The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (4 page)

I WAS HUMMING, HALFWAY THROUGH MY MORNING
shower, when Kathleen flung open the bathroom door. “Bill, come quick!” she shouted, then turned and ran, adding, “Hurry.
Hurry!
” She sounded not just urgent but upset.

I flipped off the water and grabbed my towel, calling after her, “What’s wrong? Kathleen?
Kathleen!
Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m fine,” she yelled from the other end of the house. “There’s something on the news you need to see.”

I mopped the suds from my head and chest and wrapped the towel around my waist. Still dripping, I hurried to the kitchen, where I knew Kathleen would be watching
The Today Show,
as she did every weekday morning over coffee and granola. On the countertop TV screen, a tanned, silver-haired guy—a tennis pro or investment banker, judging by the well-kept, self-satisfied look of him—was slow dancing with a gorgeous younger woman. “Viagra,” intoned a deep voice, smooth and confident. “Make it happen.”

“So . . . honey,” I began, turning toward her, “is there something you’re trying to tell me?” I turned toward her, expecting
to see amusement in her eyes—she was a good prankster, when she wanted to be—but her coffee cup was trembling in her hand, and her expression looked distraught.

“What? No, not
that. This
.” She tapped the television, where
The Today Show
’s news anchor, an attractive woman whose name I could never remember, had just appeared on-screen for her 7
A.M
. rundown of the headlines. Superimposed across the lower part of the screen were the words “
BREAKING NEWS
—
FIERY CALIFORNIA JET CRASH
.”

The newscaster’s sculpted face was solemn, her impeccably manicured eyebrows furrowed with concern. “Authorities are investigating a fiery plane crash that occurred outside San Diego in the early morning hours today,” she began. “The crash is believed to have claimed the life of pilot and humanitarian Richard Janus, founder and president of the nonprofit organization Airlift Relief International.” The image cut to aerial footage of a steep, rocky hillside at night, lit by a fire blazing high into the sky. “According to the FAA,” the anchor’s voice-over continued, “Janus was on a solo night flight from San Diego to Las Vegas in his agency’s twin-engine jet. Minutes after takeoff, the aircraft slammed into a dark mountainside and exploded.” The camera cut to another aerial, this one showing emergency vehicles and firefighters gathered on a ridge above the blaze. “Darkness and rough terrain are hindering search-and-rescue efforts,” continued the woman. She reappeared on camera, her face brimming with compassion. “And with high winds, wooded terrain, and hundreds of gallons of jet fuel feeding the fire, authorities say the blaze could continue to burn for hours.”

The newscast moved on—another psychotic meltdown by some pop-culture princess—and I turned down the sound. “That’s awful,” I said. “Poor Richard.”

“Poor Richard,” Kathleen agreed. “And poor Carmelita. She must be devastated.” I nodded. We didn’t actually know Richard Janus or his wife, Carmelita, but we felt almost as if we did. Kathleen and I deeply admired Richard’s work, and we were regular contributors to his nonprofit, Airlift Relief, which delivered food and medical aid to areas ravaged by natural disasters or human violence. “Funny how the mind works,” Kathleen mused. “I’ve always half expected him to die in a crash someday, but I figured it’d be in some jungle somewhere. To crash on his way to Las Vegas? Seems extra sad, somehow.”

She was right; it
did
seem cruelly ironic. “Well, one silver lining,” I said, “if you can call it that. He must’ve died instantly. Probably didn’t even see it coming.” I had worked a few plane crashes, including an air force crash in the Great Smoky Mountains, and I was familiar with the swiftness and force with which airplanes—and the people inside them—could disintegrate.

Kathleen laid a hand on my arm. “Let’s send a donation.”

“We sent a big check six months ago,” I reminded her. “At the end of the year.”

“I know, I know. But this is a huge blow to Airlift Relief. He was the heart and soul of that organization. They’ll be struggling without him—and they’ll lose donors, you know they will. Please?” There were many things I loved about Kathleen, but her instinctive compassion and reflexive generosity—qualities I myself had benefited from, time and again—ranked high on the list.

I smiled and kissed her forehead. “You’re a good-hearted woman, Kathleen Brockton.”

