The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel

by Jefferson Bass

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Maddox. He’s on his way.”

  “On his way where?”

  “His way here.”

  “Here here?” I nodded. “Christ. When?”

  “Now,” I said. “Actually, twenty or thirty minutes from now. That beep from my watch was reminding me to finish up at the prison and head back here to meet him.”

  “But why, Doc? Why the hell’d you call him, if you think he killed Richard?”

  “I didn’t think that when I called him,” I pointed out. “I called him two hours ago. Before you told me all this stuff about him and Richard. Before I put the pieces together.” He still looked confused and mad. “Look, I called to tell him I’d found the spot where Richard’s killer came down when he bailed out that night. Maddox offered to dash down from L.A. to take a look.” But as I said it, I realized that taking a look was the last thing Maddox needed, because Maddox had seen this spot already, at least three times: first, when he’d scouted it out; later, when he’d placed the flares in the sand, probably the afternoon before the crash; finally, when he’d floated down through the night sky toward the fiery marker, lit by an accomplice with a lighter, a bad nicotine addiction, and a getaway car. No, Maddox wasn’t coming to see what I’d found. Maddox was coming to kill me and scrub the site.

  “We gotta get out of here,” I told Hickock. “Before he gets here.”

  “Too late for that, I’m afraid,” said a voice, and Pat Maddox—Mad Dog Maddox—stepped from behind a bushy mesquite tree, a short-barreled shotgun pointed at Hickock. “Mild Bill,” he said pleasantly. “Long time, no see. How you been?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hickock’s eyes flicker toward his revolver. Maddox must have seen it, too. “Go for it,” he said, nodding at the agent’s gun. “But I’d bet my life that your head’ll be gone before you can clear leather.”

  I said the only thing I could think of. “How’d you get here from L.A. so quick?”

  “I have a confession,” he said. “I lied, Doc. Sorry about that. I was already down here when you called.”

  Something in my head clicked. “You came down and killed Malloy, the Fox News reporter.”

  “He was damned annoying,” said Maddox. “You said so yourself.”

  “You’re the one who tipped him off about the teeth.” He gave a slight, smug smile, which I took as acknowledgment, and I rattled on, my mind racing. “Anonymously—but then he tracked you down somehow. He was onto you. So you went and strangled him and staged the porn.” I was partly stalling for time, but mainly I was still working the case, finally figuring things out, and I was absurdly excited, for a man about to be shot.

  It was Hickock, not Maddox, who interrupted me. “I should’ve figured you for this, Mad Dog. Somebody told me you were mixed up in that Iran-Contra mess—running drugs and guns for the CIA in Nicaragua—but I thought he was just blowing smoke up my ass. When I heard you were working for the NTSB, I thought you’d settled down. Stepped up onto the straight and narrow.”

  “I had,” said Maddox. “I got scared straight for a long time. Remember that C-123 got shot down in Nicaragua in 1986? The one that could’ve brought down Ronald Reagan and George Bush, if Ollie North hadn’t taken the fall? I was supposed to be flying that plane, but I was sick. Appendicitis. I didn’t fly, so I didn’t die. I pulled some good-old-boy strings and got a job investigating crashes. Not too boring, as jobs go.”

  “And you played by the rules?” asked Hickock.

  “I was a good boy for fifteen years.”

  “Then what happened?” I asked.

  “Then I worked a crash about a hundred miles from here. A seaplane, bringing in a load of cocaine to the Salton Sea, up in the Imperial Valley. Bad weather, lousy pilot; the plane flipped and sank. I got a call from one of my old buddies, offering me a nice little nest egg if I could retrieve the cargo and hand it over. The rest, as they say, is history. I started doing a little moonlighting for Chapo Guzmán—two, three flights a month. Good money, and a lot more fascinating than civil service. But then somebody started sneaking snitches out of the country. Didn’t take a genius to figure out it was Saint Richard. Ever the Boy Scout.”

  “So you took him out,” I said. “Damage control.”

  He nodded. “Should’ve done it sooner. I let nostalgia get in the way.”

  There was one more thing I still didn’t get. “Tell me,” I pressed, “why the double fake? First you staged it to look like Janus accidentally crashed, or killed himself. But then you told the reporter and the FBI he’d faked his death. How come?”

