Without Mercy

by Jefferson Bass

  The most striking thing about him, of course, was his blasted face. It drew my eye irresistibly—horrifyingly—even when I tried to focus elsewhere. And there was abundant evidence of other trauma, earlier trauma, elsewhere on his body. In addition to the tattoos, Shiflett’s skin bore a profusion of scars attesting to fistfights (layer upon layer of scar tissue on his knuckles), bludgeon fights (star-shaped scars on his cheek and scalp), even knife fights (long, healed gashes in an upper arm and the lower belly).

  Eddie interrupted his dictated inventory of the scars long enough for a side comment to me. “Nobody would accuse him of having a soft life.”

  “Just a guess,” I said, “but I’d hate to see the other guys. I suspect they look even worse.” I caught myself looking at the face again. “Except, of course, for . . . you know.”

  “Indeed. By the way, do you need me to take DNA samples for identification? Dental records are perhaps not ideal in this case.”

  “Perhaps not,” I echoed, amused by his wry understatement. “But no, we don’t need DNA. The TBI took fingerprints from the hand that didn’t get blasted. The prints in his service records are a match. It’s Shiflett, for sure.”

  Eddie nodded, then, with deft strokes of a scalpel, he made a Y-shaped incision, cutting from each shoulder to the breastbone, then down the chest and abdomen to the pubic bone. He laid the scalpel aside, then tugged open the flaps he’d made, exposing the rib cage and viscera. As he did, I was struck again by his hands: if I didn’t know they’d been cut from a cadaver and stitched onto Eddie’s wrists, I wouldn’t have guessed there’d ever been a thing wrong with them.

  Using a stout pair of shears, he cut the ribs and opened the chest cavity, moving swiftly, removing and weighing the heart and lungs, then slicing open each and examining the interior, dictating, as he worked, into a microphone suspended over the autopsy table. For a dead guy, Shiflett appeared remarkably healthy—except, of course, for . . . you know.

  Finally I decided to stop resisting and just give in—just look at the damn face. “Eddie,” I said, stretching both hands toward the head, “do you mind?”

  “Please, be my guest.” And with a courtly gesture, including a slight, humorous bow, he stepped back to give me free access.

  I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, never having examined a face that had been decimated by a blasting cap, but aside from the gruesome disfigurement, I found it fascinating. A few sluggish maggots—the eggs laid and hatched during the day or three when Shiflett’s body had been accessible to blowflies—were running for cover, fleeing down the throat or up into the skull. Their numbers were far fewer than I was accustomed to—corpses at the Body Farm teemed with maggots by the thousands—so I ignored them, figuring that they’d either get out of the way or get squashed by my probing hands.

  The head was already tilted back, supported by a neck block that either Eddie or a morgue assistant had positioned beforehand, and the mangled mandible hung down, almost as if Shiflett were wearing a grisly war trophy around his neck—the jawbone of an enemy he had killed in battle. We have met the enemy, and he is us, I thought, a memorable quote from my favorite childhood comic strip, “Pogo.” Thanks to the neck block and the dangling mandible, I had an unobstructed view into the mouth cavity, or, rather, into what used to be the mouth cavity, once upon a time.

  The blast damage was both massive and intricate: massive because the bones of the face and the floor of the skull tended to be far thinner and more delicate than, say, the cranium or the cheekbones, which were rugged enough to withstand substantial impacts; intricate because the bones were not just thin but also irregular in shape. I remembered Miranda’s description of the sphenoid, the floor of the skull, as the “bat-bone” because of its winged appearance.

  As I explored the abyss of carnage—my spelunking lit by the surgical light I pulled down from above, angling and swiveling it this way and that—I found myself surprised by the depth of the damage. “Look at this, Eddie,” I said, stepping back so he could lean in for a better view. “If he was biting the blasting cap with his incisors, I’d expect most of the energy from the explosion to vent out of his mouth, wouldn’t you?”

  “That seems reasonable,” he said mildly. “And yet there appears to be extensive trauma to the throat—the top of the trachea and the esophagus are macerated.” He reached a finger in and moved a flap of tissue aside. “Also, two of the cervical vertebrae are partially exposed. C-3 and C-4, it appears.”

