker. “Give it back. Give it back!”

  “You’re too little,” scoffed Tyler. “You’re just a baby.”

  “Boys,” Jenny called toward them. “Cut it out!”

  “Give it back!” wailed Walker. “Give it back!”

  Suddenly a terrible realization hit me. “Oh dear God,” I gasped, leaping up so suddenly my chair toppled backward. “Please no.” I ran from the kitchen, my feet scrabbling on the tile as I made the turn into the dining room and dashed down the hall.

  “Let go. Let go!” yelled Walker. I heard a growl like that of some wild, angry animal, and then a howl of pain.

  My feet seemed mired in mud or concrete, moving in excruciating, exhausting slow motion. “Boys,” I called out desperately. “Stop! Don’t move!”

  “Dad? What’s going on? Dad?” Behind me, as I ran toward the bedroom, I could hear panic in Jeff’s voice.

  “Jeff, go,” I heard Jenny saying, her voice panicky. “Hurry! Something’s wrong!”

  “Boys, don’t move!” I shouted again. I reached the bedroom doorway and froze in horror. My grandsons, on my bed, were wrestling over a nine-millimeter handgun, the weapon seesawing back and forth in their hands as they fought for possession. “Boys! Stop it! Put it down!”

  But they were too caught up in the struggle to hear or to heed. I hesitated, afraid to grab for the gun but terrified not to. Jeff and Jenny lurched against my back, then craned to see what was happening in the bedroom. Then came a jolt and a scream as Jenny hurtled past me. An instant later a gunshot cracked, and voices around me and within me began to shriek.

  THE EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT AT UT MEDICAL Center was surprisingly quiet, the waiting room empty except for the three of us. Jeff, Tyler, and I sat without speaking. I sat hunched over, my elbows on my knees, my chin in my hands. Jeff cast occasional glances at me, his expression a mixture of confusion, anger, and sorrow.

  Jenny emerged from the treatment area, shaking her head, and sat down beside Jeff and Tyler, ignoring me. Tyler crawled into her lap, and she wrapped her arms around him, enfolding him to her breast, one hand over the ear that wasn’t pressed against her. She drew a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Well,” she said to Jeff. “They just finished splinting the fingers. Luckily, the breaks weren’t bad. And kids heal fast.” She gave a quick, almost i
mperceptible smile. “Walker’s in love with the nurse. He’s listening to her heart through a stethoscope. She said she’d bring him out in a minute.”

  Jenny looked at me for the first time, and I braced myself against the anger I saw in her eyes. “The doctor asked me how it happened,” she went on. “I told him the boys were fighting over a gun, and Walker’s fingers got twisted in the trigger guard.” I nodded grimly; the police were probably on their way to arrest me, and I deserved it. Leaving a loaded handgun lying around where kids could find it—what would the charge be, criminal neglect? Reckless endangerment? She held my eyes, then, after an uncomfortable pause, added, “I told him it was a cap gun.” I stared at her, dumbfounded. She shrugged, though her eyes still glittered with anger. “Now, why the hell was that thing laying right there where the boys could get ahold of it?”

  How could I explain? “Decker—Captain Decker, from KPD—loaned it to me,” I said lamely, “when Satterfield sent me . . .” I trailed off, not wanting to say too much in front of Tyler. “When Satterfield sent me that package. Decker thought I might need it.”

  Jeff frowned. “But what was it doing on the bed?” he demanded. “You said Satterfield’s in solitary, and his girlfriend’s in jail.” I nodded but didn’t offer any other explanation; I was too ashamed to tell them the truth, and I didn’t have it in me to conjure up a plausible lie. Jeff’s eyes bored into me. “Tyler told me you were crying when we showed up.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sad these days, son, you know?”

  “Well, yeah, Dad, I do know,” he snapped. “I am, too. Mom’s gone, and it hurts like hell. Hurts you most, maybe, but hurts me, too. And Jenny. And the boys, even though they don’t really understand it. But here’s the thing you don’t seem to get. If something happened to you—if we lost you, too?” He was speaking low now, in an angry whisper, so Tyler couldn’t hear. “Do you have any idea how damaging that would be for these boys?” I blinked, blindsided by the turn the conversation had taken. “You lost your dad when you were a kid,” he went on, “and that sucks, and I’m sorry,” he said, though he sounded more fierce than sympathetic. “But you had your grandparents—all four of ’em, all good as gold, the way you tell it. Tyler and Walker just lost one. Don’t you dare take another one from them.” With that, he stood up and strode to the far side of the waiting room, staring out the window at the ambulance parked outside.