The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (13 page)

“What’s the SAC?” I butted in.

“Special agent in charge,” he explained. “Head of the field office. The boss.”

“Yes and no,” said Prescott. He no longer sounded irritated. In fact, the smile on his face was growing broader by the second.

McCready frowned. “Huh?”

“Yes and no,” Prescott repeated. “It was the boss. But not the SAC.” His smile widened.

“Then who?” asked McCready. He stared at Prescott, who was now grinning like a Cheshire cat. “Wait—are you kidding me?” McCready shook his head in seeming disbelief. “Whoa,” he said. “That’s major.”

“So who
was
it?” I looked from one to the other, feeling clueless and stupid.

Finally Prescott took pity on me. “Who gave you a ride out here?”

I pointed at McCready. “
Duh.
He did.”

Prescott shook his head. “Who gave you and Mac a ride? Who let you borrow his ride?”

I furrowed my brow at him, still playing catch-up. “His ride? You mean the jet—the Gulfstream?” Finally I got it. “Are you telling me that was the director—the director of the FBI—on the phone just now?” I felt myself starting to smile, too. “Whoa,” I said. “That
is
major.”

AS THE AFTERNOON WORE ON, WE CONTINUED PICKING
our way through the crumpled shell of the cockpit and instrument panel—a mixed-media collage of burned wires, melted knobs, shattered glass, splintered circuit boards. We found a few more shards of bone and a handful more teeth—including the other chipped incisor, which brought our total to twenty-nine of the thirty-two teeth.

Tangled amid the wiring, I came upon a pendant on a thin steel chain, the clasp still fastened around a throat that wasn’t there.
A neckless necklace,
I thought ironically. At first glance, the pendant appeared to be a cross. Looking closer, I saw that the lower end had small tailfins; the pendant was an airplane, suspended from its nose in a perpetual climb. But when I rubbed it against the leg of my pants to remove the soot, I noticed that it was engraved—not with initials or an inscription, but with an etched outline of Jesus: an aeronautical crucifix; Christ on a flying cross. I held it in my palm as Kimball photographed it in detail, then I slipped it into my pocket, to give to McCready. We’d found a set of
keys earlier, a charred cell phone, and the mangled remains of a stainless-steel wristwatch. The pendant, though, was the only truly personal effect we’d found, and I hoped McCready would give it to Janus’s widow. What had it meant to him, I wondered: an emblem that melded elements of work and worship, worn around the neck of a man who seemed equal parts humanitarian and drug smuggler?
A man is a mass of contradictions,
I thought—a well-worn quotation, but no one had ever embodied it better than Richard Janus, I suspected—up until the split second he no longer embodied anything at all.

By now we were mining the lowest layer of wreckage—the floorpan of our excavation, down in the land of diminishing returns—and bit by bit, piece by piece, I began to smell the metaphorical barn. Finally we reached the aircraft’s nose, its outer skin, which was molded to the contours of the bluff almost as closely as human flesh adheres to cheekbones, forehead, jaws. “Okay, fellas,” I said, straightening up and twisting—left, right, left—to wring the kinks from my back. “Anything we haven’t found by now is either decimated or incinerated. Or both. I think I smell the barn. Or maybe it’s just us.” My announcement was greeted by a chorus of grateful sighs and weary cheers. I stepped back and took a critical look at the nose, the last large piece of wreckage to go up. “This is gonna be tough to get onto the platform,” I said. “Take some finagling to work it through those cables.”

“How ’bout we just hang it underneath?” suggested Boatman.

“Be easier—more stable, anyhow—if we took the platform off altogether,” said Kimball. “Fasten it right to the cable.” He explained how he would do it, pointing and motioning to show places he could attach straps to the piece, and everyone
agreed that the plan made sense. Kimball made a solo trip topside to unhook and park the platform. Ten minutes later he rappelled back down, followed by the crane’s steel cable, the big U-shaped shackle dangling from the line like a giant fishing hook.

Kimball had brought down a half-dozen neon-hued nylon straps, which he began threading around and through the flattened nose cone. As he bent over the mangled metal, tugging and tussling to work a strap beneath the bottom edge, he paused. “Hey, Doc. Got another one for you. A stray.” He reached a thumb and forefinger beneath the jagged edge of metal and plucked a small object from a recess in the rock. I held out my hand, palm upturned, and into it Kimball dropped the object: a tooth, one that had been snapped off at the gum line. I stared, blinked hard, stared again.

