The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (3 page)

THE FAMILIAR ARC OF A RIB CAGE FILLED MY FIELD
of vision as I leaned down and peered through the smoke. On the rack of my charcoal grill, two slabs of baby back ribs sizzled, the meat crusting a lovely reddish brown. Ribs were a rare treat these days—Kathleen, invoking her Ph.D. in nutrition, had drastically cut our meat consumption when my cholesterol hit 220—but she was willing to bend the dietary rules on special occasions. And surely this, our thirtieth wedding anniversary, counted as a special occasion.

As soon as the FBI training at the Body Farm had ended, I’d headed for home, stopping by the Fresh Market, an upscale grocery, to procure the makings of a feast, southern style: ribs, potato salad, baked beans, and coleslaw.

As I fitted the lid back onto the smoker, I heard a car pull into the driveway, followed by the opening and slamming of four doors and the clamor of four voices. A moment later the backyard gate opened, and Jeff, my son, came in. Leaning into the column of smoke roiling upward, he drew a deep, happy breath. “Smells great. Almost done?”

“Hope so. The guest of honor should be home any minute. She’s been dropping hints all week about celebrating at the Orangery.” The Orangery was Knoxville’s fanciest restaurant. “Way I see it, only way to dodge that bullet is to have dinner on the table when she gets here.”

“You know,” he said, “it wouldn’t kill you to take Mom someplace with cloth napkins and real silverware once every thirty years.”

I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise. “You got something against the plastic spork? Anyhow, I thought it’d be nicer to celebrate here.”

The wooden gate swung open again—burst open, whapping against the fence—and Tyler came tearing into the backyard, with all the exuberance of a five-year-old who’d just been liberated from a car seat. “Grandpa
Bill,
Grandpa
Bill,
I could eat a
horse,
” he announced, wrapping himself around my left leg.

A few steps behind came his younger brother, Walker, age three, grabbing my right leg and crowing, “I can eat a elephant!”

Jeff’s wife, Jenny—a pretty, willowy blonde, who carried herself with the easy grace of an athlete—came up the steps after them, closing the gate. “Stay away from the grill, boys,” she called. “It’s hot. Very, very hot.” She leaned over the boys to give me a peck on the cheek. “I don’t know about the ribs, but you smell thoroughly smoked,” she said. “Are you
sure
you want us horning in on your anniversary dinner?”

“Absolutely. What better way to celebrate thirty years of marriage?”

“Hmm,” Jeff grunted. “Hey, how ’bout you and Mom celebrate with the boys while Jenny and I eat at the Orangery?”

“Listen to Casanova,” scoffed Jenny. “For
our
anniversary,
he took me to the UT-Vanderbilt game.
Super
romantic.” She shook her head good-naturedly. Then, with characteristic helpfulness, she asked, “What needs doing?”

“If you could set the table, that’d be great. Oh, and maybe put the slaw and potato salad and beans in something better looking than those plastic tubs?”

She nodded. “Hey, kiddos, who wants to be Mommy’s helper?”

“
I
do,
I
do,” they both shouted, abandoning me to follow her through the sliding glass door and into the kitchen.

“What on earth did you do to deserve her?” I asked Jeff as the door slid shut.

“I think she likes me for the foil effect,” he said. “I make her look so good by comparison. Same reason Mom keeps you around.”

At that moment I heard the quick toot of a car horn in the driveway, followed by the clatter of the garage door opening. Kathleen was home.

Soon after, delighted squeals—“Grandmommy! Grandmommy!”—announced her arrival in the kitchen.

The slider rasped open and she emerged, the strap of her leather briefcase still slung over her shoulder. “Bill Brockton, you
sneak
. You didn’t tell me you were cooking.”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“I wanted to surprise you, too,” she said. “I made us a seven o’clock reservation at the Orangery.”

“Oh, darn—I wish I’d known,” I said. She shot me a dubious look, which I countered with an innocent smile. “That would’ve been nice, honey. But I guess you’d better call and cancel.”

“I’ll call,” she said, “but I won’t cancel; I’ll reschedule, for Saturday night. You don’t get off the hook
that
easily. If I can
survive thirty years of Cracker Barrel vittles, one fancy French dinner won’t kill you.”

She turned and headed inside. The instant the sliding-glass door closed, Jeff and I looked at each other and burst into laughter.

Dinner was loud, rowdy, and wonderful, with three terrible puns (all of them mine), two brotherly squabbles, and one spilled drink (also mine). The ribs were a hit—smoky, succulent, and tender.

Sitting at the head of the kitchen table, I surveyed my assembled family, then, with my sauce-smeared knife, I tapped the side of my iced-tea glass. “A toast,” I said. The three adults looked at me expectantly; the two boys gaped as if I were addled.

“Toast?” said Walker. “Toast is breakfast, silly.”

