The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (30 page)

A moment later we climbed back into the helicopter for the quick flight down to Brown Field. I had reserved a rental car there, and—despite their protests that I should stay someplace nicer—I’d booked a room in the Otay Mesa Quality Inn: a cruddy but convenient base from which to do the exploring I’d planned for the following day. Besides, in a twisted sort of way, it felt like my home away from home.

As the engine throttled up and Skidder raised the stick, the helicopter practically leapt upward. I was pleasantly surprised by its newfound nimbleness—until I remembered what Skidder had said earlier about the aircraft getting “zippy” just before the tank ran dry. I shot a quick, panicky look at the
instrument panel, trying to spot the fuel gauge. Skidder must have noticed. “No worries,” he said. “It’s all downhill from here. We can coast in, if we have to.”

“Skidder,” I said, “how come every time you try to reassure me, it scares the crap out of me?”

THE OTAY MESA QUALITY INN WAS SHABBIER THAN I
remembered—and I had remembered it as damn shabby. “Memory is a trickster,” as one of my UT colleagues, a pompous English professor, was fond of saying.

I asked the desk clerk for a room on the hotel’s quiet side. “Define ‘quiet,’” said the clerk, a sallow young man with greasy black hair and cynical eyes. “No traffic, or no gunshots?”

He didn’t appear to be kidding. “Tough choice,” I said, “but I’m gonna go for no gunshots.”

He handed me a key. “All the way at the end,” he said, nodding toward the freeway. I thanked him, moved the car, and carried my bag to the room.

As I turned the key in the lock, a truck roared past on the freeway, rattling my door and window.
Home sweet home,
I thought, echoing Prescott’s description of the hotel when he’d brought us here our first night. But the truth was, I didn’t much mind the shabbiness. I’d be sleeping in an empty bed; that was the worst part—far worse than the torn carpet and
stained bedspread.
Just don’t let me get bedbugs,
I prayed. Like the desk clerk, I was dead serious.

MAYBE KATHLEEN REALLY
WAS
HAUNTING ME—NOT
about the Janus case, as she’d threatened, but about the backlog of old voice mails on my phone. Throughout our teaching careers, our offices had been a study in contrast: hers always neat and tidy, mine always . . . less so. As with our desktops, so with our voice mails. I tended to procrastinate, avoiding messages I knew would be unpleasant (a category that nowadays seemed to encompass virtually all of them). “Okay, Kath,” I announced over the rumble of traffic, “I’m clearing my decks. You’d be proud.”

Mercifully, most of the messages were so old that they had become utterly irrelevant, and I found myself hitting the “delete” key many times in swift succession. Muckraking talk-radio host badgering me about disrespecting veterans? Delete. Obituary-stalking strangers who’d read about my wife’s passing in the newspaper? Delete. Neighborhood widows offering a soft shoulder and a warm casserole? Delete delete delete.

The message I most dreaded hearing—the one I saved for last—was the voice mail I’d received from Captain Brian Decker shortly before his throat had been cut in a prison interview room by Nick Satterfield. Decker was still at Vanderbilt Hospital, still barely alive—still in a coma, in fact—and merely seeing his number on my phone’s display was enough to make me feel bad all over again: guilty, somehow, even though I’d urged him not to go rattle Satterfield’s cage. The TBI agent investigating the incident—if
investigating
was the right word for an inquiry that gave any weight at all to Satterfield’s version of events—had said that the call had lasted
five minutes. As I punched the series of keys that would play the message, I braced myself for bad tidings: a grim reminder of Satterfield’s virally infectious venom, at the very least, and possibly even a self-incriminating revelation from Deck about what he’d intended to do to Satterfield. I considered erasing it without listening—what was the point, besides pain?—but decided I owed it to Decker to hear him out.

As the message began to play, all I heard was random background noise—doors opening and closing; metal chairs scraping on a concrete floor; a staticky, scratchy sound that I finally recognized as the rustle of fabric against a microphone. Decker must have pocket-dialed me, I realized, accidentally hitting “redial” as he’d slid his phone into his shirt. Through the rustle and static, I suddenly heard Decker speaking, and then—to my horror—I heard Satterfield answering. His voice came across the miles and the weeks in a soft, sinister hiss, taunting Decker about his brother’s death. Weeks after their bloody fight, I found myself eavesdropping on their confrontation, as mesmerized and terrified as if I were actually in the room with them.

