Without Mercy Page 17

  “That’s right,” said O’Conner. “He left the army under some sort of cloud, if I remember right.”

  Waylon nodded. “Some kind of trouble in Afghanistan. Buncha villagers killed at what turned out to be a wedding. Way Shiflett tells it, the wedding was a cover for a Taliban get-together. He says the army’s done gone to the dogs—not lettin’ soldiers be soldiers. Lettin’ in all kinda riffraff—blacks and Hispanics and A-rabs. Course, them ain’t the words he used.”

  “Sounds like a prince,” Miranda observed.

  Waylon shrugged. “Shiflett says the real reason he got throwed out was for standing up for the white man. After he come back home, he took up with some of them militia folks over in North Carolina. I disremember the name of the group.”

  O’Conner pondered this a moment, then posed a question to the deputy. “You think he’d come in peacefully if we called and said we wanted to talk to him?”

  The big man’s face scrunched into an expression of disbelief. “Come in peaceful? Hell, no! He’d head for them hills like a scalded cat. He might be crazy, but he ain’t stupid. Long time ’fore that boy was a soldier, he was a hunter and a tracker, good as any I ever seen. If he gets wind we’re a-comin’, he’ll be gone just like that”—Waylon snapped his fingers—“and we won’t never catch sight of him no more.”

  “What if he doesn’t get wind of us?” the sheriff persisted. “What if we just show up at his door with a warrant—will he put up a fight?”

  Waylon guffawed. “Will a politician lie? Will a bear shit in the woods?” He shot a quick, abashed glance at Miranda. “Sorry for the language, Miss Miranda.”

  “I hear worse all the time,” she said. “Mostly from my own mouth.”

  “You could still bring in the feds,” I suggested. “Sure, they’d end up taking the case away and getting credit, but they also have the resources to do it.”

  “Beggin’ your pardon, Doc,” said Waylon, shifting his enormous frame, “but if Jim and me can’t bring him in, I don’t reckon the FBI can. Look at how long it took ’em to nab Eric Rudolph.”

  It was interesting to hear Rudolph come up again so soon after our meeting in Montgomery. “And he survived up in the mountains for, what, five years?” I asked.

  Waylon nodded. “Says he got by on acorns and salamanders, Dumpster scraps, that kind of thing. But word on the street is, he also got help from some Carolina militia folk. Them, and his crazy family.”

  “Crazy how?” asked Miranda.

  Waylon snorted. “His brother cut off his own hand with a power saw—on purpose—and sent it up to the FBI. ‘A message,’ he called it.”

  I had either missed or forgotten that piece of the story. “And the message,” I said, “was, ‘we’re all nuts here’?”

  “I’m guessing the FBI got it,” said O’Conner, “loud and clear.”

  I wanted to get back to the case at hand. The problem at hand. “But y’all think there’s a high risk our suspect, Jimmy Ray Shiflett, could cut and run.” Waylon and O’Conner both nodded. “Or put up a serious fight?”

  “Hell, he’s probly got enough guns up there at his place to start a war,” Waylon said. “Dynamite and such, too.”

  “Well,” I pointed out, “that could be an argument for bringing in the FBI.”

  O’Conner shifted in his seat, looking uncomfortable. “Yes and no,” he said. “Here’s my issue with the FBI. I don’t give a rat’s ass who gets credit for bringing him in, if he did this. What worries me is, there’s a lot of distrust of the federal government up here. Some of it goes back eighty years. Some families are still pissed off about the park.” I nodded; Great Smoky Mountains National Park was America’s most heavily visited park, but its creation had taken a toll on hundreds of hardscrabble mountain families, forced off their land for the sake of a park for tourists. “I’m just imagining a convoy of FBI armored vehicles rolling in here,” the sheriff continued. “I hate to say it, but I’m afraid things could get ugly; spiral out of hand. You’d be surprised how many folks up here believe the stories about jackbooted soldiers and black helicopters and the New World Order. I’d hate to see this turn into some sort of Waco.”

  I had an idea. “Would they be less freaked out by Knoxville police? KPD has a great SWAT team. They serve a lot of high-risk warrants, and this guy Shiflett sounds about as high-risk as they come.” O’Conner drummed his fingers, pondering the suggestion. “Sure, they’re outsiders, too,” I conceded, “but they’re East Tennessee outsiders. Some of them probably have kinfolk up here.”