She responded by wrapping her arms around me and giving me a full-body hug. “You’re an observant man, Bill
Brockton.” After a moment, she reached down and untied her bathrobe, opening the front to press against me, skin to skin.

“Oh my,” I said. “A lucky man, too.” After three decades of marriage, Kathleen and I had settled into a companionable relationship, one in which fiery passion had given way to steady warmth. Still, she retained the capacity to surprise me and even, when something enkindled her desire, to take my breath away. “Not that I’m complaining,” I managed to say, “but didn’t you tell me last night you were on the sick list?”

“I feel
much
better this morning,” she murmured. “And I was thinking how bereft I’d be if I lost
you
suddenly. So
carpe diem,
I guess.”

“
Carpe me-um,
” I murmured back.

She gave me a squeeze, one hard enough to make me yelp. “One more bad pun,” she breathed in my ear, “and I might just change my mind.”

“My lips are sealed,” I breathed back. I began kissing and nibbling the side of her neck, seeking what I liked to think of as the magic spot. When she groaned, I thought for sure I’d found it, but gradually I realized that the telephone was ringing, and I echoed her groan.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t answer it.” But it was too late; she was already pulling away and picking up the handset. “Damn,” I muttered. “So close and yet so far.”

“Hello?” Kathleen sounded breathless, as if she’d run to catch the phone; her eyes were shining, the pupils still dilated wide. “Yes, it is. . . . May I tell him who’s calling?” Her gaze grew focused and serious—her brows knitting together the way the newscaster’s had—and she held the receiver toward me, mouthing something I couldn’t quite make out.

Moments later, I felt my own forehead furrowing, as
images from the television news—images of flames and smoke and emergency vehicles—flashed through my mind. “Of course,” I said after a moment. “I’ll see you there.”

AN HOUR AFTER THE PHONE CALL, I WAS STANDING
on the tarmac, my “go” bag slung over one shoulder, as a white Gulfstream V—its only markings an aircraft registration number stenciled on the two engines—touched down at McGhee Tyson Airport and taxied toward Cherokee Aviation, the small terminal for private planes and charter aircraft.

The jet stopped, but its engines continued spooling as the cabin door flipped down and Special Agent Clint McCready appeared in the opening, beckoning me up the stairs that were notched into the door’s inner surface. McCready gave me a hand up—a gesture that merged into a quick handshake—then he pulled the door closed and latched it. “Thanks again,” he said. “We figure this I.D. will be quite a challenge. Glad you can help us out on such short notice.”

“Anytime,” I said. “I sure didn’t expect to see you again so soon. Where’d you just come from, anyhow? We were out at the Body Farm till four yesterday. Did you even have time to get back to Quantico last night?”

He gave a rueful smile. “I had just enough time to take a shower and unpack.” He turned and pointed to two closely cropped young men in the second row of seats. I recognized them both from the prior day’s training at the Body Farm. “Doc, you remember Kimbo—Kirby Kimball—and Tim Boatman from yesterday?”

“Of course,” I said. Kimball stretched out a bronzed paw and gave me a crushing handshake. Mercifully, Boatman, thin and sallow, had a grip that was as limp as Kimball’s was fierce.

McCready added, “You saw how good they are with the Total Station. Best in the Bureau, actually.”

I nodded, projecting more knowledge than I felt. I understood what a Total Station was—a high-tech mapping system, one that could record and document, in three dimensions, the exact position of bodies, bones, bullets, and other pieces of evidence at a large, complex crime scene—but I’d never witnessed one in action until the prior day’s training exercise. “A crash site,” I said to Kimball and Boatman. “I’m guessing you guys’ll have your work cut out for you.” They grinned, and I understood the sentiment behind their happy expressions. It wasn’t that they were pleased someone had died; it was, rather, that they loved the challenge of helping solve the puzzle that awaited them at the scene. The truth was, I felt exactly the same way, and I also felt honored by the FBI’s confidence in my identification skills.

The engines spooled up and the plane began rolling, so McCready motioned me to my seat. In less than a minute we turned from the taxiway to the runway, and without even stopping, the Gulfstream hurtled forward, the acceleration pressing me deep into the glove-soft leather, as if I were on some luxurious theme-park ride. “This thing has some good giddyup,” I remarked as the plane leapt off the runway, still accelerating.

