Slicing into the first one, I’d felt slightly tentative. I didn’t want to damage any bones, since they’d all end up in the skeletal collection, so I worked my way cautiously down through the muscles and tendons and ligaments linking the arms to the shoulders: the deltoid and teres major muscles, the four interwoven muscles of the rotator cuff, and the ligaments that helped secure the head of the humerus within the recesses of the scapula. I was grateful that I was removing arms, not legs; tucked deep within the acetabulum, the socket of the hip joint, was a ligament that was difficult to cut without gouging the bone.
By the third corpse, I’d found a rhythm, and by the fifth I was slicing as swiftly and ruthlessly as a butcher. Still, it had been a long, tense night, and by the time I’d finished packing the arms in five ice chests and wrestling the coolers into the truck, I was spent. After a quick shower at my office, I’d donned khakis and a button-down shirt, along with the digital recorder and a new video camera from Rankin, this one concealed in a fat fountain pen in my pocket — a pen whose gold clip was adorned with a small disk of “onyx,” just like the tie clip I’d worn in Las Vegas. I merged onto I-40 East just as the Sunday sun was rising. Now — winding my way through the mountains toward Asheville — I felt fatigue replacing anxiety as my main problem.
I was startled out of my fog by the electronic whoop of a siren. Checking the side mirror, I was dismayed to see a North Carolina highway patrol cruiser close behind me. I put on my blinker and eased to the shoulder, hoping — though my hope didn’t last long — that he would swing around me and accelerate away.
As the trooper approached, I rolled down the window. Above his left shirt pocket, he wore a brass nameplate that read OFFICER HARRINGTON. “Good morning, Officer Harrington. Did I do something wrong?”
“Sir, I need to see your license, registration, and proof of insurance, please.”
“Certainly.” I pulled my Tennessee driver’s license from my wallet and removed the paperwork from a small leather notebook I kept in the glove box. I also unclipped my Tennessee Bureau of Investigation consultant’s badge from my belt and handed it to him along with the other things. “Just so you know, I’m considered one of the good guys over on the other side of the mountains,” I said.
He looked surprised when he saw the TBI shield. “Mr. Brockton, do you know why I stopped you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” I confessed.
“I’ve been following you for the last five miles,” he said. “Were you aware of that?” I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t know that either. “You’ve been driving very erratically. Slowing down, speeding up, drifting between the lanes. Have you been drinking, Mr. Brockton?”
“No. I don’t drink. Ever.”
“Are you sleepy?”
“Not really. I’m tired, but not particularly sleepy. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. I guess I was just really distracted.”
“This is a dangerous stretch of road for that.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll pay better attention.”
“That’d be a good idea. If you would sit tight for just a moment, Mr. Brockton, I need to call in a routine check on your license and registration. Do you have any recent citations that you know of?”
“None. I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket.”
“Never?”
I shook my head.
He smiled. “Congratulations. That’s rare. Sit tight — I’ll be right back.” He turned and started back toward the cruiser, then stopped. He peered through the window of the shell covering the back of the truck, then turned to me. “Mr. Brockton?”
“Yes, Officer?”
“You’ve got a lot of coolers in your truck. What’s in ’em?”
My heart caught in my throat. “Specimens,” I said. “Biological specimens.”
“Specimens of what?”
I sat locked in the back of the cruiser for what seemed an eternity while Harrington explored the possibility that I was a chain-saw-happy serial killer. He talked on the radio to his dispatcher, the dispatcher’s supervisor, and the day-shift captain. Within seconds after Harrington had politely asked me to open one of the coolers, he’d drawn his gun and put me in the back of the car. Minutes later a second cruiser, lights strobing and siren screaming, screeched to a stop behind us, followed shortly by a third. The three troopers huddled at the back of my truck, chatting and shaking their heads in disbelief, raising the lid of the cooler repeatedly to confirm that yes, it really did contain four amputated human arms, nestled in the ice like fresh-caught fish, their tail fins replaced by fingers. The troopers’ roadside huddle was periodically interrupted by radio consultations, not just with Harrington’s supervisors but also with various officials of the state’s hazardous-materials office and — last but not least — the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
I’d tried suggesting he call the TBI first, since I was pretty sure they’d vouch for my current standing (or at least my recent past) as a law-abiding, crime-solving consultant and professor. If I’d had the good fortune to be pulled over in Tennessee rather than North Carolina, I’d have been on my way within five minutes, I felt sure, but here in Carolina nobody knew me, so it was a thornier problem. I’d considered asking the trooper to call Ben Rankin at the FBI, but I quickly rejected that idea. Getting Rankin to rescue me from the North Carolina state police might save me some time and embarrassment in the short run, but it would compromise the secrecy of the sting. So instead I sat and chafed in the back of the police car while Harrington proved himself to be a thorough, dutiful cop, the sort who went by the book and worked things up the chain of command.
I’d noticed a pair of black Ford sedans cruise by, equipped with the radio antennas characteristic of law-enforcement vehicles. How ironic, I thought. I’m wired for sound and video, but the surveillance van’s fifty miles away in Asheville.
I’d tried to phone Rankin while Harrington ran my tag and my license—“Is that you that just went past? Come back and get me out of here,” I’d have said — but there was no cell-phone signal in this part of the mountains, so I had no choice but to let the drama play out however it played out.
Finally Harrington, his bosses, and the state’s environmental-protection guardians seemed satisfied that I was neither a murderer nor a bioterrorist. The trooper opened the door of the cruiser, and I was a free man once more. “Okay, Dr. Brockton”—I gathered that someone at the TBI had vouched for me as “Dr. Brockton”—“we’re gonna let you head on to Asheville now. I’m sorry this took so long. It’s not the sort of situation we encounter every day.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Do you feel able to concentrate on your driving the rest of the way? Reason I ask is, if you had an accident and this stuff you’re carrying got strewn all over I-40, we would have one hell of a mess to deal with, and I’m not just talking about picking up the arms off the pavement.”
I winced, picturing the media circus and the scandal that would surely follow an arm-slinging crash. “I will pay total attention to the road,” I said. “Scout’s honor. I apologize for taking up so much of your morning.”
“No problem,” he said with a slight smile, handing me my license and registration. “Beats writing speeding tickets.”
CHAPTER 32
I’d built an hour of cushion into my schedule, in case the logistics of parking and unloading at the Grove Park proved complicated. My unscheduled stop on the shoulder of I-40 had used every minute of that. I might have been tempted to make up the lost time by speeding, but that impulse was held firmly in check by my frequent glances in the rearview mirror. There behind me, a respectful but vigilant hundred yards back, hung Officer Harrington. He followed me all the way to downtown Asheville, then parted company with me when I took the exit ramp. I rolled down my window and waved. He answered with a brief whoop of his siren.