The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (21 page)

SHE ANSWERED ON THE FIRST RING, HER VOICE AS
flat and expressionless as a computer’s. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Janus?” She didn’t respond, so I went on. “Mrs. Janus, it’s Bill Brockton—Dr. Brockton, the forensic anthropologist—returning your call.”

“Oh, thank you, Doctor,” she said, and it was as if a switch had flipped: Her voice was no longer mechanical and flat; now it was warm, expressive, and deeply sad. “Thank you. I am very grateful. No one else will return my calls—no one except reporters, and I don’t want to talk to them. It is extremely painful, this sudden . . .
not knowing
.”

The phrase,
not knowing
—or, rather, the deep chord it struck in me—took me by surprise. I’d heard the same phrase many times over the years, most often from the parents of abducted kids, runaway girls, or missing young women; I’d also heard it from the families of Vietnam War soldiers who were still, after decades, missing in action. I had pegged Mrs. Janus as different from such simple, open grievers. I had sized her up as cool, calm, and collected—or maybe I had judged her to be
complicit and guilty. Now, in response to her comment, I felt my shields lowering and my sympathy rising.

Still, I knew that if not knowing was her problem, I was in no position to solve it. “Unfortunately, Mrs. Janus,” I said, “I probably can’t tell you anything that will help you. The truth is, I don’t know what’s going on. I no longer have any idea whether your husband is dead or alive. I wish I did. And I’ve got your number. If I find out anything, I promise to call you.”

“Wait,” she said, her voice urgent. “Don’t hang up.
Please.
You are my only hope.”

“Me? But I just told you—I don’t know anything. Really, I don’t. I’ve never been so confused and frustrated by a case.” As I said the words “a case,” I realized they might sound cold and callous to her. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean to sound insensitive or unkind.”

“I understand,” she said. “And you don’t. But tell me, please—at the meeting, you sounded convinced that it was Richard in the plane.”

“At the meeting, I was,” I said. “But now? Now I don’t know.”

“The media and the FBI are saying that it
wasn’t
Richard,” she said. “That it was someone else. That Richard had his teeth pulled, and he killed someone else, and pulled that man’s teeth, too. But how can this be, Doctor? It cannot be.”

“It
might
be,” I said, thinking—just as Maddox had, one phone call and five minutes earlier—that I shouldn’t say anything more. But then, just like Maddox, I kept talking. “The only new information I have is this. I just now reexamined the teeth—your husband’s teeth—and it’s true that they had been pulled. Extracted.” I heard what sounded like a soft gasp on the other end of the line. I went on: “I couldn’t see that when I found them in the wreckage, because the teeth were
covered with soot and grease. But I just now finished cleaning them. And when I looked at them under a magnifying glass, I could see marks—little scratches and cracks—made by forceps or pliers or some other tool.”

“
Dios mío,
” she whispered.
My God
. “But who could have done this? Could . . . Richard do that himself? Pull all his own teeth, so he could fake his death?”

I hadn’t even considered this grisly possibility. “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I’ve never heard of anybody pulling out all their own teeth. One or two, sure, but a whole mouthful? There would be a lot of pain. And a lot of blood. I suspect the body would go into shock long before all the teeth were out.”

“So if Richard did this—if he faked his death—he would have needed help. An accomplice.”

“I think so,” I said, wondering if
she
might be the accomplice. I tried to imagine Carmelita Janus—the elegant woman I’d sat across the table from only a few days before—yanking tooth after bloody tooth from her husband’s mangled mouth. I couldn’t picture it. Suddenly I recalled the FBI’s struggle to obtain Janus’s dental records. “He might have had a dentist do it. To minimize the pain and the damage. Even so, it would have been a drastic step.” I recalled stories I’d heard about coyotes and wolves, caught in traps, gnawing off their own legs to free themselves, but I stopped myself from mentioning those to her. Instead, I simply said, “He would have to be very desperate to do that. But it sounds like maybe he was.”

