Years before—for my forty-fifth birthday, when Kathleen had decided that I was sliding into some sort of midlife rut—she’d given me a weekend of instruction at a rock-climbing school in the mountains of North Carolina. The lessons hadn’t transformed me into Spider-Man by any stretch of the imagination, but they had shown me how to find toeholds on surprisingly small ledges, and how to jam a few fingers or cram a whole fist into a crack, twisting it to lock it into place and to create a powerful handhold—one that was “bombproof,” as my instructor liked to say. Now, standing at the base of the cliff, I studied it from a fresh perspective: sizing it up not as a forensic scientist, but as a climber. I noticed a half-dozen or so small, blocky bumps zigzagging upward—a simple ascent for a serious climber, though not for a rank, rusty amateur like me. But the crash itself had worked in my favor, I realized: Besides creating new cracks and sharp edges in the rock, the impact had subtly altered the angle of the rock face. The lower half of the crater was no longer absolutely vertical, but—because of its concavity—only relatively vertical now. If I was lucky, that subtle difference in geometry might just be enough. Might.
Reaching overhead, I hooked my fingertips over two bumps in the rock. Then I took a small step up with my right foot, and a bigger step with my left, stretching wide and splaying myself against the rock. I clawed higher with my left hand, then raised my right foot, feeling for a foothold that had looked within reach but that suddenly seemed to elude me. Again and again I scrabbled—with my toes, with the side of my foot, with my toes again—seeking but not finding purchase. The muscles in my hands and forearms began to tremble and shriek, and just as I finally found the foothold I needed, my grip failed, my fingers loosened, and I felt myself toppling backward. In that instant—the instant when I realized I was falling—I had just enough time to recall the last person who had fallen to the base of this cliff: a supremely jinxed man who had jumped from the frying pan of Mexico’s hardships and fallen straight into the combined fires of perilous terrain, a powerful predator, and a hurtling jet.
My descent ended not in a bone-breaking thud onto rocks, but in an unexpected embrace, of sorts: Skidder, to my surprise, was there to catch me, sort of, or at least slow my fall. “Damn, Doc,” he grunted as I half slid, half staggered to my feet in front of him. “What the hell you doing? I thought I was the only crazy stuntman around here.”
Carmelita Janus was hurrying toward us. “My God, Dr. Brockton, are you hurt?”
“Just my pride,” I said. “I was trying to get a closer look at something up there. Probably nothing, but seemed worth checking out.”
“I don’t think you should try it alone,” she said. “Let us help you. Please.”
Reluctantly—ashamed of my clumsiness and weakness—I assented. Skidder interlaced his fingers to create a stirrup for my right foot, hoisting it as high as his waist. As I raised my left foot, feeling for a toehold, Carmelita Janus grabbed my shoe and guided it to a ledge I had not noticed. Then Skidder did the same with my right foot—angling it into a niche that was as high as his head—and after one more step with my left foot, this time unaided, I reached a stable, sustainable position, my feet secure, my fists wedged into cracks that would hold me with virtually no effort required. “That’s about as high as we can get you, Doc,” Skidder said.
“It’s as high as I need to be.” I felt a second wave of adrenaline kicking in, and this one was not from my fall or my fear.
“You’ve found something,” said Carmelita. “What is it?”
“Look at this,” I said, freeing my left hand and plucking a small, cigar-shaped object—twice the size of a grain of brown rice, but hollow and almost weightless—from a nook in the rock. “I’m going to drop it now. Watch close.” I released it and watched it float down, as light as a tiny feather.
Carmelita caught it in midair, the way a child might catch a snowflake. She peered at it, then looked up at me. “What is it?”
“It’s a puparium,” I told her, wedging my fist back into the crack. “An empty pupa case. From a maggot that turned—that metamorphosed—into an adult fly. If y’all look close, you can see more of these down lower, in crevices here and there.”
“Yes,” she said after a moment, pointing. “Here’s one. And here’s another.”
“I wanted to climb to see how high they went. I followed them all the way up here.”
“Huh,” Skidder grunted. “You’re sounding kinda excited about this, Doc.”
“I am. It means there were maggots up here.”
