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That’s when his wrist was seized in a grip like a vise. “Pig,” said Satterfield calmly. “Pig guts and pig blood.”
The EMT stared at the prisoner’s face. Satterfield stared back, holding the EMT’s gaze, as he slipped a second shank—the twin of the one he’d dropped on the basketball court—out of his waistband. Driving it into the man’s belly, he sliced upward until the blade hit the breastbone. The EMT grunted, his own entrails spilling out—as if in some sadistically parallel-universe echo of the sham disemboweling Satterfield had staged—and then he sank to his knees, clutching the gurney until he toppled. In a better world—a world in which rural ambulance services had ample funding—the gutting would have been captured by an interior video camera, thus alerting the driver. But this was not a better world; this was cash-strapped Wayne County, Tennessee, where one-quarter of children lived in poverty. By the time the ambulance pulled up to the hospital’s emergency entrance, the dead EMT was strapped to the gurney and covered with a sheet, and by the time the unsuspecting driver switched off the engine, the blade in Satterfield’s hand was already slicing the young man’s carotid artery.
Thirty seconds after cutting the driver’s throat, Satterfield—dressed in scrubs, his features concealed by a surgical mask—wheeled the gurney into the hospital, parked the corpse in a hallway, and followed a labyrinth of corridors to the main lobby. He walked out the front entrance, a free man, for the first time in more than twenty years.
By the time the hospital, police, and prison staff pieced together the bloody puzzle, Satterfield would be long gone: eastbound toward Knoxville, and toward Brockton, and toward the bloody reckoning Satterfield had lovingly imagined every day for two decades.
PART THREE
The Dark and Tangled Web
O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!
—Sir Walter Scott, “Marmion”
The dark net: a place without limits, a place to push boundaries, a place to . . . sate our curiosities and desires, whatever they may be. All dangerous, magnificent, and uniquely human qualities.
—Jamie Bartlett, The Dark Net
CHAPTER 20
I BUZZED PEGGY, AT THE FAR END OF THE STADIUM. “Hey,” I said, “would you hold my calls?”
“Napping again?” she teased.
“Not yet, but I probably will be soon,” I admitted. “I’m taking another run at Miranda’s dissertation. Last time I nodded off at page six.”
“In that case, I’ll buzz you every five minutes.”
“You’re such a help.” I hung up, smiling. I still wasn’t quite sure what was happening with Peggy—if, in fact, anything was happening: neither of us had spoken about our unexpected evening of movie-watching hand-holding—but the air around us did seem different, charged with electricity, low though the voltage might be, and full of unspoken possibilities. But was I ready for possibilities?
I had just propped my feet on the desk and opened the dissertation to page six when my intercom beeped. “Heavens, I’m not even sleepy yet,” I answered.
“You have a call on line two,” Peggy said.
“A call? You mean one of those things you’re holding?”
“I know. But this is Captain Decker, from the Knoxville Police. He says it’s urgent.”
“Well, then, I reckon I’d better take it. Thanks.” I pressed the blinking button. “Deck, is that you? Long time, no see. How you been?”
“Hanging in there, Doc. Keeping busy.”
“Me, too. I like it that way. Keeps the ghosts at bay, you know?”
“Yessir, I do. Fact is, that’s why I’m calling. One of the ghosts. Our old pal Nick Satterfield. Bad news, Doc.”
“Well then, he must not be dead,” I said. “That would be great news. To you and me both.”
“It sure would. No, sir, it’s bad. Real bad.”
“He’s gotten another appeal? He’s getting a new trial?”
“Worse, Doc. The very worst.”
I felt an icy claw clutch at my heart, and then Decker and I spoke the dreadful words in grim unison: “He’s escaped.”
CHAPTER 21
THE WOMAN’S FACE WAS GRAVE, HER BROWN EYES brimming with concern and compassion, as she looked directly at us—at me and my son, Jeff; at Jeff’s wife, Jenny; at their teenaged boys, Tyler and Walker—and began to speak. “A massive manhunt is under way for an escaped serial killer,” she told us, her gaze unwavering despite the dire news.
Dire, indeed, and news, literally: The woman was Beth Haynes, a coanchor of WBIR-TV’s five P.M. newscast, and one of my favorite television journalists. I had watched her for years—and admired her for years, not just for her poise and charisma, but also the intellect and heart she brought to stories on complex issues such as domestic violence, homelessness, and racial tensions. When Beth talked, I listened. Always.
“Authorities say convicted killer Nick Satterfield, serving a life sentence for the murders of four prostitutes in 1992, escaped today from South Central Correctional Facility in Clifton, Tennessee,” she went on, still looking directly at me, and only at me, or so it seemed. “Details of the escape are sketchy”—now Beth’s earnest face was replaced by a fullscreen shot of an ambulance parked at the emergency entrance of a hospital, the vehicle and entrance cordoned off with yellow-and-black crime-scene tape—“but early reports indicate that Satterfield overpowered and killed two emergency medical technicians, while en route to a local hospital for medical treatment.”
Suddenly the screen filled with the face of Satterfield himself—a courtroom photo from his trial, an image that captured a venomous look in my direction. After more than twenty years, the malevolence of his stare still sent a spike of primal fear through me. “Satterfield was caught in 1992, during the attempted murder of University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist Bill Brockton and his family,” Beth reported. “Asked today about Satterfield’s escape, Dr. Brockton had this to say.”
Now I had the odd sensation of looking directly into my own eyes, of being on the receiving end of a comment from myself. “He’s a really bad guy,” I said. “I just hope they catch him before he kills anybody else.”
Jeff, standing behind me—the “me” sitting tensely in my living-room recliner—gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Jenny, seated on the sofa, reached out and laid her hand on mine.
Then the camera angle widened abruptly, so that the shot included the young female reporter who had ambushed me outside my office two hours earlier. “Dr. Brockton, do you feel personally in danger?” she asked. “Nick Satterfield came after you once before. Will he come after you again?”
The me on the TV screen—looking grayer, older, and tenser than I would have liked—shook his head. “He’d have to be pretty dumb to come after me,” I told the reporter—or was I telling myself? “If he comes within a mile of me, he’ll be nabbed by the FBI or the TBI or the Knoxville Police Department. I’m what the fishermen call ‘live bait,’ and he’s way too smart to take it.” With that, I gave the reporter a smile—a strained, plastic smile, clearly—and walked out of the shot, hoping that what I’d said was true.
