The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (10 page)

I SLEPT FITFULLY, MY DREAMS A PATCHWORK OF
conversations, confrontations, and altercations. Some of the dreams featured a fat man with red hair, one whose shadowy, sinister face I could never quite discern. Others featured a redheaded woman, her features also veiled and vague.

I stayed in the shower a long time—hot water, then cold, then hot again—to clear the cobwebs from my brain. When I turned off the taps, I heard the warbling of my cell phone. Still dripping, I raced to answer. “Kathleen?”

“Uh, no. Sorry. Is this Dr. Brockton?”

I recognized the voice of the reference librarian. “Oh, sorry. Yes, this is Dr. Brockton.” I hesitated, feeling foolish, then plunged ahead. “Red, is that you?”

“Yes. Am I calling too early?”

“No, it’s fine. I was in the shower. Have you tracked down the Goose Man already?” I was speaking low and fast. “That was quick. What can you tell me about him?”

“Well, for one thing, I can tell you that there is no such guy as ‘the Goose Man.’”

“It’s a nickname,” I said. “Like ‘the Godfather’ or something.” I thought I heard a snort of laughter at the other end.

“Yeah, ‘Goose Man’—
there’s
a name calculated to strike fear into the hearts of global badasses,” she said, sounding far more amused than I thought she should. “I can hear it now: ‘Call off your goons, or the Goose Man is gonna come
peck
you to death.’” Now there was no question about it—she was definitely laughing.

“
Hey.
” I felt my cheeks flushing and my temper ratcheting up.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, through the remnants of a laugh. “Couldn’t resist. But I swear, I’ve got the scoop. The guy’s not ‘the Goose Man’; the guy’s
name
is Guzmán. Spelled G-U-Z-M-A-with-an-accent-N. Pronounced ‘gooz-MAHN’—accent on the second syllable. Leastwise, that’s how they say it south of the border, down Mehico way.”

“He’s Mexican?”

“
Sí, señor.
Joaquin Guzmán Loera. Widely known as ‘Chapo,’ which translates as ‘Shorty’—a reference to his shape, which resembles a stout fireplug.”

“But who is he?”

“A badass. One of the very baddest badasses on the planet,” she said, sounding pleased with her discovery, or with the opportunity to apply the colorful label, or with both. “Also one of the very
richest
badasses on the planet.”

“Do tell.”

“Chapo runs the Sinaloa drug cartel, the biggest drug-smuggling operation in the world. Based in Mexico’s Sinaloa Province, a rural mountainous region that’s apparently perfect for growing marijuana. Also ideal for hiding big cocaine-processing labs. Giant meth labs, too.”

“Giant
meth
labs? I thought people cooked that stuff in,
like, pressure cookers. In trailers in the backwoods of Tennessee.”

“They did,” she said. “Still do, I guess. But these guys—this cartel—is all about supply and demand. Any drug there’s big demand for, they supply. Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, meth: If rich gringos want it, these guys have got it. Take a guess at Shorty’s net worth.”

“I have no idea.” From the way she put the question, I could tell it must be a lot. “Fifty million bucks?”

“Chicken feed. You’re ice-cold.”

“A hundred million?”

“Still frosty.”

“
Five
hundred million?”

“A cool billion,” she said. “That’s b-b-b-billion. With a
b
.”

“Get outta here. A
billion dollars
? Says who?”

“Says
Forbes
magazine. He’s on their list of the world’s richest people. Has been for years.”

“But . . . how does he keep getting away with it?”

“Easy,” she said. “Mexico’s police and military are
owned
by guys like this. Bought and paid for. Case in point: Guzmán was arrested at one point, back in 1993—”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “You just said he owned the police force.”

“He did. Does. In Mexico. But he was arrested in Guatemala. Once he got caught, Mexico had to pretend to be glad. So they put him in prison. Maximum security, so-called. But guess what? He kept running his drug empire from inside the slammer; kept
building
it from inside the slammer; kept getting richer. Then, three years ago, in 2001? Uncle Sam started leaning on Mexico to extradite Shorty to the U.S. So what did Shorty do? He walked out of jail.”

“Just like that? Walked right out the front gate?”

