I called Decker, still in my dream, to ask him to save my family once more. Decker had reasons of his own to consider the job, for Decker hated Satterfield even more than I did. Deck’s younger brother, a bomb-squad technician, had died back in 1992 in a search of Satterfield’s booby-trapped house. Years later, Decker himself had nearly died, when Satterfield managed to cut his throat. It happened in a fight at the prison where Decker had gone to interview him.
Decker agreed to help, but on one condition: Only under a black flag. No arrest. No trial. Only summary execution.
“A black flag,” I agreed.
In my dream. But it was only a dream. Wasn’t it?
CHAPTER 22
WAS IT THE EFFECT THE ARCHITECT INTENDED, OR was it just my paranoid or guilty imagination? Every time I passed between the severe, three-story concrete columns flanking the entrance to the FBI building, I felt as if I’d been zapped with a shrink-ray, as if I were some Lilliputian prisoner, stepping into a mammoth, marble-floored prison cell.
The building’s lobby was equally disorienting, as ornate as the exterior was austere. Floored and walled in marble and gilding, the space looked as if it had been teleported from a fancy hotel or investment bank. Did the concrete-and-brick exterior and the opulent lobby really belong to the same building? If so, the building was suffering from bipolar disorder or maybe multiple personalities.
My architectural overanalyzing was cut short by the opening of a door and the emergence of Angela Price, wearing a no-nonsense suit and no-nonsense face—exactly the face I had pictured during my uncomfortable call with her, a few days and a lifetime earlier, when all I’d had to worry about was a simple hate crime—hate that wasn’t directed at me or my family.
“Dr. Brockton,” she greeted me, extending a hand and shaking mine with a grip that was coolly consistent with the rest of her.
I had once made the mistake of addressing her as “Angela,” and her swift, acerbic correction—“it’s Special Agent Price”—ensured that I never made that particular mistake with her again.
“Special Agent Price,” I replied, nodding gravely.
“Actually, it’s Special Agent in Charge Price,” she said. “I’m running the field office now.” She turned and headed off, talking over her shoulder. “We’re in the main conference room. Right this way.” She headed briskly through the doorway and down a hall—a beige, drywalled, fluorescent-lighted corridor that seemed to have no connection to the lavish lobby—and I hurried to keep up.
She slowed but did not stop at a wide, walnut door labeled CONFI, twisting a brushed nickel handle and pushing the door inward. It opened to reveal a massive table, five feet wide by a dozen feet long, surrounded by an assortment of law enforcement officers, many of whom I’d known for years. Several were in uniform—the dark blue of the Knoxville Police Department and the Knox County Sheriff’s Office—but most wore crisp dress shirts and tightly cinched ties: the unofficial but regulation uniform donned daily by detectives and agents of the FBI, TBI, and KPD.
“All right, gentlemen, let’s get to it,” she said, taking the chair at the head of the table. “We’ve got a bad guy—a really, really bad guy—on the loose. It’s the mission of this task force to find him and put him where he belongs. In prison—or in the ground.” Her bluntness surprised me, and as I glanced around the table, I saw a few other faces that appeared startled . . . and several that looked grim and gratified. “You didn’t hear that from me,” she added. “But no kidding, this guy’s a menace, and we’ve got to nail him. And fast.” With no further ado, she had each person around the table introduce himself—she was the only woman in the room—and talk about his agency’s contribution to the manhunt. One of the group was present only acoustically: my old pal Pete Brubaker, the retired FBI profiler, linked to the meeting by speakerphone.
I knew and liked and respected all these people. For decades, after all, I had worked with the best homicide investigators that local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies had to offer, and if ever there were a case that called for pulling out all the stops, this was it: a sadistic serial killer on the loose again, a bloody trail of new bodies already in his wake.
First to talk was Wellington Meffert, a TBI agent generally known by the deceptively deprecating nickname “Bubba.” I was surprised to see him here, as Steve Morgan had said Meffert was seriously ill with cancer. But I was grateful, too, for multiple reasons. Bubba and I had worked the first Satterfield case—Satterfield 1, perhaps we should call it—more than twenty years before. Now gray at the temples and gaunt to the point of looking skeletal—from the cancer, or from the chemotherapy that would kill either the cancer or himself—Meffert was one of the TBI’s senior agents. “As you’ve probably heard,” he began, “Satterfield didn’t just kill the two EMTs in the ambulance. He also killed—or had accomplices kill—the families of a prison guard and the prison doctor.”