From his scrapbook, Satterfield removed a Knoxville street map, which was tucked into a pocket at the back, and unfolded and smoothed it on the tabletop. Then, scrolling down the street index, he located the Brocktons’ street coordinates and marked their address with a pair of small, neat Xs in red ink. Finally, he sliced the pink and yellow names from the faculty directory and taped them to the map beside the Xs.
Before folding the map and putting it back in its pocket, Satterfield looked at a spot ten miles northeast of the Brocktons’ street: a small, roadless parcel at the end of Cahaba Lane. The parcel was bounded on the north by Interstate 40 and on the south by John Sevier Highway. Within the blank parcel, three small red Xs had been added in Satterfield’s precise calligraphy.
CHAPTER 28
Kittredge
KITTREDGE WATCHED IN SILENCE. Skeptical, discouraged silence. He and Janelle—the prostitute lucky enough to be alive—were huddled in an interview room with a crime-lab tech, who was using an Identi-Kit to piece together a face from Janelle’s description of her attacker.
Janelle peered at the latest assemblage of features, the tech’s third try, and shook her head. “Nothing personal,” she said. “I know you’re trying to help, and I appreciate it. But none of these looks like a real person.” The tech frowned. “They all look like cartoons,” she added. “Of retards.”
Kittredge coughed to cover a laugh, and Janelle and the tech looked up. Kittredge feigned another cough while slipping Janelle a conspiratorial wink, then he shrugged at the tech. It wasn’t the tech Kittredge blamed; it was the Identi-Kit. In theory, it seemed like a good idea: Offer a smorgasbord of predrawn facial features to choose from, so a victim’s verbal description of a suspect—wide eyes or squinty eyes? blue eyes or brown? broad nose or thin, a beak or a ski jump? thin lips or full?—could be translated into an actual face assembled out of transparent overlays, each overlay printed with one specific feature.
That was the persuasive theory behind the Identi-Kit. In flawed practice, though, Janelle’s dubious dismissal was dead-on. Few police departments had the money to hire professional artists—KPD certainly didn’t—and the Identi-Kit didn’t require much in the way of training or artistic talent. Unfortunately, it didn’t deliver much, either, in Kittredge’s experience. The Identi-Kit was made by Smith & Wesson, he’d been surprised to learn a while back. Should’ve stuck to handguns, he’d thought. Still, even though it was a long shot, the Identi-Kit seemed a shot worth taking, given that the stakes had just gone sky-high. Janelle had seen the face of a sick, sadistic killer and had lived to tell about it; that made her description their best hope of finding him before he killed again. But maybe he already has. And what if the anthropologist, Dr. Brockton, was right—what if there were already more bodies out there in the woods around Cahaba Lane? We’ll know soon enough, he thought grimly, checking his watch. He’d be rendezvousing at Cahaba Lane in an hour with a team of cadets from the Police Academy, leading them in a line search. Meanwhile, he desperately needed a suspect sketch.
“Hang in there—don’t give up on it yet,” Kittredge said. He wasn’t sure who needed the encouragement more, Janelle, the tech, or himself.
“Who did that other one?” Janelle asked him.
“That other what?”
“That other drawing. That good one.” Kittredge and the tech looked at each other, puzzled. “A week or two ago,” she said. “Or maybe a month. I saw it on TV. It was a girl, a drawing of a dead girl. They found her in the woods, too—just bones—and one of y’all’s artists drew what she looked like. It was good. It looked like a real person.”
“Oh, gotcha,” Kittredge said to Janelle, then—to the tech—“A cold case up in Morgan County. Skeletal remains from an old strip mine outside Wartburg. The UT bone expert, Dr. Brockton—he’s working on that one, too.” To Janelle: “I think that girl’s sketch came from the bone expert.”
“Well, he’s an art expert, too, then,” she said. “Could we get him in here to work with me?”
“He didn’t actually draw it himself,” the detective clarified. “I think he found an artist to do it. Based on what the skull looked like.”
“Well,” she persisted, “who was that artist he got? Can we get him for me, too?”
Kittredge felt exasperation at her pain-in-the-assedness, admiration for her doggedness.
Kittredge excused himself for a moment, to go call Brockton: to ask for the name of an artist who could do a good drawing. One that didn’t look like a cartoon of a retard.
CHAPTER 29
Janelle
JANELLE FELT THE AIR whoosh out of her hopes when the girl walked into the room. She was just a kid, sixteen or seventeen. “You’re the one? You did the picture of that dead girl?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the girl.
Janelle snorted. “Nobody’s ever called me ‘ma’am’ before,” she said, then added, “not unless they were mocking me.” She eyed the girl warily. “Are you mocking me?”
“No, ma’am,” said the girl. “No. No. Why would I mock you?”