Jefferson Bass
The Breaking Point
In memory of Clyde Snow, Walter Birkby, and
Ted Rathbun: good friends, valued colleagues,
superb teachers, and crusaders for justice.
Part One
The Two Faces of Richard Janus
And thus does Fortune’s wheel turn treacherously
And out of happiness bring men to sorrow.
One of ancient Rome’s most powerful and mysterious deities, Janus — the god of two faces — was guardian of gateways and transitions. The two faces signified not hypocrisy, as people often assume, but dual vision: One face turned toward the past, the other toward the future, Janus stood sentinel on the threshold of birth, as well as the threshold between death and the afterlife. In one hand he held a key; in the other, a cudgel.
Prologue
McCready stopped and knelt beside a rut in the dirt road, raising a hand to halt the six men and two women fanned out behind him. The road, if a pair of faint tracks through grass, weeds, and leaves could indeed be called a road, meandered down a hillside of oaks and maples, their trunks girdled with vines. The mid-June morning was sweet with honeysuckle blossoms; the exuberant lushness of June had not yet given way to the duller green of July and the browning scorch of August, but underneath the perfume lurked something darker, something malodorous and malevolent hanging in the air.
McCready — Special Supervisory Agent Clint “Mac” McCready — studied the rut, which was damp and also deeply imprinted with multiple layers of sharply defined tire tracks. He pulled two evidence flags from a back pocket and marked the ends of the tracks, then, with the camera slung around his neck, took a series of digital photographs. The photos were wide-angle views at first, followed by tighter and tighter shots. As he snapped the final, frame-filling close-ups, he said, to no one in particular, “It rained, what, couple days ago?”
“Night before last.” The answer came from behind him, from Kimbo — Kirby Kimball, the youngest, newest, and therefore most eager member of SSA McCready’s Evidence Response Team. “The front passed through about thirty-six hours ago. Rain stopped shortly after midnight.”
McCready nodded, smiling slightly at the young agent’s zeal, and lowered the camera, focusing now solely with his eyes. “These tracks look like they’ve been machined. What does that tell us?”
“New tires,” said Kimball. “Deep tread blocks. Almost no wear. But there’s a nick — a cut — here. At the outer edge.”
“What else?”
“Big, off-road tires,” Kimball added, squatting for a closer look. “SUV or four-by-four. Just one, looks like. One set of impressions heading in, another — on top — heading back out.”
“Right.” McCready glanced over his shoulder at the other agents. “Mighty quiet back there. I thought maybe the rest of you guys had gone for coffee.” The agents exchanged sheepish glances. “Okay, what else can we tell from these tracks? Somebody besides Kimbo jump in. Anybody?”
“The vehicle passed through after the rain stopped.” This from Boatman, an earnest, thirtysomething agent who looked and listened a lot more than he talked.
“Right, far as it goes. But can you pin it down any tighter than that?”
Boatman stepped forward and bent down, his brow furrowing, his gaze shifting from the tracks to the surrounding vegetation — crabgrass and spindly poison ivy. “Quite a while after the rain stopped. Hours later, I’d say; maybe yesterday afternoon or even last night.”
“Because?”
“The impressions wouldn’t be so crisp — so perfect — if there’d been a puddle there when the vehicle went through,” Boatman said. He surveyed the margins of the rut, then inspected the undersides of some of the blades of grass there. “Plus, if there’d been standing water, there’d be mud spatter on the vegetation. There’s no spatter.”
“Good.” McCready focused on Kimball, who stood motionless yet somehow seemed cocked and ready to fire: his T-shirt stretched by the tension in his shoulders and biceps; the heels of his boots hovering a half inch off the ground, as if he were ready to spring into action. “Kimbo, you’re an eager beaver this morning; you wanna cast these?” It wasn’t actually a question.
“Yessir. On it.” Kimball jogged back to the truck, a Ford Econoline chassis with a big cargo box grafted behind the cab; the vehicle might have passed for an ambulance on steroids if not for the prominent FBI logo on the side and the foot-high letters reading EVIDENCE RESPONSE TEAM. Opening a hatch on the side of the vehicle, Kimball hauled out a large tackle box and lugged it to the tracks. He unlatched the lid and took out a gallon-sized Ziploc bag, half filled with powdered gypsum crystals — dental stone — and a graduated squeeze bottle. Squirting ten ounces of water into the bag, he resealed it and began kneading, creating a slurry the color and consistency of thin pancake batter: runny enough to flow into every block and groove of the tire tracks, thick enough not to seep into the soil itself.
McCready had already moved on, following the tracks in a hunched-over crouch: half bloodhound, half Quasimodo. “Looks like they parked here,” he said, stopping to study the ground again. The soil was covered with leaves, and McCready frowned at the lack of castable shoe impressions. A trail of scuffed leaves led toward the trees at the edge of the clearing, but the undergrowth beyond the tree line appeared to be undisturbed; indeed, the scuff marks led only as far as a large, convex oval of mussed leaves situated just short of the trees. McCready began circling the oval, pausing occasionally to take photos. “This matches the C.I.’s description of where it went down,” he said. Heads nodded in agreement; earlier, McCready had passed out transcripts of his interview with the confidential informant. “Boatman, you and Kimbo…” He paused to glance over his shoulder at Kimball, who had already finished pouring the slurry of dental stone into the rut. “You and Kimbo set up the total station and start mapping. Rest of you, suit up and get ready to dig in.” The other six team members returned to the truck and wriggled into white biohazard suits and purple gloves. They came back laden with rakes, shovels, trowels, plastic bins, and a wood-framed screen of quarter-inch wire mesh.
As they laid their tools neatly beside the oval mound, Boatman latched the 3-D mapping unit onto a tripod. Kimball returned to the tire tracks again, this time holding a long, reflector-topped rod, its length marked in alternating, twelve-inch bands of red and white. Boatman swiveled the instrument toward Kimball and sighted on the reflector. “Lights, camera, action,” he deadpanned, and he began pressing buttons to capture the position of the track. Checking the small display screen, he nodded. “Got it,” he said, rotating the unit toward the oval mound, to which Kimball jogged with the reflector.
The mound, uncovered by careful raking, was red-brown clay, roughly four feet by six feet. The clay was broken and infused with pale, shredded roots, freshly shorn and torn from the soil — a raw, ragged wound in the earth’s smooth, dark skin. McCready’s gaze ranged over the lumpy surface, then zoomed in on something no one else had seen, tucked beneath a clod of clay. Kneeling just outside the margin of the oval mound, he leaned down, his nose practically in the dirt. “Cartridge case,” he said. “That was careless of somebody.” Then, without looking around: “Kimbo.” By the time he’d finished saying the name, Kimball was already placing the end of the rod beside the piece of brass.