“Where are you going?”
I was about to tell her—it was my nature to tell Kathleen everything, although I’d made an exception when the finger from Satterfield had arrived—but I just shook my head instead. “If anybody calls looking for me, you don’t know where I am. All you know is, I’m out, and you don’t know where I am, and I forgot to take my phone with me.” A sudden thought struck me—a terrible thought: the thought that Satterfield might send someone to the house while I was gone. “Kath, why don’t you go spend the night at Jeff and Jenny’s?”
“What?”
“Sure! Do it, Kath. I’m likely to get a zillion calls—hell, maybe even people coming to the house looking for me—and that’ll drive you crazy. You could babysit, and let Jeff and Jenny have a dinner date. The boys would love it. You’d love it.”
Her eyes searched my face, and I suspected she could tell I was holding something back besides my whereabouts. If she had to find me in an emergency, she could probably guess where I’d gone, but if I didn’t tell her, she wouldn’t have to lie to anyone.
“How long will you be gone?”
“I’m not sure. Tonight. Probably all day tomorrow. I hope I’ll be back tomorrow night.”
Her eyes flickered with an expression I couldn’t quite read, and I wondered if she was upset about my disappearing act. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I’ll be off the grid tomorrow, too.”
“What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she repeated. “A journal article I’m writing. Tomorrow’s the deadline. I’ve never had such a hard time finishing something. It’s been like pulling—” She interrupted herself.
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” I growled, smiling in spite of myself. Then I raised her hand and kissed it, pushed away from the table, and hurried back to UT—not to the hospital’s loading dock this time, but to the small, grimy office tucked beneath girders and grandstands, a bone’s throw from Neyland Stadium’s north end zone.
Hurrying up the stairs, I turned the balky lock of my office door and dashed to my desk to retrieve a small plastic bin: the bin that contained the mortal remains of Richard Janus—or those of a convincing decoy. Grabbing the bin, I raced back down the stairs, hopped into my truck, and hurried away.
I DIDN’T HAVE FAR TO DRIVE. A HUNDRED YARDS from Neyland Stadium—hunkered in a low spot of the asphalt that surrounded the stadium like an alluvial floodplain—was a dilapidated blue building of corrugated metal, the paint cloudy with age and streaked with rust. The building still bore a sign that read ANTHROPOLOGY ANNEX, but the sign, like the building, was faded and rusting. Years before, until we’d built the Regional Forensic Center, with its high-tech processing rooms, the annex had been the place where our donated bodies had finished shuffling off their mortal coil—or, rather, simmering off their mortal coil—in large, steam-jacketed kettles, to which we added a bit of Biz and a dash of Downy to sweeten the pot.
I parked the truck behind the building, then flipped through my many keys, searching for the one that fit the annex’s garage door. My secretary, Peggy, occasionally scolded me about the jangly mess that was my key ring, but now—as I found the snaggletoothed key that unlocked the garage—I felt vindicated for all the years I’d hauled around this spiky excess baggage of brass and steel. “See,” I said smugly to an imaginary Peggy, twisting the door’s latch. As if by way of an indignant retort, the latch let out a screech that made my fillings shudder in my teeth, and as the door clattered and groaned upward, it unleashed a shower of dust, rust, and crumbled bird droppings.
I didn’t care. I retrieved the truck from behind the building and eased it into the dusty garage bay, then lowered the door and went missing. AWOL. The Invisible Man.