The Breaking Point

Prologue

McCready stopped and knelt beside a rut in the dirt road, raising a hand to halt the six men and two women fanned out behind him. The road, if a pair of faint tracks through grass, weeds, and leaves could indeed be called a road, meandered down a hillside of oaks and maples, their trunks girdled with vines. The mid-June morning was sweet with honeysuckle blossoms; the exuberant lushness of June had not yet given way to the duller green of July and the browning scorch of August, but underneath the perfume lurked something darker, something malodorous and malevolent hanging in the air.

McCready — Special Supervisory Agent Clint “Mac” McCready — studied the rut, which was damp and also deeply imprinted with multiple layers of sharply defined tire tracks. He pulled two evidence flags from a back pocket and marked the ends of the tracks, then, with the camera slung around his neck, took a series of digital photographs. The photos were wide-angle views at first, followed by tighter and tighter shots. As he snapped the final, frame-filling close-ups, he said, to no one in particular, “It rained, what, couple days ago?”

“Night before last.” The answer came from behind him, from Kimbo — Kirby Kimball, the youngest, newest, and therefore most eager member of SSA McCready’s Evidence Response Team. “The front passed through about thirty-six hours ago. Rain stopped shortly after midnight.”

McCready nodded, smiling slightly at the young agent’s zeal, and lowered the camera, focusing now solely with his eyes. “These tracks look like they’ve been machined. What does that tell us?”

“New tires,” said Kimball. “Deep tread blocks. Almost no wear. But there’s a nick — a cut — here. At the outer edge.”

“What else?”

“Big, off-road tires,” Kimball added, squatting for a closer look. “SUV or four-by-four. Just one, looks like. One set of impressions heading in, another — on top — heading back out.”

“Right.” McCready glanced over his shoulder at the other agents. “Mighty quiet back there. I thought maybe the rest of you guys had gone for coffee.” The agents exchanged sheepish glances. “Okay, what else can we tell from these tracks? Somebody besides Kimbo jump in. Anybody?”

“The vehicle passed through after the rain stopped.” This from Boatman, an earnest, thirtysomething agent who looked and listened a lot more than he talked.

“Right, far as it goes. But can you pin it down any tighter than that?”

Boatman stepped forward and bent down, his brow furrowing, his gaze shifting from the tracks to the surrounding vegetation — crabgrass and spindly poison ivy. “Quite a while after the rain stopped. Hours later, I’d say; maybe yesterday afternoon or even last night.”

“Because?”

“The impressions wouldn’t be so crisp — so perfect — if there’d been a puddle there when the vehicle went through,” Boatman said. He surveyed the margins of the rut, then inspected the undersides of some of the blades of grass there. “Plus, if there’d been standing water, there’d be mud spatter on the vegetation. There’s no spatter.”

“Good.” McCready focused on Kimball, who stood motionless yet somehow seemed cocked and ready to fire: his T-shirt stretched by the tension in his shoulders and biceps; the heels of his boots hovering a half inch off the ground, as if he were ready to spring into action. “Kimbo, you’re an eager beaver this morning; you wanna cast these?” It wasn’t actually a question.

“Yessir. On it.” Kimball jogged back to the truck, a Ford Econoline chassis with a big cargo box grafted behind the cab; the vehicle might have passed for an ambulance on steroids if not for the prominent FBI logo on the side and the foot-high letters reading EVIDENCE RESPONSE TEAM. Opening a hatch on the side of the vehicle, Kimball hauled out a large tackle box and lugged it to the tracks. He unlatched the lid and took out a gallon-sized Ziploc bag, half filled with powdered gypsum crystals — dental stone — and a graduated squeeze bottle. Squirting ten ounces of water into the bag, he resealed it and began kneading, creating a slurry the color and consistency of thin pancake batter: runny enough to flow into every block and groove of the tire tracks, thick enough not to seep into the soil itself.

McCready had already moved on, following the tracks in a hunched-over crouch: half bloodhound, half Quasimodo. “Looks like they parked here,” he said, stopping to study the ground again. The soil was covered with leaves, and McCready frowned at the lack of castable shoe impressions. A trail of scuffed leaves led toward the trees at the edge of the clearing, but the undergrowth beyond the tree line appeared to be undisturbed; indeed, the scuff marks led only as far as a large, convex oval of mussed leaves situated just short of the trees. McCready began circling the oval, pausing occasionally to take photos. “This matches the C.I.’s description of where it went down,” he said. Heads nodded in agreement; earlier, McCready had passed out transcripts of his interview with the confidential informant. “Boatman, you and Kimbo…” He paused to glance over his shoulder at Kimball, who had already finished pouring the slurry of dental stone into the rut. “You and Kimbo set up the total station and start mapping. Rest of you, suit up and get ready to dig in.” The other six team members returned to the truck and wriggled into white biohazard suits and purple gloves. They came back laden with rakes, shovels, trowels, plastic bins, and a wood-framed screen of quarter-inch wire mesh.

As they laid their tools neatly beside the oval mound, Boatman latched the 3-D mapping unit onto a tripod. Kimball returned to the tire tracks again, this time holding a long, reflector-topped rod, its length marked in alternating, twelve-inch bands of red and white. Boatman swiveled the instrument toward Kimball and sighted on the reflector. “Lights, camera, action,” he deadpanned, and he began pressing buttons to capture the position of the track. Checking the small display screen, he nodded. “Got it,” he said, rotating the unit toward the oval mound, to which Kimball jogged with the reflector.

The mound, uncovered by careful raking, was red-brown clay, roughly four feet by six feet. The clay was broken and infused with pale, shredded roots, freshly shorn and torn from the soil — a raw, ragged wound in the earth’s smooth, dark skin. McCready’s gaze ranged over the lumpy surface, then zoomed in on something no one else had seen, tucked beneath a clod of clay. Kneeling just outside the margin of the oval mound, he leaned down, his nose practically in the dirt. “Cartridge case,” he said. “That was careless of somebody.” Then, without looking around: “Kimbo.” By the time he’d finished saying the name, Kimball was already placing the end of the rod beside the piece of brass.

“Got it,” Boatman called a moment later.

Still kneeling, McCready took a twig from the ground and used it to lift the shell from the clay. Angling it to catch the light, he peered closely at the marks in the base. “Remington. Nine millimeter.” A paper evidence bag materialized beside his knee, held open by one of the agents; McCready dropped the case into it, and the agent sealed and labeled it, then set it in one of the plastic bins.

He sat back on his heels. “All right. We’re burning daylight, so let’s get to it. Boatman, you and Kimball keep mapping. The rest of you, dig in: shovel till you see something, then switch to trowels. Screen everything — dirt, leaves, twigs, everything but the air. Hell, screen the air, too.” He waved a hand in a sweeping gesture that encompassed not just the mound of clay but the surrounding area as well. “Might be more brass, buried or scattered around the periphery. Maybe cigarette butts, too, if we’re lucky or the shooters are stupid. Maybe they left us some DNA.”

“Maybe a signed confession, too,” joked one of the agents. McCready did not laugh, so no one else did, either.

“All right,” he said. “Dig in. Easy does it, though. If our C.I.’s playing straight with us, we’ve got three bodies here — the two buyers and our undercover guy. Way the C.I. tells it, the traffickers never intended to sell; their plan all along was to kill the buyers, keep the coke, and move their own distributors into the dead guys’ turf.”

“Nice folks,” muttered someone.

“Aren’t they all?” someone else responded.

They began by defining the margins of the grave with probes — thin, four-foot rods of stainless steel, each topped by a one-foot horizontal handle. Pressed into the soft earth of a fresh grave, the slender shafts sank easily; encountering hard, undisturbed soil, though, they balked and bowed, resisting. The probes weren’t actually necessary; the perimeter of the grave was clearly visible, once the leaves and the slight mound of excess fill dirt had been removed. Still, the Bureau prided itself on thoroughness, and McCready was a Bureau man all the way. There would be no shortcuts today, for himself or his team.

Once the grave’s outline was flagged and mapped and photographed, three of the agents — already sweating inside their biohazard suits — began digging. They started with shovels, working at the margins, digging down a foot all the way around before nibbling their way toward the carnage they expected to unearth at the center. After a grim twenty minutes, marked mainly by labored breathing and the rasping and ringing of shovel blades against soil and rocks, one of the agents — Starnes, a young woman whose blond hair spilled from the hood of her moonsuit like a saint’s nimbus — paused and leaned in for a closer look. “Sir? I see fabric. Looks like maybe a shirtsleeve.”

McCready knelt beside her. With the triangular tip of a thin trowel, he flicked away crumbs of clay. “Yeah. It’s an arm. Lose the shovels. Switch to trowels. Let’s pedestal the remains.”

Two sweaty hours later, digging downward and inward from all sides, they’d uncovered a tangle of limbs, torsos, and heads. The pedestaled assemblage resembled a macabre sculpture — a postmortem wrestling match, or a pile of tacklers on a football field. It also reminded McCready, for some odd reason, of an ancient Roman statue he’d seen years before, in the Vatican Museums: a powerful sculpture of a muscular man and his two terrified sons caught in the crushing coils of sea serpents. Maybe the reason wasn’t so odd after all, he realized: like the chilling figures frozen in stone, these three men had died in the coils of something sinister, something that had slithered up behind them as surely and fatally as any mythological monster.

McCready photographed the entwined bodies from every angle, seemingly oblivious to the stench that grew steadily stronger as the day — and the corpses — got hotter. “All right,” he said finally. “Give me three body bags over on this patch of grass. Let’s lift them out one at a time. I’ll want pictures after each one.”

It took another half hour to lay out the corpses, faceup, on the open body bags. By then, several of the techs were looking green around the gills, though no one had vomited. The last of the bodies to be lifted from the grave — the eyes gone to mush, the cheeks puffed out — was recognizable, just barely, as the man whose photograph McCready had passed around in the morning’s briefing. “This one’s Haskell, our undercover guy,” he said grimly.

“So the C.I. was telling us true,” said Kimball. “The drug buy goes bad, turns into a shoot-out.”

“Looks like it,” said McCready. “But just to be sure, let’s ask him.” He turned, looking over one shoulder toward the trees on the far side of the clearing. “Hey,” he called out. “You — Brockton. Step out from behind that tree. And keep your hands where I can see them.”

The team turned as a man emerged. He did not appear to be a seedy specimen from the sewers of the drug-trafficking world. The man looked more bookish than dangerous, and as he raised his hands, a broad smile creased his face.

Chapter 1

“You—Brockton,” I heard McCready calling. “Step out from behind that tree. And keep your hands where I can see them.”

“I’m unarmed,” I yelled, stepping from my observation post behind an oak tree. “But I’ve got a Ph.D., and I’m not afraid to use it. One wrong move, and I’ll lecture you to death!” The joke—mostly a joke — drew laughs from the weary FBI agents, as I’d hoped it would. “I’m Dr. Bill Brockton,” I added as I approached. “Welcome to the Body Farm.” I approached the rim of the empty grave, which was ringed with evidence flags and sweat-drenched FBI forensic techs. Peering into the hole, I saw that they had excavated all the way down to undisturbed soil, four feet down. The clay there was deeply grooved, as if it had been clawed by an immense monster. I, in fact, was that monster, and I’d left those marks the day before, when I’d dug the grave with a backhoe.

I’d missed most of today’s excavation, having spent the morning entombed deep inside Neyland Stadium, the colossal cathedral to college football that the University of Tennessee had erected beside the emerald waters of the Tennessee River. Wedged beneath the stadium’s grandstands, caught in a spiderwork of steel girders, was Stadium Hall: a dingy string of offices, classrooms, and laboratories, most of them assigned to the Anthropology Department, which I chaired. The rooms were strung along one side of a curving, quarter-mile corridor, one that underscored the hall in Stadium Hall. At midafternoon, when McCready had texted to say that the training exercise was nearly finished, I’d hopped into my truck, crossed the bridge, and slipped through a high wooden gate and down through the woods, stepping carefully to avoid treading on the bodies and bones scattered throughout the three-acre site: donated corpses whose postmortem careers were meticulously scrutinized, itemized, and immortalized, in photos, journal articles, scholarly dissertations, and law-enforcement anecdotes.

Officially, my macabre laboratory was named the Anthropology Research Facility, but a few years before, one of McCready’s waggish FBI colleagues had dubbed it “the Body Farm,” and the moniker — popularized by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell — had caught on so thoroughly that even I, the facility’s creator, tended to call it by the catchy nickname. For several years now, the FBI had been sending Evidence Response Team members to the Body Farm for training exercises like this one. With a ready supply of actual human corpses, plus plenty of privacy, the facility was the only place in the nation — possibly in the entire world — where forensic teams could hone their skills in such realistic scenarios.

The three corpses just unearthed by McCready’s team had gradually attracted a cloud of blowflies, some of which strayed — either at random, or in an excess of eagerness — from the faces of the dead to the eyes and nostrils of the quick, causing the agents to squint and swat at the unwelcome intruders. Off to one side was a large mound of sifted dirt, plus piles of clay clods and rocks too big and too hard to pass through the quarter-inch wire mesh. On the ground beside the dirt lay the screen and — atop the mesh — three cartridge cases, two cigarette butts, and one wad of chewing gum, plus a gum wrapper.

I scrutinized the screen, then the bodies, then the hole in the ground, taking my time before turning to face the assembled agents. “That’s it? That’s all you got?” Their expressions, which had been confident and proud a moment before, turned nervous when I added, “So y’all just ran out of steam before you got to the fourth body?” Exchanging worried glances, they returned to the edge of the grave, their eyes scanning its floor and walls. I chuckled. “Kidding,” I said, and a chorus of good-natured groans ensued. “Okay, so tell me what you’ve learned from the scene.”

I pointed at Kimball, the eager young agent who’d cast the tire tracks. “Agent Kimball,” I said. “You like to make a good… impression.” More groans, as the dreadful pun sank in. “What else does that rut tell us, besides the fact that the puddle had dried up by the time the tracks were made?” McCready had texted me a few notes on the team’s findings, starting with their observations about the tire impressions. Kimball frowned, so I gave him a hint. “How many sets of tracks did you cast?”

“Just the one,” he said. “That’s all…” He hesitated, his eyes darting back and forth, then the light dawned. “Ah — they all rode in together.”

“Bingo,” I said. “But they didn’t all ride out together. And what about the grave? What does the evidence there tell us?”

“The cartridge cases are from two different weapons,” said one of the dirt sifters. “They’re all nine-millimeter Remington, but there’s two different firing-pin impressions. One’s round, the other’s rectangular.” I nodded approvingly; when I’d asked a friend on the campus police force for spent shells, I’d specifically requested shells from two different handguns, so I was pleased that the difference had been noticed. “Also,” he went on, “the cigarette butts are two different brands. So we might get two different DNA profiles from those.”

“Good,” I said. “Maybe there’s DNA in the gum, too — and maybe the gum chewer’s not one of the smokers. So there could be three DNA profiles, right?” Heads nodded. “Okay, let’s talk taphonomy — the arrangement of the items you excavated. What did you learn as you unearthed the bodies?”

“All three were killed with a single shot to the back of the head,” said a guy whose nerdy, Coke-bottle glasses were offset by immense, chiseled jaw muscles, gleaming with sweat and smears of clay. “Execution style.” I nodded, slightly self-conscious about this part. The shots to the head were the least realistic part of the exercise, because the shots — unlike the corpses themselves — were fakes. It had struck me as unnecessary and disrespectful to fire bullets into donated bodies, so I’d settled instead for daubing a small circle of red dye onto the back of each head, and a larger circle on each forehead, to simulate entry and exit wounds.

“What else?” A long silence ensued. “Did you find blood in the grave?” Heads shook slowly. “Did you find blood anywhere besides on the wounds themselves?” More head shaking; several of the agents now cast nervous sidelong glances at one another. “So what does that suggest to you?”

The blond woman raised a hand. “It suggests they were killed somewhere else,” she said. “And then brought here.”

I gave her a thumbs-up. “Which explains why there was only one vehicle. Tell me — how often do drug traffickers and drug buyers carpool to the place where the deal’s going down?” A few of the agents laughed, but Kimball, the tread caster, winced, as he should have: Kimball, of all people, should have given more thought to the absence of a second vehicle. “Also,” I went on, “how likely is it that only three bullets would be fired during a drug-deal shoot-out? All of them to the back of the victims’ heads?” I could see them rethinking the scenario. “Anything else?” The agents looked from the grave to the bodies and back to the grave, then at me once more. My questions made it clear that they were still missing something — still failing to connect important dots — but apparently they needed a hint. “Look closely at the three faces,” I said. “See any differences?”

“Ah,” said the nimbus-haired blonde. “The two ‘buyers’ look a lot better than our guy. A lot… fresher.”

“Bingo,” I said. “They show no signs of decomposition, and no insect activity. Look at your ‘undercover agent.’ He’s a mess — he’s starting to bloat, and he’s got maggots in his mouth and nostrils. Anybody look in there?” Several of the agents grimaced; most shook their heads sheepishly. “So if you compare the condition of the bodies, what does the difference in decay tell you?”

“He was killed before the other two,” said Boatman, the agent who’d noticed the absence of mud spatter beside the tire tracks.

“Exactly,” I said, pulling on a pair of purple nitrile gloves. “Also, your undercover guy was probably outdoors, or maybe stashed outdoors for a while — someplace where the blowflies could get to him.” I pointed a purple finger at the puffed-up face again. “Blowflies like to lay their eggs in the moist orifices of the body,” I went on. “The mouth, the nose, the eyes, the ears, even the genitals, if those are accessible. But especially, especially, any bloody wound.” I stooped beside the dead “agent” and lifted his head. I had gone to the trouble of mixing a bit of actual blood — pig blood — with the red food coloring on his head, and I’d brought him out to the Body Farm two days before I’d brought the other bodies. During that time, his “gunshot wound” had attracted legions of flies, and by the time I’d placed the bodies in the ground, maggots had begun colonizing his hair, forehead, and orifices. “Next time, check for maggots. And collect the biggest ones.” I bent down and plucked a quarter-inch specimen from an eye socket, holding it in my palm for them to inspect. “A forensic entomologist could tell you that this maggot hatched three or four days ago,” I said. “Which — if I remember right — is just about the time your undercover agent dropped off the radar screen. Is that correct, Agent McCready?”

“That’s correct, Dr. Brockton.”

I flicked the maggot into the woods. It was time to reveal the final plot twist in the scenario. When I’d first phoned to suggest the idea, McCready had sounded dubious. As we talked, though, he warmed to the idea, and by the end of the call, he’d embraced the scenario enthusiastically: “A good lesson in investigative skepticism,” he’d called it.

“So,” I said to the team of trainees, “knowing that these other two guys were killed a couple days after your agent — and knowing that all of them were brought out here and buried together…”—I paused, giving them time to think and rethink before offering the final hint—“what does that tell you about your confidential informant?”

“It tells us he’s a lying sack of shit,” Kimball blurted. His face was flushed and his tone was angry, as if the corpse really was a murdered FBI agent, rather than a married insurance agent who’d had a heart attack during a tryst with his mistress. “It tells us the C.I.’s whole story is bullshit,” Kimball fumed, smacking a fist into an open palm. “Hell, maybe he even set up our guy — ratted him out to the traffickers.”

I nodded. “Maybe so. So be careful who you trust. Bad guys lie through their teeth. But bugs?” I pointed to the bloated face and the telltale maggots. “You can always believe them. Whatever they tell you, it’s the truth.”

Chapter 2

The familiar arc of a rib cage filled my field of vision as I leaned down and peered through the smoke. On the rack of my charcoal grill, two slabs of baby back ribs sizzled, the meat crusting a lovely reddish brown. Ribs were a rare treat these days — Kathleen, invoking her Ph.D. in nutrition, had drastically cut our meat consumption when my cholesterol hit 220—but she was willing to bend the dietary rules on special occasions. And surely this, our thirtieth wedding anniversary, counted as a special occasion.

As soon as the FBI training at the Body Farm had ended, I’d headed for home, stopping by the Fresh Market, an upscale grocery, to procure the makings of a feast, southern style: ribs, potato salad, baked beans, and coleslaw.

As I fitted the lid back onto the smoker, I heard a car pull into the driveway, followed by the opening and slamming of four doors and the clamor of four voices. A moment later the backyard gate opened, and Jeff, my son, came in. Leaning into the column of smoke roiling upward, he drew a deep, happy breath. “Smells great. Almost done?”

“Hope so. The guest of honor should be home any minute. She’s been dropping hints all week about celebrating at the Orangery.” The Orangery was Knoxville’s fanciest restaurant. “Way I see it, only way to dodge that bullet is to have dinner on the table when she gets here.”

“You know,” he said, “it wouldn’t kill you to take Mom someplace with cloth napkins and real silverware once every thirty years.”

I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise. “You got something against the plastic spork? Anyhow, I thought it’d be nicer to celebrate here.”

The wooden gate swung open again — burst open, whapping against the fence — and Tyler came tearing into the backyard, with all the exuberance of a five-year-old who’d just been liberated from a car seat. “Grandpa Bill, Grandpa Bill, I could eat a horse,” he announced, wrapping himself around my left leg.

A few steps behind came his younger brother, Walker, age three, grabbing my right leg and crowing, “I can eat a elephant!”

Jeff’s wife, Jenny — a pretty, willowy blonde, who carried herself with the easy grace of an athlete — came up the steps after them, closing the gate. “Stay away from the grill, boys,” she called. “It’s hot. Very, very hot.” She leaned over the boys to give me a peck on the cheek. “I don’t know about the ribs, but you smell thoroughly smoked,” she said. “Are you sure you want us horning in on your anniversary dinner?”

“Absolutely. What better way to celebrate thirty years of marriage?”

“Hmm,” Jeff grunted. “Hey, how ’bout you and Mom celebrate with the boys while Jenny and I eat at the Orangery?”

“Listen to Casanova,” scoffed Jenny. “For our anniversary, he took me to the UT-Vanderbilt game. Superromantic.” She shook her head good-naturedly. Then, with characteristic helpfulness, she asked, “What needs doing?”

“If you could set the table, that’d be great. Oh, and maybe put the slaw and potato salad and beans in something better looking than those plastic tubs?”

She nodded. “Hey, kiddos, who wants to be Mommy’s helper?”

“I do, I do,” they both shouted, abandoning me to follow her through the sliding glass door and into the kitchen.

“What on earth did you do to deserve her?” I asked Jeff as the door slid shut.

“I think she likes me for the foil effect,” he said. “I make her look so good by comparison. Same reason Mom keeps you around.”

At that moment I heard the quick toot of a car horn in the driveway, followed by the clatter of the garage door opening. Kathleen was home.

Soon after, delighted squeals—“Grandmommy! Grandmommy!”—announced her arrival in the kitchen.

