The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  “Is that like a bomb-bay door on a B-17?”

  “Bingo,” Maddox said. “Main difference between a bomb and a cargo pallet is what happens when it hits the ground.”

  “And the belly door on the Citation could be opened in flight?”

  “That’s the whole point of a belly door,” he said. “Pretty crazy—the Citation can’t carry a lot of cargo, and it must’ve cost a damn fortune to install that door. But I guess it paid for itself the first time he dropped a pallet-load of cocaine.” He paused briefly, as if considering whether or not to tell me something. “You know he had a little private airstrip a few miles from Brown Field, right? Perfect place to do drug drops on his way back from Mexico.”

  I was still playing catch-up, but it was all starting to make sense. “So you’re thinking Janus took off, opened the belly door, and bailed out just before the plane hit?”

  “Sure looks like it.”

  “But he wouldn’t have time to open a parachute, would he? That mountain was coming up fast to meet him.”

  “At the end, yeah, but not at first, Doc. I’ve looked again at the terrain profile and the aircraft’s altitude. The airport, Brown Field, is about five hundred feet above sea level, and so is Lower Otay Lake, where he changed course and headed south. We all thought he was turning toward Mexico, you know? But I think he was aiming straight for Otay Mountain all along. If he jumped when he was over his airstrip, he’d’ve been a good fifteen hundred feet AGL.”

  “AGL?” The term wasn’t familiar to me.

  “Above ground level.”

  “Fifteen hundred feet? That’s high enough to jump?”

  “If you know what you’re doing,” he said. “And if you’re lucky. Skydivers are required to pull the cord by two thousand feet AGL. Gives ’em time to pop their reserve chute, if the main doesn’t open. Combat jumps can be as low as five hundred feet. But those lunatics that jump off buildings and bridges—BASE jumpers, I think they’re called? Some of them jump from two, three hundred feet. Dumb-asses with a death wish.”

  “So he could’ve done it.”

  “Hell, yeah, he could’ve done it. Would’ve been pretty fascinating, though.”

  “Fascinating?” It seemed an odd word to use.

  He chuckled. “Sorry. Slang. Means ‘scary as hell.’ Dark night, rough terrain, fast as he was going? Extremely fascinating. Remember D. B. Cooper—Dan Cooper? Hijacked a commercial airliner about thirty years ago?”

  “Vaguely,” I said. “He got money and a parachute, right, and made the plane take off again?”

  “Right,” said Maddox. “The plane he picked to hijack was a Boeing 727; damn things had stairs back near the tail that could be lowered in flight. Cooper bailed out around midnight, somewhere over the Columbia River Gorge. To this day, nobody knows whether he survived or not. Maybe that’s where Janus got the idea. In-ter-esting. Fascinating. Risky as hell, though.” He gave a small grunt. “If the Feebies were about to lock him up forever, though, I guess not jumping looked risky as hell, too.”

  Two things still bothered me. I asked Maddox about the first. “So how come we didn’t figure this out while we were out there working the scene?” I hoped that the word “we” wouldn’t sound accusatory, but he saw right through my politeness.

  “You mean, how come the hotshot crash expert missed something as big as a pair of belly doors in the wreckage?” He sounded surprisingly unruffled by the implied criticism.

  “Well, okay. Yeah. How come you missed that?”

  He chuckled again. “I dunno. Same reason you missed the tool marks on the teeth, maybe?” He didn’t sound spiteful; he sounded matter-of-fact, or even slightly amused. “For one thing, the fuselage was pretty thoroughly fragmented.”

  “True,” I conceded. “Looked like it’d been through a shredder.”

  “A shredder plus an incinerator,” he said. “For another thing, the evidence techs—not the ones working with you, but the other four, the ones gathering up the scattered chunks?—they were sending up stuff faster than I could sort through it. I didn’t get a chance to start combing through everything till after the press conference. Two days ago, I saw some parts I didn’t recognize—a couple hinges and latches—so I dug deeper, started asking around. That’s when I found out about the belly door. So I got on the horn to Prescott.”

  “What’d he say when you told him?”

