The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel (6 page)

THE FBI AGENTS AND I SHIFTED IN OUR CHAIRS IN
the command center—adjusting and readjusting our personal-space boundaries, like people crammed into an oversized elevator—as crash investigator Patrick Maddox began briefing us on what to expect in the wreckage. Using the command center’s satellite link and computers, Maddox had, in ten minutes or so, downloaded a batch of files and created a PowerPoint presentation. I was impressed. Maddox appeared at least ten years older than I was—a leathery, rode-hard sixty, probably more—but he seemed far more Internet savvy and Power-Point positive. My relationship with PowerPoint could best be characterized not as love-hate, but as
loathe
-hate. I despised the software, with a deep and abiding passion. Drop my 35-millimeter slides into the slots of a Kodak Carousel projector, and I’m a happy guy; import them into PowerPoint—whose default settings seem to include a permanent “blur” feature—and I’m one pissed-off professor.

“Okay, guys,” Maddox commenced. “I’ll give you the supercondensed version of ‘Aircraft 101.’ So I guess that makes
it ‘Aircraft 0.1.’ Maybe some of you know some of this stuff already. Hell, maybe
all
of you know
all
this stuff already. Tough shit—I like talking about it. And it’ll be easier to recognize the ‘after’—the debris you’ll be recovering—if you’ve taken a look at the ‘before,’ inside and out.” He reached for the power button on the projector, but stopped before switching it on. “By the way, anybody remember anything particularly relevant about this mountain?” None of the younger guys seemed to, but Prescott, as a San Diego old-timer, nodded, and so did I, a middle-aged Tennessean. “A twin-engine Hawker jet crashed up here thirteen years ago, about a quarter mile from here. It was carrying a band. Doc, what’s the name of that Nashville singer they played for?”

“Reba McEntire,” I said. “She lost her whole band.”

He nodded. “She and her husband were supposed to be on the plane, too, but they decided to spend the night in San Diego and catch a flight the next day. Lucky for them. Too bad for everybody else.”

“What caused that one to crash?” asked Kimball.

“Bad luck and stupidity,” said Maddox, shaking his head. “The night was dark and hazy. The pilots didn’t know the area or the terrain. The FAA briefer they talked to on the radio gave ’em bad advice—practically steered ’em into the mountainside. Shouldn’t’ve happened. But it did. And I can tell you, it was a mess to clean up. Anyhow.” He switched on the projector, and a photo of a sleek little twin-engine jet filled the screen. “Here’s a Cessna Citation.” He clicked forward to another, bigger jet. “Here’s another Citation.” He fast-forwarded through a series of jets, each different from the others. “These are
all
Citations. Some have straight wings, some have swept wings. Some carry four passengers; some carry sixteen. But they’re all Citations—Cessna calls it the ‘Citation family.’ Confusing
as all get-out, unless you’re an airplane geek like me.” He flashed a photo that I recognized from an Airlift Relief newsletter: a smiling Richard Janus standing beside a jet, freshly painted with the agency’s name and symbol. “This is the one we’re recovering here. Donated to Janus’s organization four years ago, in 2000. It’s a 501—an early Citation—built in 1979. Funny thing, most of us wouldn’t dream of driving a car that’s twenty-five years old, but we routinely zip around the sky—six miles up; five, six hundred miles an hour—in vehicles built before some of you guys were even born. This Citation wasn’t new by any stretch, but two years ago, it was upgraded—retrofitted with bigger engines and bigger fuel tanks—so it could fly faster and farther. In the end, of course, that meant it crashed harder and burned longer.”

“Excuse me,” McCready interrupted. “I’ve been wondering about that.”

“About which—the crash, or the burn?”

“The burn. How come the fuel didn’t all explode on impact—one giant fireball?”

“Because this wasn’t a scene in a Bruce Willis movie,” Maddox deadpanned, earning another round of laughs. “Actually, that’s a good question. Evidently the fuel tanks didn’t rupture completely. So instead of vaporizing and exploding, the fuel—some of it, at least—stayed contained within the wing structure, and it dribbled out or poured out, sustaining the fire. More on that in just a minute,” he said. “First, let’s back up to some basics. Structurally, an aircraft has a lot in common with a bug.” He looked around, noticed puzzled looks on many of the faces, and smiled, clearly pleased by the response. He turned to me. “Dr. Brockton, how would you describe the structural framework of humans?”

“Well,” I began, “we’re primates—upright, bipedal
vertebrates—with an axial skeleton and an appendicular skeleton. The axial skeleton—”

He held up a finger to interrupt me. “Full marks,” he said. “To translate that into terms that even I can understand, you’re saying our skeleton is an endoskeleton—an interior structural framework—right?”

