The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

“Mac, it’s Bill Brockton, in Knoxville. Are you still speaking to me, or is the entire Bureau shunning me?”

 

 

“Still speaking, but I’m not sure I’m much of an asset to you. I’m not exactly the golden boy around here, either. Prescott’s pretty pissed at me, too. Hard to blame him—he’s been getting chewed up pretty bad himself, by big dogs with sharp teeth.”

 

I hadn’t taken time to consider the awkwardness of Prescott’s position—he was, after all, the public face of the troubled case—but whatever compassion I felt for him was offset by my slight resentment of the time pressure he’d applied . . . and by the powerful sting of feeling like the scapegoat. “Not fun for any of us,” was the best I could muster. “Listen, Mac, I’m still trying to figure out who told Prescott about the teeth. Do you know?”

 

“It was that reporter. Malloy. Guy’s a prick, but you gotta hand it to him—he was a giant step ahead of us.”

 

“But how’d he get there, Mac? Who told Malloy the teeth had been pulled? Who knew? I sure didn’t. Not till I cleaned ’em off the other day—after Prescott called to fire me.”

 

“Had to’ve been somebody who was in on it,” McCready mused. “Maybe it was the guy with the pliers. Hell, maybe it was Janus himself.”

 

“Why? Why would whoever faked the death—Janus or his DIY dentist—put a bug in a reporter’s ear?”

 

“Good question, Doc. Figure that one out, and you’re nearly there.”

 

“You think Janus wanted to embarrass the Bureau?” As soon as I said it, I decided it was highly unlikely, given that the Bureau wouldn’t just be embarrassed; the Bureau would be gunning for vengeance. “Nah, not that,” I said. “Janus would know that the FBI would move heaven and earth to catch him if he’s humiliated y’all. Maybe he promised the dental assistant a big payoff, but stiffed the guy instead.”

 

“That could work,” he agreed. “Listen, I gotta go—I’m teaching a fresh batch of recruits at the Academy about one of your favorite topics today: bugs. ‘Trust the bugs,’ right? Keep the faith, Doc. It’ll get better.”

 

As I hung up, I couldn’t help wondering, Will it? How? And when?

 

 

AMONG THE MANY MEAN SURPRISES THAT ACCOMPANIED the Ultimate Mean Surprise—Kathleen’s death-sentence surprise—was the secretarial surprise: the mountain of insurance forms, financial forms, legal forms, and other forms of forms to be scaled. In a perverse corner of my mind, I imagined the grim reaper, twenty-first-century style, no longer mowing down mortals with a scythe, but simply burying them alive beneath truckloads of paper.

 

In the seven days since our telephone conference with Dr. Spitzer, Kathleen and I had come to an unspoken agreement, an uneasy détente. We distracted ourselves from the bigger issues of mortality and grief by focusing on what we began calling “the business of death and dying.” We dealt with the business—the bureaucracy—at the kitchen table, sorting papers into stacks and categories that sometimes covered every square inch, despite the fact that we’d added a leaf to the table. There was a certain amount of apt irony, Kathleen noted early on, in dealing with death at the kitchen table, where she had almost perished at the hands of Nick Satterfield years before. “Not with a bang, and not with a whimper,” she’d joked, “but with a notarized signature in triplicate.” At moments like that—moments of understated heroism—I admired the hell out of her and wondered how on earth I’d be able to bear losing her.

 

I was doing a surprisingly good job of not falling apart—even Kathleen commented on it—until she slid me an official-looking form headed with the logo of the Tennessee Department of Health and Environment. “What’s this?” I asked.

 

“An advance directive. It’s the state’s new version of a living will.” I felt a jolt of fear shoot through me as I scanned down the page. Near the top, directly beneath her own name, Kathleen had designated me as her “Agent”—the person authorized to make health-care decisions for her—but in a series of boxes beneath my name, she had systematically tied my hands, checking the “No” box beside every possible treatment option: No cardiopulmonary resuscitation. No defibrillation. No life support. No surgery, antibiotics, or transfusions. No tube feeding or IV fluids.

 

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