“No. He
wasn’t,
” she said. Her voice broke, and her breath turned quick and ragged and jerky, like that of a hurt child or an injured animal. “He . . . was worried, yes. Afraid, even. He had agreed to do something dangerous . . . to . . . help someone. But it was almost over, he said, and everything was going to be all right. That was the last thing he said to me. ‘I’ll be
back soon, and everything will be all right.’ And then he said, ‘I love you so much.’ And then . . . he was gone.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet, and she kept sobbing. Finally she spoke again, her voice now thick and gluey. “To think that he was dead—it broke my heart. To think he might be alive—it would make me . . .
happy . . .”
Something about the way she said it—the pause before she said the word; the upward inflection that left the end of the sentence hanging in midair—seemed to contradict her words. “But it also makes me very confused. I thought I knew my husband, Doctor—I thought I knew, absolutely, who he was. Now, I cannot say that, not with conviction. But not to know the truth? That is the worst of all. It will drive me insane. And that is why I beg you to help me.”

Perhaps she was just a practiced liar and a good actress, or perhaps I was reacting out of my own wounded pride, but I found myself believing her—and wanting to ease her pain. “Mrs. Janus, I would help you if I could,” I said. “But frankly, I don’t see how I can. I’ve been taken off the case. The FBI thinks I botched it. And maybe they’re right.”

“The FBI.” Her voice had turned steely. “The FBI wanted Richard dead. Maybe enough to kill him.”

“
Wait
a minute,” I said. “They’re a law enforcement agency. They’re the good guys. They would never do that.”

I heard a sharp exhalation. “I see that you’re an idealist, Dr. Brockton.” There was a note of sadness, or even bitterness, in her words. “Just like Richard. You believe in the goodness of people. And sometimes, yes, that is a gift. A prophecy and a catalyst.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sometimes believing that people are good
inspires
them to be good. Inspires them to try harder. Maybe they begin
to see themselves the way that you see them; maybe they like what they see, and so they try to
become
it—try to become honest, or kind, or generous; more noble than they have been before. Sometimes.” She paused, then added, “But other times, believing good things about people allows them to take advantage of you. Or deceive you. Or even destroy you.” She drew another breath, this one long and steady. “Be careful, so this doesn’t happen to you also.”

This conversation was not going the way I’d expected it to. “As I said, Mrs. Janus, I’m not at all sure I can help you. But maybe you can help me. I’m very confused, too. I still feel sure that those were your husband’s teeth in the wreckage.”

“Yes, without a doubt,” she agreed. “Even if the rest of the remains were someone else’s, the teeth were Richard’s.”

“But the spinal cord stimulator,” I pointed out. “That’s evidence that the remains—”

“
That,
” she interrupted, “is evidence that the FBI cannot be trusted.”

“Why do you say that? The FBI now seems to think that it wasn’t Richard in the plane. But the spinal cord stimulator suggests that it
was
him.”

Again she surprised me, this time with a brief, bitter laugh. “Not at all,” she said. “Richard did not have a spinal cord stimulator.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, more confused than ever. “I saw his medical records. I saw the x-ray.
You
saw the x-ray.”

“He
used
to have a spinal cord stimulator,” she said. “But it wasn’t working, so he had it removed. More than a year ago.”

“Then why didn’t his medical records say that he’d had it taken out?”

“Because Richard decided that the doctor who put it in was a quack. He stopped going to that doctor. He had it
taken out in Mexico City, when we were visiting my family.”

My mind was racing. “But why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you say something, when I talked about finding the stimulator in the wreckage? When I showed you the x-ray?”

“You were with the FBI,” she said simply. “I did not trust them, so why would I trust you? Why would I tell you anything? If I thought Richard was still alive—hiding somewhere—why would I tell that to the FBI? They would just keep looking for him.”

My next question seemed the obvious one. “Then why are you telling me now, Mrs. Janus?”

“Because I have changed my mind about you, Dr. Brockton.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. First, you told me something about yourself that day—a small but important fact, something easy for me to check, to find out if it was the truth or a lie.”

“What fact?”

“You told me that you give money to support Richard’s work. I checked, and it’s true. That tells me that you’re an honest man, and also a good man. That is one reason I changed my mind.”

“What’s the other reason?”

“Because now the FBI has betrayed you, too,” she said, her voice cold with contempt. “There is an old saying, Doctor, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ You know this saying?”