“A toast,” Jenny explained, “is also a kind of blessing. Or a thank-you. Or a wish.”

Walker’s face furrowed, then broke into a smile. “I toast we get a dog!” His toast drew laughs from Kathleen and me, and nervous, noncommittal smiles from his parents.

“A toast,” I repeated. “To my lovely wife. To thirty wonderful years together.”

We clinked glasses all around. Kathleen looked into my eyes and smiled but then, to my surprise, she teared up. “To this lovely moment,” she said, her voice quavering, “and this lovely family. The family that almost wasn’t.”

Now I felt my own eyes brimming. We almost never spoke of it, but none of us—Kathleen, Jeff, Jenny, or I—would ever forget the near miss to which she was alluding. The grown-ups clinked glasses again—somberly this time—and Kathleen reached out to me with her right hand. Instead of clasping hands, though, she bent her pinky finger, hooked it around mine, and squeezed. It was our secret handshake, of sorts: our
reminder of what a sweet life we had, and how close—how terribly close—we’d come to losing it, right in this very room, right at this very table, a dozen years before. I lifted her hand to my face and uncrooked her finger, tracing the scar around the base and then giving it a kiss. By now the scar was a faint, thin line—barely visible and mostly forgotten, except when something triggered memories of that nightmarish night, and that evil man: Satterfield, sadistic killer of women. Satterfield, emerging from our basement, gun in hand, to bind us—Kathleen, Jeff, me, and even Jenny, Jeff’s girlfriend at the time—to the kitchen chairs. Satterfield, putting Kathleen’s finger into the fishlike jaws of a pair of gardening shears, and closing the jaws in a swift, bloody bite.

Odd, how memories can open underfoot, in the blink of an eye, taking you down a rabbit hole of the mind to some subterranean, subconscious universe where different rules of time and space and logic hold sway. Part of me remained sitting at the table, my fingers smeared with barbecue sauce, but part of me had gone down that bloody rabbit hole.

Kathleen’s finger, which had sent me spinning there, now beckoned me back. She stroked my damp cheek and smiled again. “Will you marry me, Bill Brockton?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” I answered. “Again and again. Every day.” Half rising from my chair, I leaned over and kissed her—a grown-up kiss, on the mouth, taking my time.

“
Gross,
” said Tyler.

“Gross gross
gross,
” agreed Walker.

IT WAS TEN-THIRTY BY THE TIME JEFF’S FAMILY WAS
gone, the kitchen was clean, and Kathleen and I were showered and in bed. I rolled toward her on the mattress and
cupped her face in one hand. “Not as romantic as the fancy French dinner you wanted,” I said, “but tasty.”

“Says the man who thinks turkey jerky is a delicacy,” she said. “But yes, delicious. And it’s always so sweet to see Jeff and Jenny with the boys. They’re such good parents, Bill.”

“They should be. You’re a great role model.”

“You, too,” she said, then—from nowhere—“You still sad we couldn’t have more?”

“No,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true; deep down, I would always wish I’d had a daughter as well as a son. “I’m the luckiest man alive. I couldn’t be happier.” I felt the stirrings of desire, and I slid my hand down to her hip. “Well, maybe I could be a
tiny
bit happier.”

She smiled, but she also shook her head. Taking my hand from her hip, she brought it to her lips and gave it a consolation-prize kiss. “I need a rain check, honey. Bad time of the month.”

“Still?” She nodded glumly. “That doesn’t bother me,” I assured her. “You know I’m not squeamish.”

“I do know, and I appreciate that,” she said. “But I’m just not up to it. I’m sorry, sweetie; I’ll be off the sick list soon, and I
will
make it up to you. I promise.”

She crooked her little finger at me again, to make sure I knew she meant it.

“I’m sorry it’s giving you trouble,” I told her, my disappointment giving way to sympathy. “Seems like that’s gotten worse again. You need to go back to the doctor?” She’d had outpatient surgery a year or so ago, to remove a uterine fibroid—a knot of benign tissue—and her cramps and bleeding had lessened afterward. For a while.

“I think it’s just menopause, letting me know it’s headed my way,” she said. “Now turn out the light and spoon me.”
She rolled over and snuggled against me. Switching off the light, I wrapped an arm tightly across her chest. Her breathing slowed and deepened, her body twitching as she sank into sleep. As my own breathing found the same cadence as hers, I made a silent wish for her—one last anniversary toast, Walker style:
I toast you sleep well and feel better tomorrow.

Brown Field Municipal Airport

San Diego, California

Twin shafts of light—one green, the other white—sliced the hazy night in opposite directions, like luminous blades, as the airport beacon turned with blind, unblinking constancy.