“Actually, he rode out the gate,” she said.

“And he’s a
billionaire
?”

“According to
Forbes
. And they know a lot about rich people. Apparently he’s got a great business model. Plus his own fleet of boats. Planes, too: Learjets, DC-3s, even 747s. This guy’s even got underground railways—secret tunnels running under the border near Tijuana.”

I was stunned by the scope of Guzmán’s operation. “But I thought we were winning the war on drugs.”

“Define ‘winning,’” she said drily.

“How is it,” I asked, “that America—the richest, mightiest nation on earth—can’t shut down this one guy?”

“Because we
love
this guy.”

“
Love
him? He’s the scum of the earth,” I squawked.

“Oh, I agree,” she said. “But Americans—lots of Americans—can’t get enough of the stuff this guy’s selling. ‘The insatiable American nose,’ one Mexican journalist calls it. Even our commander in chief seems to’ve had a taste for cocaine when he was young.”

“George Bush? The
president
? I don’t believe it.”

“Unconfirmed fire,” she conceded, “but persistent smoke. The point is, Shorty’s a businessman, pure and simple. Well, not so simple, and not pure at all. There’s blood on every line of coke snorted by every snotty, spoiled rich kid in America. But in the end, all Shorty cares about is the bottom line. He only supplies what we demand.”

I wished I could find some fatal flaw in that piece of logic, but I couldn’t. It was clear, compelling, and deeply discouraging. Suddenly the implications of her research hit me like a punch in the gut. “Well,
damn,
” I said.

“What?”

“I just connected the dots, and I hate the picture.” I
sighed. “I should’ve figured this out the minute I heard those guys talking. But my brain’s running in slo-mo; jet-lagged, I reckon, or maybe cooked by the sun.” I hesitated, unsure how much I should reveal. “This stuff’s connected to . . . a case I’m working.”

“The Richard Janus crash.” She didn’t put it as a question.

“How the hell did you know that?”

“Well, for one thing, you’re all over the local news. The
News-Sentinel;
Channel Ten. But I figured it out last night. When you said you were in San Diego.”

I wasn’t happy to hear this, but I was impressed. “How?”

“Easy-peasy. The crash was big news—national news—yesterday morning. Sensational story; celebrity pilot; everybody tight-lipped about whether the body’s been I.D.’d. Then one of the world’s experts on identifying skeletal remains turns up in San Diego. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”

“I like the way your mind works, Red. Ever think about getting out of the library?”

“Huh?” She sounded . . . what? confused? taken aback? No: She sounded defensive, maybe even scared.
Why?
Parsing what I’d said to her, I realized,
Hell, Bill, you dumb-ass. This woman’s been stalked, and suddenly you sound like maybe you’re hitting on her. Angling for a date.
“What I mean is,” I hurried to clarify, “ever think about changing fields? From library science to . . . oh, for instance, forensic anthropology? We can always use smart people.”

I heard a brief snort—was it laughter, or scorn? “Hey, thanks,” she said. “I’ll add that to my list of brilliant career moves: years of school, mountains of debt, and a one-in-a-million shot at some dead-end teaching job in Fargo—where the odds of getting tenure would be about as low as the average winter temperature.”

“So you
like
the idea,” I said. “Great. I’ll be watching for your application.” Using my shoulder to hold the phone against my ear, I began wriggling into my clothes.

“You do that. Meanwhile,
I’ll
be watching for my Mac-Arthur Genius Grant.” She paused, then her tone got serious again. “Speaking of which: Your guy Janus—
he
was a Mac-Arthur Fellow, wasn’t he? Didn’t he get a genius grant for creating that charity?”

“Yeah,” I said, saddened anew by the shame and the waste of Janus’s death, or his fall, or whatever it was. “A quick-response relief force, helping people hang on till the governments and the Red Cross can get there? It
was
a brilliant idea.”

“Important work,” she agreed. “Bound to be frustrating, though—so much need, so little funding.” She fell silent a moment. “So put yourself in his shoes. What would you say—what
could
you say—if somebody offered you a way to raise more money and help more people? A way to hire more staff, buy more planes? What if all it took to make it happen was to take a little something back with you, back across the border, on your way home?”

