The Breaking Point

Chapter 37

My return to San Diego, six weeks after my first visit, felt like a low-rent case of déjà vu: Instead of landing in a posh Gulfstream V, I thumped down in a weather-beaten 737, my knees bruised by the seatback ahead of me, my elbows chafed by the men seated on either side of me, their rolls of fat spilling over the armrests and into my personal space.

Thirty minutes after landing, I was in a helicopter once more, headed back to Otay Mountain. This time, though, instead of the combat-grade Bell 205 from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, I strapped myself into a civilian chopper whose cockpit appeared to have both the shape and the structural strength of an eggshell. The craft offered seating for four people, but horsepower for only two. With three adults and one suitcase aboard, the thing hesitated, as if considering whether to lift off or simply sit and tremble on the tarmac. Finally, with funereal slowness, we slipped the surly bonds of earth and crept off the ground, though the word “skyward” would have been a wild exaggeration. “Not quite as sporty as the one I rode in last time I was here,” I told the pilot. “But maybe that’s a good thing. That last ride scared the crap out of me.”

It was only when the pilot laughed and apologized that I recognized him as the very same pilot who had scared the crap out of me. He wasn’t wearing a deputy’s uniform this time, but he was definitely the one whose hovering above the burning Citation had damn near killed three FBI agents and me. “Only scary thing about this machine is how underpowered she is,” he said. “The good news is, she gets pretty zippy once we burn off about forty gallons.”

I knew I shouldn’t take the bait, but I couldn’t help myself. “And what’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is, when she gets zippy, you know she’s running on empty.”

“Don’t scare him,” said a woman’s voice — Carmelita Janus’s voice — from the cramped rear of the cabin, which she shared with my baggage. “Dr. Brockton needs to concentrate, not worry.”

When I had finally returned her calls, after weeks of ignoring her during Kathleen’s brief, brutal death spiral, Mrs. Janus had sounded shocked and saddened to hear my news. She had also withdrawn her plea for help—“I know you have many other things on your mind,” she’d said — but I had insisted on coming, assuring her that immersing myself in work would take my mind off my troubles. And so at my request, she had chartered a helicopter — piloted, to my surprise, by the off-duty deputy. The deputy’s name was Charles Throckmorton; his nickname, though, was Tailskid — Skidder, for short — a handle whose origins I was afraid to ask about. Skidder had been a friend of Richard’s, I learned — something he hadn’t mentioned to the FBI agents or to me that first day, although he had told us they had flown together a few times. Probably just as well that he hadn’t said they were friends, I realized. As before, Skidder’s mission on this trip would be to fly me back to the crash site. This time, though, we would follow, as precisely as possible, the dogleg route the Citation had flown the night of the crash.

To get to our starting point at Brown Field, we skirted the edge of San Diego Bay, the skyline of downtown out the left side of the canopy’s bubble, the low, narrow strand of Coronado Beach across the bay on our right. When we reached the end of the bay, the pilot banked to the left, and the San Ysidro Mountains — including Otay Mountain — reared up in the distance, high and dry in the August heat. “Brown Field’s straight ahead,” said the deputy. “Six miles.” He pressed a radio-transmitter button on the control stick and notified other aircraft in the vicinity that we’d be making a low pass over the runway from the west and then departing to the northeast. “If we land,” he explained to me, “we’d have to get this thing off the ground all over again. Better to keep flying, so we can pretend we’re rolling down the runway like a jet.” I could see his point.

We skimmed the runway a hundred feet above the asphalt, then began to climb. A half mile beyond the airport, we banked to left, turning northeast, which put Otay Mountain off to our right. “Think of this as a slow-motion replay,” said Skidder. “The Citation was climbing two thousand feet a minute that night, accelerating to three hundred miles an hour. Our rate of climb and our airspeed are about one-fourth of the jet’s. So you’ll have plenty of time to look around.” After a moment, he added, “If you don’t mind my asking, what is it you’re looking for, Dr. Brockton?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you’ll know it when you see it?”

I held out my hands, palms up, and shrugged. “Hope so. All I know is, I won’t see it if I don’t look.”

Mrs. Janus’s voice came through the headset. “That reminds me of Richard. ‘Better to die trying than to live without trying,’ he used to say.”

“Christ, Carmelita,” squawked the pilot, “and you told me not to scare him.”

Ahead of us, I saw what at first glance might have been a pair of immense shopping malls. As we got closer, I noticed tall watchtowers and coils of razor wire, and I remembered passing the entrance road to a prison on my prior trip. “That’s quite a prison,” I said. “State penitentiary — am I remembering that right?”

“The one on the left is,” the pilot answered. “Donovan. The one on the right’s county, mostly, with a little federal thrown in for good measure.” Beyond the prisons lay a blue-green lake, one I’d seen before, but from a different angle, looking down from the crash site.

I pointed. “Otay Lake?”

“Lower Otay Lake, technically. You see the arm stretching to the east? We’ll turn south when we get to the far end of that.” He pointed to a dial on the instrument panel. “Miracle of miracles, we’re almost at thirty-nine hundred feet.”

Mrs. Janus spoke again. “You see the little airstrip just beyond the tip of the lake? And the two hangars? Richard’s maintenance shop is there. ‘Janus Junkyard,’ he called it. You can see a DC-3 carcass he cannibalized for parts, to keep ours flying.”

“Why didn’t he just do everything at Brown Field?”

“Too expensive,” she said. “He bought this whole place from a skydiving school, for about what it cost to park the Citation at Brown Field for a year. He would’ve kept the jet here, too, but the runway’s too short.”

“Damn rough, too,” added the pilot.

“Not as rough as those jungle clearings,” she pointed out.

“Well, no,” he agreed. He glanced down at a chart spread across his lap. “Okay, I’m turning south, descending to thirty-three hundred feet.”

I turned toward him, though his attention was focused on the gauges and the horizon, not on my puzzled face. “Descending? Why?”

“Because that’s what the Citation did that night.”

“But I thought the plane was flying straight and level when it hit.”

