Cut to the Bone: A Body Farm Novel bf-8

by Jefferson Bass

  Kittredge reached beneath the pages of the yellow pad on which he’d been taking notes and pulled out a folded piece of newsprint — the front page of the News Sentinel.

  I felt the ground open beneath my feet when I saw the face in the sketch. I felt the darkness engulf me totally when I heard Kathleen gasp, saw the horror of recognition on her face, and felt her body begin to quake once more.

  CHAPTER 40

  Satterfield

  Soon, thought Satterfield, gripping the tan, waxy cylinder of dynamite with his right hand as he bore down with his left, sliding the serrated blade back and forth with neat, measured strokes across the middle of the eight-inch stick. They’ll be coming soon. Maybe not today, maybe not even tomorrow. But soon.

  The News Sentinel lay faceup on the kitchen table beside the cutting board, and Satterfield’s face — only a sketch, but a good likeness, no question about it — stared up at him from the front page. Above it, a headline in inch-high type shrieked, “KPD SEEKS SERIAL-KILLER SUSPECT.”

  The one that got away: She’d gone to the cops, all right, and now the net was closing. He’d cursed himself a hundred times for the carelessness and stupidity that had allowed the girl to get away. In addition to the cigarette burn in his palm, he now had a dozen more, on various parts of his body. But when he’d unrolled the newspaper and seen himself — seen that the final clockwork had been set in motion — he’d felt something shift inside himself, and he’d thrown away the cigarettes. Burning himself was a trivial and self-indulgent gesture; it was a waste of time, and he had no time to waste.

  He eased up on the blade as the sharp tips of the serrations began grazing the cutting board, etching a razor-thin line across the grain of the maple. A few more feather-light strokes — one, two, three — and the dynamite parted. A few shreds of the waxy wrapping clung to the blade, and Satterfield wiped the knife on his leg to brush them off, careful not to snag the denim.

  He laid the knife aside and picked up one of the pieces of dynamite, holding it up to the light to inspect the cross-section. The cut was clean, the small zigzags from the blade’s serrations etched neatly in the soft, glistening explosive, which had the consistency and the sheen of sausage. Holding the half stick to his eye, he sighted along it, as if it were the barrel of a weapon; as if he were taking aim at someone or something — something very near in space or time. Then, reaching across the table with his left, he picked up a slender silver cylinder — an electric blasting cap, the size and shape of a firecracker, with a pair of thin, insulated wires projecting from one end. Centering the blunt, wireless end of the cap on the freshly cut face of the dynamite, he pressed, twisting slightly. As the cap penetrated, Satterfield felt a thrill, as he always did when handling dynamite. The very name — coined by Alfred Nobel himself, from the Greek word “dynamis”—meant “power.” Nobel was a man who understood power — destructive power — and devoted decades to mastering it. Satterfield considered him a role model: a man who’d triumphed through intelligence, vision, and sheer will.

  Satterfield pushed back from the kitchen table and stood, then walked into the den and settled into the leather recliner in the center of the room, facing the television. A slight movement caught his eye; in the wire-mesh terrarium, the broad, triangular head of the snake had swiveled in his direction, and the black ribbon of tongue was testing the air, tasting his presence in the room. As the snake’s unblinking, ancient eyes watched, Satterfield lifted the half stick of dynamite and stared at it, then opened his jaws and took it in, wrapping his lips around it as it slid across his tongue and deep into his mouth. When he felt it against the back of his throat, he closed his eyes and lifted his other hand to his face. Clasped them both across his mouth, he imagined the force that would be unleashed when the current raced from the 9-volt battery into the blasting cap, the cap’s small explosion setting off the dynamite’s large one.

  This wasn’t how he’d planned or wanted it to end: forced into a corner, his back to the wall. Still, he had to admit, there was relief in knowing that it would be over soon. And there was power in ending things on his own terms; on terms that were — to borrow Nobel’s word — dynamic.

  CHAPTER 41

  Decker

  “Lieutenant! We’ve got a vehicle passing our position, headed toward the house.” The voice, from a spotter positioned at the mouth of the dead-end road, was an urgent whisper in his earpiece, and Lt. Brian Decker, commander of KPD’s SWAT team, snapped to alertness.

