Without Mercy Read online

  “No,” I said. “I know it doesn’t always work out that way. All I know is, it feels like I’ve got something stuck in my teeth—stuck in my brain—and it’s driving me crazy.”

  “And going back to the scene would be . . . mental floss?” I groaned. It was a dreadful pun, and I fervently wished I’d thought of it myself.

  “Mental floss,” I agreed. “Unless I go back and take another look, I’m not gonna be able to concentrate on teaching. Or grading. Or, especially, on reading your dissertation.”

  “A low blow,” she said. “Look, I just can’t go. I’ve got to get ready to defend my dissertation. But good luck chasing that wild goose.”

  I NEARLY MISSED THE INTERSTATE EXIT FOR JONESPORT. I was in the left lane, passing a Walmart truck, when I noticed the exit only a few hundred yards ahead. “Well, crap,” I muttered, flooring the gas pedal. Barely clearing the front bumper of the semi, I whipped across the right lane and rocketed onto the ramp, then hit the brakes to avoid careening through the stop sign just ahead. The Walmart truck roared past, the horn blaring long and loud, the driver justifiably angry. “Sorry,” I said to the truck’s rear bumper as it barreled on. “Didn’t mean to be a jerk.”

  The near miss spiked my adrenaline and also jolted me back to the present—a helpful place to be, given that it would take some concentration to find my way back up to the death scene. I’d considered calling the sheriff’s office and asking if either O’Conner or Waylon could go with me, but in the end, I decided I’d rather be there alone, free to spend as much time as I wanted, unburdened by conversation or by the distraction of feeling watched as I rambled aimlessly, looking for . . . what? I had no idea.

  The road up the mountain was now carpeted with leaves, mostly the bright yellow of tulip poplars. The sound of the tires was muted by the foliage, the normal crunch of gravel replaced by a rushing, swishing sound, almost like wind through treetops: almost as if the leaves contained the sound of the wind within themselves.

  At the fork in the road, I bore right, then stopped at the locked gate that blocked the road to the tumbledown ruins of Wasp. Here the fresh leaf fall was so heavy that leaves swirled around my boots as I shuffled through them. When I reached the tree to which the victim had been chained, I stopped and ran my fingers through the groove in the bark, horrified all over again by the young man’s cruel captivity, his ceaseless circling, and his eventual violent death.

  I was probably on a fool’s errand, I realized: anything we hadn’t seen and collected the day we worked the scene with O’Conner and Waylon would be completely hidden now. If I’d been thinking more clearly, I’d have brought a leaf blower, and as I pictured myself wielding it, I couldn’t help but smile at the absurdity of the image: an egghead professor blowing leaves in a half-million acres of forest. “For my encore, folks,” I announced to the watching trees, “I’ll collect every grain of sand off Miami Beach.”

  As if in response to my words, the wind kicked up, dislodging still more leaves from the other trees in the area. “Thank you,” I said as leaves floated down. “Thank you so much. Very helpful!”

  Almost as if in response, the breeze eddied and swirled, creating small cyclones of golden leaves around the base of the dead tulip poplar. I looked down, delighted, as the leaves spun upward from my feet.

  And that’s when I saw it—a brief flash of light, coming from a crevice in the tree’s craggy roots. One brief glint of something small and shiny. Metallic and foreign. Anomalous and therefore interesting. I tried reaching in with my index finger and thumb to extricate the object, but the gap in the roots was too narrow to accommodate both my fingers. Forceps: forceps would fit, but I had driven my own truck to the mountains this time, not the Anthropology Department’s truck, with its cargo bed full of tools and implements. Scanning the ground nearby, I found a promising-looking twig, about the diameter of a pencil. Man the Toolmaker, I thought. Angling the twig downward between the roots, I worked one end beneath the small, silvery object and gave the twig a small, deft flick. Trouble was, the flick was neither as small nor as deft as I’d intended. The silvery object catapulted upward, tumbling end over glinting end, and then disappeared beneath the layer of leaves, as if burrowing for safety.

  “Crap,” I muttered. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire.” I studied the spot where I thought it had gone under, doing my best to pinpoint the location before I moved. Then, still eyeing the spot, I crawled to it on all fours and stuck the twig into the ground as a reference point: a central point from which to begin searching, spiraling my way outward inch by inch, leaf by leaf. Amazing, I soon realized, how very many leaves there are on the floor of a national forest in late October. Equally amazing was how difficult it was to find a small metallic object nestled within those leaves.

