The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

“We can wait, if you’re just touching base.”

  “She’s pretty chatty,” I said, though the truth was, I tended to be the long-winded one.

  He nodded. “You want us to bring you something on the way back? Burger? Chicken sandwich? They make a mighty mean onion ring.”

  “A good chocolate shake, too,” added Boatman.

  “Sounds good,” I said, “but none of that stuff travels well. Thanks anyhow.” I waved a hand in cheery dismissal. “Y’all don’t worry about me. I’ll get checked in, call Kathleen, and scrub off some of this grime. Plenty of time to grab a bite after that.”

  Prescott inclined his head toward one side of the building. “There’s a pool, if you want to take a dip.”

  “Didn’t bring a suit,” I said. “Didn’t realize we’d be staying at a luxury resort.”

  He laughed. “Yeah. First class all the way.” The freeway’s exit ramp bordered one side of the pool, and the overpass loomed above the far end. I imagined a steady rain of dust, exhaust particulates, and rusted car parts raining down onto the pool court like volcanic ash onto Pompeii.

  Opening the door, I stepped onto the parking lot’s blasted asphalt. “Pop the back? So I can grab my bag?” He did, and I extricated my yellow L.L. Bean duffel and closed the hatch. McCready took my place riding shotgun. As I passed Prescott’s window, it slid down a few inches. “See you in the morning. Wheels up at seven? Or is that too early for an ivory-tower guy like you?” It could have been a dig, but it didn’t sound like it.

  “Seven? Early? That’s ten, Knoxville time. That’s sleeping in, man.”

  “Hey, feel free to head on up at four. I’ve got a flashlight and a map I can loan you.”

  “Nah,” I said. “You guys would be sad if you showed up and I’d already finished working the scene without you.”

  “Sad,” he agreed. “Heartbroken, even.” The tinted window slid up, hiding him from view. The black Suburban did a U-turn, and the four invisible FBI agents glided away.

  RECOUNTING MY DAY TO KATHLEEN HELPED ME PROCESS it; it also helped me feel grounded, connected with her—we’d been together so long, I tended to feel unsettled and unmoored when I was away. If not for the three-hour time difference, I’d have talked her to sleep as I settled into bed myself. Instead, I’d roamed the neighborhood around the motel as we talked.

  Neighborhood wasn’t actually the right term for it; industrial park was more like it. Otay Mesa, or at least this part of it, consisted of grim blocks of warehouses, alternating with unpaved parking lots—some of them empty, others filled with semitrailers, and virtually all of them surrounded by chain-link fences topped with razor wire. Otay Mesa was a stone’s throw from a border crossing, and the town appeared to revolve around it the way water revolves around the drain in a toilet bowl. Years before, attending a conference in San Diego, I’d taken a brief side trip to Tijuana; the border crossing there, a few miles to the west, had reminded me of a drive-through version of an airport terminal: a bustling crossroads traversed by throngs of tourists and business travelers. The crossing here at Otay Mesa, on the other hand, put me in mind of a freight depot or railroad switchyard: a gritty frontier outpost where produce and car parts and probably contraband came pouring in, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  The nearness of Mexico was underscored everywhere I looked: Brown faces, which outnumbered white faces by two or three to one. Beer trucks hauling Tecate and Negro Modelo, rather than Budweiser and Coors. Import-export brokers and warehouses with names like COMERCIALIZADORA IMPORTADORA and MARQUEZ VEJAR and INTEGRACION ADUANAL. Dual-language placards on signposts and walls and fences: STOP and also PARE; DANGER as well as PELIGRO; BEWARE OF DOG plus ¡CUIDADO CON EL PERRO!, a warning illustrated by a snarling German shepherd—a visual that made the sign trilingual, in a hieroglyphic sort of way.

  From the top of the overpass that spanned the Otay Mesa Freeway, I spied the sign for the burger joint the four FBI agents had gone to—the oddly punctuated Carl’s Jr.—as well as a closer, higher sign for McDonald’s. To my left, the freeway’s six lanes curved northwest toward San Diego; to my right, they ran due south for a quarter mile to the border checkpoint. As the trucks rumbled beneath me, I noticed that the southbound trucks—heading for the border—rattled and clattered, their cargo trailers empty. The northbound trucks—fresh from Mexico—thudded and groaned beneath heavy loads.

