The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (31 page)

AFTER AN EARLY BREAKFAST OF PETRIFIED BAGEL, I
stocked up on water and snacks at a nearby convenience store—a place sporting so many signs in Spanish, I half wondered if I had somehow strayed through a gap in the border fence—and aimed the rental car toward Otay Mountain, guided by the detailed topographic map I’d gotten from Carmelita Janus.

The topo map confirmed what I had already noticed: The area around the airfield and my motel was pancake flat, the streets following straight gridlines. To the north and east of town, though, the terrain began to rise and the roads began to undulate, following the contours.

My first stop was the grass airstrip at the eastern end of Lower Otay Lake—the home of “Janus Junkyard,” where Airlift Relief had kept spare parts, picked-over airplane skeletons, and a maintenance shop. Pat Maddox, the NTSB expert, had sounded certain that the airstrip was where the Citation’s pilot—the actual, living pilot—would have steered his parachute. It made sense, I’d agreed, as I’d studied the topo map:
the airstrip and the area around it were flat and free of hazards, except for a couple of hangars, a windsock tower, and a handful of airplane carcasses. Would I be able to find evidence of a parachute landing somewhere out there, in forty acres of grass and weeds? Or was I wasting time and energy on a fool’s errand? “Only one way to know,” I muttered, turning down the dusty dirt lane that led to the airstrip.

I’d gone only a hundred yards when I came to a farm gate that blocked the road, a thick chain and padlock cinching the gate to a stout fencepost. The gate itself wasn’t much of an obstacle; its construction—horizontal tubes of galvanized steel, spaced eight or ten inches apart—made it a makeshift ladder. No, the real obstacle was the yellow-and-black crime scene tape stretched across the gateway, along with a laminated notice bearing the FBI logo and a stern
NO TRESPASSING
warning. I cast a furtive look around, found the coast was clear, and stepped onto the gate’s second rung, my hands gripping the top crossbar.

One step up, I paused, partly because of the
NO TRESPASSING
notice—specifically, its mention of video surveillance—but also partly because of something I remembered from the prior day’s flight retracing the jet’s route. According to Skidder, an expert pilot, the Citation was still maneuvering when it crossed the airstrip. In fact, the jet’s five-hundred-foot descent and leveling off had occurred only after it had made its turn toward the mountain. The jumper must not have landed here.

Returning to the car, I pulled out the topo map and spread it on the hood, studying the lay of the land and the way the roads wrapped around its contours. Shortly before I’d reached the turnoff to the airstrip, I had passed another dirt road—this one heading south, into the broad valley that funneled up to the peak. The day before, retracing the Citation’s route in
the air to the crash site, I’d hit pay dirt. Maybe I’d get lucky again this time, following the ground track.

As I doubled back and entered the mouth of the valley—
the Mouth of Truth?
I heard myself wondering—I quickly realized my rental car was a poor steed for this ride. I had asked for an SUV, but the Hertz counter at Brown Field didn’t have any; instead of a Jeep Cherokee or Ford Expedition, I was bucking up a washboard road in a low-slung Chevy Impala, dodging football-sized rocks and wincing with every scrape of the oil pan against jutting ledges. The road ended a half mile up the valley, in a wide hollow with a flat, sandy turnaround area. Stopping thirty yards short of the turnaround, I got out and walked, my eyes scanning the ground. I could see tire tracks, but unlike the crisp tread marks I’d left in my FBI training exercise at the Body Farm, these furrows—plowed in dry, soft sand—revealed nothing about the tires or vehicles that had made the marks.

As I neared the turnaround, where the tracks looped back, I saw other signs of disturbance: sandy heaps and hollows, which I suspected had been sculpted by the scuffing of feet. Then I spotted something that made my heart race: a midden of cigarette butts strewn beside the tire tracks, as if someone had emptied an ashtray there . . . or had parked and waited for an hour or two, chain-smoking an entire pack, using each cigarette’s final embers to light the next, then dropping the dying butt to the ground beneath the car’s open window.