The slider rasped open and she emerged, the strap of her leather briefcase still slung over her shoulder. “Bill Brockton, you sneak. You didn’t tell me you were cooking.”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“I wanted to surprise you, too,” she said. “I made us a seven o’clock reservation at the Orangery.”

“Oh, darn — I wish I’d known,” I said. She shot me a dubious look, which I countered with an innocent smile. “That would’ve been nice, honey. But I guess you’d better call and cancel.”

“I’ll call,” she said, “but I won’t cancel; I’ll reschedule, for Saturday night. You don’t get off the hook that easily. If I can survive thirty years of Cracker Barrel vittles, one fancy French dinner won’t kill you.”

She turned and headed inside. The instant the sliding-glass door closed, Jeff and I looked at each other and burst into laughter.

Dinner was loud, rowdy, and wonderful, with three terrible puns (all of them mine), two brotherly squabbles, and one spilled drink (also mine). The ribs were a hit — smoky, succulent, and tender.

Sitting at the head of the kitchen table, I surveyed my assembled family, then, with my sauce-smeared knife, I tapped the side of my iced-tea glass. “A toast,” I said. The three adults looked at me expectantly; the two boys gaped as if I were addled.

“Toast?” said Walker. “Toast is breakfast, silly.”

“A toast,” Jenny explained, “is also a kind of blessing. Or a thank-you. Or a wish.”

Walker’s face furrowed, then broke into a smile. “I toast we get a dog!” His toast drew laughs from Kathleen and me, and nervous, noncommittal smiles from his parents.

“A toast,” I repeated. “To my lovely wife. To thirty wonderful years together.”

We clinked glasses all around. Kathleen looked into my eyes and smiled but then, to my surprise, she teared up. “To this lovely moment,” she said, her voice quavering, “and this lovely family. The family that almost wasn’t.”

Now I felt my own eyes brimming. We almost never spoke of it, but none of us — Kathleen, Jeff, Jenny, or I — would ever forget the near miss to which she was alluding. The grown-ups clinked glasses again — somberly this time — and Kathleen reached out to me with her right hand. Instead of clasping hands, though, she bent her pinky finger, hooked it around mine, and squeezed. It was our secret handshake, of sorts: our reminder of what a sweet life we had, and how close — how terribly close — we’d come to losing it, right in this very room, right at this very table, a dozen years before. I lifted her hand to my face and uncrooked her finger, tracing the scar around the base and then giving it a kiss. By now the scar was a faint, thin line — barely visible and mostly forgotten, except when something triggered memories of that nightmarish night, and that evil man: Satterfield, sadistic killer of women. Satterfield, emerging from our basement, gun in hand, to bind us — Kathleen, Jeff, me, and even Jenny, Jeff’s girlfriend at the time — to the kitchen chairs. Satterfield, putting Kathleen’s finger into the fishlike jaws of a pair of gardening shears, and closing the jaws in a swift, bloody bite.

Odd, how memories can open underfoot, in the blink of an eye, taking you down a rabbit hole of the mind to some subterranean, subconscious universe where different rules of time and space and logic hold sway. Part of me remained sitting at the table, my fingers smeared with barbecue sauce, but part of me had gone down that bloody rabbit hole.

Kathleen’s finger, which had sent me spinning there, now beckoned me back. She stroked my damp cheek and smiled again. “Will you marry me, Bill Brockton?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” I answered. “Again and again. Every day.” Half rising from my chair, I leaned over and kissed her — a grown-up kiss, on the mouth, taking my time.

“Gross,” said Tyler.

“Gross gross gross,” agreed Walker.

It was ten-thirty by the time Jeff’s family was gone, the kitchen was clean, and Kathleen and I were showered and in bed. I rolled toward her on the mattress and cupped her face in one hand. “Not as romantic as the fancy French dinner you wanted,” I said, “but tasty.”

“Says the man who thinks turkey jerky is a delicacy,” she said. “But yes, delicious. And it’s always so sweet to see Jeff and Jenny with the boys. They’re such good parents, Bill.”

“They should be. You’re a great role model.”

“You, too,” she said, then — from nowhere—“You still sad we couldn’t have more?”

“No,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true; deep down, I would always wish I’d had a daughter as well as a son. “I’m the luckiest man alive. I couldn’t be happier.” I felt the stirrings of desire, and I slid my hand down to her hip. “Well, maybe I could be a tiny bit happier.”

She smiled, but she also shook her head. Taking my hand from her hip, she brought it to her lips and gave it a consolation-prize kiss. “I need a rain check, honey. Bad time of the month.”

“Still?” She nodded glumly. “That doesn’t bother me,” I assured her. “You know I’m not squeamish.”

“I do know, and I appreciate that,” she said. “But I’m just not up to it. I’m sorry, sweetie; I’ll be off the sick list soon, and I will make it up to you. I promise.”

She crooked her little finger at me again, to make sure I knew she meant it.

“I’m sorry it’s giving you trouble,” I told her, my disappointment giving way to sympathy. “Seems like that’s gotten worse again. You need to go back to the doctor?” She’d had outpatient surgery a year or so ago, to remove a uterine fibroid — a knot of benign tissue — and her cramps and bleeding had lessened afterward. For a while.

“I think it’s just menopause, letting me know it’s headed my way,” she said. “Now turn out the light and spoon me.” She rolled over and snuggled against me. Switching off the light, I wrapped an arm tightly across her chest. Her breathing slowed and deepened, her body twitching as she sank into sleep. As my own breathing found the same cadence as hers, I made a silent wish for her — one last anniversary toast, Walker style: I toast you sleep well and feel better tomorrow.

Chapter 3

Twin shafts of light — one green, the other white — sliced the hazy night in opposite directions, like luminous blades, as the airport beacon turned with blind, unblinking constancy.

Poised at the western end of the runway was a small twin-engine jet, its airframe quivering like a living creature: like a racehorse trembling in a starting gate, its entire existence — bloodline and breeding and birth and indeed every moment prior to this one — mere preamble and prelude to the impending instant of release and freedom, of exultant headlong hurtling.

Within the indigo glow of the cockpit, the pilot, his face ghostly in the glow of gauges and screens, worked his way down the takeoff checklist, item by item: engine instruments, check; fuel, full; altimeter, set; radio frequency, 128.25; flaps, ten degrees; flight controls — rudder, ailerons, elevator — free, clear, and correct. Satisfied, he throttled back the engines. He did not hurry; he could take all the time he needed or wanted — hell, he could take a three-hour nap right here on the active runway, if he pleased, with no risk of being disturbed. The control tower had closed for the night at seven, and at the moment — a moment shortly after midnight — the dawn’s early light, and the first stirrings of human and aircraft activity, were still hours away. And by then he would be long gone.

Finished with the checklist, he tucked it into a slot in the center console and sighted down the runway, an eight-thousand-foot ribbon of black, outlined by jewel-like orange lights, which seemed to converge and merge at the far end. It was pure coincidence, but it was nonetheless an interesting and apt coincidence, that Mexico, too — specifically, the quarter of Tijuana known as Libertad, “Liberty”—lay almost exactly eight thousand feet away as well: a mile and a half due south of him; less than thirty seconds away, if he banked hard right immediately after takeoff. Not that he would, though; a half mile off, he’d be banking left: toward the northeast, and Vegas.

He folded the paper copy of the flight plan he’d phoned in an hour before—“visual flight direct to Las Vegas”—then took one last look at the sectional chart, the detailed aviation map for Southern California. The map’s green and tan landforms were splashed with yellow splotches, which denoted cities; in addition, the area above and around the yellow splotch of San Diego was overlaid with a crazed cross-hatching of blue lines — a tangle of arcs and angles, rhomboids and trapezoids and skewed chevrons, like the webwork of some deranged spider, one of those given LSD during a Cold War CIA experiment. The lines represented a 3-D maze in the sky — borders and boundaries and NO TRESPASSING zones in the air above San Diego. Surrounded by U.S. Navy and Marine Corps airfields nearby — Miramar, North Island, Imperial Beach — the city’s airspace was the most complex in the nation, exponentially more intricate than L.A.’s or New York’s. Blessedly, though, Brown Field — a sleepy municipal airport whose traffic was mostly single-engine private planes, plus a few bizjets and charter aircraft — lay just beyond the navigational nightmare; just outside the edges of the tangled web. Consequently a pilot could get in and out of Brown Field with little hassle and no red tape: no queue, no clearances, and no control-tower bureaucrats, at least not at night or on weekends.

It was time. With his right thumb he pressed a red button on the jet’s U-shaped control yoke. “Brown traffic,” he radioed to the empty night sky, “Citation Alpha Romeo One is rolling on runway eight. Departing the pattern to the northeast.” Grasping the twin throttle levers with his left hand, he pushed them all the way forward. The engines spooled up again and the plane’s racehorse tremble resumed, intensifying as the turbines reached full power, the brakes barely able to keep the craft in check. Then, easing the pressure on the brake pedals, he unleashed the shuddering beast. Forward it sprang, with gathering speed and single-minded purpose and a double-throated roar of joy.

Amos Wilson rubbed his eyes and reached for his coffee mug. The night was quiet—too damn quiet, he thought blearily; the flurry of inactivity made it hard to stay awake, let alone alert. The radar screen showed only two aircraft: a Navy F-18 inbound for Miramar, and a civilian plane twenty miles southeast, just off Brown Field and climbing fast, turning northeast. Vegas, he guessed. Some fat cat — banker? no; real estate developer — dashing up for a weekend of blackjack and hookers. It was a game Wilson played when he worked the graveyard shift alone: making up stories about who was transiting his sector; where they were headed, and why.

His mug was empty. “Dad-gum-it,” he muttered. Spinning in his chair, he snagged the handle of the coffeepot and poured himself a refill, then took a swig. Grimacing, he spat it back into the mug. The coffee had been cooking for upwards of three hours, thickening to a bitter sludge, now more suitable for fossilizing fence posts — rendering them rot resistant and bugproof — than for reinvigorating humans. Wilson took another glance at the screen, assured himself that the two aircraft posed no possible risk to each other, and hurried to the sink. It took him just thirty seconds to dump the sludge, rinse and refill the pot, pour the water into the machine, and jam a fresh filter pack into the brew basket.

When he returned to his seat, the F-18 was already on the ground at Miramar; the civilian aircraft had leveled off at twenty-seven hundred feet; oddly, though, it had changed course by ninety degrees, a right bank so steep the turn was almost square cornered. “What the hell?” said Wilson. The plane was heading southeast now, streaking toward the border like a scalded cat; in less than a minute—hell, not even, he realized — it would enter Mexican airspace, due south of Otay Mountain. Then, as Wilson stared, mesmerized and paralyzed, the icon on the radar screen began to blink, and three words appeared beside it, flashing in sync with a harsh electronic rasp: LOW ALTITUDE ALERT.

A shape as tan as the rocks, as fluid as quicksilver, flowed down the stony slope, the very embodiment of stealth and predatory focus. Below, something moved, and the creature — an adult male mountain lion, 150 pounds of cunning, sinew, and hunger — froze, its belly pressed to the rock. After a long pause, punctuated only by the sound of labored, painful breathing twenty feet away, the big cat flowed forward again, its tail twitching as it closed on its prey.

Its prey was Jesús Antonio Gonzales, a new, illegal, injured, and unsuspecting immigrant. Fleeing what he’d feared to be a Border Patrol truck jolting along the ridge in the darkness, Jesús had darted off the road and scrambled down the slope. Suddenly he’d taken a step into nothingness — one moment the mountain was solidly beneath his feet, the next moment it was gone. Tumbling off a ledge, he’d landed on his left side, hard, atop a boulder. He’d tried to regain his feet but quickly sank back against the rock, the pain in his ribs causing him to gasp and groan. He now lay twenty feet below the rim of the outcrop, and even if he hadn’t been injured, he felt sure he wouldn’t be able to climb back up the way he’d come down. He dared not risk another fall in the steep terrain — he’d barely missed cracking his head on the boulder, and if he fell again, he might not be as lucky — so he resolved to stay where he was, to wait until dawn before limping out of the mountains and into the outskirts of San Diego. There would be other, different risks in daylight — for one, he’d heard that La Migra, the immigration police, had cameras and motion detectors and dogs everywhere — but Jesús would just have to take his chances. He closed his eyes and shifted against the rock. The movement caused the ends of his splintered ribs to grate against one another, like shards of glass grinding inside him, and he grunted in pain.

Jesús could have paid a coyote, an immigrant smuggler, to bring him across — he probably should have, he realized now — but the coyote had demanded an outrageous sum: five thousand U.S. dollars, which Jesús didn’t possess, and for what? A bone-jarring ride across the desert inside the hot cylinder of an empty water truck, followed by a two-day hike to the nearest city. Cheaper and safer to find his own way, he had decided; after all, coyotes weren’t infallible, either; some, he’d heard, had been known to leave people dying in the desert — abandoned hundreds of miles from the nearest town, or even locked inside a cargo container. Besides, he consoled himself, maybe everything would still work out just fine, despite his fall and his broken ribs: maybe, by daylight, the stabbing pain in his side would ease, and Jesús would find a good path down, and San Diego would spread itself before him like a glittering kingdom — a kingdom so rich that even his namesake, Jesús Cristo, would have yielded to temptation and bowed for the sake of such glory and wealth. Sí, Jesús Antonio Gonzales told himself, San Diego será mío. He practiced it in English: Yes. San Diego will be mine.

Somewhere in the darkness, he heard the throaty hum of an aircraft engine — or was it two? — and he prayed it was not Border Patrol helicopters scouring the hills. As he listened, trying to place the source of the sound, a pebble clattered down the rocky face above him. Bouncing off a nearby boulder, the stone tapped Jesús Antonio on the arm, as if to get his attention. Puzzled, he looked up, and in the darkness above him, he saw the gleam of jewels: a pair of green-gold eyes. They glittered, brighter and brighter in the light — the light that had inexplicably appeared in midair and was now rushing toward him, its glare accompanied by a deafening roar. A cone of incandescence encircled Jesús Antonio — Jesús and the mountain lion, too, spotlighting them as neatly as if man and beast were actors on a rocky stage. And as the single-minded beast made its instinctual leap, closing the gap between its fangs and Jesús Antonio’s neck, the cone of light narrowed, narrowed, narrowed, so that at the precise instant Jesús Antonio reached up to cross himself, his trembling finger touched the very tip of the hurtling jet.

It was the briefest of touches — less than a millisecond — yet in that fleeting touch, Jesús’s fingertip wrought a miracle: Night became day; darkness was transformed into light, a burst of red and orange and yellow, with pyrotechnic sparks and spokes of purple and green and magenta shooting off in all directions; Jesús himself was transubstantiated — the injured immigrant, the indigenous mountain lion, the hurtling airplane, and the high-octane fuel, all of them — transformed from mundane matter into dazzling energy, a radiant bloom upon the blackness that engulfed the wider world beyond.

Chapter 4

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.

I was only halfway through the newsletters when I felt my ears popping from the Gulfstream’s swift descent. As I tucked the binder back in my bag, I felt the plane bank sharply. Looking out my window, I saw a rocky peak below the right wingtip, and for one brief, disorienting moment — perhaps because of my immersion in accounts of cataclysms — I had the startling impression that we were circling an active volcano, one that had just erupted and sent a plume of smoke roiling skyward. Not until I saw the emergency vehicles clustered along the ridgeline of the peak did my brain register the fact that I was looking down on a plane crash — the crash I had just flown across the country to work. From the television footage I’d seen, I’d expected the entire mountainside to be ablaze, but luckily — or thanks to the trucks spraying water around the margins of the site — the fire had been confined to a narrow section of slope, at the blackened center of which now smoldered a tangle of wreckage. A line from a James Taylor song popped into my head: Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.

Soon I would sift through those smoldering pieces, seeking the shattered remains of a man whose dreams I had long supported — and whose actions I had deeply admired.

Chapter 5

The Gulfstream straightened and leveled off, leaving the crash scene behind. A minute later we streaked low over the coastline, then made a U-turn back toward the east, back toward Brown Field, the airport from which Janus had taken off just nine hours before. A thousand feet below us, the Pacific glittered in the morning sun like polished pewter. When the waves reached shore — a pristine stretch of sand and grass — they curled into a white line of surf, broken only, at a single point, by a high, blank wall, dividing one featureless stretch of sand from another, splitting wave after wave of the ceaseless surf. I was puzzled for a moment, then I realized that the wall must be the border fence separating the United States from Mexico.

A few hundred yards inland, on the Tijuana side of the fence, I noticed a large, circular structure, like a high-sided bowl — it appeared to be a stadium of some sort, but it was proportioned more like Rome’s Colosseum than Knoxville’s Neyland Stadium. Encircled by the steep grandstands was a small patch of bare, brown dirt, barely a hundred feet across. “Hey, Mac,” I called across the aisle to McCready, “what’s this stadium-looking thing? Looks way too small for soccer, and I know that’s not a football field.”

“That would be the Plaza de Toros,” he said, without even looking. “The ‘Bullring by the Sea.’ Holds twenty thousand people. If it’s a big festival, every seat will be filled, and more people hanging over the railings. We should go, once we finish working this crash scene.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I’d have the stomach for it. I’m no animal-rights crusader, but a bullfight seems just plain cruel.”

“Nothing plain about it,” he said. “Very elaborate. But cruel? Define ‘cruel.’ You eat beef?” I nodded, knowing he was leading me into a trap. “Beef cattle get castrated,” he said, “force-fed growth hormones, crammed into feedlots and trucks, and then carried by conveyor belts into the slaughterhouse to have their brains knocked out. Me, I’d rather hang on to my cojones, service some heifers, and go out with a splash — maybe even take a matador down with me, just to even the scales. Sure, it’s a raw deal. But bulls make lousy house pets, Doc. And none of us gets out alive, remember.”

Just then I heard a click in the overhead speaker, followed by the pilot’s drawl. “Guys, we’re on final. Touchdown in about thirty seconds.”

I checked my watch. I had kissed Kathleen good-bye in my kitchen in Knoxville, two thousand miles to the east, at 7:30 A.M.. It was now 8:55. The Gulfstream wasn’t quite as swift as the transporter beam on Star Trek, but it would do in a pinch. It would definitely do.

We were on the ground at Brown Field for less than ten minutes — just long enough for the group to make a pit stop and then cross the tarmac to our next vehicle, a helicopter labeled SAN DIEGO COUNTY SHERIFF. It was parked near a twin-engined cargo plane — a battered DC-3 that had seen not just better days, but better decades, and a fair number of better decades, at that. Faded paint along the side of the fuselage read AIRLIFT RELIEF INTERNATIONAL, and I recognized it as the same plane I’d seen in many of the newsletters I’d read on the flight from Knoxville. Crime-scene tape was stretched between stanchions placed around the plane’s perimeter, creating the odd impression that the aircraft was an exhibit in some bizarre history museum devoted to aviation outlaws. The same tape was stretched across the front of a large metal hangar, which was considerably newer and less battered than the DC-3. The hangar, too, bore the organization’s name.

The helicopter that awaited us, its turbine whining and its rotor spinning, was painted white, with blue lettering, but the paint did little to camouflage the craft’s military lineage: It was clearly a plainclothes version of the Huey, the U.S. Army’s helicopter workhorse during the Vietnam War. Nearing the whirling rotor, I ducked into a crouch — probably unnecessary; as far as I knew, no one had ever been decapitated because of good posture — but why take chances? Kimball and Boatman stashed their equipment and our bags in the back of the cabin, then clambered into the middle seats, leaving the seats directly behind the pilot to McCready and me. As we settled in, the pilot — a leathery deputy in aviator sunglasses — tapped his ear, then pointed to a pair of headsets hanging beside us. We nodded and tugged them on, their rubber seals shushing the urgent whine of the turbine and the jackhammer thud of the rotor. “Welcome, gentlemen,” he said. “Strap in and we’ll hop on up there.”

The FBI’s jet had been equipped with simple lap belts, like a commercial jetliner — as if a lap belt would have done any good if we’d hit the ground at almost the speed of sound. The sheriff’s helicopter, on the other hand, was equipped with five-point, military-style harnesses. As I struggled with the fittings, McCready leaned over to help, tugging the straps so tight I could scarcely move. The instant I was clipped in we took off — an upward leap and a forward tilt so swift that I decided the pilot, like the aircraft, probably had some links to Vietnam service. Two minutes later we reached Otay Mountain, which lay only a few miles beyond the end of the runway. “There it is, gents,” said the pilot. “Want to look it over before we land?”

“If it doesn’t cost extra,” McCready answered.

Without another word, the pilot put the helicopter into a bank so steep the rotor blades were almost vertical; if not for the centrifugal force, and the harnesses holding us in our seats, we might have tumbled down against the cabin door. For the second time in a quarter hour, I found myself circling the column of black smoke. This time, though, I was much lower and closer, and the helicopter bucked in the vortex of turbulence generated by the fire, the wind, and the rocky terrain.

Just as I was getting used to the steep bank, the helicopter plunged downward, dropping into a hover below the ridgeline, crabbing sideways, closer and closer to the mountainside. Looking out the right-side windows, I found myself at eye level with the wreckage of Richard Janus’s jet — a mess of mangled metal that appeared to have been run through a junkyard shredder, doused with gasoline, and then set ablaze. “Damn,” came McCready’s voice through the headset. “That’s what I call a crash.”

“Nobody walked away from that one,” agreed the pilot. “I don’t get it. Richard was a damn good pilot.”

“Friend of yours?”

“I knew him. Flew with him a few times. He was too good a pilot to just auger in like that. Unless something went bad wrong. Or unless he did it on purpose.”

“Why would he do it on purpose?” asked McCready, his voice neutral.

“No clue. Beautiful wife, high-minded work, plenty of adventure. The perfect life, seems like. I guess you just never know.”

I didn’t join the conversation; I was too busy wondering how the hell I’d recover a victim — or even identifiable parts — from the devastation that lay just beyond my window. Almost as if he’d read my mind, the pilot added, “I don’t reckon you guys’ll be needing a body bag. Couple sandwich bags, more like it.”

Years before, I’d helped recover and identify remains from the wreckage of an air force transport that had hit a cloud-shrouded ridge in the Great Smoky Mountains at high speed. The debris from that crash had been strewn for half a mile, and — on the basis of that experience — I’d expected a similar debris field here. Instead, everything seemed to be contained within a narrow wedge of valley, which sloped away to the north. The valley stretched for miles, but the debris seemed confined to its final, highest hundred yards or so. Judging by the tightness of the wreckage, the center of impact appeared to be the base of the bluff that formed the valley’s upper terminus — a bluff that rose all the way to the mountain’s ridgeline, where a long line of emergency vehicles was perched. Fire trucks at either end of the line sprayed feathery plumes of water onto the evergreen trees at the margins of the smoldering debris field.

