The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (20 page)

I DIDN’T HAVE FAR TO DRIVE. A HUNDRED YARDS
from Neyland Stadium—hunkered in a low spot of the asphalt that surrounded the stadium like an alluvial floodplain—was a dilapidated blue building of corrugated metal, the paint cloudy with age and streaked with rust. The building still bore a sign that read
ANTHROPOLOGY ANNEX
, but the sign, like the building, was faded and rusting. Years before, until we’d built the Regional Forensic Center, with its high-tech processing rooms, the annex had been the place where our donated bodies had finished shuffling off their mortal coil—or, rather, simmering off their mortal coil—in large, steam-jacketed kettles, to which we added a bit of Biz and a dash of Downy to sweeten the pot.

I parked the truck behind the building, then flipped through my many keys, searching for the one that fit the annex’s garage door. My secretary, Peggy, occasionally scolded me about the jangly mess that was my key ring, but now—as I found the snaggletoothed key that unlocked the garage—I felt vindicated for all the years I’d hauled around this spiky excess
baggage of brass and steel. “See,” I said smugly to an imaginary Peggy, twisting the door’s latch. As if by way of an indignant retort, the latch let out a screech that made my fillings shudder in my teeth, and as the door clattered and groaned upward, it unleashed a shower of dust, rust, and crumbled bird droppings.

I didn’t care. I retrieved the truck from behind the building and eased it into the dusty garage bay, then lowered the door and went missing. AWOL. The Invisible Man.

IT TOOK FIVE MINUTES JUST TO REMOVE THE MANY
layers of wrapping from the plastic bin of remains. As I snipped and tugged, I felt almost as if I were unwinding a modern-day mummy, this one wrapped not in linen but in Saran Wrap and packing tape—our makeshift maneuver to avoid stinking up not only my carry-on bag—my “carrion bag,” I had jokingly dubbed it—but the entire plane. As I unwound the final layer of plastic, I caught a faint whiff of odor—not the familiar, overpowering smell of decomposing flesh, but the charred aroma of burned meat.

Opening a dusty supply cabinet, I found a disposable surgical sheet—made of absorbent blue paper—and unfolded it on the counter that ran the length of one wall. Then I laid out the teeth and bone fragments in anatomical order, or in as close an approximation of anatomical order as I could achieve, given the high degree of fragmentation. The teeth, being the most intact, were the easiest; they were also of greatest interest and greatest consternation to me. What was it Prescott had asked about?
Tool marks or other evidence of extraction?
His question had sounded angry, but not merely angry; it had sounded surprisingly specific, too, and I wondered
what had prompted such specificity. As far as I knew, none of the FBI agents had reexamined the teeth after we had recovered them and sent them to the medical examiner’s office, along with the bits of burned bone. The morning of the press conference, Prescott had sent one of his subordinates to the M.E.’s office to retrieve the material, which the M.E. was glad to release, the identification having been made—positively and correctly, to the best of everyone’s knowledge at the time. So what had changed since then? What new information, or allegations, or accusations, had come to light to undermine the identification—
my
identification; my work; my reputation?

An old magnifying lamp, its lens gray beneath a blanket of dust, still hovered over the counter, its articulating arm creaky and arthritic with age. I flipped its switch, not expecting anything, but after a moment, the fluorescent bulb that encircled the lens flickered to life. “Hmm,” I said, then quoted a line from a Monty Python comedy, a scene in which a plague victim is being carried prematurely to a cart of corpses: “I’m not
quite
dead,” I cracked in my best—or my worst—Cockney accent. Then, after I’d said the words, they took on a new and unexpected meaning, and I imagined them being spoken by Richard Janus. Was Janus quite dead, or was he—like me—merely missing, AWOL, the Invisible Man?

Even after cleaning the magnifying lens and examining the teeth through it, I still couldn’t answer the question.
Someone
was dead, all right; that much was absolutely clear from the bones: vertebrae; shards of shattered limbs; charred chunks of pelvis; curved cranial fragments. But were those bits and pieces from Richard Janus?

The teeth were his; that, too, was beyond doubt. But other things were now entirely in doubt. Could it be true—as both Prescott and the television reporter indicated—that the teeth
had been extracted, then placed in the plane with a decoy body? If so, that meant the decoy’s teeth had been pulled, too, because if they hadn’t, we’d have found two sets of teeth.