“It was,” he said. “For the last two miles. But before that — right after the last turn — it came down five hundred feet, pretty quick.”

“Came down? Why the hell would it do that?” I asked, but immediately, I answered my own question. “To make sure it hit the mountain.” Then, after a moment, another question occurred to me — one I was not able to answer for myself. “Could the plane’s autopilot have made it descend and level off?”

“No,” said the pilot and Mrs. Janus in unison.

“An autopilot’s more like cruise control,” added the pilot. “It can keep the wings level, and keep the plane on course, but it’s not designed to maneuver the plane.”

“Then that tells us something useful,” I said. “Tells us that if somebody bailed out, they didn’t jump until after that maneuver, right?”

“Guess so,” said Skidder.

“Assuming that’s true,” said Mrs. Janus, “what do you make of it? What’s the significance?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “All I know is that I’m looking for something…”

“Though you don’t know what it is,” the pilot reminded me.

“I don’t know what it is,” I echoed, “but if you’ll tell me when we level off…”

“Right… about… now.”

“… then I’ll know where to start looking.” He gave a nod, and I looked down. Below us, the flat terrain surrounding the lake and the airstrip began giving way to hills and valleys. Somewhere down there must be the spot where a parachute jumper had landed in the darkness. Even in daylight, the terrain looked forbidding. If I searched the terrain below, might I come across a parachute — attached to a man who had broken both legs upon landing, slowly dying on a rocky mountainside? I scanned the ground for signs of a ’chute, but unless it was the color of desert camo, there wasn’t one.

Two miles ahead of us, up the longest and straightest of the valleys, loomed Otay Mountain. As I stared out at it — its ridgeline stretching from one side of the canopy to the other, its peak aligned directly with the bubble’s vertical center support — I had the uneasy feeling that the helicopter was a rifle scope centered on a target… and that I was a human projectile streaking straight for the bull’s-eye. I thought about the Citation streaking toward it — far faster than this — and I thought about the other jet that had crashed into Otay Mountain earlier, back in 1991. Maybe that crash — clearly an accident — had inspired Janus, or whoever was at the controls that night, to aim the Citation at the same dark peak.

Soon the peak was rearing directly before us, and as Skidder continued hurtling toward it, I felt my fingers digging into my thighs. I’d thought that the deputy had pushed his luck — as well as the envelope of flight and the boundaries of sanity — when he’d hovered the sheriff’s helicopter a stone’s throw from the burning aircraft wreckage. Today, in the helpful light of hindsight, that maneuver seemed comparatively tame: Skidder was now aiming our flying egg toward a small rock shelf jutting from the mountainside, just below the crash site. As the spinning rotor edged closer and closer to the trees and boulders, I found myself clenching the sides of my seat. Afraid of looking, but terrified of closing my eyes, I focused my gaze out the left side of the canopy, where the hazards lay slightly farther away. “Looks like a mighty tight fit here,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt.

“Skidder could do a backflip and set us down on that spot,” said Mrs. Janus. “Those helicopter chase scenes you see in Hollywood movies? Skidder does the flying for some of those.”

I spoke before I thought. “You mean the ones where the chopper collides with a train — or a tumbling car or a motorcycle — and then explodes?”

“Don’t forget the one where the chopper gets taken down by a bow and arrow,” Skidder said. “Rambo Three. Or by a squadron of fierce flamingos—Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.” I felt the skids settle onto the rock, and he shut down the engine.

“Nice,” I said, my admiration exceeded only by my relief.

The last time I’d seen the crash site — the day we’d hoisted the Citation’s flattened nose off the rock face, revealing the crushed corpses of the Mexican and the mountain lion — the place had been bustling, still swarming with people and vehicles from the FBI, the sheriff’s office, the fire department, the U.S. Forest Service, and the National Transportation Safety Board. Now, as I stepped out onto silent scorched earth, the place seemed out of kilter and surreal, as if its transformation back to wilderness were not just implausible, but somehow unnatural.

Carmelita Janus called to me from the helicopter’s cabin. “How can we help, Dr. Brockton?”

“Let me take a look around first,” I said. “I need to get my bearings again. Get my head back in the game.”

“We’ll sit tight,” said Skidder. “Just holler when you need us.”

As I surveyed the vertical bluff, some thirty yards upslope from where we had landed, I conjured up a mental image of the debris field as it had been the first day after the crash, with pieces of engine cowling and wingtips strewn across the narrowing valley, the shredded rubble of the fuselage still smoldering. As I picked my way up the rocky slope, I replayed the excavation, fast-forwarding through three days of digging in just three minutes.

Nearing the base of the bluff, I began to glimpse remnants of wreckage amid the rocks: shards that would have required weeks of tedious tweezering to pluck from their nooks and crannies and crevices. I found the presence of these fragments strangely comforting — confirmation, perhaps, that I was indeed in the right place; reassurance that I hadn’t just imagined the entire episode.

For some reason — perhaps a continuation of my earlier sensation of being a human projectile aimed at the mountainside — I felt drawn to the impact’s epicenter, the broad, shallow crater created by the jet’s missilelike strike. During the excavation, we’d spent three days crouching and stooping beneath that crater, picking our way steadily down, down, down, until we’d cleared the rubble and reached bare rock at the base of the bluff. Now, as I approached, I found myself looking up, not down: up at the wide, shallow crater; up at the still-fresh fractures radiating outward, like some gigantic spider’s web etched into the stone above my head. And in one of those fractures, I caught a glimpse of something — of several small somethings, in fact — that called out for a closer look, and a climb.

Years before — for my forty-fifth birthday, when Kathleen had decided that I was sliding into some sort of midlife rut — she’d given me a weekend of instruction at a rock-climbing school in the mountains of North Carolina. The lessons hadn’t transformed me into Spider-Man by any stretch of the imagination, but they had shown me how to find toeholds on surprisingly small ledges, and how to jam a few fingers or cram a whole fist into a crack, twisting it to lock it into place and to create a powerful handhold — one that was “bombproof,” as my instructor liked to say. Now, standing at the base of the cliff, I studied it from a fresh perspective: sizing it up not as a forensic scientist, but as a climber. I noticed a half-dozen or so small, blocky bumps zigzagging upward — a simple ascent for a serious climber, though not for a rank, rusty amateur like me. But the crash itself had worked in my favor, I realized: Besides creating new cracks and sharp edges in the rock, the impact had subtly altered the angle of the rock face. The lower half of the crater was no longer absolutely vertical, but — because of its concavity — only relatively vertical now. If I was lucky, that subtle difference in geometry might just be enough. Might.