“I know the saying, Mrs. Janus,” I said, suddenly uncomfortable, “but it doesn’t apply here. I don’t think I’ve been betrayed. And the FBI is certainly not my enemy.”

“Are you sure, Doctor? The FBI seems to consider
you
an enemy.”

I was just about to answer her—disagree with her again—when the building’s corrugated metal siding boomed and rattled so loudly I nearly dropped the phone.

“Dr. Brockton,” I heard a deep voice calling. “Are you in there?”

What the hell?
I thought.
And
who
the hell?

As if in answer to my question, a voice called out, “Dr. Brockton, if you’re in there, I need you to open the door. It’s Special Agent Billings. FBI.”

SPECIAL AGENT COLE BILLINGS—A TALL, MUSCLED
young man in a suit and a hurry—fixed me with a piercing stare when I tugged open the annex’s rusty door. “I’m glad to see you, Dr. Brockton,” he said, but his tight jaw and hawkish eyes looked the opposite of glad. “We were getting worried. Nobody seemed to know where you were.”

“Oh, sorry to cause a fuss.” I gave him my most conciliatory expression. “I’ve been right here since . . .”—I looked at my watch and gave a vague shrug—“sometime yesterday.”

“You don’t seem to’ve told anybody where you’d be,” he said. “Your wife said she didn’t know. Your secretary, either.”

I shook my head, rolling my eyes in what I hoped would pass for embarrassment at my own incompetence. “You know what they say about absentminded professors,” I told him. “And I’ve got plenty to make my mind especially absent lately. A Nashville TV station has opened a real can of worms. Raising a big stink—pardon the pun—about veterans’ bodies at the Body Farm. You seen any of that coverage?”

“A little.” He said it dismissively, so I’d be sure not to
make the mistake of thinking it mattered to him in the least.

“What a mess,” I went on. “I’ve been getting phone calls all hours of the day and night. Reporters circling my office, even coming to my house. Driving me nuts.” His eyes flickered impatiently. “Anyhow. I’m glad it’s you that found me, not that damn woman from Nashville. Channel Four.” I motioned him inside. “I’ve actually been working on something for you guys—your San Diego colleagues. Cleaning the teeth and bone fragments.”

If possible, he looked even less glad than before, possibly even alarmed. Apparently this was something he
did
care about. “From the Janus plane crash?”

I nodded. “I didn’t get a chance to clean them out there. We were scrambling pretty fast. Now that I’ve got the soot off, I can see things I couldn’t see before. Tool marks on the teeth. They’d all been pulled! Damnedest thing I ever saw.” I pointed toward the counter where the material was spread on blue surgical drapes. “Here, let me show you.”

His expression turned stone-cold, and I knew he wasn’t buying my show of uninformed friendliness. “I’m sure that’d be very interesting, Dr. Brockton, but I don’t have time for that. I’m here to pick up that material from you. I’d better just get it and go.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Of course. It’ll take me a few minutes to pack it up. You can help, if you want to, or just look over my shoulder. Make sure I don’t miss anything.”

His eyes searched my face for signs of sarcasm, and it was quite possible that he found them. As I packed and padded the teeth and bits of bone, giving a verbal accounting of the items, he stood at my side, watching closely, and he reread the evidence receipt three times before signing it, bearing down so hard that the point of the pen almost tore through the paper.

BY THE TIME I FINISHED CLEANING THE ANNEX—NOT
only the slight mess I had made, but also the accumulated dust, dead bugs, and cobwebs of two prior years of neglect—it was six
P.M
.; I had been holed up for well over twenty-four hours, scrubbing and studying the teeth, my only sustenance the two apples and the three packs of peanut butter crackers I’d brought from home. Even though I was tired, hungry, and dirty, I hated to leave, because leaving meant plunging into the turbulence of the two storm systems swirling around me: the Janus case, where I was being made to look incompetent, and the Channel 4 ruckus—“Vet-Gate,” one newspaper reporter had dubbed it—where I was being portrayed as uncaring and unpatriotic. Not to mention the other problem, which wasn’t just painful but potentially deadly: Satterfield.