  O’Conner pondered further, then looked inquiringly at his deputy. Waylon answered the unspoken question with a fine-by-me shrug. “Sold,” said the sheriff. “I’ll make the call.”

  I took out my cell phone, searched my contacts for “KPD Decker,” then slid the phone across the desk. “Captain Brian Decker. The SWAT team commander. He’s a good guy.”

  O’Conner looked mildly surprised, then smiled, took the phone, and pressed the “call” button. After three rings, I heard Decker’s familiar voice spooling from the tiny speaker in a thin thread of sound, faint but distinct. “Hey, Doc. Everything okay?”

  “Captain Decker, this is Jim O’Conner, the sheriff up in Cooke County. Not to worry—everything’s fine. Dr. Brockton just loaned me his phone to call you, since he’s got your number in his contacts.” He put the phone closer to his ear, muffling Decker’s words. “Sure, I’ll hand the phone back to Dr. Brockton in just a second. He suggested I call and see if your SWAT team might be able to help us serve a warrant on a fellow we think might not come quietly. . . . Murder suspect. . . . He’s ex-military. Possible militia member. White supremacist. Permanently pissed off. . . . Exactly, one helluva nice guy.”

  They talked a while longer, then made a plan for Decker and two of his men to come to Cooke County later in the day to reconnoiter and formulate a plan.

  O’Conner handed me the phone so Decker and I could finish the call. “Talk to me, Deck,” I said. “What’s the word on Satterfield? Any progress?”

  “Well, hell,” he said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  What was the line from The Princess Bride, that tongue-in-cheek fairy-tale movie my grandsons had made me watch a dozen times when they were younger? Oh, right: “Get used to disappointment.”

  MOST OF THE DRIVE BACK TO KNOXVILLE WAS A grim, bleak blur. Miranda did not give me her ACLU lecture, although under the circumstances, a liberal rant about protecting civil liberties would have been a lot more pleasant than the dark fears and memories swirling in my mind.

  Finally, as we approached the eastern outskirts of the city—about the time we passed the spot where Satterfield had killed several of his victims—Miranda spoke. She sounded as if she were far away—perhaps she’d been trying to get my attention for some time—and if I’d ever heard her voice so tentative, I couldn’t remember when. “Excuse me? Dr. B?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was somewhere else. Didn’t mean to ignore you.”

  “I didn’t take it that way. And maybe I should just leave you alone.”

  “No, please,” I said. “I’d appreciate some distraction.”

  “Well, if you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.” I waved away her concern, and she went on. “Satterfield—that all happened before my time.”

  I nodded. “You were probably in first grade,” I said. “Twenty years ago? No, more than that—it was 1992. Bill Clinton was running for president. Clinton and Al Gore. Running against Bush the Elder.” When I put it in those terms, it sounded as if several lifetimes had passed since Clinton first ran. “Wow. Elections were a lot more civilized back then, seems like. Now, campaigning’s turned into a reality TV show. Survivor meets Jerry Springer or something.”

  “With some cage-fighting thrown in,” she added. A pause. “I know Satterfield tried to kill you.”

  “Not just me. My whole family—Kathleen and Jeff and Jenny, who was Jeff’s girlfriend at the time. They were in high schoo
l. Actually, Jeff was still in high school; Jenny had just graduated. Satterfield snuck into the house at dinnertime. He had come to UT and hidden in the back of my truck. I drove him right into our garage. Like inviting a vampire to come in, though I didn’t know it, of course. We had just sat down at the kitchen table, the four of us, when he came up the stairs. The uninvited dinner guest from hell. If it hadn’t been for Decker, and Tyler . . .” I trailed off, picturing the astonishing way our salvation arrived: a three-foot concrete statue of the archangel Michael, flying through the sliding glass door from the patio, his outstretched wings and raised sword pinning Satterfield to the wall.

  “Tyler was your assistant?”

  “He was. Tyler Wainwright, my first assistant.” I looked at her. “My second-best assistant. Jeff and Jenny’s son—the first one—is named for him.”

  “I remember you saying that once, when you introduced me to them at a cookout. One thing I never understood, though. Why did Satterfield come after you in the first place? He was a serial killer, preying on women. Prostitutes, right?” I nodded. “So why come after you—a professor—and your family?”

  “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.”