The teeth were damaged—their roots almost entirely broken and burned away. At the scene, I’d been surprised at the lack of jawbone surrounding them, but then again, the jaws themselves—both the mandible and the maxilla—had been reduced to fragments. I’d asked Maddox if such extreme fragmentation was normal; he’d shrugged and nodded. “I’m surprised there’s this much left,” he’d said. “A high-impact crash like this? Usually all we find is a smoking hole.” I must have looked surprised, because he’d added, “If it were a helo crash, or a military aircraft, I’d expect more. Those guys wear helmets, so it gives a little protection. Poor bastards don’t have a snowball’s chance of surviving, mind you. The helmets just mean we get to pick up bigger pieces.”

The day before the press conference, I’d told Prescott I wanted to take a second look at the teeth, but he’d resisted the idea. The high profile of the Janus case had put too much pressure on him—pressure from the Bureau’s uppermost level. Now—now that it was too late; now that things were a royal mess—I was finally getting that second look.

I still didn’t see “tool marks”—which I took to mean marks from dental extraction forceps, or perhaps from ordinary pliers—but I wouldn’t really know until I’d cleaned the teeth thoroughly. So what had prompted the question, or the accusation, from Prescott? I could think of only one explanation that fit the facts: Someone had told Prescott—or the Fox reporter, or both—that the teeth had been extracted, and that Janus’s death had been faked. But who? And why?

HOURS LATER—HOURS OF CLEANING AND SCRUTINIZING
later—I still had no idea where the revelation had come from, or what had motivated it. But I
had
found signs of abrasions and fractures in the enamel of many of the teeth: abrasions and fractures that were more consistent with compressive and torsional forces—gripping and twisting—than with impact. With a heavy heart and sinking spirit, I concluded that the teeth had indeed been extracted before the crash. But I still didn’t see the big picture. In fact, if anything, I was more baffled than ever. Had Richard Janus indeed faked his death? If so, how the hell had he done it?

I WAS SURPRISED TO FIND A PHONE STILL HANGING
on the annex wall, draped in Halloween-worthy cobwebs, and I was downright astonished to hear a dial tone when I lifted the dusty receiver to my ear. Digging deep into my wallet, I found the business card—formerly crisp and imposing, now dirty and crumpled—that I’d gotten from Pat Maddox, the NTSB crash investigator, and dialed the number. The phone rang half a dozen times before a deep, gravelly voice rumbled, “Uh . . . yeah . . . Maddox.”

“Oh hell, I woke you up,” I said. “Sorry, Pat. I didn’t think about the time change. It’s only, what . . .” I glanced at my watch.

“Six fifteen here.”

“I apologize.”

“I might possibly forgive you,” he growled—still sounding like a balky diesel engine on a cold morning—“if you’ll tell me who the hell this is, and what’s so damn important.”

“Oh, sorry, Pat. It’s Bill Brockton. The anthropologist. From Tennessee. I’m calling about the Janus crash.”

“Oh, Doc,” he said, his voice warming up. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “In fact, I don’t have a clue. Which is the problem, I guess. I got a call—a voice mail—yesterday from Miles Prescott, the FBI case agent.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “I saw him on the news last night. Special Agent Prescott, not looking ’specially happy. Was he calling to say ‘thanks again for the great work’?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “How much news coverage have you seen?”

“Not much. Just the one story last night. Talking about the teeth. By that jerk from Fox News.”

“You mean ‘Mike Mal-
loy
. . .
Fox
Five News!’?”

Maddox gave a dry laugh. “Yeah. That guy. You’ve got him nailed. He called me yesterday—no, day before—fishing around. Sounded like he had some kinda scoop, but he wouldn’t say what. All I gave him was a suggestion about what he should go do to himself. Not politically correct—not anatomically possible, either—but it made me feel better to say it.”

“You think it was Malloy who told Prescott the teeth had been extracted?”

“Dunno,” said Maddox. “Maybe. Probably. He seems to have a real hard-on for this story.”

“But where’d
Malloy
get the information? I’ve spent all night looking at those teeth, Pat, and he’s right—they
were
extracted. Pulled. Thing is, I had to clean ’em off and look at ’em under a magnifying glass before I could tell. It’s not like some reporter could take a quick glance and spot the marks. Besides, how could he have even seen them—the teeth, I mean?”

“Well, I’m guessing
you
didn’t give him a look,” he said.

“Hell, no.”

“Okay, so who
could’ve
?”

“Nobody,” I said. “The only people who had access to those teeth were us.” Suddenly something occurred to me. “Wait.
Not
just us. The medical examiner did, too.”

