The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  “You’ll be very interested in this,” I told him. “And I’d appreciate your advice.”

  “Advice? Hell, Doc, I stopped giving advice a long damn time ago. I noticed I was nearly always wrong, but even when I was right—especially when I was right—people ended up getting pissed off at me.”

  I laughed. “I promise not to get pissed off.”

  “I’ll hold you to it, Doc. So to paraphrase the 911 dispatchers, what’s the nature of your advice emergency?”

  “So, remember when we talked a few weeks ago? When you said there was a way to bail out of a Citation—out of that Citation—in flight?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I don’t surprise that easy anymore, old as I am, but I gotta admit, you coulda knocked me over with a feather when I found out about those belly doors.”

  “Well, get ready for another surprise. I found where the guy landed.”

  “Come again?”

  “I found where he landed. The guy that bailed out.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Seriously, Doc, what’s on your mind?”

  “No kidding. Hand-on-the-Bible serious. I came back to San Diego, and I found the place, Pat. Not where you thought, though—it’s about a mile south of that airstrip.” I described the scene—the dead-end road, the pile of cigarette butts, the giant + sign formed by flares. “In the middle of the night, right under the flight path, no other lights around? That signal would’ve stood out like a searchlight.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “If that’s what it was. And if that’s when it was.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Coulda just been kids, out there some other night. Drinking, smoking dope, playing with fire. You know—kids.”

  “I’ve got a good feeling about this, Pat. Those flares, arranged in that pattern? That wasn’t made by stoned kids messing around. I’m telling you, Pat, that was a signal. I think maybe I should call Prescott, let his evidence guys see what they can find.”

  “Special Agent Prescott? I thought you were number one on his shit list.”

  “Well, yeah,” I conceded. “That’s why I called you. To see what you think. You’re a fed, Pat. Would Prescott actually listen to what I have to say? Or would he just dismiss it, since he thinks I’m full of crap?”

  “Hmm. Interesting question, Doc. Tricky.” He paused to think. “Here’s an idea. I’m just thinking out loud here. I’m not on Prescott’s shit list. What if I came down and took a quick look? If it’s all you say it is, maybe I could make the call to Prescott—soften him up a bit—and then hand the phone over to you. Might help him listen with an open mind if I ran a little interference for you.”

  “I see your point,” I said, “and I appreciate it. But I’m nervous about just leaving it for a day or two, or whenever you can get away and get down here.”

  “And you think Prescott and Company are gonna rush right over there? Not bloody likely.” Maddox chuckled. “You’ve never ridden with me, have you, Doc?”

  “Well, no. Why?”

  “Because if you had, you’d know it’s like ridin’ in a low-flying plane. I can be there in two hours. That soon enough for you?”

  I checked my watch. “Really? Three o’clock? Today?”

  “Three-thirty, tops, if there’s not a wreck on the 405. Can you wait that long? You could run back to town and grab lunch, if you haven’t already eaten.”

  “Nah, I’ve got snacks in the car. Besides, I’ve got something else I want to do out this way. I’ll plan on meeting you at three, or as soon after that as you can get here.”

  “Where? Can you tell me how to find this place?” I gave him directions, and as I finished, he said, “I see it on the map, and I’m printing it out right now. I’ll see you in a couple hours.”

  “Drive safe, Pat.”

  He chuckled again. “Clearly you’ve never ridden with me, Doc.”

  DONOVAN STATE PRISON OCCUPIED THE ENTIRE TOP of a low, oblong mesa. The terrain was dry and dun colored, and the few bits of scrubby vegetation that hadn’t been bulldozed looked as brown and desiccated as the rocks and dirt. A road encircled the complex, skirting the base of three parallel chain-link fences, fifteen feet high and ten feet apart. Out of curiosity, I circumnavigated the complex on the perimeter road, keeping count of the cellblocks and guard towers. If my count was correct, there were twenty cellblocks and a dozen guard towers, each tower thirty or forty feet high.

