The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  “Well, yeah, there’s that,” she conceded. “But maybe you could rationalize it.”

  “Rationalize it how?”

  “Same way Robin Hood did, I guess. Take from the rich, give to the poor.”

  “But,” I started to protest, then stopped. But what?

  “There’s something else,” she added.

  Crack! Crack crack crack! The metal door of my room rattled, and I jumped almost as if the knocks had been gunshots. “I gotta go,” I said furtively. “Somebody’s at my door.”

  More rapping. “Hey, Doc—you in there?” It was McCready’s voice. “You about ready?” I checked the bedside clock. Crap, I thought. I was five minutes late. “Be right there,” I hollered. “One second.”

  BANG! “Yo, Doc! We’re burning daylight!”

  “Coming. Coming!” I muttered a quick “talk to you later” into the phone and ended the call, then hurried to the door and tugged it open. “Sorry,” I said, my face flushing. “I got caught on a call to UT.”

  “Everything all right?”

  I nodded. His question was routine—superficial small talk, without a doubt.

  Almost without a doubt, I realized uneasily. Was it just my imagination, or were his eyes boring into mine with the keen skepticism of a federal investigator?

  On the rocky ride up the mountain, I mentally replayed the phone call, pondering the information and testing her Robin Hood theory: Did it fit the facts? And was it the simplest explanation that did? I had to admit, it did seem to fit with Janus’s swashbuckling style, his daredevil streak. I’d seen videos of him landing a DC-3 in jungle clearings scarcely bigger than my backyard. Clearly the man didn’t mind some peril—in fact, he seemed to thrive on it. Was he simply braver than most of us, more tolerant of high doses of danger? Or was it possible that Janus was an adrenaline junkie: not just accustomed to risk, but addicted to it—that danger was his drug of choice?

  If so, he may have suffered a fatal overdose, I realized—an overdose supplied by Chapo Guzmán, a rich but deadly devil to dance with.

  “BIG DAY TODAY, GUYS,” SAID MCCREADY AS WE loaded onto the platform and prepared to descend the bluff for our second assault on the wreckage. “Summer solstice; longest day of the year. Fourteen hours of daylight.”

  Boatman groaned; Kimball said, “Great! We get overtime, right?”

  “Sure you do,” said McCready. “And good always triumphs over evil. And the Democrats and Republicans are about to set aside their differences and work together for the greater good.”

  “Hmm,” Kimball muttered.

  The morning wore on; the sun rose and the heat soared, the brown stone of the mountain soaking up the solstice sun. I was surprised by the heat—I’d heard that San Diego doesn’t get hot until July or even August—but somehow we had managed to catch a heat wave, which combined with the residual heat from the fire to make the crash site feel like a sauna. For much of the morning we were in shadow, sheltered by the rock wall at our backs. By eleven, though, the shadow had shrunk to a narrow band at the base of the bluff, and a hot, dry wind was funneling up the valley, swirling dust and cinders around us.

  Mercifully, a few minutes later, McCready called a lunch break. Caked with dust and the salt of dried sweat, we boarded the platform and ascended the bluff. After our hours of baking on the slope, the comforts of the command center—ice water, air-conditioning, and a feast of sandwiches, fruit, chips, cookies, even ice cream bars—seemed wondrous beyond comprehension: as if we’d been released from a low, hot circle of Dante’s Inferno and whisked straight to Paradise.

  AFTER LUNCH I STAKED A CLAIM ON A CORNER OF the command center’s small sofa. I must have nodded off, because I suddenly found myself waking up. The chatter in the room had ceased, and—hearing the abrupt silence—I jerked awake and said, “What?” Then, as the fog of sleep dissipated, I heard what had caused the agents to fall silent: the thrum of an approaching helicopter. My first thought was of the sheriff’s chopper, but then I realized that the pitch was too high. This was no army-bred workhorse; this was a racehorse—the same Fox 5 News racehorse that had trailed Carmelita Janus up the mountain, I saw when I followed the agents outside.