“Just the medical examiner himself? Nobody on his staff?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “All the material went to the morgue—just overnight—so the M.E. could write up the death certificate. Maybe somebody on his staff snuck the reporter into the morgue.”

“But why?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Malloy’s girlfriend—or boyfriend, or cousin, or somebody—works for the M.E.”

“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Any chance somebody wanted to make you look bad, Doc? You done anything to piss off the San Diego medical examiner?”

“Of course not. Not that I know of, anyhow.” I thought for a moment. “Unless he felt like I was stepping on his toes just by being there.”

“You mean, like maybe it was an insult—a slap in his face? Like he wasn’t good enough—smart enough—to make the I.D. himself?”

“Could be, I reckon,” I conceded. “I’ve worked with a lot of medical examiners over the years, and most of them are great. But some of ’em are pretty weird.”

“Hell, Doc, what do you expect from guys who spend all their time with dead bodies?” I felt my hackles begin to rise—being a guy who happened to spend a lot of time with dead bodies myself—but then Maddox added, “Only folks weirder than
that
would be sickos who get their kicks poking around in plane crashes, right?” He chuckled.

“Right,” I said, almost smiling in spite of myself. Maddox’s wit was one of the things I’d liked about him while we were working the crash.

“So what does Prescott want you to do now?”

“Get lost, basically,” I said. “Stay away from the media. Stay away from the case. I’ve got to take the teeth and bones over to the FBI’s Knoxville field office. Should’ve already done it, but I wanted to take a closer look first—see if it’s true about the teeth.”

“And?”

“It is. The damn Fox guy got it right.”

Maddox didn’t speak for a moment. “So . . . I’m guessing this puts you in a kinda awkward spot, huh?”

“Kinda awkward. Like the pope is kinda Catholic.”

He grunted a sort of laugh, then said, “Sorry to hear that, Doc.”

“Makes two of us.” I blew out a long breath. “If the FBI was about to come down hard on Janus, I get
why
he might fake his death. But I don’t get
how
. How’d he get that plane to crash into that mountainside, carrying a decoy body and his bloody teeth?” Maddox didn’t answer, so I ventured a guess. “The autopilot?”

“The autopilot? How do you mean, Doc?”

“Could Janus program the autopilot to make the plane take off on its own, then turn south and level off?”

“Sure, Doc,” Maddox said, “if this was a Hollywood movie. Or if that Citation was a CIA drone. Otherwise, no way. He had to’ve been at the controls.”

“But
how
?”

Maddox sighed. “I’m probably not supposed to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“Turns out there might’ve been a way—there
was
a way—for Janus to jump from the plane in flight.”

I pulled the handset away from my ear and stared at it, as if the phone were Maddox himself. “But you said there
wasn’t
. You said he’d’ve smashed into the engine right after going out the door.”

“He would’ve—if he’d gone out the cabin door. Which, you may recall, couldn’t be opened in flight. So that’s all true.”

“Then
how
?” I was starting to sound like a broken record.

“Like I say, I shouldn’t be telling you things. But I can’t keep you from guessing, can I? So think about it, Doc. If he couldn’t go out
that
door . . .”

He’d made it easy for me to finish that sentence. “He went out another door—a different door.” I searched my mental data banks and called up an image of the aircraft. “But
what
different door? You showed us the cutaway. There
is
no other door on a Citation.”

“Well . . . not when it rolls out of the Cessna factory, there’s not.” He waited, as if he had given a big enough hint to allow me to solve the riddle.

“Ah,” I said, the light dawning. “Janus had the Citation modified, didn’t he? Bigger engines. Bigger fuel tanks. ‘So he could crash harder and burn hotter’—wasn’t that how you put it?”

“Good memory. Those were
among
the mods . . .”

“So he had other changes made, too,” I said. “Like adding another door somewhere.”

“Bingo. And what kind of door might a guy like Janus—a guy delivering stuff to remote villages—want to add?”

“A cargo door. But could that be opened in flight?”

“Depends on the kind of cargo door,” he said. “You know what a clamshell belly door is?”

“Is that like a bomb-bay door on a B-17?”

“Bingo,” Maddox said. “Main difference between a bomb and a cargo pallet is what happens when it hits the ground.”

“And the belly door on the Citation could be opened in flight?”

“That’s the whole point of a belly door,” he said. “Pretty crazy—the Citation can’t carry a lot of cargo, and it must’ve cost a damn fortune to install that door. But I guess it paid for itself the first time he dropped a pallet-load of cocaine.” He paused briefly, as if considering whether or not to tell me something. “You know he had a little private airstrip a few miles from Brown Field, right? Perfect place to do drug drops on his way back from Mexico.”