“Right.”

“Whereas bugs have . . . ?”

“An exoskeleton,” I supplied, feeling a bit like a student being nose-led by a professor—and not particularly liking the feeling. “An external shell, made of chitin—a bioprotein or biopolymer, if I’m remembering my zoology.”

“I’ll take your word for the chemical details,” he cracked. “A bug’s shell is light, strong, and rigid. So is an aircraft’s. Trouble is, when either one—a bug or a plane—gets squashed, the shell crumples, and the guts go everywhere.”

“The plane’s guts,” asked Kimball, “or the pilot’s?”

“At four hundred miles an hour? Both,” Maddox answered. “As we dig down through it, we’ll certainly recognize parts. I’m pretty good at identifying airplane pieces, and I’m told Dr. Brockton here is terrific at identifying
people
pieces. But basically? That plane and anybody in it? Squashed like a bug.”

“Oh, goody,” Kimball joked. “Can’t wait.”

It was gallows humor—a sanity-saving necessity in work this grim. But the truth was, I
couldn’t
wait. And unless I missed my guess, neither could eager-beaver Kimball.

I WAS HALFWAY THROUGH MY PART OF THE BRIEFING
—I had passed out diagrams of the human skeleton and had worked my way from the skull down through the spine and into the pelvis—when I noticed that my voice wasn’t the
only thing droning. Maddox was ignoring me by now, his head turned in the direction of the sound; a moment later, I saw McCready and Prescott turn toward it, too. In the distance but closing fast was the distinctive thudding of a helicopter rotor.

When it became clear that the helicopter was landing, McCready and Prescott headed for the door, trailed by the rest of us. Maddox and I stayed in the background, watching from the command center’s steps.

The agents fanned out on the concrete, facing the helicopter—the sheriff’s helicopter again, as I’d guessed from the low, military muscularity of the pitch. As the rotor slowed, the left cockpit door opened and a woman got out of the copilot’s seat—a woman I recognized, even through the dark hair whipping across her face, as Carmelita Janus. She was dressed in black from head to toe, but the outfit was a far cry from widow’s weeds; it looked more like a commando’s uniform for night ops—but night ops with style. She wore billowy cargo pants of what appeared to be parachute nylon, topped by a long-sleeved, form-fitting pullover; the pants were tucked into tight, knee-high boots that sported tapered toes and a hint of a heel.

Maddox nudged me, muttering, “Is that who I think it is?”

“If you think it’s the grieving widow,” I muttered back.

“Christ, what’s
she
doing here?”

“Trying to find out if her husband’s dead, I guess. Or maybe trying to make sure we’re not sitting around playing video games.” I glanced at McCready and Prescott; to say they didn’t look thrilled to see her would have been the understatement of the century.

Mrs. Janus strode toward the FBI agents, who stood shoulder to shoulder, like some posse of Wild West lawmen, minus
the six-shooters and the ten-gallon hats. Her gaze swept across the group, then returned to the central figure, the one wearing the power suit. “You must be Agent Prescott,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Special Agent in Charge Miles Prescott. So, Mrs. Janus? Why are you here?”

“To identify my husband’s body, if it’s been found. To help search for it, if it hasn’t been.”

Prescott shook his head slowly, seeming pained. “Ma’am, I’m very sorry, but I can’t let you do that.”

“Why not? I’m trained in search and rescue. I’m also a paramedic. Not that I think Richard could have survived this crash.”

“How did you get the sheriff’s office to fly you up here?”

“Our organization has a good partnership with the sheriff’s office,” she said. “We often work together. Quite closely.” Prescott frowned. “Mr. Prescott, I’m here to help any way I can. Even if it’s just to identify the body.”

He held out his hands, palms up. “Mrs. Janus, we haven’t even started the search. It’s not safe yet. I can’t put you at risk. And once we do start, we’ll be collecting forensic evidence—evidence we’re counting on to tell us what happened last night. You wouldn’t want any of that evidence to be overlooked, or damaged, or destroyed, would you?”

“No, of course not. But—”

Their dispute was interrupted by the whine and whump of the helicopter revving. Prescott looked puzzled for a moment. Then, as it became apparent that the chopper was about to take off—without Mrs. Janus—his expression changed from confusion to fury. “What the
hell,
” he snapped, then whirled and barked at the agent standing beside him. “
You.
Get on the radio with the sheriff’s office. Tell them to tell that pilot—” The helicopter lifted off. “Shit. You tell them to get that helicopter
on the ground—right here, right now—to pick her up. Or I will come down on them like the wrath of God.”