Reaching overhead, I hooked my fingertips over two bumps in the rock. Then I took a small step up with my right foot, and a bigger step with my left, stretching wide and splaying myself against the rock. I clawed higher with my left hand, then raised my right foot, feeling for a foothold that had looked within reach but that suddenly seemed to elude me. Again and again I scrabbled — with my toes, with the side of my foot, with my toes again — seeking but not finding purchase. The muscles in my hands and forearms began to tremble and shriek, and just as I finally found the foothold I needed, my grip failed, my fingers loosened, and I felt myself toppling backward. In that instant — the instant when I realized I was falling — I had just enough time to recall the last person who had fallen to the base of this cliff: a supremely jinxed man who had jumped from the frying pan of Mexico’s hardships and fallen straight into the combined fires of perilous terrain, a powerful predator, and a hurtling jet.

My descent ended not in a bone-breaking thud onto rocks, but in an unexpected embrace, of sorts: Skidder, to my surprise, was there to catch me, sort of, or at least slow my fall. “Damn, Doc,” he grunted as I half slid, half staggered to my feet in front of him. “What the hell you doing? I thought I was the only crazy stuntman around here.”

Carmelita Janus was hurrying toward us. “My God, Dr. Brockton, are you hurt?”

“Just my pride,” I said. “I was trying to get a closer look at something up there. Probably nothing, but seemed worth checking out.”

“I don’t think you should try it alone,” she said. “Let us help you. Please.”

Reluctantly — ashamed of my clumsiness and weakness — I assented. Skidder interlaced his fingers to create a stirrup for my right foot, hoisting it as high as his waist. As I raised my left foot, feeling for a toehold, Carmelita Janus grabbed my shoe and guided it to a ledge I had not noticed. Then Skidder did the same with my right foot — angling it into a niche that was as high as his head — and after one more step with my left foot, this time unaided, I reached a stable, sustainable position, my feet secure, my fists wedged into cracks that would hold me with virtually no effort required. “That’s about as high as we can get you, Doc,” Skidder said.

“It’s as high as I need to be.” I felt a second wave of adrenaline kicking in, and this one was not from my fall or my fear.

“You’ve found something,” said Carmelita. “What is it?”

“Look at this,” I said, freeing my left hand and plucking a small, cigar-shaped object — twice the size of a grain of brown rice, but hollow and almost weightless — from a nook in the rock. “I’m going to drop it now. Watch close.” I released it and watched it float down, as light as a tiny feather.

Carmelita caught it in midair, the way a child might catch a snowflake. She peered at it, then looked up at me. “What is it?”

“It’s a puparium,” I told her, wedging my fist back into the crack. “An empty pupa case. From a maggot that turned — that metamorphosed — into an adult fly. If y’all look close, you can see more of these down lower, in crevices here and there.”

“Yes,” she said after a moment, pointing. “Here’s one. And here’s another.”

“I wanted to climb to see how high they went. I followed them all the way up here.”

“Huh,” Skidder grunted. “You’re sounding kinda excited about this, Doc.”

“I am. It means there were maggots up here.”

“You sound surprised,” said Carmelita. “But didn’t you tell us, that day in the meeting at the FBI office, that you had found maggots? I thought that was one way you knew the Mexican man died the night of the crash.”

“You have a good memory,” I said. “That’s true. But those maggots were down near the ground. These are too high to be from that guy, or from the mountain lion. Maggots can fall, but they can’t climb. I’ll tell you like I tell my students: Trust the bugs. The bugs never lie.”

Skidder furrowed his brows. “And the truth that these new bugs are telling you…?”

“I think they’re telling me that some pieces from our guy — the guy in the cockpit — came through the windshield and landed in some of these crevices. If those pieces were shielded from the fire, maybe they didn’t get cooked.”

“And if you can find uncooked pieces, maybe you can get DNA after all,” he finished.

“Exactly.” I peered into every crack I could see from where I stood, clinging to the rock. As I bobbed my head and craned my neck, I caught a sudden glimmer of reflected light to my right. “Hang on,” I called, freeing my right hand this time and reaching into the recess where I’d glimpsed the reflection. “I think I might see a piece of windshield.”

“Be careful,” he said. “That could be jagged. You don’t want to get cut.”

“I’m not worried about cuts,” I said. “I’m worried about snakes.” I reached in gingerly. My hand now blocked my view, so I was working blindly, strictly by touch, praying not to encounter the open mouth of a rattlesnake. Beneath my fingertips, I felt the feather-light shells of more puparia — dozens of them! — and I groped on, eagerly. Suddenly I felt something shift against my fingers, and I heard a dry, hollow rustling—a rattlesnake’s tail buzzing? — and with a yelp, I yanked my hand from the opening. I lost my balance again and felt myself toppling backward once more — this time from much higher — but luckily, my left fist was wedged tightly enough into its crack to hold. Bombproof, I thought gratefully.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Carmelita. “What happened?”

“Sorry,” I said. “And ouch.” My left hand felt as if it had argued with a belt sander and a claw hammer — and lost both arguments — but at least my brains weren’t spattered on the rocks. “I heard something that I thought might be a rattlesnake,” I explained sheepishly, “so I jerked my hand back.” She gasped, so I hurried on. “But it wasn’t. It was just my hand knocking a bunch of dry puparia out of the way, rustling them. Dumb. Okay, let’s try this again.” I reached into the recess once more, willing myself to ignore the rustle of the insect shells.

“You look like you’re putting your hand in the Mouth of Truth,” said Carmelita — a reference to an ancient Roman carving of a face — a man or a god — with a gaping mouth. “Tell a lie with your hand in the mouth, legend says, and the mouth bites it off.”