Suddenly I stopped, my eye caught by what appeared to be another artifact—an odd, enigmatic, and therefore electrifying creation. At the center of the wide turnaround, five fat cigar butts, each as thick as my thumb, jutted upward from the sand a couple of inches apiece. With one at the center and the other four radiating outward from it—each five feet
or so from the center—they formed a large, precise geometric shape: like the five dots on dominos or dice . . . or like a giant
+
sign, measuring ten or twelve feet from tip to tip. A small circle of sand at the base of each stub was black with soot, and as I edged closer, I saw that the cigar butts weren’t cigar butts at all, but the remnants of signal flares stuck into the ground. Set alight in the blackness of this wilderness, they would have created a blazing bull’s-eye here: here in the softest, safest spot for a parachutist leaping into the blackness from a streaking jet.

Hands shaking, I dialed Skidder’s number.
Deputy
Skidder’s number. Given that he was briefing the sheriff—had probably briefed the sheriff the day before—about the piece of skull, he’d need to relay this information, too. But my call didn’t go through, and when I looked at my phone I saw why. Down in this hollow, miles from town, I had no signal. Zero bars. “Crap,” I muttered; I’d need to return to civilization to make the call. As I turned back toward my car, I spotted signs of civilization—a grim sort of civilization—on the skyline only a few miles away: the guard towers of the state prison. My first thought was a bad pun:
plenty of bars at a prison.
My second thought was less silly, and maybe even useful:
Maybe one of the guards saw something that night.

It took every particle of patience I had to thread the car slowly back down the rocky road and out of the hollow. Once I reached the main road, I floored the gas pedal, gunning the small-caliber engine. I made a skidding turn at the sign pointing toward the prison, then—glancing at my phone and seeing that I had four signal bars—I pulled to the side and phoned the deputy to tell him what I’d found. “This is Skidder,” said the voice-mail greeting. “Leave me a message and I’ll call you back.”

“Deputy, this is Bill Brockton,” I said. “I think I found
where Richard’s killer came down when he bailed out that night. Call me back soon as you can.”

Next I scrolled down my list of contacts until I found Special Agent Miles Prescott. I debated the pros and cons of calling him. On the one hand—the call-now hand—an FBI Evidence Response Team would have the best shot at finding any significant evidence, if indeed I was right about what I’d seen; with luck, there might even be recoverable DNA on the cigarette butts, and possibly fingerprints on the unburned bases of the flares. On the other hand—the slow-down hand—the San Diego County sheriff was supposedly engaged in some delicate interagency diplomacy with the FBI, possibly even at this very moment; if I called Prescott directly, rather than letting the sheriff finesse things, I might accidentally sabotage his efforts to refocus the investigation.

I decided to seek a second opinion. This time the call was answered by a human, not a recording. “Safety Board. Maddox.”

“Pat,” I said. “Bill Brockton here.”

“Doc,” he said heartily. “How the hell are you?”

“Well, I’m okay,” I said. “It’s been rocky lately. My wife passed away recently. Unexpectedly.”

“
What?
Did you just say your wife died?”

“Yes. But—”

“My God, Doc, I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks, Pat. I appreciate that. But that’s not what I’m calling about.”

“Well, no,” he said, “I realize I might not be your main go-to guy for emotional support. What’s up?”

“You’ll be very interested in this,” I told him. “And I’d appreciate your advice.”

“Advice? Hell, Doc, I stopped giving advice a long damn time ago. I noticed I was nearly always wrong, but even when
I was right—
especially
when I was right—people ended up getting pissed off at me.”

I laughed. “I promise not to get pissed off.”

“I’ll hold you to it, Doc. So to paraphrase the 911 dispatchers, what’s the nature of your advice emergency?”

“So, remember when we talked a few weeks ago? When you said there was a way to bail out of a Citation—out of
that
Citation—in flight?”

“Sure,” he said. “I don’t surprise that easy anymore, old as I am, but I gotta admit, you coulda knocked me over with a feather when I found out about those belly doors.”

“Well, get ready for another surprise. I found where the guy landed.”

“Come again?”

“I found where he landed. The guy that bailed out.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Seriously, Doc, what’s on your mind?”

