“No, of course not. But—”
Their dispute was interrupted by the whine and whump of the helicopter revving. Prescott looked puzzled for a moment. Then, as it became apparent that the chopper was about to take off—without Mrs. Janus—his expression changed from confusion to fury. “What the hell,” he snapped, then whirled and barked at the agent standing beside him. “You. Get on the radio with the sheriff’s office. Tell them to tell that pilot—” The helicopter lifted off. “Shit. You tell them to get that helicopter on the ground—right here, right now—to pick her up. Or I will come down on them like the wrath of God.”
The young agent pushed past me into the command center, and I could hear a terse exchange of voices. Sixty seconds later, the helicopter returned. It hovered directly over the cluster of federal agents, its downdraft buffeting them and yet somehow leaving Mrs. Janus—standing twenty feet from them—unruffled. Then it edged sideways and touched down. Without a word, Carmelita Janus turned, strode toward it, and climbed back into the copilot’s seat.
As the machine leapt up again—buffeting the agents once more on its way out—I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before: a second helicopter, hovering a hundred yards away. The cabin door was open; perched on the sill, his feet propped on a landing skid, was a man—a man with a boxy black object balanced on one shoulder. A cylinder projected from the front of the box; at its center, I saw a glint of blue: the reflection of a telephoto lens, watching and recording the scene that had just transpired. Judging by the logo emblazoned on the side of the helicopter, Fox News viewers across San Diego—or across the entire nation—would soon be seeing Mrs. Richard Janus being banished from the site of her husband’s smoldering jet, her brave offer to help spurned by the heartless forces of the FBI. I felt sorry for Prescott; his Bureau bosses might well—and his media critics surely would—take him to task for being so unsympathetic . . . or for being caught on camera. At the same time, I couldn’t help admiring Mrs. Janus’s moxie and resourcefulness. Her maneuver could end up complicating our work, though, I realized, especially if it increased the pressure for us to work fast.
“Damn,” said Prescott.
O Brother, I thought, you can say that again.
“Damn,” he repeated. “Damn damn damn.”
AN HOUR HAD PASSED SINCE CARMELITA JANUS FLEW off, but the cyclone of grit and grouchiness she’d stirred up continued to swirl long after the helicopter had vanished. Prescott spent some quality time fussing into his phone; I heard the word “grandstanding” at least three times; I also heard him say, “I want to know everything there is to know about her husband’s life insurance. How much? Does it pay double for accidental death? Is there a suicide exclusion? Most important—is she the sole beneficiary?” There was more muttering I couldn’t quite catch, then he snapped the phone shut and glared at the group as if we were his problem, saying, “So? Now what are we waiting for?” I was wondering that myself, though I wasn’t in a position to ask.
McCready looked startled—or was it angry?—for a split second, but his answer was matter of fact. “We’re waiting for a couple key pieces of gear,” he said. “Should be here any minute.” He recapped the team’s assignments, concluding, “Remember, safety first. Followed closely—really, really closely—by evidence preservation.” He scanned the agents’ faces. “Any other questions for me? For Dr. Brockton or Mr. Maddox? No?” He pointed toward the door. “Okay, fellows, let’s go get it.”
Remembering the thirty-foot bluff we’d have to descend to get to the wreckage, I couldn’t help wondering, Get it? How?
I didn’t have to wonder for long. As we exited the command center, I heard a deep, powerful roar. A moment later a crane lurched into view and rumbled along the rocky ridge road. McCready, Prescott, and Maddox huddled briefly, and then Maddox limped into the crane’s path. Waving his arms to get the driver’s attention, he headed toward the rim of the bluff, motioning the crane to follow. As they traversed the edge, silhouetted against the sky, I imagined for a moment that Maddox was a farmer, leading some immense, long-necked, bellowing beast out to graze. He stopped, peering down the bluff, and then pointed to the ground at his feet, indicating the spot where he wanted the crane. Then he raised his arm overhead and slowly lowered it to horizontal, pointing straight out over the abyss, miming the motion of the machine’s boom.
The crane had a capacity of sixteen tons—thirty-two thousand pounds—according to prominent warnings stenciled on the vehicle and on the boom. No problem, I thought; from where I stood, it looked as if most pieces of the wreckage weighed less than I did. Sidling over to Maddox, I joked, “Reckon we’ve got enough muscle?”
Maddox shrugged, looking more dubious than I’d expected. “It’s not the load capacity I’m worried about, it’s the boom length,” he said. “The plane only weighed six tons, dripping wet, so this thing could easily hoist a whole Citation. Plus another whole Citation. The trick’ll be reaching out far enough. The boom’s a hundred feet long.” He studied the debris field below, then looked again at the boom, now swinging out in a gargantuan imitation of Maddox’s pantomime. “Might be enough. Wish we had another fifty feet.” He frowned at the rough jeep road the crane had lurched up to reach us. “Might be tough to get a bigger rig up the mountain, though.”
