THE GIRL HOOKED HER thumbs through the elastic of her G-string and shimmied out of it, then lay back on the rear seat of his car, raised her arms over her head, and opened her knees.
Satterfield stared. Her body was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen—far more beautiful than anything in the skin magazines his stepfather kept in the sleeper cab of the semi. Beneath the red-orange glow of the streetlight filtering through the car’s tinted glass, her skin shone like molten copper. Her muscled legs testified to the strength and grace that hours of dancing each night had created. Her belly—flat when she was standing—was concave now that she lay on her back, and the strands of the golden tassel that hung from the piercing in her navel fanned out in the same way her hair fanned on the leather upholstery behind her head. “Okay, sailor boy,” she said, fingering one of her nipple rings, “show me.”
Satterfield was unmanned. Inside, when she’d been seductive but unavailable, he’d been about to explode. Now, though—the teasing done, replaced by a command to perform—he felt himself beginning to panic, to sweat, and to shrink. Mortified, he began rubbing his crotch, slowly at first, then with increasing desperation and fury.
She raised herself onto her elbows. “What? You not want me? Why you act like you want me, if you not want me?” Her eyes flitted from his face to his crotch and back up again. “You never been with woman, sailor boy?” Her lips curled into a smile—a smirking, scornful smile. “You scared, sailor boy? You a sissy, sailor boy? You wet bed at night, sailor boy?”
He was on her in an instant, delivering a backhanded slap, then a forehand slap. She opened her mouth to scream, but he clamped one hand over her mouth, and clamped the other around her throat. Her eyes bugging wide, she thrashed and bucked beneath him, but she was no match for him, and gradually her struggles lessened. He removed the hand from her mouth and loosened his grip on her throat. She gasped like a drowning victim surfacing from underwater; he allowed her a few sips of air, then bore down on her neck again. Her eyes were desperate and pleading now, and he felt himself growing aroused.
His orgasm came when her eyes rolled back in her head.
HE WAS INTERROGATED BY the local cops but he was never charged. Nobody’d seen her leave with him, and she’d been seen doing lap dances for a lot of men around the time she went missing.
The military police had their suspicions, too—just routine lead checking at first, but then, once the bone detective got involved, they’d zeroed in on Satterfield. In the end, the Navy chose not to court-martial him, but it also chose not to keep him in its ranks. There’s the right kind of killing and the wrong kind of killing; the kind that solves problems, and the kind that creates them.
Two years after enlisting—two years after he walked away from his mother and his stepfather and finally embarked on what felt like a life of power and prestige—Satterfield found himself unmoored. Two years of basic training and special-forces training were shot. His two-week career as a SEAL—two weeks of training, before he’d been washed out—was memorialized in a tattoo on his right forearm. He’d gotten the tat the day he’d heard he’d been accepted for SEAL training—a moment of overconfidence or of hope or even of gratitude. He’d gotten the celebratory tattoo that afternoon, then gone to the strip club that night.
Administrative discharge, “under circumstances other than honorable,” with nothing to show but the tat. It made him a decorated veteran in his own ironic way. By the end of his military service, he’d acquired skills in stealth, survival, and attack—with bare hands, knife, pistol, rifle, even explosives.
He’d also acquired even more valuable things: insight and self-knowledge, which he’d gained in those moments when he first tasted the fruit of the tree of power—the power unleashed by the convergence of pain, sex, and fear. Especially fear.
Last but not least, he’d acquired a new nemesis: the man who’d focused the Navy investigator’s suspicions on Satterfield. The man who’d ruined the life Satterfield had finally, against all odds, begun to create for himself.
The man whose reciprocal, retaliatory ruination Satterfield had come to Tennessee to set in motion.
CHAPTER 15
Brockton
“ART DEPARTMENT.” THE FEMALE voice in my ear sounded young, alert, and amused, as if she’d heard the punch line of a joke just before she picked up the phone.
“Good morning,” I said. “This is Dr. Brockton, in Anthropology. Is Dr. Hollingsworth in?”
“Dr. Hollingsworth?” There was a puzzled pause, followed by a suppressed snort of laughter. “Oh, you mean Joe?”
Flustered, I glanced at the campus directory again. Art Department: Chair, Joseph Hollingsworth. I’d probably met him at some faculty function or other, but if I had, I didn’t remember. “He—Joe—he’s the department chairman, right?”