“Yeah, Doc?”
“You reckon maybe you could turn loose of my wrist? I’m starting to lose the feeling in my fingers.”
AN HOUR AFTER DECKER LEFT—FINALLY SOUNDING sane but still looking haunted and harrowed—my fingers were still tingling from his viselike grip on my wrist. Before he departed, I had nervously circled back to the subject of Satterfield, urging Deck not to go to the prison and “rattle his cage,” as he’d put it. “If you do,” I said, “he’ll know he’s getting to me.” Deck had grunted, then nodded—conceding, apparently, that cage rattling might not be a brilliant idea. I appreciated the concession. I just wished it had seemed more convincing.
After Decker’s departure, I had begun scaling the mountain of messages—the Everest of Insistence—that Peggy had left for me. I started by sorting them into three categories: Not Important, Urgent, and 911. After leafing through the first ten messages, I saw that the Not-Important stack contained no messages; all ten had ended up in the 911 stack. I redefined the categories—Bad, Worse, and Worst—but the outcome was similar, with all the messages landing in Worst. Next I briefly considered (and swiftly rejected) Worst, More Worst, and Most Worst, then settled on Oh Shit, Holy Shit, and Somebody Shoot Me. Still no change.
Clearly a paradigm shift was required. Instead of sorting by urgency, I decided to categorize by caller: Media Meddlers, UT Honchos, and Other. This time, the results were different, and though I certainly didn’t think I had conquered, I had, at least, divided: The callers were split almost evenly between two categories, Media Meddlers and UT Honchos, with only a few outliers in Other. Many of the messages were duplicates, I noticed: UT’s general counsel, Amanda Whiting, had called four times; the dean had dialed me twice; my newswoman nemesis, Athena Demopoulos, had tried me three times; and one persistent caller—the record holder—had left me seven messages, each of which bore the same San Diego number, followed by the words “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News!!!” I tossed the duplicate messages—and all of Malloy’s—and found to my relief that I actually had only a dozen callers chasing me, rather than two or three dozen. Better yet, I decided I could safely ignore most of the reporters, though not, alas, my Nashville nemesis.
The one caller whose name stood out as a pleasant surprise was Wellington Meffert, a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent who was better known, to lawmen and lawbreakers in the mountainous East Tennessee counties he covered, as “Bubba Hardknot.” Meffert had left me only two messages, but because I actually looked forward to talking with him, I moved Bubba to the head of the line. I was reaching for the phone to call him when the intercom buzzed. “Well, crap,” I muttered to myself, then—picking up the handset—answered with, “Yes, Peggy. Which particular pain in my ass is about to flare up?”
“Two of them, actually,” answered an echoey female voice that sounded familiar but didn’t sound like Peggy. My heart sank and my face flushed as the voice continued, “It’s Amanda Whiting, Dr. Brockton. The dean and I decided to drop by for a visit. Peggy was kind enough to put us on speaker when she paged you.”
“That was kind,” I said drily.
SITTING IN THE LEATHER SWIVEL CHAIR BEHIND THE oak desk in my administrative office, I occupied the seat of power, at least furniture-wise. But looking across at the grim faces of the dean and the general counsel, perched on the ladder-back chairs normally occupied by failing students, I knew that my position was tenuous, at best. Amanda Whiting, UT’s top legal eagle, seemed ready to tear me to shreds with her Harvard-honed talons, and the dean—long one of my staunchest supporters—was relegated to the role of onlooker and sympathetic spectator as the shredding commenced and the blood began to flow. “Dr. Brockton, I appreciate the contribution that your research facility has made to forensic science,” Whiting was saying for at least the third time.
Methinks thou dost protest too much, I thought, but what I interrupted her to say was, “Not just ‘has made,’ Amanda.”
“Excuse me?”
“You said ‘has made.’ We’re still making contributions. Present tense, and future tense. We’ve got a dozen studies under way right now, and more coming down the pike, some of them really exciting.”