“The truth is, this makes me very nervous,” I said. It must not have been a lie, because my hand remained attached and unhurt. My fingers eased through the cluster of pupa cases and then came to a larger, heavier object — the thing that had shifted when my fingers grazed it. I had thought it might be a piece of windshield, but as I closed my fingers carefully around it, it felt different from a piece of shattered acrylic. It felt greasy, and it felt familiar.

“Are you sure?” asked Carmelita, staring at the small, curved fragment I had pulled from my pocket once I’d made it safely down.

“Absolutely,” I told her. “Look at the edge here. See the cross section? There’s a hard layer of bone on the outside and the inside, separated by a spongy layer in between. It’s definitely a piece of cranium. A skull fragment.”

“What are those?” asked Skidder, pointing at the inner surface, which was etched with branchy indentations. “They look like riverbeds. Dry gullies.”

“Close,” I said. “Those are meningeal grooves — grooves where blood vessels ran. More proof that it’s a skull fragment.”

“It might be from an animal,” Carmelita said.

“Might be, but it’s not,” I said. Turning the piece over, I showed them the outer surface. It still had a bit of dried scalp and a tuft of short, gray hair attached. “That’s human hair.”

“My God,” Carmelita whispered. “That’s Richard’s hair.” She clutched Skidder’s arm for support. “My husband really is dead.”

After giving Mrs. Janus a few minutes alone, i circled back to her. “Do you still have something of Richard’s, like a toothbrush or a baseball cap? Something that could be used for DNA comparison?” She might be right — it might be a tuft of Richard’s hair, and a bit of Richard’s skull, in her hand. But might be wasn’t good enough, wasn’t certain enough. I couldn’t afford to be accused of botching the identification a second time.

“I have his favorite cap,” she said. “Also a hairbrush. You need hairs that still have the follicles attached, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised and impressed. “How did you know that?”

“I’ve been through this already with the FBI. I gave them a comb and a hat.”

“Oh, great — never mind, then,” I said. “They’ve already got something to compare to this.”

She glanced at Skidder, then at me again, suddenly looking wary. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, since they’ve already got the hat and the comb, all we need to take them is the skull fragment.”

She stared at me. “We can’t take this to the FBI,” she said.

“But… we have to. It’s their case.”

“But the FBI has told everyone Richard faked his death,” she protested. “They’ve told everyone he’s still alive, somewhere in hiding. This piece of skull would prove them wrong. I don’t think they will admit their mistake.”

“Come on,” I said. “They won’t ignore clear proof that he’s dead. Teeth are one thing; teeth can be pulled — Richard’s teeth were pulled. But you can’t just pull out a piece of skull and walk away. If the DNA matches, they’ll believe it.”

“I don’t trust them,” she said. “I think they’re more interested in protecting their image than in finding the truth.”

Suddenly I had an idea — an idea that I was shocked to hear myself suggesting. “What about that obnoxious Fox News reporter, Mike Malloy?” Carmelita and Skidder shot glances at each other. “What?” I said. “Look, I don’t like him either — he’s pushy as hell — but he’s actually done the best job of covering this. Seems like he’d love another big scoop. The latest twist in the world’s most twisted case.”

Carmelita shook her head. “Mike Malloy is dead,” she said.

I stared at her, then at Skidder. He nodded. “Found dead in his bed yesterday,” he said. “A leather strap around his neck and the bedpost.”

“He hanged himself?”

The deputy grimaced. “Not on purpose. There was a bunch of porn in the bed. Looks like an accidental autoerotic asphyxiation.” As I struggled to take this in, he went on, “Supposedly it increases the intensity of orgasm if there’s less oxygen in the brain. So some people — kinky people…” He trailed off awkwardly.

“I get it, I get it,” I said. Suddenly a thought struck me. “What if it was staged? What if he’d kept poking around, looking for the story behind the story? What if he’d managed to track down his source — whoever it was that knew about the teeth? What if he’d found out that it really was Richard in the wreckage — that the whole thing was an elaborate double fake? Malloy might have looked like a threat.”

Carmelita was nodding excitedly. “I think you’re right,” she said. “Maybe he figured out who the killer was.”

Skidder cleared his throat. “That could be true,” he said. “But meanwhile, we’ve got to do something with this piece of skull. I have an idea. Carmelita, I understand your concerns about the FBI. But what we’ve just found is a game changer. I propose a compromise. I’m not in uniform today, but I am a law enforcement officer. How ’bout if I take custody of this piece of evidence? I can transfer it — or a piece of it — to a forensic lab that’s not part of the FBI. And I can transfer custody of the rest of it to Prescott, if the outside lab confirms that it’s Richard.”

“When the outside lab confirms that it’s Richard,” said Carmelita grimly.

One of the consolation prizes of being an aging professor is that you teach a lot of students over the years — students who go on to become doctors and lawyers and research geneticists. One of my former students had ended up running a genetics lab at UCLA Medical Center, in Los Angeles. It took just five minutes on my cell phone — high on Otay Mountain, I got a great signal — to ask if he could do a DNA analysis, comparing a bit of scalp tissue with a sample from a comb or a cap. “Piece of cake,” he said. “Can you overnight it?”

“I might be able to do better than that,” I said. I turned to Skidder. “Any chance you could fly this up to UCLA Medical Center?”

“Sure thing,” he said. “I know that helipad like the back of my hand.” I relayed this information to my student, who was suitably impressed with the speed, and assured me he’d be waiting, and could be at the helipad within five minutes’ notice.

After thanking him and hanging up, I asked Skidder how soon he might be able to make the handoff.

“Three, four hours,” he said. Seeing my disappointment, he explained, “I gotta turn in this bird and get one from the sheriff’s fleet. Plus I’ll need to brief the sheriff.” Now my disappointed expression turned to a look of alarm, but Skidder gave a don’t-worry wave of his hand. “The sheriff had a lot of respect for Richard. Plus he’s a master of the interagency-cooperation game. Trust me — he’ll find a way to spin this thing so Prescott can’t possibly bitch. Hell, Prescott’ll probably end up having to give the sheriff a public pat on the back, for being such a great team player and all.”