  “Vehicle’s approaching the suspect’s residence,” added a second voice a half-minute later. Even through the tiny, tinny speaker, there was no mistaking the tension in the whisper from McElroy, the spotter watching the front of the Satterfield house. “Turning into the driveway.”

  Decker held up a hand, and the air around him grew electric, the slack boredom on the men’s faces replaced by nervousness and excitement. Like all the men in the SWAT unit, Decker detested waiting — not just because he preferred action, but because waiting dulled a man’s edge, and a dull edge was more dangerous than a sharp one. Decker’s men — two teams, a primary and an emergency, plus a couple of snipers with scoped rifles — had slipped into their positions at 11:00 A.M., expecting to serve the high-risk warrant and take the suspect into custody by noon; one, at the latest. The five-man Primary Team, which would execute the takedown plan once the warrant was signed, lay concealed in the woods just across the road from the residence. Decker and the four others on the Emergency Reactionary Team had crept into closer positions, in the bushes at the east end of the house, so they could storm the front door if the situation suddenly went to shit for some reason.

  But things wouldn’t go to shit. Decker felt confident about the takedown plan. A quarter-mile up the road, a truck — a bucket truck labeled KNOXVILLE UTILITIES BOARD, with big KUB logos on the doors — was parked at the mouth of a dirt side road, beneath a power line and transformer, awaiting the green light from Decker. On his signal, the two men in the truck, wearing KUB coveralls, would pull up to the house in the bucket truck and fire up the chain saws, then start hacking branches off the best-looking tree near the power line. If Decker’s own behavior as a property owner was typical — and he felt pretty sure it was — the suspect would come racing out the door, mad as a hornet, by the time the first limb hit the ground. The Primary Team would swarm out of the woods and take him down before he had any inkling what was happening.

  The plan was rock solid; bureaucracy was the problem. Noon had come and gone without the warrant, and so had another two hours, as Decker’s spotters had kept watch on a curtain-shrouded house on a dead-end street, where nothing moved except falling leaves, plunking acorns, and a few squirrels. The one consolation was that they had music to pass the time: 1970s rock-and-roll wafted faintly from inside the house — Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon first, followed by Led Zeppelin. Even so, as the autumn leaves had corkscrewed down, Decker’s boredom had spiraled upward. So had his stress, the two contradictory moods rising side by side, like a pair of vultures carried aloft on powerful, parallel updrafts.

  The arrival of a vehicle, therefore, was welcome news. It meant that finally something was happening, even if it was just some lost driver turning around at the end of the cul-de-sac.

  “Talk to me, Mac.” Decker radioed the spotter, wishing his view wasn’t blocked by the corner of the house. “What kind of vehicle?”

  “A piece-of-shit Ford Escort,” McElroy answered. “Held together by pink Bondo and gray primer and Domino’s Pizza signs.”

  “He’s ordered a pizza?” Decker rolled his eyes in disgust. He saw his afternoon and evening — his whole life—stretching before him, a vast, unbroken plain of boredom and inactivity. Then he had an inspiration, and switching frequencies, he radioed Captain Hackworth, the watch commander, with a question to which he already knew the answer. “Hey, Cap, has that warrant come through yet?”

  “Not yet, Deck.” Hackworth sounded as frustrated as Decker felt. “I told
you, you’ll hear the minute I hear.”

  “Question, Cap. We’ve got a pizza delivery going down right now. Can we go in? Call it ‘exigent circumstances’?” It was a legal loophole, an end run around the requirement for a warrant.

  There was a pause before Hackworth answered. “Who’s delivering it?”

  Decker was puzzled by the question. “Uh, Domino’s,” he said. “What the hell’s that got to do with it?”

  “Not the brand, Deck; the person. Man or woman?”

  “Oh, sorry. Dunno. Let me find out.” Switching to the team’s frequency, Decker called McElroy. “Hey, Mac. The pizza guy — male guy or female guy?”

  “Can’t tell yet,” the spotter replied. “Still in the car. Bad glare and dirty windows.”

  Decker switched back to Hackworth. “Don’t know yet, Cap.”

  “If it’s a woman,” said Hackworth, “and she goes inside, she might be in imminent danger. That would let you go without the warrant. Risky, though — might turn into a hostage situation. Or worse.”

