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“I know what she told you. She told you a lie.”
He walked to the Blazer. “Ma’am? Sir?” He rapped the rear windshield with his knuckles. “I need you to get down off your vehicle and leave the premises.”
Athena Demopoulos looked down, feigning innocence and surprise. “Is there a problem, Officer?” She was clearly stalling for time, and the cameraman kept shooting.
“Yes, ma’am. The problem is, you don’t have permission to be here filming. I need you to turn off the camera and get down off of there. Right now, please.”
“We don’t need permission,” she said. “This is public property.” Her colleague swiveled the camera slightly and adjusted his focus.
“No, ma’am,” the officer replied. “Technically—legally—UT Medical Center is private property. I’ve asked you, as nice as I know how, to shut off that camera and get down from there. I’m going to ask you one last time, and if you don’t do it by the time I count to three, I’ll arrest you for trespassing. One . . .” She laid her hand lightly on the cameraman’s shoulder; he held up a just-a-second finger. “Two . . .” She gave the shoulder a squeeze. “Three.” The officer touched the radio transmitter on his shoulder. “This is Officer Edmonds,” he said, his head angled toward the mike. “We have a trespassing incident at the Body Farm. I need backup.”
The cameraman straightened up and raised his hands. “Hey, everything’s cool,” he said. “No worries. Just takes a minute to power this thing down. We’re leaving right now, aren’t we, Athena?”
“Absolutely,” she said. She looked at Edmonds coyly. “Help me down?” Edmonds folded his arms across his chest and glared. She turned to me, raising her eyebrows. I shook my head slightly. “I guess it’s true.” She sighed. “Chivalry really is dead.”
“That’s right,” I said. “It died right after journalistic integrity gave up the ghost.”
WAITING FOR THE CHANNEL 4 STORY TO AIR WAS LIKE waiting for a firing squad to raise their rifles and pull the trigger. Time seemed to move at a fraction of its normal speed, and I oscillated wildly between wishing the event simply wasn’t happening, and wishing it would just hurry the hell up and be done. I twisted in the wind like that for two days; on the afternoon of the third day, I got a phone call. “Bill, it’s Amanda Whiting,” I heard the general counsel say.
“You’re calling to tell me you’ve gotten an injunction to block the story?”
“Sorry; not possible,” she said. “I’m calling to tell you the story airs tonight. I just got a courtesy call from Channel Four’s attorney to let me know.”
“Courtesy call,” I scoffed. “Well, that call is about the only courtesy they’ve shown. How bad’s the story?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”
“Guess we’ll hear all about it tomorrow from friends in Nashville,” I said. “I’m glad it’s airing there instead of here.” She didn’t reply—she conspicuously didn’t reply—so after the silence dragged on a while longer, I said, “Amanda? What?”
“It is airing here, Bill. Channel Four is NBC. The NBC affiliate here, WBIR, is picking it up, too.”
“Channel Ten?” My heart sank; WBIR was Knoxville’s leading news station, and I’d always enjoyed a good relationship with reporters there. “I thought they liked me.”
“I’m sure they do like you, Bill. But if their sister station in Nashville runs a big news story about you, WBIR can’t ignore it.”
Why not? I heard a voice in my head shrieking. Why the hell not?
AS THE NEWSCAST LOOMED, KATHLEEN TRIED HER best to cheer me up, but I wasn’t having any of it. She made one final attempt. “Should I pop some popcorn?”
“Sure,” I grumbled. “But instead of butter and salt, give it some strychnine and arsenic.”
“Oh, good grief,” she said. “Get down off that cross and come sit by me on the sofa. It can’t be as bad as you think.”
During the Knoxville anchor’s lead-in, Kathleen appeared to be right. “The University of Tennessee’s ‘Body Farm’ is making headlines tonight in Nashville,” he began. “The research facility, created by UT anthropologist Bill Brockton, uses donated cadavers to study postmortem human decomposition. The Body Farm’s research helps homicide detectives make accurate time-since-death estimates.”
Kathleen nudged me. “See? Nothing to worry about.”
But the newscaster’s face turned serious as he continued. “But some critics are charging that the Body Farm’s research isn’t just macabre, it’s disrespectful—and possibly even unpatriotic. From Nashville, Athena Demopoulos reports.”