“You sound surprised,” said Carmelita. “But didn’t you tell us, that day in the meeting at the FBI office, that you had found maggots? I thought that was one way you knew the Mexican man died the night of the crash.”
“You have a good memory,” I said. “That’s true. But those maggots were down near the ground. These are too high to be from that guy, or from the mountain lion. Maggots can fall, but they can’t climb. I’ll tell you like I tell my students: Trust the bugs. The bugs never lie.”
Skidder furrowed his brows. “And the truth that these new bugs are telling you . . . ?”
“I think they’re telling me that some pieces from our guy—the guy in the cockpit—came through the windshield and landed in some of these crevices. If those pieces were shielded from the fire, maybe they didn’t get cooked.”
“And if you can find uncooked pieces, maybe you can get DNA after all,” he finished.
“Exactly.” I peered into every crack I could see from where I stood, clinging to the rock. As I bobbed my head and craned my neck, I caught a sudden glimmer of reflected light to my right. “Hang on,” I called, freeing my right hand this time and reaching into the recess where I’d glimpsed the reflection. “I think I might see a piece of windshield.”
“Be careful,” he said. “That could be jagged. You don’t want to get cut.”
“I’m not worried about cuts,” I said. “I’m worried about snakes.” I reached in gingerly. My hand now blocked my view, so I was working blindly, strictly by touch, praying not to encounter the open mouth of a rattlesnake. Beneath my fingertips, I felt the feather-light shells of more puparia—dozens of them!—and I groped on, eagerly. Suddenly I felt something shift against my fingers, and I heard a dry, hollow rustling—a rattlesnake’s tail buzzing?—and with a yelp, I yanked my hand from the opening. I lost my balance again and felt myself toppling backward once more—this time from much higher—but luckily, my left fist was wedged tightly enough into its crack to hold. Bombproof, I thought gratefully.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Carmelita. “What happened?”
“Sorry,” I said. “And ouch.” My left hand felt as if it had argued with a belt sander and a claw hammer—and lost both arguments—but at least my brains weren’t spattered on the rocks. “I heard something that I thought might be a rattlesnake,” I explained sheepishly, “so I jerked my hand back.” She gasped, so I hurried on. “But it wasn’t. It was just my hand knocking a bunch of dry puparia out of the way, rustling them. Dumb. Okay, let’s try this again.” I reached into the recess once more, willing myself to ignore the rustle of the insect shells.
“You look like you’re putting your hand in the Mouth of Truth,” said Carmelita—a reference to an ancient Roman carving of a face—a man or a god—with a gaping mouth. “Tell a lie with your hand in the mouth, legend says, and the mouth bites it off.”
“The truth is, this makes me very nervous,” I said. It must not have been a lie, because my hand remained attached and unhurt. My fingers eased through the cluster of pupa cases and then came to a larger, heavier object—the thing that had shifted when my fingers grazed it. I had thought it might be a piece of windshield, but as I closed my fingers carefully around it, it felt different from a piece of shattered acrylic. It felt greasy, and it felt familiar.
“ARE YOU SURE?” ASKED CARMELITA, STARING AT the small, curved fragment I had pulled from my pocket once I’d made it safely down.
�
�Absolutely,” I told her. “Look at the edge here. See the cross section? There’s a hard layer of bone on the outside and the inside, separated by a spongy layer in between. It’s definitely a piece of cranium. A skull fragment.”
“What are those?” asked Skidder, pointing at the inner surface, which was etched with branchy indentations. “They look like riverbeds. Dry gullies.”
“Close,” I said. “Those are meningeal grooves—grooves where blood vessels ran. More proof that it’s a skull fragment.”
“It might be from an animal,” Carmelita said.
“Might be, but it’s not,” I said. Turning the piece over, I showed them the outer surface. It still had a bit of dried scalp and a tuft of short, gray hair attached. “That’s human hair.”
“My God,” Carmelita whispered. “That’s Richard’s hair.” She clutched Skidder’s arm for support. “My husband really is dead.”
AFTER GIVING MRS. JANUS A FEW MINUTES ALONE, I circled back to her. “Do you still have something of Richard’s, like a toothbrush or a baseball cap? Something that could be used for DNA comparison?” She might be right—it might be a tuft of Richard’s hair, and a bit of Richard’s skull, in her hand. But might be wasn’t good enough, wasn’t certain enough. I couldn’t afford to be accused of botching the identification a second time.