  “Diversionary tactics,” he said. “Divide and conquer. I could tell the DEA was closing in. If I could make the FBI look like screwups—like they’d scared Guzmán into hiding—the DEA would be royally pissed at the Bureau. And less likely to follow the trail to me. Right, Chubby?” Hickock didn’t respond. “But if I could also make it look like Janus was actually still alive—that he’d faked the whole thing—the FBI would get pissed, too . . . and they’d be hell-bent on finding him instead of helping Fatso here.”

  “But Prescott said that Janus had gotten an FBI agent killed,” I persisted. “What’d he mean by that?”

  Maddox made a face. “Janus snuck another snitch out of Mexico back in the spring,” he said. “Swooped down and scooped up the guy right out from under the nose of one of Guzmán’s enforcers. Turns out an FBI agent was tailing the snitch, and the assassin killed the FBI agent instead of the snitch. Wasn’t Janus’s fault, but the Bureau was too dumb to know that. That, or they chose to spin it that way so they could make Janus the scapegoat.” He drew a breath, as if to clear his head, and when he exhaled, loudly and slowly through his nostrils, the rush of air had the sound of finality. “So. Boys, this has been fun, but I’ve got other fish to fry, and one of mis amigos will be here to pick me up in a few minutes. So if you two would be so kind as to get down on your knees, we can get this show on the road.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Hickock. “Or you’re stupid. You’re gonna blow away a DEA agent and an FBI consultant, and you think you can just walk away scot-free?”

  “I’m not stupid,” said Maddox. “And I’m not going to blow you away.” I felt a glimmer of hope, but then he added, “An assassin from the Tijuana drug cartel is.” Shifting the shotgun into his left hand, he reached behind his back and pulled a nine-millimeter pistol from his belt. “Shocking, that a veteran DEA agent walked into a trap with no backup. And tragic that his bad judgment cost the life of a respected forensic scientist, too.” He shook his head and gave an ironic tsk-tsk. “Quite a lucky break for Guzmán and the Sinaloa cartel, though.” He gave a sigh of mock sadness, then said, “On your knees. Now.”

  “Fuck you,” said Hickock. “You might kill me, but I sure as hell won’t die kneeling.”

  Maddox rolled his eyes. “Christ, Hickock, you’re still the same self-righteous prick you were back in Laos. Okay, have it your way.” He aimed the pistol at the agent’s chest, and I saw his finger tighten on the trigger.

  In desperation—having no better ideas, and having nothing to lose—I raised my arms over my head and waved them frantically, looking up at the low ridge across the hollow. “Take the shot!” I shouted. “Take the shot! Now!”

  All hell suddenly broke loose beside me. Maddox’s attention wavered from Hickock for an instant, and in that instant, Hickock yanked the revolver from its shoulder holster and swung it upward. I heard the crack of a shot—or was it two?—and then a sort of ripping sound in the air beside my right ear, and then another crack rolling in from somewhere in the distance. Maddox jerked forward, his arms flailing, and the short shotgun in his left hand thrashed and boomed. Something whacked me in the head, and I felt myself falling to the sand.

  “DOC? HEY, DOC—CAN YOU HEAR ME?” I FELT MY eyelids being tugged open, and as my eyeballs leveled and came into focus, I recognized the face of Special Agent Miles Prescott. “Doc? You back with me now?”

  “Yeah,” I
said, sitting up abruptly and staring wildly at the scene. Sprawled on the ground ten feet away lay Maddox—or most of Maddox, from the chest down. His head—or most of his head—lay off to one side a ways, and I’d worked enough shotgun deaths to know how it had gotten there. I also noticed a large bloody wound in his chest. From the size of it, it looked like an exit wound, which would mean he’d been shot from behind, but I didn’t see how that could have happened, since he and Hickock had been face-to-face when the shooting started. Hickock, I thought in sudden panic. Where’s Hickock? I looked beside me, where he’d been standing, but he wasn’t there. I whirled, scanning in all directions, and finally saw him twenty feet behind me, sitting on the ground, leaning against the left front wheel of my car. “Hey, Hickock,” I said. “From now on, you’re Wild Bill. Nothing mild about you at all. Fastest gun in the West, man.”

  I waited for his wheezy answer, but he was silent—utterly, unnaturally silent—and when I looked closer, I saw that his eyes were glassy and the sand beneath him was red, his blood mingling with the puddle of oil the Impala had hemorrhaged a quarter hour before. A lifetime before.

