Cut to the Bone: A Body Farm Novel

SATTERFIELD WAS A SHADOW among shadows, flowing through the night like some coalescence of darkness—like darkness made flesh—along the perimeter of the quarry yard. The night watchman had just made his 1:00 A.M. circuit, and he wouldn’t make another for an hour—maybe longer, if he fell asleep in the guard shack, as he sometimes did.

 

Satterfield didn’t need an hour; didn’t need even half an hour. The blasting caps were locked in a windowless steel building—it was called a “magazine,” but essentially it was a vault—tucked into a recess in one of the quarry’s limestone walls. The dynamite was locked in an identical magazine in a second recess, fifty yards from the first one. Satterfield had not actually been inside either magazine, but earlier in the day, he’d watched through his spotting scope as a wiry guy had gone into the first structure and emerged a few minutes later with a handful of caps, dangling from their electrical wires like silver firecrackers swinging from long, slender fuses of red and blue. After driving a brief distance along the rim of the gaping pit, he’d gone into the second magazine and then emerged carrying a box covered with warning labels—labels Satterfield had seen many times during his demolition training in the Navy.

 

Satterfield had been researching lock picking, so he could come and go without leaving a visible trace. He’d seen locks picked in plenty of movies—the long, slender picks, worked into the keyhole, wiggled and twisted in some artful, arcane manner—but as it turned out, it looked like it was going to be easier than that. The prior night, when the watchman had gone to make his rounds, Satterfield had slipped into the guard shack and rummaged around. Sure enough, in the gritty center drawer of a gritty metal desk, he’d found an assortment of gritty spare keys. One of them bore the promising label “demo.” For a moment he’d doubted his luck—had they really been stupid enough to use identical locks on both bunker doors?—but then he realized that yes, of course they had. If they were dumb enough to leave the keys to the whole operation in an unlocked desk—an unlocked desk in an unlocked guard shack, for crissakes—they were plenty dumb enough to use identical locks for the blasting caps and the explosives.

 

The guard’s 2:00 A.M. rounds would take him first to the blasting-cap magazine, so Satterfield started there, to make sure he’d be finished well ahead of time. The building was low and squat, maybe ten feet square by seven feet high, the steel outer walls lined with several inches of hardwood, if the quarry’s magazines were built like the Navy’s. The door looked like something from a warship: Also made of heavy steel plate, it was low and narrow, mounted on massive hinges.

 

Satterfield slid the key into the padlock’s keyway, feeling the pins bump across the teeth, one by one. When the key bottomed out, he twisted gently. The lock opened grudgingly, grittily, the coating of limestone dust resisting as the shackle slid out of the brass body. It took most of his strength to wrest the door open, and he felt a flash of admiration for the wiry blaster he’d watched through his scope; the guy was several inches shorter than Satterfield, and probably weighed twenty or thirty pounds less. Not an ounce of fat on that guy, he thought. The door rasped on the hinges, but the sound was slight—almost as though it were absorbed by the velvet blackness of the magazine’s interior.

 

Once inside, he tugged the door shut behind him, then clicked on the small Mag-Lite. As he scanned the room, he smiled. Three walls were lined with wooden shelves, and the shelves were like a high-explosives candy store. The blasting caps—hundreds of them; hell, thousands of them—were stored in wooden bins. Some sported pigtails of bright orange det cord; others—the ones he wanted—trailed electrical leads, the pairs of wires looped and fastened into tight coils.

 

He slipped three caps into one of the thigh pockets of the black BDUs—no point getting greedy, since he had the key to the store, and he didn’t want to risk creating a noticeable shortage in the inventory—then turned to go.

 

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