At that, Dillworth lifted a hand, as if asking for silence or bestowing a blessing, then turned and walked away. Baffled, the EMTs looked to the nurse. She shrugged apologetically and said, “Don’t ask me. Dr. Dillworth said not to touch him. Said we didn’t have time, and there was nothing we could do. That’s all I know.”
“Christ,” said the older EMT. “This guy could code any second. Let’s go.” Together the medics maneuvered the gurney into the ambulance and secured it, then the younger man latched the rear door and hurried to the driver’s seat.
He hit the siren as soon as he cleared the prison gate and turned onto the long, straight stretch of highway headed toward town. His older colleague—riding in back with the patient—unbuckled his seat belt, leaned over the gurney, and put his stethoscope on the blood-smeared chest. His face registered surprise when he heard the heart. He’d expected it to be weak and irregular, but it thumped strongly, seventy beats a minute, steady as a metronome. He folded down the sheet far enough to expose one of the man’s biceps and cinched a blood-pressure cuff around the arm. The reading—120 over 80—was better than the EMT’s own blood pressure. “Damn, hoss, you’re one strong son of a gun,” the medic said to Satterfield. If Satterfield heard, there was no sign of it; his eyes remained closed, his face clamped in what seemed a permanent grimace of pain. “Let’s just take a closer look at that belly.”
The EMT folded back the sheet far enough to expose Satterfield’s bloody hands, still clutching the coils of intestine. “Can you hear me?” he asked. There was no response. “I think I’d best irrigate this mess with betadine,” the EMT went on, “and then wrap it. If you were to lose consciousness and let go, your insides might be all over the floor. Not good.” He took hold of Satterfield’s wrists and lifted them up, then laid them on the gurney beside him. Just then the ambulance hit a bump, and the gurney jounced. The pile of intestines jiggled and shifted. Then—as the EMT made a frantic but unsuccessful grab for them—they slid sideways and down, landing on his feet with a sticky plop. “Oh shit,” he gasped. Then: “What the hell?” The patient’s belly was covered with blood, but the gaping wound the EMT expected to see—the wound through which the intestines had emerged—was simply not there. The EMT ran an exploratory hand over the skin to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him.
That’s when his wrist was seized in a grip like a vise. “Pig,” said Satterfield calmly. “Pig guts and pig blood.”
The EMT stared at the prisoner’s face. Satterfield stared back, holding the EMT’s gaze, as he slipped a second shank—the twin of the one he’d dropped on the basketball court—out of his waistband. Driving it into the man’s belly, he sliced upward until the blade hit the breastbone. The EMT grunted, his own entrails spilling out—as if in some sadistically parallel-universe echo of the sham disemboweling Satterfield had staged—and then he sank to his knees, clutching the gurney until he toppled. In a better world—a world in which rural ambulance services had ample funding—the gutting would have been captured by an interior video camera, thus alerting the driver. But this was not a better world; this was cash-strapped Wayne County, Tennessee, where one-quarter of children lived in poverty. By the time the ambulance pulled up to the hospital’s emergency entrance, the dead EMT was strapped to the gurney and covered with a sheet, and by the time the unsuspecting driver switched off the engine, the blade in Satterfield’s hand was already slicing the young man’s carotid artery.
Thirty seconds after cutting the driver’s throat, Satterfield—dressed in scrubs, his features concealed by a surgical mask—wheeled the gurney into the hospital, parked the corpse in a hallway, and followed a labyrinth of corridors to the main lobby. He walked out the front entrance, a free man, for the first time in more than twenty years.
By the time the hospital, police, and prison staff pieced together the bloody puzzle, Satterfield would be long gone: eastbound toward Knoxville, and toward Brockton, and toward the bloody reckoning Satterfield had lovingly imagined every day for two decades.
PART THREE
The Dark and Tangled Web
O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!
—Sir Walter Scott, “Marmion”
The dark net: a place without limits, a place to push boundaries, a place to . . . sate our curiosities and desires, whatever they may be. All dangerous, magnificent, and uniquely human qualities.
—Jamie Bartlett, The Dark Net
CHAPTER 20
I BUZZED PEGGY, AT THE FAR END OF THE STADIUM. “Hey,” I said, “would you hold my calls?”
“Napping again?” she teased.
“Not yet, but I probably will be soon,” I admitted. “I’m taking another run at Miranda’s dissertation. Last time I nodded off at page six.”