THE POLICE SCANNER WAS still going crazy as Satterfield turned off Kingston Pike and on to Cherokee Boulevard, looping and swooping along the serpentine road toward the river. Toward the Brockton house.
From the flurry of transmissions on the police scanner, he knew they’d found the two other bodies in the woods. He would love to have seen the face of whoever had found the corpses, especially the woman’s; for that matter, he’d love to see the faces of everyone working the scene. Fools and weaklings, he thought. Most of all, he’d love to see Brockton’s face, now and also later, when the surprise Satterfield had left for him was discovered.
He slowed as he neared the house. The garage door was up, and through the opening, he saw that the Camry—the woman’s car—was still inside. Satterfield eased to the curb and parked in front of the house. He sat for a moment, looking for signs of movement at the windows, then got out, went to the rear of the van, and took two orange highway cones from the back. He placed one ten feet behind the van, the other ten feet in front, the way he’d seen the telephone linemen do. Stupid, he thought. If you can’t see the damn truck without the cones, you’re not gonna see the damn truck with the cones.
Satterfield was counting on the truck being seen—specifically, being seen by the lady of the house. He’d spent hours preparing it to be seen: spraying the horizontal stripes of blue and gold along both sides and across the back—the stripes were the easy part—then, using the stencils he’d cut, adding the BellSouth name and logo. As always, he’d worked meticulously, and although the signage wasn’t perfect, he believed it would fool anyone but an actual BellSouth worker . . . and he knew it would fool a woman looking out the window of a Sequoyah Hills home: a privileged woman; a woman accustomed to having men in work vans show up to attend to her lawn and her TV cable and her telephone lines.
Angling across the lawn, he headed for the end of the house farthest from the driveway—the end where the phone line ran from the street to the service box on the outside of the house. As he walked, Satterfield glanced occasionally at a clipboard he carried in one hand. In his other hand he carried a telephone—one of the handsets from his cordless home phone—and he pretended to be carrying on a conversation. Every few steps, he nodded his head, as if listening intently, then uttered a terse, technical-sounding phrase, in case the woman in the house was watching and listening. “It could be the capacitor in the sub-relay,” he said into the phone. “It’s not quite up to specs. Voltmeter’s showing only 17 ohms.” He nodded again, striding purposefully, almost to the corner now. “Naw, the junction-box circuits all check out fine. Could be a bad ground, though.” There: He’d rounded the corner of the house, apparently unnoticed. A few feet along the wall, just beyond the electricity meter, was a gray plastic box, not much bigger than a book, its front embossed with the BellSouth logo. Satterfield took a screwdriver from the tool belt he was wearing and unscrewed a single screw, then unsnapped the latch and swung the cover open. Inside was a tangle of thin, brightly colored wires—blue, white, red, yellow, green—just like the ones he’d seen when he’d studied the box on his own house. He left those alone, and reached instead for the wide, flat cable, which he unclipped, disconnecting the house from the outside world—from help—as simply as disconnecting a phone from a wall. So easy, he marveled.
He crossed the grassy front yard to the center of the house and trotted up the brick steps, then rang the doorbell and listened. When he heard footsteps inside, he made a show of flipping through the forms on the clipboard. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the curtain beside the door move slightly, then felt eyes on his face and his clipboard, his counterfeit BellSouth badge, and his counterfeit BellSouth shirt. He assumed the eyes were noticing the counterfeit BellSouth van at the curb, too. They must have, for he heard the snick of a dead bolt, followed by the squeak of rubber weather stripping as the door swung off the sill and opened a foot. “Yes?” Her voice was tight; was she scared, or was she just annoyed at being called to the door on a Saturday morning?
“Good morning . . .” He glanced down at the clipboard, then back up at her face. No bombshell, but not bad looking at all. “ . . . Ms. Brockton.”
“Yes?”
“Wayne Taylor, BellSouth. Sorry to bother you, ma’am, but we’ve had some reports of rolling service outages along your street. You noticed any trouble on your line today?”
“Today? No. I used the phone an hour ago. It was fine.”