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Beth Haynes’s face filled the screen once more, looking even more somber than before—more somber than I’d ever seen her. “Breaking news, and a shocking update, just in. Authorities now say that family members of two prison officials from South Central Correctional Facility—the prison from which Nick Satterfield escaped—were brutally murdered today. It’s not yet known whether or how these murders are connected with Satterfield’s escape, but WBIR News will continue to monitor this developing story and keep you posted.” In what seemed to be a return to her earlier script, she added, “Needless to say, escaped killer Nick Satterfield is considered armed and extremely dangerous. Anyone with information on his whereabouts should call the FBI or the TBI. Authorities have announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to his capture.” Satterfield’s photo appeared on-screen over one of Beth’s shoulders, and a toll-free nu
mber materialized at the bottom of the screen, along with the caption “$50,000 Reward.”
The story over, I switched off the television so we could talk.
“Fifty thousand dollars!” exclaimed Walker, who—at fifteen—still retained a boyish enthusiasm. “I wish I knew where he was! I could buy a Corvette with that!”
“Yeah, right,” said Tyler, already world-weary at age seventeen. “A Corvette. Just what you need. Because you’re such a great driver already, the way you keep one foot on the brake at all times.”
“Hey, I’m not the one who ran over our mailbox.”
“Shut up,” said Tyler.
“And the neighbors’ mailbox,” Walker persisted.
In the blink of an eye, Tyler pounced, hurling his brother to the floor. “Boys! Boys!” Jenny yelled, to no avail, as they grappled and thrashed. “Boys!” Jeff came from behind my chair, preparing to pull them apart, but before he could enter the fray, a denim-clad leg—impossible to say whose—kicked upward, the foot careening against a ceramic lamp and sending it flying. The lamp hit the wall in a duet of destruction: the soprano notes of shattering lightbulbs accompanied by the lower, rounder clanking of fired pottery splintering into shards.
The room fell silent, except for the panting of the boys and the slow, furious breathing of their dad. “Get up,” he ordered. “Get up, clean up that mess, and apologize for your stupid, stupid behavior.” The boys lay there, looking stricken. “Dammit, I mean now!” he bellowed, grabbing each boy by an upper arm, and yanking with a force and a fury I had never seen in him before. Jenny stared at him, shocked, as the boys—flushed and frightened-looking—scrambled to their feet and hurried to the kitchen for the broom and the Dustbuster.
“Jeff?” She said it slowly; carefully; as if unsure whether the man in front of her was her accountant husband or a psychotic mental patient.
Jeff squeezed his eyes tightly closed, and drew a deep breath, then let it out slowly before opening his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just . . . I’m sorry.”
“It’s a lot to process,” I said. I looked at Jenny, who still seemed shaken. “Why don’t y’all go on home. I’ll clean this up. To be honest, I could use the distraction. Ever since I heard the news, I’ve been about to jump out of my skin. I expect we’re all feeling edgy. Even them.” I nodded toward the kitchen, just as the boys emerged, cleaning implements in hand.
“Grandpa Bill, I’m so sorry,” said Tyler. “I didn’t mean to break your lamp, and I . . . I’ll buy you . . .” He stopped, and I saw tears coursing down his face.
“Oh, honey, it’s okay,” I said, gathering him in my arms, feeling him begin to sob. “I know you didn’t mean to.” A moment later, I felt Walker burrowing against us, and I widened my arms to take him in, too. They were quite an armful—hardly boys anymore—yet at this moment, they seemed small and vulnerable. “Everything will be okay,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen to any of us. I promise.” They squeezed more tightly against me. “And you know what else, guys? For forty years, I have secretly hated that damn lamp.”
THAT NIGHT I HAD A DREAM, AND IN MY DREAM, I could hear Satterfield’s voice inside my head, taunting me. “You should have let Decker kill me,” he said. “He had the chance, and he wanted to, but you said no. You chose mercy over justice. A foolish choice. Now all your family will die. Everything you ever loved will die.”
I called Decker, still in my dream, to ask him to save my family once more. Decker had reasons of his own to consider the job, for Decker hated Satterfield even more than I did. Deck’s younger brother, a bomb-squad technician, had died back in 1992 in a search of Satterfield’s booby-trapped house. Years later, Decker himself had nearly died, when Satterfield managed to cut his throat. It happened in a fight at the prison where Decker had gone to interview him.
Decker agreed to help, but on one condition: Only under a black flag. No arrest. No trial. Only summary execution.
“A black flag,” I agreed.
In my dream. But it was only a dream. Wasn’t it?
CHAPTER 22
WAS IT THE EFFECT THE ARCHITECT INTENDED, OR was it just my paranoid or guilty imagination? Every time I passed between the severe, three-story concrete columns flanking the entrance to the FBI building, I felt as if I’d been zapped with a shrink-ray, as if I were some Lilliputian prisoner, stepping into a mammoth, marble-floored prison cell.
