The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  “See,” he said, “I knew you could figure it out.”

  “He must’ve told her to be on the lookout for a finger to send me. A woman’s or a kid’s. They’re pen pals, right?”

  “Pen pals, and more,” he said. “The mailroom says they swap letters two, three times a month. And she visits once or twice a year.”

  I looked again at the mug shot. In addition to her name, the placard in the image bore a calendar date.

  I looked up. “She was arrested yesterday?” He nodded, looking pleased, and I pressed on. “For this?”

  “Yup. Desecrating a corpse.”

  “Any evidence? Besides circumstantial?”

  “We got so lucky on this one,” he said. “There was a big scandal, couple months back, about a Memphis mortician who was having sex with female corpses.”

  “I remember that. Really disgusting.”

  “No kidding, Doc. Anyhow, the guy that owns the funeral home handling this boy’s burial? He got spooked by that Memphis stuff. Had hidden cameras installed in all the embalming rooms. So when I showed up yesterday, asking who had access to the kid’s body, he puffs up, all proud, and says, ‘Here, let’s take a look.’ He calls up the footage on his computer with me sitting right there. Doc, you should’ve seen that man’s face when it showed this gal—his employee, mind you—slicing off the kid’s finger. That man was shitting bricks. Probably still is. I’m guessing the kid’s parents are gonna sue the pants off him.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about his pants,” I said. “Most funeral homes have huge insurance policies. That’s one reason funerals cost so damn much.” I looked again at the mug shot. “So she’s in custody. She talking? About Satterfield?”

  He made a face. “Nah, she’s all lawyered up. My guess is, she’ll end up trying to cut a deal. And maybe the D.A. will require cooperation as part of that.” I frowned, and he went on. “Meanwhile, I’m thinking I might take a little road trip over to Clifton. South Central Correctional Facility.”

  “To see Satterfield?”

  “See him. Talk to him. Rattle his cage a little. Have a frank, man-to-man chat in a private interview room.” He began to nod slowly, a dark glint in his eyes, his fingers clenching and unclenching rhythmically. “Suggest that it’s not a good idea to bother you and your family.”

  For a moment, I allowed myself to imagine what I suspected Decker himself was imagining: Decker, built like a linebacker, beating the crap out of Satterfield. I imagined it, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. I felt myself yielding to the idea, being taken over by it. It was as if I were spellbound, enchanted by the siren song of violent vengeance. It almost seemed as if I myself were the one slamming Satterfield’s face against a cinder-block wall, kicking Satterfield’s splintering ribs. Suddenly my fantasy took an unexpected and horrifying turn. During a split-second pause in the carnage, Satterfield managed to turn his face toward me, and through the bloody lips and the broken teeth, he grinned at me: a mocking, malicious, complicit grin. “Gotcha,” the grin seemed to say. “How do you like it, becoming me?”

  “No!” My voice—my shout—startled me from my waking dream. Was I shouting at Satterfield, at myself, or at Decker? I had no idea.

  Decker stared at me. “Doc? What’s wrong?”

  I felt a shudder run through me. “Nothing. Sorry. Just . . . probably not a good idea to go see Satterfield. But, Christ, that guy is still under my skin. Like some dormant virus, or a cancer cell—lurking, biding its time, you know?” He nodded. A thought struck me. “Know much about shingles?”

  “Roofing shingles?”

  “Medical shingles. The disease.”

  “Not much,” he said. “Old people get it, right? Very painful, I’ve heard.”

  “Ever have chicken pox, as a kid?”

  “Sure. Itched like crazy.”

  “The virus that caused it? You’ve still got it,” I said. “When your immune system kicked in, it killed most of the virus, but not all. Some of it survived; it’s hiding at the base of one of your spinal nerves, coiled up like a snake. One day when you’re fifty or sixty or seventy, something reactivates it—nobody really knows how or why—and it comes slithering out.”

  Suddenly Decker grabbed the edge of my desk with both hands. He went pale and began to breathe in quick, sharp pants; sweat beaded on his forehead and began to run down his face. His eyes were wide and wild, staring with an expression of utter horror at something that was either miles away from my office, or deep within himself.

  “Deck? What’s the matter?”

  “Kev,” he whispered, then—louder: “Kevin! No!”

