The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (12 page)

This close.
Maybe the phrase didn’t exactly mean what I thought it meant.

This close.
It echoed in my mind.
Presumptive, but not positive.

DURING MY TIME TOPSIDE WITH THE SPINAL CORD
stimulator, the evidence techs had begun to mine a rich vein of skeletal material: splintered ribs; incinerated vertebrae; fractured long bones. By the time I rejoined them amid the wreckage, our five-gallon bucket—what I’d taken to calling our “special bucket”—was half filled with pieces of burned bone. As I studied the bucket’s contents, gently lifting and sifting my way downward, I was impressed by what they’d found—and fascinated by what they hadn’t. “Hmm,” I said. “So far, everything’s from the postcranial skeleton.”

Boatman handed me a singed scapula—the left shoulder blade. “The which?”

“Postcranial,” I said. “Below the skull. If we hadn’t found that tooth yesterday, I’d almost think he didn’t have a head. The headless horseman, but riding a plane instead of a horse.” Suddenly it hit me, and I let out a bark of startled laughter. “I’ll be damned,” I told the surprised agents. “Maybe he
was
headless.” Their puzzled expressions prompted me to explain. “When he hits—remember, he’s going four hundred miles an hour—he’s strapped in, right? So his body’s restrained, for a fraction of a second, by the harness. But his head
isn’t
restrained, and it snaps forward really, really hard. How many g’s did Maddox say the deceleration created?”

“Eighteen hundred.” The answer came from Kimball, not surprisingly.

“So if his head weighed ten or twelve pounds,” I mused, “then it would have jerked forward . . .” I did some mental math. “Jesus. With almost twenty thousand pounds of force.”

Kimball gave a low whistle. “That’s some serious traction.”

“I don’t know how much force it takes to pull the head clean off the spine,” I added. “We’ve never done that particular experiment at the Body Farm. But I’m guessing twenty thousand pounds would do it.” I redirected my gaze and began scanning a different area of the wreckage from where the vertebrae had been found. “I’m also guessing that we’ll find the skull—the pieces of it—somewhere up here, instead of down there.”

Straightening up from my crouch—I’d been stooped over the area where the vertebrae and scapula had been—I began examining the remnants of the instrument panel, the windshield, and the cockpit ceiling. The windshield itself had melted or burned away—it was plastic, not glass—but its misshapen framework remained: two rectangular openings, separated and reinforced by a stout central pillar. The pillar was bent and blackened and, down near its base, encrusted with a coating of black particles. The particles were bits of burned bone, I realized; more specifically, they were charred crumbles of skull, a few of them large enough to retain their distinctive, layered structure: hard outer and inner shells of dense bone,
separated by a softer, spongy layer. My pulse racing, I leaned close and worked my way downward. A few inches below the base of the pillar—embedded in the glass-filled cavity of a shattered instrument—I spotted them: a handful of blackened pebbles. A handful of teeth. “Bingo,” I said softly, mainly to myself. Then, a moment later: “Can somebody hand me the tooth jar?”

“Here you go, Doc.”

Without even looking to see who’d said it, I reached back and took the container. I removed the lid and tucked it in one of my shirt pockets, then took a pair of forceps from the other pocket. One by one, I plucked teeth from their nest amid the shards of glass. They weren’t all there—only ten of them; the others must have been scattered or shattered by the impact—but four of the ten were enough to send my adrenaline soaring again. “Somebody wake up McCready,” I joked.

“He’s standing right there,” said Kimball, pointing up at the rim of the bluff.

I glanced up and saw McCready silhouetted against the sky. “Hey, Mac,” I called, “can you give me another lift?”

He leaned perilously over the edge. “You okay, Doc? What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine. Got something else to show you.” I tucked my find into my shirt pocket, sealing six of the teeth in the small jar, folding the other four into a piece of paper.

“Climb aboard. Holler when you’re set.”

The ERT techs steadied the corners of the rack as I positioned myself at the center. “All set—beam me up, Scotty!” McCready spun his finger at the crane operator, and once more I ascended, swung around to the side, and settled gently onto what I had come to think of as the landing pad. “You’re gonna like this,” I said. “I’m . . .
positive
.”

He raised his eyebrows as my double-entendre meaning sank in. “Whatcha got? Suicide note? Signed in blood—in an asbestos envelope?”