The young agent pushed past me into the command center, and I could hear a terse exchange of voices. Sixty seconds later, the helicopter returned. It hovered directly over the cluster of federal agents, its downdraft buffeting them and yet somehow leaving Mrs. Janus—standing twenty feet from them—unruffled. Then it edged sideways and touched down. Without a word, Carmelita Janus turned, strode toward it, and climbed back into the copilot’s seat.

As the machine leapt up again—buffeting the agents once more on its way out—I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before: a second helicopter, hovering a hundred yards away. The cabin door was open; perched on the sill, his feet propped on a landing skid, was a man—a man with a boxy black object balanced on one shoulder. A cylinder projected from the front of the box; at its center, I saw a glint of blue: the reflection of a telephoto lens, watching and recording the scene that had just transpired. Judging by the logo emblazoned on the side of the helicopter, Fox News viewers across San Diego—or across the entire nation—would soon be seeing Mrs. Richard Janus being banished from the site of her husband’s smoldering jet, her brave offer to help spurned by the heartless forces of the FBI. I felt sorry for Prescott; his Bureau bosses might well—and his media critics surely would—take him to task for being so unsympathetic . . . or for being caught on camera. At the same time, I couldn’t help admiring Mrs. Janus’s moxie and resourcefulness. Her maneuver could end up complicating our work, though, I realized, especially if it increased the pressure for us to work fast.

“Damn,” said Prescott.

O Brother,
I thought,
you can say that again
.

“Damn,” he repeated. “Damn damn
damn
.”

AN HOUR HAD PASSED SINCE CARMELITA JANUS FLEW
off, but the cyclone of grit and grouchiness she’d stirred up continued to swirl long after the helicopter had vanished. Prescott spent some quality time fussing into his phone; I heard the word “grandstanding” at least three times; I also heard him say, “I want to know everything there is to know about her husband’s life insurance. How much? Does it pay double for accidental death? Is there a suicide exclusion? Most important—is she the sole beneficiary?” There was more muttering I couldn’t quite catch, then he snapped the phone shut and glared at the group as if we were his problem, saying, “So?
Now
what are we waiting for?” I was wondering that myself, though I wasn’t in a position to ask.

McCready looked startled—or was it angry?—for a split second, but his answer was matter of fact. “We’re waiting for a couple key pieces of gear,” he said. “Should be here any minute.” He recapped the team’s assignments, concluding, “Remember, safety first. Followed closely—really,
really
closely—by evidence preservation.” He scanned the agents’
faces. “Any other questions for me? For Dr. Brockton or Mr. Maddox? No?” He pointed toward the door. “Okay, fellows, let’s go get it.”

Remembering the thirty-foot bluff we’d have to descend to get to the wreckage, I couldn’t help wondering,
Get it? How?

I didn’t have to wonder for long. As we exited the command center, I heard a deep, powerful roar. A moment later a crane lurched into view and rumbled along the rocky ridge road. McCready, Prescott, and Maddox huddled briefly, and then Maddox limped into the crane’s path. Waving his arms to get the driver’s attention, he headed toward the rim of the bluff, motioning the crane to follow. As they traversed the edge, silhouetted against the sky, I imagined for a moment that Maddox was a farmer, leading some immense, long-necked, bellowing beast out to graze. He stopped, peering down the bluff, and then pointed to the ground at his feet, indicating the spot where he wanted the crane. Then he raised his arm overhead and slowly lowered it to horizontal, pointing straight out over the abyss, miming the motion of the machine’s boom.

The crane had a capacity of sixteen tons—thirty-two thousand pounds—according to prominent warnings stenciled on the vehicle and on the boom.
No problem,
I thought; from where I stood, it looked as if most pieces of the wreckage weighed less than I did. Sidling over to Maddox, I joked, “Reckon we’ve got enough muscle?”

Maddox shrugged, looking more dubious than I’d expected. “It’s not the load capacity I’m worried about, it’s the boom length,” he said. “The plane only weighed six tons, dripping wet, so this thing could easily hoist a whole Citation. Plus another whole Citation. The trick’ll be reaching out far enough. The boom’s a hundred feet long.” He studied
the debris field below, then looked again at the boom, now swinging out in a gargantuan imitation of Maddox’s pantomime. “Might be enough. Wish we had another fifty feet.” He frowned at the rough jeep road the crane had lurched up to reach us. “Might be tough to get a bigger rig up the mountain, though.”

I thought,
Might be?
I was amazed that
any
rig had managed to make it up.

