Cut to the Bone

by Jefferson Bass

Kittredge

  KITTREDGE FROWNED AT THE driver’s license the forensic tech, Bohanan, was holding between a gloved thumb and forefinger. Nicholas Eugene Satterfield, said the license, which had come from the dead man’s wallet. The face in the photo bore a strong resemblance to the artist’s sketch of the Cahaba Lane rapist—the Cahaba Lane killer. The frown-inducing problem was that Kittredge couldn’t match the face on the license or the face in the sketch to the face of the dead guy slumped in the La-Z-Boy, because the dead guy slumped in the La-Z-Boy had no face.

  Bohanan tucked the license into an evidence bag. “We got dental records on Mr. Satterfield?”

  “Not yet,” said the detective. “Military does, but we don’t. I’m still trying to find out who’s got ’em—the Navy, or the Military Personnel Records Center, in St. Louis.” The detective leaned in and peered at the bloody stump of spine. “Ick. What good will dental records do us, anyhow? We got no teeth.”

  “O ye of little faith,” said Bohanan. “Just because his teeth aren’t in his head anymore—”

  “His head’s not in his head anymore,” Kittredge pointed out.

  “Teeth are tough,” Bohanan persisted. “They might be somewhere in this mess. Some of ’em, anyhow. Parts of some of ’em. A bit of bridgework, maybe, or a weird-shaped filling.”

  “What about DNA?” said the detective. “Everything I read these days goes on and on about how great DNA is. Genetic fingerprints, no two alike. The future of forensics, supposedly.”

  “Exactly,” said Bohanan. “The future. Sure, it’s possible, in some fancy-schmancy genetics lab. But routine forensic casework, in Knoxville, Tennessee? That’s five years down the road. Maybe ten.” Bohanan rocked back on his heels, studying the corpse. “We got anything else to base an ID on? Anything that doesn’t require, you know, a head or hands? Surgical scars, tattoos, six toes, anything?”

  Kittredge snapped his fingers. “Damn. Yeah—he’s got tats. Both forearms. A snake on one. A devil’s pitchfork on the other.”

  Bohanan lifted the handless right arm and slid the shredded sleeve up to the elbow. On the inside of the forearm was a crudely inked image of an eagle, its wings spread, its talons clutching a ship’s anchor and a three-pronged spear. “Not a pitchfork,” Bohanan said. “A trident. Symbol of Neptune—god of the sea. I’ve got an uncle with one kinda like this. He was a SEAL during the Vietnam War.”

  “That fits,” said Kittredge. “Let’s see the other arm.”

  Bohanan reached across the recliner and raised the left arm. Stretching upward above the shredded remnants of the wrist was a snake. Like the man, the reptile had been decapitated by the blast.

  “Bingo,” said Kittredge, reaching for his radio. “Cap? It’s him. . . . ID in his wallet, tats on his arms. . . . Yeah, both tats, exactly like she described.” He glanced again at the snake. Burn in hell, asshole, he thought.

  CHAPTER 44

  Brockton

  TWO POLICE CARS WERE idling outside my house when I arrived—the officers who’d kept watch over Jeff and Kathleen—and I stopped in the street and got out to thank them. Behind me, my watchdog, Maddox, eased his cruiser to the curb and parked. As I eyed the three police cars, I wondered what the neighbors must be thinking. Quite a fight, I pictured the crone across the street murmuring as she peered out her window. Mind your business, woman, I imagined her withered husband admonishing from the couch, then adding, I told you that Brockton fella had a mean streak in him, didn’t I?

  My family’s guards, whom I hadn’t met, got out and walked toward me in the twilight, greeting me by name and extending their hands to shake mine. “I sure do appreciate y’all keeping an eye on my wife and my son,” I said. “I can’t tell you how much that helped my peace of mind.” Behind me, I heard Maddox’s door open and close, then heard his footsteps on the darkened asphalt.

  “Glad to do it,” said the one who’d been assigned to Kathleen. “That dude was some bad business.” The other two nodded.

  “I just got an update,” Maddox said. “They’ve got a positive ID on him now. It’s over.”

  I didn’t know whether to cheer or weep. Instead, I asked, “How?”

  “Driver’s license,” he said. “And tattoos.”