“How’d you guess?” I fished in my pocket. “Actually, no, but probably just as good.” I held out my hand, my fingers closed, then slowly opened them to reveal four teeth in my palm. “Check it out,” I said. “I found a bunch of teeth. More than this, but these four are really special.” With my pinky, I pointed to the first. “A canine. Dog tooth. The longest root of any tooth.”

McCready leaned in, studying the tooth. “Looks kinda gnarly.
Twisted,
almost.”

“Exactly—the root’s got a slight corkscrew curve. Very distinctive. I’ve never seen one quite like this before.”

He nodded. “So far, so good.”

“It gets better.” I pointed to a pair of teeth. “The upper central incisors—both of ’em.” I tapped my own, then touched the teeth in my palm again. “Look at that.”

“They’re chipped—the corners broken off. By the crash?”

“No. See how the edges of the breaks are rounded off? They’re worn. These teeth have been chipped for years. That picture Maddox showed us, of Janus grinning beside the jet? Look close and you’ll see these chipped teeth.”

McCready himself was now starting to smile. “This is good, right?”

“Good? It’s
grrreeaat,
” I responded, in my best Tony the Tiger imitation. “But I saved the best for last. The most interesting, anyhow. This one’s a maxillary third molar—a wisdom tooth. Upper right.” I opened my mouth and put the tip of my tongue in the hollow of my tooth to show him. “
Iss
whun,” I mumbled, tapping the outside of my cheek as well. “This one’s interesting in a couple of ways. First, it’s got a filling.
That’s far more common in a lower molar, because food and saliva tend to collect there.” He nodded, but I could tell I was losing him, so I hurried on. “But the really cool thing about this tooth?
This
.” Plucking it carefully from my palm, I held it up, rotating it slowly to reveal the prize.

“Huh,” he said. “What’s that funny little knob on the side?”

“That,” I said triumphantly, “is a cusp of Carabelli.”

“A cusp of what?”

“Not
what,
” I corrected. “
Who
. Or whom. Whichever. A cusp of Carabelli, the guy who first studied ’em, back in the 1800s.”

“Oh,
him,
” McCready cracked. “Sure.”

“Carabelli was the royal dentist for one of the Hapsburg emperors,” I explained. “Carabelli’s cusp—also called Carabelli’s tubercle—is a prominent bump located on the lingual surface—the ‘tongue’ side of a tooth—instead of the biting surface. It’s found occasionally on first molars, rarely on second molars, and almost never on third molars.”

“So the fact that we’ve got one on a third molar . . .”

“Means we’ve got a slam dunk on the I.D.,” I finished. “If—
if
—it matches Janus’s dental records.” I gave him a pointed, interrogatory look.

He growled in exasperation. “Okay, okay, let me see if I can light a fire under that dentist.” He unholstered his cell phone and scrolled down the display, then pushed the “call” button. When the call was answered, he spoke in an official-sounding tone I’d never heard him use before. “This is Special Agent McCready of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I need to speak with Dr. Grant.”

Through the tiny speaker, I heard a woman’s tinny voice. “Sir, he’s with a patient. If you’ll give me your name and number—”

“Ma’am, listen closely. Are you listening? I need Dr. Grant to take his fingers out of that patient’s mouth, pick up the phone, and talk to me for sixty seconds. It’s a law-enforcement matter, and it’s quite urgent.” I saw his jaw muscles clench as she promised once more to relay a message. He cut her off. “
Ma’am,
I’ve spoken with you six times in the past three days, and all six times, you’ve told me he was with a patient, and you’ve assured me that he’d call me back as soon as he was free. So here’s the deal. If the patient he’s with right now is the president of the United States, then I’ll leave a message. But otherwise, I either speak with him in the next thirty seconds, or I file charges—against Dr. Grant, and against
you
—for obstruction of justice. So I suggest you lay down the phone and go explain the options to him, because that thirty seconds? It starts . . . right . . .
now
.” He took the phone away from his ear and pressed it to his shoulder, shaking his head and muttering, “Why do some people go out of their way to make things difficult?” He put the phone back up to his ear, and a few seconds later, his eyes narrowed. “Dr. Grant, at last. Special Agent McCready, FBI. . . . Yes, you must have the world’s busiest dental practice. . . . You’re in the Medical Arts Building on Broadway, is that right? . . . Uh-huh. As I believe I indicated in my prior phone calls—my
six
prior phone calls—we need the dental records of one of your patients, Richard Janus, and we need ’em day before yesterday. So here’s what’s about to happen, Dr. Grant. In ten minutes, an FBI agent will arrive at your office. He’ll have a subpoena in one hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other. If he doesn’t leave with those records, he leaves with you. Your choice. Do I make myself clear, Dr. Grant?” He listened for a moment more. “Thank you, Dr. Grant. You’re making a wise choice.” He snapped the phone shut with a grim smile, then gave another growl.