I felt sure the crane could get the wreckage up the bluff. But I still wasn’t clear on how we could get down.

That answer, too, was quick to materialize. Two of McCready’s agents emerged from the back of the ERT truck, big coils of rope slung over their shoulders. The ropes were red nylon, interwoven with diamonds of black—a pattern that made them look more like rattlesnakes than I liked. Two other agents brought out bundles of harnesses, racks of carabiners, and other climbing hardware. The agents with the ropes tied them off to cleats at opposite ends of the crane, then flung the coiled bundles off the edge of the bluff. For a moment, as the bright red loops separated and unspooled, they looked like party streamers, and the juxtaposition—the festive unfurling against the grim backdrop—gave me a surprising pang.
Poor Richard,
I thought, followed by a line of Shakespeare’s:
So quick bright things come to confusion.

“Yo,
Doc
.” I turned to find McCready staring at me.

“Sorry. Were you saying something to me?”

“Only three times. You wanna stay up top till things cool off some more? Or would you like to get a closer look? Probably too soon to start the actual recovery, but you could start getting the lay of the land down there—figure out a plan of attack—if you want to.”

I hated the notion of a whole posse of agents tromping
around the wreckage unsupervised—specifically, unsupervised by
me
. I imagined fragile, burned bones crushed into cinders by careless footsteps. No matter that the FBI’s crime-scene techs were the best in the nation. The Bureau had brought me out here for a reason, and I meant to give them their money’s worth. “Beam me down, Scotty,” I said.

“You got it.” He nodded toward the rope-throwing agents, who were now laying out climbing harnesses near the rim. “You ever done any rappelling?”

“A little. It’s been a while, but I reckon it’ll come back to me once I’m harnessed up.” In fact, it came flooding back to me only a heartbeat later: a death scene I’d roped down to, in a rugged part of the Cumberland Mountains. “Here’s the thing,” I hedged. “Can somebody else go first?” He looked puzzled. “Ten or twelve years ago, I recovered a woman’s body up near the Kentucky border. She’d been dismembered and thrown off a bridge into a ravine.”

He nodded. “I think I remember reading about that case. Serial killer? What was his name?”

“Satterfield. Sick, sadistic sonofabitch. Anyhow, I roped down a bluff to this woman’s body, and I landed right by a rattlesnake—a coiled-up, pissed-off timber rattler. It struck at me; missed my leg by about that much.” I held up a thumb and forefinger, practically touching. I took another glance down at the rocky terrain. “I’m thinking this terrain looks kinda snaky, and I’ve had enough fun with snakes to last me a lifetime.”

He nodded, tucking back part of a smile. “I’ll send Kimball and Boatman down first, with the Total Station,” he said. “They’ll stomp around and scare off the varmints.”

He turned toward the two agents, who were uncoiling a pair of ropes and tying them to their gear—a hard-shell tripod
case, about the size of a golf bag, plus a suitcase-sized aluminum box containing the electronics. “Yo, Kimball,” McCready yelled. The ever-eager agent looked up. “Got a job for you.”

“Instead of the Total Station?”

“In addition. You’re on snake-bait duty.”

“Snakebite duty?” The young agent cocked his head. “You want me to take the antivenom kit with us?”

“Not snake
bite
. Snake
bait.
You’re the designated snake bait.”

“Boss. Seriously? Did you really just call me snake bait?”

“I did. Doc here is snake-phobic. Your job is to run interference. If he gets bit, you get transferred. To Fargo.”

Kimball pondered this for a fraction of a second. “Hey, Doc,” he said. “Do me a favor, will you?”

“If I can.”

“If you get bit, chuck that snake over at me, so it’ll bite me, too. I’m
Fargo
-phobic.” He turned to his partner. “Hey, Boat-Man, toss me that figure eight, would you?” A piece of polished metal arced through the air toward Kimball; he caught it deftly, looped the rope through it, and then clipped it to his climbing harness. Then, easing the tripod case over the rim, he lowered it down the bluff, feeding the rope smoothly through the figure eight until the line went slack. Boatman did the same with the aluminum case.

Once the hardware was down, the two men clipped themselves to the rappelling ropes, backed off the precipice in sync, and dropped from sight. “Look out, all you rattlers and cottonmouths and king cobras,” I heard Kimball call out as he descended. “I’m coming down, and I am one snake-stompin’ son-of-a-mongoose badass!”

“Yeah, right,” I heard Boatman taunting as he slithered
down the other rope. “You proved your badassedness in Baton Rouge, didn’t you? How many times did you hurl at that scene? Four? Or was it five?”