  I’d seen forbidding penitentiaries before. Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain State Prison—whose hard-core convicts had once included James Earl Ray, the assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—was a forbidding stone fortress, complete with crenellations that looked transplanted from a medieval castle. Donovan State Prison, by contrast, had nothing even grimly ornamental about it. It was almost as if Donovan’s designers and builders had carefully, purposefully excluded any scraps of ornament or history or humanity. Donovan had the bare-bones, bleached-bones look of a bottom-rung industrial complex: a slaughterhouse of the human spirit, as efficient and utilitarian as any meatpacking plant where cows were conveyor-belted to their deaths.

  The one exception to the grimness was the administration building, set outside the triple fencing amid grass, shrubbery, and even a few palm trees. After my brief sightseeing circuit, I parked in front and entered the glass doors. A receptionist behind glass asked if she could help me. “I hope so,” I said, introducing myself and flashing my TBI consultant’s badge—an official-looking brass shield, especially impressive if the word “CONSULTANT” was masked by a strategically placed knuckle.

  “Tennessee,” she said. “You’re a long way from home.”

  “I sure am,” I said, smiling. “The FBI asked me to help with a case out here. I’m hoping I could talk to the watch commander—if that’s the right term—who was supervising the guard-tower staff during the graveyard shift on a night back in June.”

  “Well, the night-shift watch commander wouldn’t be on duty now,” she said. “But he reports to the assistant warden for security, who is here. Could he help you with this?”

  “Well, it’s worth a try,” I said.

  “WALTER JESSUP,” SAID THE ASSISTANT WARDEN ten minutes later, extending his hand across a desk. “I understand you’re interested in events the night of June eighteenth, early morning of June nineteenth?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m wondering if any of the watchtower guards saw something unusual, around one in the morning.”

  “Any of them? All of them. Have to be blind to miss that fire on the mountain.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, and I reckon you don’t put a lot of blind men up in those guard towers. Actually, though, I’m hoping somebody saw something before the fire. Before the plane hit.”

  “You mean the parachute?”

  I blinked. I stared. I blinked again. “Are you serious? Somebody really saw a ’chute?”

  “Yep. Tompkins. Minute or so after the plane flew over. Minute or so before it hit. A little south of the usual spot, though.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Not quite the same place the ’chutes usually come down.”

  “Let me make sure I’m following you,” I said slowly. “Are you telling me this happens regularly? Nighttime parachute jumps over wilderness?”

  “Not regularly. More like irregularly. Occasionally. Three, four times a year, maybe. But usually, like I say, usually they’re a little farther north—right over that little airstrip by the lake. And usually they’re before the plane lands, not after it takes off. Propeller plane, in the past. Not a jet. So this time was same thing, only different.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this. “How long has this been going on?”

  He shrugged. “Five years, plus or minus a year. If it’s important, we could ask some of the guards if they can pin it down closer than that.”

  “Ever reported it to anybody?”

  “You bet. Plane comes in at night from south of the border, drops something at a private airstrip a few miles from town before
landing at a port of entry? Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out they’re running contraband.”

  I felt my heart sinking and my anger rising. “Who’d you report it to?”

  “DEA. I talked to the guy myself, face-to-face. Big fat redheaded fella, sitting right there where you’re sitting now, wheezing like he had asthma or emphysema or something. He said he’d look into it, but I never heard back from him. And those parachutes kept on coming down.”

  SITTING IN THE CAR IN THE PRISON PARKING LOT, I dialed—jabbed—Carmelita Janus’s number on my cell phone. “You lied to me,” I said, my voice shaking with rage. “Right to my face, looking me straight in the eye. ‘Oh, Richard hated drugs,’ you said. ‘Richard would never smuggle drugs.’ I can’t believe I fell for that load of crap. And I can’t believe I crawled out on a limb to help you. Don’t ever call me again.”

  “Wait,” she said. “I didn’t lie to you. Where are you? What’s happened? Why are you saying this?”

  “I’m at Donovan State Prison,” I said coldly. “The guard towers there have a good view toward Richard’s airstrip. They’ve known about the drug drops for years. So has the DEA. Richard’s fat, crooked pal.”

  “Richard wasn’t smuggling drugs,” she said. “I swear it. You have to believe me.”

