“Oh, Bill,” said Kathleen. “I am so, so sorry.”
The fourth and final voice mail was from a blocked number. The message began with what might have been the heavy breathing of an obscene call, but then the breathing became torn and ragged, as if the caller were struggling to regain control. “Please,” said a woman’s voice, hoarse and anguished and barely recognizable. “Do not play games with me. I must know. Is my husband dead, or is he alive? Tell me the truth, please. I beg you. Please.” The breathing grew even more ragged as she gasped out a San Diego telephone number, and then the call ended.
Kathleen stared at me from across the table. One hand remained on my wrist; the other was over her mouth. “My God,” she breathed. “Was that . . . ?”
“Yes.” I nodded. “Carmelita Janus.”
“How awful.” Kathleen’s eyes were wide. “What on earth do you do now?”
I considered my options, not liking any of them. “I give the teeth and bones back to the FBI. But first I spend some time with them.” I heard another voice, and I realized that my cell phone was nagging me to replay, save, or delete my messages. Instead, I simply disconnected the call, and left the phone on the table. “I think the voice-mail system keeps those marked as new messages until I tell it to do something with them,” I told Kathleen. “I’m leaving now, but I’m not taking that with me.”
“Where are you going?”
I was about to tell her—it was my nature to tell Kathleen everything, although I’d made an exception when the finger from Satterfield had arrived—but I just shook my head instead. “If anybody calls looking for me, you don’t know where I am. All you know is, I’m out, and you don’t know where I am, and I forgot to take my phone with me.” A sudden thought struck me—a terrible thought: the thought that Satterfield might send someone to the house while I was gone. “Kath, why don’t you go spend the night at Jeff and Jenny’s?”
“What?”
“Sure! Do it, Kath. I’m likely to get a zillion calls—hell, maybe even people coming to the house looking for me—and that’ll drive you crazy. You could babysit, and let Jeff and Jenny have a dinner date. The boys would love it. You’d love it.”
Her eyes searched my face, and I suspected she could tell I was holding something back besides my whereabouts. If she had to find me in an emergency, she could probably guess where I’d gone, but if I didn’t tell her, she wouldn’t have to lie to anyone.
“How long will you be gone?”
“I’m not sure. Tonight. Probably all day tomorrow. I hope I’ll be back tomorrow night.”
Her eyes flickered with an expression I couldn’t quite read, and I wondered if she was upset about my disappearing act. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I’ll be off the grid tomorrow, too.”
“What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she repeated. “A journal article I’m writing. Tomorrow’s the deadline. I’ve never had such a hard time finishing something. It’s been like pulling—” She interrupted herself.
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence,” I growled, smiling in spite of myself. Then I raised her hand and kissed it, pushed away from the table, and hurried back to UT—not to the hospital’s loading dock this time, but to the small, grimy office tucked beneath girders and grandstands, a bone’s throw from Neyland Stadium’s north end zone.
Hurrying up the stairs, I turned the balky lock of my office door and dashed to my desk to retrieve a small plastic bin: the bin that contained the mortal remains of Richard Janus—or those of a convincing decoy. Grabbing the bin, I raced back down the stairs, hopped into my truck, and hurried away.
I DIDN’T HAVE FAR TO DRIVE. A HUNDRED YARDS from Neyland Stadium—hunkered in a low spot of the asphalt that surrounded the stadium like an alluvial floodplain—was a dilapidated blue building of corrugated metal, the paint cloudy with age and streaked with rust. The building still bore a sign that read ANTHROPOLOGY ANNEX, but the sign, like the building, was faded and rusting. Years before, until we’d built the Regional Forensic Center, with its high-tech processing rooms, the annex had been the place where our donated bodies had finished shuffling off their mortal coil—or, rather, simmering off their mortal coil—in large, steam-jacketed kettles, to which we added a bit of Biz and a dash of Downy to sweeten the pot.
I parked the truck behind the building, then flipped through my many keys, searching for the one that fit the annex’s garage door. My secretary, Peggy, occasionally scolded me about the jangly mess that was my key ring, but now—as I found the snaggletoothed key that unlocked the garage—I felt vindicated for all the years I’d hauled around this spiky excess baggage of brass and steel. “See,” I said smugly to an imaginary Peggy, twisting the door’s latch. As if by way of an indignant retort, the latch let out a screech that made my fillings shudder in my teeth, and as the door clattered and groaned upward, it unleashed a shower of dust, rust, and crumbled bird droppings.
I didn’t care. I retrieved the truck from behind the building and eased it into the dusty garage bay, then lowered the door and went missing. AWOL. The Invisible Man.
IT TOOK FIVE MINUTES JUST TO REMOVE THE MANY layers of wrapping from the plastic bin of remains. As I snipped and tugged, I felt almost as if I were unwinding a modern-day mummy, this one wrapped not in linen but in Saran Wrap and packing tape—our makeshift maneuver to avoid stinking up not only my carry-on bag—my “carrion bag,” I had jokingly dubbed it—but the entire plane. As I unwound the final layer of plastic, I caught a faint whiff of odor—not the familiar, overpowering smell of decomposing flesh, but the charred aroma of burned meat.
