CHAPTER 30
Brockton
I’d barely begun raking — my lawn’s first dusting of red-orange maple leaves — when Kathleen opened the front door and called to me. “Bill, there’s a Detective Kittredge on the phone for you. He says it’s important.” I laid down the rake and hurried inside.
“You were right, Doc,” he said without any preamble. “We just found two more bodies in the woods behind Cahaba Lane. Deeper in. Several hundred yards away from the woman with no feet.” I wasn’t surprised to hear there were more victims, but I was surprised to hear that one of them was a man.
I took no satisfaction in being right; in fact, I hated it. I would much rather have heard that the search was a wild-goose chase, my nightmare not a premonition but simply the product of an overheated imagination. Two more dead, I thought. Please, God, let these be the last. I prayed it, but I didn’t expect it.
Kittredge gave me directions to the scene; this time, we’d go in from the back side, by means of a different road. “Brace yourself, Doc,” the detective added. “It’s bad. The worst I’ve seen. The woman—”
“Don’t tell me,” I interrupted. “I want to see it with fresh eyes. No preconceptions.”
“You got it. See you soon.”
Tyler met me at the stadium; we tucked an extra body bag in the back of the truck and headed east along the river, along Neyland Drive and Riverside Drive. I could have done that stretch of road in my sleep; Riverside dead-ended at the pig farm where I’d warehoused bodies until recently. A mile before the farm, we turned left onto Holston Hills Road, which paralleled the Holston River. We passed a mile of woods and farm fields, then crossed the river at Boyd’s Bridge, zigzagging eastward on a series of progressively smaller roads. Normally I liked back roads; this time, though, the roads seemed to be leading us somewhere sinister. Leading us into the heart of darkness.
Neither of us had spoken since leaving the stadium. “You’re quiet,” I said finally. “You pissed off because we’re working on Saturday?”
There was a pause before he answered. “I’m tired,” he said. “I was up late. Writing up my research notes.”
“Uh-huh. Did your research notes give you that hickey?” Tyler had mentioned that Roxanne was in town for the weekend, and I suspected they’d made the most of their night.
“No comment.” He was pissed off. Not surprising, I thought. He hasn’t seen her in weeks, and I’m dragging him off to a death scene.
We lapsed back into silence, and in the silence, I heard Kittredge’s words echoing: “The worst I’ve seen.” Would it turn out to be worse than the things I’d seen? If so, what adjective could describe it? When the normal progression — bad, worse, worst — couldn’t do justice to the horror, what could? Worst, more worst, most worst?
Even with Kittredge’s directions, I found the route mazy. This time, because of the location of the bodies, we’d be approaching the woods from the east. I’d highlighted the route in my Tennessee Atlas & Gazetteer. Given the propensity for bodies in East Tennessee to wind up off the beaten track, I’d found the Gazetteer indispensable, since it showed not just paved roads and dirt roads, but even major trails and topographic contour lines. During the three years since my arrival at UT, I had put two dozen red Xs in my Gazetteer, each X neatly marking a death scene I’d worked.
I followed the route Kittredge had dictated — Moshina Road, Pine Grove Road, and finally Ratliff Lane. By the time we turned on to Ratliff, Tyler was slumped against his door, his head askew, his mouth open, a string of drool swaying from his chin. I smiled, thinking, Roxanne drove all the way from Memphis for this?
Ratliff Lane started out as asphalt, soon turned to gravel, and finally became a pair of red-clay ruts. It dead-ended at a clearing that was occupied by a rusting mobile home and a rusty Ford pickup, plus two Knox County sheriff’s cruisers, a KPD mobile crime lab, an unmarked Crown Victoria, and a black Chevy Suburban. The Crown Vic, I guessed, was issued to Detective Kittredge. The crime-lab van, I hoped, was brought by Art Bohanan. Art was a senior KPD forensic tech; he was also one of the nation’s leading experts on fingerprints, I’d learned in the course of several prior cases with him. The Suburban, I knew for sure, belonged to Knox County’s medical examiner, Dr. Garland Hamilton. Hamilton’s vehicle was unmistakable, at least from the rear: Prominently positioned alongside the government-issue tag was an ironically apt bumper sticker — a skull wearing a crown of thorns, captioned GRATEFUL DEAD.
A sheriff’s deputy directed me past the other vehicles to the lower side of the clearing, where I shoehorned the truck into a space that would have been better suited to a Honda Civic. Branches snapped and screeched along the passenger side as I bulled my way into the underbrush, waking Tyler with a start. He stared at the fractured twigs clawing across his window, then rubbed his eyes and shook his head, causing the string of drool to twitch and sway beneath his chin. “Wow,” he said. “I guess I nodded off for a minute there.”
“I guess so,” I replied. “Unless you’ve started drooling when you’re awake.”
He rubbed his mouth and chin, grimacing when he got to the drool. “What the hell?” he squawked. “This isn’t supposed to start happening till I’m, like, your age.”
“I guess you’re precocious,” I said. “You know what they say about drooling, right?”
“Can’t say as I do.”
“Once the drooling starts, impotence and incontinence aren’t far behind.”
“Hey. Don’t even joke about that stuff,” he muttered, making the sign of the cross.
“Joking? Who said I was joking?” I slid from the truck and closed the door before he had a chance to retort.
I opened the back of the truck and tucked the two body bags into the plastic bin that contained our field kit — camera, gloves, trowels, tweezers, paintbrushes, evidence bags, clipboard. Tyler emerged from the underbrush, bits of twigs and leaves in his hair, and I slid the bin across the tailgate to him. Leaning back in, I retrieved a rake and a shovel, which I angled over my shoulder like some outsized, double-barreled farming implement. Swords to plowshares, I thought, shotguns to shovels.
The deputy met us midway across the clearing. “They’re up yonder,” he said, nodding in the general direction of the unmarked Crown Vic that was last in the line of vehicles. “Couple hunnerd yards in. Just follow the blazes of tape.” A pine tree at the clearing’s edge had a strip of crime-scene tape tied around its trunk at shoulder height. Peering farther into the woods, I could see another bright band twenty yards beyond, and a third farther still.
I headed up the gentle incline, my usual surge of adrenaline accompanied by an unexpected topspin of something else — apprehension? dread? Sometimes, walking into a crime scene with a shovel over my shoulder, I would hear myself singing softly: “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go.”
This time, as I followed the blazes deeper into the woods, I did not hear singing. This time, I heard crackling under my feet, thudding in my chest, and alarm bells in my head.
CHAPTER 31
Satterfield
The police scanner was still going crazy as Satterfield turned off Kingston Pike and on to Cherokee Boulevard, looping and swooping along the serpentine road toward the river. Toward the Brockton house.
From the flurry of transmissions on the police scanner, he knew they’d found the two other bodies in the woods. He would love to have seen the face of whoever had found the corpses, especially the woman’s; for that matter, he’d love to see the faces of everyone working the scene. Fools and weaklings, he thought. Most of all, he’d love to see Brockton’s face, now and also later, when the surprise Satterfield had left for him was discovered.
He slowed as he neared the house. The garage door was up, and through the opening, he saw that the Camry — the woman’s car — was still inside. Satterfield eased to the curb and parked in front of the house. He sat for a moment, looking for signs of movement at the windows, then got out, went to the rear
of the van, and took two orange highway cones from the back. He placed one ten feet behind the van, the other ten feet in front, the way he’d seen the telephone linemen do. Stupid, he thought. If you can’t see the damn truck without the cones, you’re not gonna see the damn truck with the cones.