“I know, I know. But hey, look on the bright side. We know it’s him; now all we gotta do is prove it. We just need more teeth. You’ve got the dental records now, right?”
He frowned: sore subject. “Working on it. The dentist is dragging his heels.”
“So pull on him harder.” His frown turned to a scowl, which meant I’d drilled into a nerve. I shrugged apologetically. “Hey, cheer up,” I said, holding up a thumb and forefinger, separated by a hairsbreadth. “We’re this close.”
Only after I said it did I realize why the phrase—this close—came so easily to my lips. Prescott had used it to threaten the pushy Fox News reporter.
I had also heard another federal agent use it — the wheezy fat man who had ripped into Prescott at the IHOP — to describe how near he’d been to nailing not just Janus but Guzmán, too.
This close. Maybe the phrase didn’t exactly mean what I thought it meant.
This close. It echoed in my mind. Presumptive, but not positive.
During my time topside with the spinal cord stimulator, the evidence techs had begun to mine a rich vein of skeletal materiaclass="underline" splintered ribs; incinerated vertebrae; fractured long bones. By the time I rejoined them amid the wreckage, our five-gallon bucket — what I’d taken to calling our “special bucket”—was half filled with pieces of burned bone. As I studied the bucket’s contents, gently lifting and sifting my way downward, I was impressed by what they’d found — and fascinated by what they hadn’t. “Hmm,” I said. “So far, everything’s from the postcranial skeleton.”
Boatman handed me a singed scapula — the left shoulder blade. “The which?”
“Postcranial,” I said. “Below the skull. If we hadn’t found that tooth yesterday, I’d almost think he didn’t have a head. The headless horseman, but riding a plane instead of a horse.” Suddenly it hit me, and I let out a bark of startled laughter. “I’ll be damned,” I told the surprised agents. “Maybe he was headless.” Their puzzled expressions prompted me to explain. “When he hits — remember, he’s going four hundred miles an hour — he’s strapped in, right? So his body’s restrained, for a fraction of a second, by the harness. But his head isn’t restrained, and it snaps forward really, really hard. How many g’s did Maddox say the deceleration created?”
“Eighteen hundred.” The answer came from Kimball, not surprisingly.
“So if his head weighed ten or twelve pounds,” I mused, “then it would have jerked forward…” I did some mental math. “Jesus. With almost twenty thousand pounds of force.”
Kimball gave a low whistle. “That’s some serious traction.”
“I don’t know how much force it takes to pull the head clean off the spine,” I added. “We’ve never done that particular experiment at the Body Farm. But I’m guessing twenty thousand pounds would do it.” I redirected my gaze and began scanning a different area of the wreckage from where the vertebrae had been found. “I’m also guessing that we’ll find the skull — the pieces of it — somewhere up here, instead of down there.”
Straightening up from my crouch — I’d been stooped over the area where the vertebrae and scapula had been — I began examining the remnants of the instrument panel, the windshield, and the cockpit ceiling. The windshield itself had melted or burned away — it was plastic, not glass — but its misshapen framework remained: two rectangular openings, separated and reinforced by a stout central pillar. The pillar was bent and blackened and, down near its base, encrusted with a coating of black particles. The particles were bits of burned bone, I realized; more specifically, they were charred crumbles of skull, a few of them large enough to retain their distinctive, layered structure: hard outer and inner shells of dense bone, separated by a softer, spongy layer. My pulse racing, I leaned close and worked my way downward. A few inches below the base of the pillar — embedded in the glass-filled cavity of a shattered instrument — I spotted them: a handful of blackened pebbles. A handful of teeth. “Bingo,” I said softly, mainly to myself. Then, a moment later: “Can somebody hand me the tooth jar?”
“Here you go, Doc.”
Without even looking to see who’d said it, I reached back and took the container. I removed the lid and tucked it in one of my shirt pockets, then took a pair of forceps from the other pocket. One by one, I plucked teeth from their nest amid the shards of glass. They weren’t all there — only ten of them; the others must have been scattered or shattered by the impact — but four of the ten were enough to send my adrenaline soaring again. “Somebody wake up McCready,” I joked.
“He’s standing right there,” said Kimball, pointing up at the rim of the bluff.
I glanced up and saw McCready silhouetted against the sky. “Hey, Mac,” I called, “can you give me another lift?”
He leaned perilously over the edge. “You okay, Doc? What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine. Got something else to show you.” I tucked my find into my shirt pocket, sealing six of the teeth in the small jar, folding the other four into a piece of paper.
“Climb aboard. Holler when you’re set.”
The ERT techs steadied the corners of the rack as I positioned myself at the center. “All set — beam me up, Scotty!” McCready spun his finger at the crane operator, and once more I ascended, swung around to the side, and settled gently onto what I had come to think of as the landing pad. “You’re gonna like this,” I said. “I’m… positive.”
He raised his eyebrows as my double-entendre meaning sank in. “Whatcha got? Suicide note? Signed in blood — in an asbestos envelope?”
“How’d you guess?” I fished in my pocket. “Actually, no, but probably just as good.” I held out my hand, my fingers closed, then slowly opened them to reveal four teeth in my palm. “Check it out,” I said. “I found a bunch of teeth. More than this, but these four are really special.” With my pinky, I pointed to the first. “A canine. Dog tooth. The longest root of any tooth.”
McCready leaned in, studying the tooth. “Looks kinda gnarly. Twisted, almost.”
“Exactly — the root’s got a slight corkscrew curve. Very distinctive. I’ve never seen one quite like this before.”
He nodded. “So far, so good.”
“It gets better.” I pointed to a pair of teeth. “The upper central incisors — both of ’em.” I tapped my own, then touched the teeth in my palm again. “Look at that.”
“They’re chipped — the corners broken off. By the crash?”
“No. See how the edges of the breaks are rounded off? They’re worn. These teeth have been chipped for years. That picture Maddox showed us, of Janus grinning beside the jet? Look close and you’ll see these chipped teeth.”
McCready himself was now starting to smile. “This is good, right?”
“Good? It’s grrreeaat,” I responded, in my best Tony the Tiger imitation. “But I saved the best for last. The most interesting, anyhow. This one’s a maxillary third molar — a wisdom tooth. Upper right.” I opened my mouth and put the tip of my tongue in the hollow of my tooth to show him. “Iss whun,” I mumbled, tapping the outside of my cheek as well. “This one’s interesting in a couple of ways. First, it’s got a filling. That’s far more common in a lower molar, because food and saliva tend to collect there.” He nodded, but I could tell I was losing him, so I hurried on. “But the really cool thing about this tooth? This.” Plucking it carefully from my palm, I held it up, rotating it slowly to reveal the prize.