  I turned and stared the question at Prescott, and he shook his head. “Right in the heart,” he said. “Amazing he managed to walk that far.”

  “Well, damn,” I said softly. To my surprise, I felt tears come to my eyes and roll down my cheeks. “He was a good man. I misjudged him at first, but he was a damn good man.”

  “You’re right,” said Prescott, his voice suddenly a little thick. “I did, too. And yeah—as good as they get.”

  I got to my feet, but the movement caused a searing pain in my head, and when I rubbed it, my hand came away sticky with blood.

  “We need to get that looked at,” said Prescott. “I think Maddox’s pistol flew out of his hand and whacked you in the head, but we oughta get that wound cleaned up. Maybe get an x-ray, too. Before we do anything else, though, I gotta ask one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You yelled ‘Take the shot.’ How the hell did you know we had a sharpshooter up there?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “You did?” He looked as confused as I was, then he nodded. “I was totally bluffing,” I told him. “He was about to shoot Hickock. I was hoping to distract him long enough to let Hickock get off a shot. Guess it didn’t work.”

  “Actually, it did,” Prescott said. “You can’t see it now, because of the exit wound from the rifle round, but Hickock nailed him. Maddox was walking dead when the rifle bullet hit him.”

  I turned and looked again at the body of the DEA agent. “Hickock said he was trying to protect me. And by God he did, didn’t he? He died waging war.” Prescott nodded. “So now I gotta ask one thing,” I said. “How the hell did you know to put a sharpshooter out here?”

  “We had a GPS tracker on your car. And a tap on your cell phone. We even managed to get a shotgun mike up on that ridge in time to record that last part of Maddox’s little speech.”

  I was impressed, but I was also confused. “You did all that? Why?”

  “One of our partner agencies—the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department—shared a key piece of new evidence with us yesterday. A skull fragment, which confirmed that Richard Janus was murdered. That took the investigation in a new direction. It also suggested that the killer might attempt to . . . uh . . . contact you.”

  I pondered the implications of all this. “Are you saying you used me as bait for a killer, Agent Prescott?” I remembered a brief bit of banter from our first ride down Otay Mountain weeks before and gave him a grin. “Did you just throw me under the bus?”

  “Of course not, Dr. Brockton,” he said, grinning back. “We never throw anyone under the bus. And if a forensic consultant just happens to fall under the bus? While we’re standing nearby with our hand on his back? We do our very best to pick him up and dust him off and remind everyone how glad we are that he’s okay.” He paused to let that sink in, then added, “I’ll be recommending to SAC that we hold a joint press conference tomorrow, together with the DEA and the sheriff, to update the media and set the record straight on Richard Janus’s case. I’d like to get Mrs. Janus there, too, if she’s willing to accept an olive branch and bury the hatchet. If you could find it in your heart to join us, there might even be a letter of commendation in it for you. A very lavish letter.”

  “When you say lavish,” I said, “do you mean embossed with the FBI seal? In color?”

  “You know the Bureau doesn’t make promises,” he said. “But I’ll recommend color and embossing. In the strongest possible terms.”

  Knoxville, Tennessee

  WE HELD KATHLEEN’S MEMORIAL SERVICE AT SECOND Presbyterian Church in late August, a week after the university’s fall semester began—a long time after her death, but the only way to include the university community that had meant so much to her. Jeff, Jenny, and the boys sat with me in the front row. So did Carmelita Janus and helicopter-jockey Skidder, who had given up his law enforcement job to become chief pilot for Airlift Relief International. Carmelita was getting the organization back on its feet again, thanks to Kathleen’s bequest and a flood of other donations in Richard’s honor, which began pouring in once the media began portraying him as a misunderstood and martyred saint, of sorts. Last but not least, in a wheelchair parked at the end of our pew, was KPD Captain Brian Decker, still weak but out of the woods and expected to recover from his close brush with death.

  Behind us, in the second pew, sat Kathleen’s colleagues from Nutrition Sciences. At my request, they all wore their academic robes as a way of honoring Kathleen as a teacher and scholar. The sight of them reminded me yet again that Kathleen’s death was a loss to many people, in many walks of life—some of them children in faraway places. They would never lay eyes on her, but they would see the world itself, as a result of her foundation’s eyesight-saving work.