The building’s lobby was equally disorienting, as ornate as the exterior was austere. Floored and walled in marble and gilding, the space looked as if it had been teleported from a fancy hotel or investment bank. Did the concrete-and-brick exterior and the opulent lobby really belong to the same building? If so, the building was suffering from bipolar disorder or maybe multiple personalities.
My architectural overanalyzing was cut short by the opening of a door and the emergence of Angela Price, wearing a no-nonsense suit and no-nonsense face—exactly the face I had pictured during my uncomfortable call with her, a few days and a lifetime earlier, when all I’d had to worry about was a simple hate crime—hate that wasn’t directed at me or my family.
“Dr. Brockton,” she greeted me, extending a hand and shaking mine with a grip that was coolly consistent with the rest of her.
I had once made the mistake of addressing her as “Angela,” and her swift, acerbic correction—“it’s Special Agent Price”—ensured that I never made that particular mistake with her again.
“Special Agent Price,” I replied, nodding gravely.
“Actually, it’s Special Agent in Charge Price,” she said. “I’m running the field office now.” She turned and headed off, talking over her shoulder. “We’re in the main conference room. Right this way.” She headed briskly through the doorway and down a hall—a beige, drywalled, fluorescent-lighted corridor that seemed to have no connection to the lavish lobby—and I hurried to keep up.
She slowed but did not stop at a wide, walnut door labeled CONFI, twisting a brushed nickel handle and pushing the door inward. It opened to reveal a massive table, five feet wide by a dozen feet long, surrounded by an assortment of law enforcement officers, many of whom I’d known for years. Several were in uniform—the dark blue of the Knoxville Police Department and the Knox County Sheriff’s Office—but most wore crisp dress shirts and tightly cinched ties: the unofficial but regulation uniform donned daily by detectives and agents of the FBI, TBI, and KPD.
“All right, gentlemen, let’s get to it,” she said, taking the chair at the head of the table. “We’ve got a bad guy—a really, really bad guy—on the loose. It’s the mission of this task force to find him and put him where he belongs. In prison—or in the ground.” Her bluntness surprised me, and as I glanced around the table, I saw a few other faces that appeared startled . . . and several that looked grim and gratified. “You didn’t hear that from me,” she added. “But no kidding, this guy’s a menace, and we’ve got to nail him. And fast.” With no further ado, she had each person around the table introduce himself—she was the only woman in the room—and talk about his agency’s contribution to the manhunt. One of the group was present only acoustically: my old pal Pete Brubaker, the retired FBI profiler, linked to the meeting by speakerphone.
I knew and liked and respected all these people. For decades, after all, I had worked with the best homicide investigators that local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies had to offer, and if ever there were a case that called for pulling out all the stops, this was it: a sadistic serial killer on the loose again, a bloody trail of new bodies already in his wake.
First to talk was Wellington Meffert, a TBI agent generally known by the deceptively deprecating nickname “Bubba.” I was surprised to see him here, as Steve Morgan had said Meffert was seriously ill with cancer. But I was grateful, too, for multiple reasons. Bubba and I had worked the first Satterfield case—Satterfield 1, perhaps we should call it—more than twenty years before. Now gray at the temples and gaunt to the point of looking skeletal—from the ca
ncer, or from the chemotherapy that would kill either the cancer or himself—Meffert was one of the TBI’s senior agents. “As you’ve probably heard,” he began, “Satterfield didn’t just kill the two EMTs in the ambulance. He also killed—or had accomplices kill—the families of a prison guard and the prison doctor.”
Price interrupted him. “Any leads on those killings yet?”
Meffert shook his head. “Not yet. Both in isolated homes. We’re interviewing neighbors, but none of ’em are close, so we might not get much. We know the doctor’s wife was alive at the time of the escape, because he talked to her. And we know she was dead an hour after the escape, because that’s when a sheriff’s deputy found the body. Could Satterfield have gotten to her in that period, or was she killed by an accomplice right after she got off the phone? Don’t know.”
“And what about the prison guard’s wife and son?” Price asked. “Any telephone contact with them around the time of the escape?”
“None,” said Meffert. “We’re also interviewing inmates, but as you know, that poses challenges of its own. The bad news is, this was a well-coordinated plan. The good news is, it was complex, which could work to our advantage.” I glanced around the table, and judging by the expressions on other people’s faces, I wasn’t the only one puzzled by the advantage Meffert claimed we had. “This thing had lots of moving parts,” Meffert explained. “Somebody got him those pig guts. Somebody fed him information about the guard’s family and the doctor’s family. There were lots of links in this chain of events. At least one of those links is weak, and when we pull hard enough . . .” He hooked together his thumbs and index fingers, then yanked them apart. “Snap.”
