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“FBI? This gets more interesting all the time. Can you tell me anything more about the pictures? Give me a little hint what I’ll be looking at?”
“I have an idea,” I said, “but I don’t want to skew your thinking. Call me once you’ve had a look, and we’ll see if we agree.”
By the time I hung up, Agent Kimball had already hit “send.”
I’D HOPED WE’D HAVE THE ANSWER IN THIRTY MINUTES, but I was wrong.
We had it in twenty.
Helen had called back in just five minutes—but it took another fifteen for Prescott’s staff to track down the information I’d requested as a result, and to e-mail a response. Kimball opened the message, then clicked on the attachment, and a ghostly gray image filled the screen. McCready studied it closely, comparing it to the burned object Kimball had plucked from the frame of the pilot’s seat. Maddox, the NTSB crash expert, peered over McCready’s shoulder with keen interest, but he let the FBI agent ask the questions. “So tell me again what it is—and what the hell it does?”
“It’s a spinal cord stimulator,” I repeated. “It’s like shock therapy for chronic back pain. The gizmo is called a pulse generator. It sends weak electrical signals out these wires, to electrical leads at the ends. The leads are surgically implanted in the epidural space of the spine, right by the spinal cord. The way I understand it, the electrical stimulation distracts the nerves—short-circuits them, sort of—so they can’t send pain messages to the brain.”
“Sounds scary. But it works?”
I gave a half shrug. “Sometimes. Not always. It’s a last-resort kind of thing, when ordinary back surgery hasn’t worked.”
He peered at the computer screen, where Kimball was displaying the image we’d just received from the field office. It was an x-ray of a man’s spine; of Richard Janus’s spine, to be precise. Floating just above the left hip was an electronic circuit board, its metal connectors and battery showing up crisp and white against the muted grays of x-rayed flesh and bone. A pair of thin wires, attached to the circuit board, angled toward the lumbar spine and then threaded up the thoracic vertebrae, terminating in a series of flat electrical leads laid out in a geometric pattern that hopscotched from the tenth vertebra up to the eighth.
Maddox couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “It looks just like somebody’s connected him to a computer mouse,” he said. “So you just wear that generator on your belt, like a pager?”
“Oh, no,” I corrected. “It’s internal. The surgeon cuts a slot in the skin—a hip pocket, literally—and sutures it inside. Looks and feels a little odd, probably—a hard, square thing just under the skin—but I don’t guess anybody would’ve noticed it except him and his wife.”
McCready appeared mesmerized by the x-ray. “And how’d you know it’d be so easy to confirm that Janus had gotten one of these things—this thing—put in?”
“The media loved Janus,” I said, “and he loved the media. I remembered reading that he’d hurt his back in a crash, and that he’d had some kind of surgery to try to make it better. I figured there must’ve been a press release or a news report about that. So I suspected it wouldn’t take much digging to find out if he’d gotten one of these.” McCready nodded. “What I didn’t expect,” I admitted, “was that we’d get an actual post-op x-ray so fast.”
McCready clapped me on the back. “Well, all I can say is, you’re a wizard, Doc. And Prescott’s gonna be a happy guy when I tell him we’ve made the I.D.” He lifted his phone to make a call.
My head snapped around, and I grabbed his arm. “Wait. Don’t tell him that.”
“What? Why not?” He stared at me as if I’d gone mad. “You just pulled this rabbit out of the hat, and now you’re saying ‘never mind’? What the hell, Doc? Is it Janus, or isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s him,” I said, “but it’s not admissible. It’s a presumptive identification—we can presume it’s him—but it’s not a positive identification, one that would stand up in court.” He still looked confused, so I went on. “The x-ray image seems to match the burned stimulator, and Janus’s medical records will probably confirm that he got this brand, and this model. But unless his surgeon kept better records than any other surgeon on the planet, the records won’t tell us the individual serial number—the DNA, so to speak, of this one device. And without a unique serial number, we can’t prove that it’s him.”
He sighed. “Well, hell, Doc.”
“I know, I know. But hey, look on the bright side. We know it’s him; now all we gotta do is prove it. We just need more teeth. You’ve got the dental records now, right?”