  Half an hour later—a mountainous pile of leaves later—I glimpsed it again, this time dropping from a handful of leaves I was sifting, as if it were making another bid for freedom. “Ha! Gotcha,” I exclaimed, laying aside the leaves and bending down to examine my prize.

  It was a cylindrical fitting of some sort, roughly the diameter of the end of my pinkie finger and less than half an inch long. The widest part was a sort of collar at one end, with flat facets on its rim that appeared designed to be gripped, by a small wrench or pliers. The collar was attached to the body of the cylinder in a way that allowed it to rotate, to spin freely without coming off. The collar’s inner surface was threaded, to allow the fitting—a female coupling—to be screwed onto a male coupling. I stared at it, recognizing yet not quite recognizing the shape. It was a familiar object, a doodad I’d seen many times, but something was missing, some crucial piece of context I needed to identify it.

  As I turned it over and over in my palm, gradually I ceased to look at the object and began instead to feel it, and I realized that I knew it not just by sight but by touch: My fingertips recognized the object. It was something I’d not only seen but had used; had connected and disconnected many times, twisting the collar to loosen or tighten the coupling, to connect or disconnect a video cable. The cable was the missing piece of context—the cable that must have connected to the back of a television set or a modem or a DVD player. “Or a video camera,” I murmured, feeling a rising sense of horror as the implications sank in. It’s all on video, I thought. Somewhere out there—somewhere near here—some sick bastard has the whole thing on video.

  I hoped that we could find it.

  And I prayed that we couldn’t.

  PART TWO

  The Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last

  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  —W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

  CHAPTER 18

  South Central Correctional Facility

  Clifton, Tennessee

  IT WAS NEARLY NOVEMBER, YET THE EXERCISE YARD shimmered with unseasonal warmth, the masonry walls and concrete basketball court basking in the midday sun. Leaning against the wall of the mess hall, two guards, Testerman and Burchfield, sought the scrap of shade created by the stingy geometry of the roofline, wall, and angle of solar incidence.

  Out on the cracked court, ten shirtless men—six black, two Hispanic, two white, killers all of one sort or another—shoved and elbowed and jockeyed in a tight scrum. The wet slaps of skin on sweaty skin mingled with grunts and muttered curses, the scuffing of leather soles, and the clatter of the basketball rattling the rusty rim bolted loosely to the backboard.

  Suddenly inmate number 00255787—the tall, muscled white man named Satterfield—bellowed and dropped to his knees beneath the goal, both hands clutching his belly. Blood oozed across his knuckles and poured onto the pavement, and glistening loops of intestine protruded between his splayed fingers.

  The guards, both of them hefty men, heaved themselves off from the wall and lumbered toward the prisoners, fumbling at their belts for the only weapons they were allowed to carry inside: small canisters of pepper spray�
��absurd, sissified stand-ins for guns. Shit, Testerman thought for the thousandth time, a man can carry a gun anywhere in Tennessee except the one place he needs it most—in a bunch of cold-blooded killers. It was a favorite complaint of his. Like sending a soldier into battle with a damn slingshot.

  “Break it up, break it up,” Testerman shouted, bulling his way through the sweaty bodies. The nine standing men had bunched up around Satterfield, either spectating or camouflaging, or—most likely—both: watching the action, while also making sure the guards couldn’t. Sons of bitches, Testerman thought.

  A long, bloody shank glistened on the concrete beside Satterfield, and Testerman’s first move was to plant his left boot over the business end of the thing. From the round shaft and hexagonal head protruding from beneath his midsole, Testerman saw that it had been crafted from a six-inch bolt, the threads scraped against concrete for weeks or even months to hone a wicked, scalpel-like blade at one end. An opportunistic eye, a deft hand, and infinite patience: any inmate who possessed that unholy trinity of attributes could, sooner or later, procure a piece of metal and fashion a weapon sharp enough to stab a stoolie or gut a guard.

