Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella (8 page)

Satterfield

HE PICKED UP THE
sheaf of pages and tamped their bottom edges on the kitchen table to align them, then turned the stack sideways and repeated the maneuver to even up the sides. Once the sheets were in perfect alignment, he inserted them into the three-hole punch and swung the lever down slowly. Closing his eyes to concentrate, he savored the slight variations in resistance as the steel posts punched through the five single-spaced pages, sheet by sheet by sheet.

A loose-leaf binder, already half filled, lay open on the table in front of Satterfield. Popping open the gleaming chrome rings, he threaded the freshly punched pages onto the stack, then clicked the rings shut and began rereading the text, twirling a pink Hi-Liter with the thumb, index finger, and middle finger of his left hand as he read. When he came to the description of the cut marks, he uncapped the marker and highlighted the passage: “The bones were severed with a curved tool of unknown type, the cutting edge having a curved shape approximated by the arc of a circle 3.5 inches in diameter.”

A yellow legal pad and a mechanical pencil lay beside the binder. Setting down the marker, Satterfield picked up the pencil and drew a curved line on the pad, then—doubting the accuracy of the drawing—he pushed back from the table and went to one of the kitchen drawers. Rummaging in the drawer, he found a metal tape measure and extended the tape to 3.5 inches. Next he opened the cabinet containing glassware and held the tape across the mouths of various vessels until he found one—a coffee mug—whose diameter fit the description in the forensic report. Setting the mug on the legal pad, he ran the mechanical pencil one-third of the way around the base, then set the mug aside and inspected the neat arc he had traced. The shape puzzled him. Trying to imagine the head of an ax or a hatchet behind the curve he’d traced, he frowned; the arc was too steep to fit either of those tools. Besides, he suspected that both of those implements—certainly a hatchet—lacked the weight required to cut cleanly through bone in a single stroke. Rereading the highlighted passage, he concluded that he’d interpreted the text correctly and had drawn the curve accurately. That meant he simply needed to do more research. Tearing the perforated page from the yellow pad, he folded and tucked it into his pocket. Then, closing the binder, he returned it to its hiding place—the cold-air return of the ventilation ductwork—along with the box of stolen files, the mother lode of material he’d begun to build his plans around. Fitting the slotted grille neatly over the mouth of the duct, he flipped the latches to lock it into place.

He checked his watch. Home Depot would be closing in an hour, but Satterfield figured an hour was plenty of time. It wouldn’t take him long to find just the right tool for the job, if Home Depot had it. Satterfield was a man who believed in having the right tool for the job, whether the job was cutting up a corpse or eviscerating an adversary.

F
rowning, he hung the ax back on its pegs—the blade was too tall, the arc of the edge too shallow—and continued down the aisle. Next he picked up a maul, a wood-splitting tool whose wedge-shaped head was like a cross between an ax and a sledgehammer. The tool’s heft was good, promising to strike with tremendous force, but again, the cutting edge lacked the curvature he was seeking. Satterfield took the sketch from his pocket and compared it with the edge of the maul.
Could I file it down?
he wondered.
Reshape it? Probably not,
he decided.
It’d take forever, even with a bench grinder.
He was mildly disappointed, but he was also intrigued; the puzzle—the quest—was challenging and invigorating, and solving it would be hugely satisfying: it would redouble his adversary’s frustration, and underscore Satterfield’s superior intellect.

“Help you, hon?” The question caught Satterfield by surprise. He looked over his shoulder at the questioner, a middle-aged woman in an orange Home Depot apron. Stoop-shouldered and beaten-down looking, she fell somewhere on the spectrum between mousy and hard-bitten. She clearly had never been pretty, and now her face was drooping and folding in on itself, as if she were already losing teeth. He caught a whiff of stale cigarette smoke coming from her, which explained her leathery skin and ashen hue. Satterfield found her not merely unappealing but actively repellent, not that he was shopping for anything but a tool here anyhow.

“No thanks. Just looking.” He turned back toward the display, folding the sketch and replacing it in his pocket, then drifted back toward the axes.

“Gotcha some trees need cuttin’?” she persisted.
Christ,
he thought,
is she working on commission? Trying for Employee of the Month?
“We got chain saws, too, next aisle over.”

“No trees,” he said flatly. He glanced over his shoulder again—she was still there—and then he slowly turned to face her. “No
trees,
” he repeated, cocking his head slightly, as if something about the word itself suddenly struck him. With a slight smile he added, “Just . . .
limbs
.”

“Oh,
you’re
prunin’
. How thick are the limbs?”

“Not very,” he said. His eyes drifted from her face to her shoulder and then down her arm, and he reached out and took hold of her left wrist, encircling it completely with his thumb and middle finger. Startled, she yanked her arm, but he had a firm grip. She opened her mouth to protest—maybe even to yell—but he bore down hard, pressing his thumb into the bony side of her wrist, and all she could do was gasp now, her eyes darting in panic, the way the rabbit’s had. “Not thick at all,” he said, smiling, raising her arm for a closer look. “Probably about like this. Maybe not quite so skinny.” He turned her forearm this way and that, examining it from various angles, still bearing down on the bone. Finally he let off, though her wrist remained firmly in his grip. “What do you recommend?”

She cleared her throat. “Well, if you’re just cutting branches,” she said, her voice strained and trembling, “a lopper might be what you want.” She pointed her free hand toward the wall at the end of the aisle. Satterfield noticed that the hand was quaking; he liked that. He raised his eyes to study her face—her eyes downcast, her posture cringing, like a chained dog about to be beaten—and then he glanced in the direction she was pointing. When he saw the assortment of long-handled pruning tools there, he released her and walked wordlessly to the wall. The woman scuttled away, rubbing her wrist, keeping a wary watch over her shoulder.