“Smuggling drugs? You’re saying Richard Janus made a deal with the devil?”

“Not saying; just wondering,” she replied. “Just thinking out loud. Playing what-if. Deadhead miles are a waste of time and fuel, right? Ask any long-haul delivery guy. Wheels or wings, same diff. Besides,
somebody’s
gonna haul it;
somebody’s
gonna get rich. Why not one of the good guys?”

“Because then you stop being one of the good ones,” I pointed out. “Because running drugs makes you one of the bad guys.”

“Well, yeah, there’s that,” she conceded. “But maybe you could rationalize it.”

“Rationalize it how?”

“Same way Robin Hood did, I guess. Take from the rich, give to the poor.”

“But,” I started to protest, then stopped.
But what?

“There’s something else,” she added.

Crack! Crack crack crack!
The metal door of my room rattled, and I jumped almost as if the knocks had been gunshots. “I gotta go,” I said furtively. “Somebody’s at my door.”

More rapping. “Hey, Doc—you in there?” It was McCready’s voice. “You about ready?” I checked the bedside clock.
Crap,
I thought. I was five minutes late. “Be right there,” I hollered. “One second.”

BANG!
“Yo,
Doc
! We’re burning daylight!”

“Coming. Coming!” I muttered a quick “talk to you later” into the phone and ended the call, then hurried to the door and tugged it open. “Sorry,” I said, my face flushing. “I got caught on a call to UT.”

“Everything all right?”

I nodded. His question was routine—superficial small talk, without a doubt.

Almost
without a doubt, I realized uneasily. Was it just my imagination, or were his eyes boring into mine with the keen skepticism of a federal investigator?

On the rocky ride up the mountain, I mentally replayed the phone call, pondering the information and testing her Robin Hood theory: Did it fit the facts? And was it the simplest explanation that did? I had to admit, it did seem to fit with Janus’s swashbuckling style, his daredevil streak. I’d seen videos of him landing a DC-3 in jungle clearings scarcely bigger than my backyard. Clearly the man didn’t mind some peril—in fact, he seemed to thrive on it. Was he simply braver than most of us, more tolerant of high doses of danger? Or
was it possible that Janus was an adrenaline junkie: not just accustomed to risk, but addicted to it—that danger was his drug of choice?

If so, he may have suffered a fatal overdose, I realized—an overdose supplied by Chapo Guzmán, a rich but deadly devil to dance with.

“BIG DAY TODAY, GUYS,” SAID MCCREADY AS WE
loaded onto the platform and prepared to descend the bluff for our second assault on the wreckage. “Summer solstice; longest day of the year. Fourteen hours of daylight.”

Boatman groaned; Kimball said, “Great! We get overtime, right?”

“
Sure
you do,” said McCready. “And good always triumphs over evil. And the Democrats and Republicans are about to set aside their differences and work together for the greater good.”

“Hmm,” Kimball muttered.

The morning wore on; the sun rose and the heat soared, the brown stone of the mountain soaking up the solstice sun. I was surprised by the heat—I’d heard that San Diego doesn’t get hot until July or even August—but somehow we had managed to catch a heat wave, which combined with the residual heat from the fire to make the crash site feel like a sauna. For much of the morning we were in shadow, sheltered by the rock wall at our backs. By eleven, though, the shadow had
shrunk to a narrow band at the base of the bluff, and a hot, dry wind was funneling up the valley, swirling dust and cinders around us.

Mercifully, a few minutes later, McCready called a lunch break. Caked with dust and the salt of dried sweat, we boarded the platform and ascended the bluff. After our hours of baking on the slope, the comforts of the command center—ice water, air-conditioning, and a feast of sandwiches, fruit, chips, cookies, even ice cream bars—seemed wondrous beyond comprehension: as if we’d been released from a low, hot circle of Dante’s Inferno and whisked straight to Paradise.