Poised at the western end of the runway was a small twin-engine jet, its airframe quivering like a living creature: like a racehorse trembling in a starting gate, its entire existence—bloodline and breeding and birth and indeed every moment prior to this one—mere preamble and prelude to the impending instant of release and freedom, of exultant headlong hurtling.

Within the indigo glow of the cockpit, the pilot, his face ghostly in the glow of gauges and screens, worked his way down the takeoff checklist, item by item: engine instruments, check; fuel, full; altimeter, set; radio frequency, 128.25; flaps, ten degrees; flight controls—rudder, ailerons, elevator—free, clear, and correct. Satisfied, he throttled back the engines. He did not hurry; he could take all the time he needed or wanted—hell,
he could take a three-hour nap right here on the active runway, if he pleased, with no risk of being disturbed. The control tower had closed for the night at seven, and at the moment—a moment shortly after midnight—the dawn’s early light, and the first stirrings of human and aircraft activity, were still hours away. And by then he would be long gone.

Finished with the checklist, he tucked it into a slot in the center console and sighted down the runway, an eight-thousand-foot ribbon of black, outlined by jewel-like orange lights, which seemed to converge and merge at the far end. It was pure coincidence, but it was nonetheless an interesting and apt coincidence, that Mexico, too—specifically, the quarter of Tijuana known as
Libertad,
“Liberty”—lay almost exactly eight thousand feet away as well: a mile and a half due south of him; less than thirty seconds away, if he banked hard right immediately after takeoff. Not that he would, though; a half mile off, he’d be banking left: toward the northeast, and Vegas.

He folded the paper copy of the flight plan he’d phoned in an hour before—“visual flight direct to Las Vegas”—then took one last look at the sectional chart, the detailed aviation map for Southern California. The map’s green and tan landforms were splashed with yellow splotches, which denoted cities; in addition, the area above and around the yellow splotch of San Diego was overlaid with a crazed cross-hatching of blue lines—a tangle of arcs and angles, rhomboids and trapezoids and skewed chevrons, like the webwork of some deranged spider, one of those given LSD during a Cold War CIA experiment. The lines represented a 3-D maze in the sky—borders and boundaries and
NO TRESPASSING
zones in the air above San Diego. Surrounded by U.S. Navy and
Marine Corps airfields nearby—Miramar, North Island, Imperial Beach—the city’s airspace was the most complex in the nation, exponentially more intricate than L.A.’s or New York’s. Blessedly, though, Brown Field—a sleepy municipal airport whose traffic was mostly single-engine private planes, plus a few bizjets and charter aircraft—lay just beyond the navigational nightmare; just outside the edges of the tangled web. Consequently a pilot could get in and out of Brown Field with little hassle and no red tape: no queue, no clearances, and no control-tower bureaucrats, at least not at night or on weekends.

It was time. With his right thumb he pressed a red button on the jet’s U-shaped control yoke. “Brown traffic,” he radioed to the empty night sky, “Citation Alpha Romeo One is rolling on runway eight. Departing the pattern to the northeast.” Grasping the twin throttle levers with his left hand, he pushed them all the way forward. The engines spooled up again and the plane’s racehorse tremble resumed, intensifying as the turbines reached full power, the brakes barely able to keep the craft in check. Then, easing the pressure on the brake pedals, he unleashed the shuddering beast. Forward it sprang, with gathering speed and single-minded purpose and a double-throated roar of joy.

Southern California Air Traffic Control Center

San Diego, California

Amos Wilson rubbed his eyes and reached for his coffee mug. The night was quiet—
too damn quiet,
he thought blearily; the flurry of inactivity made it hard to stay awake, let alone alert. The radar screen showed only two aircraft: a Navy F-18 inbound for Miramar, and a civilian plane twenty
miles southeast, just off Brown Field and climbing fast, turning northeast.
Vegas,
he guessed.
Some fat cat—banker? no; real estate developer—dashing up for a weekend of blackjack and hookers.
It was a game Wilson played when he worked the graveyard shift alone: making up stories about who was transiting his sector; where they were headed, and why.

His mug was empty. “Dad-
gum
-it,” he muttered. Spinning in his chair, he snagged the handle of the coffeepot and poured himself a refill, then took a swig. Grimacing, he spat it back into the mug. The coffee had been cooking for upwards of three hours, thickening to a bitter sludge, now more suitable for fossilizing fence posts—rendering them rot resistant and bugproof—than for reinvigorating humans. Wilson took another glance at the screen, assured himself that the two aircraft posed no possible risk to each other, and hurried to the sink. It took him just thirty seconds to dump the sludge, rinse and refill the pot, pour the water into the machine, and jam a fresh filter pack into the brew basket.

