The night before, I’d spared her the grisly details of the death scene in the woods. Now I told her a bit more, and then told her about Roxanne’s sudden departure, and the bitter question she’d posed to Tyler. “It’s been bugging me all day. So I stopped to see if Mike might have some insight.”
She stared at me from across the table. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You were hoping a theologian could solve the conjoined-twin problems of evil and misogyny in a five-minute, oh-by-the-way mini-lecture?” I shrugged sheepishly; I hadn’t gone into his study with such a clearly articulated and clearly ludicrous agenda, but she’d summed it up pretty well. “Honestly, Bill, you do put the idiot in idiot savant sometimes.”
“You know,” I began, in feeble protest. But I didn’t have a leg to stand on, and we both knew it. “It’s true,” I conceded, shaking my head. “You’re right. Absolutely, utterly right.” She smiled then, reaching across the table to give my hand a squeeze. One of the things I appreciated most about Kathleen was her readiness to forgive, to let go of a grievance at the first sign of contrition.
“And what words of wisdom and divine insight did the Right Reverend Michaelson impart while your steak was turning to shoe leather?”
“Steak? I missed steak?”
“On the grill. Grilled potatoes, too.”
“Ah, man,” I moaned. “My favorite dinner? I can’t believe I missed it. Proof positive that the devil is alive and well. Messing with the world in general and me in particular.”
“Maybe it’s not beyond redemption.”
“The world?”
“The steak. I pulled it off while it was still medium rare. Believe it or not, it no longer surprises me when you’re late for dinner.”
“You’re an angel,” I said. “And the age of miracles is not yet over.”
“I’ll fix you a plate if you’ll tell me what Mike had to say.” She scooted back from the table, went to the fridge, and began pulling out Tupperware containers.
“I’m not sure I can remember all the details.”
“Then give me the Cliffs Notes version.”
“Here’s the Cliffs Notes version: ‘It’s complicated.’ ”
She frowned across the plate of steak and potatoes. “I think I’ll give this to the dog next door. Because that’s not complicated; it’s simple, and the dog will adore me.”
“Hang on, I’ll try to give you the gist,” I squawked. “But it is complicated. I asked Mike, ‘Why are men such shits to women?’ and—”
“I hope you rephrased the question.”
“No,” I admitted, “I gave him the unvarnished version.” She shook her head despairingly. “Anyhow, his answer started with the Judeo-Christian concept of the Fall of Man—”
“The Fall of Man? Did he blame it on Eve?” she asked sharply.
“No, actually. Matter of fact, he took a few shots at the early church fathers for painting it as the woman’s fault.”
“Well, praise the Lord,” she said sarcastically. “It’s about time Eve’s criminal record got expunged.”
“Anyhow, after the Fall, he—Mike, not the Lord—veered off into evolutionary biology and primate behavior. Male aggression, territorialism, competition for mates, mate guarding. He knows more zoology than I do. Then we got into psychology and cultural anthropology and sociology and politics: patriarchies, matriarchies, oligarchies, preserving the power structure . . .”
“All right, you win,” she sighed, popping the plate in the microwave and tapping the one-minute button. “I should’ve let you stop with ‘It’s complicated.’ But did it make you feel better, wandering down those trails with him?”
“Kinda,” I hedged. “But he didn’t really answer the question. Like I said—and like he said—it’s complicated.”
“No it’s not,” she said.
“Wait—you just agreed that it was complicated.”
“I agreed that his answer was complicated,” she said. “But my answer’s simple.” I stared at her. “Men treat women like shit for the same reason they treat children or animals like shit: Because they can. It’s a power trip. ‘I’ll feel stronger and better if I prove that you’re weaker,’ right?”
“Well . . .”
“Every guy wants to be the big man on campus,” she went on. “Bed the prettiest women; breed with the prettiest woman. It’s like a pride of lions. If you’re not the big lion—if you’re only a medium-sized lion—you take it out on the little lions. Men like that would probably rather be shits to other men, but they can’t be, so they’re shits to women and children and animals.”