THIRTY MINUTES LATER, AS I WAS PLUCKING BLACKENED
shards of bone from the aircraft wreckage once more, I heard the now-familiar
whop-whop-whop
of helicopter blades approaching. “
Criminy,
” said Kimball. “Are we working a restricted crash site here, or is this now the approach to LAX?”

I looked up, expecting to see the television chopper again, the new crew waving a Freedom of the Press banner or wielding some sort of injunction giving them permission to ignore the airspace restriction. But instead of the colorful Fox 5 logo, I saw only glossy black paint.

“That must be one of ours,” said Kimball. “No markings.”

A moment later, his guess was confirmed when McCready radioed down, asking for me to come up. “Prescott’s here with the dental records,” Kimball told me.

By the time Kimball finished the sentence, I was already clambering aboard the platform for the ride up.

“GOOD WORK,” SAID PRESCOTT, LOOKING UP FROM
the teeth cradled in his palm—the corkscrew canine, the chipped incisors, and the molar with the cusp of Carabelli on the side. “So now we’re positive.”

“Looks like it,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘looks like it’? It’s his plane, his battery-powered spine, and his weird teeth.” He pointed at the molar. “So tell me, what are the chances that this molar, with this bump on the side, came from somebody other than Richard Janus?”

“Oh, virtually zero,” I said. “One in a million, probably.”

He nodded. “And what are the chances that all four of these teeth—which match his dental records perfectly—came from someone else?”

“So small, I don’t even know how to say it. One in many billions.”

“But you don’t sound certain.”

“I am,” I said. “It’s just . . .”

“Just
what,
Doc?” I’d heard irritation in Prescott’s voice before, so I recognized when I heard it again now.

“It’d be good to confirm it with some soft-tissue DNA,” I told him. “Just to be absolutely certain.”

Prescott glanced at McCready, eyebrows raised. McCready gave a slight shake of his head. P rescott glared at me again. “McCready says the guy’s a crispy critter. Is he telling me wrong?”

“No.”

Prescott was like a dog gnawing a bone, but the bone was me. “Have you
got
some soft tissue from this guy, Dr. Brockton?”

“Not so far.”

“Are you
expecting
any, Dr. Brockton?”

“Well, no.”

Prescott raised his hands, as if he were Christ on the cross. “Look, no offense”—a phrase that was nearly always followed by offensive words—“but we’re not living in a perfect world here, or working in some ivory-tower laboratory. We’re at a crime scene that’s one hell of a challenge, and we’ve found multiple bases for identification. Without soft tissue—or some magical video that shows Richard Janus actually steering the plane into the mountainside—this seems about as positive an I.D. as we’re gonna get.”

“You’re probably right,” I conceded.

“
Thank
you,” he said. “I said it before and I’ll say it again: I appreciate your contribution. And now I’m calling the boss.” Prescott raised his phone, found a number,
and pressed “call.” “I’m up at the Janus crash site,” he said. “With the dental records. We’ve got a solid match—it’s a positive I.D. . . . Dr. Brockton, the anthropologist, just walked me through it. It’s solid, sir. Very solid. We’ve got several teeth with very distinctive features. Any one of them would be enough, says Brockton; cumulatively, it’s beyond question. There’s more, too. We’ve also recovered an orthopedic device that Janus had implanted a few years ago.” He listened, nodding. “We can be ready whenever. You want us to brief the widow first? . . . Yes, sir, I agree. But I think we should do them back to back: give her the news first, then—bam!—straight to the press conference. We don’t want her to get out ahead of us and spin it. We need to be the ones shaping the story. . . . Yes, sir, we’ll be ready. . . . Thank
you,
sir. Thank you very much.”

He clicked the phone shut, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

McCready raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like the SAC is keeping a close eye on this one,” he said.