I thought, Might be? I was amazed that any rig had managed to make it up.
I felt sure the crane could get the wreckage up the bluff. But I still wasn’t clear on how we could get down.
That answer, too, was quick to materialize. Two of McCready’s agents emerged from the back of the ERT truck, big coils of rope slung over their shoulders. The ropes were red nylon, interwoven with diamonds of black—a pattern that made them look more like rattlesnakes than I liked. Two other agents brought out bundles of harnesses, racks of carabiners, and other climbing hardware. The agents with the ropes tied them off to cleats at opposite ends of the crane, then flung the coiled bundles off the edge of the bluff. For a moment, as the bright red loops separated and unspooled, they looked like party streamers, and the juxtaposition—the festive unfurling against the grim backdrop—gave me a surprising pang. Poor Richard, I thought, followed by a line of Shakespeare’s: So quick bright things come to confusion.
“Yo, Doc.” I turned to find McCready staring at me.
“Sorry. Were you saying something to me?”
“Only three times. You wanna stay up top till things cool off some more? Or would you like to get a closer look? Probably too soon to start the actual recovery, but you could start getting the lay of the land down there—figure out a plan of attack—if you want to.”
I hated the notion of a whole posse of agents tromping around the wreckage unsupervised—specifically, unsupervised by me. I imagined fragile, burned bones crushed into cinders by careless footsteps. No matter that the FBI’s crime-scene techs were the best in the nation. The Bureau had brought me out here for a reason, and I meant to give them their money’s worth. “Beam me down, Scotty,” I said.
“You got it.” He nodded toward the rope-throwing agents, who were now laying out climbing harnesses near the rim. “You ever done any rappelling?”
“A little. It’s been a while, but I reckon it’ll come back to me once I’m harnessed up.” In fact, it came flooding back to me only a heartbeat later: a death scene I’d roped down to, in a rugged part of the Cumberland Mountains. “Here’s the thing,” I hedged. “Can somebody else go first?” He looked puzzled. “Ten or twelve years ago, I recovered a woman’s body up near the Kentucky border. She’d been dismembered and thrown off a bridge into a ravine.”
He nodded. “I think I remember reading about that case. Serial killer? What was his name?”
“Satterfield. Sick, sadistic sonofabitch. Anyhow, I roped down a bluff to this woman’s body, and I landed right by a rattlesnake—a coiled-up, pissed-off timber rattler. It struck at me; missed my leg by about that much.” I held up a thumb and forefinger, practically touching. I took another glance down
at the rocky terrain. “I’m thinking this terrain looks kinda snaky, and I’ve had enough fun with snakes to last me a lifetime.”
He nodded, tucking back part of a smile. “I’ll send Kimball and Boatman down first, with the Total Station,” he said. “They’ll stomp around and scare off the varmints.”
He turned toward the two agents, who were uncoiling a pair of ropes and tying them to their gear—a hard-shell tripod case, about the size of a golf bag, plus a suitcase-sized aluminum box containing the electronics. “Yo, Kimball,” McCready yelled. The ever-eager agent looked up. “Got a job for you.”
“Instead of the Total Station?”
“In addition. You’re on snake-bait duty.”
“Snakebite duty?” The young agent cocked his head. “You want me to take the antivenom kit with us?”
“Not snake bite. Snake bait. You’re the designated snake bait.”
“Boss. Seriously? Did you really just call me snake bait?”
“I did. Doc here is snake-phobic. Your job is to run interference. If he gets bit, you get transferred. To Fargo.”
Kimball pondered this for a fraction of a second. “Hey, Doc,” he said. “Do me a favor, will you?”
“If I can.”
“If you get bit, chuck that snake over at me, so it’ll bite me, too. I’m Fargo-phobic.” He turned to his partner. “Hey, Boat-Man, toss me that figure eight, would you?” A piece of polished metal arced through the air toward Kimball; he caught it deftly, looped the rope through it, and then clipped it to his climbing harness. Then, easing the tripod case over the rim, he lowered it down the bluff, feeding the rope smoothly through the figure eight until the line went slack. Boatman did the same with the aluminum case.
Once the hardware was down, the two men clipped themselves to the rappelling ropes, backed off the precipice in sync, and dropped from sight. “Look out, all you rattlers and cottonmouths and king cobras,” I heard Kimball call out as he descended. “I’m coming down, and I am one snake-stompin’ son-of-a-mongoose badass!”