The Breaking Point (Body Farm 9)

“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?”

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 p

ast 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.