“No kidding. Hand-on-the-Bible serious. I came back to San Diego, and I found the place, Pat. Not where you thought, though—it’s about a mile south of that airstrip.” I described the scene—the dead-end road, the pile of cigarette butts, the giant
+
sign formed by flares. “In the middle of the night, right under the flight path, no other lights around? That signal would’ve stood out like a
searchlight
.”

“Maybe,” he said. “If that’s what it was. And if that’s
when
it was.”

“How do you mean?”

“Coulda just been kids, out there some other night. Drinking, smoking dope, playing with fire. You know—kids.”

“I’ve got a good feeling about this, Pat. Those flares, arranged in that pattern? That wasn’t made by stoned kids messing around. I’m telling you, Pat, that was a signal. I think
maybe I should call Prescott, let his evidence guys see what they can find.”

“Special Agent Prescott? I thought you were number one on his shit list.”

“Well, yeah,” I conceded. “That’s why I called you. To see what you think. You’re a fed, Pat. Would Prescott actually listen to what I have to say? Or would he just dismiss it, since he thinks I’m full of crap?”

“Hmm. Interesting question, Doc. Tricky.” He paused to think. “Here’s an idea. I’m just thinking out loud here. I’m
not
on Prescott’s shit list. What if I came down and took a quick look? If it’s all you say it is, maybe I could make the call to Prescott—soften him up a bit—and then hand the phone over to you. Might help him listen with an open mind if I ran a little interference for you.”

“I see your point,” I said, “and I appreciate it. But I’m nervous about just leaving it for a day or two, or whenever you can get away and get down here.”

“And you think Prescott and Company are gonna rush right over there? Not bloody likely.” Maddox chuckled. “You’ve never ridden with me, have you, Doc?”

“Well, no. Why?”

“Because if you had, you’d know it’s like ridin’ in a low-flying plane. I can be there in two hours. That soon enough for you?”

I checked my watch. “Really? Three o’clock?
Today?
”

“Three-thirty, tops, if there’s not a wreck on the 405. Can you wait that long? You could run back to town and grab lunch, if you haven’t already eaten.”

“Nah, I’ve got snacks in the car. Besides, I’ve got something else I want to do out this way. I’ll plan on meeting you at three, or as soon after that as you can get here.”

“Where? Can you tell me how to find this place?” I gave him directions, and as I finished, he said, “I see it on the map, and I’m printing it out right now. I’ll see you in a couple hours.”

“Drive safe, Pat.”

He chuckled again. “
Clearly
you’ve never ridden with me, Doc.”

DONOVAN STATE PRISON OCCUPIED THE ENTIRE TOP
of a low, oblong mesa. The terrain was dry and dun colored, and the few bits of scrubby vegetation that hadn’t been bulldozed looked as brown and desiccated as the rocks and dirt. A road encircled the complex, skirting the base of three parallel chain-link fences, fifteen feet high and ten feet apart. Out of curiosity, I circumnavigated the complex on the perimeter road, keeping count of the cellblocks and guard towers. If my count was correct, there were twenty cellblocks and a dozen guard towers, each tower thirty or forty feet high.

I’d seen forbidding penitentiaries before. Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain State Prison—whose hard-core convicts had once included James Earl Ray, the assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—was a forbidding stone fortress, complete with crenellations that looked transplanted from a medieval castle. Donovan State Prison, by contrast, had nothing even grimly ornamental about it. It was almost as if Donovan’s designers and builders had carefully, purposefully excluded any scraps of ornament or history or humanity. Donovan had the bare-bones, bleached-bones look of a bottom-rung industrial complex: a slaughterhouse of the human spirit, as efficient and utilitarian as any meatpacking plant where cows were conveyor-belted to their deaths.

The one exception to the grimness was the administration building, set outside the triple fencing amid grass, shrubbery, and even a few palm trees. After my brief sightseeing circuit, I parked in front and entered the glass doors. A receptionist behind glass asked if she could help me. “I hope so,” I said, introducing myself and flashing my TBI consultant’s badge—an official-looking brass shield, especially impressive if the word “
CONSULTANT
” was masked by a strategically placed knuckle.