The Breaking Point (Body Farm 9)

Jenny lifted Tyler from her lap and stood him up. “Why don’t you and Daddy go look at the ambulance,” she said. “There’s a helicopter out there, too. I bet he’d take you to see that, too.” He scurried off, and she shifted into the chair beside me. She gave me a long, long look, shaking her head slowly. Her cheeks were splotchy and her eyes brimming. “I am so mad,” she said quietly, “that I want to slap the bejesus out of you. You put my kids in terrible danger. It’s a miracle one of them’s not dead.” I nodded miserably. “But goddamnit, I love you, and we need you. So how ’bout you cut the crap, quit feeling sorry for yourself, and rejoin the land of the living?” While I was still taking in this wide-ranging message, she leaned over and kissed my cheek. At the same time, she reached across and gave my other cheek a quick slap—a slap that was half playful, half serious. Before I had time to respond, I saw a door opening, and a pretty young nurse led Walker into the lobby, two of his fingers taped into a splint, an x-ray clutched in his other hand.

He came running over. “Grandpa Bill,” he said, holding up the injured hand, “Tyler broke this finger and this finger. Look—they took a picture of the bones!” He handed me the x-ray proudly.

“Yup, those are broken, all right,” I said. “But you know what? Soon they’ll be good as new. Even better—stronger than before.”

“I know,” he said. He beamed up at the nurse. “She told me. It’s a miracle!”

“I guess it is, buddy,” I said. “I guess it is.”

IT WAS DARK BY THE TIME I LEFT THE HOSPITAL AND headed for home. Crossing the Tennessee River, I stopped on the bridge at the center of the span. The shoulder was wide—they’d built the bridge optimistically broad, big enough to accommodate two or three additional lanes at some point in a prosperous future—so by parking close to the concrete guardrail, I had a good ten feet of clearance between my door and the nearest lane of traffic. Standing by the front bumper, I put my hands on the rail and leaned over, peering at the water. The great river, black and silent, spooled past far below, unaware and indifferent to me and my recent troubles; indifferent to my past joys, too, for that matter. It flowed onward, ceaselessly southward, called by the sea—or blindly bound by the laws of gravity and fluid dynamics. In the swirling water, I had no reflection and no significance. The realization was humbling, but it was liberating, too. What did it matter, really, if I lived or died—or, more accurately, what did it matter when I died?

The nine-millimeter pistol—which I had taken from the house and locked in my glove box when we’d hurried to the hospital—hung at my side, dark and heavy, as if a piece of the night itself had condensed and crystallized in my hand. If I leaned over the concrete railing of the bridge, I reflected, I could blow my head off without leaving a mess for anyone to clean up. If I sat on the railing and leaned backward as I pulled the trigger, I could topple into the water and sink beneath the surface. Or do a backflip off the railing first, I thought, and pull the trigger on the way down. That way, even if my nerve failed me, I was still committed. If the bullet don’t get ya, the water will, I told myself, in a hillbilly twang. It sounded like a parody of a country music tearjerker, and it brought an ironic smile to my lips.

I remembered Jenny’s parting words to me in the ER’s waiting room. “You owe these boys now,” she’d said to me. “If you do something stupid and self-destructive, they’ll think it was their fault somehow. Just like you thought that your dad’s death was your fault.” Had I told her that in an unguarded moment, or had she intuited it? Either way, she was right. “Don’t you do that to these boys,” she’d added, punctuating her final four words by jabbing a fierce finger at me. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Shifting my grip to the gun’s barrel, I cocked my arm and flung the weapon into the darkness—a sidearm throw that sent it spinning out across the black water like some small, lopsided boomerang. Don’t come back, I silently ordered it. A moment later I heard it hit: plunk; the sound seemed faint and far away, as fleeting and insignificant—as unexpectedly miraculous, too—as if a fish had just leapt from the water to launch itself, for one brief and exuberant moment, headlong into the air.

Standing at the rail in the darkness, I fished out my cell phone and dialed a number I knew by heart. “Book a flight,” I told the computer that answered Delta’s phone. “A new reservation . . . San Diego, California.”

The Key

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

—T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

San Diego, California

August 2004

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.”