The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (32 page)

“Tennessee,” she said. “You’re a long way from home.”

“I sure am,” I said, smiling. “The FBI asked me to help with a case out here. I’m hoping I could talk to the watch commander—if that’s the right term—who was supervising the guard-tower staff during the graveyard shift on a night back in June.”

“Well, the night-shift watch commander wouldn’t be on duty now,” she said. “But he reports to the assistant warden for security, who
is
here. Could he help you with this?”

“Well, it’s worth a try,” I said.

“WALTER JESSUP,” SAID THE ASSISTANT WARDEN
ten minutes later, extending his hand across a desk. “I understand you’re interested in events the night of June eighteenth, early morning of June nineteenth?”

“Yes, sir. I’m wondering if any of the watchtower guards saw something unusual, around one in the morning.”

“
Any
of them?
All
of them. Have to be blind to miss that fire on the mountain.”

I smiled. “Yeah, and I reckon you don’t put a lot of blind men up in those guard towers. Actually, though, I’m hoping somebody saw something before the fire. Before the plane hit.”

“You mean the parachute?”

I blinked. I stared. I blinked again. “Are you serious? Somebody really saw a ’chute?”

“Yep. Tompkins. Minute or so after the plane flew over. Minute or so before it hit. A little south of the usual spot, though.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not quite the same place the ’chutes usually come down.”

“Let me make sure I’m following you,” I said slowly. “Are you telling me this happens regularly? Nighttime parachute jumps over wilderness?”

“Not regularly. More like irregularly. Occasionally. Three, four times a year, maybe. But usually, like I say, usually they’re a little farther north—right over that little airstrip by the lake. And usually they’re before the plane lands, not after it takes off. Propeller plane, in the past. Not a jet. So this time was same thing, only different.”

I didn’t like the sound of this. “How long has this been going on?”

He shrugged. “Five years, plus or minus a year. If it’s important, we could ask some of the guards if they can pin it down closer than that.”

“Ever reported it to anybody?”

“You bet. Plane comes in at night from south of the border, drops something at a private airstrip a few miles from town before landing at a port of entry? Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out they’re running contraband.”

I felt my heart sinking and my anger rising. “Who’d you report it to?”

“DEA. I talked to the guy myself, face-to-face. Big fat redheaded fella, sitting right there where you’re sitting now, wheezing like he had asthma or emphysema or something. He
said he’d look into it, but I never heard back from him. And those parachutes kept on coming down.”

SITTING IN THE CAR IN THE PRISON PARKING LOT, I
dialed—jabbed—Carmelita Janus’s number on my cell phone. “You lied to me,” I said, my voice shaking with rage. “Right to my face, looking me straight in the eye. ‘Oh, Richard
hated
drugs,’ you said. ‘Richard would
never
smuggle drugs.’ I can’t believe I fell for that load of crap. And I can’t believe I crawled out on a limb to help you. Don’t ever call me again.”

“Wait,” she said. “I didn’t lie to you. Where are you? What’s happened? Why are you saying this?”

“I’m at Donovan State Prison,” I said coldly. “The guard towers there have a good view toward Richard’s airstrip. They’ve known about the drug drops for years. So has the DEA. Richard’s fat, crooked pal.”

“Richard wasn’t smuggling drugs,” she said. “I swear it. You have to believe me.”

“No, I don’t, Mrs. Janus. I already made that mistake. I won’t make it again. I hope they catch whoever killed your husband. But I can’t help you anymore.”

“Wait,” she said again.

I didn’t wait. I clicked off the phone, started the car, and left the prison, circling the complex one last time. This time I seemed to feel myself being watched, and I found myself looking upward: up at the looming towers. In the glare of sunlight glinting off their windows, I seemed to see only blank, blind stares, unblinking and utterly indifferent to whatever crimes and misdeeds were occurring—on either side of the triple fencing and coiled razor wire.