As I studied the destruction, I heard and felt a boom as the mountainside erupted. Chunks of metal and rock hurtled against the shuddering helicopter, and with a crack like a rifle shot, my window shattered into thousands of shards, held together only by a thin film of plastic embedded in the glass. With a yank on the control stick, the pilot spun us away from the mountainside. “Dam-nation,” he yelled. “Thought for a minute I was back in ’Nam. Oxygen cylinder blew, I guess. Sorry. Anybody hurt?”

“I’m all right,” I said. “Nothing a quick shower and a clean pair of pants won’t fix.”

McCready glanced back at Kimball and Boatman, who gave him thumbs-up signals. “We’re all fine,” he told the pilot. His words sounded calm, but I noticed that his voice was pitched half an octave higher than normal.

The pilot lofted us above the ridge and then eased down toward a flat, rectangular surface — a concrete pad, I saw as we descended, its surface weather-beaten and cracking, a cluster of battered meteorological instruments huddled at one corner. He landed the big machine softly — tenderly, almost — as if to make up for his earlier recklessness and our near-death experience.

I heard the inner echo of Kathleen’s recent words—carpe diem—and also heard myself adding a silent “thank you.” But for what, and to whom? To the helicopter pilot, for not quite killing us just now? To Kathleen, for being a loving wife and loyal friend for thirty years? To God, for blessing me — far beyond all deserving — with a fine family, good health, and work that I loved doing?

Maybe all of them, I realized as the turbine spooled down. All of those, and more besides. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Chapter 6

The rotor was still spinning as a man approached the helicopter with a limp in his stride, a scowl on his face, and a pair of outstretched arms that silently shouted the question “What the hell?!?” Tight on his head was a navy blue baseball cap, monogrammed NTSB in large letters. He made a beeline for the cockpit door, but the pilot pointed a thumb over his shoulder, indicating that McCready was the one he should talk to. A moment later the cabin door was yanked open. “Who are you,” shouted the man in the cap, “and what the hell did you think you were doing, besides jeopardizing my crash scene?”

“Actually, it’s my crash scene now,” McCready said, flashing his badge. “Supervisory Special Agent Clint McCready. Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“FBI?” The man in the cap glowered, but he dialed back the anger a few clicks. “What brings the Bureau up here?”

“We’re… investigating,” McCready said drily. “We’ll be working this as a crime scene. I’ve got an identification expert and a mapping team with me, and an eight-man Evidence Response Team is headed up the mountain now from our local field office.” McCready clambered out of the cabin and extended a hand. “We appreciate your help, Mr.…?” The final sentence was more than just a way of asking who the pissed-off guy in the cap was; it was also McCready’s efficient way of putting the guy in his place, of showing him whose jurisdictional penis was larger. McCready’s smile, as he waited for an answer, was polite but tight, underscoring the message that the Bureau was running the show now.

“Maddox,” said the man in the NTSB cap. “Patrick Maddox, National Transportation Safety Board.” He unfolded his arms and shook McCready’s hand with understandable coolness. In less than thirty seconds, Maddox had been demoted from head honcho to hired help. Henceforth, he was a consultant who might provide useful insights, but his investigative procedures and priorities now carried far less weight than they had before our arrival.

Wriggling out of my harness, I lurched out of the cabin with my bag. Kimball and Boatman were close on my heels, nimble despite their load of gear and baggage.

As the rotor spun up again, Maddox surveyed the lot of us, then shrugged. “It’s all yours,” he shouted. “Knock yourself out.” The helicopter lifted off and spun away, wheeling westward and dropping down toward Brown Field. Maddox watched it, then turned to McCready again. “By the way,” he added, as the rotor’s noise faded in the distance, “do you realize that you guys nearly made history?”

“How’s that?” asked McCready.

“First crash ever witnessed — in person, in real time — by an NTSB investigator. You’d’ve been famous at the Safety Board. Legends, all of you.”

I had to admit, he had a point — and maybe a sense of humor, too. “No offense,” I chimed in, “but I’d much rather be a living legend.”

McCready and Maddox both smiled, and I hoped I’d helped ease the tension.

McCready pointed at me. “Mr. Maddox, this—”

“Call me Pat,” said Maddox.

“Okay, Pat. Call me Special Supervisory Agent McCready.” Maddox stiffened again, but then McCready laughed. “I’m kidding, Pat. Call me Mac. Sorry to get in your business here.” He gestured at the two young agents. “Pat, meet Agents Kimball and Boatman. They’ll use a Total Station to map the site.” He indicated me. “And this is Dr. Bill Brockton, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Tennessee. Doc here specializes in human identification and skeletal trauma.”

Maddox shook my hand, nodding in the direction of the crash. “Plenty of trauma here, but probably not much human left to identify.” He furrowed his brow at me. “Remind me? How many bones in the human body?”

“Two hundred and six, in adults.”

“Uh-huh. Ever work one of those thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles?”

I shook my head. “Never had the patience.”

“Well, better start cultivating some,” he said. “Just a guess — but it’s a fairly educated guess — you’ve got one hell of a puzzle waiting down there, and the pieces are gonna be damned tiny.”

“You mean ‘we,’ don’t you? We’ve got a puzzle. You’ll be down there with us, right?”

He shook his head. “I wish. Can’t.” He hoisted up the left leg of his pants to reveal a contraption of straps, buckles, and hinges that resembled a medieval implement of torture. “Knee surgery three weeks ago. I’m not supposed to be walking on anything rougher than wall-to-wall carpet. My orthopedist went ballistic when I asked what to do if I had to climb around on a mountainside. ‘Schedule a knee replacement,’ he said.”

“Knee surgery’s tricky stuff,” I said. “Your doctor’s right to be cautious.”

Maddox sighed. “I hate being on the sidelines, though.”

“Not to worry, Pat,” said McCready, clapping me on the shoulder. “If anybody can put the pieces together, it’s this man right here. The best there is.” Then he frowned. “I have a question, though. That little kaboom a minute ago — what the hell was that? It rang our chimes pretty good.”

“I’ve seen planes brought down by less,” said Maddox. “A lot less.”

“Hovering beside a burning aircraft.” McCready looked rueful. “Kinda dumb, I guess.”

“You said it.”

“So what was it?” persisted McCready.

Maddox shrugged. “Won’t know till we start combing through the debris. Just guessing, though, I’d say an overheated oxygen cylinder.”

“That’s what the helicopter pilot said, too.” McCready looked puzzled. “But the fire’s about out. Why would it blow now, not earlier?”

“Well…” The crash expert glanced away, then met McCready’s gaze. “Frankly?” McCready gave a yes-please nod. “Probably the buffet from your rotor wash,” Maddox said, “stirring things around. Maybe knocked the cylinder against something sharp — a metal rod, or a shard of rock — and it popped. Like a balloon.”

McCready grimaced. “So it was my own damn fault?” I looked at him, surprised; it had been the pilot, not the FBI agent, who had dropped down beside the wreckage. McCready was choosing to let the buck stop with him, though, and I admired that. Maddox gave a half nod, half shrug, which I also admired: He was confirming what McCready said, but without rubbing his nose in it, as he could’ve. McCready shook his head. “Hate that,” he said. “I put my people at risk, and I altered the scene, too. If anybody should know better, it’s me, Mr. Save-the-Evidence. Sorry about that.”

“Well, look on the bright side,” Maddox said. “If it hadn’t blown now, it might’ve blown later, with your guys right there beside it. Somebody’s boot bumps it, the thing tips over, hits a sharp edge, and kaboom. Could’ve taken off a foot, maybe blinded somebody. So you probably did us all a big favor.” He paused. “Hell, now that I think about it, maybe you oughta call that chopper back to stir things around some more; set off anything else that’s about to blow.” He smiled, making sure we knew it was a joke, not a jab. McCready smiled back. Olive branches had been accepted all around, it seemed.

McCready shifted gears and got down to business. “Seriously, how soon you think it’s safe to get down there and start working it? We got more oxygen cylinders down there? What about other hazards?”

Maddox shrugged. “Well, the fuel’s just about burned off. Hydraulic fluid — for the brake lines and the flight-control systems — that’s combustible but not explosive, and it’s probably burned off by now, too. I doubt that there’s another oxygen cylinder — one’s the standard on a Citation, but some have two. I’ve got somebody tracking down the maintenance guys, back at the hangar, so we’ll know for sure.”

“I haven’t had a chance to read up on the Citation,” McCready said — another surprise to me, since I’d noticed him unfolding a big cutaway diagram of the jet during our cross-country flight. “It’s a twin-engine bizjet? Like a Gulfstream or a Learjet?” Was he doing more fence mending — giving Maddox a chance to demonstrate his knowledge? — or was he testing to see how much the man knew?

Maddox gave a half smile. “Sort of like a Learjet. The first version of the Citation was a little sluggish; some pilots called it a ‘Nearjet.’ Newer ones are faster, though still not as fast as that Gulfstream horse you guys rode in on — that was you that circled on your way in, right?” McCready nodded, and Maddox rattled on. “But the Citation’s a good design. Solid. Simple, relatively speaking — it’s the only jet approved for single-pilot operation. Sensible, for a multimillion-dollar minivan. It—”

McCready broke in. “Excuse me? Did you just say ‘minivan’?”

Maddox nodded. “It’s the Dodge Caravan of bizjets. Not too fast, not too fancy, but functional and roomy, and plenty good enough, you know?”

“So much for the magic of flight,” said McCready.

“Hey, I’m all about the magic of flight,” Maddox answered. “It is magic. But tell me: What’s Europe’s biggest aircraft maker called? Airbus, that’s what. Air. Bus. I rest my case.”

A cell phone at McCready’s belt shrilled; he flipped it open, turning his back to Maddox and me. “McCready,” I heard him say. “Go ahead.” He listened a moment, then said, “Got it; we won’t start the party without you. Thanks.” Snapping the phone shut, he turned to us again. “That was Miles Prescott, from the San Diego field office. He’s the lead agent on this case. He’s on his way up — almost here, he says — and he’s bringing the cavalry with him.”

McCready pointed down at a jeep road, and sure enough, a quarter mile below, I saw a minicaravan snaking up the ridge. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” muttered Maddox.

The lead vehicle, a black Chevrolet Suburban — its windows tinted nearly as dark as its paint — sped past the line of emergency vehicles and pulled onto the concrete pad. It was followed by the familiar, boxy shape of an evidence-recovery truck. Lumbering up behind them was a massive vehicle labeled MOBILE COMMAND CENTER. It looked like the offspring of a Winnebago that had somehow managed to mate with a fire truck.

The doors on all three vehicles opened simultaneously, almost as if the move were choreographed, and a dozen FBI agents emerged, one wearing a suit and spit-shined shoes, the others decked out in cargo pants, boots, and T-shirts. One of these things is not like the others, I thought. It was an absurd echo from my son’s Sesame Street days, twenty years or more ago, and yet it fit. And maybe, I realized, what was silly was not the song, but the wearing of a three-piece suit on a rocky mountaintop in the wilderness.

A round of introductions ensued — a litany of names I promptly forgot, except for that of Prescott, the Suit — and when it was done, Prescott turned to McCready. “So we good to go?”

McCready frowned and shook his head slightly. “I don’t think we can start working it quite yet,” he said.

“I agree,” said Maddox, taking the opportunity to step forward and reclaim a seat at the figurative table. “The fire’s mostly out, but that wreckage is gonna be hot as hell for a while yet. An oxygen cylinder exploded half an hour ago. Why put your men at risk?” He didn’t mention the helicopter’s role in triggering the explosion, and McCready didn’t either, so I kept quiet about it, too.

Prescott looked impatient, and at me. “Dr. Brockton? What’s your take on this, forensically speaking?”

“Forensically speaking,” I said, “this reminds me of something a Tennessee sheriff said to me at a death scene years ago, on a mountainside in the middle of the night.” The other FBI agents and the crash investigator edged closer so they could hear better. “We were discussing whether to start working the scene right then, or to wait until daylight. The sheriff mulled it over and then said, ‘Well, Doc, I reckon he ain’t gonna get any deader by morning.’” Maddox grinned; Prescott gave a tight smile; McCready kept his expression as neutral as Switzerland. “I reckon Richard Janus won’t get any deader if we let things cool down for an hour or so while we figure out the best way to work this thing.”

What I didn’t say, but couldn’t help thinking, was that in an I.D. case with a celebrity victim, every minute we delayed would cost us, too. The throng of reporters — and therefore the authorities whom the reporters would be badgering for updates — would want us to hurry, to push, to make up for lost time. Looming even larger in my mind was another person who would surely be waiting impatiently, perhaps even desperately: Mrs. Richard Janus.

Chapter 7

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.”

Chapter 8

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.”

“Cool,” I said. “And that’s accurate to within, what — a few feet? a few inches?”

“More like a millimeter — less than a tenth of an inch.”

“Amazing.”

From across the way, Kimball called to Boatman. “Yo, pard, you ’bout ready to rock and roll?”

“Ready. Gimme that broken branch right over your head, would you? The one with the big rattlesnake on it?”

“Ha ha,” Kimball said drily, but all the same, I saw him sneak a glance at the branch before raising the prism.

Boatman punched the “save” button, then scrolled down and clicked on a caption. Tree strike, I read over his shoulder. “Got it,” he called. “You want to work that whole side first? Come back up to the base of the bluff, then go across and down the far side?”

“Work the edges first, then go in? Makes sense,” said Kimball. “Gonna be some backing and forthing, though, any way we do it.”

“Not for me,” chuckled Boatman.

“Your job does seem a bit cushier,” I remarked. “All you have to do is swivel that thing around and push some buttons.”

At the moment, I would have killed for a button-pushing job — for any job that would have helped me feel productive. As it was, I felt like a fifth wheel; the young agents treated me with politeness, respect, and possibly a bit of misplaced awe, but clearly this was the FBI’s show, and I was an outsider, waiting for my cue. And I hated waiting.

“Hey, Boat-Man,” came Kimball’s voice from across the way, as if to confirm my glum thoughts. “Less talk, more action. There’s a wingtip here.”

“Got it,” called Boatman, and with that, the pair settled into a smooth routine, Kimball scampering around the edges of the debris field, pausing just long enough to hold the prism and call out a description of the object he was marking. He didn’t mark everything — that would’ve taken forever; instead, he sought out large, recognizable components (“engine cowling”; “turbine blades”; “wheel and strut”) and concentrations of debris (“structural members”; “aluminum skin”; “hydraulic lines”).

After an hour — an hour in which the temperature climbed from eighty degrees to an unseasonably hot ninetysomething — they’d mapped the crash scene’s entire perimeter. Kimball rejoined Boatman and me on the ledge long enough to chug a bottle of water and scarf down a nut bar. “Okay,” he said, looking at the central pile of wreckage. “You ready?”

Boatman nodded. “I’m always ready.”

“Wasn’t asking you, Mr. Button-Pusher,” scoffed Kimball. “I was asking Doc, the one who’s got some real work ahead.” He looked at me. “You ready to get dirty?”

“That’s what I’m here for,” I said.

“Okay, I’ll talk to the man upstairs.” He tapped a shoulder-mounted radio mike. “Hey, Mac, it’s Kimbo. We’ve got the first layer mapped. Doc says he’s ready to dig in. You want to send down the other guys, so we can start moving some metal?” He listened, nodded, and gave me a thumbs-up. I took a deep breath and blew it out, relieved that the standing and waiting was over, glad to be getting into the game.

Kimball and I started back toward the blasted base of the bluff. As we neared it, a shadow flowed across the ground toward us, then enveloped us, eclipsing the sun. I looked up to see a large rectangular silhouette, rotating slowly beneath the outstretched boom of the crane. As I watched, the rectangle grew larger, and larger still, descending toward us: a wooden platform, suspended from the steel cable. It was framed of stout lumber; it was decked with heavy-duty plywood; and it was laden with six FBI evidence-recovery specialists. As it came down, I stepped to one side to avoid being crushed.

Our system for retrieving and removing wreckage was simple — primitive, even — but it made sense, given the challenging terrain. Four of the evidence techs were assigned to work directly with me, combing the central debris field for human remains and other potential evidence. Kimball and Boatman would float: using the Total Station to map significant or unusual finds, but also photographing and logging our progress. The other two would fan out across the crash site to scan for evidence of explosive devices, retrieve scattered wreckage, and load it onto the platform. The platform had a foot-high plywood rim all the way around it, to keep pieces of debris from falling off. In addition, at its center was a sort of corral or fence, sized to hold a five-gallon plastic bucket securely in place. The bucket would be the repository for whatever pieces of bone and soft tissue we could find and bag, as well as any small objects the agents considered forensically significant. As soon as either the rack or the bucket was filled, the crane would haul up the load. Topside, Maddox and two other FBI evidence techs would transfer the aircraft wreckage to a pair of shipping containers that had arrived shortly after the crane: one container for large chunks, the other — in which shelves had been hastily installed — for the countless small pieces. Whatever human material we found, on the other hand, would be taken from the bucket and stored in coolers in the command center, for transport to the San Diego County medical examiner at the end of each day. The FBI might trump the locals when it came to crime-scene investigation, but it was the M.E., not the Bureau, who had the authority to issue death certificates.

Apart from the crane and the high-tech nature of the artifacts we were collecting, our system reminded me of my early summers in field archaeology: field digs where local workers had hauled dirt in buckets, and graduate students had placed potsherds in baskets. Like most physical anthropologists, I had paid my grad-school dues in the trenches of archaeology, excavating sites that were hundreds or thousands of years old, unearthing the past year by year, century by century, burrowing deeper and deeper into the basement of time. In every dig, the topmost layer is “now”; the deeper you dig, the farther back in time you travel, inch by inch, foot by foot — and sometimes skull by skull.

Excavating the Janus crash would likewise mean traveling back, but through a far, far thinner slice of time. The surface layer of debris—“now”—was the tail, the final part of the plane to hit, and the deeper we dug, the earlier in the crash event we’d be. But the interval we would cover, from end to beginning — from the uppermost scrap of tail debris down to the lowermost layer of nose cone — would span only a single second. Not even, I realized. A fraction of a second. I did some rough, quick calculations in my head. Four hundred miles an hour was… upwards of five hundred feet a second, if my math was right. Maddox had told us the Citation was about fifty feet long. That meant the entire plane, nose to tail, had crumpled in less than one-tenth of a second. I blinked. The blink of an eye, I realized. That’s how quick it can all come crashing down.

All these things ran through my mind as I approached the main debris field. Its center appeared to be a spot near the base of the cliff — a wide, shallow crater now — where the nose of the jet must have first hit, followed — a hundredth or a thousandth of a second later — by the nose of the pilot himself.

Shards of twisted metal and tangled wires radiated outward from the ground beneath the crater. Mixed and mingled throughout, I assumed, were cinders of flesh and bits of burnt bone. The only way to find them would be bit by bit, piece by piece — removing the metal, shaking and perhaps even scraping the scraps, scouring everything for bone shards and teeth.

McCready had assigned two of the ERT techs to work the perimeter of the debris field, gathering scattered wreckage to load onto the rack and hoist up at intervals. Four more — plus Boatman and Kimball, when they weren’t mapping things with the Total Station — would help me dissect the heart of the debris, in search of human remains. Before we began, I reiterated what I’d said earlier, up top, in my minilecture on osteology. “We won’t find much that’s recognizable,” I reminded them. “Look for bone shards and tissue, but teeth are the big prize. The soft tissue — even the bones — might be too burned for DNA testing. But teeth are tough. Our best shot at a DNA profile is inside the teeth — the molars, especially. But even if we can’t get DNA out of the teeth, we can still make an identification, if we can find fillings or bridgework or something that matches our guy’s dental records.” They nodded and fanned out, and in near-perfect synchrony — as if we’d all been transported to a church service in the smoldering shell of a ruined cathedral — we dropped to our knees.

Four hours later, we were still on our knees, but my prayers of finding Richard Janus had gone unanswered. Over the course of the afternoon, our plywood platform had been filled, hoisted, emptied, and lowered time and again. The two wider-ranging agents had also sent up load after load of bigger pieces on their rack — turbine blades; wheels; sections of wing and tail — and my four assistants and I had contributed plenty of smaller pieces as we’d picked our way into the central pile of debris. But the five-gallon bucket designated for human material remained empty — stubbornly, frustratingly, accusingly empty — and I’d begun to feel less like an anthropologist than like a miner, or a trash picker in a scrapyard. Kathleen and I had recently watched a documentary about poverty-stricken Brazilians who lived beside an immense landfill in Rio de Janeiro, and the people — men, women, even children — spent ten hours a day, every day, picking through load after load of garbage dumped at the landfill — some seeking plastic bottles, others seeking circuit boards, still others in search of scraps of wire: lifetimes of drudgery, dredging through the detritus of modern materialism. Not long before — less than twenty-four hours before, in fact — these bits of smoldering scrap had been a multimillion-dollar jet aircraft. But in one catastrophic instant the Citation had been reduced to trash, and we had been reduced to trash pickers.

Hour by tedious hour, the shadows grew long, and the mountainside began to cool. When the freshly emptied rack descended once more, demanding to be filled again — for the fifteenth time, or the fiftieth? — McCready leaned over the rim and called down to us. “Hey, guys. Six o’clock. Quittin’ time. Come on up.” He didn’t have to tell us twice. Hours before, I had rappelled down, but now that we had an elevator, I would ride up. The ERT techs and I clambered aboard the swaying platform. They sat around the perimeter, legs dangling into space; I stood at the center, straddling the still-empty bucket, and braced myself by holding the cables bolted to the platform’s four corners.

Overhead, the crane rumbled and whined, and with a slight lurch we began rising up the rock face. After we cleared the rim, the crane’s boom pivoted and began easing us down toward the concrete pad — my third landing of the day, I realized, this one a bit more primitive than the prior ones in the Gulfstream and the helicopter. As we hovered briefly, McCready threw us a mock salute, then called out, “You guys look like that painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware.” Glancing around, I saw the visual resemblance — the aging general, my stance wide, surrounded by a boatload of loyal troops. But Washington’s boat had been carrying the Stars and Stripes, while all we had was a plastic bucket. As the platform settled, the cables I was holding went slack, and I staggered forward; only the quick reflexes of the closest agents kept me from falling. “More like Brockton going overboard,” I said, but the joke came out sounding bitter, and it fell as flat as I had nearly done. As I disentangled myself from agents and cables, I said what was really on my mind. “So what if there was nobody in the plane?” Everyone turned, eyeing me intently. “We haven’t found any remains so far. Is it possible he jumped? Maybe he was having engine trouble and bailed out?”