  McCready and Prescott—apparently the case agent had arrived sometime during my nap—frowned as the helicopter settled down, and their frowns turned to scowls as a young reporter, accompanied by a cameraman, ducked beneath the swirling blades and scurried toward us. Prescott held up a warning hand and shook his head—a clear, strong no signal—but they kept coming. The cameraman handed the reporter a microphone, and as they neared us, he held it up and began speaking. “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News. Who’s in charge here?”

  “I am,” said Prescott.

  “And who are you?” he demanded.

  “I’m the federal officer who’s going to arrest you both if you don’t leave immediately. This is a restricted area and you know it. So get back in your helicopter and get out of here, and I mean now.”

  “Of course, of course. Just a couple quick questions before we go.”

  “No,” said Prescott. “Now.”

  “Have you identified the body of Richard Janus yet?” Prescott didn’t respond. “Have you found his body—or any body?”

  “I won’t comment on an ongoing investigation,” said Prescott, his voice ringing like steel on stone. “But I will comment on this.” He held up a thumb and forefinger, practically touching. “You are this close to being arrested for tampering with a crime scene, interfering with a federal officer in performance of his duties, and two or three other things I haven’t thought of yet. When we have news, we will hold a press conference. Which you’ll be welcome to attend. If you’re not behind bars.”

  The reporter held up his hands and began backing away, but he wasn’t giving up yet. “What’s the crime? You say this is a crime scene, so what crime are you investigating?” Prescott scowled, but I wasn’t sure whether his anger was triggered by the reporter’s doggedness or his own revelation—I felt sure it was unintentional—that the mountaintop wasn’t just a crash scene, but a crime scene.

  Then I noticed Prescott’s gaze lifting and shifting, refocusing on something beyond the journalists, and I saw four ERT techs edging up behind them. Prescott gave a slight nod—a gesture so subtle that I wasn’t sure whether I’d actually seen it or just imagined it—and the four agents swiftly closed the gap, grabbing the TV guys by the arms and force-marching them back to the helicopter. Just before the reporter was pushed into the cabin, he shouted a final question, and the flicker in Prescott’s eyes as he heard the last three words sent a shock wave coursing clear through me.

  “Do you consider Richard Janus to be the victim,” the reporter had yelled, “or the criminal?”

  BACK AMID THE SWELTERING WRECKAGE, THE AIR-CONDITIONED comfort of lunchtime soon seemed a distant memory, and by midafternoon, even Kimball and Boatman had stopped bantering. We worked in steady silence, punctuated only by the thud of metal bumping metal, the rasp of metal scraping rock, the clink of rock rolling against rock. We’d still found no signs of hair or teeth or sinew, and as I stooped and straightened, stooped and straightened, I settled into a trancelike rhythm, moving like some assembly-line automaton: a metal-sorting machine, my clawlike hands gripping scraps and shards and depositing them on the rack, which—every twenty minutes or so—ascended into heaven, or into what passed for heaven out on the hellishly hot hillside. Only moments after disappearing, it seemed, the rack would return, its maw empty and mocking, sneering, So, ready to pack it in?

  “So, ready to pack it in?” I heard the question again, this time coming from outside my head, not inside. Startled, I looked around, then looked up. McCready was peering down at me from the rim, his expression quizzical and amused.

  “Sorry,” I said. “What?”

  “Ready to call it a day? It’s after five.” The insatiable rack had just come down once more, and McCready pointed toward me, then pointed toward the rack, and then mimed the act of
reeling in a fish. I was exhausted, true; I’d spent most of the night fretting rather than sleeping, and I’d been keyed up all day as well.

  But I was loath to end a second day without finding something: that, too, was true—truer, or at least more compelling at the moment, than my fatigue. I suspected that Prescott was still pressuring McCready, but if he was, McCready was shielding us from it. “Don’t forget, it’s the solstice,” I called up to him. “You promised us extra fun in the sun today.”

  “Go for it,” he said. “The rest of you guys got a little more in you?” I heard a smattering of sures and why nots from the ERT team; they sounded halfhearted, at best, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to let the sun set without finding something—even if that “something” was only clear evidence that, despite Maddox’s confidence, there was nothing in the wreckage to be found.

  We worked for another hour without talking, the quiet broken at intervals by sighs and grunts and occasional muttered curses; by the tin-roof clatter of scraps raining onto the platform; by the rumble and whine of the crane as it hoisted another load from the base of the bluff to the top of the ridge.