I expected to hear Decker respond with threats and violence, but he didn’t. Satterfield kept it up—kept goading Decker with cruel details about the agonies his brother had suffered—but Decker wasn’t taking the bait. Suddenly I felt a jolt like an electric shock, as Satterfield said my name. “I’ve got unfinished business with Brockton. I’ll be back to deal with him. All of them. And I’ll take up right where I left off.”

“Don’t even think about it,” said Decker. “I should’ve shot you last time, but I let Brockton talk me out of it. I won’t make that mistake next time.”

“Here’s the thing, asshole,” said Satterfield. “You won’t be around next time. You’re about to bleed out on this floor.” All
at once the message erupted into noisy chaos: crashing furniture, thudding bodies, and a strangled shriek of pain. Then, in midshriek, the phone went silent. Two seconds later, a computerized voice prompted me: “To replay this message, press one. To delete it, press three. To save it, press two.” My fingers shaking, I carefully pressed two. Then I dialed Steve Morgan, the former student now working for the TBI. Not surprisingly, I got
his
voice mail. “Steve, it’s Bill Brockton,” I said. “I’m about to forward you a message—a recording of what went down between Captain Decker and Nick Satterfield. I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with Agent Fielding. And I’d appreciate it if Fielding would get off my ass. If he really wants to do the right thing, he might also drop by Vanderbilt Hospital and apologize to Decker. Who knows, Decker might actually hear it. Might fight a little harder to pull through.”

I ended the call, then returned to my voice mail and forwarded the recording to Steve. That done, and my decks clear, I got back to the business at hand. The business that had brought me back to California, back to Otay Mountain, and back to this seedy motel and this rough-edged border crossing.

Somewhere nearby, I heard a loud bang: gunshot, or backfiring engine? Out here, I was having trouble telling the difference.

THE OTAY MESA BRANCH OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY
was just ten minutes west but a world away from the seamy-underbelly freight district where I was staying. Instead of the dilapidated warehouses and rusting shipping containers of my neighborhood, the library nestled amid neat houses, tree-lined streets, baseball fields, and basketball courts. The library’s reference desk occupied a back corner of the main reading
room, flanked by low shelves of encyclopedias on one side and bound volumes of old
Life
magazines, decades’ worth, on the other. “Excuse me,” I said to a reference librarian whose steel-framed spectacles matched the silvery curls of her hair. “Do you keep files of news clippings about local stories?”

“Vertical files? Oh, yes,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Some of them are a bit out of date, though. The Internet, you know—it’s making newspaper clippings obsolete.” She pointed to a set of chest-high filing cabinets, which appeared to be approximately the same age as my own venerable self. “The files are there. Can I help you find something specific?”

“I’m interested in several topics,” I said. “A San Diego man named Richard Janus, who founded a charity called Airlift Relief International. He’s been in the news lately.”

“Indeed,” she said, her radiant smile giving way to a pursed, prunish expression. “Most unfortunate.” I didn’t know if she was referring to the plane crash or the drug-running allegations. Perhaps both.

“I’m also interested in a man who runs a Mexican drug cartel,” I went on. “His name is Guzmán.” I spelled it for her. “El Chapo Guzmán. I seem to remember hearing about some sort of connection between his drug trafficking and Otay Mesa.”

Her mouth had gone from slightly pursed to tightly puckered, and not in a kissing kind of way. From the look of prim disapproval, I might have been asking her to help me find pornography. “The files are arranged alphabetically,” she snipped. “You can try looking up the last names of the two . . .
people
. I believe there might also be a file called
DRUGS
.” I got the distinct impression that not only did she disapprove of drugs themselves, she also disapproved of news coverage that mentioned them—and of anyone who might have the brass to read such coverage.

“Thank you,” I said pleasantly. “You’ve been most helpful.”
She’s no Red,
I thought as I walked toward the files.
But then again, Red’s no Red either—not the reference librarian she pretended to be, anyhow.