Maddox spoke before McCready or Prescott had a chance. “Jump?” he said. “From a Citation? At four hundred miles an hour?” He gave an amused, dismissive grunt. “First off, you can’t do it,” he said. “The cabin door pivots forward to open; can’t be done in flight — too much air pressure. Second, even if you could do it, which you can’t, it’d be guaranteed suicide to bail out — you’d hit the left engine about a millisecond after you did. Easier to stay on the ground and just blow your brains out. Third, he didn’t do it — that cabin door was sealed tight as a drum.”

“You sure about that?” asked McCready. Prescott was listening closely.

“Here, I’ll show you.” Maddox crooked a finger, beckoning, and led us across the cracked concrete pad to one of the shipping containers, which by now was half filled with mangled metal. Tugging at a wadded-up chunk that was leaning against one wall, he laid it flat and dragged it toward the container’s opening, where the light was better. “This came up a couple hours ago,” he said. “It’s the cabin door. Some of it, anyhow.” He pointed to a crumpled lever. “This is the latch. Banged up and burned, but you can still tell that it was in the ‘closed’ position. Also”—he pointed to one edge of the door, which was fringed with torn metal—“here’s a piece of the door frame, which got ripped apart by the impact. See these bolts?” He tapped two metal rods, which — despite their thickness — were bent, their ends crowned with jagged aluminum. “When the door latches, a dozen of those bolts — spaced around the rim of the door — slide out and lock into the frame.”

“Like the door of a bank vault?”

He nodded. “Or a watertight door on a ship. The whole hull is pressurized, so the latches and seals have to be really robust.” I could feel myself starting to recalibrate — to get interested in the puzzle pieces again — when he added, “Look, he’s gotta be in there. You’ll find him. You just gotta keep digging.”

He was right — in my heart of hearts, I knew he was right — but I was tired, and my back hurt, and his confidence and encouragement seemed slightly condescending, so my frustration returned, this time as annoyance. Prescott didn’t help my mood any when he said, “Maybe you’re looking too close, you know what I mean?”

I turned and stared at him. “No,” I said. “I have no idea what you mean.”

If he sensed my anger, he didn’t let on. “You know how, if you look at a photograph through a microscope, you might not be able to recognize the picture?”

I stared at him. “So you think maybe we’ve all been stumbling over a body down there, but nobody’s noticed it, because we’re too close to see the shape of the arms and legs and head?”

“No, I don’t mean that,” he hedged. “I’m just wondering if you might get a better feel for the bigger picture — for how things are… arranged—if you take a step back, get into a groove, and get some momentum going.”

“Three years ago — after 9/11—I spent ten days sifting through rubble from the World Trade Center,” I told him. “In those ten days, I saw four intact long bones. Four.” I held up my right hand, fingers splayed, for digital emphasis. “I didn’t see a single complete skull. Mostly what I saw were shreds and splinters. Even the teeth were in bits and pieces. I could be wrong — Pat, please correct me if I am — but I’m guessing this crash is like a scaled-down version of that rubble. Yes? No?”

Maddox hesitated, looking reluctant to choose sides. “Well, I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. But a straight-on impact at that velocity?” He considered it only for a moment. “The pilot probably fragments from the initial impact. Then the rest of the plane slams into him like a pile driver. Then comes the fire.” He shrugged at Prescott in what seemed a sort of apology. “This reminds me of some military crashes I’ve seen. Fighter jets. Sometimes all they leave is a smokin’ hole.” He gave us all a conciliatory smile. “But hey, tomorrow’s another day, right? A juicy steak and a good night’s sleep, and we’ll be raring to go again.”

I couldn’t help wondering: Which “we”? The “we” in the air-conditioned command center, or the “we” doubled over like field hands? Still, I appreciated his sticking up for me, and I suspected I’d enjoy trading stories with him over dinner. “You eating with us, Pat?”

He shook his head. “Nah, I hear you guys are staying in Otay Mesa. Close to Brown Field. I’m booked somewhere in San Diego. Pain in the ass to get there, but hey, a good soldier goes where he’s sent.” He flashed us a peace sign and turned to go, leaving me with the FBI agents.

Chapter 9

Jouncing down from the crash site, back toward town, I was so grateful to be riding shotgun that I mostly forgave Prescott for criticizing our work pace. He was at the wheel of the vehicle, with McCready, Kimball, and Boatman in the back — a place where I’d have gotten carsick within minutes. Our Suburban, followed closely by the other one, was bucking and lurching down Otay Mountain Truck Trail — a rough-hewn route whose chief virtue, as best I could tell, was the honesty of the label TRUCK TRAIL. Between bumps, I marveled anew at the fleet of assorted vehicles that had managed to make the climb — especially the crane and the mobile command center — and I made a mental note to express my admiration to their drivers. As if to make sure I didn’t forget, the Suburban tilted suddenly to the right, then abruptly to the left, whapping my head against the window. I thought longingly of the swift, smooth hop the helicopter had made from the airfield to the summit: two minutes; three, tops. Yesterday’s travel was a lot cushier than today’s, I thought. Suddenly, astonished, I realized: No — that was today, too. I was eating breakfast in my kitchen in Knoxville this morning.

As we descended, the kinked switchbacks relaxed, opening up into looser, looping curves, and the primitive truck trail evolved into an actual gravel road. By the time we came off the mountain’s flank and into the valley floor, we had picked up enough speed to churn up a dense, dun-colored plume, and I was glad to be in the lead vehicle rather than any of the trailing ones, which had vanished inside the dust storm we were creating.

Shortly after turning onto a wide paved road, we passed a side road marked by a large sign. The sign, made of wooden boards framed by rough-hewn rock, read DONOVAN STATE PRISON. I was just about to ask Prescott about it when his cell phone rang. He frowned at the display but took the call. “No,” he said tersely, “not right now.” Then: “All right.… I said all right.… Fine. See you then.” He closed the phone with an angry snap.

“Trouble?”

He made a face of minor distaste, or perhaps disdain. “Just a friendly little jurisdictional discussion. Otherwise known as a pissing contest.”

“With the sheriff’s office?”

He shook his head. “I wish. It’s easy to outpiss the locals. Nah, this is with some of our federal brethren.” He glanced at me, saw the question on my face. “Nothing serious,” he said. “Case like this gets lots of media attention, so everybody wants to share the glory. ’Course, if things go south — if something goes wrong — those same glory hounds’ll run for cover. Pausing only long enough to throw us under the bus.” He looked into the rearview mirror and gave his backseat colleagues a slight, ironic smile. “Not that we would ever do that, if the tables got turned. Right, fellas?” Kimball and Boatman and McCready, jammed in the backseat, swiftly agreed that no, they would never run for cover or throw anyone under the bus.

“Bus? What bus? I see no bus,” said Kimball, his tone all mock innocence. “Pay no attention to that large, fast-moving vehicle!” The agents laughed the laugh of the righteous and confident, and I assured myself that I didn’t need to worry, as long as I looked both ways before crossing streets.

“Home sweet home,” Prescott announced, pointing through the windshield. Looking down in the direction of his point — we were on an overpass, crossing a six-lane freeway — I spotted a Quality Inn. Drab, aging, and ironically named, it huddled in the corner formed by the freeway and the overpass. Only the four out-of-towners were staying here; Prescott and the local evidence techs had the luxury of sleeping in their own beds, and Maddox, the NTSB investigator, was staying somewhere downtown. He’d made it sound like he was disappointed not to be staying with us, but now that I saw our lodgings, I suspected he wasn’t all that torn up about it. Too bad, I thought again, wishing I’d had the chance to swap stories with him. I’d always been fascinated by planes, and flight; I’d even taken a few flying lessons years before, but I’d failed the medical exam because of my Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear disorder that occasionally laid me low, sometimes for days on end, with bed-spinning vertigo and racking nausea.

“Doc?” Prescott had stopped the Suburban at the motel’s entrance. He was looking at me, waiting.

“Sorry; what’d you say?”

“You ready to eat? These guys are starving. There’s a Carl’s Jr. on the other side of the expressway, and we’re jonesing for burgers.”

I was hungry, too, I realized. “Sure.” Then, as an afterthought, I checked my watch. It was nearly seven, though the sun was still well above the horizon, thanks to the combined wonders of daylight saving time and the approach of the summer solstice. “On second thought, you guys go ahead. It’s close to bedtime in Knoxville, and I’d like to talk to my wife before she goes to sleep.”

“We can wait, if you’re just touching base.”

“She’s pretty chatty,” I said, though the truth was, I tended to be the long-winded one.

He nodded. “You want us to bring you something on the way back? Burger? Chicken sandwich? They make a mighty mean onion ring.”

“A good chocolate shake, too,” added Boatman.

“Sounds good,” I said, “but none of that stuff travels well. Thanks anyhow.” I waved a hand in cheery dismissal. “Y’all don’t worry about me. I’ll get checked in, call Kathleen, and scrub off some of this grime. Plenty of time to grab a bite after that.”

Prescott inclined his head toward one side of the building. “There’s a pool, if you want to take a dip.”

“Didn’t bring a suit,” I said. “Didn’t realize we’d be staying at a luxury resort.”

He laughed. “Yeah. First class all the way.” The freeway’s exit ramp bordered one side of the pool, and the overpass loomed above the far end. I imagined a steady rain of dust, exhaust particulates, and rusted car parts raining down onto the pool court like volcanic ash onto Pompeii.

Opening the door, I stepped onto the parking lot’s blasted asphalt. “Pop the back? So I can grab my bag?” He did, and I extricated my yellow L.L. Bean duffel and closed the hatch. McCready took my place riding shotgun. As I passed Prescott’s window, it slid down a few inches. “See you in the morning. Wheels up at seven? Or is that too early for an ivory-tower guy like you?” It could have been a dig, but it didn’t sound like it.

“Seven? Early? That’s ten, Knoxville time. That’s sleeping in, man.”

“Hey, feel free to head on up at four. I’ve got a flashlight and a map I can loan you.”

“Nah,” I said. “You guys would be sad if you showed up and I’d already finished working the scene without you.”

“Sad,” he agreed. “Heartbroken, even.” The tinted window slid up, hiding him from view. The black Suburban did a U-turn, and the four invisible FBI agents glided away.

Recounting my day to Kathleen helped me process it; it also helped me feel grounded, connected with her — we’d been together so long, I tended to feel unsettled and unmoored when I was away. If not for the three-hour time difference, I’d have talked her to sleep as I settled into bed myself. Instead, I’d roamed the neighborhood around the motel as we talked.

Neighborhood wasn’t actually the right term for it; industrial park was more like it. Otay Mesa, or at least this part of it, consisted of grim blocks of warehouses, alternating with unpaved parking lots — some of them empty, others filled with semitrailers, and virtually all of them surrounded by chain-link fences topped with razor wire. Otay Mesa was a stone’s throw from a border crossing, and the town appeared to revolve around it the way water revolves around the drain in a toilet bowl. Years before, attending a conference in San Diego, I’d taken a brief side trip to Tijuana; the border crossing there, a few miles to the west, had reminded me of a drive-through version of an airport terminal: a bustling crossroads traversed by throngs of tourists and business travelers. The crossing here at Otay Mesa, on the other hand, put me in mind of a freight depot or railroad switchyard: a gritty frontier outpost where produce and car parts and probably contraband came pouring in, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The nearness of Mexico was underscored everywhere I looked: Brown faces, which outnumbered white faces by two or three to one. Beer trucks hauling Tecate and Negro Modelo, rather than Budweiser and Coors. Import-export brokers and warehouses with names like COMERCIALIZADORA IMPORTADORA and MARQUEZ VEJAR and INTEGRACION ADUANAL. Dual-language placards on signposts and walls and fences: STOP and also PARE; DANGER as well as PELIGRO; BEWARE OF DOG plus ¡CUIDADO CON EL PERRO! a warning illustrated by a snarling German shepherd — a visual that made the sign trilingual, in a hieroglyphic sort of way.

From the top of the overpass that spanned the Otay Mesa Freeway, I spied the sign for the burger joint the four FBI agents had gone to — the oddly punctuated Carl’s Jr. — as well as a closer, higher sign for McDonald’s. To my left, the freeway’s six lanes curved northwest toward San Diego; to my right, they ran due south for a quarter mile to the border checkpoint. As the trucks rumbled beneath me, I noticed that the southbound trucks — heading for the border — rattled and clattered, their cargo trailers empty. The northbound trucks — fresh from Mexico — thudded and groaned beneath heavy loads.

I turned down the street toward the burger joint. I glanced inside, looking for the FBI agents, but I saw no sign of them — not surprising, given that they could have ordered and eaten and driven away a half hour or an hour before. I was reaching for the door, my stomach rumbling in earnest now, when something caught my eye and I spun in my tracks. Directly across the street was an IHOP — International House of Pancakes — and IHOP was hardwired to some of my fondest memories: Throughout my son’s childhood and adolescence, he and I hit the IHOP almost every Saturday morning. Happily I headed across the deserted street and into the IHOP. By now it was nearly nine, the posted closing time, and the hostess station was vacant. Wandering into the dining room, I found a server, a sturdy young Latina. “Am I too late to eat?”

“You made it just in time,” she said. “Have a seat”—she motioned me toward a high-backed booth along one wall, beside a hallway that led to the restrooms—“and I’ll bring you a menu.”

“Don’t need one,” I told her. “I know what I want.” She nodded, pulling an order pad and a pen from her back pocket. “Waffle combo,” I said. “The waffles with fruit and whipped cream — extra fruit and extra cream, please. Two eggs over medium. Bacon. Orange juice.” I thought for a moment. “And an extra side of bacon, please.” Kathleen wouldn’t approve — in fact, Kathleen would be appalled — but Kathleen was fifteen hundred miles away. I knew some people who indulged in alcohol or even adultery while on road trips. Me, I indulged in bacon.

I slumped down in the booth, suddenly dog-tired; I must have nodded off, because in what seemed mere moments, I heard a thunk and opened my eyes to behold a huge helping of food. “Looks great,” I said. “Smells great, too.”

“Let me know if you need anything else.” If we’d been in Tennessee, she’d have punctuated the sentence with a darlin’ or a hon, but we weren’t, so she didn’t. She simply smiled and walked away.

The first bite of food — if the word “bite” can be applied to the microcosmic feast I hoisted mouthward, the fork flexing from its load — filled my mouth with layer upon layer of flavor and texture: the warm, still-crisp waffle; the sweet, juicy berries; the smooth, rich cream; the satisfying substance of the egg. My mouth was practically overflowing, but I couldn’t resist cramming in half a piece of bacon for the sake of the smoky, salty crunch.

I was only beginning to comprehend the gap between how much I had bitten off and how little I could chew when I heard a familiar voice behind me: Special Agent Miles Prescott’s voice. My inclination was to stand up and say hello, but my mouth was far too full to speak, so I sat, slumped and unseen in the high-backed booth.

Prescott’s voice was low, but I quickly realized it had a steely edge to it; in fact, as I chewed and listened, I realized that he sounded furious, and I wondered if he was chewing out one of the other agents. Surely not Kimball or Boatman — they were too lowly to inspire such ire — but McCready might have angered him by allowing us to work too slowly. “You know the goddamn rules,” he practically spat. “We had the intel first, so it was our operation.”

“It was a penny-ante, pissant little operation,” said another, unfamiliar voice — a voice so raspy and wheezy that the speaker was close to coughing out the words. “If you had let this thing play out just a little longer, we’d have taken it a lot higher up the food chain. Maybe—maybe—even gotten Goose Man. We were this close.”

“In your dreams.”

“This close,” the second man wheezed again. “But no, the Bureau had to come charging in like the Seventh Fucking Cavalry — flags waving, bugles blowing — and scare everybody back into their hidey-holes. Do you realize you sabotaged a three-year investigation?”

“Do I look like I give a damn?” snapped Prescott. “It was our operation. Our call. Janus got a good agent killed two weeks ago—”

“You don’t know that,” interrupted the other man. “Your agent was in way over his head, playing three guys off against each other. I don’t think Janus fingered him. I think your guy just fucked up.”

“Janus got one of our agents killed,” insisted Prescott. “And when one of ours gets killed, we don’t just stand by and — how’d you put it? ‘Let things play out’? We come down like the wrath of God. Maybe that’s the reason we don’t lose as many agents as you guys do.”

My mouth was still full, but I had stopped chewing and started sweating. I didn’t know who Prescott meant by you guys, or by he, and I had no earthly idea who “Goose Man” was. The one thing I understood with perfect clarity was that I’d stumbled into the pissing contest Prescott had mentioned earlier. And it sounded like a doozy.

Still slouching in the booth, I vacillated: On the one hand, I wanted them to leave immediately; on the other, I wanted them to keep arguing—from the beginning, guys! — so I could figure out what they were talking about. Across the room, I noticed the waitress clearing a table; she glanced in my direction, and I felt a jolt of panic. If she came over now — offering a refill of juice, or asking why I wasn’t eating — she’d blow my cover. Not now, not now, I telegraphed her, carefully avoiding eye contact.

“You sanctimonious sonofabitch,” the stranger was rasping. In my mind’s eye, he was fat and sweaty, his words struggling to burrow out from within a mountain of flesh. “You wanna know why we lose more agents than the Bureau? I’ll tell you why. It’s because you guys are going after pussies — embezzlers and secret sellers and kiddie-porn perverts. Pussies. Meanwhile, we’re out there waging war. With the worst motherfuckers on the planet.”

“Are you?” Prescott’s voice dripped with sarcasm. I couldn’t tell if he was questioning the badness of the enemy, or the totality of the war effort.

“Damn right we are. And we’re doing it with a fraction of the money and manpower you necktie-and-cufflink office boys get.”

“You’re breaking my heart,” Prescott sneered. “Poor, pitiful you. Now if you’re through whining, I’ve got work to do before we climb that mountain tomorrow and pick up the pieces of this operation.” He walked away, his heels pummeling the tile.

“Prick,” muttered the other man. I heard him turn and trail Prescott out of the IHOP. As his footsteps neared the front door, I risked raising up to take a look. I got a fleeting glimpse of a man who was short and fat, his hair a graying, greasy shade of red. From behind, at least, he looked as repulsive as he sounded.

I looked down at my plate. The now soggy waffle was surrounded by a moat of cold egg yolk, and the strips of bacon gleamed dully through a varnish of congealed grease. I pushed the plate away, my appetite killed by disgust. Or was it by fear? As I pulled out my wallet for the reckoning with IHOP, I couldn’t help wondering what other reckonings awaited, and what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

I stepped out into the night — still warm, but not unpleasant. Eighty-five degrees in the sauna-dry foothills east of San Diego was a different animal from eighty-five degrees in the steam bath that was East Tennessee. It wasn’t that I didn’t sweat here, I’d noticed; it was that the sweat evaporated almost instantly, cooling the body a bit without drenching the clothes entirely.

“How was your dinner?” The voice came from the darkness behind me.

“Crap,” I exclaimed, jumping with surprise. Again I recognized the voice as Prescott’s, and I turned toward it. He was leaning against the IHOP’s wall, waiting for me. “You scared the bejesus out of me.”

I expected him to say that he didn’t mean to; instead, he repeated, “How was dinner?”

“Kinda meager,” I said. “I ordered a lot, but I only ate one bite. It was a big bite — my mouth was too full to say anything when I heard you behind me — but I’m not sure it’s gonna tide me over till breakfast.” I looked at him more frankly now, embarrassed to have been caught, but relieved not to be keeping secrets. “You knew I was there the whole time?”

“Just about.”

“How? I didn’t think you guys could me see over the back of the booth.”

“Couldn’t,” he said. “I noticed your reflection in the window. Hickock never did.”

“Hickock’s the pissed-off guy?”

“You might say that. Wild Bill. He was in the middle of his tirade when I spotted you. If I’d cut him off — if he’d known we had an audience — he’d’ve gone ballistic. At me and you both.” He shook his head. “No point in that.”

I nodded. “Well, thanks. Sorry I was sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time. Didn’t mean to put you in an awkward spot.”

“You didn’t. From what I hear, you’re one of the good guys. Besides, Hickock and I should both know better. Talking business in public? I oughta rip myself a new one for that.”

I remembered old national-security posters I’d seen from the early 1940s. “Loose lips sink ships?”

“Sounds corny, but basically, yeah.” He nodded across the parking lot, to the black Suburban under a streetlight, its back window thick with dust. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride home.”

“Thanks, but I’d kinda like to walk.”

He frowned. “You carrying?”

“Carrying? You mean a gun?” He nodded, and I shook my head. “Heavens no. I’ve never owned one.”

“Let me give you a ride, then. This ain’t exactly the tourist district, Doc. You might get robbed; you might get mistaken for a robber. Either way, you wander around here after dark, you’re liable to get shot. Or stabbed. Or worse. Not good for either of us.”

“Since you put it that way,” I said, “thanks.”

In the privacy of the Suburban, I figured he’d tell me at least a bit about the raspy-voiced man, and about their argument, but he didn’t. Instead, during the brief drive, he asked about my research at the Body Farm, then quizzed me about a couple of prior cases I’d helped the Bureau with. It was obvious that he was redirecting the conversation away from the confrontation I had stumbled into. It was also, perhaps, a reminder that he had done his research, had read the Bureau’s file on me. It might even have been a subtle caution: If I wanted to keep working with the FBI, I should keep quiet about what I’d overheard tonight. As I thanked him for the lift and headed toward my room, I parsed the conversation — the things he’d said and the ones he hadn’t. Loose lips sink ships, I reminded myself. And maybe crash careers.

Chapter 10

The trouble with graduate assistants, I’d noticed — well, one of the troubles — was their tendency to go gallivanting off every summer: for gainful employment, for adventurous travel, or for romance. My current assistant, Marty, was helping direct a student dig in Tuscany for three months, and judging by the letter and photos he’d sent in early June, he was getting both well paid and well laid. Not that I was envious.

What I was, though, was inconvenienced. I had a question that needed researching, but no time or tools to research it myself — and no helpful minion at my beck and call. So instead, despite the late hour, I called Kathleen.

It was only 8:45 in San Diego, but it was nearly midnight in Knoxville, and that meant Kathleen had probably been asleep for at least an hour. To my surprise, she answered on the second ring. Her voice sounded thick, but not sleepy.

“Hey,” I said, “is something wrong? Are you crying?”

“Oh, I am,” she sniffled, “but it’s just a movie I’m watching.” In the background, I heard voices and music. “Hang on, honey, let me pause it.” She laid the phone down with a rustle, then the background noise quieted. “You know I don’t sleep worth a hoot when you’re gone,” she said, “so I stopped at Blockbuster on the way home.”

“I’m jealous. What’d you get?”

“One of those chick flicks you wouldn’t take me to.”

“Silence of the Lambs?”

“Ha. Not quite. Shakespeare in Love.”

“I take it back,” I said. “I’m not a bit jealous.”