  “And burns? Seems like I remember hearing that he had scars on his arms from cigarette burns as a kid.”

  He shrugged. “I guess, but I’ll ask, if you want. They said it was positive, so if he had ’em, they must’ve seen ’em.”

  “I trust y’all,” I said. “So I reckon we’ve seen the last of y’all for awhile?” He nodded. “Y’all can call your wives, tell ’em you’ll be home for supper after all.”

  Maddox glanced at the other two, then back at me. “Actually, some of us are getting together at Patrick Sullivan’s Saloon,” he said. “That was Boomer’s favorite hangout. Come join us, if you want to.”

  “I appreciate the invitation,” I said, lifting my hand in farewell and turning to go. “But I ought to stay here, be with my family. They need me right now.”

  Was that true? I didn’t actually know, I realized as I clambered back into my truck and turned into the driveway. What I did know was that I needed them.

  “Dammit, Jeff,” I muttered, threading between the Toyota and the shrubbery. “Don’t take your half in the middle.” The driveway was sixteen feet wide—more than enough for two vehicles to pass, with room to spare—but Jeff had parked the old Corolla we’d bought him smack in the center. If I detoured around him on the right, I’d make ruts in the lawn; hugging the left side of the driveway, as I was doing, meant raking the fingernails of the boxwoods down the side of the truck. The screeching set my teeth on edge and sent involuntary shivers up my spine.

  My irritation gave way to relief, though, as the garage door ratcheted upward to reveal Kathleen’s Camry tucked in the near bay of the garage. I eased in alongside and hopped out, feeling gladder to be home than I could remember feeling in . . . when? Forever? As I trudged up the basement stairs and into the kitchen, I said a prayer of thanks.

  Kathleen was at the sink, pouring pasta from a steaming pot into a colander. Jeff was at the stove, stirring sauce; to my surprise, Jenny Earhart was at the table, setting places for four. “Hello, hello,” I said, “Jenny, how nice to see you.”

  The pot clattered into the sink as Kathleen whirled toward me. “Bill. Oh, thank God. Are you all right?” She wiped her hands on her apron, then wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands as she hurried to me and folded against my chest.

  “Oh, honey, I’m fine,” I said, taking her in my arms. “Didn’t your watchdog tell you I was okay? He was supposed to.”

  “He did,” she said, “but I didn’t believe him. The way he said it—‘Don’t you worry, ma’am, your husband is fine, just fine’—it sounded like the opposite of fine. Like you were alive, but paralyzed or something. He wouldn’t tell me anything else. I thought about turning on the news, but I was afraid to.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Still holding her in my arms, I stroked her head to soothe her. “I’m so sorry you worried. Things got bad—not for me, but for the police, at his house. Satterfield’s house.” I squeezed her tightly. “The good news is, he’s dead.”

  She leaned back to look at me, her eyes wide. “The police shot him?”

  I shook my head. “He killed himself.”

  “Good.” Her quick vehemence surprised me.

  “But he did some damage on his way out. He was holding a bomb or a hand grenade or something. He set it off when the SWAT team went in. Blew himself up.”

  Her hands flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God! He killed the SWAT team?”

  “No. No, not them. It was stranger than that. Bizarre. Like a nightmare.” I led her to the table and motioned for all of them to sit, partly so I could see them all while I told the story, but also so that I could sit down, too. I drew a breath and began to tel
l what I knew, or at any rate what I’d heard—possibly at third hand, possibly at thirteenth hand—about the blast, and the bomb squad, and the snake and the dog and the dog’s dead handler. About how Satterfield had reached up from the grave, or from hell itself, to take more innocent people down with him.

  CHAPTER 45

  Satterfield

  SATTERFIELD REACHED UP TO scratch an itch on his head, and the dial of his watch swam past his face in a smear of luminescence. Beneath the cargo hatch, the space was low and pitch black, and it smelled faintly of death. Like a coffin, he thought. A family-sized coffin. On wheels. Should he put them in here, once he was finished with them? No. Leave them out—on display—for all the world to see. He raised his left hand, the luminous dial floating upward a few more inches in the blackness, until his fingers brushed the lid, eighteen inches above his face.