The image switched to a row of neat white headstones in a military cemetery. Then the shot tilted up and widened to show many more tombstones, all identical, and a woman—my new nemesis—walking between them, speaking directly to the camera. “Most veterans rest in peace after death,” she began, “buried with honors in military cemeteries like this one in north Nashville.” The screen showed close-ups of several tombstones, then switched to four photographs of soldiers in uniform. “But for these four Nashville-area veterans—men who were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country—there is no peaceful burial. By rights, they should be here. Instead, after death, their bodies ended up at a gruesome Knoxville facility known as the Body Farm.” The peaceful cemetery images were replaced by sinister-looking shots of the Body Farm’s main gate and fence—wide shots, then close-ups zooming in on the gate’s rusting padlock, the heavy steel chain, and the barbed wire and concertina topping the fence. Then—in a sequence that Buck, the PR staffer had shot—I appeared on-screen. Walking up to the gate, I unlocked it and stepped inside, then closed the gate, vanishing from view. “The Body Farm is the creation of this man, Dr. Bill Brockton,” the reporter continued, “a University of Tennessee anthropologist whose obsession with death and decay drives him to perform macabre experiments on human bodies—including these four Nashville-area veterans. Dr. Brockton refused to allow us inside the grounds of the ghoulish facility.” Once more—this time in slow motion—I stepped through the gate and closed it, as if I were closing it in Athena’s face—“but reliable sources gave Channel Four disturbing details of the indignities inflicted upon the dead. Human bodies are tossed on the ground to rot. The remains are infested with insects, preyed upon by scavenging animals.”
Suddenly the screen filled with the face—the tear-streaked face—of a thirtysomething-year-old man. The shot widened to show him walking across lush, carefully clipped grass, between tidy rows of tombstones at the Nashville military cemetery. “But one man is vowing to set things right, for his grandfather and other veterans as well. Adam Anderson—grandson of Lucius Anderson, one of the four Nashville veterans at the Body Farm—says he’ll do whatever it takes to get his grandfather back and give him the dignified burial he deserved.”
“It ain’t right,” the young man said, shaking his head and wiping his eyes. “He served his country. He deserved better than this. We got to put a stop to this.”
“Anderson isn’t the only one ready to do battle over the treatment of veterans’ bodies,” Demopoulos said. Now the camera showed a portly, glossy-haired man striding into an office lined with law books. “He’s found a powerful ally in Wayne Wilson, a state senator from Jackson, Tennessee.
“I was shocked,” Wilson pronounced, “to hear what’s being done to these veterans—and to other deceased individuals—in the name of science.” He added, “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not antiscience. There’s a place for it. But this isn’t science; this is just morbid obsession. And I believe the people of the great state of Tennessee would want their elected representatives in Nashville to right this grievous wrong.”
I practically leapt up from the sofa. “Grievous wrong!” I sputtered. “What a load of crap! I’ll give you some grievous wrong, all right!”
“Shhh,” said Kathleen. Latching onto my arm, she pulled me back to my seat beside her and patted my leg.
The footag
e cut to a close-up of Athena Demopoulos’s face, filled with compassion. “Adam Anderson says he’s grateful for Senator Wilson’s vow to help. He just wishes it had come sooner—in time to help give his grandfather dignity in death.”
The shot widened to show Anderson standing beside her in the cemetery. “It just breaks my heart,” Anderson told her, “that they’re allowed to treat him that way . . .” He wiped his eyes again, and Athena leaned closer, handing him a tissue and giving his shoulder a comforting squeeze. “It breaks my heart they’re allowed to treat anybody this way,” he said, his voice breaking. She nodded earnestly, then—when he put his face in his hands and wept—she enfolded him in a hug. Then she stretched out one hand, fingers raised and spread wide, to block the camera’s view—a gesture the lens captured in loving, lingering detail throughout her final, somber line of voice-over: “Athena Demopoulos, Eyewitness Four News.”
Kathleen had been right: The story wasn’t been as bad as I’d thought it would be. It was worse. Much, much worse.
UNABLE TO SLEEP, I REACHED FOR HER IN THE NIGHT. “Tell me you love me,” I said. “Tell me everything will be all right.”
“I do love you, darling,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re home.” But a moment later, as my hand slid up her hip and toward her breast, she laid her own hand over mine, immobilizing it. “I’m still out of commission, honey. I’m sorry.”
I pulled back to look at her in the dim light of the bedroom. “You still have your period? How can that be? It’s been almost two weeks. You need to go to the doctor.”
“I called. Nothing to worry about. But if it keeps on much longer, I’ll go in.” She gave a short, ironic laugh. “Funny way for menopause to start, huh—the nonstop period? Like having a month of monsoons just before a forty-year drought sets in.”
She was trying to be game about it, but her words gave me a sharp pang. Was it hearing her use the word “drought” to describe the change her womanly body was about to undergo? Or was it the combination of images—drought and flood, a pair of biblical-sounding plagues—that suddenly made me feel the grip of cold, bony fingers closing around my heart like some scaly and pitiless claw?
IS IT POSSIBLE, AS PRIESTS AND MYSTICS BELIEVE, to conjure up evil beings simply by speaking their names—out loud, or even silently, in the fearful shadows of the heart and mind? Earlier in my life, I would have scoffed at the suggestion. Yet now, in my hand—my trembling hand—I held powerful evidence to the contrary. Unscientific evidence, yet no less convincing and frightening for all that.
Satterfield read the return address on the padded envelope I had just taken from the mailbox. Nothing more, just the name. But the name was enough. More than enough.