He frowned: sore subject. “Working on it. The dentist is dragging his heels.”
“So pull on him harder.” His frown turned to a scowl, which meant I’d drilled into a nerve. I shrugged apologetically. “Hey, cheer up,” I said, holding up a thumb and forefinger, separated by a hairsbreadth. “We’re this close.”
Only after I said it did I realize why the phrase—this close—came so easily to my lips. Prescott had used it to threaten the pushy Fox News reporter.
I had also heard another federal agent use it—the wheezy fat man who had ripped into Prescott at the IHOP—to describe how near he’d been to nailing not just Janus but Guzmán, too.
This close. Maybe the phrase didn’t exactly mean what I thought it meant.
This close. It echoed in my mind. Presumptive, but not positive.
DURING MY TIME TOPSIDE WITH THE SPINAL CORD stimulator, the evidence techs had begun to mine a rich vein of skeletal material: splintered ribs; incinerated vertebrae; fractured long bones. By the time I rejoined them amid the wreckage, our five-gallon bucket—what I’d taken to calling our “special bucket”—was half filled with pieces of burned bone. As I studied the bucket’s contents, gently lifting and sifting my way downward, I was impressed by what they’d found—and fascinated by what they hadn’t. “Hmm,” I said. “So far, everything’s from the postcranial skeleton.”
Boatman handed me a singed scapula—the left shoulder blade. “The which?”
“Postcranial,” I said. “Below the skull. If we hadn’t found that tooth yesterday, I’d almost think he didn’t have a head. The headless horseman, but riding a plane instead of a horse.” Suddenly it hit me, and I let out a bark of startled laughter. “I’ll be damned,” I told the surprised agents. “Maybe he was headless.” Their puzzled expressions prompted me to explain. “When he hits—remember, he’s going four hundred miles an hour—he’s strapped in, right? So his body’s restrained, for a fraction of a second, by the harness. But his head isn’t restrained, and it snaps forward really, really hard. How many g’s did Maddox say t
he deceleration created?”
“Eighteen hundred.” The answer came from Kimball, not surprisingly.
“So if his head weighed ten or twelve pounds,” I mused, “then it would have jerked forward . . .” I did some mental math. “Jesus. With almost twenty thousand pounds of force.”
Kimball gave a low whistle. “That’s some serious traction.”
“I don’t know how much force it takes to pull the head clean off the spine,” I added. “We’ve never done that particular experiment at the Body Farm. But I’m guessing twenty thousand pounds would do it.” I redirected my gaze and began scanning a different area of the wreckage from where the vertebrae had been found. “I’m also guessing that we’ll find the skull—the pieces of it—somewhere up here, instead of down there.”
Straightening up from my crouch—I’d been stooped over the area where the vertebrae and scapula had been—I began examining the remnants of the instrument panel, the windshield, and the cockpit ceiling. The windshield itself had melted or burned away—it was plastic, not glass—but its misshapen framework remained: two rectangular openings, separated and reinforced by a stout central pillar. The pillar was bent and blackened and, down near its base, encrusted with a coating of black particles. The particles were bits of burned bone, I realized; more specifically, they were charred crumbles of skull, a few of them large enough to retain their distinctive, layered structure: hard outer and inner shells of dense bone, separated by a softer, spongy layer. My pulse racing, I leaned close and worked my way downward. A few inches below the base of the pillar—embedded in the glass-filled cavity of a shattered instrument—I spotted them: a handful of blackened pebbles. A handful of teeth. “Bingo,” I said softly, mainly to myself. Then, a moment later: “Can somebody hand me the tooth jar?”
“Here you go, Doc.”
Without even looking to see who’d said it, I reached back and took the container. I removed the lid and tucked it in one of my shirt pockets, then took a pair of forceps from the other pocket. One by one, I plucked teeth from their nest amid the shards of glass. They weren’t all there—only ten of them; the others must have been scattered or shattered by the impact—but four of the ten were enough to send my adrenaline soaring again. “Somebody wake up McCready,” I joked.