“I
told
you, man, that was food poisoning from the night before. Toxic gumbo. Tainted crawdads. A lesser man—you, for instance—woulda keeled over and died.”

“Yeah,” mocked Boatman. “You just keep on telling yourself that, Mr. Badass.”

I WAS THE LAST TO RAPPEL DOWN. IF ANY SNAKES
remained nearby, they were doing a good job of hiding. As I unclipped, though, I changed my assessment: If any snakes were in the immediate vicinity, they were thoroughly cooked. The earth was scorched, and heat continued to radiate from the rocks.

Unclipping from the rope, I stepped back and studied the rock face I had just descended. Some thirty feet high by fifty feet wide, it was unremarkable, at least geologically: merely the upper terminus of a long valley; a vertical transition up to the mountain’s ridgeline. In human terms, though, it was momentous: the rocky hand of death, smashing Richard Janus’s hurtling aircraft as effortlessly and heedlessly as I might reflexively crush a gnat in midair.

Head high above the base of the bluff was a shallow crater, rough and raw, six or eight feet in diameter, with additional fracture lines radiating beyond the edges of the depression. Mangled debris was piled almost as high as the crater’s center, and it sprawled outward to either side in approximately equal measures. “Must’ve impacted right there,” I said to Kimball and Boatman.

“Sure looks like it,” Kimball agreed. He shook his head.
“Man. A hundred feet higher, he’d’ve cleared it. A flick of the wrist—that’s all it would’ve taken.” He scanned the debris scattered behind and to the sides, then turned to Boatman. “So, Boat-Man. I’m thinking we ought to set the station off to one side, so we’re not standing right on ground zero.” He pointed to a narrow shelf of rock at one edge of the draw, just outside the zone of destruction. “How about that flat spot?”

Boatman studied the shelf. “Works for me,” he said. “Gives us a clear view of the whole debris field, far as I can tell. Also a line of sight to those trees”—he pointed at a swath of broken branches a short ways down the valley. “Looks like the wings clipped ’em on the way in.” He hoisted one of the gear cases and started across the slope to the shelf. I snagged the tripod case and began following him.

“Hang on, Doc,” Kimball called after me.

“Might as well make myself useful,” I said, trudging on. “I hate just standing around. Besides, I want to look over your partner’s shoulder while he sets that thing up.”

Kimball caught up just as I reached the rock shelf. He took the tripod case from me and set it down carefully. Unlatching it, he lifted out the tripod, extended and unfolded the legs, and set it on the flattest spot, then made a few adjustments to level it. Then, reaching into the case again, he removed a telescoping rod marked with twelve-inch bands of red and white, one end topped by a jewel-like prism. “You made off with my piece of the gear, Doc,” he squawked good-naturedly, waving the rod like a scepter.

“Oh. Sorry. No wonder you were trying to stop me. I thought you were just afraid I would break something.”

“That too.” He grinned, then turned and headed across the draw, toward the broken branches that marked the beginning of the end of the Citation’s flight.

Boatman, meanwhile, had opened the aluminum case that contained the system’s brains: a boxy yellow instrument that looked like a cross between a fish finder, a surveyor’s transit, and an overgrown camera. Bolting it to the head of the tripod, he powered it up, leveled it, and began scrolling through menus on a small digital screen. I edged closer and leaned in. “Mind if I look over your shoulder? I saw y’all using this at the Body Farm, but I didn’t have a chance to pay much attention.”

“Be my guest.” Boatman leaned back a bit so I could see the screen. “A Total Station’s like a cross between a GPS receiver and a surveyor’s rig, with a laser pointer and a microcomputer thrown in. The way it works is, first you mark your reference point—this point right here, where we’ve set it up.” He pressed a button. “Okay, so we have our reference point; ground zero. Guess I shouldn’t call it that anymore—not since 9/11. Anyhow. Now we can measure the position of any other point or object out here—those broken branches; that wheel over there; whatever—in relation to the reference point. All we need to know is the distance, the heading, and the angle up or down. Kimball holds the prism beside whatever we want to map, I bounce the laser off the prism, and I hit this button to capture the data. Easy as pie.”

“Don’t you have to label it somehow?”

“Ah. Good question. Yeah. I’ve got a bunch of captions preloaded—we worked a plane crash about six months ago—so mostly I’ll just scroll down the list and click on whatever caption I need. But I can add new ones, if I need to, using this.” He tapped a small keyboard. “Then Kimbo moves the reflector to the next point, I hit the button again, and so on. All those coordinates get stored in memory, and when we dump everything onto the computer up there in the command center, we can spit out maps in 3-D, from any angle we want to.”