AFTER LUNCH I STAKED A CLAIM ON A CORNER OF
the command center’s small sofa. I must have nodded off, because I suddenly found myself waking up. The chatter in the room had ceased, and—hearing the abrupt silence—I jerked awake and said, “What?” Then, as the fog of sleep dissipated, I heard what had caused the agents to fall silent: the thrum of an approaching helicopter. My first thought was of the sheriff’s chopper, but then I realized that the pitch was too high. This was no army-bred workhorse; this was a racehorse—the same Fox 5 News racehorse that had trailed Carmelita Janus up the mountain, I saw when I followed the agents outside.

McCready and Prescott—apparently the case agent had arrived sometime during my nap—frowned as the helicopter settled down, and their frowns turned to scowls as a young reporter, accompanied by a cameraman, ducked beneath the swirling blades and scurried toward us. Prescott held up a warning hand and shook his head—a clear, strong no signal—but they kept coming. The cameraman handed the reporter a microphone, and as they neared us, he held it up
and began speaking. “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News. Who’s in charge here?”

“I am,” said Prescott.

“And who are you?” he demanded.

“I’m the federal officer who’s going to arrest you both if you don’t leave immediately. This is a restricted area and you know it. So get back in your helicopter and get out of here, and I mean
now
.”

“Of course, of course. Just a couple quick questions before we go.”

“No,” said Prescott. “Now.”

“Have you identified the body of Richard Janus yet?” Prescott didn’t respond. “Have you found his body—or any body?”

“I won’t comment on an ongoing investigation,” said Prescott, his voice ringing like steel on stone. “But I will comment on this.” He held up a thumb and forefinger, practically touching. “You are
this close
to being arrested for tampering with a crime scene, interfering with a federal officer in performance of his duties, and two or three other things I haven’t thought of yet. When we have news, we will hold a press conference. Which you’ll be welcome to attend.
If
you’re not behind bars.”

The reporter held up his hands and began backing away, but he wasn’t giving up yet. “What’s the crime? You say this is a crime scene, so what crime are you investigating?” Prescott scowled, but I wasn’t sure whether his anger was triggered by the reporter’s doggedness or his own revelation—I felt sure it was unintentional—that the mountaintop wasn’t just a crash scene, but a crime scene.

Then I noticed Prescott’s gaze lifting and shifting, refocusing on something beyond the journalists, and I saw four ERT
techs edging up behind them. Prescott gave a slight nod—a gesture so subtle that I wasn’t sure whether I’d actually seen it or just imagined it—and the four agents swiftly closed the gap, grabbing the TV guys by the arms and force-marching them back to the helicopter. Just before the reporter was pushed into the cabin, he shouted a final question, and the flicker in Prescott’s eyes as he heard the last three words sent a shock wave coursing clear through me.

“Do you consider Richard Janus to be the victim,” the reporter had yelled, “or the criminal?”

BACK AMID THE SWELTERING WRECKAGE, THE AIR-CONDITIONED
comfort of lunchtime soon seemed a distant memory, and by midafternoon, even Kimball and Boatman had stopped bantering. We worked in steady silence, punctuated only by the thud of metal bumping metal, the rasp of metal scraping rock, the clink of rock rolling against rock. We’d still found no signs of hair or teeth or sinew, and as I stooped and straightened, stooped and straightened, I settled into a trancelike rhythm, moving like some assembly-line automaton: a metal-sorting machine, my clawlike hands gripping scraps and shards and depositing them on the rack, which—every twenty minutes or so—ascended into heaven, or into what passed for heaven out on the hellishly hot hillside. Only moments after disappearing, it seemed, the rack would return, its maw empty and mocking, sneering,
So, ready to pack it in?

“So, ready to pack it in?” I heard the question again, this time coming from outside my head, not inside. Startled, I looked around, then looked up. McCready was peering down at me from the rim, his expression quizzical and amused.

“Sorry,” I said. “What?”

“Ready to call it a day? It’s after five.” The insatiable rack had just come down once more, and McCready pointed toward me, then pointed toward the rack, and then mimed the act of reeling in a fish. I was exhausted, true; I’d spent most of the night fretting rather than sleeping, and I’d been keyed up all day as well.

But I was loath to end a second day without finding something: that, too, was true—truer, or at least more compelling at the moment, than my fatigue. I suspected that Prescott was still pressuring McCready, but if he was, McCready was shielding us from it. “Don’t forget, it’s the solstice,” I called up to him. “You promised us extra fun in the sun today.”