  It had been easy—so easy, he thought—but then, he’d had a big advantage: He had known they’d be coming, but they hadn’t known he knew. Fools. They should have known better. They should have done better.

  The pizza guy, on the other hand—no way that poor bastard could have known better. A quick, lethal snap of the neck, administered by someone who ordered pizza once or twice a week, and always tipped five bucks? No way to see that coming. Swapping clothes, slapping on the fake beard, stenciling the tats on the arms, tightening the trip wire on his way out the front door, tripping the timers on the lights and TV and the recording of the woman’s screams—all that had taken less than ten minutes. Practice makes perfect, he praised himself.

  Driving away from the house in the kid’s piece-of-shit Escort, he’d checked the rearview mirror repeatedly, smiling every time he looked and found it empty. Half an hour after answering his front door and beckoning the unsuspecting pizza guy inside, Satterfield had parked the Escort near the stadium, jimmied the latch on Brockton’s cargo hatch, and clambered in, pulling the hatch closed above him.

  Now—after three hours of patiently lying in wait in the pitch-black bed of Brockton’s truck—Satterfield was ready to emerge from the coffinlike blackness; ready to rise from the dead and rejoin the land of the living. Ready to take Brockton and his family out of it.

  How long should he wait? Part of him wanted to draw it out. The longer he waited, the more times and more ways he could envision it, savor it, play out in his mind the infinite permutations that were still possible for now, before the fact. Once it was done, only one version would remain in his head: the real version—one finite actuality, which would sweep away all the manifold and intricate and pleasant hypotheticals.

  But waiting increased the chances that something might miscarry. Satterfield had bought time—hours, at least; possibly even days—with the explosion and the decoy corpse, but the longer he waited, the greater the risk that the police would unravel his ruse.

  He ran a thumbnail beneath the hinge of his jaw and scraped at the edge of the rubber cement. Once he’d pried away a bit of the glue-matted hair, he tugged off the beard and flicked it into the corner of the pickup’s bed. The insulated pizza bag lay beside him, and Satterfield slowly opened the Velcro straps, the ripping-apart almost deafening in the close darkness, and then opened the flap. With his fingertips, he took inventory of the contents once more, though he already knew the items by heart and by touch: the four-cell Mag-Lite, blindingly bright and heavy as a club; the straight razor; a small, orange ball of baling twine; the twelve-inch zip ties; the flattened roll of duct tape; and a small pair of pruning shears. The 9-mm Glock was already out of the bag, tucked into his waistband.

  SATTERFIELD’S EYELIDS BLOOMED RED-ORANGE, crisscrossed by a spiderweb of dark veins, when he clicked the switch and the Mag-Lite blazed to life. Squinting against the glare, he propped the flashlight against the truck’s wheel well and reached overhead for the long, thin rods that held the cargo hatch closed. Gripping each rod at its midpoint, he pulled downward, bending them both enough to free their ends and unlock the cargo hatch. He pushed gently, and the hatch pivoted upward, opening like a vast maw to disgorge Satterfield. To unleash him upon them.

  He lay still and listened before moving. A few faint tickings from the engine of the truck and from the Camry parked beside it. The dull whir of the furnace blower. The gurgle of water draining from a sink. The murmur of a voice—indistinct words, but distinctly Brockton’s voice—filtering down through the joists and the flooring above the garage.

  Moving fluidly and noiselessly, he rolled onto his side and curled his legs to his chest—coiling—then pivoted into a crouch and eased over the tailgate. By the light of the flashlight, still propped against the wheel well, he sorted his gear, tucking the razor and the pruning shears into his right hip pocket, the coil of baling twine into his right front pocket, the zip ties into his left front pocket, and the fat, flattened roll of duct tape into his left hip pocket.

  Once the items were stowed within easy reach, he picked up the flashlight and started around the end of the truck, heading for the front of the garage. Then, on an impulse, he leaned into the bed of the truck once more to retrieve the Domino’s cap and the empty insulated bag. Tucking the bag under his left arm, he donned the cap, twisting and tilting it slightly—a jaunty angle, he thought.