  “Not much. That’s the weird thing. It was almost like he’d been expecting it; like somebody’d already told him something. He sounded mad when he picked up the phone. First thing he said was, ‘And what’s your good news?’ Like he’d just gotten some other bad news, you know?” He paused. “Maybe he’d just gotten a call about the teeth from Mike Mal-loy, Fox Five News.” He did a pretty good imitation of my imitation of the pushy, self-important reporter.

  My second question was one Maddox wouldn’t be able to answer—it was one maybe nobody could answer—so I thanked Maddox and hung up, leaving the question unasked, except in my own frustrated mind: If it wasn’t Janus strapped into the Citation when it hit Otay Mountain, who the hell was it?

  Suddenly a third thought struck me. This one wasn’t a question, but an inescapable conclusion, and it was the most disturbing of the three. If he really had faked his death and sent a decoy corpse hurtling into the mountainside, that could mean only one thing: that Richard Janus—a man I had admired deeply—was not just a hypocrite and a drug trafficker, but a diabolical killer, too.

  SHE ANSWERED ON THE FIRST RING, HER VOICE AS flat and expressionless as a computer’s. “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Janus?” She didn’t respond, so I went on. “Mrs. Janus, it’s Bill Brockton—Dr. Brockton, the forensic anthropologist—returning your call.”

  “Oh, thank you, Doctor,” she said, and it was as if a switch had flipped: Her voice was no longer mechanical and flat; now it was warm, expressive, and deeply sad. “Thank you. I am very grateful. No one else will return my calls—no one except reporters, and I don’t want to talk to them. It is extremely painful, this sudden . . . not knowing.”

  The phrase, not knowing—or, rather, the deep chord it struck in me—took me by surprise. I’d heard the same phrase many times over the years, most often from the parents of abducted kids, runaway girls, or missing young women; I’d also heard it from the families of Vietnam War soldiers who were still, after decades, missing in action. I had pegged Mrs. Janus as different from such simple, open grievers. I had sized her up as cool, calm, and collected—or maybe I had judged her to be complicit and guilty. Now, in response to her comment, I felt my shields lowering and my sympathy rising.

  Still, I knew that if not knowing was her problem, I was in no position to solve it. “Unfortunately, Mrs. Janus,” I said, “I probably can’t tell you anything that will help you. The truth is, I don’t know what’s going on. I no longer have any idea whether your husband is dead or alive. I wish I did. And I’ve got your number. If I find out anything, I promise to call you.”

  “Wait,” she said, her voice urgent. “Don’t hang up. Please. You are my only hope.”

  “Me? But I just told you—I don’t know anything. Really, I don’t. I’ve never been so confused and frustrated by a case.” As I said the words “a case,” I realized they might sound cold and callous to her. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean to sound insensitive or unkind.”

  “I understand,” she said. “And you don’t. But tell me, please—at the meeting, you sounded convinced that it was Richard in the plane.”

  “At the meeting, I was,” I said. “But now? Now I don’t know.”

  “The media and the FBI are saying that it wasn’t Richard,” she said. “That it was someone else. That Richard had his teeth pulled, and he killed someone else, and pulled that man’s teeth, too. But how can this be, Doctor? It cannot be.”

  “It might be,” I said, thinking—just as Maddox had, one phone call and five minutes earlier—that I shouldn’t say anything more. But then, just like Maddox, I kept tal
king. “The only new information I have is this. I just now reexamined the teeth—your husband’s teeth—and it’s true that they had been pulled. Extracted.” I heard what sounded like a soft gasp on the other end of the line. I went on: “I couldn’t see that when I found them in the wreckage, because the teeth were covered with soot and grease. But I just now finished cleaning them. And when I looked at them under a magnifying glass, I could see marks—little scratches and cracks—made by forceps or pliers or some other tool.”

  “Dios mío,” she whispered. My God. “But who could have done this? Could . . . Richard do that himself? Pull all his own teeth, so he could fake his death?”

  I hadn’t even considered this grisly possibility. “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I’ve never heard of anybody pulling out all their own teeth. One or two, sure, but a whole mouthful? There would be a lot of pain. And a lot of blood. I suspect the body would go into shock long before all the teeth were out.”