  Despite my resolve not to end the day empty-handed, I realized—as the emptied platform descended for the thousandth time of the day—that I was pooped. Exhausted. Out of gas. “Okay,” I groaned, “stick a fork in me, ’cause I’m done.” All around me, I heard what sounded like sighs of weary relief.

  “Just in time,” said Kimball. “By now I wouldn’t know a femur if it hit me upside the head.” He radioed up to McCready. “Hey, boss, Doc’s pleading for clemency. Any chance you can let us off with time served?” I didn’t hear McCready’s response, but a moment later, the platform eased a step closer to the ground, and Kimball offered me a hand climbing aboard.

  Just as I stepped up, though, I caught a glimpse of something—or half a glimpse, or a tenth of one—in my peripheral vision. I didn’t know what it was, but it triggered some subliminal sensor, set off some subconscious alarm or detector. I froze and scanned the ground, but I couldn’t see anything of particular interest or importance. I stepped back, reversing course, and then retraced my steps, this time in extreme slow motion, letting my gaze brush lightly across the surface of the rubble: looking, but not too closely, for it was only when I hadn’t been looking that I’d actually seen whatever it was I’d seen.

  No luck. I repeated the maneuver twice more without success while the ERT techs watched. I had just given up, and was stepping onto the rack for good, when I saw it again, a faint glimmer of something small and smooth and lustrous. This time I got a better fix on where it was, and I bent down, maintaining the same visual angle and keeping my eye glued to the spot. “I’ll be damned,” I said as much to myself as to the four FBI agents. “It’s a tooth—an honest-to-god tooth!” I knelt—sharp rubble dug into my knees, but I didn’t care—and plucked it from the metal shards that swirled around it, like some dangerous version of a gemstone’s setting. It was a bicuspid—an upper right—the roots broken and burned but the crown intact. I held it between my thumb and forefinger, studying it from all angles, as if it were a miraculous and precious object, unique in all the world. Which it was, of course—there was no other tooth anywhere on earth exactly like this one. Without fillings or other distinctive anomalies, it wasn’t a sufficient basis for a positive identification. But it was a start, by damn. And it was proof that the plane wasn’t some empty, unpiloted ghost ship after all.

  “Don’t tell McCready,” I said to my teammates in a low voice. “I want to surprise him with it.” Kimball held out a small paper evidence bag, the top open. I eased the tooth inside, then tucked the bag into my shirt pocket. Next I took an evidence flag from one of my back pockets and wiggled the thin steel shaft into the spot where I’d found the tooth, so Kimball and Boatman could map the spot when we returned in the morning. “Always park on the downhill,” my granddaddy had taught me long ago, back when I was fifteen and learning to drive a stick shift. “Makes it easier to get going the next time.” The advice had served me well ever since, and not just when it came to cars. Ending the day by flagging the spot where I’d found the tooth—the first of many, I hoped—was my way of parking us on the excavation’s downhill slope.

  Straddling the empty bucket again—not empty for much longer, I told myself—I caught hold of the cables, and we ascended. This time, the tide of battle seemed to be turning, and I stood taller, actually feeling a bit like George Washington this time, the Stars and Stripes fluttering beside us in the breeze.

  “Hold out your hand and close your eyes,” I told McCready when we disembarked topside. He looked wary, but he did it. Reaching into my pocket, I fished out the bag and opened it, then carefully laid the tooth in his palm. “Happy solstice,” I said, and when he opened his eyes and saw it, a smile dawned, spreading across his face like daybreak.

  THE SOLSTICE SUN WAS EASING TOWARD THE HORIZON—a broad track of sunlight glinted off the Pacific, though the sun was still too bright to look at—when we adjourned to the command post to celebrate our find, to toast the tooth with ice water and Diet Coke. We tapped plastic bottles and aluminum cans together as exuberantly as if they’d been crystal champagne flutes. “To the upper right bicuspid,” I toasted, holding it aloft. “The first of many teeth awaiting us tomorrow.”