The Richard Janus file contained a thick sheaf of clippings—yellowing with age, untarnished by the recent scandal—praising him for his humanitarian service. During his flying for Air America back during the Vietnam War, several clippings reported, Janus had delivered rice to starving peasants in Laos—experiences that he consistently described as “deeply rewarding” and “the inspiration for Airlift Relief International.” None of the clippings mentioned Air America’s drops of “hard rice”—guns and ammunition—or of homemade napalm, cooked up in oil drums by the CIA and dispersed over villages thought to harbor Communist guerrillas. Had Janus napalmed villages? Had he ferried opium to fund U.S.-friendly warlords in the poppy-growing region known as the “Golden Triangle”? The press clippings shed no light on those questions.

One interesting side note I found in Janus’s file was a brief bio of his wife. As a young woman from an aristocratic family in Mexico City, Carmelita Janus had been a beauty queen, model, and honors law student, well on her way to a promising legal career. She had left Mexico in her early twenties—with Richard Janus—shortly after the murder of her father, a high-ranking judge. In light of the widespread, well-documented corruption of Mexico’s police, army, and prosecutors by narco traffickers, I couldn’t help wondering: Had her father been killed because he’d opposed drug lords like Guzmán? Or had he sold out to one drug lord, then gotten gunned down by a rival?

El Chapo’s file was far slimmer than Janus’s. It contained
just three clippings, which had merited clipping and filing, as best I could tell, because each of the three quoted “knowledgeable DEA sources in San Diego.” The first story reported Guzmán’s 1994 arrest and imprisonment; the second recounted his 2001 escape; and the third—the one I recalled Red mentioning—described how DEA agents discovered an elaborate underground railroad, used to haul drugs through a tunnel beneath the U.S.-Mexico border. The drugs—tons of them, according to the “knowledgeable DEA sources”—were loaded into carts beneath a house in Tijuana, wheeled the length of the tunnel, and then unloaded. The rail line’s northern terminus, said the story, was a warehouse fifty yards north of the border, in the industrial sector of Otay Mesa.
In the Quality Inn sector of Otay Mesa,
I realized with a shock. It was likely that I had wandered past that very warehouse my first evening in town—
The fenced building with the guard-dog sign?
I wondered—before I’d ended up at the IHOP, overhearing the argument between Miles Prescott and the fat, wheezing warrior from the DEA or the CIA or whatever federal agency it was that waged war on badasses.

The pursed-lipped librarian’s clippings did not, however, shed light on the things that had been gnawing at me all afternoon and evening, ever since I’d found the bit of bone that seemed to have come from the shattered skull of Richard Janus: If Janus had in fact been murdered—if a killer had strapped Janus’s body into the cockpit, aimed the plane at the mountainside, and then parachuted to safety—a whole series of baffling questions reared their heads, clamoring for answers. Why had the killer pulled Janus’s teeth? Why had he tucked a spinal cord stimulator behind the body? Why had he told the Fox reporter and the FBI agent that tool marks could be found on the teeth? In short, why had the killer gone to such
elaborate lengths to do a
double
fake: to start out by creating the illusion that Janus had died in the fiery crash, but then to shatter that illusion, replacing it with a second illusion—the illusion that Janus was alive and on the lam somewhere?

For years, I had preached the gospel of Occam’s razor, a rule of logic stating that the simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost certainly the
correct
explanation. This case, though, seemed to be turning Occam’s razor on its head: the more complex and bizarre the explanation, the closer it seemed to stumble toward some grotesque, distorted, funhouse-mirrored travesty of truth.

That night, in my lumpy bed in my shabby motel, I dreamed of Janus—not the American pilot Janus, but the Roman deity, the one with two faces. That Janus, the one who gazed unblinkingly at both the past and the future, had been the guardian of doorways and transitions and transformations; he’d been both the keeper of the key and the wielder of the cudgel. In my dreams, the key to the mystery remained just out of reach, my fingertips not quite touching it as first my hand, then my entire arm, plunged into the Mouth of Truth.

I knew that the key must be close at hand, though, because as I groped blindly, my motions accompanied by the soft rattlings of dry pupa cases or snake tails, I felt myself being cudgeled. Rhythmically, ceaselessly cudgeled.