  My own colleagues and students turned out in droves, too. So did the dean, UT’s provost and president, and even the sharptaloned legal eagle Amanda Whiting, who had actually worked behind the scenes to rally legislative support for the Body Farm: Amanda had enlisted police chiefs, county sheriffs, and district attorneys from throughout the state in a campaign to remind their senators and representatives that the Body Farm’s research helped solve murders throughout the great state of Tennessee, and that voting against the Body Farm might be perceived as getting soft on crime. The strategy worked brilliantly, and the legislative assault on the facility ended not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with utter silence.

  The service itself was fairly brief. I wasn’t able to say much—I choked up pretty quickly, so about all I was able to get out was something about what a privilege it had been to share thirty years of my life with such a wonderful woman. Jeff did better than I did, but the real prizewinner was Jenny, who talked about becoming family with Kathleen: about finding a haven, and a friend, and a role model, and a hero all rolled into one in this remarkable woman. Amen, I thought.

  The receiving line, after the service, lasted for nearly two hours. By the end I was exhausted, having trouble recognizing faces and remembering names. The last person in line was a young woman, and when I looked at her, I drew an utter blank. She looked to be around twenty or so, an attractive redhead with lively eyes. She had probably taken one of my intro classes; by now, thousands of UT students had.

  “Hello,” I said, extending my hand, as I had hundreds of times in the past two hours. “Thank you for coming.”

  “We haven’t met, Dr. Brockton, but we’ve talked on the phone,” she said, and I knew her voice instantly. She must have seen the shock of recognition on my face, because the next thing she said was, “Yes. I’m Red. I’m not really a reference librarian, and I apologize for misleading you. The phone was ringing, you seemed to need some help, and . . . I . . . I just got carried away. It was just so . . . fascinating.”

  “Fascinating,” I said, smiling. “I’ve been hearing that word a lot lately. It’s my new
favorite word.”

  She looked confused, which was understandable. “Anyhow, I’m very sorry you lost your wife.”

  “Thank you. Me, too.”

  “And I’m sorry I tricked you.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You helped me a lot, too. A lot more than the actual reference librarian I talked to, out in Otay Mesa.”

  “Otay Mesa? That’s the place where El Chapo—you know, ‘Goose Man’—ran that underground railroad under the border from Tijuana!”

  “See,” I said. “You’re good, Red. The offer’s still open. If you want to switch fields—turn anthropologist—let me know.”

  She blushed, and she smiled shyly. “Actually,” she said, “I’ve sent in my application.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “I’ll look for it. Will I find it filed under R, for Red?”

  “No,” she said. “You’ll find it in the Ls. Under Lovelady. Miranda Lovelady. Does this mean I’m in?”

  “I’m like the FBI, Miranda,” I said, grinning. “I don’t make promises. But I’ll recommend you to myself. In the strongest possible terms.”

  During ten years of writing Body Farm novels, I’ve often noted the blurred boundary—the semi-permeable membrane; the oft-crosssed border—between fact and fiction in the books. Given that the stories are informed by years of Dr. Bill Bass’s forensic casework, how could it be otherwise?

  This book is no exception. One factual underpinning is the death of Ann Bass, Bill’s first wife, who died in 1993. Our fictional character Kathleen Brockton is not interchangeable with the late Mrs. Bass, but she obviously shares traits with her, just as Dr. Brockton—who is not exactly interchangeable with Bill Bass—shares many traits in common with him. The specifics of Kathleen’s illness and of Dr. Brockton’s grief are products of my own writerly imagination.

  Tragically, the 1991 crash on Otay Mountain that’s mentioned in the book was not a product of my imagination. Country music singer Reba McEntire lost seven musicians and her band’s road manager in the early morning hours of March 16, 1991, when a twin-engine jet—piloted by a crew unfamiliar with the mountainous terrain to the east of San Diego—took off from Brown Field Municipal Airport and slammed into the dark peak of Otay Mountain. Astonishingly, in October 2004, another twin-engine jet—this one an air ambulance—hit the mountainside in the dark, killing the pilots and three medical crew members. After the 2004 crash, the Federal Aviation Administration revised its procedures and charts to reduce the chances of additional collisions with the dark, dangerous terrain lurking to the east of Brown Field.