Raising the metal garage door, amid another chorus of metallic banshee shrieks, I stepped outside, blinking and stretching in the golden, slanting light. Drawing a deep breath, I smelled something unpleasant—something that I quickly realized must be me. I took a deep, analytical sniff and came to the conclusion that if I had been the subject of a multiple-choice exam question—“Which of the following does Bill Brockton stink of?”—the correct answer would be “(d) all the above.” Suddenly, to my surprise, I detected a delightful aroma amid the malodorous miasma, and my mouth began to water, as reflexively and reliably as those of Pavlov’s dogs.
Ribs,
I realized, my nostrils dilating, my head swiveling into the breeze like some ravenous, carnivorous weathervane. A quarter mile away, a thin plume of smoke spooled upward from the kitchen of Calhoun’s on the River and wafted my way.
Do I dare,
I wondered,
dirty as I am?
I took another deep drag of the divine scent.
I do, I do,
I decided;
I could ask for an outside table, on the patio overlooking the water, and I could duck into the bathroom on my way into the restaurant and do a bit of damage control at the sink. Life was looking up.

Reflexively I reached for my cell phone to call Kathleen. She probably wouldn’t want ribs again so soon (had our anniversary dinner really been less than two weeks ago? It seemed like months). But my hand came up empty, and I remembered that I’d left my phone on the counter at home, so that Kathleen and I could both truthfully say that I didn’t have it with me. What was the phrase the CIA had coined back in the 1960s—when they were hatching political-assassination plots they didn’t tell the president about?
Plausible deniability
: the I-didn’t-know legal loophole. I’d left my cell phone at home so I could say I didn’t know that the FBI was looking for me, but now plausible deniability was circling back to bite me in the butt—or at least to make it hard to score a dinner date with my wife. “Crap,” I muttered, ducking back inside to call her from the annex phone.

Kathleen didn’t answer her cell or the house line. Finally I remembered that she’d mentioned being off the grid today, too—something about a journal article she desperately needed to finish writing. I dialed her office on campus, on the off chance that she was holed up there, now that everyone else had likely left for the day. No luck. “Crap,” I repeated, not wanting to eat alone. Deflated again, I backed my truck out of the corrugated cave, wrestled down the screeching door and locked it, heading for home and for leftovers in lieu of ribs by the riverside.

On an impulse, instead of heading directly home, I detoured to Kathleen’s building, hoping for a chance to tell her about my conversations with Maddox, Mrs. Janus, and
Special Agent Billings. I didn’t see her car in the parking lot, though, and her office window looked dark. Only then did I remember that she had planned to hole up in the library.

I parked in a fire lane outside the library’s main entrance on Melrose Avenue, switching on the truck’s flashers in hopes that they might ward off a ticket or a tow truck. I took a quick spin through the coffee shop and the study areas on the main floor without spotting her, then peered through the doors of several study rooms, before it occurred to me that she might be downstairs in Reference. I didn’t see her there, either, but I did see a librarian I knew slightly, peering at a computer screen.
Thelma? Velma?
Neither of those names seemed quite right. “Hello there,” I said to her. “How long before actual books are a thing of the past?”

She looked up, reflexively smiling when she recognized me. Then something flickered in her eyes, and she looked slightly embarrassed, as if she’d remembered something unseemly about me. “Oh. Dr. Brockton. Hello.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen my wife in here this evening,” I said.

“No, but I’ve been staring at this screen pretty hard. Feel free to take a look around.”

“I already did. Didn’t see her. She’s working on an article, so I thought she might’ve needed help finding something.”

“Well, not that I know of, but if I see her, I’ll tell her you were looking for her.”

“Thanks.” I nodded and started away, but then stopped and turned back. “Oh, long as I’m here . . . is, uh, Red working tonight?”

“Who?”

“Red. That’s her nickname. I don’t know her actual name. Young woman. Smart. Sarcastic, but in a fun way.” Thelma/Velma/what’s-her-name
was giving me a blank stare. “You know,
Red,
” I repeated. “I think that’s the color of her hair.”

“I can’t think of anybody who fits that description. Not in Reference, anyway. Maybe she’s in Periodicals?”