  I felt the tired buzz of fatigue—or thought I felt the buzz of fatigue, but as the tingling ended and then resumed, ended and resumed, I realized that my cell phone—tucked in my pocket and set on “vibrate”—was receiving a call. I fished it out and saw Knoxville’s area code, 865, followed by the number that Red, the reference librarian, had given me. I noticed McCready and Maddox both looking my way, and I felt my face flush with the guilty knowledge that I was keeping secrets. “Go ahead and take that if you want to, Doc,” McCready called over the din. “I’ll make these guys quiet down.”

  I shook my head with what I hoped was nonchalance. “Naw. I recognize the number. It’s just UT bureaucracy.”

  McCready looked up at the wall clock, which read 6:47. “Man, you ivory-tower folks work some mighty long hours.”

  It was nearly ten o’clock in Knoxville, I realized. Crap, Brockton, I chided myself, could you have said anything dumber? “Takes a lot of work to keep the place all clean and shiny,” I said lamely. McCready returned to his conversation with Maddox, but his eyes seemed to linger on me for an extra moment.

  THE BONE-JARRING RIDE DOWN THE MOUNTAIN seemed to take hours, although my watch suggested that only thirty minutes had elapsed. When we finally pulled into the motel’s parking lot, I practically leapt from the Suburban. “I’m gonna scrub up and call home,” I said on my way out. “If y’all are hungry, go on without me. I can fend for myself again.”

  “Hell, we’ll wait,” said McCready. “Fella works as hard as you do shouldn’t have to eat alone.”

  “Thanks,” I said, though I would rather have had the time alone. “Want me to call you when I’m ready?”

  “Just meet us in the lobby whenever you get done. Maybe thirty minutes? Eight o’clock, plus or minus?”

  “You sure y’all don’t want to just go on without me?”

  “Sure, Doc. It’s not like we’ve got big plans.”

  “Hey, speak for yourself, old man,” cracked Kimball. “Jack in the Box? Mickey D’s? Them joints is some happenin’, dude—I’ll be rockin’ this warehouse district all night!” I could hear the younger agents riffing on this theme and laughing as I stepped into my room. Closing the door behind me, I immersed myself in the cool and the dark, soaking up the soothing, white-noise hum of processed air.

  My phone was already in my hand by the time I’d chained the door, and I felt a surge of nervous energy when I saw that I had two voice mails waiting.

  The first was a reminder about a finance committee meeting at my church the next day, one I might have skipped even if I weren’t two thousand miles away. The second one, though, was as electrifying as the first one was boring. “Dr.
Brockton? It’s Red. I’ve got some follow-up info I think you’ll find interesting. Call back when you can.”

  I checked the clock. It was 7:30 in San Diego, which made it 10:30 in Knoxville. Too late to call, I thought. But then again, she worked until midnight—or did on some nights, although I didn’t know about tonight. She said to call anytime, I reminded myself. I hit the “call” button. “Hello,” said the now-familiar voice. “Is that you, Dr. B?”

  “It is. Sorry to call so late. Are you still working?”

  “I’m always working. My work ethic knows no bounds. Well, few bounds.” She paused. “Okay, truth is, my work ethic is fairly feeble. But I’m gung ho about this particular task.”

  I didn’t have time for witty repartee. “Your voice mail said you found something interesting.”

  “Well, I think so, but I’ll let you be the judge.”

  “Tell me quick, then,” I said. “I don’t have much time.”

  “Richard Janus was a pilot for Air America from 1970 to ’75.”

  That wasn’t interesting at all, I judged. “So? The man’s a pilot. Was. I’d be surprised if he didn’t fly for an airline or two.”

  “Air America wasn’t an airline. Air America was the CIA’s secret air force in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.”

  Suddenly I judged the information to be considerably more interesting. “The CIA? As in Central Intelligence Agency?”

  “As in. Air America was the cover name. A shell company, it’s called. Civilian pilots—get this—flying military aircraft, on black-ops missions: commando insertions, weapons drops, downed-pilot rescues. Mostly in Laos and Cambodia, where U.S. troops weren’t supposed to be. There’s some evidence—claims, anyhow—that Air America also trafficked in opium.”

  “What?”

  “To help fund their operations. More profitable than bake sales, I guess.”