“Actually, you’d really like the scene where he’s in bed with Gwyneth Paltrow.”

She knew me well. “Well then,” I said, “when I get home, we can rent it again and fast-forward to that part.”

“Hmmph.” She sniffed again, and in the brief pause that followed, I could practically hear the gears in her mind shifting. “Why aren’t you asleep?” Her voice was laser sharp now, and despite the two thousand miles between us, I could almost feel her eyes searching mine. “You called me to say good night two hours ago. What’s happened?”

“I don’t know.” I told her about my accidental, disturbing eavesdropping at the IHOP. “I wish I understood what’s going on,” I said. “Not that I need to know everything, but…”

“But what?”

“But it feels like there’s stuff here — players and politics and agendas — that I don’t understand, stuff that could affect the investigation.”

“Affect it how?”

Suddenly I thought, Shit, what if my phone is tapped? A moment later I scolded myself, Don’t be paranoid. Who the hell would want to tap your phone? “I don’t know, Kath. That’s the frustrating thing — I don’t know enough to know what else I need to know. What is it Donald Rumsfeld calls this kind of thing?”

“God, don’t get me started on Rumsfeld,” she said. She had a point there — she despised the man, and the mere mention of his name sometimes set her off on a Rumsfeld rant. “But I believe ‘unknown unknowns’ is the gobbledygook term you’re thinking of.”

“That’s it,” I said. “I’m worried that the unknown unknowns here could affect this case in ways I can’t foresee or control. Distort it, undermine its objectivity or integrity. Here I am doing my thing, crawling around looking for teeth and bones. But I’ve got a bad feeling, like I’m wandering around in a minefield. One false step, and there goes a foot. Figuratively speaking. If I blow this case, Kathleen — the highest-profile case the Bureau has ever used me on? They’ll write me off, and for good.”

“Just do your best,” she said. “How many times have you worked with the FBI before this?”

“Four. No, five.”

“Any problems with them?”

“No. They’re the best. Of course.” I still felt fretful. “I wish Marty were around this summer. I’d get him to poke around a little.”

“Poke around how? In what?”

“I don’t know,” I repeated in reflexive frustration. She kept quiet — her way of making me think instead of just spouting off — and after a moment I added, “I’d see if he could find out who’s the FBI agent that got killed, and how, and why? Who’s the fat, raspy guy that claims to be fighting supervillains? And who’s this Goose Man character that the fat fellow’s so hot to take down?”

“And you think Marty could dig up answers to those questions?”

“I don’t…” I caught myself before repeating it, my mantra of mystification, once again. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Marty’s great with a trowel, Bill. And he knows his osteology forward and backward. But his skill set is — how to put this nicely? — very specific. What you need is a detective. Or an investigative journalist.”

“A journalist? God, Kathleen, if I talked to a journalist about an open FBI case? It’d be my last case for them. Ever.”

“Probably,” she said. “Okay, how about a reference librarian?”

“What?”

“A reference librarian.”

“Are you serious — a librarian?”

“Sure, I’m serious,” she said. “Why not? They’re smart, they’re helpful, and they have dozens of databases at their fingertips. Remember when I was looking for stuff on child blindness and vitamin A deficiency? And nonprofits? I called the reference desk at Hodges”—the university’s main library—“and maybe two hours later, a librarian handed me a stack of articles I never would have found on my own. That’s how I first heard about Richard Janus and Airlift Relief.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’d forgotten that.” I wasn’t sure that confiding in a librarian was a brilliant idea, but it trumped anything else I had at the moment. “You think somebody’s there now? It’s nearly midnight.”

“They’re open another five minutes,” she said. “Worth a try.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a UT directory there beside the remote and the Kleenex box?”

“Don’t need one,” she said, and I smiled as she recited the number from memory. Kathleen was smart and wise — sassy, too — and I loved her for those qualities. And more, many more.

The phone rang a dozen times — I counted the rings as I drummed my fingers. “Good grief,” I groused as I pulled the phone away from my ear and reached for the “end” button. “Doesn’t anybody work a full day anymore?”

As if in answer to my question, I suddenly heard a voice on the other end of the line. “Excuse me?” Then I heard a loud clatter, as if the phone had been dropped. A moment later a slightly breathless woman said, “Oops. Sorry about that. I had to vault the counter to get to the phone. Figured it must be important, as many times as it rang.”

I was taken aback by the woman’s breezy attitude. “Uh,” I faltered, “is this the reference desk?”

“Technically, no,” she said. “But I’m standing at the reference desk. Will that do?”

Was she mocking me? I didn’t have the luxury of exploring that question. “This is Dr. Bill Brockton, head of the Anthropology Department.”

“Yes?”

“I need some information. I’m afraid I can’t give you much to go on. But it’s important. And sensitive — it’s related to a criminal investigation — so I need you to keep it confidential.”

“Sounds intriguing,” she said. “What do you need to know, Dr. Brockton? And what can you tell me to point me in the right direction?”

“What I need to know, Ms.… What did you say your name is?”

“I didn’t,” she said cheerily. “Just call me Red.”

“Red? Is that a nickname?”

She laughed. “I would hope so!” Again I wondered if she was mocking me, though her tone sounded more amused than sarcastic.

“Look… Red,” I said. “This seems a little… strange, not to know who I’m talking to. Would you rather hand me off to somebody else?”

“Unfortunately, at the moment, I’m all you’ve got,” she said. “I don’t mean any disrespect, Dr. Brockton; please forgive me if it sounded that way. I’ve been stalked a couple times — seriously stalked — so I’m skittish about giving my name to men on the phone at midnight, even if they sound legit. The guy I still have nightmares about? He sounded every bit as legit as you, at first.”

“But—” I began, then stopped myself. But what? You think if you argue, she’ll feel more at ease? Not bloody likely. “Fair enough, Red,” I conceded. “Is that your hair color, or your politics?”

“Both,” she said. “Also the color of my checkbook balance. Maybe short for ‘Ready Reference,’ too. How can I help you, Dr. Brockton? The lights in the library go out in about three minutes, so tell me quick, if you can.”

I started with the thing that seemed strangest. “I need you to dig up whatever you can about someone called ‘Goose Man.’” The line was silent, and I wondered if the call had been dropped — or if she’d decided I was a crank and hung up. “Hello? Red? Are you there?”

“I’m here,” she said. “I was waiting for you to tell me more.”

“There is no ‘more.’ That’s it.”

“That’s all you’ve got—‘Goose Man’? You’re kidding, right?”

“No,” I snapped, feeling defensive. “I’m not kidding. I told you I couldn’t give you much to go on.”

She laughed again. “So you did. I see you’re a man of your word. But… can I ask a couple things, superquick? Just to make sure we’re on the same page here — the same virtually blank page? What put ‘Goose Man’ on your radar? How’d you hear about him? In what context?”

“I heard a cop — at least, I think he was a cop — mention him to another cop.”

“Was the second one also a maybe cop? Or was cop number two a for-sure cop?”

“A for-sure cop.”

“Knoxville cop?”

“No. Federal cop. Both feds, I think. One’s FBI. The other, I don’t know — maybe Homeland Security, maybe DEA, maybe Border Patrol. Hell, maybe even CIA.”

“Wowzer,” she said. “You don’t play in the minors, do you? Should you even be telling me this?”

“No,” I said. “Almost certainly not. But something’s going on that I don’t understand, and it’s making me nervous. I’d like to know who the other players are, and what teams they’re playing for.”

In the background, I heard a robotic-sounding announcement: The library is now closed. Please exit now. “Crap,” she muttered. “Oh well — in for a penny, in for a pound. Quick, what makes you think Fed Number Two might be CIA?”

“He said they were waging war with the worst badasses on the planet. Pardon the language.”

“Pardon it? I appreciate it. I hate it when people beat around the bush, all tactful and mealy-mouthed. Say what you mean, mean what you say — that’s my motto. One of ’em, anyhow. So… presumably the Goose Man is one of these badasses?”

“Presumably,” I said. “The FBI guy was getting reamed out. Apparently he scared the Goose Man away, just as Fed Number Two was about to reel him in.”

“In-ter-esting,” she said. “So the Goose Man is a pretty big fish. And he’s swimming around right here in the little ol’ pond of Knoxville?”

“Ah. No,” I said. “Sorry. In San Diego. I mean, I don’t know if San Diego’s where the Goose Man is swimming, but it’s where I’m swimming at the moment. Or treading water. And it’s where these guys were arguing.”

“I really have to go,” she said. “How do I reach you?” I gave her my number. “Got it. Let me give you mine.”

“I’ve already got it,” I pointed out. “I just dialed it.”

“I’m away from the desk most of the time,” she said. “Better to call me on my cell.” She rattled off the digits like machine-gun fire; I wrote hurriedly, hoping I was getting it right.

“Let me read that back to you.”

“I gotta go — I’m about to get locked in.”

“Last question,” I said. “What are your hours — do you work weeknights?”

“Call whenever,” she said. “I really, really gotta go.”

The line went dead, and I was left staring at the scrawled phone number of a woman who didn’t even trust me with her name.

Chapter 11

I slept fitfully, my dreams a patchwork of conversations, confrontations, and altercations. Some of the dreams featured a fat man with red hair, one whose shadowy, sinister face I could never quite discern. Others featured a redheaded woman, her features also veiled and vague.

I stayed in the shower a long time — hot water, then cold, then hot again — to clear the cobwebs from my brain. When I turned off the taps, I heard the warbling of my cell phone. Still dripping, I raced to answer. “Kathleen?”

“Uh, no. Sorry. Is this Dr. Brockton?”

I recognized the voice of the reference librarian. “Oh, sorry. Yes, this is Dr. Brockton.” I hesitated, feeling foolish, then plunged ahead. “Red, is that you?”

“Yes. Am I calling too early?”

“No, it’s fine. I was in the shower. Have you tracked down the Goose Man already?” I was speaking low and fast. “That was quick. What can you tell me about him?”

“Well, for one thing, I can tell you that there is no such guy as ‘the Goose Man.’”

“It’s a nickname,” I said. “Like ‘the Godfather’ or something.” I thought I heard a snort of laughter at the other end.

“Yeah, ‘Goose Man’—there’s a name calculated to strike fear into the hearts of global badasses,” she said, sounding far more amused than I thought she should. “I can hear it now: ‘Call off your goons, or the Goose Man is gonna come peck you to death.’” Now there was no question about it — she was definitely laughing.

“Hey.” I felt my cheeks flushing and my temper ratcheting up.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, through the remnants of a laugh. “Couldn’t resist. But I swear, I’ve got the scoop. The guy’s not ‘the Goose Man’; the guy’s name is Guzmán. Spelled G-U-Z-M-A-with-an-accent-N. Pronounced ‘gooz-MAHN’—accent on the second syllable. Leastwise, that’s how they say it south of the border, down Mehico way.”

“He’s Mexican?”

“Sí, señor. Joaquin Guzmán Loera. Widely known as ‘Chapo,’ which translates as ‘Shorty’—a reference to his shape, which resembles a stout fireplug.”

“But who is he?”

“A badass. One of the very baddest badasses on the planet,” she said, sounding pleased with her discovery, or with the opportunity to apply the colorful label, or with both. “Also one of the very richest badasses on the planet.”

“Do tell.”

“Chapo runs the Sinaloa drug cartel, the biggest drug-smuggling operation in the world. Based in Mexico’s Sinaloa Province, a rural mountainous region that’s apparently perfect for growing marijuana. Also ideal for hiding big cocaine-processing labs. Giant meth labs, too.”

“Giant meth labs? I thought people cooked that stuff in, like, pressure cookers. In trailers in the backwoods of Tennessee.”

“They did,” she said. “Still do, I guess. But these guys — this cartel — is all about supply and demand. Any drug there’s big demand for, they supply. Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, meth: If rich gringos want it, these guys have got it. Take a guess at Shorty’s net worth.”

“I have no idea.” From the way she put the question, I could tell it must be a lot. “Fifty million bucks?”

“Chicken feed. You’re ice-cold.”

“A hundred million?”

“Still frosty.”

“Five hundred million?”

“A cool billion,” she said. “That’s b-b-b-billion. With a b.”

“Get outta here. A billion dollars? Says who?”

“Says Forbes magazine. He’s on their list of the world’s richest people. Has been for years.”

“But… how does he keep getting away with it?”

“Easy,” she said. “Mexico’s police and military are owned by guys like this. Bought and paid for. Case in point: Guzmán was arrested at one point, back in 1993—”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “You just said he owned the police force.”

“He did. Does. In Mexico. But he was arrested in Guatemala. Once he got caught, Mexico had to pretend to be glad. So they put him in prison. Maximum security, so-called. But guess what? He kept running his drug empire from inside the slammer; kept building it from inside the slammer; kept getting richer. Then, three years ago, in 2001? Uncle Sam started leaning on Mexico to extradite Shorty to the U.S. So what did Shorty do? He walked out of jail.”

“Just like that? Walked right out the front gate?”

“Actually, he rode out the gate,” she said.

“And he’s a billionaire?”

“According to Forbes. And they know a lot about rich people. Apparently he’s got a great business model. Plus his own fleet of boats. Planes, too: Learjets, DC-3s, even 747s. This guy’s even got underground railways — secret tunnels running under the border near Tijuana.”

I was stunned by the scope of Guzmán’s operation. “But I thought we were winning the war on drugs.”

“Define ‘winning,’” she said drily.

“How is it,” I asked, “that America — the richest, mightiest nation on earth — can’t shut down this one guy?”

“Because we love this guy.”

“Love him? He’s the scum of the earth,” I squawked.

“Oh, I agree,” she said. “But Americans — lots of Americans — can’t get enough of the stuff this guy’s selling. ‘The insatiable American nose,’ one Mexican journalist calls it. Even our commander in chief seems to’ve had a taste for cocaine when he was young.”

“George Bush? The president? I don’t believe it.”

“Unconfirmed fire,” she conceded, “but persistent smoke. The point is, Shorty’s a businessman, pure and simple. Well, not so simple, and not pure at all. There’s blood on every line of coke snorted by every snotty, spoiled rich kid in America. But in the end, all Shorty cares about is the bottom line. He only supplies what we demand.”

I wished I could find some fatal flaw in that piece of logic, but I couldn’t. It was clear, compelling, and deeply discouraging. Suddenly the implications of her research hit me like a punch in the gut. “Well, damn,” I said.

“What?”

“I just connected the dots, and I hate the picture.” I sighed. “I should’ve figured this out the minute I heard those guys talking. But my brain’s running in slo-mo; jet-lagged, I reckon, or maybe cooked by the sun.” I hesitated, unsure how much I should reveal. “This stuff’s connected to… a case I’m working.”

“The Richard Janus crash.” She didn’t put it as a question.

“How the hell did you know that?”

“Well, for one thing, you’re all over the local news. The News-Sentinel; Channel Ten. But I figured it out last night. When you said you were in San Diego.”

I wasn’t happy to hear this, but I was impressed. “How?”

“Easy-peasy. The crash was big news — national news — yesterday morning. Sensational story; celebrity pilot; everybody tight-lipped about whether the body’s been I.D.’d. Then one of the world’s experts on identifying skeletal remains turns up in San Diego. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”

“I like the way your mind works, Red. Ever think about getting out of the library?”

“Huh?” She sounded… what? confused? taken aback? No: She sounded defensive, maybe even scared. Why? Parsing what I’d said to her, I realized, Hell, Bill, you dumb-ass. This woman’s been stalked, and suddenly you sound like maybe you’re hitting on her. Angling for a date. “What I mean is,” I hurried to clarify, “ever think about changing fields? From library science to… oh, for instance, forensic anthropology? We can always use smart people.”

I heard a brief snort — was it laughter, or scorn? “Hey, thanks,” she said. “I’ll add that to my list of brilliant career moves: years of school, mountains of debt, and a one-in-a-million shot at some dead-end teaching job in Fargo — where the odds of getting tenure would be about as low as the average winter temperature.”

“So you like the idea,” I said. “Great. I’ll be watching for your application.” Using my shoulder to hold the phone against my ear, I began wriggling into my clothes.

“You do that. Meanwhile, I’ll be watching for my Mac-Arthur Genius Grant.” She paused, then her tone got serious again. “Speaking of which: Your guy Janus—he was a Mac-Arthur Fellow, wasn’t he? Didn’t he get a genius grant for creating that charity?”

“Yeah,” I said, saddened anew by the shame and the waste of Janus’s death, or his fall, or whatever it was. “A quick-response relief force, helping people hang on till the governments and the Red Cross can get there? It was a brilliant idea.”

“Important work,” she agreed. “Bound to be frustrating, though — so much need, so little funding.” She fell silent a moment. “So put yourself in his shoes. What would you say — what could you say — if somebody offered you a way to raise more money and help more people? A way to hire more staff, buy more planes? What if all it took to make it happen was to take a little something back with you, back across the border, on your way home?”

“Smuggling drugs? You’re saying Richard Janus made a deal with the devil?”

“Not saying; just wondering,” she replied. “Just thinking out loud. Playing what-if. Deadhead miles are a waste of time and fuel, right? Ask any long-haul delivery guy. Wheels or wings, same diff. Besides, somebody’s gonna haul it; somebody’s gonna get rich. Why not one of the good guys?”

“Because then you stop being one of the good ones,” I pointed out. “Because running drugs makes you one of the bad guys.”

“Well, yeah, there’s that,” she conceded. “But maybe you could rationalize it.”

“Rationalize it how?”

“Same way Robin Hood did, I guess. Take from the rich, give to the poor.”

“But,” I started to protest, then stopped. But what?

“There’s something else,” she added.

Crack! Crack crack crack! The metal door of my room rattled, and I jumped almost as if the knocks had been gunshots. “I gotta go,” I said furtively. “Somebody’s at my door.”

More rapping. “Hey, Doc — you in there?” It was McCready’s voice. “You about ready?” I checked the bedside clock. Crap, I thought. I was five minutes late. “Be right there,” I hollered. “One second.”

BANG! “Yo, Doc! We’re burning daylight!”

“Coming. Coming!” I muttered a quick “talk to you later” into the phone and ended the call, then hurried to the door and tugged it open. “Sorry,” I said, my face flushing. “I got caught on a call to UT.”

“Everything all right?”

I nodded. His question was routine — superficial small talk, without a doubt.

Almost without a doubt, I realized uneasily. Was it just my imagination, or were his eyes boring into mine with the keen skepticism of a federal investigator?

On the rocky ride up the mountain, I mentally replayed the phone call, pondering the information and testing her Robin Hood theory: Did it fit the facts? And was it the simplest explanation that did? I had to admit, it did seem to fit with Janus’s swashbuckling style, his daredevil streak. I’d seen videos of him landing a DC-3 in jungle clearings scarcely bigger than my backyard. Clearly the man didn’t mind some peril — in fact, he seemed to thrive on it. Was he simply braver than most of us, more tolerant of high doses of danger? Or was it possible that Janus was an adrenaline junkie: not just accustomed to risk, but addicted to it — that danger was his drug of choice?

If so, he may have suffered a fatal overdose, I realized — an overdose supplied by Chapo Guzmán, a rich but deadly devil to dance with.

Chapter 12

“Big day today, guys,” said McCready as we loaded onto the platform and prepared to descend the bluff for our second assault on the wreckage. “Summer solstice; longest day of the year. Fourteen hours of daylight.”

Boatman groaned; Kimball said, “Great! We get overtime, right?”

“Sure you do,” said McCready. “And good always triumphs over evil. And the Democrats and Republicans are about to set aside their differences and work together for the greater good.”

“Hmm,” Kimball muttered.

The morning wore on; the sun rose and the heat soared, the brown stone of the mountain soaking up the solstice sun. I was surprised by the heat — I’d heard that San Diego doesn’t get hot until July or even August — but somehow we had managed to catch a heat wave, which combined with the residual heat from the fire to make the crash site feel like a sauna. For much of the morning we were in shadow, sheltered by the rock wall at our backs. By eleven, though, the shadow had shrunk to a narrow band at the base of the bluff, and a hot, dry wind was funneling up the valley, swirling dust and cinders around us.

Mercifully, a few minutes later, McCready called a lunch break. Caked with dust and the salt of dried sweat, we boarded the platform and ascended the bluff. After our hours of baking on the slope, the comforts of the command center — ice water, air-conditioning, and a feast of sandwiches, fruit, chips, cookies, even ice cream bars — seemed wondrous beyond comprehension: as if we’d been released from a low, hot circle of Dante’s Inferno and whisked straight to Paradise.

After lunch I staked a claim on a corner of the command center’s small sofa. I must have nodded off, because I suddenly found myself waking up. The chatter in the room had ceased, and — hearing the abrupt silence — I jerked awake and said, “What?” Then, as the fog of sleep dissipated, I heard what had caused the agents to fall silent: the thrum of an approaching helicopter. My first thought was of the sheriff’s chopper, but then I realized that the pitch was too high. This was no army-bred workhorse; this was a racehorse — the same Fox 5 News racehorse that had trailed Carmelita Janus up the mountain, I saw when I followed the agents outside.

McCready and Prescott — apparently the case agent had arrived sometime during my nap — frowned as the helicopter settled down, and their frowns turned to scowls as a young reporter, accompanied by a cameraman, ducked beneath the swirling blades and scurried toward us. Prescott held up a warning hand and shook his head — a clear, strong no signal — but they kept coming. The cameraman handed the reporter a microphone, and as they neared us, he held it up and began speaking. “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News. Who’s in charge here?”

“I am,” said Prescott.

“And who are you?” he demanded.

“I’m the federal officer who’s going to arrest you both if you don’t leave immediately. This is a restricted area and you know it. So get back in your helicopter and get out of here, and I mean now.”

“Of course, of course. Just a couple quick questions before we go.”

“No,” said Prescott. “Now.”

“Have you identified the body of Richard Janus yet?” Prescott didn’t respond. “Have you found his body — or any body?”

“I won’t comment on an ongoing investigation,” said Prescott, his voice ringing like steel on stone. “But I will comment on this.” He held up a thumb and forefinger, practically touching. “You are this close to being arrested for tampering with a crime scene, interfering with a federal officer in performance of his duties, and two or three other things I haven’t thought of yet. When we have news, we will hold a press conference. Which you’ll be welcome to attend. If you’re not behind bars.”

The reporter held up his hands and began backing away, but he wasn’t giving up yet. “What’s the crime? You say this is a crime scene, so what crime are you investigating?” Prescott scowled, but I wasn’t sure whether his anger was triggered by the reporter’s doggedness or his own revelation — I felt sure it was unintentional — that the mountaintop wasn’t just a crash scene, but a crime scene.