A moment later we climbed back into the helicopter for the quick flight down to Brown Field. I had reserved a rental car there, and — despite their protests that I should stay someplace nicer — I’d booked a room in the Otay Mesa Quality Inn: a cruddy but convenient base from which to do the exploring I’d planned for the following day. Besides, in a twisted sort of way, it felt like my home away from home.

As the engine throttled up and Skidder raised the stick, the helicopter practically leapt upward. I was pleasantly surprised by its newfound nimbleness — until I remembered what Skidder had said earlier about the aircraft getting “zippy” just before the tank ran dry. I shot a quick, panicky look at the instrument panel, trying to spot the fuel gauge. Skidder must have noticed. “No worries,” he said. “It’s all downhill from here. We can coast in, if we have to.”

“Skidder,” I said, “how come every time you try to reassure me, it scares the crap out of me?”

Chapter 38

The Otay Mesa Quality Inn was shabbier than I remembered — and I had remembered it as damn shabby. “Memory is a trickster,” as one of my UT colleagues, a pompous English professor, was fond of saying.

I asked the desk clerk for a room on the hotel’s quiet side. “Define ‘quiet,’” said the clerk, a sallow young man with greasy black hair and cynical eyes. “No traffic, or no gunshots?”

He didn’t appear to be kidding. “Tough choice,” I said, “but I’m gonna go for no gunshots.”

He handed me a key. “All the way at the end,” he said, nodding toward the freeway. I thanked him, moved the car, and carried my bag to the room.

As I turned the key in the lock, a truck roared past on the freeway, rattling my door and window. Home sweet home, I thought, echoing Prescott’s description of the hotel when he’d brought us here our first night. But the truth was, I didn’t much mind the shabbiness. I’d be sleeping in an empty bed; that was the worst part — far worse than the torn carpet and stained bedspread. Just don’t let me get bedbugs, I prayed. Like the desk clerk, I was dead serious.

Maybe Kathleen really was haunting me — not about the Janus case, as she’d threatened, but about the backlog of old voice mails on my phone. Throughout our teaching careers, our offices had been a study in contrast: hers always neat and tidy, mine always… less so. As with our desktops, so with our voice mails. I tended to procrastinate, avoiding messages I knew would be unpleasant (a category that nowadays seemed to encompass virtually all of them). “Okay, Kath,” I announced over the rumble of traffic, “I’m clearing my decks. You’d be proud.”

Mercifully, most of the messages were so old that they had become utterly irrelevant, and I found myself hitting the “delete” key many times in swift succession. Muckraking talk-radio host badgering me about disrespecting veterans? Delete. Obituary-stalking strangers who’d read about my wife’s passing in the newspaper? Delete. Neighborhood widows offering a soft shoulder and a warm casserole? Delete delete delete.

The message I most dreaded hearing — the one I saved for last — was the voice mail I’d received from Captain Brian Decker shortly before his throat had been cut in a prison interview room by Nick Satterfield. Decker was still at Vanderbilt Hospital, still barely alive — still in a coma, in fact — and merely seeing his number on my phone’s display was enough to make me feel bad all over again: guilty, somehow, even though I’d urged him not to go rattle Satterfield’s cage. The TBI agent investigating the incident — if investigating was the right word for an inquiry that gave any weight at all to Satterfield’s version of events — had said that the call had lasted five minutes. As I punched the series of keys that would play the message, I braced myself for bad tidings: a grim reminder of Satterfield’s virally infectious venom, at the very least, and possibly even a self-incriminating revelation from Deck about what he’d intended to do to Satterfield. I considered erasing it without listening — what was the point, besides pain? — but decided I owed it to Decker to hear him out.

As the message began to play, all I heard was random background noise — doors opening and closing; metal chairs scraping on a concrete floor; a staticky, scratchy sound that I finally recognized as the rustle of fabric against a microphone. Decker must have pocket-dialed me, I realized, accidentally hitting “redial” as he’d slid his phone into his shirt. Through the rustle and static, I suddenly heard Decker speaking, and then — to my horror — I heard Satterfield answering. His voice came across the miles and the weeks in a soft, sinister hiss, taunting Decker about his brother’s death. Weeks after their bloody fight, I found myself eavesdropping on their confrontation, as mesmerized and terrified as if I were actually in the room with them.

I expected to hear Decker respond with threats and violence, but he didn’t. Satterfield kept it up — kept goading Decker with cruel details about the agonies his brother had suffered — but Decker wasn’t taking the bait. Suddenly I felt a jolt like an electric shock, as Satterfield said my name. “I’ve got unfinished business with Brockton. I’ll be back to deal with him. All of them. And I’ll take up right where I left off.”

“Don’t even think about it,” said Decker. “I should’ve shot you last time, but I let Brockton talk me out of it. I won’t make that mistake next time.”

“Here’s the thing, asshole,” said Satterfield. “You won’t be around next time. You’re about to bleed out on this floor.” All at once the message erupted into noisy chaos: crashing furniture, thudding bodies, and a strangled shriek of pain. Then, in midshriek, the phone went silent. Two seconds later, a computerized voice prompted me: “To replay this message, press one. To delete it, press three. To save it, press two.” My fingers shaking, I carefully pressed two. Then I dialed Steve Morgan, the former student now working for the TBI. Not surprisingly, I got his voice mail. “Steve, it’s Bill Brockton,” I said. “I’m about to forward you a message — a recording of what went down between Captain Decker and Nick Satterfield. I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with Agent Fielding. And I’d appreciate it if Fielding would get off my ass. If he really wants to do the right thing, he might also drop by Vanderbilt Hospital and apologize to Decker. Who knows, Decker might actually hear it. Might fight a little harder to pull through.”

I ended the call, then returned to my voice mail and forwarded the recording to Steve. That done, and my decks clear, I got back to the business at hand. The business that had brought me back to California, back to Otay Mountain, and back to this seedy motel and this rough-edged border crossing.