Kathleen’s blunt gloss on the issue lacked the intellectual nuance of Reverend Mike’s—no detours down scenic side trails of theology and sociology and anthropology—but what it lacked in sophistication, it made up for in ringing clarity. “So you’re saying it all comes down to pecking order?”
“No. I’m saying it all comes down to pecker order; pecker size. Men who treat women badly are men with small peckers—metaphorically, at least. Probably literally, too.”
I laughed, mildly shocked but mightily impressed. “Next time Mike needs a guest preacher, you should fill the pulpit. The congregation would get some straight talk. And they’d get to Calhoun’s half an hour before the Baptists.” She smiled. “But now I’m puzzled about something else. If Mike didn’t answer the question, how come I came out of there feeling so much better?”
“That’s easy, too,” she said. “It’s in the Gospel According to James.”
“James? There isn’t a Gospel According to James.” I ticked off the four gospel writers: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.”
“I’m talking about the Gospel According to James Taylor.”
“James Taylor? The folksinger?”
“Folksinger and prophet of the human heart. ‘Shower the People’?” She wagged a finger at me and began to sing. “Once you tell somebody the way that you feel, you can feel it beginning to ease.” She cocked her head. “Right? Isn’t that why you feel better?”
“Crap, Kathleen. How’d you get to be so much smarter than I am?”
“Not just smarter,” she said. “Wiser. It’s a woman thing.” She tapped her belly with an index finger. “It’s the uterus. It gives us superpowers of wisdom and insight.” Without looking, she reached behind her back and popped the door of the microwave, cutting off the timer a nanosecond before it began its annoying beeps. “Want salad?” I shook my head. She set the plate down in front of me, singing, “Better to shower the people you love with love, show them the way you feel . . .”
The steak smelled gloriously of mesquite smoke and marinade, as if it had only that moment been lifted off the grill. Rich, reddish-brown juice seeped from the seared meat, pooling beneath the crisp potatoes. “Perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And Bill?” I glanced up, my fork and knife already poised above the plate. “Thanks for not being a shit to women. Or kids. Or animals.” I smiled at her. “You’ve got a big heart.” She smiled back. “And you know what they say about the size of a man’s heart.”
“Oh my,” I said, as I caught the drift of her innuendo. “Is it true, what they say?”
“Better than true. It’s an understatement.”
Beaming, I bowed my head and tucked into the feast.
CHAPTER 35
Satterfield
SATTERFIELD WAS A SHADOW among shadows, flowing through the night like some coalescence of darkness—like darkness made flesh—along the perimeter of the quarry yard. The night watchman had just made his 1:00 A.M. circuit, and he wouldn’t make another for an hour—maybe longer, if he fell asleep in the guard shack, as he sometimes did.
Satterfield didn’t need an hour; didn’t need even half an hour. The blasting caps were locked in a windowless steel building—it was called a “magazine,” but essentially i
t was a vault—tucked into a recess in one of the quarry’s limestone walls. The dynamite was locked in an identical magazine in a second recess, fifty yards from the first one. Satterfield had not actually been inside either magazine, but earlier in the day, he’d watched through his spotting scope as a wiry guy had gone into the first structure and emerged a few minutes later with a handful of caps, dangling from their electrical wires like silver firecrackers swinging from long, slender fuses of red and blue. After driving a brief distance along the rim of the gaping pit, he’d gone into the second magazine and then emerged carrying a box covered with warning labels—labels Satterfield had seen many times during his demolition training in the Navy.
Satterfield had been researching lock picking, so he could come and go without leaving a visible trace. He’d seen locks picked in plenty of movies—the long, slender picks, worked into the keyhole, wiggled and twisted in some artful, arcane manner—but as it turned out, it looked like it was going to be easier than that. The prior night, when the watchman had gone to make his rounds, Satterfield had slipped into the guard shack and rummaged around. Sure enough, in the gritty center drawer of a gritty metal desk, he’d found an assortment of gritty spare keys. One of them bore the promising label “demo.” For a moment he’d doubted his luck—had they really been stupid enough to use identical locks on both bunker doors?—but then he realized that yes, of course they had. If they were dumb enough to leave the keys to the whole operation in an unlocked desk—an unlocked desk in an unlocked guard shack, for crissakes—they were plenty dumb enough to use identical locks for the blasting caps and the explosives.