  Testerman’s trigger finger twitched atop the pepper spray. “Jesus,” he said, seeing the blood and entrails. Over his shoulder, without taking his eyes off the prisoners, he shouted to Burchfield: “Call for some backup. And a stretcher.” Glancing around the group, he said, “Anybody wanna tell me who did this?” No one spoke. “Thought not. Too bad—I was gonna write up a commendation. Y’all go over there and line up along the fence. Go on now. Git.”

  Once they were twenty feet away, Testerman set down the pepper spray and reached into the lower thigh pocket of his cargo pants, tugging out a pair of purple nitrile gloves. In Testerman’s mind, the gloves were even more essential than the pepper spray. In here, one man in every three was HIV-positive; in here, blood and saliva and semen erupted like deadly little geysers on a daily or even hourly basis. After his hands were protected, he took another pair of gloves from his pocket, and—removing his boot from the bloody shank—he slid the weapon carefully into the purple sleeve of the index finger, using the glove as a makeshift bag, not worrying much about whether he smeared whatever fingerprints might’ve been on the shaft. He knotted the second glove around the blade and tucked it into his shirt pocket, careful not to pierce either the glove or himself. Only then did he turn his cursory attention to the wounded man.

  Eyeing the bloody coils spilling through the clawlike fingers, Testerman shook his head slowly. “Satterfield, Satterfield,” he said, a grim smile spreading across his face. “Couldn’t’ve happened to a nicer guy.” He sat back on his heels, musing, then nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a whole mess of chitlins hanging out of your belly there, stud. You might just bleed out right here in the yard.” He chewed the inside of one cheek, musing. “Yep. Infirmary’s probably pretty busy today. Might just take a while for them to get here with a stretcher. Might just take quite a while, matter of fact.”

  Satterfield spoke through clenched teeth. “Listen to me, you fat fuck. I’ve got friends. Friends in here, and friends outside. You let me die and you’ll wish you hadn’t. Now and for the rest of your sorry little life.”

  The guard snorted. “I don’t think so.”

  “Think again,” Satterfield muttered. “What’s the name of that good-lookin’ little wife you’ve got, with the blond hair and the hot body? Christie? And that boy of yours—Sammy?”

  Testerman’s face hardened. “You shut your mouth,” he snarled. “Don’t you ever talk about my family.”

  “Sammy,” Satterfield went on, as if he hadn’t heard. “Something’s not right with Sammy. Autistic, or something? But making progress, I hear.”

  “I’m warning you, Satterfield. You keep talking, I’ll finish you off myself.”

  “I’m thinking it might set Sammy back a bit if he was to see a few days’ worth of bad things happen to his mama. Really bad things. What do you think, Testerman?”

  “I think you’re a dead man, Satterfield. You can’t touch them.”

  “Can’t I? They’re at your place on the lake right now,” he said. “Got there about an hour ago. She called to tell you they’d made it. Said it took an extra thirty minutes because there was a wreck on I-24.” Testerman stared at him now, wild-eyed, trying to figure out how the hell Satterfield could possibly know that. Could the inmate really have enough connections on both the outside and the inside to keep track of her? “She didn’t tell you she had company, because she didn’t know it yet. But she knows it now. You better bet she knows it now.” The guard’s jaw clenched rhythmically, twin knots of muscle throbbing on either side. “Here’s the deal, Testerman,” Satterfield went on. “If I don’t make it to the infirmary in five minutes, you’re gonna have one hell of a mess to clean up at that cabin. And one fucked-up retard of a motherless child.”

  The guard’s chest heaved, his nostrils flaring, electro-shocks of rage pulsing down his beefy shoulders and arms and into his twitching fists. “You sick sonofabitch,” he hissed at Satterfield. “If I find out you’re messing with me, I’ll strangle you with your own guts.” Then—over his shoulder, loud and urgent: “Burchfield! We need that stretcher! And I mean now!”

  CHAPTER 19

  OVER THE COURSE OF SIXTEEN YEARS AT THE PRISON’S infirmary, Asa Dillworth, M.D., had seen thousands of bites, hundreds of fractures, and scores of stab wounds—some minor, others fatal. A skull shattered with a baseball bat to protest an umpire’s call at home plate in a softball game. A loose eyeball gouged out by a thumb in a lovers’ quarrel. An ear bitten off during a dining-hall food fight that got out of hand. But never before had he seen a man clutching two handfuls of his own intestines.

  Dr. Dillworth whistled appreciatively. “That’s a hell of an incision,” he said to Satterfield. “I’m amazed you’re conscious.”