  I leaned across the desk and squeezed one of Decker’s forearms. The muscles were clenched so tightly, his arm felt like a bar of cast iron. Then I realized what must have happened. Decker’s younger brother, Kevin—a bomb-squad technician—had died while searching Satterfield’s house for explosives: killed not by a booby trap, but by a deadly snake, a fer-de-lance, that had been set loose in the house. Comparing Satterfield to a lurking virus—and then comparing the virus to a snake—must have taken Decker back to the scene of his brother’s death. It was as if I had poured gasoline on Decker’s memory, then held a lighted match to it, and I cursed myself for my stupidity. “Hey, Deck,” I said, squeezing his arm tighter. “Deck, can you hear me? It’s Bill Brockton, Deck. We’re here in my office at Neyland Stadium.” I waved my other hand in front of his staring eyes, but it had no effect. Trying to get his attention, I began snapping my fingers near his face, moving the hand slightly from side to side, all the while calling his name. His body was now trembling, as if shivering hard, and I had visions of his heart giving out or an aneurysm in his brain bursting. I’ve got to get him out of this, I thought, and in desperation, I began tapping his cheekbone with my fingertips. He seemed not to notice, so I tapped harder, still to no effect, and then I began to slap him gently—the sound of one hand clapping, I thought absurdly—still calling his name and telling him mine. I was beginning to despair—wondering whether to call 911 or someone in the Psychiatric Department at UT Medical Center—when he reached up and seized my wrist, with a grip that felt like a vise, and brought my hand down to the desk. “Deck,” I said, struggling not to cry out. “Deck, it’s Bill Brockton. Can you hear me, Deck? I need you to hear me. I need you to stay with me, Deck. Come back from wherever you’ve gone. Come back to Neyland Stadium, to my office by the north end zone.”

  At that moment my phone rang. With my free hand I reached to answer it, but just before I did, I noticed that Decker’s eyes had flickered at the sound, so I decided to let it keep ringing, in hopes that somehow the phone would manage to reel him back from wherever he’d gone. Keep ringing, I prayed, and it did: two times; three; four. By the fourth ring, his eyes seemed to be coming into focus, searching for the source of the sound. “That’s the phone on my desk ringing,” I said. “It might be Kathleen, my wife, calling me. You remember Kathleen, don’t you, Deck? Remember that lunch we had at Calhoun’s?” I caught myself just in the nick of time—just before saying “right after Satterfield’s trial?”—and changed course to say, “You remember that huge pile of rib bones we left on the table?” The phone was still ringing. “You wouldn’t believe how much my phone’s been ringing lately, Deck. The FBI thinks I screwed up a case in San Diego, and I have about fifty reporters wanting to interview me about what a dumb-ass I am.”

  He blinked and seemed to be trying to get his bearings. I kept talking. “I have another fifty wanting to tar and feather me for disrespecting veterans—using them in our research at the Body Farm.” He blinked again, then turned to look at me, his expression suggesting that he vaguely remembered me but couldn’t quite place me. I plowed ahead, encouraged that he seemed to be heading in the right direction, namely, the direction of sanity. “I’m afraid they might try to shut down the Body Farm, Deck. I know the police understand how important our research is. So do prosecutors. But bureaucrats and politicians? I’m not sure they know or care.
What should I do, Deck? How do I protect the work I care about?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, then: “Sorry, what? I think I spaced out for a second there. What were we talking about?”

  “Beats me, Deck,” I said. I nodded at the phone—still ringing, now for at least the twentieth time—and added, “That damned thing just won’t quit ringing. Made me forget whatever it was I was saying.” He nodded, looking almost normal now, so I ventured, “Hey, Deck?”

  “Yeah, Doc?”

  “You reckon maybe you could turn loose of my wrist? I’m starting to lose the feeling in my fingers.”

  AN HOUR AFTER DECKER LEFT—FINALLY SOUNDING sane but still looking haunted and harrowed—my fingers were still tingling from his viselike grip on my wrist. Before he departed, I had nervously circled back to the subject of Satterfield, urging Deck not to go to the prison and “rattle his cage,” as he’d put it. “If you do,” I said, “he’ll know he’s getting to me.” Deck had grunted, then nodded—conceding, apparently, that cage rattling might not be a brilliant idea. I appreciated the concession. I just wished it had seemed more convincing.