  “No, I don’t, Mrs. Janus. I already made that mistake. I won’t make it again. I hope they catch whoever killed your husband. But I can’t help you anymore.”

  “Wait,” she said again.

  I didn’t wait. I clicked off the phone, started the car, and left the prison, circling the complex one last time. This time I seemed to feel myself being watched, and I found myself looking upward: up at the looming towers. In the glare of sunlight glinting off their windows, I seemed to see only blank, blind stares, unblinking and utterly indifferent to whatever crimes and misdeeds were occurring—on either side of the triple fencing and coiled razor wire.

  AS I NEARED THE TURNAROUND OF THE DEAD-END road—the spot I had come to think of as the drop zone—my small, citified, sissified car bottomed out for what felt like the dozenth time, the oil pan banging and rasping as the metal scraped across stone. When I’d rented the vehicle back at Brown Field, the Hertz agent had done a walk-around inspection with me, marking scrapes and dings on a diagram of the car. Hope he doesn’t check for dents underneath, I thought, parking in the same place where I’d parked two hours before.

  The engine was ticking with heat, but something about the sound struck me as odd—as different—from the usual dry, metallic click . . . and it seemed to be coming not just from the engine but from the ground as well. Kneeling in the sand, I leaned on my elbows and peered beneath the car. Tick-splat, tick-splat, tick-splat. “Well, damn,” I muttered. “Damn damn damn.” Each damn was echoed by a fat drop of oil falling from the ripped oil pan and splatting into a fast-growing puddle beneath the engine. Still on all fours, I turned and looked behind the car. A thread of oil trailed down the rocky road, like greasy blood, from the wounded Impala.

  Then, as if snuffling along the trail, another vehicle nosed up the road, a black Suburban with big tires and plenty of ground clearance. Clambering to my feet, I walked back toward the SUV. “I’m sure glad to see you,” I said to Maddox as the door opened.

  But it was not Maddox who got out of the Suburban. It was a fat man with greasy red hair, a sweaty white shirt, a leather shoulder holster, and a stubby revolver. The revolver was still holstered, but the safety strap was unsnapped, and I suddenly wished I still had the pistol I’d thrown into the river a few days before. “You,” I said, my blood pressure spiking. Even though the air was bone dry, sweat began rolling from my scalp and seeping from my armpits. “What are you doing here?”

  “Following you,” he wheezed. “I don’t believe we’ve formally met, Dr. Brockton. I’m Special Agent William Hickock. I’m with the DEA. The Drug Enforcement Administration.”

  “I know what the DEA is,” I said. “And I know who you are. You’re the guy waging war on the worst badasses on the planet, right? Or are you?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about your pissing contest with Miles Prescott and the FBI. I heard you and Prescott arguing in the IHOP that night. The night after somebody aimed Richard Janus’s jet—his jet and his corpse and his yanked-out teeth—at that mountainside and bailed out. Were you still in cahoots with Janus at that point, or had you two had a falling-out? Had Janus gotten greedy? Or was it you that got greedy?”

  “I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he wheezed.

  “Bullshit,” I snapped. “If you’ve been following me, you know I just came from Donovan State Prison. The assistant warden there told you years ago about Janus’s drug drops. Did you offer to look the other way, for a piece of the profits? Or were you two partners, fifty-fifty? You lined up the product, he flew the planes?”

  He stared at me, then gave a guffaw. “Drug drops? Those weren’t drug drops.”

  “Jesus, Hickock, give me a break. You’re gonna shoot me anyhow, so there’s no point in lying.”

  “Shoot you?” He looked at me as if I were insane. “I’m trying to protect you, Dr. Dumb-Ass.”

  Now I was the one gaping. “Protect me?”

  “Hell, yeah. And you’re not making it easy.” He shook his head. “Janus wasn’t dropping drugs from that DC-3. He was dropping people.”

  “People? What people? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about people who needed to get the hell out of Mexico, under the radar. People who had price tags on their heads. People who were trying to help us bring down the country’s biggest drug cartel.”

  “You mean the Sinaloa cartel? You mean Guzmán?”

  “I mean Guzmán.” He gave a slight, ironic smile. “And yeah, in my world, at least, he is the baddest badass on the planet.”