  “Got it.” He switched back to McElroy just as he heard the faint thud of a car door slamming.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Go ahead, Mac.”

  “The pizza guy? Definitely a guy. Or a chick with one hell of a beard.”

  “Got it,” said Decker, feeling both relieved and disappointed at the knowledge that they’d have to sit tight until the warrant came through.

  “He’s ringing the doorbell now,” McElroy narrated. “Front door’s opening.” Led Zeppelin’s volume ratcheted up a notch. “I see the suspect. Talking to pizza guy. Pizza guy’s going inside. Door’s closing.” The music softened and blurred again.

  “Can you hear anything?”

  “Nah. The music’s drowning ’em out.”

  Decker cursed their lack of gear. If they had parabolic microphones, McElroy would be able to pick up every word that was spoken, even from across the road. “Okay, keep watching, Mac. Tell me everything you see.”

  “Roger that.”

  Two faint songs later—“The Battle of Evermore” and “Stairway to Heaven”—Decker radioed Hackworth again. “Cap? Deck here.”

  “Go ahead, Deck. What’s happening?”

  “That’s the thing, Cap — nothing’s happening. Pizza guy’s been in there a long damn time.” Decker checked his watch. “Eight minutes. Shouldn’t take but two, three minutes to pay for a pizza, right? Five, tops.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Hackworth said. “What if our guy couldn’t find his wallet? What if he’s writing a check, and the Domino’s dude has to get a license number? What if they’re just feeling chatty?”

  “What if this creep swings both ways?” countered Decker. “What if he’s killing the pizza guy right now?”

  “I never heard of a sex killer who went after women and men,” said Hackworth. “They like one or the other. Women, nine times out of ten. Anyhow, we got nothing on the suspect that suggests the pizza guy’s at risk.”

  It wasn’t what Decker had wanted to hear, but it was what he’d expected to hear. He was pretty sure, even before he radioed, what Hackworth would say. He was also pretty sure, despite his chafing impatience, that the watch commander was right. A moment later, McElroy’s whisper proved it. “Lieutenant? Pizza guy’s coming out.” A minute later, the Bondo-patched, primer-splotched car was gone.

  * * *

  At three, Decker radioed Hackworth again. “Before you ask,” the captain said, “the answer’s no—we still don’t have the warrant. How much longer is the chain saw plan workable?”

  “Not much. Thirty minutes, tops. There’s only an hour of daylight left. Besides, when’s the last time you saw a tree-trimming crew start work at four? That’s quittin’ time, boss.”

  “Don’t give up on it,” said Hackworth. “We’ll get that warrant yet. Maybe you can take him down first thing in the morning. Wake him up with a chain-saw serenade — that might knock him off balance even more.”

  “If we have to stay out here all night, Cap, tree branches might not be the only limbs we go after with the chain saw.”

  “Ha. Steady on, Deck. You’ll know the second we’ve got the warrant. Stay sharp. And stay safe.”

  * * *

  When four o’clock came and went without the warrant, Decker sighed and shelved the tree-trimming plan, then gave the order to break out the night-vision gear — one rifle-mounted scope for each team leader and each sniper, plus one for McElroy. The scopes were big and heavy—1960s technology, military surplus leftovers from Vietnam — and the image they gave was grainy as hell. Still, grainy night vision was better than no night vision, when lives were on the line. Decker was constantly lobbying for newer, better gear, and constantly being shot down, but he owed it to his guys to try.

  Things had remained quiet at the house; the rock music had stopped once the Led Zeppelin album ended, and a light had come on in a room at the back of the house, according to the rear spotter, Cody. Judging by the light’s random flickering — and the audio Cody could hear smatterings of — the suspect was watching the local news.

  Decker’s two best options, as he saw it, were to storm the house sometime after Satterfield went to bed, or to sit tight till morning and send in the tree trimmers then. He hated the thought of waiting another fourteen hours, but he also hated the thought of sending a team into a pitch-black house to capture an ex-soldier, even with night-vision gear. Better to wait it out, much as he despised waiting.

  He was just about to radio this assessment to Hackworth when his earpiece erupted. “Lieutenant! It’s Cody! I hear a woman in the back of the house — in the den or whatever that room with the big window is. She’s screaming her head off!”