Somewhere nearby, I heard a loud bang: gunshot, or backfiring engine? Out here, I was having trouble telling the difference.

The Otay Mesa branch of the public library was just ten minutes west but a world away from the seamy-underbelly freight district where I was staying. Instead of the dilapidated warehouses and rusting shipping containers of my neighborhood, the library nestled amid neat houses, tree-lined streets, baseball fields, and basketball courts. The library’s reference desk occupied a back corner of the main reading room, flanked by low shelves of encyclopedias on one side and bound volumes of old Life magazines, decades’ worth, on the other. “Excuse me,” I said to a reference librarian whose steel-framed spectacles matched the silvery curls of her hair. “Do you keep files of news clippings about local stories?”

“Vertical files? Oh, yes,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Some of them are a bit out of date, though. The Internet, you know — it’s making newspaper clippings obsolete.” She pointed to a set of chest-high filing cabinets, which appeared to be approximately the same age as my own venerable self. “The files are there. Can I help you find something specific?”

“I’m interested in several topics,” I said. “A San Diego man named Richard Janus, who founded a charity called Airlift Relief International. He’s been in the news lately.”

“Indeed,” she said, her radiant smile giving way to a pursed, prunish expression. “Most unfortunate.” I didn’t know if she was referring to the plane crash or the drug-running allegations. Perhaps both.

“I’m also interested in a man who runs a Mexican drug cartel,” I went on. “His name is Guzmán.” I spelled it for her. “El Chapo Guzmán. I seem to remember hearing about some sort of connection between his drug trafficking and Otay Mesa.”

Her mouth had gone from slightly pursed to tightly puckered, and not in a kissing kind of way. From the look of prim disapproval, I might have been asking her to help me find pornography. “The files are arranged alphabetically,” she snipped. “You can try looking up the last names of the two… people. I believe there might also be a file called DRUGS.” I got the distinct impression that not only did she disapprove of drugs themselves, she also disapproved of news coverage that mentioned them — and of anyone who might have the brass to read such coverage.

“Thank you,” I said pleasantly. “You’ve been most helpful.” She’s no Red, I thought as I walked toward the files. But then again, Red’s no Red either — not the reference librarian she pretended to be, anyhow.

The Richard Janus file contained a thick sheaf of clippings — yellowing with age, untarnished by the recent scandal — praising him for his humanitarian service. During his flying for Air America back during the Vietnam War, several clippings reported, Janus had delivered rice to starving peasants in Laos — experiences that he consistently described as “deeply rewarding” and “the inspiration for Airlift Relief International.” None of the clippings mentioned Air America’s drops of “hard rice”—guns and ammunition — or of homemade napalm, cooked up in oil drums by the CIA and dispersed over villages thought to harbor Communist guerrillas. Had Janus napalmed villages? Had he ferried opium to fund U.S.-friendly warlords in the poppy-growing region known as the “Golden Triangle”? The press clippings shed no light on those questions.

One interesting side note I found in Janus’s file was a brief bio of his wife. As a young woman from an aristocratic family in Mexico City, Carmelita Janus had been a beauty queen, model, and honors law student, well on her way to a promising legal career. She had left Mexico in her early twenties — with Richard Janus — shortly after the murder of her father, a high-ranking judge. In light of the widespread, well-documented corruption of Mexico’s police, army, and prosecutors by narco traffickers, I couldn’t help wondering: Had her father been killed because he’d opposed drug lords like Guzmán? Or had he sold out to one drug lord, then gotten gunned down by a rival?

El Chapo’s file was far slimmer than Janus’s. It contained just three clippings, which had merited clipping and filing, as best I could tell, because each of the three quoted “knowledgeable DEA sources in San Diego.” The first story reported Guzmán’s 1994 arrest and imprisonment; the second recounted his 2001 escape; and the third — the one I recalled Red mentioning — described how DEA agents discovered an elaborate underground railroad, used to haul drugs through a tunnel beneath the U.S.-Mexico border. The drugs — tons of them, according to the “knowledgeable DEA sources”—were loaded into carts beneath a house in Tijuana, wheeled the length of the tunnel, and then unloaded. The rail line’s northern terminus, said the story, was a warehouse fifty yards north of the border, in the industrial sector of Otay Mesa. In the Quality Inn sector of Otay Mesa, I realized with a shock. It was likely that I had wandered past that very warehouse my first evening in town—The fenced building with the guard-dog sign? I wondered — before I’d ended up at the IHOP, overhearing the argument between Miles Prescott and the fat, wheezing warrior from the DEA or the CIA or whatever federal agency it was that waged war on badasses.

The pursed-lipped librarian’s clippings did not, however, shed light on the things that had been gnawing at me all afternoon and evening, ever since I’d found the bit of bone that seemed to have come from the shattered skull of Richard Janus: If Janus had in fact been murdered — if a killer had strapped Janus’s body into the cockpit, aimed the plane at the mountainside, and then parachuted to safety — a whole series of baffling questions reared their heads, clamoring for answers. Why had the killer pulled Janus’s teeth? Why had he tucked a spinal cord stimulator behind the body? Why had he told the Fox reporter and the FBI agent that tool marks could be found on the teeth? In short, why had the killer gone to such elaborate lengths to do a double fake: to start out by creating the illusion that Janus had died in the fiery crash, but then to shatter that illusion, replacing it with a second illusion — the illusion that Janus was alive and on the lam somewhere?

For years, I had preached the gospel of Occam’s razor, a rule of logic stating that the simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost certainly the correct explanation. This case, though, seemed to be turning Occam’s razor on its head: the more complex and bizarre the explanation, the closer it seemed to stumble toward some grotesque, distorted, funhouse-mirrored travesty of truth.

That night, in my lumpy bed in my shabby motel, I dreamed of Janus — not the American pilot Janus, but the Roman deity, the one with two faces. That Janus, the one who gazed unblinkingly at both the past and the future, had been the guardian of doorways and transitions and transformations; he’d been both the keeper of the key and the wielder of the cudgel. In my dreams, the key to the mystery remained just out of reach, my fingertips not quite touching it as first my hand, then my entire arm, plunged into the Mouth of Truth.