“I have his favorite cap,” she said. “Also a hairbrush. You need hairs that still have the follicles attached, yes?”
“Yes,” I said, surprised and impressed. “How did you know that?”
“I’ve been through this already with the FBI. I gave them a comb and a hat.”
“Oh, great—never mind, then,” I said. “They’ve already got something to compare to this.”
She glanced at Skidder, then at me again, suddenly looking wary. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, since they’ve already got the hat and the comb, all we need to take them is the skull fragment.”
She stared at me. “We can’t take this to the FBI,” she said.
“But . . . we have to. It’s their case.”
“But the FBI has told everyone Richard faked his death,” she protested. “They’ve told everyone he’s still alive, somewhere in hiding. This piece of skull would prove them wrong. I don’t think they will admit their mistake.”
“Come on,” I said. “They won’t ignore clear proof that he’s dead. Teeth are one thing; teeth can be pulled—Richard’s teeth were pulled. But you can’t just pull out a piece of skull and walk away. If the DNA matches, they’ll believe it.”
“I don’t trust them,” she said. “I think they’re more interested in protecting their image than in finding the truth.”
Suddenly I had an idea—an idea that I was shocked to hear myself suggesting. “What about that obnoxious Fox News reporter, Mike Malloy?” Carmelita and Skidder shot glances at each other. “What?” I said. “Look, I don’t like him either—he’s pushy as hell—but he’s actually done the best job of covering this. Seems like he’d love another big scoop. The latest twist in the world’s most twisted case.”
Carmelita shook her head. “Mike Malloy is dead,” she said.
I stared at her, then at Skidder. He nodded. “Found dead in his bed yesterday,” he said. “A leather strap around his neck and the bedpost.”
“He hanged himself?”
The deputy grimaced. “Not on purpose. There was a bunch of porn in the bed. Looks like an accidental autoerotic asphyxiation.” As I struggled to take this in, he went on, “Supposedly it increases the intensity of orgasm if there’s less oxygen in the brain. So some people—kinky people . . .” He trailed off awkwardly.
“I get it, I get it,” I said. Suddenly a thought struck me. “What if it was staged? What if he’d kept poking around, looking for the story behind the story? What if he’d managed to track down his source—whoever it was that knew about the teeth? What if he’d found out that it really was Richard in the wreckage—that the whole thing was an elaborate double fake? Malloy might have looked like a threat.”
Carmelita was nodding excitedly. “I think you’re right,” she said. “Maybe he figured out who the killer was.”
Skidder cleared his throat. “That could be true,” he said. “But meanwhile, we’ve got to do something with this piece of skull. I have an idea. Carmelita, I understand your concerns about the FBI. But what we’ve just found is a game changer. I propose a compromise. I’m not in uniform today, but I am a law enforcement officer. How ’bout if I take custody of this piece of evidence? I can transfer it—or a piece of it—to a forensic lab that’s not part of the FBI. And I can transfer custody of the rest of it to Prescott, if the outside lab confirms that it’s Richard.”
“When the outside lab confirms that it’s Richard,” said Carmelita grimly.
One of the consolation prizes of being an aging professor is that you teach a lot of students over the years—students who go on to become doctors and lawyers and research geneticists. One of my former students had ended up running a genetics lab at UCLA Medical Center, in Los Angeles. It took just five minutes on my cell phone—high on Otay Mountain, I got a great signal—to ask if he could do a DNA analysis, comparing a bit of scalp tissue with a sample from a comb or a cap. “Piece of cake,” he said. “Can you overnight it?”
“I might be able to do better than that,” I said. I turned to Skidder. “Any chance you could fly this up to UCLA Medical Center?”
“Sure thing,” he said. “I know that helipad like the back of my hand.” I relayed this information to my student, who was suitably impressed with the speed, and assured me he’d be waiting, and could be at the helipad within five minutes’ notice.
After thanking him and hanging up, I asked Skidder how soon he might be able to make the handoff.