  “So if Richard did this—if he faked his death—he would have needed help. An accomplice.”

  “I think so,” I said, wondering if she might be the accomplice. I tried to imagine Carmelita Janus—the elegant woman I’d sat across the table from only a few days before—yanking tooth after bloody tooth from her husband’s mangled mouth. I couldn’t picture it. Suddenly I recalled the FBI’s struggle to obtain Janus’s dental records. “He might have had a dentist do it. To minimize the pain and the damage. Even so, it would have been a drastic step.” I recalled stories I’d heard about coyotes and wolves, caught in traps, gnawing off their own legs to free themselves, but I stopped myself from mentioning those to her. Instead, I simply said, “He would have to be very desperate to do that. But it sounds like maybe he was.”

  “No. He wasn’t,” she said. Her voice broke, and her breath turned quick and ragged and jerky, like that of a hurt child or an injured animal. “He . . . was worried, yes. Afraid, even. He had agreed to do something dangerous . . . to . . . help someone. But it was almost over, he said, and everything was going to be all right. That was the last thing he said to me. ‘I’ll be back soon, and everything will be all right.’ And then he said, ‘I love you so much.’ And then . . . he was gone.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet, and she kept sobbing. Finally she spoke again, her voice now thick and gluey. “To think that he was dead—it broke my heart. To think he might be alive—it would make me . . . happy . . .” Something about the way she said it—the pause before she said the word; the upward inflection that left the end of the sentence hanging in midair—seemed to contradict her words. “But it also makes me very confused. I thought I knew my husband, Doctor—I thought I knew, absolutely, who he was. Now, I cannot say that, not with conviction. But not to know the truth? That is the worst of all. It will drive me insane. And that is why I beg you to help me.”

  Perhaps she was just a practiced liar and a good actress, or perhaps I was reacting out of my own wounded pride, but I found myself believing her—and wanting to ease her pain. “Mrs. Janus, I would help you if I could,” I said. “But frankly, I don’t see how I can. I’ve been taken off the case. The FBI thinks I botched it. And maybe they’re right.”

  “The FBI.” Her voice had turned steely. “The FBI wanted Richard dead. Maybe enough to kill him.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “They’re a law enforcement agency. They’re the good guys. They would never do that.”

  I heard a sharp exhalation. “I see that you’re an idealist, Dr. Brockton.” There was a note of sadness, or even bitterness, in her words. “Just like Richard. You believe in the goodness of people. And sometimes, yes, that is a gift. A prophecy and a catalyst.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sometimes believing that people are good inspires them to be good. Inspires them to try harder. Maybe they begin to see themselves the way that you see them; maybe they like what they see, and so they try to become it—try to become honest, or kind, or generous; more noble than they have been before. Sometimes.” She paused, then added, “But other times, believing good things about people allows them to take advantage of you. Or deceive you. Or even destroy you.” She drew another breath, this one long and steady. “Be careful, so this doesn’t happen to you also.”

  This conversation was not going the way I’d expected it to. “As I said, Mrs. Janus, I’m not at all sure I can help you. But maybe you can help me. I’m very confused, too. I still feel sure that those were your husband’s teeth in the wreckage.”

  “Yes, without a doubt,” she agreed. “Even if the rest of the remains were someone else’s, the teeth were Richard’s.”

  “But the spinal cord stimulator,” I pointed out. “That’s evidence that the remains—”

  “That,” she interrupted, “is evidence that the FBI cannot be trusted.”

  “Why do you say that? The FBI now seems to think that it wasn’t Richard in the plane. But the spinal cord stimulator suggests that it was him.”

  Again she surprised me, this time with a brief, bitter laugh. “Not at all,” she said. “Richard did not have a spinal cord stimulator.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, more confused than ever. “I saw his medical records. I saw the x-ray. You saw the x-ray.”

  “He used to have a spinal cord stimulator,” she said. “But it wasn’t working, so he had it removed. More than a year ago.”

  “Then why didn’t his medical records say that he’d had it taken out?”