AS I NEARED THE TURNAROUND OF THE DEAD-END
road—the spot I had come to think of as the drop zone—my small, citified, sissified car bottomed out for what felt like the dozenth time, the oil pan banging and rasping as the metal scraped across stone. When I’d rented the vehicle back at Brown Field, the Hertz agent had done a walk-around inspection with me, marking scrapes and dings on a diagram of the car.
Hope he doesn’t check for dents underneath,
I thought, parking in the same place where I’d parked two hours before.

The engine was ticking with heat, but something about the sound struck me as odd—as different—from the usual dry, metallic click . . . and it seemed to be coming not just from the engine but from the ground as well. Kneeling in the sand, I leaned on my elbows and peered beneath the car.
Tick-splat, tick-splat, tick-splat
. “Well, damn,” I muttered. “Damn damn damn.” Each
damn
was echoed by a fat drop of oil falling from the ripped oil pan and splatting into a fast-growing puddle beneath the engine. Still on all fours, I turned and
looked behind the car. A thread of oil trailed down the rocky road, like greasy blood, from the wounded Impala.

Then, as if snuffling along the trail, another vehicle nosed up the road, a black Suburban with big tires and plenty of ground clearance. Clambering to my feet, I walked back toward the SUV. “I’m sure glad to see you,” I said to Maddox as the door opened.

But it was not Maddox who got out of the Suburban. It was a fat man with greasy red hair, a sweaty white shirt, a leather shoulder holster, and a stubby revolver. The revolver was still holstered, but the safety strap was unsnapped, and I suddenly wished I still had the pistol I’d thrown into the river a few days before. “
You,
” I said, my blood pressure spiking. Even though the air was bone dry, sweat began rolling from my scalp and seeping from my armpits. “What are
you
doing here?”

“Following you,” he wheezed. “I don’t believe we’ve formally met, Dr. Brockton. I’m Special Agent William Hickock. I’m with the DEA. The Drug Enforcement Administration.”

“I know what the DEA is,” I said. “And I know who you are. You’re the guy waging war on the worst badasses on the planet, right? Or are you?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about your pissing contest with Miles Prescott and the FBI. I heard you and Prescott arguing in the IHOP that night. The night after somebody aimed Richard Janus’s jet—his jet and his corpse and his yanked-out teeth—at that mountainside and bailed out. Were you still in cahoots with Janus at that point, or had you two had a falling-out? Had Janus gotten greedy? Or was it
you
that got greedy?”

“I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he wheezed.

“Bullshit,” I snapped. “If you’ve been following me, you know I just came from Donovan State Prison. The assistant warden there told you
years
ago about Janus’s drug drops. Did you offer to look the other way, for a piece of the profits? Or were you two partners, fifty-fifty? You lined up the product, he flew the planes?”

He stared at me, then gave a guffaw. “Drug drops? Those weren’t drug drops.”

“Jesus, Hickock, give me a break. You’re gonna shoot me anyhow, so there’s no point in lying.”

“Shoot you?” He looked at me as if I were insane. “I’m trying to
protect
you, Dr. Dumb-Ass.”

Now I was the one gaping. “
Protect
me?”

“Hell, yeah. And you’re not making it easy.” He shook his head. “Janus wasn’t dropping drugs from that DC-3. He was dropping people.”

“People?
What
people? What the hell are
you
talking about?”

“I’m talking about people who needed to get the hell out of Mexico, under the radar. People who had price tags on their heads. People who were trying to help us bring down the country’s biggest drug cartel.”

“You mean the Sinaloa cartel? You mean Guzmán?”

“I mean Guzmán.” He gave a slight, ironic smile. “And yeah, in my world, at least, he is the baddest badass on the planet.”

“You brought Richard Janus in on this? How? Why?”

“Richard and I go way back,” he said. “
Went
way back. Forty years. I flew with him in Southeast Asia—Laos—back in the sixties.”

“Air America? You were an Air America pilot too?”

“Nah, I wasn’t a pilot. I was his kicker.”

“Kicker?”

“Cargo kicker. Richard would take us in through the treetops, weaving and juking, dodging branches and bullets. That man had balls of solid brass. Then he’d pop up and level off for about two seconds—just long enough for me to kick the rice out the door—and dive back down to the deck.” He shook his head again. “This DEA gig? The pucker factor escalates every now and then, but kicking cargo for Richard? Fascinating, every damn day.”