  “You brought Richard Janus in on this? How? Why?”

  “Richard and I go way back,” he said. “Went way back. Forty years. I flew with him in Southeast Asia—Laos—back in the sixties.”

  “Air America? You were an Air America pilot too?”

  “Nah, I wasn’t a pilot. I was his kicker.”

  “Kicker?”

  “Cargo kicker. Richard would take us in through the treetops, weaving and juking, dodging branches and bullets. That man had balls of solid brass. Then he’d pop up and level off for about two seconds—just long enough for me to kick the rice out the door—and dive back down to the deck.” He shook his head again. “This DEA gig? The pucker factor escalates every now and then, but kicking cargo for Richard? Fascinating, every damn day.”

  I blinked. “Excuse me. Did you just call it ‘fascinating’?”

  He gave a wheezy laugh. “Yeah. That’s Air America slang—coined by Richard, in fact. It’s a whistling-past-the-graveyard kinda term. It means—”

  “I know what it means,” I said, as alarms started sounding somewhere in the back of my mind. “It means ‘scary as hell,’ right?”

  “Right.” He grinned, then—studying my expression—he frowned. “Something wrong? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  “I just heard an echo,” I said. “Somebody else used that word recently, exactly the same way—said jumping out of the Citation that night would’ve been pretty fascinating. I don’t suppose you know the NTSB crash investigator, Maddox? Any chance he was an Air America kicker too?”

  “Pat Maddox? ‘Mad Dog’ Maddox?” Hickock’s expression darkened. “Hell, yeah, I know him. And hell no, he wasn’t a kicker. He was a Marine Corps pilot from ’Nam. He got scrubbed—given a fake discharge, civilian papers, a bogus contract—and sent to Laos as a so-called civilian. Mad Dog loved the black-ops stuff, the CIA dirty work. He used to call Richard ‘Boy Scout’ because he was such a straight arrow. Me, he called ‘Mild Bill.’ Maddox was a hard-ass. An asshole. But hey, it was war, and war is hell.”

  “He came from the marines? Y
ou know what he flew in Vietnam?”

  “Sure. He talked about it all the damn time. He flew F-4s.”

  “Jets?”

  “Hell, yeah. The F-4 Phantom was a supersonic attack fighter. Mad Dog loved to wave his top-gun dick in everybody’s face.”

  I hated the image, but I liked the information. “So if he was flying dogfights at Mach 2 or whatever,” I said, “he’d have no trouble at the controls of a mild-mannered civilian jet, right?”

  “Well, every aircraft’s different, but if he studied up on the pilot’s handbook and the panel . . .” He trailed off, and I could see him working to connect the dots that I had just begun to connect myself. “Let me get this straight,” he wheezed. “Are you thinking—”

  I interrupted. “Maddox told me the Citation was like a Dodge Caravan,” I said excitedly. “Almost as if he’d flown one and found it kinda boring.”

  Hickock held up a hand. “Slow down, slow down. Do you really, seriously—”

  I cut him off again. “Fighter pilots get parachute training, too, right?”

  Hickock furrowed his brow, then gave a grunt—“Huh”—and began to nod, slowly and tentatively at first, then more decisively. “Mad Dog loved the edgy stuff. Survival skills, commando training, inserting assassin teams. All that macho Rambo shit.”

  “He was limping,” I went on. “The day after the crash. He was wearing a knee brace. He said he’d had surgery, but I bet he hadn’t—that’d be easy to find out. I bet he twisted his knee when he jumped out of the Citation—came down hard, or crooked, or something. Came down right over there!” I pointed toward the five burned tubes jutting from the sand. “Those are signal flares. A landing zone. A target. Somebody was waiting here. Maddox phoned just before takeoff, or maybe the guy here just listened for the sound of the jet. He lit the flares, the jet turned, and Maddox made the jump. Then—being the crash investigator assigned to this region—he was in a perfect position to cover his tracks.” Hickock rubbed his jaw, considering the scenario.

  At that moment my watch began to beep, and when I looked at it and saw the time—two forty-five—I felt a wave of panic. “Oh shit,” I said.