  “You’re kidding.” Eddie stepped back deferentially, and I peered in again. “I’ll be damned,” I murmured. “You’re right.” I straightened up, partly to fend off what felt like a neck cramp, partly to take a wider look, and partly to think. When I leaned down again, I focused on the teeth, and what I saw puzzled me. The incisors—which by rights ought to have been blown to kingdom come, roots and all—were simply snapped instead, folded forward in a hinge fracture.

  I had seen hundreds of hinge fractures in my time. Land teeth-first on a concrete curb, or whack somebody across the mouth with a baseball bat, and the incisors will fold inward, breaking through the thin, bony walls of their sockets as they fold. Shiflett’s teeth, of course, were folded outward, not inward, but it was the fact that they were folded—not shattered or pulverized—that I found puzzling. No: electrifying—a slow, building buzz of mental current.

  “Eddie,” I finally said, “if I didn’t know better, I’d think he was swallowing that blasting cap, not biting down on the end, when it went off.”

  Eddie studied my own face for several seconds before turning again to Shiflett’s. He leaned in again, swiveling the light, and then reached in with one hand, feeling the interior surfaces. “Jesus, Eddie, be careful. Some of that bone is really splintered. You don’t want to stick yourself.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “I still have to take immunosuppressants to avoid rejection, so I need to be careful about bloodborne pathogens. But some things require touch, as you know.” I held my breath until he withdrew his hand. Seeing my nervousness, he smiled and held out his fingers so we could both inspect them. “You see,” he said calmly, “no damage.” He looked back at the corpse’s face again. “I think you are correct,” he mused. “The epicenter—if I may use that word for a small explosion rather than a large earthquake?—seems to be at the back of the buccal cavity, between the base of the tongue and the posterial wall of the oropharynx. The damage seems to radiate outward in all directions from there, rather than from the front of the mouth. In fact, if you wish to feel it, you’ll find a deep crater at the back of the tongue, consistent with immediate proximity to the blast.”

  I believed him, and I didn’t particularly want to stick my hand down the guy’s throat. “It might be interesting to take x-rays and a CT scan,” I said, “to get a better look at the geometry of the damage—to confirm all this.”

  Eddie gave another of his formal, inclining nods. “An excellent suggestion.”

  “But unless those images contradict what we’re seeing and feeling and thinking, I’d say that our man Shiflett here wasn’t biting down on that blasting cap when it went off.”

  “No, apparently not,” agreed Eddie. “It would almost appear that he was trying to swallow it.”

  “Or trying not to.” I turned for one more look, and when I did, I accidentally stepped on Eddie’s foot. For a moment I was off balance, and in that moment, I instinctively reached out to steady myself. My hand nudged the block that was wedged beneath the shoulders, and it shifted beneath my weight. When it did, the corpse’s head turned toward me. Flopped toward me. I shot a startled look at Eddie, then looked back at the corpse. The head was rotated a full 90 degrees. Reaching out with both hands, I gently rotated it back to center, then continued rotating until I had turned it 180 degrees. “My God,” I said, “did you know this?”

  “I had no idea,” Eddie said. “This case is getting very interesting.”

  AN HOUR LATER, AFTER I HAD CHANGED OUT OF MY surgical scrubs and
returned to my office at the north end of Neyland Stadium, the Cooke County sheriff’s dispatcher patched me through to Jim O’Conner, who was winding up his second day at the Shiflett place with the ATF team.

  “Broken? You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure, Jim. His neck was snapped, and his spinal cord was severed.”

  “It didn’t seem broken when they took the body away.”

  “He was still in rigor mortis then. The muscles would have stabilized the head. Now he’s out of rigor, and his neck’s as floppy as a limp noodle.”

  “Interesting,” he said.

  “It gets even more interesting, Jim. The severed spinal cord was the cause of death. His heart and his lungs stopped working instantly. The blasting cap was just a smokescreen, shoved down his throat and detonated after he was dead.”

  “What makes you think that? Couldn’t the shock wave from the explosion have done the damage to his spine?”