I blinked. “Excuse me. Did you just call it ‘fascinating’?”

He gave a wheezy laugh. “Yeah. That’s Air America slang—coined by Richard, in fact. It’s a whistling-past-the-graveyard kinda term. It means—”

“I know what it means,” I said, as alarms started sounding somewhere in the back of my mind. “It means ‘scary as hell,’ right?”

“Right.” He grinned, then—studying my expression—he frowned. “Something wrong? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“I just heard an echo,” I said. “Somebody else used that word recently, exactly the same way—said jumping out of the Citation that night would’ve been pretty fascinating. I don’t suppose you know the NTSB crash investigator, Maddox? Any chance he was an Air America kicker too?”

“Pat Maddox? ‘Mad Dog’ Maddox?” Hickock’s expression darkened. “Hell, yeah, I know him. And hell no, he wasn’t a kicker. He was a Marine Corps pilot from ’Nam. He got scrubbed—given a fake discharge, civilian papers, a bogus contract—and sent to Laos as a so-called civilian. Mad Dog loved the black-ops stuff, the CIA dirty work. He used to call Richard ‘Boy Scout’ because he was such a straight arrow. Me, he called ‘Mild Bill.’ Maddox was a hard-ass. An asshole. But hey, it was war, and war is hell.”

“He came from the marines? You know what he flew in Vietnam?”

“Sure. He talked about it all the damn time. He flew F-4s.”

“Jets?”

“Hell, yeah. The F-4 Phantom was a supersonic attack fighter. Mad Dog loved to wave his top-gun dick in everybody’s face.”

I hated the image, but I liked the information. “So if he was flying dogfights at Mach 2 or whatever,” I said, “he’d have no trouble at the controls of a mild-mannered civilian jet, right?”

“Well, every aircraft’s different, but if he studied up on the pilot’s handbook and the panel . . .” He trailed off, and I could see him working to connect the dots that I had just begun to connect myself. “Let me get this straight,” he wheezed. “Are you thinking—”

I interrupted. “Maddox told me the Citation was like a Dodge Caravan,” I said excitedly. “Almost as if he’d flown one and found it kinda boring.”

Hickock held up a hand. “Slow down, slow down. Do you really, seriously—”

I cut him off again. “Fighter pilots get parachute training, too, right?”

Hickock furrowed his brow, then gave a grunt—“Huh”—and began to nod, slowly and tentatively at first, then more decisively. “Mad Dog loved the edgy stuff. Survival skills, commando training, inserting assassin teams. All that macho Rambo shit.”

“He was limping,” I went on. “The day after the crash. He was wearing a knee brace. He said he’d had surgery, but I bet he hadn’t—that’d be easy to find out. I bet he twisted his knee when he jumped out of the Citation—came down hard,
or crooked, or something. Came down right over there!” I pointed toward the five burned tubes jutting from the sand. “Those are signal flares. A landing zone. A target. Somebody was waiting here. Maddox phoned just before takeoff, or maybe the guy here just listened for the sound of the jet. He lit the flares, the jet turned, and Maddox made the jump. Then—being the crash investigator assigned to this region—he was in a perfect position to cover his tracks.” Hickock rubbed his jaw, considering the scenario.

At that moment my watch began to beep, and when I looked at it and saw the time—two forty-five—I felt a wave of panic. “Oh
shit,
” I said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Maddox. He’s on his way.”

“On his way where?”

“His way here.”

“
Here
here?” I nodded. “Christ. When?”

“Now,” I said. “Actually, twenty or thirty minutes from now. That beep from my watch was reminding me to finish up at the prison and head back here to meet him.”

“But why, Doc? Why the hell’d you call him, if you think he killed Richard?”

