“No way,” Kimball insisted. “These wires aren’t long enough. Besides, they’re hardwired — soldered directly to the circuit board — not plugged into a jack. See?”
“Computer mouse, then,” replied Boatman. “The wires are the tail.”
Kimball shook his head doggedly. “Too short for that, too. And there’s no USB connector on the other end. Just these weird flat tabs of copper.”
“So the USB connector got sheared off,” said Boatman. “Or melted.” The pair of them made me think of an old, bickering married couple. He turned to look at me. “Doc? If you stare at that thing any harder, it might burst into flames. What are you thinking?”
I could feel gears turning in my mind — gears, or maybe combination-lock tumblers, their notches gradually aligning, one by one. “I think,” I said, as the last tumbler clicked home, unlocking an idea, “that it’s okay to move. I also think we’ll know in thirty minutes whether or not this is Richard Janus.”
Kimball and I went topside to the command center, taking the electronic gizmo and the camera with us. While Kimball transferred photographs from the camera to the computer, I showed the gizmo to McCready and Maddox and asked McCready to enlist some of Prescott’s field-office agents for a bit of quick research. A moment later he was on the phone, calling in the cavalry.
Meanwhile, I called my friend Helen Taylor in Knoxville, hoping I’d catch her still at work. The phone rang six times, and I feared she’d left early, but finally she answered. “East Tennessee Cremation Services.”
“Oh, good,” I said, relieved. “Helen, it’s Bill Brockton. I was afraid you’d left for the day.”
“No, just processing a cremation. How are you, Dr. Brockton?”
“I’m fine, but I need a favor. Can I send you some pictures of something that’s burned to a crisp and get you to tell me what it is?” If anybody could confirm my hunch about the incinerated object, I suspected Helen was the one.
“I will if I can,” she said. “Do you have our mailing address?”
“I’m in a hurry, Helen. Can I fax you the pictures?”
“Well, yes.” She sounded doubtful. “But they’d come through clearer if you e-mailed them — as scans, or image files, attached to a message. Can you do that?”
I turned to Kimball. “Can we send e-mail? With picture files as attachments?”
“With this computer, and the satellite data link we’ve got?” Kimball grinned. “We could just about send you as an attachment.”
“Yes, we can e-mail them,” I told Helen. “What’s the address?” I jotted it on a notepad beside the computer. “Check your in-box in about thirty seconds. The message will come from”—I looked at Kimball as I spoke—“an FBI address?” He nodded, so I confirmed it. “Yeah, from an FBI address.”
“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.”