“Three, four hours,” he said. Seeing my disappointment, he explained, “I gotta turn in this bird and get one from the sheriff’s fleet. Plus I’ll need to brief the sheriff.” Now my disappointed expression turned to a look of alarm, but Skidder gave a don’t-worry wave of his hand. “The sheriff had a lot of respect for Richard. Plus he’s a master of the interagency-cooperation game. Trust me—he’ll find a way to spin this thing so Prescott can’t possibly bitch. Hell, Prescott’ll probably end up having to give the sheriff a public pat on the back, for being such a great team player and all.”
A moment later we climbed back into the helicopter for the quick flight down to Brown Field. I had reserved a rental car there, and—despite their protests that I should stay someplace nicer—I’d booked a room in the Otay Mesa Quality Inn: a cruddy but convenient base from which to do the exploring I’d planned for the following day. Besides, in a twisted sort of way, it felt like my home away from home.
As the engine throttled up and Skidder raised the stick, the helicopter practically leapt upward. I was pleasantly surprised by its newfound nimbleness—until I remembered what Skidder had said earlier about the aircraft getting “zippy” just before the tank ran dry. I shot a quick, panicky look at the instrument panel, trying to spot the fuel gauge. Skidder must have noticed. “No worries,” he said. “It’s all downhill from here. We can coast in, if we have to.”
“Skidder,” I said, “how come every time you try to reassure me, it scares the crap out of me?”
THE OTAY MESA QUALITY INN WAS SHABBIER THAN I remembered—and I had remembered it as damn shabby. “Memory is a trickster,” as one of my UT colleagues, a pompous English professor, was fond of saying.
I asked the desk clerk for a room on the hotel’s quiet side. “Define ‘quiet,’” said the clerk, a sallow young man with greasy black hair and cynical eyes. “No traffic, or no gunshots?”
He didn’t appear to be kidding. “Tough choice,” I said, “but I’m gonna go for no gunshots.”
He handed me a key. “All the way at the end,” he said, nodding toward the freeway. I thanked him, moved the car, and carried my bag to the room.
As I turned the key in the lock, a truck roared p
ast on the freeway, rattling my door and window. Home sweet home, I thought, echoing Prescott’s description of the hotel when he’d brought us here our first night. But the truth was, I didn’t much mind the shabbiness. I’d be sleeping in an empty bed; that was the worst part—far worse than the torn carpet and stained bedspread. Just don’t let me get bedbugs, I prayed. Like the desk clerk, I was dead serious.
MAYBE KATHLEEN REALLY WAS HAUNTING ME—NOT about the Janus case, as she’d threatened, but about the backlog of old voice mails on my phone. Throughout our teaching careers, our offices had been a study in contrast: hers always neat and tidy, mine always . . . less so. As with our desktops, so with our voice mails. I tended to procrastinate, avoiding messages I knew would be unpleasant (a category that nowadays seemed to encompass virtually all of them). “Okay, Kath,” I announced over the rumble of traffic, “I’m clearing my decks. You’d be proud.”
Mercifully, most of the messages were so old that they had become utterly irrelevant, and I found myself hitting the “delete” key many times in swift succession. Muckraking talk-radio host badgering me about disrespecting veterans? Delete. Obituary-stalking strangers who’d read about my wife’s passing in the newspaper? Delete. Neighborhood widows offering a soft shoulder and a warm casserole? Delete delete delete.
The message I most dreaded hearing—the one I saved for last—was the voice mail I’d received from Captain Brian Decker shortly before his throat had been cut in a prison interview room by Nick Satterfield. Decker was still at Vanderbilt Hospital, still barely alive—still in a coma, in fact—and merely seeing his number on my phone’s display was enough to make me feel bad all over again: guilty, somehow, even though I’d urged him not to go rattle Satterfield’s cage. The TBI agent investigating the incident—if investigating was the right word for an inquiry that gave any weight at all to Satterfield’s version of events—had said that the call had lasted five minutes. As I punched the series of keys that would play the message, I braced myself for bad tidings: a grim reminder of Satterfield’s virally infectious venom, at the very least, and possibly even a self-incriminating revelation from Deck about what he’d intended to do to Satterfield. I considered erasing it without listening—what was the point, besides pain?—but decided I owed it to Decker to hear him out.
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