Then I noticed Prescott’s gaze lifting and shifting, refocusing on something beyond the journalists, and I saw four ERT techs edging up behind them. Prescott gave a slight nod — a gesture so subtle that I wasn’t sure whether I’d actually seen it or just imagined it — and the four agents swiftly closed the gap, grabbing the TV guys by the arms and force-marching them back to the helicopter. Just before the reporter was pushed into the cabin, he shouted a final question, and the flicker in Prescott’s eyes as he heard the last three words sent a shock wave coursing clear through me.

“Do you consider Richard Janus to be the victim,” the reporter had yelled, “or the criminal?”

Back amid the sweltering wreckage, the air-conditioned comfort of lunchtime soon seemed a distant memory, and by midafternoon, even Kimball and Boatman had stopped bantering. We worked in steady silence, punctuated only by the thud of metal bumping metal, the rasp of metal scraping rock, the clink of rock rolling against rock. We’d still found no signs of hair or teeth or sinew, and as I stooped and straightened, stooped and straightened, I settled into a trancelike rhythm, moving like some assembly-line automaton: a metal-sorting machine, my clawlike hands gripping scraps and shards and depositing them on the rack, which — every twenty minutes or so — ascended into heaven, or into what passed for heaven out on the hellishly hot hillside. Only moments after disappearing, it seemed, the rack would return, its maw empty and mocking, sneering, So, ready to pack it in?

“So, ready to pack it in?” I heard the question again, this time coming from outside my head, not inside. Startled, I looked around, then looked up. McCready was peering down at me from the rim, his expression quizzical and amused.

“Sorry,” I said. “What?”

“Ready to call it a day? It’s after five.” The insatiable rack had just come down once more, and McCready pointed toward me, then pointed toward the rack, and then mimed the act of reeling in a fish. I was exhausted, true; I’d spent most of the night fretting rather than sleeping, and I’d been keyed up all day as well.

But I was loath to end a second day without finding something: that, too, was true — truer, or at least more compelling at the moment, than my fatigue. I suspected that Prescott was still pressuring McCready, but if he was, McCready was shielding us from it. “Don’t forget, it’s the solstice,” I called up to him. “You promised us extra fun in the sun today.”

“Go for it,” he said. “The rest of you guys got a little more in you?” I heard a smattering of sures and why nots from the ERT team; they sounded halfhearted, at best, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to let the sun set without finding something — even if that “something” was only clear evidence that, despite Maddox’s confidence, there was nothing in the wreckage to be found.

We worked for another hour without talking, the quiet broken at intervals by sighs and grunts and occasional muttered curses; by the tin-roof clatter of scraps raining onto the platform; by the rumble and whine of the crane as it hoisted another load from the base of the bluff to the top of the ridge.

Despite my resolve not to end the day empty-handed, I realized — as the emptied platform descended for the thousandth time of the day — that I was pooped. Exhausted. Out of gas. “Okay,” I groaned, “stick a fork in me, ’cause I’m done.” All around me, I heard what sounded like sighs of weary relief.

“Just in time,” said Kimball. “By now I wouldn’t know a femur if it hit me upside the head.” He radioed up to McCready. “Hey, boss, Doc’s pleading for clemency. Any chance you can let us off with time served?” I didn’t hear McCready’s response, but a moment later, the platform eased a step closer to the ground, and Kimball offered me a hand climbing aboard.

Just as I stepped up, though, I caught a glimpse of something — or half a glimpse, or a tenth of one — in my peripheral vision. I didn’t know what it was, but it triggered some subliminal sensor, set off some subconscious alarm or detector. I froze and scanned the ground, but I couldn’t see anything of particular interest or importance. I stepped back, reversing course, and then retraced my steps, this time in extreme slow motion, letting my gaze brush lightly across the surface of the rubble: looking, but not too closely, for it was only when I hadn’t been looking that I’d actually seen whatever it was I’d seen.

No luck. I repeated the maneuver twice more without success while the ERT techs watched. I had just given up, and was stepping onto the rack for good, when I saw it again, a faint glimmer of something small and smooth and lustrous. This time I got a better fix on where it was, and I bent down, maintaining the same visual angle and keeping my eye glued to the spot. “I’ll be damned,” I said as much to myself as to the four FBI agents. “It’s a tooth — an honest-to-god tooth!” I knelt — sharp rubble dug into my knees, but I didn’t care — and plucked it from the metal shards that swirled around it, like some dangerous version of a gemstone’s setting. It was a bicuspid — an upper right — the roots broken and burned but the crown intact. I held it between my thumb and forefinger, studying it from all angles, as if it were a miraculous and precious object, unique in all the world. Which it was, of course — there was no other tooth anywhere on earth exactly like this one. Without fillings or other distinctive anomalies, it wasn’t a sufficient basis for a positive identification. But it was a start, by damn. And it was proof that the plane wasn’t some empty, unpiloted ghost ship after all.

“Don’t tell McCready,” I said to my teammates in a low voice. “I want to surprise him with it.” Kimball held out a small paper evidence bag, the top open. I eased the tooth inside, then tucked the bag into my shirt pocket. Next I took an evidence flag from one of my back pockets and wiggled the thin steel shaft into the spot where I’d found the tooth, so Kimball and Boatman could map the spot when we returned in the morning. “Always park on the downhill,” my granddaddy had taught me long ago, back when I was fifteen and learning to drive a stick shift. “Makes it easier to get going the next time.” The advice had served me well ever since, and not just when it came to cars. Ending the day by flagging the spot where I’d found the tooth — the first of many, I hoped — was my way of parking us on the excavation’s downhill slope.

Straddling the empty bucket again—not empty for much longer, I told myself — I caught hold of the cables, and we ascended. This time, the tide of battle seemed to be turning, and I stood taller, actually feeling a bit like George Washington this time, the Stars and Stripes fluttering beside us in the breeze.

“Hold out your hand and close your eyes,” I told McCready when we disembarked topside. He looked wary, but he did it. Reaching into my pocket, I fished out the bag and opened it, then carefully laid the tooth in his palm. “Happy solstice,” I said, and when he opened his eyes and saw it, a smile dawned, spreading across his face like daybreak.

Chapter 13

The solstice sun was easing toward the horizon — a broad track of sunlight glinted off the Pacific, though the sun was still too bright to look at — when we adjourned to the command post to celebrate our find, to toast the tooth with ice water and Diet Coke. We tapped plastic bottles and aluminum cans together as exuberantly as if they’d been crystal champagne flutes. “To the upper right bicuspid,” I toasted, holding it aloft. “The first of many teeth awaiting us tomorrow.”

I felt the tired buzz of fatigue — or thought I felt the buzz of fatigue, but as the tingling ended and then resumed, ended and resumed, I realized that my cell phone — tucked in my pocket and set on “vibrate”—was receiving a call. I fished it out and saw Knoxville’s area code, 865, followed by the number that Red, the reference librarian, had given me. I noticed McCready and Maddox both looking my way, and I felt my face flush with the guilty knowledge that I was keeping secrets. “Go ahead and take that if you want to, Doc,” McCready called over the din. “I’ll make these guys quiet down.”

I shook my head with what I hoped was nonchalance. “Naw. I recognize the number. It’s just UT bureaucracy.”

McCready looked up at the wall clock, which read 6:47. “Man, you ivory-tower folks work some mighty long hours.”

It was nearly ten o’clock in Knoxville, I realized. Crap, Brockton, I chided myself, could you have said anything dumber? “Takes a lot of work to keep the place all clean and shiny,” I said lamely. McCready returned to his conversation with Maddox, but his eyes seemed to linger on me for an extra moment.

The bone-jarring ride down the mountain seemed to take hours, although my watch suggested that only thirty minutes had elapsed. When we finally pulled into the motel’s parking lot, I practically leapt from the Suburban. “I’m gonna scrub up and call home,” I said on my way out. “If y’all are hungry, go on without me. I can fend for myself again.”

“Hell, we’ll wait,” said McCready. “Fella works as hard as you do shouldn’t have to eat alone.”

“Thanks,” I said, though I would rather have had the time alone. “Want me to call you when I’m ready?”

“Just meet us in the lobby whenever you get done. Maybe thirty minutes? Eight o’clock, plus or minus?”

“You sure y’all don’t want to just go on without me?”

“Sure, Doc. It’s not like we’ve got big plans.”

“Hey, speak for yourself, old man,” cracked Kimball. “Jack in the Box? Mickey D’s? Them joints is some happenin’, dude — I’ll be rockin’ this warehouse district all night!” I could hear the younger agents riffing on this theme and laughing as I stepped into my room. Closing the door behind me, I immersed myself in the cool and the dark, soaking up the soothing, white-noise hum of processed air.

My phone was already in my hand by the time I’d chained the door, and I felt a surge of nervous energy when I saw that I had two voice mails waiting.

The first was a reminder about a finance committee meeting at my church the next day, one I might have skipped even if I weren’t two thousand miles away. The second one, though, was as electrifying as the first one was boring. “Dr. Brockton? It’s Red. I’ve got some follow-up info I think you’ll find interesting. Call back when you can.”

I checked the clock. It was 7:30 in San Diego, which made it 10:30 in Knoxville. Too late to call, I thought. But then again, she worked until midnight — or did on some nights, although I didn’t know about tonight. She said to call anytime, I reminded myself. I hit the “call” button. “Hello,” said the now-familiar voice. “Is that you, Dr. B?”

“It is. Sorry to call so late. Are you still working?”

“I’m always working. My work ethic knows no bounds. Well, few bounds.” She paused. “Okay, truth is, my work ethic is fairly feeble. But I’m gung ho about this particular task.”

I didn’t have time for witty repartee. “Your voice mail said you found something interesting.”

“Well, I think so, but I’ll let you be the judge.”

“Tell me quick, then,” I said. “I don’t have much time.”

“Richard Janus was a pilot for Air America from 1970 to ’75.”

That wasn’t interesting at all, I judged. “So? The man’s a pilot. Was. I’d be surprised if he didn’t fly for an airline or two.”

“Air America wasn’t an airline. Air America was the CIA’s secret air force in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.”

Suddenly I judged the information to be considerably more interesting. “The CIA? As in Central Intelligence Agency?”

“As in. Air America was the cover name. A shell company, it’s called. Civilian pilots — get this — flying military aircraft, on black-ops missions: commando insertions, weapons drops, downed-pilot rescues. Mostly in Laos and Cambodia, where U.S. troops weren’t supposed to be. There’s some evidence — claims, anyhow — that Air America also trafficked in opium.”

“What?”

“To help fund their operations. More profitable than bake sales, I guess.”

“Damn,” I whispered. Her news wasn’t just “interesting,” it was also damning, or at least potentially incriminating, on many levels. Had official U.S. agencies been complicit in the global drug trade? Had Richard Janus been part of that complicity? And had this much-admired humanitarian actually been a drug smuggler — for years, or even decades?

If so, it could explain a lot — maybe even explain everything: The investigation by the FBI. The involvement of another federal agency — the DEA, or the CIA, or whoever the redheaded fat man worked for. A desperate midnight run for the border of Mexico. It could even explain controlled flight into terrain — suicide-by-mountainside — if the demons or humans hounding Janus were sufficiently savage, if dying seemed less hellish than living.

“Gotta go,” I said. “Thanks for the info. Very interesting, but damned discomforting.”

“How do you mean?”

“If Janus was a serious drug runner, that could change things — change the investigation — in all sorts of ways. Maybe he was assassinated — possibly by Guzmán, possibly by the government. Maybe he was set up. Maybe this whole thing is one huge hoax.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe it’s even more complicated than any of those. Be interesting to find out. Have a good night, Dr. B.”

“Yeah,” I said as I disconnected and headed out for an evening of fast food, forced camaraderie, and unshared secrets.

Chapter 14

Despite my night of fretting about Air America, the CIA, and the labyrinth of secrets that seemed to surround the life and death of Richard Janus, I resumed searching on day three with high hopes. Buoyed by the prior afternoon’s discovery of a tooth, I’d assumed the rest of the remains would emerge immediately.

I’d assumed wrong. After an hour of searching and sifting, we were still empty-handed. Had the force of the impact somehow caused one of the teeth to ricochet away from the others? Or had a single tooth been planted in the wreckage, as a red-herring hoax? If so, by whom, and for what purpose?

By late morning, we’d sent up four loads of debris without having found any more teeth or bones, and my mood had gone from buoyant to discouraged to downright mad. So when a tangle of metal tubing resisted my efforts to remove it from the wreckage, I gave a furious tug. Suddenly, unexpectedly, it came free and I toppled backward, my arms windmilling for balance. Catapulted by my flailing, a lumpy object — it looked like a charred chunk of driftwood pulled from a riverbank campfire — arched into the air, tumbling end over end. Blackened and broken though it was, I recognized it at once. I made a scrabbling lunge for it and managed to catch it just before it hit the rocks.

“Nice catch,” said Boatman, on all fours, one hand working a shard of riveted aluminum free from a crevice. “You been practicing with the UT football team?”

“No, but I feel like I just scored a touchdown,” I said. “Guys, this is the pelvis. Part of it, anyhow.” The FBI techs came closer, careful not to disturb anything in the vicinity where the pelvis had been. “That tangle of tubing must be the framework of the seat.” As I leaned down for a closer look, I felt my heart race even faster. “It is,” I said. “I see vertebrae in there, too!”

“Wow,” said Kimball, crouching alongside me. “Hard to tell where the seat leaves off and the skeleton begins.”

“The man and the machine are pretty thoroughly mashed together,” I said. “That whole aircraft — twelve thousand pounds — slamming into him like a pile driver, at four hundred miles an hour? I’m surprised it’s not even more fragmented than this.” I rotated the piece, studying what remained of the pelvis, then — on professorial autopilot — began pointing out structures. “This curved, triangular piece is the sacrum — the base of the spine, where it joins the pelvis. The sacrum is made of five vertebrae, and in children and adolescents, they’re separate. But here, you can see, they’re fused together. That tells us that this person was an adult; midthirties, at least.” I pointed to the narrowest tip of the triangle. “The coccyx — that’s the tailbone — attaches here, but it’s been snapped off.” I rotated the piece again. “Both pubic bones are broken, too. That makes it harder to tell the sex. So let’s look at the sciatic notch, which is this gap where the sciatic nerve runs from the spine down the leg.” I cradled the piece in one palm, so the V-shaped notch faced upward, and then pressed the side of my index finger down into the V. “I know you guys might not’ve noticed, but a woman’s hips are broader than a male’s, so the sciatic notch is wider, too. If it’s a female, you can fit two fingers into the sciatic notch.” I tried, and failed, to squeeze my middle finger alongside the index finger. “Here, I can’t — the notch is too narrow. So we know he’s a he.”

Boatman must have been reading my mind. “Any way to tell how old he is?”

I shook my head. “It’s too damaged. Normally, you can tell the age — the decade, anyhow — from the wear on the pubic symphysis.”

“The what?” asked Boatman.

“The pubic symphysis. That’s the joint where the left and right pubic bones meet, just above your crotch.”

Kimball chuckled. “Boatman’s would look like a kid’s, then,” he gibed. “No risk of wearing out his pubic bones.” Grinning at his joke, he began taking photos of the pelvis and the mangled framework of the pilot’s seat. Suddenly, as he hovered over the seat, he said, “Guys, look at this!” He lowered the camera, letting it hang from its strap, and bent down to extricate a charred object from the mangled metal. It was thin and small — half the size of a deck of cards — with rounded corners and a pair of thin wires, about a foot long, dangling from it.

He held it in his palm, turning it over to inspect it. “This is a circuit board. And a battery, looks like. Holy crap—I think this is some kind of detonator.” He looked up, eyes wide. “Don’t move.”

He didn’t have to tell us twice. A detonator implied a bomb — possibly a live bomb. I flashed back to the explosion that had nearly brought down our helicopter the day we’d arrived. Maddox had thought it was an oxygen cylinder bursting, but maybe he’d been wrong. Our eyes moved — scanning one another’s faces; scanning the rocks and the ragged debris — but our bodies remained as motionless as statues.

After a long, tense silence, Boatman finally spoke. “We can’t just stand here forever,” he pointed out. Then, without moving his feet, he leaned forward to study the object in Kimball’s hand. “So,” he said, “if it’s a detonator, why isn’t the pelvis blown to smithereens? And why isn’t the detonator blown to bits?” Slowly he shook his head. “I think it’s just a cell phone — or maybe an iPod — with what’s left of some earbuds.”

“No way,” Kimball insisted. “These wires aren’t long enough. Besides, they’re hardwired — soldered directly to the circuit board — not plugged into a jack. See?”

“Computer mouse, then,” replied Boatman. “The wires are the tail.”

Kimball shook his head doggedly. “Too short for that, too. And there’s no USB connector on the other end. Just these weird flat tabs of copper.”

“So the USB connector got sheared off,” said Boatman. “Or melted.” The pair of them made me think of an old, bickering married couple. He turned to look at me. “Doc? If you stare at that thing any harder, it might burst into flames. What are you thinking?”

I could feel gears turning in my mind — gears, or maybe combination-lock tumblers, their notches gradually aligning, one by one. “I think,” I said, as the last tumbler clicked home, unlocking an idea, “that it’s okay to move. I also think we’ll know in thirty minutes whether or not this is Richard Janus.”

Kimball and I went topside to the command center, taking the electronic gizmo and the camera with us. While Kimball transferred photographs from the camera to the computer, I showed the gizmo to McCready and Maddox and asked McCready to enlist some of Prescott’s field-office agents for a bit of quick research. A moment later he was on the phone, calling in the cavalry.

Meanwhile, I called my friend Helen Taylor in Knoxville, hoping I’d catch her still at work. The phone rang six times, and I feared she’d left early, but finally she answered. “East Tennessee Cremation Services.”

“Oh, good,” I said, relieved. “Helen, it’s Bill Brockton. I was afraid you’d left for the day.”

“No, just processing a cremation. How are you, Dr. Brockton?”

“I’m fine, but I need a favor. Can I send you some pictures of something that’s burned to a crisp and get you to tell me what it is?” If anybody could confirm my hunch about the incinerated object, I suspected Helen was the one.

“I will if I can,” she said. “Do you have our mailing address?”

“I’m in a hurry, Helen. Can I fax you the pictures?”

“Well, yes.” She sounded doubtful. “But they’d come through clearer if you e-mailed them — as scans, or image files, attached to a message. Can you do that?”

I turned to Kimball. “Can we send e-mail? With picture files as attachments?”

“With this computer, and the satellite data link we’ve got?” Kimball grinned. “We could just about send you as an attachment.”

“Yes, we can e-mail them,” I told Helen. “What’s the address?” I jotted it on a notepad beside the computer. “Check your in-box in about thirty seconds. The message will come from”—I looked at Kimball as I spoke—“an FBI address?” He nodded, so I confirmed it. “Yeah, from an FBI address.”

“FBI? This gets more interesting all the time. Can you tell me anything more about the pictures? Give me a little hint what I’ll be looking at?”

“I have an idea,” I said, “but I don’t want to skew your thinking. Call me once you’ve had a look, and we’ll see if we agree.”

By the time I hung up, Agent Kimball had already hit “send.”

I’d hoped we’d have the answer in thirty minutes, but I was wrong.

We had it in twenty.

Helen had called back in just five minutes — but it took another fifteen for Prescott’s staff to track down the information I’d requested as a result, and to e-mail a response. Kimball opened the message, then clicked on the attachment, and a ghostly gray image filled the screen. McCready studied it closely, comparing it to the burned object Kimball had plucked from the frame of the pilot’s seat. Maddox, the NTSB crash expert, peered over McCready’s shoulder with keen interest, but he let the FBI agent ask the questions. “So tell me again what it is — and what the hell it does?”

“It’s a spinal cord stimulator,” I repeated. “It’s like shock therapy for chronic back pain. The gizmo is called a pulse generator. It sends weak electrical signals out these wires, to electrical leads at the ends. The leads are surgically implanted in the epidural space of the spine, right by the spinal cord. The way I understand it, the electrical stimulation distracts the nerves — short-circuits them, sort of — so they can’t send pain messages to the brain.”

“Sounds scary. But it works?”

I gave a half shrug. “Sometimes. Not always. It’s a last-resort kind of thing, when ordinary back surgery hasn’t worked.”

He peered at the computer screen, where Kimball was displaying the image we’d just received from the field office. It was an x-ray of a man’s spine; of Richard Janus’s spine, to be precise. Floating just above the left hip was an electronic circuit board, its metal connectors and battery showing up crisp and white against the muted grays of x-rayed flesh and bone. A pair of thin wires, attached to the circuit board, angled toward the lumbar spine and then threaded up the thoracic vertebrae, terminating in a series of flat electrical leads laid out in a geometric pattern that hopscotched from the tenth vertebra up to the eighth.

Maddox couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “It looks just like somebody’s connected him to a computer mouse,” he said. “So you just wear that generator on your belt, like a pager?”

“Oh, no,” I corrected. “It’s internal. The surgeon cuts a slot in the skin — a hip pocket, literally — and sutures it inside. Looks and feels a little odd, probably — a hard, square thing just under the skin — but I don’t guess anybody would’ve noticed it except him and his wife.”

McCready appeared mesmerized by the x-ray. “And how’d you know it’d be so easy to confirm that Janus had gotten one of these things—this thing — put in?”

“The media loved Janus,” I said, “and he loved the media. I remembered reading that he’d hurt his back in a crash, and that he’d had some kind of surgery to try to make it better. I figured there must’ve been a press release or a news report about that. So I suspected it wouldn’t take much digging to find out if he’d gotten one of these.” McCready nodded. “What I didn’t expect,” I admitted, “was that we’d get an actual post-op x-ray so fast.”

McCready clapped me on the back. “Well, all I can say is, you’re a wizard, Doc. And Prescott’s gonna be a happy guy when I tell him we’ve made the I.D.” He lifted his phone to make a call.

My head snapped around, and I grabbed his arm. “Wait. Don’t tell him that.”

“What? Why not?” He stared at me as if I’d gone mad. “You just pulled this rabbit out of the hat, and now you’re saying ‘never mind’? What the hell, Doc? Is it Janus, or isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s him,” I said, “but it’s not admissible. It’s a presumptive identification — we can presume it’s him — but it’s not a positive identification, one that would stand up in court.” He still looked confused, so I went on. “The x-ray image seems to match the burned stimulator, and Janus’s medical records will probably confirm that he got this brand, and this model. But unless his surgeon kept better records than any other surgeon on the planet, the records won’t tell us the individual serial number — the DNA, so to speak, of this one device. And without a unique serial number, we can’t prove that it’s him.”

He sighed. “Well, hell, Doc.”

“I know, I know. But hey, look on the bright side. We know it’s him; now all we gotta do is prove it. We just need more teeth. You’ve got the dental records now, right?”

He frowned: sore subject. “Working on it. The dentist is dragging his heels.”