  After Decker’s departure, I had begun scaling the mountain of messages—the Everest of Insistence—that Peggy had left for me. I started by sorting them into three categories: Not Important, Urgent, and 911. After leafing through the first ten messages, I saw that the Not-Important stack contained no messages; all ten had ended up in the 911 stack. I redefined the categories—Bad, Worse, and Worst—but the outcome was similar, with all the messages landing in Worst. Next I briefly considered (and swiftly rejected) Worst, More Worst, and Most Worst, then settled on Oh Shit, Holy Shit, and Somebody Shoot Me. Still no change.

  Clearly a paradigm shift was required. Instead of sorting by urgency, I decided to categorize by caller: Media Meddlers, UT Honchos, and Other. This time, the results were different, and though I certainly didn’t think I had conquered, I had, at least, divided: The callers were split almost evenly between two categories, Media Meddlers and UT Honchos, with only a few outliers in Other. Many of the messages were duplicates, I noticed: UT’s general counsel, Amanda Whiting, had called four times; the dean had dialed me twice; my newswoman nemesis, Athena Demopoulos, had tried me three times; and one persistent caller—the record holder—had left me seven messages, each of which bore the same San Diego number, followed by the words “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News!!!” I tossed the duplicate messages—and all of Malloy’s—and found to my relief that I actually had only a dozen callers chasing me, rather than two or three dozen. Better yet, I decided I could safely ignore most of the reporters, though not, alas, my Nashville nemesis.

  The one caller whose name stood out as a pleasant surprise was Wellington Meffert, a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent who was better known, to lawmen and lawbreakers in the mountainous East Tennessee counties he covered, as “Bubba Hardknot.” Meffert had left me only two messages, but because I actually looked forward to talking with him, I moved Bubba to the head of the line. I was reaching for the phone to call him when the intercom buzzed. “Well, crap,” I muttered to myself, then—picking up the handset—answered with, “Yes, Peggy. Which particular pain in my ass is about to flare up?”

  “Two of them, actually,” answered an echoey female voice that sounded familiar but didn’t sound like Peggy. My heart sank and my face flushed as the voice continued, “It’s Amanda Whiting, Dr. Brockton. The dean and I decided to drop by for a visit. Peggy was kind enough to put us on speaker when she paged you.”

  “That was kind,” I said drily.

  SITTING IN THE LEATHER SWIVEL CHAIR BEHIND THE oak desk in my administrative office, I occupied the seat of power, at least furniture-wise. But looking across at the grim faces of the dean and the general counsel, perched on the ladder-back chairs normally occupied by failing students, I knew that my position was tenuous, at best. Amanda Whiting, UT’s top legal eagle, seemed ready to tear me to shreds with her Harvard-honed talons, and the dean—long one of my staunchest supporters—was relegated to the role of onlooker and sympathetic spectator as the shredding commenced and the blood began to flow. “Dr. Brockton, I appreciate the contribution that your research facility has made to forensic science,” Whiting was saying for at least the third time.

  Methinks thou dost protest too much, I thought, but what I interrupted her to say was, “Not just ‘has made,’ Amanda.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said ‘has made.’ We’re still making contributions. Present tense, and future tense. We’ve got a dozen studies under way right now, and more coming down the pike, some of them really exciting.”

  Whiting responded with a nod that acknowledged what I’d said and yet somehow, at the same time, dismissed it as utterly irrelevant. “I understand,” she said, and then proceeded to demonstrate that she didn’t, in fact, understand and also didn’t care. “But surely you can understand that the university needs to prioritize risk management and damage control.”

  “Can I?” I could feel my blood pressure ratcheting up. “My understanding has always been that the university’s priorities are the pursuit of knowledge and the education of students. When did those get replaced by playing it safe and covering our asses?”

  She flushed, not from embarrassment but from anger. “Don’t play the simpleton,” she snapped, and I felt my own color rising. Before I could retort, she barreled on. “How much of our funding comes from the state?”

  “A lot.”

  “You’re damn right, a lot. A hundred fifty million dollars this year, give or take a few million. And if the state decided to take a few million—or more than a few—how do you propose that we fund the pursuit of knowledge and the education of students? You ready to teach for free?”