  Metal edges and handles glinted as he played the flashlight across the garage’s back wall, where tools were neatly arrayed on pegboards, one on either side of the door that led into the basement. Household tools occupied the pegboard to the left of the door: a Dustbuster, three sizes of pipe wrenches, an assortment of pliers, a set of screwdrivers, rolls of electrical tape, coils of insulated wire. Woodworking tools and lawn-care implements filled the other side: saws, hammers, clamps, planes, chisels, pruning shears, a hatchet, an ax, a sledgehammer, splitting wedges. Christ, Satterfield thought, the fucker’s a one-man Home Depot. He played the flashlight along the knee-high shelf beneath the workbench lining the wall, the beam lingering on a belt sander, a circular saw, and a chain saw. Hell, if he’d known there’d be such a wealth of implements to choose from, he’d have brought fewer things with him. His hands were already full, and he didn’t want to deviate from his initial plan, but he made a mental note to return to the garage in a few hours and pick a few choice items to liven things up, to stave off boredom.

  He checked the wall beside the door that led into the house. There was a switch plate with three light switches, plus a doorbell-style button beneath it—the garage-door opener, probably. No keypad, so no security alarm, which he already knew from his scouting trip a few days before, when he’d “fixed” the telephone line.

  The basement door was metal, with a dead bolt as well as a lock in the knob. Switching off the flashlight, Satterfield tried the knob. It turned, and when he pushed lightly, the door opened a crack. Idiots.

  The large room inside the door—a basement den—was faintly lit by the blue clock of a VCR. Beyond, a hallway bisected the far half of the basement, leading, he recalled, to a bathroom, the kid’s bedroom, and a spare bedroom jammed with junk. Easing down the dark hall, he found all three doors ajar, all three rooms empty. Retracing his steps, he returned to the stairwell and started up, testing each step for any hint of a squeak before committing his full weight to it.

  A line of golden light showed beneath the door at the top of the stairs, the sound of voices mingling with the clink of cutlery on ceramic. “Jeff, mind your manners,” he heard the woman say. “Leave a little for the rest of us.”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  He conjured up his mental picture of the layout. The door from the basement opened directly across from an exterior door—a sliding-glass door—that led to a patio and a garden in back of the house. To the right of the stairwell was the dining room; to his left, the kitchen. Judging by the direction of the sounds, they were eating in the kitchen.

  Satterfield slipped the Mag-Lite into the pizza bag and pulled the pistol from his waistband. Hanging the pizza bag from his left w
rist by the nylon strap, he took tender hold of the doorknob and twisted, his thumb moving as slowly as the second hand on a clock. The door opened inward, into the stairwell—much better for him than if it swung outward, into view. He eased it open an inch, then waited and listened. “Bill, have some more salad,” the woman said.

  Another careful inch.

  “Thanks, hon, but I’m not really hungry.”

  A foot this time.

  “I’ll take some more,” the boy said.

  Satterfield swung the door fully open.

  “Please?” prompted Brockton.

  “It’s okay, Dad—you don’t have to beg me.” A half second later: “Hey, come on. That was funny.”

  “No, not really,” Satterfield said, taking two quick steps—through the doorway and then around the corner, into the kitchen. “Who wants pizza?” Their faces, startled and stupid with surprise, swiveled toward him. Four startled faces, not three. A girl. Who the hell’s the girl? Brockton, seated at the near end of the table, started to his feet, the look of surprise on his face giving way to anger and fear as his gaze shifted from the Domino’s shirt and pizza bag to the face of the man. The face of Satterfield.

  Satterfield swung the pizza bag sideways by its strap, the heavy rectangle slicing through the air and smashing into Brockton’s face, the weight of the heavy flashlight inside adding to the force. Brockton toppled backward, knocking over his chair as he fell, and then struggled to rise from the floor. Satterfield kicked him to put him back down, then took a step back and waved the pistol. “I’m sorry to have to break it to you,” he said, “but I lied—I don’t really have pizza for you.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Decker

  DECKER KNEW THAT THE detective and the forensic techs didn’t want him there—he was lurking and watching, radiating anguish and rage—but nobody wanted to get in his face about it; nobody wanted to be the jerk that told a guy whose brother had just died to get the hell out of the way. The detective, Kittredge, was squatting beside Bohanan, the senior forensic tech, who was kneeling near the feet of the headless corpse, using tweezers to pluck filaments of wire from the floor.