“No,” I said, feeling embarrassed and awkward—stupid, even—but also stubborn, not quite ready to give up. “Reference. I’ve talked to her two or three times. She was working the late shift one night a couple weeks ago when I called. June . . . twentieth, I think. Just before midnight. You could check the staff schedule.”

“I don’t need to,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t need to check the staff schedule to tell you that there was nobody named Red working late that night. Nobody named
anything
.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The library’s open till midnight during summer session,” she said, “but the Reference Desk is only staffed until ten.”

I STRIPPED IN THE GARAGE, TOSSED MY CLOTHES
into the washing machine, and stepped into the shower in the basement bathroom. I stayed there, slumped under the spray, until the water turned cold. I was physically exhausted—I hadn’t slept in almost forty hours—but I was unmoored and off kilter, too, from the roller-coaster ride of all the recent revelations, confrontations, implications, and miscommunications: Prescott’s angry message, Maddox’s new information, Mrs. Janus’s mistrust of the FBI. The last two backbreaking straws had been my unsuccessful search for Kathleen, followed by the disquieting discovery that “Red”—to whom I had confided about the Janus case—was a stranger and an
imposter of some sort, someone whose motives and machinations were utter mysteries to me.

Shivering as I stepped out from under the chilly water, I dried off, wrapped the towel around me, and trundled upstairs, where I found Tupperware containers of baked beans and potato salad deep in the fridge: the remains, I realized, of our anniversary dinner. The beans looked and smelled fine; the potato salad was slightly suspect, with a gauzy layer of mold floating above the chunky surface. It seemed more like a layer of ground fog than a deeply established colony of fungus, so I commenced a culinary version of an archaeological dig, removing the top stratum and setting it aside before excavating in earnest, shoveling it into my mouth.

By the time I’d finished the potato salad and baked beans, my whole body was buzzing with fatigue. Shuffling back to the bedroom, I pulled on a soft, ragged pair of sweatpants and a paint-spattered T-shirt, then returned to the living room and settled onto the sofa to watch a bit of the History Channel until Kathleen came home. Outside, the summer light began to fade. Inside, the sights and sounds of World War II filled the room. Within minutes, the menacing growls of warplanes and the lethal clatter of machine-gun fire lulled me into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I AWOKE TO DAYLIGHT—BRIGHT MORNING DAYLIGHT—
streaming through the living room windows. Surfacing from fathomless depths, I felt disoriented, staring around the room as if it were unfamiliar territory. The television screen was dark and silent, so evidently Kathleen had come in at some point during the war and switched it to peacetime mode. But why hadn’t she waked me, even if only to lead me to bed?

“Kathleen? Kathleen! Are you here?”

“I’m in the kitchen, honey. About to leave.”

Swinging my feet onto the floor, I levered myself into a sitting position and pushed myself off the couch. Rounding the corner into the kitchen, I saw Kathleen rinsing her coffee cup, her briefcase already slung over one shoulder. Still groggy, I moved toward her, hoping for a kiss. “Why didn’t you wake me up? What time did you get in?”

“Really late,” she said. “Midnight, maybe? You were really out of it—I could hear you snoring from down in the garage, as soon as I got out of my car—so I figured I should just let sleeping dogs lie.”

“I wish you’d woken me up. I really wanted to see you.”

“Sorry, hon. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep if I woke you up. And I was desperate to get to sleep by the time I got home last night. After you left yesterday—no, day before yesterday; God, I’m so tired—the phone started ringing off the hook. Reporters and FBI agents calling all afternoon and half the night. So I didn’t get much sleep Sunday night. And yesterday was . . . well, intense.” She picked up her keys from the counter.

I glanced at the microwave clock. It read 8:15—later than my usual departure time, but earlier than hers. “Do you have to go right now?” I heard a note of petulance in my voice, and I realized that my feelings were hurt.

“I have a meeting at eight-thirty, darling.” She came and gave me a peck on the cheek, then slid off and headed downstairs for the garage. “I’ll talk to you this evening,” she called up the stairs. “Love you.”

“Love you, too,” I murmured to the empty doorway, my unheard voice a mix of wistfulness and resentment.