  I turned down the street toward the burger joint. I glanced inside, looking for the FBI agents, but I saw no sign of them—not surprising, given that they could have ordered and eaten and driven away a half hour or an hour before. I was reaching for the door, my stomach rumbling in earnest now, when something caught my eye and I spun in my tracks. Directly across the street was an IHOP—International House of Pancakes—and IHOP was hardwired to some of my fondest memories: Throughout my son’s childhood and adolescence, he and I hit the IHOP almost every Saturday morning. Happily I headed across the deserted street and into the IHOP. By now it was nearly nine, the posted closing time, and the hostess station was vacant. Wandering into the dining room, I found a server, a sturdy young Latina. “Am I too late to eat?”

  “You made it just in time,” she said. “Have a seat”—she motioned me toward a high-backed booth along one wall, beside a hallway that led to the restrooms—“and I’ll bring you a menu.”

  “Don’t need one,” I told her. “I know what I want.” She nodded, pulling an order pad and a pen from her back pocket. “Waffle combo,” I said. “The waffles with fruit and whipped cream—extra fruit and extra cream, please. Two eggs over medium. Bacon. Orange juice.” I thought for a moment. “And an extra side of bacon, please.” Kathleen wouldn’t approve—in fact, Kathleen would be appalled—but Kathleen was fifteen hundred miles away. I knew some people who indulged in alcohol or even adultery while on road trips. Me, I indulged in bacon.

  I slumped down in the booth, suddenly dog-tired; I must have nodded off, because in what seemed mere moments, I heard a thunk and opened my eyes to behold a huge helping of food. “Looks great,” I said. “Smells great, too.”

  “Let me know if you need anything else.” If we’d been in Tennessee, she’d have punctuated the sentence with a darlin’ or a hon, but we weren’t, so she didn’t. She simply smiled and walked away.

  The first bite of food—if the word “bite” can be applied to the microcosmic feast I hoisted mouthward, the fork flexing from its load—filled my mouth with layer upon layer of flavor and texture: the warm, still-crisp waffle; the sweet, juicy berries; the smooth, rich cream; the satisfying substance of the egg. My mouth was practically overflowing, but I couldn’t resist cramming in half a piece of bacon for the sake of the smoky, salty crunch.

  I was only beginning to comprehend the gap between how much I had bitten off and how little I could chew when I heard a familiar voice behind me: Special Agent Miles Prescott’s voice. My inclination was to stand up and say hello, but my mouth was far too full to speak, so I sat, slumped and unseen in the high-backed booth.

  Prescott’s voice was low, but I quickly realized it had a steely edge to it; in fact, as I chewed and listened, I realized that he sounded furious, and I wondered if he was chewing out one of the other agents. Surely not Kimball or Boatman—they were too lowly to inspire such ire—but McCready might have angered him by allowing us to work too slowly. “You know the goddamn rules,” he practically spat. “We had the intel first, so it was our operation.”

  “It was a penny-ante, pissant little operation,” said another, unfamiliar voice—a voice so raspy and wheezy that the speaker was close to coughing out the words. “If you had let this thing play out just a little longer, we’d have taken it a lot higher up the food chain. Maybe—maybe—even gotten Goose Man. We were this close.”

  “In your dreams.”

  “This close,” the second man wheezed again. “But no, the Bureau had to come charging in like the Seventh Fucking Cavalry—flags waving, bugles blowing—and scare everybody back into thei
r hidey-holes. Do you realize you sabotaged a three-year investigation?”

  “Do I look like I give a damn?” snapped Prescott. “It was our operation. Our call. Janus got a good agent killed two weeks ago—”

  “You don’t know that,” interrupted the other man. “Your agent was in way over his head, playing three guys off against each other. I don’t think Janus fingered him. I think your guy just fucked up.”

  “Janus got one of our agents killed,” insisted Prescott. “And when one of ours gets killed, we don’t just stand by and—how’d you put it? ‘Let things play out’? We come down like the wrath of God. Maybe that’s the reason we don’t lose as many agents as you guys do.”

  My mouth was still full, but I had stopped chewing and started sweating. I didn’t know who Prescott meant by you guys, or by he, and I had no earthly idea who “Goose Man” was. The one thing I understood with perfect clarity was that I’d stumbled into the pissing contest Prescott had mentioned earlier. And it sounded like a doozy.