“Doc? What’s up? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I think maybe I have,” I said. “It’s an incisor. An upper central.” I tapped my front teeth.

Kimball’s brow furrowed. “Huh? I thought we already found both of those.”

“We did.” I studied the faces of Kimball and the other agents as they leaned in for a better look. “This is a third one. From a second person.”

“YOU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT?” SAID MCCREADY WHEN I
radioed him about the find. I heard him mutter to someone, “Brockton says he’s found another tooth—from another person, not Janus.” In the background, I heard what seemed to be a string of garbled expletives; I couldn’t quite make out the words, but I recognized the voice. “Maddox says, with all due respect, that your head appears to be inserted into one
of your lower orifices,” McCready said. “No offense, but I’m with Maddox on this—it
can’t
be from somebody else.”

“Maybe it can’t,” I told him. “But it
is
.”

“We’re still short three of Janus’s teeth,” he persisted. “It’s gotta be one of those.”

“It’s an
incisor,
Mac. Upper central. We’ve already got those, remember? Both of them chipped. Just like in the photos and the dental records.”

“Then it’s a lateral incisor. Or a lower. Or a canine.”

“Those are all accounted for, too,” I said. “All we’re missing from Janus are two molars and one bicuspid. Besides, this is—
trust
me—an
incisor
.”

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“I’d stake my life on it. Yours, too.” I turned the tooth over in my palm. “That’s not all. This tooth is from a Mongoloid.”

The radio went silent for a moment, then he said, “You’re telling me there was a mentally retarded person on that plane with him?”

“No, no,” I clarified. “Sorry, that’s anthropologist lingo. Mongoloid, as in ‘descended from ancient inhabitants of Mongolia.’ Mongoloid, as opposed to Caucasoid or Negroid. Mongoloid, as in Asian or Native American.”

“Sit tight,” he said. “I’m coming down.”

Five minutes later, the rappelling rope twitched and seethed as a grim-faced McCready descended from on high. Without a word, I handed him the tooth—a far less celebratory echo of the way I’d jubilantly turned over the first tooth. This time he did not smile; instead, he took it and stared at it—glared at it—as if it had done him a grievous wrong. Finally he looked up, frowning and sighing. “Well, I’m no dentist,” he said, “but yeah, even I can tell it’s not a molar or bicuspid. But what makes you say it’s Asian or Native American?”

I plucked the tooth from his palm and turned it edgewise to show him the biting surface. “See how curved the edge is? And how the back of the tooth is scooped out?” He took it back and gave it a close look. “It’s called a shovel-shaped incisor,” I explained. “Unique to Mongoloid peoples. And this is a textbook example.”

He nodded in acknowledgment, but the nod was followed by a baffled head shake. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Up to now, we’ve got nothing but white-guy teeth and white-guy bits—specifically, Richard Janus bits.” He gestured at the last remnants of wreckage: shards of instrument-panel glass; bundles of burned wire; control levers and pedals; the empty, mangled framework of the windshield; the crushed cone of the nose. “We’re all but done. How can we just now—just as the buzzer’s sounding—find the very first sign of Running Bear or Miguel or whoever the hell this is?”

“Dunno,” I said. Then I realized that I was a half step behind him. “You’re right, it makes no sense. How could anybody be deeper in the debris than the pilot?” My mind began to race. “
Maybe
. . .” Bending down, I tugged at the piece, as Kimball had just begun to do when he’d spotted the tooth. “Maybe,” I grunted, “he’s not
in
the debris. Maybe he’s
under
the debris.”

“Come again?”

“Maybe he was already here when the plane hit.”

“What are you saying, Doc? You think there’s an old Indian skeleton under here?”

A flicker of movement caught my eye—an iridescent, blue-green flicker, almost like the dot of a laser pointer in midair, just above the edge of the flattened metal—and I felt a rush, as if someone had just injected pure adrenaline into an artery. “No,” I said, pointing at the iridescent dot. “See that? That’s
a blowfly. Blowflies aren’t attracted to old skeletons; they go for ripe, juicy carcasses. I’m thinking we’ve got a fairly fresh body under here.”