“So pull on him harder.” His frown turned to a scowl, which meant I’d drilled into a nerve. I shrugged apologetically. “Hey, cheer up,” I said, holding up a thumb and forefinger, separated by a hairsbreadth. “We’re this close.”

Only after I said it did I realize why the phrase—this close—came so easily to my lips. Prescott had used it to threaten the pushy Fox News reporter.

I had also heard another federal agent use it — the wheezy fat man who had ripped into Prescott at the IHOP — to describe how near he’d been to nailing not just Janus but Guzmán, too.

This close. Maybe the phrase didn’t exactly mean what I thought it meant.

This close. It echoed in my mind. Presumptive, but not positive.

During my time topside with the spinal cord stimulator, the evidence techs had begun to mine a rich vein of skeletal material: splintered ribs; incinerated vertebrae; fractured long bones. By the time I rejoined them amid the wreckage, our five-gallon bucket — what I’d taken to calling our “special bucket”—was half filled with pieces of burned bone. As I studied the bucket’s contents, gently lifting and sifting my way downward, I was impressed by what they’d found — and fascinated by what they hadn’t. “Hmm,” I said. “So far, everything’s from the postcranial skeleton.”

Boatman handed me a singed scapula — the left shoulder blade. “The which?”

“Postcranial,” I said. “Below the skull. If we hadn’t found that tooth yesterday, I’d almost think he didn’t have a head. The headless horseman, but riding a plane instead of a horse.” Suddenly it hit me, and I let out a bark of startled laughter. “I’ll be damned,” I told the surprised agents. “Maybe he was headless.” Their puzzled expressions prompted me to explain. “When he hits — remember, he’s going four hundred miles an hour — he’s strapped in, right? So his body’s restrained, for a fraction of a second, by the harness. But his head isn’t restrained, and it snaps forward really, really hard. How many g’s did Maddox say the deceleration created?”

“Eighteen hundred.” The answer came from Kimball, not surprisingly.

“So if his head weighed ten or twelve pounds,” I mused, “then it would have jerked forward…” I did some mental math. “Jesus. With almost twenty thousand pounds of force.”

Kimball gave a low whistle. “That’s some serious traction.”

“I don’t know how much force it takes to pull the head clean off the spine,” I added. “We’ve never done that particular experiment at the Body Farm. But I’m guessing twenty thousand pounds would do it.” I redirected my gaze and began scanning a different area of the wreckage from where the vertebrae had been found. “I’m also guessing that we’ll find the skull — the pieces of it — somewhere up here, instead of down there.”

Straightening up from my crouch — I’d been stooped over the area where the vertebrae and scapula had been — I began examining the remnants of the instrument panel, the windshield, and the cockpit ceiling. The windshield itself had melted or burned away — it was plastic, not glass — but its misshapen framework remained: two rectangular openings, separated and reinforced by a stout central pillar. The pillar was bent and blackened and, down near its base, encrusted with a coating of black particles. The particles were bits of burned bone, I realized; more specifically, they were charred crumbles of skull, a few of them large enough to retain their distinctive, layered structure: hard outer and inner shells of dense bone, separated by a softer, spongy layer. My pulse racing, I leaned close and worked my way downward. A few inches below the base of the pillar — embedded in the glass-filled cavity of a shattered instrument — I spotted them: a handful of blackened pebbles. A handful of teeth. “Bingo,” I said softly, mainly to myself. Then, a moment later: “Can somebody hand me the tooth jar?”

“Here you go, Doc.”

Without even looking to see who’d said it, I reached back and took the container. I removed the lid and tucked it in one of my shirt pockets, then took a pair of forceps from the other pocket. One by one, I plucked teeth from their nest amid the shards of glass. They weren’t all there — only ten of them; the others must have been scattered or shattered by the impact — but four of the ten were enough to send my adrenaline soaring again. “Somebody wake up McCready,” I joked.

“He’s standing right there,” said Kimball, pointing up at the rim of the bluff.

I glanced up and saw McCready silhouetted against the sky. “Hey, Mac,” I called, “can you give me another lift?”

He leaned perilously over the edge. “You okay, Doc? What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine. Got something else to show you.” I tucked my find into my shirt pocket, sealing six of the teeth in the small jar, folding the other four into a piece of paper.

“Climb aboard. Holler when you’re set.”

The ERT techs steadied the corners of the rack as I positioned myself at the center. “All set — beam me up, Scotty!” McCready spun his finger at the crane operator, and once more I ascended, swung around to the side, and settled gently onto what I had come to think of as the landing pad. “You’re gonna like this,” I said. “I’m… positive.”

He raised his eyebrows as my double-entendre meaning sank in. “Whatcha got? Suicide note? Signed in blood — in an asbestos envelope?”

“How’d you guess?” I fished in my pocket. “Actually, no, but probably just as good.” I held out my hand, my fingers closed, then slowly opened them to reveal four teeth in my palm. “Check it out,” I said. “I found a bunch of teeth. More than this, but these four are really special.” With my pinky, I pointed to the first. “A canine. Dog tooth. The longest root of any tooth.”

McCready leaned in, studying the tooth. “Looks kinda gnarly. Twisted, almost.”

“Exactly — the root’s got a slight corkscrew curve. Very distinctive. I’ve never seen one quite like this before.”

He nodded. “So far, so good.”

“It gets better.” I pointed to a pair of teeth. “The upper central incisors — both of ’em.” I tapped my own, then touched the teeth in my palm again. “Look at that.”

“They’re chipped — the corners broken off. By the crash?”

“No. See how the edges of the breaks are rounded off? They’re worn. These teeth have been chipped for years. That picture Maddox showed us, of Janus grinning beside the jet? Look close and you’ll see these chipped teeth.”

McCready himself was now starting to smile. “This is good, right?”

“Good? It’s grrreeaat,” I responded, in my best Tony the Tiger imitation. “But I saved the best for last. The most interesting, anyhow. This one’s a maxillary third molar — a wisdom tooth. Upper right.” I opened my mouth and put the tip of my tongue in the hollow of my tooth to show him. “Iss whun,” I mumbled, tapping the outside of my cheek as well. “This one’s interesting in a couple of ways. First, it’s got a filling. That’s far more common in a lower molar, because food and saliva tend to collect there.” He nodded, but I could tell I was losing him, so I hurried on. “But the really cool thing about this tooth? This.” Plucking it carefully from my palm, I held it up, rotating it slowly to reveal the prize.

“Huh,” he said. “What’s that funny little knob on the side?”

“That,” I said triumphantly, “is a cusp of Carabelli.”

“A cusp of what?”

“Not what,” I corrected. “Who. Or whom. Whichever. A cusp of Carabelli, the guy who first studied ’em, back in the 1800s.”

“Oh, him,” McCready cracked. “Sure.”

“Carabelli was the royal dentist for one of the Hapsburg emperors,” I explained. “Carabelli’s cusp — also called Carabelli’s tubercle — is a prominent bump located on the lingual surface — the ‘tongue’ side of a tooth — instead of the biting surface. It’s found occasionally on first molars, rarely on second molars, and almost never on third molars.”

“So the fact that we’ve got one on a third molar…”

“Means we’ve got a slam dunk on the I.D.,” I finished. “If—if—it matches Janus’s dental records.” I gave him a pointed, interrogatory look.

He growled in exasperation. “Okay, okay, let me see if I can light a fire under that dentist.” He unholstered his cell phone and scrolled down the display, then pushed the “call” button. When the call was answered, he spoke in an official-sounding tone I’d never heard him use before. “This is Special Agent McCready of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I need to speak with Dr. Grant.”

Through the tiny speaker, I heard a woman’s tinny voice. “Sir, he’s with a patient. If you’ll give me your name and number—”

“Ma’am, listen closely. Are you listening? I need Dr. Grant to take his fingers out of that patient’s mouth, pick up the phone, and talk to me for sixty seconds. It’s a law-enforcement matter, and it’s quite urgent.” I saw his jaw muscles clench as she promised once more to relay a message. He cut her off. “Ma’am, I’ve spoken with you six times in the past three days, and all six times, you’ve told me he was with a patient, and you’ve assured me that he’d call me back as soon as he was free. So here’s the deal. If the patient he’s with right now is the president of the United States, then I’ll leave a message. But otherwise, I either speak with him in the next thirty seconds, or I file charges — against Dr. Grant, and against you—for obstruction of justice. So I suggest you lay down the phone and go explain the options to him, because that thirty seconds? It starts… right… now.” He took the phone away from his ear and pressed it to his shoulder, shaking his head and muttering, “Why do some people go out of their way to make things difficult?” He put the phone back up to his ear, and a few seconds later, his eyes narrowed. “Dr. Grant, at last. Special Agent McCready, FBI.… Yes, you must have the world’s busiest dental practice.… You’re in the Medical Arts Building on Broadway, is that right?… Uh-huh. As I believe I indicated in my prior phone calls — my six prior phone calls — we need the dental records of one of your patients, Richard Janus, and we need ’em day before yesterday. So here’s what’s about to happen, Dr. Grant. In ten minutes, an FBI agent will arrive at your office. He’ll have a subpoena in one hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other. If he doesn’t leave with those records, he leaves with you. Your choice. Do I make myself clear, Dr. Grant?” He listened for a moment more. “Thank you, Dr. Grant. You’re making a wise choice.” He snapped the phone shut with a grim smile, then gave another growl.

Thirty minutes later, as I was plucking blackened shards of bone from the aircraft wreckage once more, I heard the now-familiar whop-whop-whop of helicopter blades approaching. “Criminy,” said Kimball. “Are we working a restricted crash site here, or is this now the approach to LAX?”

I looked up, expecting to see the television chopper again, the new crew waving a Freedom of the Press banner or wielding some sort of injunction giving them permission to ignore the airspace restriction. But instead of the colorful Fox 5 logo, I saw only glossy black paint.

“That must be one of ours,” said Kimball. “No markings.”

A moment later, his guess was confirmed when McCready radioed down, asking for me to come up. “Prescott’s here with the dental records,” Kimball told me.

By the time Kimball finished the sentence, I was already clambering aboard the platform for the ride up.

“Good work,” said Prescott, looking up from the teeth cradled in his palm — the corkscrew canine, the chipped incisors, and the molar with the cusp of Carabelli on the side. “So now we’re positive.”

“Looks like it,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘looks like it’? It’s his plane, his battery-powered spine, and his weird teeth.” He pointed at the molar. “So tell me, what are the chances that this molar, with this bump on the side, came from somebody other than Richard Janus?”

“Oh, virtually zero,” I said. “One in a million, probably.”

He nodded. “And what are the chances that all four of these teeth — which match his dental records perfectly — came from someone else?”

“So small, I don’t even know how to say it. One in many billions.”

“But you don’t sound certain.”

“I am,” I said. “It’s just…”

“Just what, Doc?” I’d heard irritation in Prescott’s voice before, so I recognized when I heard it again now.

“It’d be good to confirm it with some soft-tissue DNA,” I told him. “Just to be absolutely certain.”

Prescott glanced at McCready, eyebrows raised. McCready gave a slight shake of his head. P rescott glared at me again. “McCready says the guy’s a crispy critter. Is he telling me wrong?”

“No.”

Prescott was like a dog gnawing a bone, but the bone was me. “Have you got some soft tissue from this guy, Dr. Brockton?”

“Not so far.”

“Are you expecting any, Dr. Brockton?”

“Well, no.”

Prescott raised his hands, as if he were Christ on the cross. “Look, no offense”—a phrase that was nearly always followed by offensive words—“but we’re not living in a perfect world here, or working in some ivory-tower laboratory. We’re at a crime scene that’s one hell of a challenge, and we’ve found multiple bases for identification. Without soft tissue — or some magical video that shows Richard Janus actually steering the plane into the mountainside — this seems about as positive an I.D. as we’re gonna get.”

“You’re probably right,” I conceded.

“Thank you,” he said. “I said it before and I’ll say it again: I appreciate your contribution. And now I’m calling the boss.” Prescott raised his phone, found a number, and pressed “call.” “I’m up at the Janus crash site,” he said. “With the dental records. We’ve got a solid match — it’s a positive I.D.… Dr. Brockton, the anthropologist, just walked me through it. It’s solid, sir. Very solid. We’ve got several teeth with very distinctive features. Any one of them would be enough, says Brockton; cumulatively, it’s beyond question. There’s more, too. We’ve also recovered an orthopedic device that Janus had implanted a few years ago.” He listened, nodding. “We can be ready whenever. You want us to brief the widow first?… Yes, sir, I agree. But I think we should do them back to back: give her the news first, then — bam! — straight to the press conference. We don’t want her to get out ahead of us and spin it. We need to be the ones shaping the story.… Yes, sir, we’ll be ready.… Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”

He clicked the phone shut, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

McCready raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like the SAC is keeping a close eye on this one,” he said.

“What’s the SAC?” I butted in.

“Special agent in charge,” he explained. “Head of the field office. The boss.”

“Yes and no,” said Prescott. He no longer sounded irritated. In fact, the smile on his face was growing broader by the second.

McCready frowned. “Huh?”

“Yes and no,” Prescott repeated. “It was the boss. But not the SAC.” His smile widened.

“Then who?” asked McCready. He stared at Prescott, who was now grinning like a Cheshire cat. “Wait — are you kidding me?” McCready shook his head in seeming disbelief. “Whoa,” he said. “That’s major.”

“So who was it?” I looked from one to the other, feeling clueless and stupid.

Finally Prescott took pity on me. “Who gave you a ride out here?”

I pointed at McCready. “Duh. He did.”

Prescott shook his head. “Who gave you and Mac a ride? Who let you borrow his ride?”

I furrowed my brow at him, still playing catch-up. “His ride? You mean the jet — the Gulfstream?” Finally I got it. “Are you telling me that was the director — the director of the FBI — on the phone just now?” I felt myself starting to smile, too. “Whoa,” I said. “That is major.”

Chapter 15

As the afternoon wore on, we continued picking our way through the crumpled shell of the cockpit and instrument panel — a mixed-media collage of burned wires, melted knobs, shattered glass, splintered circuit boards. We found a few more shards of bone and a handful more teeth — including the other chipped incisor, which brought our total to twenty-nine of the thirty-two teeth.

Tangled amid the wiring, I came upon a pendant on a thin steel chain, the clasp still fastened around a throat that wasn’t there. A neckless necklace, I thought ironically. At first glance, the pendant appeared to be a cross. Looking closer, I saw that the lower end had small tailfins; the pendant was an airplane, suspended from its nose in a perpetual climb. But when I rubbed it against the leg of my pants to remove the soot, I noticed that it was engraved — not with initials or an inscription, but with an etched outline of Jesus: an aeronautical crucifix; Christ on a flying cross. I held it in my palm as Kimball photographed it in detail, then I slipped it into my pocket, to give to McCready. We’d found a set of keys earlier, a charred cell phone, and the mangled remains of a stainless-steel wristwatch. The pendant, though, was the only truly personal effect we’d found, and I hoped McCready would give it to Janus’s widow. What had it meant to him, I wondered: an emblem that melded elements of work and worship, worn around the neck of a man who seemed equal parts humanitarian and drug smuggler? A man is a mass of contradictions, I thought — a well-worn quotation, but no one had ever embodied it better than Richard Janus, I suspected — up until the split second he no longer embodied anything at all.

By now we were mining the lowest layer of wreckage — the floorpan of our excavation, down in the land of diminishing returns — and bit by bit, piece by piece, I began to smell the metaphorical barn. Finally we reached the aircraft’s nose, its outer skin, which was molded to the contours of the bluff almost as closely as human flesh adheres to cheekbones, forehead, jaws. “Okay, fellas,” I said, straightening up and twisting — left, right, left — to wring the kinks from my back. “Anything we haven’t found by now is either decimated or incinerated. Or both. I think I smell the barn. Or maybe it’s just us.” My announcement was greeted by a chorus of grateful sighs and weary cheers. I stepped back and took a critical look at the nose, the last large piece of wreckage to go up. “This is gonna be tough to get onto the platform,” I said. “Take some finagling to work it through those cables.”

“How ’bout we just hang it underneath?” suggested Boatman.

“Be easier — more stable, anyhow — if we took the platform off altogether,” said Kimball. “Fasten it right to the cable.” He explained how he would do it, pointing and motioning to show places he could attach straps to the piece, and everyone agreed that the plan made sense. Kimball made a solo trip topside to unhook and park the platform. Ten minutes later he rappelled back down, followed by the crane’s steel cable, the big U-shaped shackle dangling from the line like a giant fishing hook.

Kimball had brought down a half-dozen neon-hued nylon straps, which he began threading around and through the flattened nose cone. As he bent over the mangled metal, tugging and tussling to work a strap beneath the bottom edge, he paused. “Hey, Doc. Got another one for you. A stray.” He reached a thumb and forefinger beneath the jagged edge of metal and plucked a small object from a recess in the rock. I held out my hand, palm upturned, and into it Kimball dropped the object: a tooth, one that had been snapped off at the gum line. I stared, blinked hard, stared again.

“Doc? What’s up? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I think maybe I have,” I said. “It’s an incisor. An upper central.” I tapped my front teeth.

Kimball’s brow furrowed. “Huh? I thought we already found both of those.”

“We did.” I studied the faces of Kimball and the other agents as they leaned in for a better look. “This is a third one. From a second person.”

“You’re kidding, right?” said McCready when I radioed him about the find. I heard him mutter to someone, “Brockton says he’s found another tooth — from another person, not Janus.” In the background, I heard what seemed to be a string of garbled expletives; I couldn’t quite make out the words, but I recognized the voice. “Maddox says, with all due respect, that your head appears to be inserted into one of your lower orifices,” McCready said. “No offense, but I’m with Maddox on this — it can’t be from somebody else.”

“Maybe it can’t,” I told him. “But it is.”

“We’re still short three of Janus’s teeth,” he persisted. “It’s gotta be one of those.”

“It’s an incisor, Mac. Upper central. We’ve already got those, remember? Both of them chipped. Just like in the photos and the dental records.”

“Then it’s a lateral incisor. Or a lower. Or a canine.”

“Those are all accounted for, too,” I said. “All we’re missing from Janus are two molars and one bicuspid. Besides, this is—trust me — an incisor.”

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“I’d stake my life on it. Yours, too.” I turned the tooth over in my palm. “That’s not all. This tooth is from a Mongoloid.”

The radio went silent for a moment, then he said, “You’re telling me there was a mentally retarded person on that plane with him?”

“No, no,” I clarified. “Sorry, that’s anthropologist lingo. Mongoloid, as in ‘descended from ancient inhabitants of Mongolia.’ Mongoloid, as opposed to Caucasoid or Negroid. Mongoloid, as in Asian or Native American.”

“Sit tight,” he said. “I’m coming down.”

Five minutes later, the rappelling rope twitched and seethed as a grim-faced McCready descended from on high. Without a word, I handed him the tooth — a far less celebratory echo of the way I’d jubilantly turned over the first tooth. This time he did not smile; instead, he took it and stared at it — glared at it — as if it had done him a grievous wrong. Finally he looked up, frowning and sighing. “Well, I’m no dentist,” he said, “but yeah, even I can tell it’s not a molar or bicuspid. But what makes you say it’s Asian or Native American?”

I plucked the tooth from his palm and turned it edgewise to show him the biting surface. “See how curved the edge is? And how the back of the tooth is scooped out?” He took it back and gave it a close look. “It’s called a shovel-shaped incisor,” I explained. “Unique to Mongoloid peoples. And this is a textbook example.”

He nodded in acknowledgment, but the nod was followed by a baffled head shake. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Up to now, we’ve got nothing but white-guy teeth and white-guy bits — specifically, Richard Janus bits.” He gestured at the last remnants of wreckage: shards of instrument-panel glass; bundles of burned wire; control levers and pedals; the empty, mangled framework of the windshield; the crushed cone of the nose. “We’re all but done. How can we just now — just as the buzzer’s sounding — find the very first sign of Running Bear or Miguel or whoever the hell this is?”

“Dunno,” I said. Then I realized that I was a half step behind him. “You’re right, it makes no sense. How could anybody be deeper in the debris than the pilot?” My mind began to race. “Maybe…” Bending down, I tugged at the piece, as Kimball had just begun to do when he’d spotted the tooth. “Maybe,” I grunted, “he’s not in the debris. Maybe he’s under the debris.”

“Come again?”

“Maybe he was already here when the plane hit.”

“What are you saying, Doc? You think there’s an old Indian skeleton under here?”

A flicker of movement caught my eye — an iridescent, blue-green flicker, almost like the dot of a laser pointer in midair, just above the edge of the flattened metal — and I felt a rush, as if someone had just injected pure adrenaline into an artery. “No,” I said, pointing at the iridescent dot. “See that? That’s a blowfly. Blowflies aren’t attracted to old skeletons; they go for ripe, juicy carcasses. I’m thinking we’ve got a fairly fresh body under here.”

“What? How?”

“Dunno,” I said again, this time with considerably more excitement. “Who would be up here? A hiker? A hunter?” Suddenly it hit me. “A border jumper. We’re only two miles from Mexico. Maybe it’s somebody who died after sneaking across the border.”

McCready considered this. “Seems like a stretch. A lot of ’em die crossing the desert in Arizona. Dehydration — some of ’em end up walking a hundred miles or more before they keel over. But five miles from Tijuana and the outskirts of San Diego?”

I looked up at the bluff. “Not dehydration. Trauma. A fall — maybe in the dark. If he fell from up there and landed on his head, his skull would’ve burst like a melon.”

McCready looked dubious. “So Miguel here takes a nosedive, and then — a day or a week or a month later — our guy Janus just happens to pile on? Exact same spot? Sounds unlikely to me.”

It sounded unlikely to me, too. But that scenario was only a fraction as unlikely as the death scene we uncovered ten minutes later, when Kimball finished the rigging and the crane peeled the aircraft’s nose from the face of the rock.

“Holy shit,” McCready breathed.

I looked around. “Where’s the camera?” I demanded. “We gotta have pictures. Otherwise nobody will ever believe this.”

I needn’t have said it. Kimball was already snapping pictures. As the camera click click clicked, behind me and beside me, images of the tableau began etching themselves indelibly on my mind: the hunched, crouching position of the flattened man; the arms, flung upward in a frantic, futile attempt at self-preservation; inches above the bones of his hands, the head and forelegs of a mountain lion, caught in midair, crushed against the rock. Shielded from the worst of the fire by a layer of aluminum, these two corpses — man and beast; prey and predator — had escaped the incineration that had consumed the fragmented remains of Richard Janus.