  “Could’ve, maybe, but didn’t,” I told him. “The CT scan shows torsional damage to the vertebral column and the spinal cord. His neck was broken by a hard twist, not a shock wave. Besides, there’s no way he could have been biting that blasting cap when it went off. The x-ray and the CT scan both show that it was halfway down his throat when it went off.”

  “Damn,” he said. “Are you willing to repeat all that to the ATF’s point man? This definitely sounds like it could affect his investigation.”

  “Sure. What’s his name?”

  “Special Agent Tim Kidder.”

  “Oh, I know Kidder. I worked a case with him just a few months ago. He’s good. Put him on.”

  I heard the phone change hands.

  “Dr. Brockton? Tim Kidder here.”

  “Hey, Tim. Glad to hear ATF is sending in the best. You having fun up in Cooke County?”

  “It’s a blast,” he said—a joke I felt sure he’d made countless times in his career. “Sheriff O’Conner says you’ve got an interesting update for me.”

  “I think so.” I told Kidder what I’d told O’Conner. He listened without interrupting, except for a few monosyllabic grunts to register surprise or thoughtfulness.

  “That is interesting,” he said when I was finished.

  “Would y’all like me to send you copies of the x-rays and CT scans? That way, you guys can tell me if I’ve misread anything,” I said. “Besides, the images might be useful for training, too—give your folks some interesting insight into blast-related trauma.”

  “That’d be great, Doc,” said Kidder. “I’m glad you passed this along. I think maybe it explains something we’ve been wondering about up here at the scene. Something that doesn’t add up.”

  “Such as?”

  “There’s a shed in the woods here where our detectors are going crazy. Alerting for dynamite, nitroglycerin, ammonium nitrate, C-4, and a couple other things only demolition experts have ever heard of.”

  “Y’all be careful taking that stuff out,” I said.

  “No need to be, Doc. The shed’s empty. The detectors are alerting on residues. Only residues. Leftover traces of stuff that isn’t here anymore.”

  “So you’re saying there was a lot of stuff in the shed at some point—”

  “No. Recently. Very recently.”

  “But now it’s gone?”

  “Gone, baby, gone,” he said. “And from what you just told me about Jimmy Ray Shiflett and his afternoon snack, I’m thinking somebody besides him cleaned out that shed.”

  I had a bad feeling. “So what you’re saying, Tim, is that we might be looking for a killer who’s got explosives and isn’t afraid to use them?”

  “Not ‘might be’ looking, Doc. Are looking. I just hope we find him fast.”

  “I’ll let you get to it,” I said. “And I’ll get those x-rays and scans to you right away.” He thanked me and hung up.

  I turned, with a sigh, to page seven in Miranda’s dissertation and resumed reading, my eyelids instantly feeling heavy. I’d slogged through only a paragraph when my door suddenly boomed with a frantic pounding. I whirled in my chair, muttering, “What the—”

  “Doc? You in there? Dr. Brockton!”

  My heart still hammering, I unlocked the door—I’d been careful to lock it, ever since Satterfield’s escape—and opened it. “Jesus, Deck, you scared the living crap out of me. What the hell?”

  “Is it true, what I heard about Shiflett?” His eyes were wild, and he looked almost unhinged.

  “Come on in, Deck,” I said, in what I hoped was a calming voice. “Have a seat, and tell me what you heard.”

  He came in, but he didn’t—wouldn’t—sit down. Instead, he paced back and forth, back and forth, like a caged tiger. “I heard his face was blown off. His face and part of his hand.”

  “Yes, that’s true. And his neck was broken.”

  “Dammit, Doc, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Hell, Deck, I just found out. I just got out of the autopsy suite an hour ago.”

  “But you saw him—you saw his face and his hand—up there at the scene. Yesterday! Why didn’t you call me?”

  “What difference does it make, Deck? Why are you so upset?”

  He whirled on me, furious now. “Christ almighty, Doc, don’t you see? It’s him. Satterfield.”

  “The dead guy? No way.”

  “No, goddammit!” he shouted. “Not the dead guy—the killer, dumb-ass! Don’t you remember what Satterfield did to the pizza delivery guy, twenty-four years ago? He killed the guy, traded clothes with him, and put a stick of dynamite in the kid’s mouth, with his hands around it. We had his house surrounded, zipped up tight, but he drove off in that shitty delivery car with the Domino’s signs, right under our noses. Thirty minutes later, bam! We go charging in, and it looks like Satterfield has offed himself.” He stared at me angrily. “How can you not even remember that?”