“I didn’t think that when I called him,” I pointed out. “I called him two hours ago. Before you told me all this stuff about him and Richard. Before I put the pieces together.” He still looked confused and mad. “Look, I called to tell him I’d found the spot where Richard’s killer came down when he bailed out that night. Maddox offered to dash down from L.A. to take a look.” But as I said it, I realized that taking a look was the last thing Maddox needed, because Maddox had seen this spot already, at least three times: first, when he’d scouted it out; later, when he’d placed the flares in the sand,
probably the afternoon before the crash; finally, when he’d floated down through the night sky toward the fiery marker, lit by an accomplice with a lighter, a bad nicotine addiction, and a getaway car. No, Maddox wasn’t coming to see what I’d found. Maddox was coming to kill me and scrub the site.

“We gotta get out of here,” I told Hickock. “Before he gets here.”

“Too late for that, I’m afraid,” said a voice, and Pat Maddox—Mad Dog Maddox—stepped from behind a bushy mesquite tree, a short-barreled shotgun pointed at Hickock. “Mild Bill,” he said pleasantly. “Long time, no see. How you been?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hickock’s eyes flicker toward his revolver. Maddox must have seen it, too. “Go for it,” he said, nodding at the agent’s gun. “But I’d bet my life that your head’ll be gone before you can clear leather.”

I said the only thing I could think of. “How’d you get here from L.A. so quick?”

“I have a confession,” he said. “I lied, Doc. Sorry about that. I was already down here when you called.”

Something in my head clicked. “You came down and killed Malloy, the Fox News reporter.”

“He was damned annoying,” said Maddox. “You said so yourself.”

“You’re the one who tipped him off about the teeth.” He gave a slight, smug smile, which I took as acknowledgment, and I rattled on, my mind racing. “Anonymously—but then he tracked you down somehow. He was onto you. So you went and strangled him and staged the porn.” I was partly stalling for time, but mainly I was still working the case, finally figuring things out, and I was absurdly excited, for a man about to be shot.

It was Hickock, not Maddox, who interrupted me. “I should’ve figured you for this, Mad Dog. Somebody told me
you were mixed up in that Iran-Contra mess—running drugs and guns for the CIA in Nicaragua—but I thought he was just blowing smoke up my ass. When I heard you were working for the NTSB, I thought you’d settled down. Stepped up onto the straight and narrow.”

“I had,” said Maddox. “I got scared straight for a long time. Remember that C-123 got shot down in Nicaragua in 1986? The one that could’ve brought down Ronald Reagan and George Bush, if Ollie North hadn’t taken the fall? I was supposed to be flying that plane, but I was sick. Appendicitis. I didn’t fly, so I didn’t die. I pulled some good-old-boy strings and got a job investigating crashes. Not too boring, as jobs go.”

“And you played by the rules?” asked Hickock.

“I was a good boy for fifteen years.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“Then I worked a crash about a hundred miles from here. A seaplane, bringing in a load of cocaine to the Salton Sea, up in the Imperial Valley. Bad weather, lousy pilot; the plane flipped and sank. I got a call from one of my old buddies, offering me a nice little nest egg if I could retrieve the cargo and hand it over. The rest, as they say, is history. I started doing a little moonlighting for Chapo Guzmán—two, three flights a month. Good money, and a lot more fascinating than civil service. But then somebody started sneaking snitches out of the country. Didn’t take a genius to figure out it was Saint Richard. Ever the Boy Scout.”

“So you took him out,” I said. “Damage control.”

He nodded. “Should’ve done it sooner. I let nostalgia get in the way.”

There was one more thing I still didn’t get. “Tell me,” I pressed, “why the double fake? First you staged it to look like
Janus accidentally crashed, or killed himself. But then you told the reporter and the FBI he’d faked his death. How come?”

“Diversionary tactics,” he said. “Divide and conquer. I could tell the DEA was closing in. If I could make the FBI look like screwups—like they’d scared Guzmán into hiding—the DEA would be royally pissed at the Bureau. And less likely to follow the trail to
me
. Right, Chubby?” Hickock didn’t respond. “But if I could also make it look like Janus was actually still alive—that he’d faked the whole thing—the FBI would get pissed, too . . . and they’d be hell-bent on finding him instead of helping Fatso here.”