“Dunno,” said Maddox. “Maybe. Probably. He seems to have a real hard-on for this story.”
“But where’d Malloy get the information? I’ve spent all night looking at those teeth, Pat, and he’s right—they were extracted. Pulled. Thing is, I had to clean ’em off and look at ’em under a magnifying glass before I could tell. It’s not like some reporter could take a quick glance and spot the marks. Besides, how could he have even seen them—the teeth, I mean?”
“Well, I’m guessing you didn’t give him a look,” he said.
“Hell, no.”
“Okay, so who could’ve?”
“Nobody,” I said. “The only people who had access to those teeth were us.” Suddenly something occurred to me. “Wait. Not just us. The medical examiner did, too.”
“Just the medical examiner himself? Nobody on his staff?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “All the material went to the morgue—just overnight—so the M.E. could write up the death certificate. Maybe somebody on his staff snuck the reporter into the morgue.”
“But why?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Malloy’s girlfriend—or boyfriend, or cousin, or somebody—works for the M.E.”
“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Any chance somebody wanted to make you look bad, Doc? You done anything to piss off the San Diego medical examiner?”
“Of course not. Not that I know of, anyhow.” I thought for a moment. “Unless he felt like I was stepping on his toes just by being there.”
“You mean, like maybe it was an insult—a slap in his face? Like he wasn’t good enough—smart enough—to make the I.D. himself?”
“Could be, I reckon,” I conceded. “I’ve worked with a lot of medical examiners over the years, and most of them are great. But some of ’em are pretty weird.”
“Hell, Doc, what do you expect from guys who spend all their time with dead bodies?” I felt my hackles begin to rise—being a guy who happened to spend a lot of time with dead bodies myself—but then Maddox added, “Only folks weirder than that would be sickos who get their kicks poking around in plane crashes, right?” He chuckled.
“Right,” I said, almost smiling in spite of myself. Maddox’s wit was one of the things I’d liked about him while we were working the crash.
“So what does Prescott want you to do now?”
“Get lost, basically,” I said. “Stay away from the media. Stay away from the case. I’ve got to take the teeth and bones over to the FBI’s Knoxville field office. Should’ve already done it, but I wanted to take a closer look first—see if it’s true about the teeth.”
“And?”
“It is. The damn Fox guy got it right.”
Maddox didn’t speak for a moment. “So . . . I’m guessing this puts you in a kinda awkward spot, huh?”
“Kinda awkward. Like the pope is kinda Catholic.”
He grunted a sort of laugh, then said, “Sorry to hear that, Doc.”
“Makes two of us.” I blew out a long breath. “If the FBI was about to come down hard on Janus, I get why he might fake his death. But I don’t get how. How’d he get that plane to crash into that mountainside, carrying a decoy body and his bloody teeth?” Maddox didn’t answer, so I ventured a guess. “The autopilot?”
“The autopilot? How do you mean, Doc?”
“Could Janus program the autopilot to make the plane take off on its own, then turn south and level off?”
“Sure, Doc,” Maddox said, “if this was a Hollywood movie. Or if that Citation was a CIA drone. Otherwise, no way. He had to’ve been at the controls.”
“But h
ow?”
Maddox sighed. “I’m probably not supposed to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Turns out there might’ve been a way—there was a way—for Janus to jump from the plane in flight.”
I pulled the handset away from my ear and stared at it, as if the phone were Maddox himself. “But you said there wasn’t. You said he’d’ve smashed into the engine right after going out the door.”
“He would’ve—if he’d gone out the cabin door. Which, you may recall, couldn’t be opened in flight. So that’s all true.”
“Then how?” I was starting to sound like a broken record.
“Like I say, I shouldn’t be telling you things. But I can’t keep you from guessing, can I? So think about it, Doc. If he couldn’t go out that door . . .”
He’d made it easy for me to finish that sentence. “He went out another door—a different door.” I searched my mental data banks and called up an image of the aircraft. “But what different door? You showed us the cutaway. There is no other door on a Citation.”
“Well . . . not when it rolls out of the Cessna factory, there’s not.” He waited, as if he had given a big enough hint to allow me to solve the riddle.
“Ah,” I said, the light dawning. “Janus had the Citation modified, didn’t he? Bigger engines. Bigger fuel tanks. ‘So he could crash harder and burn hotter’—wasn’t that how you put it?”
“Good memory. Those were among the mods . . .”
“So he had other changes made, too,” I said. “Like adding another door somewhere.”
“Bingo. And what kind of door might a guy like Janus—a guy delivering stuff to remote villages—want to add?”
“A cargo door. But could that be opened in flight?”
“Depends on the kind of cargo door,” he said. “You know what a clamshell belly door is?”