Price interrupted him. “Any leads on those killings yet?”
Meffert shook his head. “Not yet. Both in isolated homes. We’re interviewing neighbors, but none of ’em are close, so we might not get much. We know the doctor’s wife was alive at the time of the escape, because he talked to her. And we know she was dead an hour after the escape, because that’s when a sheriff’s deputy found the body. Could Satterfield have gotten to her in that period, or was she killed by an accomplice right after she got off the phone? Don’t know.”
“And what about the prison guard’s wife and son?” Price asked. “Any telephone contact with them around the time of the escape?”
“None,” said Meffert. “We’re also interviewing inmates, but as you know, that poses challenges of its own. The bad news is, this was a well-coordinated plan. The good news is, it was complex, which could work to our advantage.” I glanced around the table, and judging by the expressions on other people’s faces, I wasn’t the only one puzzled by the advantage Meffert claimed we had. “This thing had lots of moving parts,” Meffert explained. “Somebody got him those pig guts. Somebody fed him information about the guard’s family and the doctor’s family. There were lots of links in this chain of events. At least one of those links is weak, and when we pull hard enough . . .” He hooked together his thumbs and index fingers, then yanked them apart. “Snap.”
Price nodded. “Let’s hear from Pete Brubaker next. Pete, thanks for agreeing to dust off your file and jump in on this.”
“Glad to help, if I can,” he said. “This guy’s bad news. Sooner we get him back in prison, the better off the world is.”
“Pete,” said Price, “do you have an opinion on whether Satterfield himself killed the doctor’s wife and the guard’s family?”
“I doubt it,” he said. “He killed the EMTs because he had to—they were between him and freedom. But he had no particular reason to kill the others himself. More likely, his accomplices did that. Maybe on Satterfield’s orders, maybe on their own initiative, to cover their tracks. A guy like Satterfield gets off on two kinds of murders—sadistic sexual murders, like the prostitutes he murdered years ago—and revenge killings.”
“Pete, this is Bill Brockton,” I interrupted. “By revenge, you mean like the way he came after me all those years ago? Because he thought I’d ruined his life?”
“Exactly,” said Brubaker. “The way he came after you then. The way he’s almost certainly coming after you now. You and probably your family, too. The way he sees it, he’s got unfinished business. With all of you.”
His words hung in the air for what seemed like several minutes, and I was acutely conscious of every pair of eyes in the room focusing intently on my face. But beyond that—after that—I was conscious of very little. I vaguely heard discussion and delegation of security details, round-the-clock surveillance of my home, my office, Jeff’s home, Jeff’s office, the boys’ school. I heard myself, my voice sounding muffled and far away, reciting phone numbers, addresses, and other information in a robotic monotone.
After the meeting, I sleepwalked out the door of the building, dwarfed once more by the massive concrete columns, feeling quite small, extremely exposed, and—despite the agent assigned to follow and protect me—very, very alone.
CHAPTER 23
“HERE,” I SAID, “I’LL SHOW YOU.” AND WITH THAT, I clambered onto the table at the front of the auditorium and knelt on all fours.
I loved teaching the intro course, giving freshmen and sophomores—plus the occasional branching-out junior and home-stretch senior—their first taste of the incredible feast that anthropology offered: Evolution. Anatomy. Archaeology. Human civilizations, from aboriginal to Zulu.
I enjoyed doing what Horace said poets should do: instruct and delight. I liked kneeling and crawling, wagging my butt to illustrate how humans—prehistoric prehuman ancestors, actually, millions of years ago—had once been quadrupeds, before eventually standing up for themselves, “or standing up for their dinner,” as I liked to put it, and becoming bipeds. Students would invariably laugh, and in recent years some had taken to snapping photos with their cell phones, posting them on Facebook or Instagram or SnackChat or whatever the latest social-media network was. They laughed and they learned, and I loved it.