Satterfield took one of the tools from the wall and spread the handles, causing the metal jaws to gape; then, as he squeezed the handles, the jaws clamped shut. The cutting blade looked powerful and wickedly sharp, but the edge was all wrong—straight as a ruler—and he frowned and hung the tool back on the wall. He was turning to go when he noticed that the there was more than one type of lopper. The one he’d inspected and rejected was an “anvil lopper,” according to the shelf tag. Satterfield puzzled over the name for moment, then noticed that the cutting blade—the straight, sharp-edged blade that wouldn’t serve his purpose—closed against a lower jaw that was broad and flat, like a small steel chopping block.
Like a little anvil,
he realized. Hanging beside the anvil lopper, though, was another lopper—with a different name, a different design, and a different cutting action. This one was a “bypass lopper,” and it cut scissor fashion—the edges of the two blades sliding past one another as the handles were squeezed together. The blades weren’t straight, like scissor blades, he noticed, with growing excitement. The tool’s lower jaw was blunt edged and concave, to encircle and support a branch from beneath as the upper jaw—the sharp-edged, steeply curved, convex upper jaw—sliced into the limb from above.

The bypass lopper came in three sizes. The biggest had handles as long as Satterfield’s arm; in addition, the jaws incorporated a cam to compound the handles’ leverage, multiply their force. Satterfield took the tool down from its pegs and opened and closed the handles a few times. He nodded approvingly at the metallic friction he felt; at the precision and power with which the edges slid past one another.

A selection of rakes and hoes hung on the wall a few feet away, and Satterfield walked toward them, the lopper in one hand, swaying beside his right leg. The handles of the rakes were about an inch in diameter: about the thickness of his thumb, he noticed when he held up a hand to compare. Taking a step backward, he spread the handles of the lopper wide and fitted the jaws around the wooden shaft of a rake. He closed the handles slowly, feeling for resistance—just as he’d done earlier, with the hole punch—as the concave jaw hugged the wood and the sharp edge began to bite into the layers of grain. Once the edges were well seated, he gave a smooth squeeze. The rake’s handle snapped with a dry pop, the amputated portion clattering to the floor as a razor-thin smile etched Satterfield’s face.

He took a step to his right. The hoes had heavier-duty handles: hickory, by the look of it, and nearly twice as thick as the rake handles. Satterfield opened the handles wide and worked the jaws around one of the handles. The blade cut easily at first, but the going got tougher fast, the steel handles of the lopper bending under the strain as he bore down. Just as Satterfield feared the handles might buckle, the hoe’s shaft snapped. It clattered on the concrete floor with a resonant, musical note, like the ring of a baseball bat colliding with a fastball. Satterfield bent and picked up the severed piece, studying the cross section closely. The cut was clean, but when he held the wood so that the ceiling lights raked across the cross section at a low angle, he could discern the cut marks, a myriad of ridges and valleys etched in the wood as the jaws had bitten through it. The marks were steeply curved, approximating the arc of a circle 3.5 inches in diameter.

Pocketing the piece of wood, Satterfield headed for the front of the store to check out. On the way home, he’d stop at Kroger, whose meat department sold big beef bones for soup, or for dogs. More tests were needed, but so far he had a good feeling about the bypass lopper.

He found a checkout lane with no line, and slid the tool across the stainless-steel counter. The young man working the register said, “Is that it for you today?”

“Only thing I need,” said Satterfield, but then he added, “Whoa, wait, I take that back. One more thing.” He backtracked two steps, to the end cap at the entrance to the checkout lane, and snagged a fat, striated roll of shrink-wrapped silver-gray tape. He stood it on edge and rolled it toward the scanner as if it were a thick slice from a bowling ball. With a broad smile and a worldly wink, Satterfield said, “A man can never have too much duct tape, can he, now?”

About the Author

JEFFERSON BASS is the writing team of Jon Jefferson and Dr. Bill Bass. Dr. Bass, a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, founded the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility—the Body Farm—a quarter century ago. He is the author or coauthor of more than two hundred scientific publications, as well as a critically acclaimed memoir about his career at the Body Farm,
Death’s Acre
. Dr. Bass is also a dedicated teacher, honored as “National Professor of the Year” by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Jon Jefferson is a veteran journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. His writings have been published in the
New York Times
,
Newsweek
,
USA Today
, and
Popular Science,
and broadcast on National Public Radio. The coauthor of
Death’s Acre
, he is also the writer and producer of two highly rated National Geographic documentaries about the Body Farm.

Like them on Facebook at www.facebook.com/JeffersonBassBooks.

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Also by Jefferson Bass

Fiction

C
UT TO THE
B
ONE

T
H
E
I
NQUISITOR’S
K
EY

T
HE
B
ONE
Y
ARD

T
HE
B
ON
E
T
HIEF

B
ONES OF
B
ET
RAYAL

T
HE
D
EVIL’S
B
O
NES

F
LESH AND
B
ONE

C
ARVED IN
B
ONE

Nonfiction

B
EYON
D THE
B
ODY
F
ARM

D
EATH’S
A
CRE

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Excerpt from
Cut to the Bone
copyright © 2013 by Jefferson Bass LLC.

JOR
DAN’S STORMY BANKS.
Copyright © 2013 by Jefferson Bass LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780062320308

Print Edition ISBN: 9780062320315

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