“Go for it,” he said. “The rest of you guys got a little more in you?” I heard a smattering of
sure
s and
why not
s from the ERT team; they sounded halfhearted, at best, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to let the sun set without finding something—even if that “something” was only clear evidence that, despite Maddox’s confidence, there was nothing in the wreckage to be found.

We worked for another hour without talking, the quiet broken at intervals by sighs and grunts and occasional muttered curses; by the tin-roof clatter of scraps raining onto the platform; by the rumble and whine of the crane as it hoisted another load from the base of the bluff to the top of the ridge.

Despite my resolve not to end the day empty-handed, I realized—as the emptied platform descended for the thousandth time of the day—that I was pooped. Exhausted. Out of gas. “Okay,” I groaned, “stick a fork in me, ’cause I’m done.” All around me, I heard what sounded like sighs of weary relief.

“Just in time,” said Kimball. “By now I wouldn’t know a femur if it hit me upside the head.” He radioed up to McCready.
“Hey, boss, Doc’s pleading for clemency. Any chance you can let us off with time served?” I didn’t hear McCready’s response, but a moment later, the platform eased a step closer to the ground, and Kimball offered me a hand climbing aboard.

Just as I stepped up, though, I caught a glimpse of something—or half a glimpse, or a tenth of one—in my peripheral vision. I didn’t know what it was, but it triggered some subliminal sensor, set off some subconscious alarm or detector. I froze and scanned the ground, but I couldn’t see anything of particular interest or importance. I stepped back, reversing course, and then retraced my steps, this time in extreme slow motion, letting my gaze brush lightly across the surface of the rubble: looking, but not too closely, for it was only when I
hadn’t
been looking that I’d actually seen whatever it was I’d seen.

No luck. I repeated the maneuver twice more without success while the ERT techs watched. I had just given up, and was stepping onto the rack for good, when I saw it again, a faint glimmer of something small and smooth and lustrous. This time I got a better fix on where it was, and I bent down, maintaining the same visual angle and keeping my eye glued to the spot. “I’ll be damned,” I said as much to myself as to the four FBI agents. “It’s a tooth—an honest-to-god tooth!” I knelt—sharp rubble dug into my knees, but I didn’t care—and plucked it from the metal shards that swirled around it, like some dangerous version of a gemstone’s setting. It was a bicuspid—an upper right—the roots broken and burned but the crown intact. I held it between my thumb and forefinger, studying it from all angles, as if it were a miraculous and precious object, unique in all the world. Which it
was,
of course—there was no other tooth anywhere on earth exactly like this one. Without fillings or other distinctive anomalies, it
wasn’t a sufficient basis for a positive identification. But it was a start, by damn. And it was proof that the plane wasn’t some empty, unpiloted ghost ship after all.

“Don’t tell McCready,” I said to my teammates in a low voice. “I want to surprise him with it.” Kimball held out a small paper evidence bag, the top open. I eased the tooth inside, then tucked the bag into my shirt pocket. Next I took an evidence flag from one of my back pockets and wiggled the thin steel shaft into the spot where I’d found the tooth, so Kimball and Boatman could map the spot when we returned in the morning. “Always park on the downhill,” my granddaddy had taught me long ago, back when I was fifteen and learning to drive a stick shift. “Makes it easier to get going the next time.” The advice had served me well ever since, and not just when it came to cars. Ending the day by flagging the spot where I’d found the tooth—the first of many, I hoped—was my way of parking us on the excavation’s downhill slope.

Straddling the empty bucket again—
not empty for much longer,
I told myself—I caught hold of the cables, and we ascended. This time, the tide of battle seemed to be turning, and I stood taller, actually feeling a bit like George Washington this time, the Stars and Stripes fluttering beside us in the breeze.

“Hold out your hand and close your eyes,” I told McCready when we disembarked topside. He looked wary, but he did it. Reaching into my pocket, I fished out the bag and opened it, then carefully laid the tooth in his palm. “Happy solstice,” I said, and when he opened his eyes and saw it, a smile dawned, spreading across his face like daybreak.