The Breaking Point (Body Farm 9)

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.

The Cudgel

No mortal could cross the threshold of birth or death until Janus had wielded both the objects he held in his hands: both the key and the cudgel. Passages and transformations are never easy or cheap, and the price is often reckoned in pounds of flesh and buckets of tears.

—Sofia Paxton, Ancient Teachings, Modern Wisdom

And the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?” Then Satan answered the LORD, “Does Job fear God for no reason? Hast thou not put a hedge about him and his house and all that he has, on every side? Thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse thee to thy face.”

—Job 1:8–11

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

—Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

THE BLACK FBI SUV—THE ONE THAT HAD WHISKED me from the press conference to the airport—screeched to the curb of San Diego International at 1:09. I was cutting it close; my flight was at 1:44, but I could see the Delta ticket counter just inside the glass doors, and the line was short. “Want me to wait?” asked the driver, another of Prescott’s seemingly infinite supply of young, well-groomed agents.

“Nah, I’ll be fine. Thanks for the lift.” I hopped out, scurried inside, and got in line with my bag and the plastic bin of teeth and bone shards. Only two people were ahead of me, and three ticket agents were working the counter. Piece of cake, I thought, hoping that the security screeners wouldn’t freak out and waylay me over the remains. One of the agents finished checking in a passenger, but then, instead of calling “next,” he turned and walked through a door, disappearing from view. I glanced at my watch; it was now 1:12. Suddenly nervous, I divided my attention between the two remaining ticket agents on duty, willing them to hurry. One of the agents was a sour-faced older woman who wasted no time on pleasantries; the other, a pretty twentysomething, chatted and laughed with her customer, a lanky young man whose British accent she seemed to find charming. Sour Face quickly dispensed with one of the two people ahead of me; incredibly, Pretty Girl continued chatting with the Brit as if she had the entire afternoon to devote to the conversation. “Oh, I love London,” she gushed. “It’s so much more continental than our American cities.” Oh, please, I thought, and then—checking my watch again—Oh, please hurry! Her colleague, Sour Face, sent another traveler on his way and took the next in line. There was no longer anyone ahead of me, but I was running out of time. I waved my arms to catch the girl’s attention; it took a while, but finally she looked at me, and I tapped my watch. “Sir, I’ll be with you in a moment,” she said, her voice less animated than when she was chatting with the Brit. The man looked around and seemed to have a clearer sense of my problem, or more compassion, for he took his boarding pass, thanked her, and then gestured me toward the counter.

“Sorry to rush you,” I said, handing her my itinerary, “but I’m cutting it pretty close here.”

She studied it, frowning. “Sir, that flight leaves at 1:44,” she said. “That’s less than thirty minutes from now. I’m sorry, but I can’t check you in.”

“My watch says 1:14,” I said. I was fibbing, but only by two minutes. “And I’m not checking baggage. All I have is this carry-on.”

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s 1:15. And the thirty-minute cutoff is a TSA rule. Homeland Security.”

“Come on. Sixty seconds. Besides, I was in line with time to spare. If you hadn’t been flirting with that guy ahead of me, I’d have been standing here two minutes ago.”

She flushed, but she didn’t budge; in fact, her expression hardened. “Look at me,” I pleaded. “Do I look like a terrorist? I’m a college professor.” Fumbling at my waist, I unclipped my TBI shield and laid it on the counter. “Look. I’m a consultant to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. I just came from helping the FBI. I’m one of the good guys.”

But she had stopped making ey

e contact. “Sir, I’m sorry. I don’t make the rules. The best I can do is book you on the next available flight.”

I sighed. “When is that?”

“Tomorrow morning at six-thirty.”

I stared, dumbfounded. “You’re kidding me, right?” The look she gave me indicated that she wasn’t. “It’s still lunchtime. You mean to tell me there’s no way to get to Knoxville—no way even to start toward Knoxville—until tomorrow?”

“That’s correct, sir. Do you want me to book you on that six-thirty A.M. flight?” Her fingers clattered rapidly over the keyboard. “That would get you into Knoxville at . . . 3:53 P.M.”

Unbelievable, I thought. The idea of hanging around, killing time, for the next sixteen hours seemed unbearable. There had to be a way to get home sooner. “What about Los Angeles?”

“What about it? What is it you’re asking, sir?”

“How far away is L.A.?”

She shrugged, looking as if she might be getting irritated. “Two, two and a half hours by car. Fifty minutes by air.”

“Surely LAX has more flights today. When’s the next plane to LAX? If I caught that, could I get home tonight?”

Her fingers clacked and clattered, with more force this time. “The next flight to Los Angeles is at 1:46.”

“I’ll take it. Get me on it.”

“Sir, it’s now 1:17. That flight leaves in twenty-nine minutes. I can’t put you on it.”

“But I was standing right here at 1:15. Thirty-one minutes before the flight.”

“But you weren’t booked on that flight, sir. You still aren’t. And you can’t be—it’s not possible. Those are the rules, sir.”