I was still playing catch-up, but it was all starting to make sense. “So you’re thinking Janus took off, opened the belly door, and bailed out just before the plane hit?”

“Sure looks like it.”

“But he wouldn’t have time to open a parachute, would he? That mountain was coming up fast to meet him.”

“At the end, yeah, but not at first, Doc. I’ve looked again at the terrain profile and the aircraft’s altitude. The airport, Brown Field, is about five hundred feet above sea level, and so is Lower Otay Lake, where he changed course and headed south. We all thought he was turning toward Mexico, you know? But I think he was aiming straight for Otay Mountain all along. If he jumped when he was over his airstrip, he’d’ve been a good fifteen hundred feet AGL.”

“AGL?” The term wasn’t familiar to me.

“Above ground level.”

“Fifteen hundred feet? That’s high enough to jump?”

“If you know what you’re doing,” he said. “And if you’re lucky. Skydivers are required to pull the cord by two thousand feet AGL. Gives ’em time to pop their reserve chute, if the main doesn’t open. Combat jumps can be as low as five hundred feet. But those lunatics that jump off buildings and bridges—BASE jumpers, I think they’re called? Some of them jump from two, three hundred feet. Dumb-asses with a death wish.”

“So he could’ve done it.”

“Hell, yeah, he could’ve done it. Would’ve been pretty fascinating, though.”

“Fascinating?” It seemed an odd word to use.

He chuckled. “Sorry. Slang. Means ‘scary as hell.’ Dark night, rough terrain, fast as he was going?
Extremely
fascinating. Remember D. B. Cooper—Dan Cooper? Hijacked a commercial airliner about thirty years ago?”

“Vaguely,” I said. “He got money and a parachute, right, and made the plane take off again?”

“Right,” said Maddox. “The plane he picked to hijack was a Boeing 727; damn things had stairs back near the tail that could be lowered in flight. Cooper bailed out around midnight, somewhere over the Columbia River Gorge. To this day, nobody knows whether he survived or not. Maybe that’s where Janus got the idea.
In
-ter-esting. Fascinating. Risky as hell, though.” He gave a small grunt. “If the Feebies were about to lock him up forever, though, I guess
not
jumping looked risky as hell, too.”

Two things still bothered me. I asked Maddox about the first. “So how come we didn’t figure this out while we were out there working the scene?” I hoped that the word “we” wouldn’t sound accusatory, but he saw right through my politeness.

“You mean, how come the hotshot crash expert missed something as big as a pair of belly doors in the wreckage?” He sounded surprisingly unruffled by the implied criticism.

“Well, okay. Yeah. How come you missed that?”

He chuckled again. “I dunno. Same reason you missed the tool marks on the teeth, maybe?” He didn’t sound spiteful; he sounded matter-of-fact, or even slightly amused. “For one thing, the fuselage was pretty thoroughly fragmented.”

“True,” I conceded. “Looked like it’d been through a shredder.”

“A shredder plus an incinerator,” he said. “For another thing, the evidence techs—not the ones working with you, but the other four, the ones gathering up the scattered chunks?—they were sending up stuff faster than I could sort through it. I didn’t get a chance to start combing through everything till after the press conference. Two days ago, I saw some parts I didn’t recognize—a couple hinges and latches—so I dug deeper, started asking around. That’s when I found out about the belly door. So I got on the horn to Prescott.”

“What’d he say when you told him?”

“Not much. That’s the weird thing. It was almost like he’d been expecting it; like somebody’d already told him something. He sounded mad when he picked up the phone. First thing he said was, ‘And what’s
your
good news?’ Like he’d just gotten some other bad news, you know?” He paused. “Maybe he’d just gotten a call about the teeth from Mike Mal-
loy, Fox
Five News.” He did a pretty good imitation of
my
imitation of the pushy, self-important reporter.

My second question was one Maddox wouldn’t be able to answer—it was one maybe nobody could answer—so I thanked Maddox and hung up, leaving the question unasked, except in my own frustrated mind: If it wasn’t Janus strapped into the Citation when it hit Otay Mountain, who the hell was it?

Suddenly a third thought struck me. This one wasn’t a question, but an inescapable conclusion, and it was the most disturbing of the three. If he really had faked his death and sent a decoy corpse hurtling into the mountainside, that could mean only one thing: that Richard Janus—a man I had admired deeply—was not just a hypocrite and a drug trafficker, but a diabolical killer, too.