“What? How?”

“Dunno,” I said again, this time with considerably more excitement. “Who would be up here? A hiker? A hunter?” Suddenly it hit me. “A border jumper. We’re only two miles from Mexico. Maybe it’s somebody who died after sneaking across the border.”

McCready considered this. “Seems like a stretch. A lot of ’em die crossing the desert in Arizona. Dehydration—some of ’em end up walking a hundred miles or more before they keel over. But five miles from Tijuana and the outskirts of San Diego?”

I looked up at the bluff. “Not dehydration. Trauma. A fall—maybe in the dark. If he fell from up there and landed on his head, his skull would’ve burst like a melon.”

McCready looked dubious. “So Miguel here takes a nosedive, and then—a day or a week or a month later—our guy Janus just happens to pile on? Exact same spot? Sounds unlikely to me.”

It sounded unlikely to me, too. But that scenario was only a fraction as unlikely as the death scene we uncovered ten minutes later, when Kimball finished the rigging and the crane peeled the aircraft’s nose from the face of the rock.

“Holy shit,” McCready breathed.

I looked around. “Where’s the camera?” I demanded. “We gotta have pictures. Otherwise nobody will ever believe this.”

I needn’t have said it. Kimball was already snapping pictures. As the camera
click click clicked,
behind me and beside me, images of the tableau began etching themselves indelibly on my mind: the hunched, crouching position of the flattened
man; the arms, flung upward in a frantic, futile attempt at self-preservation; inches above the bones of his hands, the head and forelegs of a mountain lion, caught in midair, crushed against the rock. Shielded from the worst of the fire by a layer of aluminum, these two corpses—man and beast; prey and predator—had escaped the incineration that had consumed the fragmented remains of Richard Janus.

I had worked a few other death scenes that had preserved, with freeze-frame precision, the drama of the deaths. I’d uncovered one of those in the rubble of a house that had burned near the Tennessee-Virginia border four years before, in the spring of 2000. Deep in the smoldering basement, seared to the concrete slab, I’d found the bones of a man’s pelvis and legs—and, oddly,
only
his pelvis and legs. Thirty minutes later, and ten feet away, I found the rest of his skeleton—his skull, spine, and arms—as well as a nickel-sized disk of melted lead pooled beside the vertebrae. The man had been shot first, I realized, then blasted in half by dynamite, in an attempt to destroy the body. When that had failed—it’s actually quite difficult to destroy a body—the killer had finally torched the house, hoping to make the death look accidental. He might have had a better chance of getting away with it if he’d reunited the two halves of the corpse . . . and if he’d removed the bullet from the dead man’s spine. Fortunately for our side, most killers aren’t geniuses.

My thoughts flashed back to ancient Pompeii, where an entire city had been entombed in volcanic ash: people lying side by side in bed, or sitting on their doorsteps; even dogs dying on their backs, pawing at the choking air. Then my mind took me back even further—nearly three thousand years back, to ancient Persia, where an invading army sacked and burned a citadel called Hasanlu. As the fire raged around the
warriors, the citadel’s main tower collapsed, toppling onto a stairway, flattening three soldiers in midstride as they ran for their lives. Two of them were side by side; the third man—slightly faster, and forever a few feet ahead—carried a large, ornate vase of pure gold. He clutched the vase—a death grip, in the most literal sense—for thirty centuries, as armies and empires and religions rose and fell above him, just as Hasanlu itself had arisen and flourished, then fallen and vanished. In the end, the gold vase was wrested from the soldier’s grasp, not by a pursuing warrior, but by an invader of a very different sort: a scrawny, twentieth-century American archaeologist, armed only with a trowel and a camera—a man who was every bit as astonished by the transaction as the skeletal soldier himself would have been.

Motionless on the California mountainside—part of the tableau myself, though only temporarily—I stared at the dead predator, then at the intended prey. “Lucky guy,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Kimball. “He was
real
lucky.”

I smiled. I hadn’t meant the dead man. I’d meant myself, for having lived to see such a thing. So very unlikely. So very dreadful. So very beautiful.

My bubble of gratitude burst a moment later, when McCready added, “Prescott is gonna
hate
this.”