Opening a dusty supply cabinet, I found a disposable surgical sheet—made of absorbent blue paper—and unfolded it on the counter that ran the length of one wall. Then I laid out the teeth and bone fragments in anatomical order, or in as close an approximation of anatomical order as I could achieve, given the high degree of fragmentation. The teeth, being the most intact, were the easiest; they were also of greatest interest and greatest consternation to me. What was it Prescott had asked about? Tool marks or other evidence of extraction? His question had sounded angry, but not merely angry; it had sounded surprisingly specific, too, and I wondered what had prompted such specificity. As far as I knew, none of the FBI agents had reexamined the teeth after we had recovered them and sent them to the medical examiner’s office, along with the bits of burned bone. The morning of the press conference, Prescott had sent one of his subordinates to the M.E.’s office to retrieve the material, which the M.E. was glad to release, the identification having been made—positively and correctly, to the best of everyone’s knowledge at the time. So what had changed since then? What new information, or allegations, or accusations, had come to light to undermine the identification—my identification; my work; my reputation?
An old magnifying lamp, its lens gray beneath a blanket of dust, still hovered over the counter, its articulating arm creaky and arthritic with age. I flipped its switch, not expecting anything, but after a moment, the fluorescent bulb that encircled the lens flickered to life. “Hmm,” I said, then quoted a line from a Monty Python comedy, a scene in which a plague victim is being carried prematurely to a cart of corpses: “I’m not quite dead,” I cracked in my best—or my worst—Cockney accent. Then, after I’d said the words, they took on a new and unexpected meaning, and I imagined them being spoken by Richard Janus. Was Janus quite dead, or was he—like me—merely missing, AWOL, the Invisible Man?
Even after cleaning the magnifying lens and examining the teeth through it, I still couldn’t answer the question. Someone was dead, all right; that much was absolutely clear from the bones: vertebrae; shards of shattered limbs; charred chunks of pelvis; curved cranial fragments. But were those bits and pieces from Richard Janus?
The teeth were his; that, too, was beyond doubt. But other things were now entirely in doubt. Could it be true—as both Prescott and the television reporter indicated—that the teeth had been extracted, t
hen placed in the plane with a decoy body? If so, that meant the decoy’s teeth had been pulled, too, because if they hadn’t, we’d have found two sets of teeth.
The teeth were damaged—their roots almost entirely broken and burned away. At the scene, I’d been surprised at the lack of jawbone surrounding them, but then again, the jaws themselves—both the mandible and the maxilla—had been reduced to fragments. I’d asked Maddox if such extreme fragmentation was normal; he’d shrugged and nodded. “I’m surprised there’s this much left,” he’d said. “A high-impact crash like this? Usually all we find is a smoking hole.” I must have looked surprised, because he’d added, “If it were a helo crash, or a military aircraft, I’d expect more. Those guys wear helmets, so it gives a little protection. Poor bastards don’t have a snowball’s chance of surviving, mind you. The helmets just mean we get to pick up bigger pieces.”
The day before the press conference, I’d told Prescott I wanted to take a second look at the teeth, but he’d resisted the idea. The high profile of the Janus case had put too much pressure on him—pressure from the Bureau’s uppermost level. Now—now that it was too late; now that things were a royal mess—I was finally getting that second look.
I still didn’t see “tool marks”—which I took to mean marks from dental extraction forceps, or perhaps from ordinary pliers—but I wouldn’t really know until I’d cleaned the teeth thoroughly. So what had prompted the question, or the accusation, from Prescott? I could think of only one explanation that fit the facts: Someone had told Prescott—or the Fox reporter, or both—that the teeth had been extracted, and that Janus’s death had been faked. But who? And why?
HOURS LATER—HOURS OF CLEANING AND SCRUTINIZING later—I still had no idea where the revelation had come from, or what had motivated it. But I had found signs of abrasions and fractures in the enamel of many of the teeth: abrasions and fractures that were more consistent with compressive and torsional forces—gripping and twisting—than with impact. With a heavy heart and sinking spirit, I concluded that the teeth had indeed been extracted before the crash. But I still didn’t see the big picture. In fact, if anything, I was more baffled than ever. Had Richard Janus indeed faked his death? If so, how the hell had he done it?
I WAS SURPRISED TO FIND A PHONE STILL HANGING on the annex wall, draped in Halloween-worthy cobwebs, and I was downright astonished to hear a dial tone when I lifted the dusty receiver to my ear. Digging deep into my wallet, I found the business card—formerly crisp and imposing, now dirty and crumpled—that I’d gotten from Pat Maddox, the NTSB crash investigator, and dialed the number. The phone rang half a dozen times before a deep, gravelly voice rumbled, “Uh . . . yeah . . . Maddox.”
“Oh hell, I woke you up,” I said. “Sorry, Pat. I didn’t think about the time change. It’s only, what . . .” I glanced at my watch.
“Six fifteen here.”
“I apologize.”
“I might possibly forgive you,” he growled—still sounding like a balky diesel engine on a cold morning—“if you’ll tell me who the hell this is, and what’s so damn important.”
“Oh, sorry, Pat. It’s Bill Brockton. The anthropologist. From Tennessee. I’m calling about the Janus crash.”
“Oh, Doc,” he said, his voice warming up. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “In fact, I don’t have a clue. Which is the problem, I guess. I got a call—a voice mail—yesterday from Miles Prescott, the FBI case agent.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “I saw him on the news last night. Special Agent Prescott, not looking ’specially happy. Was he calling to say ‘thanks again for the great work’?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “How much news coverage have you seen?”
“Not much. Just the one story last night. Talking about the teeth. By that jerk from Fox News.”
“You mean ‘Mike Mal-loy . . . Fox Five News!’?”
Maddox gave a dry laugh. “Yeah. That guy. You’ve got him nailed. He called me yesterday—no, day before—fishing around. Sounded like he had some kinda scoop, but he wouldn’t say what. All I gave him was a suggestion about what he should go do to himself. Not politically correct—not anatomically possible, either—but it made me feel better to say it.”
“You think it was Malloy who told Prescott the teeth had been extracted?”