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“Ah. For revenge. Satterfield was in the navy, and he wanted to be a SEAL. He was on the verge of getting in—there’s a scary thought—but then he killed a woman, a stripper in San Diego. No, wait—Tijuana. Anyhow, I was called in to consult—one of the navy prosecutors was a former student of mine—and I was the one who found the evidence that the woman had been strangled.”
“Her hyoid was broken?”
I nodded, smiling. “Bingo. But Satterfield was never tried. They had a circumstantial case, but no direct evidence. So all that happened was, he got kicked out of the navy.”
“You’re kidding. That’s it?”
“That’s it. But in his mind, I destroyed his dream. Ruined his life.”
She took a moment to process this. “And then, instead of dying a painful death with your family, you lived—and helped put him behind bars.” I nodded again. “So these twenty wasted years—”
“Twenty-four,” I corrected.
“These twenty-four wasted years—also your fault?”
“I haven’t asked him, but that’d be my guess.”
“Jesus,” she said. “He’s coming, and he’s pissed.”
Never one to mince words, Miranda. “That,” I agreed, “would be my guess. He’s probably coming, and he’s definitely pissed.”
CHAPTER 25
MY CELL PHONE RANG, AND I SAW THAT THE CALL was from Decker. “Hey, Deck,” I said. “Is the cavalry all saddled up and ready to ride?”
“Cavalry? Hmm,” he grunted. “Hope we make out better than Custer did at Little Bighorn. You coming?”
“Am I invited?”
“Sure you are,” he said. “I mean, if you want to be.”
“Absolutely. If you don’t think I’ll get in the way—or get shot.”
“Well, dang,” he said. “I was counting on you to draw fire away from my entry team, but if that’s how you feel, I reckon you can hang out with me in the command post instead.”
“Deal,” I told him. “I wouldn’t want to show up your men.”
“You wanna ride with me?”
“Sure. Can’t think of a safer place to be.”
“Ha,” he said. “Never ridden with me, have you? But if you’re feeling brave and want to come along, meet me in the south parking lot at KPD. We’ll roll out in about an hour.”
THE KNOXVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT OCCUPIED A drab, hulking four-story building of brick and concrete atop Summit Hill, situated across a low valley from the city’s downtown. Through the valley flowed the concrete ditch called First Creek and the concrete freeway called James White Parkway, both of them spanned by a series of bridges, some old and graceful, others new and boring.
By and large, Decker’s SWAT team members were built like linebackers and shorn like soldiers: muscled but not fat; clean-shaven, most of them sporting crew cuts and flattops. If there was a mustache or beard anywhere, I didn’t see it. Clearly they took their physical training seriously, which made sense, given the heavy thuddings and clankings of their bulletproof vests and high-powered weaponry.
If I hadn’t known the target to be a lone wolf, I’d have thought the team was about to invade a third world country. Fifteen or twenty men in fatigues and vests were milling about—it was hard to count accurately, as they were coming and going between KPD’s basement and a small fleet of vehicles, lugging equipment and an astonishing assortment of weaponry. I saw short-barreled shotguns, long-barreled sniper rifles, military-style automatic assault rifles, belts of machine-gun ammunition, and what appeared to be a cross between a 1920s Tommy gun and the world’s biggest six-shooter, which Decker appeared to be loading with the world’s largest bullets. “What the hell is that?” I asked. “It looks like something Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis might use in a Hollywood shoot-’em-up.”
He grinned happily. “It’s a forty-millimeter grenade launcher.”
“Grenades? Jesus, Deck. You guys don’t mess around, do you?”
“We don’t,” he said, “but we’re not using it to fire fragmentation grenades.” Was I imagining it, or was there a trace of wistfulness in his voice? “It’s the kinder, gentler grenade launcher. Tear gas or pepper powder or foam batons or distractants.”
“Distractants?”
“Flashbangs. Stun grenades.” He flipped open the weapon’s rotary cylinder, then slid one of the cartoonishly big shells from its chamber and handed it to me. It was three inches long and nearly two inches in diameter. “It’s got a one-and-a-half-second delay. Shoot it through a window, and bam, it goes off with enough noise and light and shock wave to disorient the bad guy for about five seconds.” I nodded; I knew—from a narrow-escape personal experience several years before—what a blinding, deafening punch a stun grenade packed.