  “I’m hearing it, too, Lieutenant,” said McElroy. “She’s screaming bloody murder.” Even Decker could hear it: a series of shrieks that made his stomach lurch — shrieks that combined fear and pain like he’d never heard.

  Decker snapped his fingers to get the attention of the emergency team. “Guys, let’s go!” he said. “Front door. Go go go.” He turned and pointed to one of the men. “E.J.,” he said. “You haul ass around back. When you hear us hit the front door, you put a flashbang through that big rear window.” He headed around the front corner of the house at a crouch, three of the men following close on his heels, as E.J. peeled off toward the back of the house.

  Decker took the four front steps in two strides. “Fireplug, you ready?”

  “Ready,” came the answer from one step behind him. Fireplug was a squat, burly former Marine; he carried the team’s forty-pound battering ram as easily as Decker could have carried a baseball bat.

  “In five,” Decker counted, “four, three, two, one!” Fireplug had begun his windup on “three,” rotating his torso away from the door, swinging the battering ram like a pendulum. Then, as the arc reversed, he spun toward the door, his entire body — two hundred pounds of muscle and sinew — pivoting into the swing. The broad, flat head of the ram slammed into the knob, punching it through the wooden door and across the room to the opposite wall. The door crashed open and Decker scurried through, moving in a half crouch, the H&K submachine gun sweeping the room in tight arcs that tracked the direction of his gaze. He’d have felt safer with the short-barrel shotgun, but in a potential hostage situation, the shotgun’s swath of devastation was too broad and indiscriminate.

  When Decker was two steps in, the foyer lit up as brightly as if a camera flash had just fired in the next room, and the house shuddered from the concussion of the flashbang — the stun grenade — that E.J. had thrown through the rear window, right on cue.

  Without even having to think, Decker began mentally ticking off the seconds: one Mississippi, two Mississippi… If the suspect had been within ten feet of the stun grenade, the flash and the concussion would have blinded and stunned him, and Decker would have five seconds or so to find him and overpower him.

  Three Mississippi. Decker risked a quick look through the doorway wher
e the flashbang had gone off, then withdrew his head swiftly, so he wouldn’t be exposed during the split second it took his brain to process the images his eyes had captured.

  Four Mississippi. He’d glimpsed a wall-sized entertainment center filling one wall, the big TV shattered by the flashbang. Shredded curtains dangling beside the missing window. Five Mississippi. A human figure — a man! — sitting in a recliner in the center of the room. At six Mississippi, Decker made his move. “Police! Don’t move!” he shouted, pivoting into the doorway, the H&K up and trained on the seated figure.

  Seven Mississippi: The fist of God slammed into Decker, knocking him back, hurling him across the foyer, slamming him against the front wall. Stunned but still running on reflex, he reset his mental stopwatch: One Mississippi, two Mississippi… The cadence seemed slow and irregular, he noticed with an odd, detached objectivity, as if he were somehow outside himself as well as inside. Gradually he became aware of a second voice in his head — this one his as well — shrieking, What the hell? Why did E.J. use two flashbangs instead of one? Then: Shit. That wasn’t a flashbang. That wasn’t us. That was him. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs, struggling to piece the fragments into a picture that would explain why he was lying here in a heap against the wall. Either the flashbang hadn’t fully incapacitated the guy — had it landed behind him? Did the recliner shield him? Or Decker had screwed it up — counting too slow, moving too slow, giving the guy time to recover? Time to recover and do what, though? Had he fired a weapon? Was Decker shot — thrown across the room by a bullet or a shotgun blast slamming into his vest? No, not a shot, he realized. A blast. An explosion. But what — a grenade? Not the flashbang, but a real one, a frag? “Fall back, fall back,” Decker shouted. “Take cover.”

  He took inventory: I’m alive. I can see. He wiggled fingers. Toes. Everything seemed to be there, unless he was already feeling phantom pain in missing limbs. He glanced down, saw arms and legs where they belonged, still attached. A chunk of splintered wood, three inches long and a quarter-inch thick, jutted from his right deltoid. Decker reached across with his left arm — not easy to do, as bulky and confining as the flak jacket was — and gave an exploratory tug. A flash of pain seared his shoulder, but the wood slid out, wet and shiny with blood.