  “What’s your point, Amanda? You want to cut off my salary?”

  “No, dammit, but the legislature might.”

  “Oh, please,” I said. “Now who’s playing the simpleton?”

  The dean shifted in his chair, scraping the legs across the floor, as if the chair were clearing its throat for attention. “Hang on, both of you. Can we maybe dial this back a notch or two?” Whiting and I continued to glare at each other, and he tried again. “We’re all on the same side, remember? And you’ve both got a point. Amanda, Bill’s research has made the Anthropology Department one of the best in the country.” I felt better, but only until he added, “But, Bill, the hornets that the Channel Four story stirred up might be about to sting us bad.”

  I turned my full attention on him. “Sting us how? What do you mean?”

  He frowned. “You remember that state senator in the story?”

  “That grandstanding dummy from Jackson? What about him?”

  “Apparently he wasn’t just grandstanding. He’s drafted a bill for the next legislative session. If you don’t shut down your research program, it would cut the university’s state funding.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, but I could tell by his expression that this was no joke. “Cut our funding? By how much?”

  Amanda Whiting answered for him. “By one hundred percent,” she said. She no longer sounded angry; now she sounded demoralized and defeated. “Every damn cent.”

  THE NEXT MORNING I GOT UP AT FIVE, AN HOUR before my alarm was set to go off, and slipped from bed. Kathleen lay motionless, her breathing steady, and I decided not to wake her—if, indeed, she was sleeping, though I half suspected she was not.

  We had been off kilter and cross all through the prior evening, to a degree that was rare and perhaps even unprecedented for us. I still hadn’t told her about Satterfield’s threat, and withholding that information meant that I couldn’t tell her about Decker’s meltdown in my office, either. My secrecy almost certainly contributed to my testiness—partly because withholding anything from Kathleen ran deeply counter to my nature. I had tried several times, on the other hand, to talk about both the Janus case and the political assault on the Body Farm. But Kathleen, usually so soli
citous and sympathetic, had seemed distant and preoccupied. By bedtime, our conversation had cooled to curt monosyllables, and we had slept, to the degree that either of us succeeded in sleeping, with our backs to each other.

  Threading my way through our neighborhood in the predawn darkness, I turned onto Cherokee Boulevard, which was flanked on one side by mansions and on the other by a long ribbon of riverfront parkland. A low layer of fog, only a few feet thick, blanketed the fields and river; as I drove, my headlights created a luminous oval pool within the fog, but the air above the lights—the air up where I sat—was clear, so I had the odd sensation that my truck had been transformed into a boat, and that I was not so much driving as navigating, finding my way through a channel whose margins were outlined by the familiar hedges and streetlamps rising from the depths and piercing the surface. At the boulevard’s roundabout, the big, illuminated fountain—normally spouting from a waist-high round basin—had been transformed into a marine geyser, jetting up through the fog as if from some undersea vent or fault line. As I curved past it, I slammed on the brakes. A solitary runner, visible only from the chest up, was rounding the fountain. The bizarre image—a human-headed sea monster swimming past a waterspout in the ocean—haunted me for the remainder of the drive to campus. Signs and omens, I thought, but of what?

  I parked my truck in the cool dark beneath the stadium’s south end, down beside the basement door leading to the bone lab. In the quiet of dawn, I could hear the truck’s engine ticking with heat, and the sound seemed to echo some ominous interior ticking I sensed but couldn’t pinpoint: the ticking of something about to explode. Satterfield? The Janus debacle? The backlash over the veterans? None of the above? All of the above? I couldn’t shake the feeling that in some soft blind spot, a creature with claws was clutching at me. Another unsettling image flashed into my mind, displacing that of the sea-monster man swimming through the fog: a naked man chained to a rock, a ragged wound in his side, a sharp-beaked eagle tearing at his liver. Prometheus, I remembered. But Prometheus—an immortal—had stolen fire from the gods. Had I committed some great transgression? Was I guilty of hubris, the arrogant pride that went before a fall, in both Greek mythology and Christian teaching? In seeking to unlock the secrets of death, was I guilty of overweening ambition—of trespassing in divine realms where mere mortals were not allowed?