  “I never saw that, Deck,” I reminded him gently. “I wasn’t there, remember? Y’all told me to stay away. I left my office and drove home—with Satterfield hiding in the back of my own truck. The Trojan horse, 1992-style. Thank God my assistant slowed him down, and you came charging in.”

  “I should’ve blown his head off,” Decker said bitterly.

  “I should’ve let you,” I admitted. “But hindsight’s always 20/20, right? So here we are.”

  It was easy now to understand Decker’s agitation, because his brother—a bomb-squad technician—had died at Satterfield’s house that day. Decker had struggled for years with PTSD, I knew—once, in my office years after his brother’s death, something had triggered Deck’s PTSD, and I’d had a hard time calming him. Lately, though—until this moment—he’d seemed recovered. But now, the more I grasped Decker’s distress, the more agitated I felt, too. “Deck, what makes you think Satterfield had any connection to Shiflett? Do you have anything linking them?”

  “The MO links them. It’s exactly the same thing he did to the pizza guy. Almost exactly, anyhow. Only difference, that one was staged to look like a suicide, this one like an accident. But everything else? Explosive device detonated in the mouth, to throw us off the scent? Déjà vu all over again. It’s Satterfield, Doc. Has to be!”

  I hoped he was wrong. But that, I feared, was too much to hope for.

  CHAPTER 27

  MY INTERCOM BEEPED, AND I GLARED AT IT IN ANNOYANCE. I was bleary and sleep deprived from another bad night: hours of restless thrashing punctuated by harrowing dreams of looming menace and terrible violence. Some of the dreams involved Satterfield, and some involved Shiflett, and one—the worst—involved both of them, teaming up to shove a blasting cap down my throat.

  I resolved to ignore the call, but after half a dozen plaintive beeps, I couldn’t stand it anymore. Snatching up the phone, I resisted the urge to shout. “Yes?” My voice was steady, calm, and icy.

  There was a pause, then Peggy—her voice carefully casual—said, “Are you shunning me?”

  “What? No, of course not.” Am I? I wondered. Maybe.
“I’m just preoccupied.”

  “Of course. Steve Morgan from the TBI is here. He’s brought something he says you’ll want to see. Shall I tell him you’re preoccupied?”

  Ouch, I thought. “No, send him down. He’s been here before. He knows how to find me.” She rang off without saying good-bye. A fine mess you’ve made with her, I thought. Maybe our hand-holding was the opening of some sort of door to romance, or maybe it was simply a onetime fluke, a reflexive response to a scary scene in a movie. But I’d never know, if I kept acting as if it simply hadn’t happened. What’s more, I was introducing a barrier, a layer of awkwardness between Peggy and me, that hadn’t existed until now.

  Five minutes later I heard the stairwell door open and close, followed by a staccato tap-tap-tapping at my chamber door. I unlocked and opened the door, and Steve entered, a U-Haul book box tucked under one arm. “Looks like you’ve brought me a present,” I said. “And it’s not even my birthday.” He set the box on my desk. “Can I shake it?”

  “You could, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said. “You might want to glove up, though.”

  My pulse quickening, I snagged a pair of gloves from the box I kept at the ready—most people keep tissues on their desktops, but forensic anthropologists keep gloves—and then pulled on the gloves. Beneath the cardboard flaps was a thick wad of bubble wrap, which I grasped and lifted gingerly. “Is this what I think it is?” Steve’s only answer was a one-shouldered shrug, accompanied by a we’ll-see hoist of his eyebrows. I laid the bubble wrap to the side before I peered into the box’s interior. “Yes,” I said, reaching in with both hands, my fingers meeting at the bottom of the box. Carefully, like a priest raising the Communion host to be sanctified, I lifted the object: a human skull, surely as much in need of a blessing as any loaf of bread ever was. The skull was clean and pale, except for a vivid mark on the forehead—a reddish-brown swastika, ragged and smeared, as if traced by a finger dripped in blood.