I knew that the key must be close at hand, though, because as I groped blindly, my motions accompanied by the soft rattlings of dry pupa cases or snake tails, I felt myself being cudgeled. Rhythmically, ceaselessly cudgeled.

Chapter 39

After an early breakfast of petrified bagel, I stocked up on water and snacks at a nearby convenience store — a place sporting so many signs in Spanish, I half wondered if I had somehow strayed through a gap in the border fence — and aimed the rental car toward Otay Mountain, guided by the detailed topographic map I’d gotten from Carmelita Janus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pat,” I said. “Bill Brockton here.”

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

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

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

“Yes. But—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come again?”

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

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

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

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

“How do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, no. Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Drive safe, Pat.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, it’s worth a try,” I said.

“Walter Jessup,” said the assistant warden ten minutes later, extending his hand across a desk. “I understand you’re interested in events the night of June eighteenth, early morning of June nineteenth?”

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

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

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

“You mean the parachute?”

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

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

“Excuse me?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Ever reported it to anybody?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wait,” she said again.

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

Chapter 40

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell are you talking about?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kicker?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jets?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s wrong?”

“Maddox. He’s on his way.”

“On his way where?”

“His way here.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was a good boy for fifteen years.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“But Prescott said that Janus had gotten an FBI agent killed,” I persisted. “What’d he mean by that?”

Maddox made a face. “Janus snuck another snitch out of Mexico back in the spring,” he said. “Swooped down and scooped up the guy right out from under the nose of one of Guzmán’s enforcers. Turns out an FBI agent was tailing the snitch, and the assassin killed the FBI agent instead of the snitch. Wasn’t Janus’s fault, but the Bureau was too dumb to know that. That, or they chose to spin it that way so they could make Janus the scapegoat.” He drew a breath, as if to clear his head, and when he exhaled, loudly and slowly through his nostrils, the rush of air had the sound of finality. “So. Boys, this has been fun, but I’ve got other fish to fry, and one of mis amigos will be here to pick me up in a few minutes. So if you two would be so kind as to get down on your knees, we can get this show on the road.”

“You’re kidding,” said Hickock. “Or you’re stupid. You’re gonna blow away a DEA agent and an FBI consultant, and you think you can just walk away scot-free?”

“I’m not stupid,” said Maddox. “And I’m not going to blow you away.” I felt a glimmer of hope, but then he added, “An assassin from the Tijuana drug cartel is.” Shifting the shotgun into his left hand, he reached behind his back and pulled a nine-millimeter pistol from his belt. “Shocking, that a veteran DEA agent walked into a trap with no backup. And tragic that his bad judgment cost the life of a respected forensic scientist, too.” He shook his head and gave an ironic tsk-tsk. “Quite a lucky break for Guzmán and the Sinaloa cartel, though.” He gave a sigh of mock sadness, then said, “On your knees. Now.”

“Fuck you,” said Hickock. “You might kill me, but I sure as hell won’t die kneeling.”

Maddox rolled his eyes. “Christ, Hickock, you’re still the same self-righteous prick you were back in Laos. Okay, have it your way.” He aimed the pistol at the agent’s chest, and I saw his finger tighten on the trigger.

In desperation — having no better ideas, and having nothing to lose — I raised my arms over my head and waved them frantically, looking up at the low ridge across the hollow. “Take the shot!” I shouted. “Take the shot! Now!”

All hell suddenly broke loose beside me. Maddox’s attention wavered from Hickock for an instant, and in that instant, Hickock yanked the revolver from its shoulder holster and swung it upward. I heard the crack of a shot — or was it two? — and then a sort of ripping sound in the air beside my right ear, and then another crack rolling in from somewhere in the distance. Maddox jerked forward, his arms flailing, and the short shotgun in his left hand thrashed and boomed. Something whacked me in the head, and I felt myself falling to the sand.

“Doc? Hey, Doc — can you hear me?” I Felt My eyelids being tugged open, and as my eyeballs leveled and came into focus, I recognized the face of Special Agent Miles Prescott. “Doc? You back with me now?”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting up abruptly and staring wildly at the scene. Sprawled on the ground ten feet away lay Maddox — or most of Maddox, from the chest down. His head — or most of his head — lay off to one side a ways, and I’d worked enough shotgun deaths to know how it had gotten there. I also noticed a large bloody wound in his chest. From the size of it, it looked like an exit wound, which would mean he’d been shot from behind, but I didn’t see how that could have happened, since he and Hickock had been face-to-face when the shooting started. Hickock, I thought in sudden panic. Where’s Hickock? I looked beside me, where he’d been standing, but he wasn’t there. I whirled, scanning in all directions, and finally saw him twenty feet behind me, sitting on the ground, leaning against the left front wheel of my car. “Hey, Hickock,” I said. “From now on, you’re Wild Bill. Nothing mild about you at all. Fastest gun in the West, man.”

I waited for his wheezy answer, but he was silent — utterly, unnaturally silent — and when I looked closer, I saw that his eyes were glassy and the sand beneath him was red, his blood mingling with the puddle of oil the Impala had hemorrhaged a quarter hour before. A lifetime before.

I turned and stared the question at Prescott, and he shook his head. “Right in the heart,” he said. “Amazing he managed to walk that far.”

“Well, damn,” I said softly. To my surprise, I felt tears come to my eyes and roll down my cheeks. “He was a good man. I misjudged him at first, but he was a damn good man.”

“You’re right,” said Prescott, his voice suddenly a little thick. “I did, too. And yeah — as good as they get.”

I got to my feet, but the movement caused a searing pain in my head, and when I rubbed it, my hand came away sticky with blood.

“We need to get that looked at,” said Prescott. “I think Maddox’s pistol flew out of his hand and whacked you in the head, but we oughta get that wound cleaned up. Maybe get an x-ray, too. Before we do anything else, though, I gotta ask one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You yelled ‘Take the shot.’ How the hell did you know we had a sharpshooter up there?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “You did?” He looked as confused as I was, then he nodded. “I was totally bluffing,” I told him. “He was about to shoot Hickock. I was hoping to distract him long enough to let Hickock get off a shot. Guess it didn’t work.”