The guard’s 2:00 A.M. rounds would take him first to the blasting-cap magazine, so Satterfield started there, to make sure he’d be finished well ahead of time. The building was low and squat, maybe ten feet square by seven feet high, the steel outer walls lined with several inches of hardwood, if the quarry’s magazines were built like the Navy’s. The door looked like something from a warship: Also made of heavy steel plate, it was low and narrow, mounted on massive hinges.
Satterfield slid the key into the padlock’s keyway, feeling the pins bump across the teeth, one by one. When the key bottomed out, he twisted gently. The lock opened grudgingly, grittily, the coating of limestone dust resisting as the shackle slid out of the brass body. It took most of his strength to wrest the door open, and he felt a flash of admiration for the wiry blaster he’d watched through his scope; the guy was several inches shorter than Satterfield, and probably weighed twenty or thirty pounds less. Not an ounce of fat on that guy, he thought. The door rasped on the hinges, but the sound was slight—almost as though it were absorbed by the velvet blackness of the magazine’s interior.
Once inside, he tugged the door shut behind him, then clicked on the small Mag-Lite. As he scanned the room, he smiled. Three walls were lined with wooden shelves, and the shelves were like a high-explosives candy store. The blasting caps—hundreds of them; hell, thousands of them—were stored in wooden bins. Some sported pigtails of bright orange det cord; others—the ones he wanted—trailed electrical leads, the pairs of wires looped and fastened into tight coils.
He slipped three caps into one of the thigh pockets of the black BDUs—no point getting greedy, since he had the key to the store, and he didn’t want to risk creating a noticeable shortage in the inventory—then turned to go.
He pushed his way out the heavy door, then closed it behind him, snapping the balky lock shut. Five minutes later he was inside the second cavelike magazine, this one containing cases of dynamite and wooden spools of detonating cord. From an open case of dynamite, he took two sticks—more than he needed—and tucked them into a deep pocket, then turned to go. At the door, though, he hesitated, then turned back, irresistibly drawn to the spools of det cord: Primacord—500- and 1,000- and 2,000-foot spools of linear explosive, in a rainbow of colors: orange, yellow, red, green, purple, in solids and stripes, each color and pattern denoting a different load of explosive inside the bright plastic sleeve. Some of the cord was no thicker than clothesline; on one spool, though, the cord was nearly as fat as his pinky. PRIMALINE 85, read the label on that one, which meant that every meter of cord contained 85 grams of high-explosive PETN.
God, I love this shit, Satterfield thought. He loved Primacord for what it could do; hell, with that one spool of Primaline 85, he could probably take down every major bridge in Knoxville. He also loved Primacord for its neatness and precision. Dynamite was dirty and messy, though undeniably macho; Primacord was clean and neat. Consistent, too: No matter which spool you unwound, no matter which loading you used, you could be sure that the explosion would rip through the cord at 23,000 feet a second, 16,000 miles an hour: New York to L.A. in ten minutes. He’d done the math during his demo training at Coronado, working the problem three times to make sure he hadn’t misplaced the decimal. How the hell did they do that, extrude high-proof explosives with such perfection that the blast traveled through the cord ten times faster than a bullet, but precisely, reliably fast? You could set your watch—hell, you could set a damn atomic clock—by precision like that.
He wasn’t here for the Primacord, but the temptation was too strong to resist. Slipping the KA-BAR knife from its sheath, he unspooled ten feet of the Primaline 85, sliced it off, and then wound it around his waist, cinching it into three tight coils. He took a moment to imagine what would happen if something set it off while he was wearing it. Shit, he thought, shaking his head and grinning, your head would come down in Kentucky and your feet in Alabama; one hand in Maryland, the other in Oklahoma. Don’t get hit by lightning on the way home.