  Still slouching in the booth, I vacillated: On the one hand, I wanted them to leave immediately; on the other, I wanted them to keep arguing—from the beginning, guys!—so I could figure out what they were talking about. Across the room, I noticed the waitress clearing a table; she glanced in my direction, and I felt a jolt of panic. If she came over now—offering a refill of juice, or asking why I wasn’t eating—she’d blow my cover. Not now, not now, I telegraphed her, carefully avoiding eye contact.

  “You sanctimonious sonofabitch,” the stranger was rasping. In my mind’s eye, he was fat and sweaty, his words struggling to burrow out from within a mountain of flesh. “You wanna know why we lose more agents than the Bureau? I’ll tell you why. It’s because you guys are going after pussies—embezzlers and secret sellers and kiddie-porn perverts. Pussies. Meanwhile, we’re out there waging war. With the worst motherfuckers on the planet.”

  “Are you?” Prescott’s voice dripped with sarcasm. I couldn’t tell if he was questioning the badness of the enemy, or the totality of the war effort.

  “Damn right we are. And we’re doing it with a fraction of the money and manpower you necktie-and-cufflink office boys get.”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” Prescott sneered. “Poor, pitiful you. Now if you’re through whining, I’ve got work to do before we climb that mountain tomorrow and pick up the pieces of this operation.” He walked away, his heels pummeling the tile.

  “Prick,” muttered the other man. I heard him turn and trail Prescott out of the IHOP. As his footsteps neared the front door, I risked raising up to take a look. I got a fleeting glimpse of a man who was short and fat, his hair a graying, greasy shade of red. From behind, at least, he looked as repulsive as he sounded.

  I looked down at my plate. The now soggy waffle was surrounded by a moat of cold egg yolk, and the strips of bacon gleamed dully through a varnish of congealed grease. I pushed the plate away, my appetite killed by disgust. Or was it by fear? As I pulled out my wallet for the reckoning with IHOP, I couldn’t help wondering what other reckonings awaited, and what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

  I STEPPED OUT INTO THE NIGHT—STILL WARM, BUT not unpleasant. Eighty-five degrees in the sauna-dry foothills east of San Diego was a different animal from eighty-five degrees in the steam bath that was East Tennessee. It wasn’t that I didn’t sweat here, I’d noticed; it was that the sweat evaporated almost instantly, cooling the body a bit without drenching the clothes entirely.

  “How was your dinner?” The voice came from the darkness behind me.

  “Crap,” I exclaimed, jumping with surprise. Again I recognized the voice as Prescott’s, and I turned toward it. He was leaning against the IHOP’s wall, waiting for me. “You scared the bejesus out of me.”

  I expected him to say that he didn’t mean to; instead, he repeated, “How was dinner?”

  “Kinda meager,” I said. “I ordered a lot, but I only ate one bite. It was a big bite—my mouth was too full to say anything when I heard you behind me—but I’m not sure it’s gonna tide me over till breakfast.” I looked at him more frankly now, embarrassed to have been caught, but relieved not to be keeping secrets. “You knew I was there the whole time?”

  “Just about.”

  “How? I didn’t think you guys could me see over the back of the booth.”

  “Couldn’t,” he said. “I noticed your reflection in the window. Hickock never did.”

  “Hickock’s the pissed-off guy?”

  “You might say that. Wild Bill. He was in the middle of his tirade when I spotted you. If I’d cut him off—if he’d known we had an audience—he’d’ve gone ballistic. At me and you both.” He shook his head. “No point in that.”

  I nodded. “Well, thanks. Sorry I was sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time. Didn’t mean to put you in an awkward spot.”

  “You didn’t. From what I hear, you’re one of the good guys. Besides, Hickock and I should both know better. Talking business in public? I oughta rip myself a new one for that.”

  I remembered old national-security posters I’d seen from the early 1940s. “Loose lips sink ships?”

  “Sounds corny, but basically, yeah.” He nodded across the parking lot, to the black Suburban under a streetlight, its back window thick with dust. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride home.”

  “Thanks, but I’d kinda like to walk.”

  He frowned. “You carrying?”

