“It’s pretty late. How about tomorrow? Like the sheriff said, one more night ain’t gonna hurt this one none. Besides, I’ve got to be in court early tomorrow for a hearing in the Ledbetter murder.”
“Oh, you mean the case where you’re going to destroy the medical examiner’s career and put a cold-blooded killer back on the streets?” I winced, but she grinned and wagged a finger at me. “You’re doing the right thing, you know you are—he should have retired years ago, and he totally blew that case. Go home. Sleep the sleep of the just and the competent.”
Only after I emerged onto the barren loading dock did I remember that my truck was parked a quarter-mile of asphalt away, over at the Body Farm, where I’d left it fourteen hours ago. I sagged in dismay and sudden fatigue. The one thing I needed most was a good night’s sleep. But that was also the one thing I was least likely to get.
CHAPTER 5
MY TRUCK SAT ALL alone at the far corner of the hospital parking lot. By day, the Body Farm’s weathered, wooden privacy fence—an eight-foot screen that shields the corpses from sightseers, and shields squeamish hospital workers from the corpses—blends into the woods. Now, under the glare of the sodium security lights, it shone a garish yellow-orange.
Unlocking the cab of my truck, I turned back toward the hospital and waved at the surveillance camera mounted high atop the roof. I doubted anyone was scrutinizing the monitor that closely, but just in case, I wanted the campus police to know I appreciated their round-the-clock vigil over my unorthodox extended family.
At this time of night, almost eleven, the highway was practically empty as I crossed the river and swooped down the Kingston Pike exit. Kingston Pike—
Knoxville’s main east–west thoroughfare—grazed one edge of the UT campus. If I turned right at the light at the bottom of the exit ramp, I would traverse the lively six-block stretch called “The Strip,” which was lined with crowded restaurants, noisy bars, and inebriated students. Turning left instead, I made for the quieter precincts of Sequoyah Hills, where I threaded my way along the grand median of Cherokee Boulevard for half a mile before diving off into the maze of dark, quiet streets that led to my house.
Most Sequoyah Hills real estate was unaffordable on a college professor’s salary, or even ten professors’ salaries. The riverfront homes had especially astronomical prices, some of them selling for millions. Here and there in the wealthy, wooded enclave, though—like patches of crabgrass in the lawn of an estate—persisted small pockets of ordinary ranch houses, split-levels, even a handful of rental bungalows fronting a tiny park. It was in one such pocket, thirty years before, that Kathleen and I had found a charming 1940s-era cottage. White brick with a stone chimney, a slate roof, a yard brimming with dogwoods and redbuds, and an only slightly ruinous price tag, it looked like a postcardperfect place for a pair of academics to settle down and start a family. And it was. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t.
Instead, it now hung around my neck like a millstone, and tonight—as always—
I fished out the key with a sense of foreboding. The deadbolt slithered open, the door swung into silent darkness, and I knew it had been a mistake to go home. My footsteps clattered on the slate foyer with all the warmth of frozen earth shoveled upon the glinting lid of a steel coffin.
I showered off the mud and grit of Cooke County, and I tried to steam away the ache in my thighs and shoulders. Then—with a mixture of sinking hope and rising dread—I crawled into my unmade bed.
After hours of tossing, I finally slept, and I dreamt of a woman. In the way that is common in dreams, she was a generic, unspecified woman at first, doing something generic and unspecified. Then she looked at me, and suddenly she looked quite specific and very afraid. A hand reached out and stroked her cheek. Then it slid downward and closed around her throat. The woman, I now saw, was my wife, and the hand, I now realized, was my own. A look of pleading filled her eyes, and then a look of sorrow. And then her eyes turned to empty sockets, and her mouth to a vacant oval. But I was the one who gave voice to the scream. “Kathleen!”
Heart pounding, sweat and tears flowing, I awoke—as I had every night for the past two years—to find myself alone in the bed. Alone in our bed. No—alone in my bed. My empty, lifeless bed in my empty, lifeless house in my empty, lifeless life.
CHAPTER 6