I carefully handed it back to him, and he reloaded it, flipped the cylinder back into place, and laid the weapon in the back of his truck, atop a heap of other weapons of various sizes and shapes. Amid the blocky, angular black guns, I noticed an odd outlier nestled against the wheel well. A softly lustrous silver, it appeared scuffed and old—antique, almost, yet also futuristic, like some nineteenth-century imagining of a twentieth-century weapon. I pointed at it. “What’s that one? That looks almost like it should be in a museum.”
“It should be.” He reached in, hauled it out, and held it up, grinning. “It’s an M3 submachine gun. From World War II. Better known as a grease gun.”
“That’s a grease gun?” He nodded. I peered at the weapon. It had a pistol grip, a stubby barrel, a long ammunition clip, and a bare-bones shoulder stock, if stock was the right word for a U-shaped length of quarter-inch steel rod. The gun’s central feature, to which all these components attached, was a fat cylindrical body, the size and shape of an oversized tube of caulk. Unlike any other gun I’d ever seen, this one appeared to be made of sheet metal—a cylinder of stamped and rolled sheet metal—rather than a solid block of machined steel. Decker handed me the gun, and I raised it to my shoulder. It was surprisingly light, owing, I surmised, to its sheet-metal construction. “This is amazing,” I said. “I’ve heard of these, but never seen one. It’s called a grease gun because of the shape?”
He nodded. “Exactly. Looks like the gizmo your auto mechanic uses to squirt lube into your wheel bearings. Although this one squirts .45-caliber pistol bullets.”
The gun was fascinating; also puzzling. “And . . . you actually use this? No offense, but it looks obsolete.”
He chuckled. “It is obsolete, but I love it. We’ve got six, and yeah, we use ’em.” He took it from me, slid a finger into the chamber, and pulled it back. I heard a click that I recognized as the sound of a trigger cocking. “You see how simple this is? A lot simpler than any of our other automatic weapons. We carry these if we’re wearing hazmat suits and respirators and gloves—if we’re going into a meth lab, for instance. The barrel’s short, so t
he accuracy’s not terrific. But for close quarters? It’s a great get-off-me gun.”
The loading up continued all around us—more and more weaponry packed into formidable vehicles by police who looked like commandos—and I couldn’t hold back the question. “I gotta ask, Deck. Y’all really need all this firepower here in scruffy little Knoxville?”
He was returning the grease gun to the heap of weapons in the back of his truck. He paused and turned to look at me, giving a shrug that was more a gesture of politeness than an indication of doubt. “Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”
I RODE WITH DECKER AT THE HEAD OF A SMALL convoy, in his black, rubber-coated Expedition, the heavily tinted windows giving the blue-sky day a dusky aspect, as if the sun were partially eclipsed. Directly behind us was an olive-drab Humvee—“up-armored,” Decker explained, with half-inch steel doors, and bulletproof windows that could keep out anything smaller than .50-caliber ammunition. Behind that came the mammoth armored vehicle the SWAT team had euphemistically dubbed the BFT—an acronym for “big fuckin’ truck,” Decker explained, his sheepishness mixed with obvious pride. The BFT—with room inside for twenty SWAT team members and their weapons—was built to repel not just gunfire but chemical, biological, and radiological assaults, too. If Armageddon came calling on East Tennessee, the inside of the BFT was clearly the place with the best odds of survival.
As we barreled east on I-40, we attracted more than a few stares from passing motorists, as well as a fairly equal mixture of thumbs-up signs and worried frowns. But not even the unhappiest frowners, I noticed, dared to flip us off.
After winding along River Road into downtown Jonesport, we rendezvoused behind the courthouse with one of O’Conner’s deputies. “The sheriff and Waylon’s up yonder near the Shiflett place with your recon team,” he told Decker. The SWAT team commander had sent a pair of two-man teams up the night before—two spotters and two snipers—to get eyes on the suspect, if possible. They’d glimpsed lights on in the house, barely visible behind heavy curtains, but they hadn’t seen any movement. O’Conner and Decker had talked strategy at daybreak; they had considered simply waiting until Shiflett emerged, then surrounding his truck, the way the FBI had nabbed some of the Oregon protesters when they left the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to drive to a nearby town. “Trouble is, he could hole up there for weeks or months,” O’Conner said. “He’s totally off the grid, which means we can’t cut off his water or power. He’s a survivalist from way back, which means he’s got months’ worth of food and water stockpiled. I don’t have the resources to sit on him that long. Besides, if he gets wind of us, he’ll just sneak out—he grew up in these mountains, and his wilderness skills are good.”