I had worked a few other death scenes that had preserved, with freeze-frame precision, the drama of the deaths. I’d uncovered one of those in the rubble of a house that had burned near the Tennessee-Virginia border four years before, in the spring of 2000. Deep in the smoldering basement, seared to the concrete slab, I’d found the bones of a man’s pelvis and legs — and, oddly, only his pelvis and legs. Thirty minutes later, and ten feet away, I found the rest of his skeleton — his skull, spine, and arms — as well as a nickel-sized disk of melted lead pooled beside the vertebrae. The man had been shot first, I realized, then blasted in half by dynamite, in an attempt to destroy the body. When that had failed — it’s actually quite difficult to destroy a body — the killer had finally torched the house, hoping to make the death look accidental. He might have had a better chance of getting away with it if he’d reunited the two halves of the corpse… and if he’d removed the bullet from the dead man’s spine. Fortunately for our side, most killers aren’t geniuses.

My thoughts flashed back to ancient Pompeii, where an entire city had been entombed in volcanic ash: people lying side by side in bed, or sitting on their doorsteps; even dogs dying on their backs, pawing at the choking air. Then my mind took me back even further — nearly three thousand years back, to ancient Persia, where an invading army sacked and burned a citadel called Hasanlu. As the fire raged around the warriors, the citadel’s main tower collapsed, toppling onto a stairway, flattening three soldiers in midstride as they ran for their lives. Two of them were side by side; the third man — slightly faster, and forever a few feet ahead — carried a large, ornate vase of pure gold. He clutched the vase — a death grip, in the most literal sense — for thirty centuries, as armies and empires and religions rose and fell above him, just as Hasanlu itself had arisen and flourished, then fallen and vanished. In the end, the gold vase was wrested from the soldier’s grasp, not by a pursuing warrior, but by an invader of a very different sort: a scrawny, twentieth-century American archaeologist, armed only with a trowel and a camera — a man who was every bit as astonished by the transaction as the skeletal soldier himself would have been.

Motionless on the California mountainside — part of the tableau myself, though only temporarily — I stared at the dead predator, then at the intended prey. “Lucky guy,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Kimball. “He was real lucky.”

I smiled. I hadn’t meant the dead man. I’d meant myself, for having lived to see such a thing. So very unlikely. So very dreadful. So very beautiful.

My bubble of gratitude burst a moment later, when McCready added, “Prescott is gonna hate this.”

Chapter 16

As I stepped through the green-glass door and into the green-glass lobby of San Diego’s federal courthouse, I had the odd sensation of plunging into an aquarium, surrounded on all sides by glossy walls, through which I could see brightly lit people outside in the open air, some of them peering through the glass at the submerged specimens. After days in the windswept wilderness atop Otay Mountain, being downtown and indoors was doubly disorienting. The tie I’d cinched around my neck felt more like a noose than a fashion accessory.

The FBI had scheduled a noon press conference at the courthouse to report the positive identification of Richard Janus’s body. The plan was straightforward: As the case agent, Prescott would make a brief statement, then hand the microphone to Maddox, the NTSB investigator, to summarize his preliminary crash findings; after that, I would explain the specifics of the identification. It was a no-nonsense, tightly scripted affair, one that would answer a few basic questions but leave others hanging, cloaked in the mystery of an ongoing investigation.

The media briefing would be Act Two, though. Before that, we had to get through Act One, a private briefing for Richard Janus’s widow. Prescott led Maddox and me into a conference room outfitted with thick carpet, warm paneling, and heavy drapes. Inside, at a large oak table, sat Carmelita Janus, flanked by a dark-suited man who looked to be a lawyer, and a woman who Prescott had told me was an FBI victim specialist.

Even in grief, Mrs. Janus was striking. I’d noticed it from a distance the day she’d stepped out of the helicopter, hair swirling in the rotor wash; I noticed it even more now, sitting four feet across a table from her. A black-haired, brown-eyed, olive-skinned beauty, she came from an aristocratic family in Mexico. I’d seen dozens of pictures of her in Airlift Relief’s newsletters — clad in cargo pants and a sweaty T-shirt, helping unload medical supplies and food for earthquake survivors in Peru; draped in a designer gown, mingling with celebrities at a Hollywood fund-raiser; wearing stained mechanic’s coveralls and wielding a wrench, helping Richard change the oil in a DC-3—and none of the pictures was unflattering. For this meeting, she wore a simple black dress, with a single strand of pearls around her neck. Her eyes were red-rimmed and weary-looking, but glittering with anger as well.

I had expected Prescott to make introductions, but the lawyer-looking guy spoke first. “I’m Martin Janus, Richard’s brother and attorney and executor. I’m here today in that capacity, but also, primarily, as counsel for Mrs. Janus. Just so we’re clear, we won’t be answering any questions today, so don’t waste your time asking. This whole series of events has been unimaginably traumatic. The FBI’s heavy-handed tactics and intimidation drove a good man — a dedicated humanitarian — to his death.” I glanced at Prescott; I suspected this had something to do with the FBI’s operation and with the interagency pissing contest, and I felt sure that Prescott knew exactly what the man meant. But if so, he hid his knowledge well, for his face was a chiseled mask, devoid of expression. “We appreciate the chance to hear what you’ll be releasing to the press. More advance notice would have been considerate, of course. But better to hear it face-to-face than on television. So. Tell us what to expect.” Having finished his curt speech, he sat back in his chair, laying a hand over one of Mrs. Janus’s and giving a quick, reassuring squeeze.

Prescott ignored the attorney, focusing entirely on the widow. “Mrs. Janus,” he began, his tone matter-of-fact, “these gentlemen are experts who are assisting us with the crash investigation.” He gestured first toward me. “This is Dr. Bill Brockton, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Tennessee. He’s an expert on skeletal trauma and human identification.” I half nodded, half bowed, conveying what I hoped was both professionalism and sympathy. Her eyes searched mine, as if trying to read my findings there, but Prescott kept going. “And this is Mr. Patrick Maddox, a crash investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board. Mr. Maddox has been analyzing the accident site, the aircraft debris, radio communications, and the plane’s flight path from the time it took off until the time it crashed.”

Maddox also nodded; Mrs. Janus’s eyes seemed to be searching his face — as if she were trying to place him from some prior meeting that she couldn’t quite recall — but then Prescott barreled ahead and her attention returned to him. “As you know, Mrs. Janus, we’ve not yet completed our investigation — of the crash or of your husband’s activities. But we have positively identified his remains in the aircraft wreckage, and we wanted to share that as soon as possible with you.”

One of her eyebrows arched upward cynically. “With me? Or with the media?”

Prescott ignored the jab. “As you know, from the media coverage and from your own visit to the crash site, the aircraft was almost completely destroyed by the impact and the fire. That made identifying your husband’s remains challenging. That’s why we brought in Dr. Brockton — he’s one of the country’s leading identification experts.”

She looked at me with what appeared to be a mixture of pain and doubt. “So Richard’s body was badly burned? ‘Burned beyond recognition,’ is that how you people say it?”

This wasn’t going to be easy, I realized. “Actually, Mrs. Janus, there was no body — not an intact one. There’s no delicate way to put this, I’m afraid, and I’m sorry about that. Your husband’s body was severely fragmented by the force of the impact. Fragmented and incinerated. Again, my apologies for being so blunt.”

Her gaze didn’t waver. “You’re saying that all you found were burned bits and pieces of him?” I winced, then nodded reluctantly. “Then how can you be sure it’s Richard? Have you done DNA testing?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “DNA tends to be destroyed by fire, although it’s possible we could find some in the teeth.” I touched the side of my jaw. “The molars can sometimes protect the DNA, if the fire’s not too hot. But the best way to make an identification in a case like this — the fastest and most reliable way — is to match the teeth to dental records.” I slid a manila folder across the table to her. “We’ve recovered almost all the teeth, and several of them had very distinctive features, which we were able to match to x-rays and photographs.” She opened the chart and looked at the top image — a close-up of the chipped incisors we’d found — and then flipped to the second photo. When she saw it, she flinched, and I mentally kicked myself for not having warned her about the photo. It was an eight-by-ten enlargement of her husband’s smiling face, his lips parted in a broad, boyish grin, red arrows pointing to the chips in the central incisors. Like seeing a ghost, I thought, flushing at my insensitivity. An annotated ghost. Regaining her composure, she leafed more guardedly through the remaining images: more close-ups of teeth — the corkscrew-root canine and the Carabelli-cusp molar — followed by dental charts and x-rays. She paused when she came to a photo that showed a tangle of burned wires and circuitry. “That’s a spinal cord stimulator,” I told her, “or what’s left of it. According to your husband’s medical records, he had it implanted three years ago. To help alleviate back pain.”

“I am aware of why he had it implanted.”

Her rebuke was subtle, but it was there. And it was probably justified. She looked up at me, so I went on. “The next page is a copy of the spinal x-ray he had taken after the surgery. You can see the electrical leads going into the spine; the impulse generator was implanted just under the skin on his left hip.”

“I know where it was implanted,” she said — another rebuke — still studying the x-ray. “And you found this in his body?”

“Well,” I said, somewhat off balance, “as I mentioned, the body was… not intact. But yes, when we removed the frame of the pilot’s seat, we found the device with the bones of the pelvis and the spine. The teeth are really the basis for the positive identification of your husband’s remains; the spinal cord stimulator is just added corroboration.” I expected her to ask more questions, but she gave a brief nod, closed the folder, and slid it aside to her brother-in-law. Prescott nudged me and nodded, so I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a small envelope. I had expected him to do this part, but he’d demurred, delegating it to me. “We also found this,” I said, handing her the envelope. “I think I’ve seen it in pictures of Richard. In the newsletter.”

“The newsletter?”

“Yes, ma’am. My wife and I are… We’re on the Airlift Relief mailing list.”

“I see,” she said, her tone neutral and her expression unreadable. As she turned the envelope to raise the flap, the chain inside shifted and slid, rasping softly. As she opened the envelope and tipped the pendant into her palm, she gasped and seemed on the verge of a sob, but she squelched it — fought it back might be more accurate — as if she felt it important not to reveal any weakness or emotion to us.

After a few moments of awkward silence, Prescott cleared his throat to get her attention. “Mrs. Janus, there’s something else we wanted to let you know before the media briefing,” he said. “In addition to your husband, we found the remains of another person at the crash site.”

Her eyes widened, and she clutched at her brother-in-law’s hand, the tendons in her hand pulled taut as bowstrings, a spiderwork of ropy blue veins crisscrossing above them. “Who?”

“We don’t know his name yet,” Prescott told her. “But we believe he was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. Apparently—”

She cut in. “But who was he? What was he doing on the plane?”

“He wasn’t on it,” he said, and she looked baffled — as baffled as I had felt the day before, when we’d found the bodies of the man and the mountain lion. “Apparently he was on the ground when the plane hit,” Prescott explained. “Wrong place, wrong time. We think he’d crossed the border recently — possibly even the night of the crash. If Dr. Brockton is correct, the man took a fall in the dark and was lying there, injured, when the plane hit.”

“My God,” she breathed. “That poor man.” Oddly, she seemed more upset by this stranger’s death than by her husband’s. I remembered Prescott’s questions about Richard’s life insurance policy, and for the first time I found myself wondering if she might have had something to do with her husband’s death. Was she unhappy in the marriage? Could she — a Mexican, after all — be the real link to the drug lord Guzmán? I felt her eyes on me, and I realized that I was staring at her intently. I flushed, hoping she wasn’t able to read my suspicious thoughts. After a moment, she turned back to Prescott. “Are you sure that this other man’s death was just a coincidence?”

“Not a hundred percent,” Prescott conceded. “But it’s the best explanation for what we found. I’ll let Dr. Brockton explain it in more detail.”

She looked at me again, her face neutral and masklike now. Opening a second manila folder, I pulled out four photos and slid them across the table to her. “The picture on top shows the wreckage of the aircraft’s nose. The nose hit first, obviously, so it was the last layer we got to as we excavated down through the debris.” Her eyes flicked rapidly across the image, scanning and then lingering, scanning and then lingering, and I wondered if she was searching the image for traces of her husband’s remains. When she looked up, I continued. “The next picture shows what we found underneath the nose — crushed between the nose and the rock face of the mountainside.” She flipped to the second photo. As she studied the image, her eyes narrowed, and I could tell that in spite of herself, she, too, was fascinated by the grim tableau. “As you can see, the man wasn’t alone on the mountainside when the plane hit. There was a mountain lion just above him — in the act of pouncing on him, as best we can tell — at the moment of impact. It’s like a freeze-frame image of the moment they died.” She shook her head slightly — not in doubt, I sensed, but in wonder. “The last two pictures are close-ups. As you can see from those, the man and the mountain lion were crushed directly against the mountainside — frankly, if you’ll forgive my bluntness once more, we had to scrape them off the rocks. That tells us they were definitely outside the plane, not inside.”

I was about to launch into more detail when I felt Prescott’s foot nudging me under the table, and he smoothly took the reins from me. “Obviously this was not the focus of our work up there, Mrs. Janus — far from it, but it’s the sort of thing the media is likely to play up, so we wanted to make sure you knew about it.”

Instead of acknowledging this, she turned to the NTSB investigator. “Mr. Maddox, I have two questions for you. First, was my husband’s crash an accident, suicide, or murder?”

Maddox blinked. “Well… I’m not sure we can answer that question. I can’t, at any rate.” He shot a quick look at Prescott, but Prescott ignored him, so he went on. “What I can do is tell you that I’ve seen no evidence of mechanical or structural failure, sabotage, explosives, or anything remotely suggesting an attack on the aircraft. I’ve also seen no signs that your husband ever lost control.” He seemed to shift gears — to take a step back into “briefing” mode — and continued, sounding more at ease. “He took off normally, made a climbing turn, changed course, and then leveled off. All those maneuvers were smoothly executed.” Maddox, too, had brought a folder of visuals to the meeting, but unlike me, he doled out the images one by one instead of giving her the whole set at once. “These are diagrams showing the aircraft’s radar track and altitude, from just after takeoff until the moment of impact.” He slid the first image across the table to her. “This one shows the radar track, superimposed on a map of Brown Field and the surrounding area. The red arrows indicate significant events in the flight, as well as the time they occurred. As you can see, the radar picks up the aircraft almost immediately after takeoff. It flies northeast for three miles — about sixty seconds. Then, over Otay Lake, it turns south, toward Mexico, shortly before leveling off. It continues south for another thirty seconds, the remainder of the flight.” She looked up, her face grim but expectant, and he slid the next page across the table. “This second diagram plots the aircraft’s altitude against the profile of the terrain. As you can see, a mile from the summit, the plane levels off at thirty-three hundred feet”—he reached across the table and, with the tip of a pen, indicated a spot on the line—“but the terrain continues rising steeply. So on that particular course, at that altitude, the collision was inevitable.” He waved the pen over the pair of diagrams, as if it were a wand, conjuring up the plane’s final moments. “Taken together, these indicate that the aircraft was in controlled flight the entire time. Again, nothing wrong with the plane, as far as we can tell at this point. Nothing obviously wrong with the pilot, either, judging from the flight path — no indications that he suffered a heart attack or seizure or stroke.” He paused briefly, then asked, “Are you aware of any medical problems that might have incapacitated him?”

“No. Richard was a strong and healthy man.”

Maddox nodded. “Let me go back to the question I said I couldn’t answer. Without any radio communications or other information that would shed light, I can’t say whether he hit the mountain accidentally or intentionally. On the one hand — the ‘accident’ hand — there’s no lights on that mountain, so even though it’s big, it’s almost invisible on a moonless night, especially if there’s any haze — and there was some haze that night. If he didn’t have a terrain warning alert on his GPS system, or if he hadn’t studied the aviation sectional chart closely — and frankly, the peak altitude of that mountain is printed in very small type — he might not have realized he was headed straight for it.” He paused, gave a pained frown. “On the other hand — the ‘intentional’ hand; the ‘suicide’ hand — if he did intend to take his life, he flew that plane in a way that would guarantee the outcome. And would minimize the risk of killing or injuring anyone else.”

“But he did,” she said. “He did kill someone else.”

“One-in-a-million odds,” Maddox replied. “One in a billion.”

To my surprise, she gave a small, ironic smile. “Not much comfort to that unlucky one.”

“No, ma’am, I suppose not.” A long silence ensued. Finally he prompted, “Did you have another question for me, Mrs. Janus?” She looked puzzled. “You said you had two questions for me. The first was whether it was murder, an accident, or suicide. Is there something else you’d like to ask me?”

“Ah. Yes. Was my husband’s death painful?”

Maddox shook his head emphatically. “No, ma’am. As I say, that mountain’s essentially invisible. He might not have seen it till the last second; maybe not at all. And at that speed — four hundred miles an hour — he would have died instantly. A millisecond. Less than the blink of an eye.”

She shifted her attention to me. “Dr. Brockton? Do you agree?”

“Absolutely,” I assured her. “He didn’t feel a thing.” I believed — and I prayed — that it was the truth.

Prescott had scheduled the press conference for the building’s largest courtroom. Even so, it was jammed. A forest of camera tripods had sprung up around the perimeter and in the aisles, and nearly every seat was taken. On the cameras, as Prescott led Maddox and me to a podium in front of the judge’s bench, I saw logos for CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, E! and a dozen other cable networks and local stations.

“Good afternoon,” Prescott began briskly. “I’m Special Agent Miles Prescott of the FBI’s San Diego field office. With me are Mr. Patrick Maddox, a crash investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board, and Dr. William Brockton, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Tennessee. Mr. Maddox and Dr. Brockton will brief you on their findings, but before I turn the podium over to them, I’ll start by confirming that we have positively identified the remains of Richard Janus. Mr. Janus was the pilot of the jet that crashed the morning of June 19. He did indeed die in the crash, and he was the only person aboard the aircraft.”

The reporters shouted questions, but Prescott motioned for silence. “Please hold your questions until the end.” He then summoned Maddox to the podium to reprise what he’d told Mrs. Janus, and once Maddox was done, he brought me up to do the same. After I’d finished, Prescott opened the floor for questions. Maddox swiftly dispensed with the idea that the plane had been shot down or sabotaged or bombed, as well as the suggestion that Janus had lost control of the aircraft, and then I answered a few basic questions: yes, I was confident that teeth were as reliable as DNA for purposes of identification; no, I didn’t think DNA testing would be possible, though we would certainly give it a try; yes, it was true that I ran a facility called the Body Farm, where corpses were allowed to rot in the name of research.

Then Prescott himself asked a question — one that he’d told me to expect, asking me to save my final images until he gave me the go-ahead. “Dr. Brockton,” he said, “did you find anything noteworthy at the crash site besides the remains of Richard Janus?” I raised my eyebrows inquiringly, to make sure I understood his cue correctly, and he gave a slight nod.

“Noteworthy? Yes,” I said. “In fact, I’d say it was quite remarkable. Under the wreckage, crushed by the nose of the plane, we found the body of another man — a Mexican immigrant, as best we can tell. We also found the body of a mountain lion, which appeared to be pouncing on the man at the moment of the crash.” The end of my sentence was nearly drowned out by a chorus of gasps, exclamations, and questions as I flashed the image of the two carcasses flattened against the rocks. If Prescott had intended to create a stir, his strategy had succeeded in spades. Catching my eye, he pointed to the screen and spun an index finger in a go-ahead signal. I clicked forward to the close-ups, and the room buzzed again. When the buzz subsided, I described in more detail how we’d found them — man and beast — plastered to the bluff’s bare rock, and how the insect activity confirmed the freshness of their deaths.

After a barrage of questions, Prescott returned to the podium, checked his watch conspicuously, and began winding things down. I was admiring his media-management savvy — if he’d scripted the entire event, it couldn’t have gone more smoothly — when a voice from the back of the room interrupted brashly. “What about the FBI’s arrest warrant for Richard Janus?” Everyone, including Prescott, suddenly sought the speaker. The crowd parted slightly as a young reporter — the reporter the FBI agents had frog-marched to the TV news helicopter a few days before — stepped into the center aisle. “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News,” he announced. Prescott raised both hands, pointed to the rear corners of the room — corners where two FBI agents were standing — and then aimed both fingers at Malloy. “My sources tell me the FBI was planning to arrest Richard Janus the night he died,” Malloy shouted over the din. “What role did the FBI play in Richard Janus’s flight, and his crash? Did the FBI drive him to suicide?” By now the two agents had muscled through the crowd and taken hold of Malloy’s elbows. But the damage was done: half a dozen television cameras had swiveled toward the reporter and recorded the dramatic turn of events, and Prescott — his jaw clenched, a large vein at his forehead standing out like a purple tree root — gestured to the agents to release the reporter.

Prescott gave the microphone three quick, attention-getting taps — taps so hard, they popped like gunshots. “As most of you know,” he said, “we have a policy of not commenting on open criminal investigations. But in view of the inflammatory, irresponsible nature of the question, I will respond briefly.” The crowd fell silent. “We have no indication that Richard Janus meant to commit suicide. In fact, we believe he was attempting to flee to Mexico. As you’ve heard, he had filed a flight plan to Las Vegas, Nevada. Almost immediately after takeoff, though, he changed course, turning directly toward Mexico. He was less than two miles from the border when the aircraft struck the peak of Otay Mountain. A hundred feet higher and twenty seconds more, and he’d have made it.” Again the room buzzed; again Prescott signaled for quiet, waiting for quite a while before he got it. “The night of his death, we were indeed preparing to take him into custody, on charges of drug trafficking and money laundering, among others. Behind the façade of a humanitarian organization, Richard Janus was a drug trafficker. He faced multiple felony charges; he faced millions of dollars in fines — and life behind bars.” Over the din of shouted questions and whirring cameras, Prescott raised his voice one more time. “That concludes this briefing. No more questions.” He stepped away from the podium, beckoned curtly to Maddox and me, and led us toward the side door.

We were followed by a hail of questions about the criminal allegations — amid the din, I heard the words “cocaine” and “DEA” and “cartel” and “Guzmán”—but Prescott paid no attention. As he opened the door, I glanced back at the clamoring throng, and suddenly I caught sight of a familiar face at the edge of the crowd — a face that looked oddly out of place in the scrum of scrubbed young journalists. The face belonged to a man who was fat and aging; even from a distance, his reddish-gray hair and sallow skin looked unkempt, unclean, and greasy. And somehow, over the noise of the crowd, I heard — or imagined I heard — a moist, whispering sound: the sound of labored breath, wheezing in and out of a mountain of flesh.

It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I froze. A moment later, I felt Prescott’s hand on my elbow, leading me out of the room. Ten minutes later, still shaky, I was in a black Suburban, with one of the younger agents driving me to the airport. This time the airport was San Diego International, not Brown Field; this time my ride wouldn’t be the FBI director’s sleek Gulfstream, but a cattle-car commercial airliner — one where I’d been assigned a middle seat in the last row.

But it didn’t matter. I’d done my job, as Kathleen had urged me to do, and I was finished.

I was headed home.

Home to Kathleen.