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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.”