When he returned to his seat, the F-18 was already on the ground at Miramar; the civilian aircraft had leveled off at twenty-seven hundred feet; oddly, though, it had changed course by ninety degrees, a right bank so steep the turn was almost square cornered. “What the
hell
?” said Wilson. The plane was heading southeast now, streaking toward the border like a scalded cat; in less than a minute—
hell, not even,
he realized—it would enter Mexican airspace, due south of Otay Mountain. Then, as Wilson stared, mesmerized and paralyzed, the icon on the radar screen began to blink, and three words appeared beside it, flashing in sync with a harsh electronic rasp:
LOW ALTITUDE ALERT
.

Otay Mountain Wilderness

Southeast of San Diego

A shape as tan as the rocks, as fluid as quicksilver, flowed down the stony slope, the very embodiment of stealth and predatory focus. Below, something moved, and the creature—an adult male mountain lion, 150 pounds of cunning, sinew, and hunger—froze, its belly pressed to the rock. After a long pause, punctuated only by the sound of labored, painful breathing twenty feet away, the big cat flowed forward again, its tail twitching as it closed on its prey.

Its prey was Jesús Antonio Gonzales, a new, illegal, injured, and unsuspecting immigrant. Fleeing what he’d feared to be a Border Patrol truck jolting along the ridge in the darkness, Jesús had darted off the road and scrambled down the slope. Suddenly he’d taken a step into nothingness—one moment the mountain was solidly beneath his feet, the next moment it was gone. Tumbling off a ledge, he’d landed on his left side, hard, atop a boulder. He’d tried to regain his feet but quickly sank back against the rock, the pain in his ribs causing him to gasp and groan. He now lay twenty feet below the rim of the outcrop, and even if he hadn’t been injured, he felt sure he wouldn’t be able to climb back up the way he’d come down. He dared not risk another fall in the steep terrain—he’d barely missed cracking his head on the boulder, and if he fell again, he might not be as lucky—so he resolved to stay where he was, to wait until dawn before limping out of the mountains and into the outskirts of San Diego. There would be other, different risks in daylight—for one, he’d heard that
La Migra,
the immigration police, had cameras and motion detectors and dogs everywhere—but Jesús would just have to take his chances. He closed his eyes and shifted against the
rock. The movement caused the ends of his splintered ribs to grate against one another, like shards of glass grinding inside him, and he grunted in pain.

Jesús could have paid a coyote, an immigrant smuggler, to bring him across—he probably should have, he realized now—but the coyote had demanded an outrageous sum: five thousand U.S. dollars, which Jesús didn’t possess, and for what? A bone-jarring ride across the desert inside the hot cylinder of an empty water truck, followed by a two-day hike to the nearest city. Cheaper and safer to find his own way, he had decided; after all, coyotes weren’t infallible, either; some, he’d heard, had been known to leave people dying in the desert—abandoned hundreds of miles from the nearest town, or even locked inside a cargo container. Besides, he consoled himself, maybe everything would still work out just fine, despite his fall and his broken ribs: maybe, by daylight, the stabbing pain in his side would ease, and Jesús would find a good path down, and San Diego would spread itself before him like a glittering kingdom—a kingdom so rich that even his namesake, Jesús Cristo, would have yielded to temptation and bowed for the sake of such glory and wealth.
Sí
, Jesús Antonio Gonzales told himself,
San Diego será mío.
He practiced it in English:
Yes. San Diego will be mine.

Somewhere in the darkness, he heard the throaty hum of an aircraft engine—or was it two?—and he prayed it was not Border Patrol helicopters scouring the hills. As he listened, trying to place the source of the sound, a pebble clattered down the rocky face above him. Bouncing off a nearby boulder, the stone tapped Jesús Antonio on the arm, as if to get his attention. Puzzled, he looked up, and in the darkness above him, he saw the gleam of jewels: a pair of green-gold eyes. They glittered, brighter and brighter in the light—the light
that had inexplicably appeared in midair and was now rushing toward him, its glare accompanied by a deafening roar. A cone of incandescence encircled Jesús Antonio—Jesús and the mountain lion, too, spotlighting them as neatly as if man and beast were actors on a rocky stage. And as the single-minded beast made its instinctual leap, closing the gap between its fangs and Jesús Antonio’s neck, the cone of light narrowed, narrowed, narrowed, so that at the precise instant Jesús Antonio reached up to cross himself, his trembling finger touched the very tip of the hurtling jet.

It was the briefest of touches—less than a millisecond—yet in that fleeting touch, Jesús’s fingertip wrought a miracle: Night became day; darkness was transformed into light, a burst of red and orange and yellow, with pyrotechnic sparks and spokes of purple and green and magenta shooting off in all directions; Jesús himself was transubstantiated—the injured immigrant, the indigenous mountain lion, the hurtling airplane, and the high-octane fuel, all of them—transformed from mundane matter into dazzling energy, a radiant bloom upon the blackness that engulfed the wider world beyond.