“Sure beats a Crown Vic,” McCready replied. “Took me eight hours to get home last night. Took me forty-five minutes to get back here this morning. This thing climbs four thousand feet a minute. Has a five-thousand-mile range. Top speed of nearly six hundred miles an hour.”

“No offense,” I said, “but since when does the FBI have such a need for speed?”

“Since 9/11. Gives us quick-response capability to terrorist threats anywhere in the world.”

I nodded reflexively, then—when his words sank in—I narrowed my eyes and stared at him. “Wait. Are you saying Richard Janus’s plane was brought down by terrorists?”

“God, no,” he replied, then hedged, “I’m not saying it
wasn’t,
either. All I’m saying is, when the G5 isn’t needed for a national security mission, we can deploy it for other high-priority investigations.”

“And an accident involving a private plane is a high-priority investigation because . . . ?” He didn’t answer, so after a moment’s thought, I answered my own question: “. . . because the accident wasn’t actually an accident?”

He shrugged. “Too soon to know.”

“But you have reason to think Richard Janus was murdered?”

He shrugged again.

I’d worked on enough FBI cases over the years to know that the Bureau liked to hold its investigative cards close to the vest. So I wasn’t surprised that McCready didn’t seem inclined to show his hand. Nor was I surprised, a moment later, when he pulled a laptop from the briefcase beneath his seat, mumbled something about catching up on paperwork, and busied himself with the computer.

I opened the outer compartment of my bag and took out a fat three-ring binder, which Kathleen had handed me on my way out the door. It was a collection of monthly newsletters and annual fund-raising appeals from Airlift Relief International, Richard Janus’s nonprofit organization. Kathleen had first learned about Airlift Relief three years before, when she’d decided to create a nonprofit organization of her own. At the time, she was teaching a course on nutrition in developing countries, and she’d been astonished and appalled to learn that five hundred thousand children a year go blind simply
from vitamin A deficiency—a deficiency that can be remedied for less than a dollar per child. Never one to sit idly by, Kathleen had created the Food for Sight Foundation—and she had modeled her newsletters and fund-raising appeals on materials from Janus’s agency, Airlift Relief International. Janus had built an organization that was lean and agile; virtually every dollar he raised went toward direct services; his mission was clear and compelling; and his agency’s communications were informative and inspiring. Kathleen’s binder on Airlift Relief was thick—four inches, at least—and contained newsletters dating back five years, all the way to the organization’s founding. The inaugural issue featured a large photo of Janus and Jimmy Carter and a slew of other dignitaries lined up on the tarmac of an airport in Georgia. Above them loomed a battered DC-3 cargo plane, given by an anonymous donor. The caption proclaimed, “Airlift Relief is ready for takeoff!”

As I began leafing through the binder, I found myself captivated anew by the newsletters, which recounted dreadful disasters and daring relief missions. When a pair of powerful earthquakes killed more than twelve hundred people in El Salvador in 2001, for instance, Janus made a dozen flights to devastated villages, delivering food, antibiotics, water purifiers, volunteer doctors and nurses, even portable field hospitals. By the time the bigger relief agencies got into gear, Janus had already delivered tons of supplies—and had also survived two minor crashes: one when his landing gear collapsed, another when a child had darted onto the airstrip, forcing Janus to veer into the bush. Luckily, neither mishap was serious, and he and a mechanic had managed to make temporary repairs in the field. The series of photographs documenting the landing-gear collapse and repair was remarkable: First, the crippled plane sat lopsided and askew on the ground, beside
a deep furrow plowed by the broken gear leg. Next, dozens of villagers pitched in to hoist one of the DC-3’s wings up onto a makeshift scaffold of crisscrossed tree trunks. Then Janus and his mechanic wrestled and welded the mangled gear leg, their labors lit by a pyrotechnic shower of sparks. In the final photo, the villagers all sat perched atop the airplane’s wing, their faces grimy, greasy, and grinning with pride. No one grinned more broadly than the pilot at the center of the crowd.