This bunker’s door was even harder to close than the other. Satterfield made a mental note to bring some WD-40 next time he came, to lube the hinges. Be a damned shame to throw out his back.
CHAPTER 36
Brockton
HOLDING MY BREATH TO protect my lungs, I jogged into the cloud of smoke that shrouded the entry to the Knoxville Police Department. The air was thick with carcinogens—at least a pack’s worth of secondhand smoke, judging by the throng of smokers loitering outside the grimy glass doors. The KPD was a squat, brooding fortress of putty-colored brick set atop Summit Hill Drive. The police shared the building with traffic court, and I suspected that most of the smokers were speeders and DUI defendants, taking advantage of the noon recess to calm their jitters with a jolt of nicotine.
“Excuse me, sir?” I was accosted by a disheveled young man whose stringy, greasy brown hair had been cut, at some point in the distant past, in a style that was named after a saltwater fish whose name I struggled to recall. I held up my hand to deflect his sob story and request for spare change. Instead of panhandling, though, he simply asked, “Could you tell me the time, please?” Ashamed of my brusque response, I stopped, one hand on the door handle, and checked my watch.
“Ten of one,” I croaked, expending as little of my lungful of air as possible.
“Dude,” he said as I tugged open the door. “What happened to your voice?”
“Throat cancer.” I clutched my larynx as I rasped out the brazen lie. “Smoking.” Before he had a chance to engage me further, I ducked through the door, hurrying toward the smoke-free air inside. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the mullet-head scrutinizing the ashy end of his cigarette, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. Then he dropped it to the concrete and ground it out. Before he did, though, he took one long last drag.
Traffic court occupied a single floor on the left-hand side of the complex; the police department commanded a four-story wing to the right. I signed in with the receptionist, who made a quick phone call and then buzzed me in. “Crime lab. Take the elevator to the second floor.”
In the lab, Art Bohanan sat at a long metal lab table, peering through a magnifying lens at the blood-smeared shaft of a hunting arrow. On a metal tray to one side were the other headless shafts, decapitated with bolt cutters to allow the dead woman’s bo
dy to be taken down from the tree. A second tray held the sharp-tipped, razor-edged arrowheads—all except for the one that had lodged deep in the femur. “Hey, Art,” I said. “Any prints?” Without looking up, he shook his head. “In that case, you probably won’t find any on this one, either.” Reaching into the pocket of my windbreaker, I pulled out a clear plastic jar, two inches wide and three inches tall, containing the arrowhead I’d extracted from the femur. “Dr. Hamilton did as much autopsy as he could this morning,” I said, “and he pulled this out. But she was too far gone for him to tell much, so he’s turned her and the man over to me. We’ll start cleaning her bones tomorrow; right now we’re still processing the woman that was splayed against the tree.”
“You think she’ll be done today?” asked Art. I’d worked with him on enough cases to feel sure that his use of the word “done” was a deliberate double entendre. Art had commented, on more than one visit to the Anthropology Annex, that we processed bones exactly the way his wife made beef stock: cut off most of the meat, then put the bones into a big pot to simmer. After my costly lesson about the penchant of unwatched pots to boil, I’d taken steps to ensure that I wouldn’t ruin any more of Kathleen’s stoves: I’d sworn never again to process skeletal material at home, and I’d dipped deeply into the department’s budget to buy the Annex a twenty-gallon steam-jacketed kettle—the kind commercial kitchens used to cook meals for the masses. With the thermostat set at 150 degrees and a bit of meat tenderizer, Biz, and Downy added to the water, the soft tissue—even the brain—softened and dissolved, leaving the bone clean, undamaged, and smelling more like laundry than roadkill.
“Might be done today; more likely tomorrow. She had a fair amount of tissue left.”
He nodded at me, then shook his head glumly at the arrow shaft he’d been examining, laying it on the tray alongside the others. “This guy was careful,” he said. “Either he wore gloves, or he wiped everything down pretty well.”
Cut to the Bone Page 23