“Actually, it did,” Prescott said. “You can’t see it now, because of the exit wound from the rifle round, but Hickock nailed him. Maddox was walking dead when the rifle bullet hit him.”

I turned and looked again at the body of the DEA agent. “Hickock said he was trying to protect me. And by God he did, didn’t he? He died waging war.” Prescott nodded. “So now I gotta ask one thing,” I said. “How the hell did you know to put a sharpshooter out here?”

“We had a GPS tracker on your car. And a tap on your cell phone. We even managed to get a shotgun mike up on that ridge in time to record that last part of Maddox’s little speech.”

I was impressed, but I was also confused. “You did all that? Why?”

“One of our partner agencies — the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department — shared a key piece of new evidence with us yesterday. A skull fragment, which confirmed that Richard Janus was murdered. That took the investigation in a new direction. It also suggested that the killer might attempt to… uh… contact you.”

I pondered the implications of all this. “Are you saying you used me as bait for a killer, Agent Prescott?” I remembered a brief bit of banter from our first ride down Otay Mountain weeks before and gave him a grin. “Did you just throw me under the bus?”

“Of course not, Dr. Brockton,” he said, grinning back. “We never throw anyone under the bus. And if a forensic consultant just happens to fall under the bus? While we’re standing nearby with our hand on his back? We do our very best to pick him up and dust him off and remind everyone how glad we are that he’s okay.” He paused to let that sink in, then added, “I’ll be recommending to SAC that we hold a joint press conference tomorrow, together with the DEA and the sheriff, to update the media and set the record straight on Richard Janus’s case. I’d like to get Mrs. Janus there, too, if she’s willing to accept an olive branch and bury the hatchet. If you could find it in your heart to join us, there might even be a letter of commendation in it for you. A very lavish letter.”

“When you say lavish,” I said, “do you mean embossed with the FBI seal? In color?”

“You know the Bureau doesn’t make promises,” he said. “But I’ll recommend color and embossing. In the strongest possible terms.”

Chapter 41

We held Kathleen’s memorial service at second Presbyterian Church in late August, a week after the university’s fall semester began — a long time after her death, but the only way to include the university community that had meant so much to her. Jeff, Jenny, and the boys sat with me in the front row. So did Carmelita Janus and helicopter-jockey Skidder, who had given up his law enforcement job to become chief pilot for Airlift Relief International. Carmelita was getting the organization back on its feet again, thanks to Kathleen’s bequest and a flood of other donations in Richard’s honor, which began pouring in once the media began portraying him as a misunderstood and martyred saint, of sorts. Last but not least, in a wheelchair parked at the end of our pew, was KPD Captain Brian Decker, still weak but out of the woods and expected to recover from his close brush with death.

Behind us, in the second pew, sat Kathleen’s colleagues from Nutrition Sciences. At my request, they all wore their academic robes as a way of honoring Kathleen as a teacher and scholar. The sight of them reminded me yet again that Kathleen’s death was a loss to many people, in many walks of life — some of them children in faraway places. They would never lay eyes on her, but they would see the world itself, as a result of her foundation’s eyesight-saving work.

My own colleagues and students turned out in droves, too. So did the dean, UT’s provost and president, and even the sharptaloned legal eagle Amanda Whiting, who had actually worked behind the scenes to rally legislative support for the Body Farm: Amanda had enlisted police chiefs, county sheriffs, and district attorneys from throughout the state in a campaign to remind their senators and representatives that the Body Farm’s research helped solve murders throughout the great state of Tennessee, and that voting against the Body Farm might be perceived as getting soft on crime. The strategy worked brilliantly, and the legislative assault on the facility ended not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with utter silence.

The service itself was fairly brief. I wasn’t able to say much — I choked up pretty quickly, so about all I was able to get out was something about what a privilege it had been to share thirty years of my life with such a wonderful woman. Jeff did better than I did, but the real prizewinner was Jenny, who talked about becoming family with Kathleen: about finding a haven, and a friend, and a role model, and a hero all rolled into one in this remarkable woman. Amen, I thought.

The receiving line, after the service, lasted for nearly two hours. By the end I was exhausted, having trouble recognizing faces and remembering names. The last person in line was a young woman, and when I looked at her, I drew an utter blank. She looked to be around twenty or so, an attractive redhead with lively eyes. She had probably taken one of my intro classes; by now, thousands of UT students had.

“Hello,” I said, extending my hand, as I had hundreds of times in the past two hours. “Thank you for coming.”

“We haven’t met, Dr. Brockton, but we’ve talked on the phone,” she said, and I knew her voice instantly. She must have seen the shock of recognition on my face, because the next thing she said was, “Yes. I’m Red. I’m not really a reference librarian, and I apologize for misleading you. The phone was ringing, you seemed to need some help, and… I… I just got carried away. It was just so… fascinating.”

“Fascinating,” I said, smiling. “I’ve been hearing that word a lot lately. It’s my new favorite word.”

She looked confused, which was understandable. “Anyhow, I’m very sorry you lost your wife.”

“Thank you. Me, too.”

“And I’m sorry I tricked you.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You helped me a lot, too. A lot more than the actual reference librarian I talked to, out in Otay Mesa.”

“Otay Mesa? That’s the place where El Chapo — you know, ‘Goose Man’—ran that underground railroad under the border from Tijuana!”

“See,” I said. “You’re good, Red. The offer’s still open. If you want to switch fields — turn anthropologist — let me know.”

She blushed, and she smiled shyly. “Actually,” she said, “I’ve sent in my application.”

“That’s great,” I said. “I’ll look for it. Will I find it filed under R, for Red?”

“No,” she said. “You’ll find it in the Ls. Under Lovelady. Miranda Lovelady. Does this mean I’m in?”

“I’m like the FBI, Miranda,” I said, grinning. “I don’t make promises. But I’ll recommend you to myself. In the strongest possible terms.”