  “Carrying? You mean a gun?” He nodded, and I shook my head. “Heavens no. I’ve never owned one.”

  “Let me give you a ride, then. This ain’t exactly the tourist district, Doc. You might get robbed; you might get mistaken for a robber. Either way, you wander around here after dark, you’re liable to get shot. Or stabbed. Or worse. Not good for either of us.”

  “Since you put it that way,” I said, “thanks.”

  In the privacy of the Suburban, I figured he’d tell me at least a bit about the raspy-voiced man, and about their argument, but he didn’t. Instead, during the brief drive, he asked about my research at the Body Farm, then quizzed me about a couple of prior cases I’d helped the Bureau with. It was obvious that he was redirecting the conversation away from the confrontation I had stumbled into. It was also, perhaps, a reminder that he had done his research, had read the Bureau’s file on me. It might even have been a subtle caution: If I wanted to keep working with the FBI, I should keep quiet about what I’d overheard tonight. As I thanked him for the lift and headed toward my room, I parsed the conversation—the things he’d said and the ones he hadn’t. Loose lips sink ships, I reminded myself. And maybe crash careers.

  THE TROUBLE WITH GRADUATE ASSISTANTS, I’D noticed—well, one of the troubles—was their tendency to go gallivanting off every summer: for gainful employment, for adventurous travel, or for romance. My current assistant, Marty, was helping direct a student dig in Tuscany for three months, and judging by the letter and photos he’d sent in early June, he was getting both well paid and well laid. Not that I was envious.

  What I was, though, was inconvenienced. I had a question that needed researching, but no time or tools to research it myself—and no helpful minion at my beck and call. So instead, despite the late hour, I called Kathleen.

  It was only 8:45 in San Diego, but it was nearly midnight in Knoxville, and that meant Kathleen had probably been asleep for at least an hour. To my surprise, she answered on the second ring. Her voice sounded thick, but not sleepy.

  “Hey,” I said, “is something wrong? Are you crying?”

  “Oh, I am,” she sniffled, “but it’s just a movie I’m watching.” In the background, I heard voices and music. “Hang on, honey, let me pause it.” She laid the phone down with a rustle, then the background noise quieted. “You know I don’t sleep worth a hoot when you’re gone,” she said, “so I stopped at Blockbuster on the way home.”

  “I’m jealous. What’d you get?”

  “One of those chick flicks you wouldn’t take me to.”
/>
  “Silence of the Lambs?”

  “Ha. Not quite. Shakespeare in Love.”

  “I take it back,” I said. “I’m not a bit jealous.”

  “Actually, you’d really like the scene where he’s in bed with Gwyneth Paltrow.”

  She knew me well. “Well then,” I said, “when I get home, we can rent it again and fast-forward to that part.”

  “Hmmph.” She sniffed again, and in the brief pause that followed, I could practically hear the gears in her mind shifting. “Why aren’t you asleep?” Her voice was laser sharp now, and despite the two thousand miles between us, I could almost feel her eyes searching mine. “You called me to say good night two hours ago. What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know.” I told her about my accidental, disturbing eavesdropping at the IHOP. “I wish I understood what’s going on,” I said. “Not that I need to know everything, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “But it feels like there’s stuff here—players and politics and agendas—that I don’t understand, stuff that could affect the investigation.”

  “Affect it how?”

  Suddenly I thought, Shit, what if my phone is tapped? A moment later I scolded myself, Don’t be paranoid. Who the hell would want to tap your phone? “I don’t know, Kath. That’s the frustrating thing—I don’t know enough to know what else I need to know. What is it Donald Rumsfeld calls this kind of thing?”

  “God, don’t get me started on Rumsfeld,” she said. She had a point there—she despised the man, and the mere mention of his name sometimes set her off on a Rumsfeld rant. “But I believe ‘unknown unknowns’ is the gobbledygook term you’re thinking of.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “I’m worried that the unknown unknowns here could affect this case in ways I can’t foresee or control. Distort it, undermine its objectivity or integrity. Here I am doing my thing, crawling around looking for teeth and bones. But I’ve got a bad feeling, like I’m wandering around in a minefield. One false step, and there goes a foot. Figuratively speaking. If I blow this case, Kathleen—the highest-profile case the Bureau has ever used me on? They’ll write me off, and for good.”