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“Would y’all like me to send you copies of the x-rays and CT scans? That way, you guys can tell me if I’ve misread anything,” I said. “Besides, the images might be useful for training, too—give your folks some interesting insight into blast-related trauma.”
“That’d be great, Doc,” said Kidder. “I’m glad you passed this along. I think maybe it explains something we’ve been wondering about up here at the scene. Something that doesn’t add up.”
“Such as?”
“There’s a shed in the woods here where our detectors are going crazy. Alerting for dynamite, nitroglycerin, ammonium nitrate, C-4, and a couple other things only demolition experts have ever heard of.”
“Y’all be careful taking that stuff out,” I said.
“No need to be, Doc. The shed’s empty. The detectors are alerting on residues. Only residues. Leftover traces of stuff that isn’t here anymore.”
“So you’re saying there was a lot of stuff in the shed at some point—”
“No. Recently. Very recently.”
“But now it’s gone?”
“Gone, baby, gone,” he said. “And from what you just told me about Jimmy Ray Shiflett and his afternoon snack, I’m thinking somebody besides him cleaned out that shed.”
I had a bad feeling. “So what you’re saying, Tim, is that we might be looking for a killer who’s got explosives and isn’t afraid to use them?”
“Not ‘might be’ looking, Doc. Are looking. I just hope we find him fast.”
“I’ll let you get to it,” I said. “And I’ll get those x-rays and scans to you right away.” He thanked me and hung up.
I turned, with a sigh, to page seven in Miranda’s dissertation and resumed reading, my eyelids instantly feeling heavy. I’d slogged through only a paragraph when my door suddenly boomed with a frantic pounding. I whirled in my chair, muttering, “What the—”
“Doc? You in there? Dr. Brockton!”
My heart still hammering, I unlocked the door—I’d been careful to lock it, ever since Satterfield’s escape—and opened it. “Jesus, Deck, you scared the living crap out of me. What the hell?”
“Is it true, what I heard about Shiflett?” His eyes were wild, and he looked almost unhinged.
“Come on in, Deck,” I said, in what I hoped was a calming voice. “Have a seat, and tell me what you heard.”
He came in, but he didn’t—wouldn’t—sit down. Instead, he paced back and forth, back and forth, like a caged tiger. “I heard his face was blown off. His face and part of his hand.”
“Yes, that’s true. And his neck was broken.”
“Dammit, Doc, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Hell, Deck, I just found out. I just got out of the autopsy suite an hour ago.”
“But you saw him—you saw his face and his hand—up there at the scene. Yesterday! Why didn’t you call me?”
“What difference does it make, Deck? Why are you so upset?”
He whirled on me, furious now. “Christ almighty, Doc, don’t you see? It’s him. Satterfield.”
“The dead guy? No way.”
“No, goddammit!” he shouted. “Not the dead guy—the killer, dumb-ass! Don’t you remember what Satterfield did to the pizza delivery guy, twenty-four years ago? He killed the guy, traded clothes with him, and put a stick of dynamite in the kid’s mouth, with his hands around it. We had his house surrounded, zipped up tight, but he drove off in that shitty delivery car with the Domino’s signs, right under our noses. Thirty minutes later, bam! We go charging in, and it looks like Satterfield has offed himself.” He stared at me angrily. “How can you not even remember that?”
“I never saw that, Deck,” I reminded him gently. “I wasn’t there, remember? Y’all told me to stay away. I left my office and drove home—with Satterfield hiding in the back of my own truck. The Trojan horse, 1992-style. Thank God my assistant slowed him down, and you came charging in.”
“I should’ve blown his head off,” Decker said bitterly.
“I should’ve let you,” I admitted. “But hindsight’s always 20/20, right? So here we are.”
It was easy now to understand Decker’s agitation, because his brother—a bomb-squad technician—had died at Satterfield’s house that day. Decker had struggled for years with PTSD, I knew—once, in my office years after his brother’s death, something had triggered Deck’s PTSD, and I’d had a hard time calming him. Lately, though—until this moment—he’d seemed recovered. But now, the more I grasped Decker’s distress, the more agitated I felt, too. “Deck, what makes you think Satterfield had any connection to Shiflett? Do you have anything linking them?”
“The MO links them. It’s exactly the same thing he did to the pizza guy. Almost exactly, anyhow. Only difference, that one was staged to look like a suicide, this one like an accident. But everything else? Explosive device detonated in the mouth, to throw us off the scent? Déjà vu all over again. It’s Satterfield, Doc. Has to be!”
I hoped he was wrong. But that, I feared, was too much to hope for.
CHAPTER 27
MY INTERCOM BEEPED, AND I GLARED AT IT IN ANNOYANCE. I was bleary and sleep deprived from another bad night: hours of restless thrashing punctuated by harrowing dreams of looming menace and terrible violence. Some of the dreams involved Satterfield, and some involved Shiflett, and one—the worst—involved both of them, teaming up to shove a blasting cap down my throat.
I resolved to ignore the call, but after half a dozen plaintive beeps, I couldn’t stand it anymore. Snatching up the phone, I resisted the urge to shout. “Yes?” My voice was steady, calm, and icy.
There was a pause, then Peggy—her voice carefully casual—said, “Are you shunning me?”
“What? No, of course not.” Am I? I wondered. Maybe.
“I’m just preoccupied.”
“Of course. Steve Morgan from the TBI is here. He’s brought something he says you’ll want to see. Shall I tell him you’re preoccupied?”
Ouch, I thought. “No, send him down. He’s been here before. He knows how to find me.” She rang off without saying good-bye. A fine mess you’ve made with her, I thought. Maybe our hand-holding was the opening of some sort of door to romance, or maybe it was simply a onetime fluke, a reflexive response to a scary scene in a movie. But I’d never know, if I kept acting as if it simply hadn’t happened. What’s more, I was introducing a barrier, a layer of awkwardness between Peggy and me, that hadn’t existed until now.
Five minutes later I heard the stairwell door open and close, followed by a staccato tap-tap-tapping at my chamber door. I unlocked and opened the door, and Steve entered, a U-Haul book box tucked under one arm. “Looks like you’ve brought me a present,” I said. “And it’s not even my birthday.” He set the box on my desk. “Can I shake it?”
“You could, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said. “You might want to glove up, though.”
My pulse quickening, I snagged a pair of gloves from the box I kept at the ready—most people keep tissues on their desktops, but forensic anthropologists keep gloves—and then pulled on the gloves. Beneath the cardboard flaps was a thick wad of bubble wrap, which I grasped and lifted gingerly. “Is this what I think it is?” Steve’s only answer was a one-shouldered shrug, accompanied by a we’ll-see hoist of his eyebrows. I laid the bubble wrap to the side before I peered into the box’s interior. “Yes,” I said, reaching in with both hands, my fingers meeting at the bottom of the box. Carefully, like a priest raising the Communion host to be sanctified, I lifted the object: a human skull, surely as much in need of a blessing as any loaf of bread ever was. The skull was clean and pale, except for a vivid mark on the forehead—a reddish-brown swastika, ragged and smeared, as if traced by a finger dripped in blood.
