“Yeah, Doc?”
“You reckon maybe you could turn loose of my wrist? I’m starting to lose the feeling in my fingers.”
An hour after Decker left — finally sounding sane but still looking haunted and harrowed — my fingers were still tingling from his viselike grip on my wrist. Before he departed, I had nervously circled back to the subject of Satterfield, urging Deck not to go to the prison and “rattle his cage,” as he’d put it. “If you do,” I said, “he’ll know he’s getting to me.” Deck had grunted, then nodded — conceding, apparently, that cage rattling might not be a brilliant idea. I appreciated the concession. I just wished it had seemed more convincing.
After Decker’s departure, I had begun scaling the mountain of messages — the Everest of Insistence — that Peggy had left for me. I started by sorting them into three categories: Not Important, Urgent, and 911. After leafing through the first ten messages, I saw that the Not-Important stack contained no messages; all ten had ended up in the 911 stack. I redefined the categories — Bad, Worse, and Worst — but the outcome was similar, with all the messages landing in Worst. Next I briefly considered (and swiftly rejected) Worst, More Worst, and Most Worst, then settled on Oh Shit, Holy Shit, and Somebody Shoot Me. Still no change.
Clearly a paradigm shift was required. Instead of sorting by urgency, I decided to categorize by caller: Media Meddlers, UT Honchos, and Other. This time, the results were different, and though I certainly didn’t think I had conquered, I had, at least, divided: The callers were split almost evenly between two categories, Media Meddlers and UT Honchos, with only a few outliers in Other. Many of the messages were duplicates, I noticed: UT’s general counsel, Amanda Whiting, had called four times; the dean had dialed me twice; my newswoman nemesis, Athena Demopoulos, had tried me three times; and one persistent caller — the record holder — had left me seven messages, each of which bore the same San Diego number, followed by the words “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News!!!” I tossed the duplicate messages — and all of Malloy’s — and found to my relief that I actually had only a dozen callers chasing me, rather than two or three dozen. Better yet, I decided I could safely ignore most of the reporters, though not, alas, my Nashville nemesis.
The one caller whose name stood out as a pleasant surprise was Wellington Meffert, a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent who was better known, to lawmen and lawbreakers in the mountainous East Tennessee counties he covered, as “Bubba Hardknot.” Meffert had left me only two messages, but because I actually looked forward to talking with him, I moved Bubba to the head of the line. I was reaching for the phone to call him when the intercom buzzed. “Well, crap,” I muttered to myself, then — picking up the handset — answered with, “Yes, Peggy. Which particular pain in my ass is about to flare up?”
“Two of them, actually,” answered an echoey female voice that sounded familiar but didn’t sound like Peggy. My heart sank and my face flushed as the voice continued, “It’s Amanda Whiting, Dr. Brockton. The dean and I decided to drop by for a visit. Peggy was kind enough to put us on speaker when she paged you.”
“That was kind,” I said drily.
Sitting in the leather swivel chair behind the oak desk in my administrative office, I occupied the seat of power, at least furniture-wise. But looking across at the grim faces of the dean and the general counsel, perched on the ladder-back chairs normally occupied by failing students, I knew that my position was tenuous, at best. Amanda Whiting, UT’s top legal eagle, seemed ready to tear me to shreds with her Harvard-honed talons, and the dean — long one of my staunchest supporters — was relegated to the role of onlooker and sympathetic spectator as the shredding commenced and the blood began to flow. “Dr. Brockton, I appreciate the contribution that your research facility has made to forensic science,” Whiting was saying for at least the third time.
Methinks thou dost protest too much, I thought, but what I interrupted her to say was, “Not just ‘has made,’ Amanda.”
“Excuse me?”
“You said ‘has made.’ We’re still making contributions. Present tense, and future tense. We’ve got a dozen studies under way right now, and more coming down the pike, some of them really exciting.”
Whiting responded with a nod that acknowledged what I’d said and yet somehow, at the same time, dismissed it as utterly irrelevant. “I understand,” she said, and then proceeded to demonstrate that she didn’t, in fact, understand and also didn’t care. “But surely you can understand that the university needs to prioritize risk management and damage control.”
“Can I?” I could feel my blood pressure ratcheting up. “My understanding has always been that the university’s priorities are the pursuit of knowledge and the education of students. When did those get replaced by playing it safe and covering our asses?”
She flushed, not from embarrassment but from anger. “Don’t play the simpleton,” she snapped, and I felt my own color rising. Before I could retort, she barreled on. “How much of our funding comes from the state?”
“A lot.”
“You’re damn right, a lot. A hundred fifty million dollars this year, give or take a few million. And if the state decided to take a few million — or more than a few — how do you propose that we fund the pursuit of knowledge and the education of students? You ready to teach for free?”
“What’s your point, Amanda? You want to cut off my salary?”
“No, dammit, but the legislature might.”
“Oh, please,” I said. “Now who’s playing the simpleton?”
The dean shifted in his chair, scraping the legs across the floor, as if the chair were clearing its throat for attention. “Hang on, both of you. Can we maybe dial this back a notch or two?” Whiting and I continued to glare at each other, and he tried again. “We’re all on the same side, remember? And you’ve both got a point. Amanda, Bill’s research has made the Anthropology Department one of the best in the country.” I felt better, but only until he added, “But, Bill, the hornets that the Channel Four story stirred up might be about to sting us bad.”
I turned my full attention on him. “Sting us how? What do you mean?”
He frowned. “You remember that state senator in the story?”
“That grandstanding dummy from Jackson? What about him?”
“Apparently he wasn’t just grandstanding. He’s drafted a bill for the next legislative session. If you don’t shut down your research program, it would cut the university’s state funding.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, but I could tell by his expression that this was no joke. “Cut our funding? By how much?”
Amanda Whiting answered for him. “By one hundred percent,” she said. She no longer sounded angry; now she sounded demoralized and defeated. “Every damn cent.”
Chapter 28
The next morning I got up at five, an hour before my alarm was set to go off, and slipped from bed. Kathleen lay motionless, her breathing steady, and I decided not to wake her — if, indeed, she was sleeping, though I half suspected she was not.
We had been off kilter and cross all through the prior evening, to a degree that was rare and perhaps even unprecedented for us. I still hadn’t told her about Satterfield’s threat, and withholding that information meant that I couldn’t tell her about Decker’s meltdown in my office, either. My secrecy almost certainly contributed to my testiness — partly because withholding anything from Kathleen ran deeply counter to my nature. I had tried several times, on the other hand, to talk about both the Janus case and the political assault on the Body Farm. But Kathleen, usually so solicitous and sympathetic, had seemed distant and preoccupied. By bedtime, our conversation had cooled to curt monosyllables, and we had slept, to the degree that either of us succeeded in sleeping, with our backs to each other.