  “I’m tough,” Satterfield said. His voice was barely above a whisper, and the doctor had to lean down to hear him.

  “I need you to move your hands so I can get a better look.”

  “Doc?” Satterfield’s voice was barely audible now. “I need to tell you something important.” The doctor bent closer, not without trepidation. Was it possible this guy was about to go Hannibal Lecter on him? Lunge up and chew off his face? “Doc, you need to call your wife on her cell phone. Don’t tell anyone what you’re doing, or why. Stay right where I can see you and hear you. Call her right now, and keep your mouth shut and listen. Then put me in an ambulance.” Dillworth stared at Satterfield, uncomprehending. “Better hurry, Doc,” the inmate whispered. His eyes bored into the physician’s like lasers. “There’s not much time. For me or your wife.”

  Leaving the baffled nurse standing on the other side of the gurney, awaiting his instructions, Dillworth backpedaled a step, fumbling in a pocket for his cell phone. After a few moments he opened his mouth to speak, but whatever he heard on the other end of the line made him keep quiet. He listened, his eyes darting back and forth, as if he were watching a high-speed tennis match that he found terrifying. Sixty seconds later he closed the phone, his face ashen. “We’ve got to get this man to the hospital right away,” he said to the nurse.

  Ten minutes later, an ambulance backed up to the infirmary’s loading dock, the doctor and nurse standing on either side of the gurney where Satterfield lay, the sheet over his belly glistening with blood. The two EMTs looked startled—disbelieving, even, when the doctor told them the patient had been partially eviscerated. In response, Dillworth raised the sheet to reveal the bloody coils, still clutched by Satterfield. “Holy shit,” said the younger of the two, the driver.

  “Take him on our gurney,” said the doctor. “It’ll save time, and he shouldn’t be moved. You can leave yours here for now.”

  “What have you done so far?” the older one asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? What do you mean, nothing?”

  “I mean nothing.”

/>   “How much blood has he lost?” The doctor made no response. “What are his vitals?” The doctor shook his head enigmatically. “Is he in shock?”

  At that, Dillworth lifted a hand, as if asking for silence or bestowing a blessing, then turned and walked away. Baffled, the EMTs looked to the nurse. She shrugged apologetically and said, “Don’t ask me. Dr. Dillworth said not to touch him. Said we didn’t have time, and there was nothing we could do. That’s all I know.”

  “Christ,” said the older EMT. “This guy could code any second. Let’s go.” Together the medics maneuvered the gurney into the ambulance and secured it, then the younger man latched the rear door and hurried to the driver’s seat.

  He hit the siren as soon as he cleared the prison gate and turned onto the long, straight stretch of highway headed toward town. His older colleague—riding in back with the patient—unbuckled his seat belt, leaned over the gurney, and put his stethoscope on the blood-smeared chest. His face registered surprise when he heard the heart. He’d expected it to be weak and irregular, but it thumped strongly, seventy beats a minute, steady as a metronome. He folded down the sheet far enough to expose one of the man’s biceps and cinched a blood-pressure cuff around the arm. The reading—120 over 80—was better than the EMT’s own blood pressure. “Damn, hoss, you’re one strong son of a gun,” the medic said to Satterfield. If Satterfield heard, there was no sign of it; his eyes remained closed, his face clamped in what seemed a permanent grimace of pain. “Let’s just take a closer look at that belly.”

  The EMT folded back the sheet far enough to expose Satterfield’s bloody hands, still clutching the coils of intestine. “Can you hear me?” he asked. There was no response. “I think I’d best irrigate this mess with betadine,” the EMT went on, “and then wrap it. If you were to lose consciousness and let go, your insides might be all over the floor. Not good.” He took hold of Satterfield’s wrists and lifted them up, then laid them on the gurney beside him. Just then the ambulance hit a bump, and the gurney jounced. The pile of intestines jiggled and shifted. Then—as the EMT made a frantic but unsuccessful grab for them—they slid sideways and down, landing on his feet with a sticky plop. “Oh shit,” he gasped. Then: “What the hell?” The patient’s belly was covered with blood, but the gaping wound the EMT expected to see—the wound through which the intestines had emerged—was simply not there. The EMT ran an exploratory hand over the skin to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him.