  “Because Richard decided that the doctor who put it in was a quack. He stopped going to that doctor. He had it taken out in Mexico City, when we were visiting my family.”

  My mind was racing. “But why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you say something, when I talked about finding the stimulator in the wreckage? When I showed you the x-ray?”

  “You were with the FBI,” she said simply. “I did not trust them, so why would I trust you? Why would I tell you anything? If I thought Richard was still alive—hiding somewhere—why would I tell that to the FBI? They would just keep looking for him.”

  My next question seemed the obvious one. “Then why are you telling me now, Mrs. Janus?”

  “Because I have changed my mind about you, Dr. Brockton.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons. First, you told me something about yourself that day—a small but important fact, something easy for me to check, to find out if it was the truth or a lie.”

  “What fact?”

  “You told me that you give money to support Richard’s work. I checked, and it’s true. That tells me that you’re an honest man, and also a good man. That is one reason I changed my mind.”

  “What’s the other reason?”

  “Because now the FBI has betrayed you, too,” she said, her voice cold with contempt. “There is an old saying, Doctor, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ You know this saying?”

  “I know the saying, Mrs. Janus,” I said, suddenly uncomfortable, “but it doesn’t apply here. I don’t think I’ve been betrayed. And the FBI is certainly not my enemy.”

  “Are you sure, Doctor? The FBI seems to consider you an enemy.”

  I was just about to answer her—disagree with her again—when the building’s corrugated metal siding boomed and rattled so loudly I nearly dropped the phone.

  “Dr. Brockton,” I heard a deep voice calling. “Are you in there?”

  What the hell? I thought. And who the hell?

  As if in answer to my question, a voice called out, “Dr. Brockton, if you’re in there, I need you to open the door. It’s Special Agent Billings. FBI.”

  SPECIAL AGENT COLE BILLINGS—A TALL, MUSCLED young man in a suit and a hurry—fixed me with a piercing stare when I tugged open the annex’s rusty door. “I’m glad to see you, Dr. Brockton,” he said, but his tight jaw and hawkish eyes looked the opposite of glad. “We were getting worried. Nobody seemed to know where you were.”

  “Oh, sorry to cause a fuss.” I gave him my most conci
liatory expression. “I’ve been right here since . . .”—I looked at my watch and gave a vague shrug—“sometime yesterday.”

  “You don’t seem to’ve told anybody where you’d be,” he said. “Your wife said she didn’t know. Your secretary, either.”

  I shook my head, rolling my eyes in what I hoped would pass for embarrassment at my own incompetence. “You know what they say about absentminded professors,” I told him. “And I’ve got plenty to make my mind especially absent lately. A Nashville TV station has opened a real can of worms. Raising a big stink—pardon the pun—about veterans’ bodies at the Body Farm. You seen any of that coverage?”

  “A little.” He said it dismissively, so I’d be sure not to make the mistake of thinking it mattered to him in the least.

  “What a mess,” I went on. “I’ve been getting phone calls all hours of the day and night. Reporters circling my office, even coming to my house. Driving me nuts.” His eyes flickered impatiently. “Anyhow. I’m glad it’s you that found me, not that damn woman from Nashville. Channel Four.” I motioned him inside. “I’ve actually been working on something for you guys—your San Diego colleagues. Cleaning the teeth and bone fragments.”

  If possible, he looked even less glad than before, possibly even alarmed. Apparently this was something he did care about. “From the Janus plane crash?”

  I nodded. “I didn’t get a chance to clean them out there. We were scrambling pretty fast. Now that I’ve got the soot off, I can see things I couldn’t see before. Tool marks on the teeth. They’d all been pulled! Damnedest thing I ever saw.” I pointed toward the counter where the material was spread on blue surgical drapes. “Here, let me show you.”

  His expression turned stone-cold, and I knew he wasn’t buying my show of uninformed friendliness. “I’m sure that’d be very interesting, Dr. Brockton, but I don’t have time for that. I’m here to pick up that material from you. I’d better just get it and go.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay. Of course. It’ll take me a few minutes to pack it up. You can help, if you want to, or just look over my shoulder. Make sure I don’t miss anything.”