After a few moments of awkward silence, Prescott cleared his throat to get her attention. “Mrs. Janus, there’s something else we wanted to let you know before the media briefing,” he said. “In addition to your husband, we found the remains of another person at the crash site.”
Her eyes widened, and she clutched at her brother-in-law’s hand, the tendons in her hand pulled taut as bowstrings, a spiderwork of ropy blue veins crisscrossing above them. “Who?”
“We don’t know his name yet,” Prescott told her. “But we believe he was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. Apparently—”
She cut in. “But who was he? What was he doing on the plane?”
“He wasn’t on it,” he said, and she looked baffled — as baffled as I had felt the day before, when we’d found the bodies of the man and the mountain lion. “Apparently he was on the ground when the plane hit,” Prescott explained. “Wrong place, wrong time. We think he’d crossed the border recently — possibly even the night of the crash. If Dr. Brockton is correct, the man took a fall in the dark and was lying there, injured, when the plane hit.”
“My God,” she breathed. “That poor man.” Oddly, she seemed more upset by this stranger’s death than by her husband’s. I remembered Prescott’s questions about Richard’s life insurance policy, and for the first time I found myself wondering if she might have had something to do with her husband’s death. Was she unhappy in the marriage? Could she — a Mexican, after all — be the real link to the drug lord Guzmán? I felt her eyes on me, and I realized that I was staring at her intently. I flushed, hoping she wasn’t able to read my suspicious thoughts. After a moment, she turned back to Prescott. “Are you sure that this other man’s death was just a coincidence?”
“Not a hundred percent,” Prescott conceded. “But it’s the best explanation for what we found. I’ll let Dr. Brockton explain it in more detail.”
She looked at me again, her face neutral and masklike now. Opening a second manila folder, I pulled out four photos and slid them across the table to her. “The picture on top shows the wreckage of the aircraft’s nose. The nose hit first, obviously, so it was the last layer we got to as we excavated down through the debris.” Her eyes flicked rapidly across the image, scanning and then lingering, scanning and then lingering, and I wondered if she was searching the image for traces of her husband’s remains. When she looked up, I continued. “The next picture shows what we found underneath the nose — crushed between the nose and the rock face of the mountainside.” She flipped to the second photo. As she studied the image, her eyes narrowed, and I could tell that in spite of herself, she, too, was fascinated by the grim tableau. “As you can see, the man wasn’t alone on the mountainside when the plane hit. There was a mountain lion just above him — in the act of pouncing on him, as best we can tell — at the moment of impact. It’s like a freeze-frame image of the moment they died.” She shook her head slightly — not in doubt, I sensed, but in wonder. “The last two pictures are close-ups. As you can see from those, the man and the mountain lion were crushed directly against the mountainside — frankly, if you’ll forgive my bluntness once more, we had to scrape them off the rocks. That tells us they were definitely outside the plane, not inside.”
I was about to launch into more detail when I felt Prescott’s foot nudging me under the table, and he smoothly took the reins from me. “Obviously this was not the focus of our work up there, Mrs. Janus — far from it, but it’s the sort of thing the media is likely to play up, so we wanted to make sure you knew about it.”
Instead of acknowledging this, she turned to the NTSB investigator. “Mr. Maddox, I have two questions for you. First, was my husband’s crash an accident, suicide, or murder?”
Maddox blinked. “Well… I’m not sure we can answer that question. I can’t, at any rate.” He shot a quick look at Prescott, but Prescott ignored him, so he went on. “What I can do is tell you that I’ve seen no evidence of mechanical or structural failure, sabotage, explosives, or anything remotely suggesting an attack on the aircraft. I’ve also seen no signs that your husband ever lost control.” He seemed to shift gears — to take a step back into “briefing” mode — and continued, sounding more at ease. “He took off normally, made a climbing turn, changed course, and then leveled off. All those maneuvers were smoothly executed.” Maddox, too, had brought a folder of visuals to the meeting, but unlike me, he doled out the images one by one instead of giving her the whole set at once. “These are diagrams showing the aircraft’s radar track and altitude, from just after takeoff until the moment of impact.” He slid the first image across the table to her. “This one shows the radar track, superimposed on a map of Brown Field and the surrounding area. The red arrows indicate significant events in the flight, as well as the time they occurred. As you can see, the radar picks up the aircraft almost immediately after takeoff. It flies northeast for three miles — about sixty seconds. Then, over Otay Lake, it turns south, toward Mexico, shortly before leveling off. It continues south for another thirty seconds, the remainder of the flight.” She looked up, her face grim but expectant, and he slid the next page across the table. “This second diagram plots the aircraft’s altitude against the profile of the terrain. As you can see, a mile from the summit, the plane levels off at thirty-three hundred feet”—he reached across the table and, with the tip of a pen, indicated a spot on the line—“but the terrain continues rising steeply. So on that particular course, at that altitude, the collision was inevitable.” He waved the pen over the pair of diagrams, as if it were a wand, conjuring up the plane’s final moments. “Taken together, these indicate that the aircraft was in controlled flight the entire time. Again, nothing wrong with the plane, as far as we can tell at this point. Nothing obviously wrong with the pilot, either, judging from the flight path — no indications that he suffered a heart attack or seizure or stroke.” He paused briefly, then asked, “Are you aware of any medical problems that might have incapacitated him?”
“No. Richard was a strong and healthy man.”
Maddox nodded. “Let me go back to the question I said I couldn’t answer. Without any radio communications or other information that would shed light, I can’t say whether he hit the mountain accidentally or intentionally. On the one hand — the ‘accident’ hand — there’s no lights on that mountain, so even though it’s big, it’s almost invisible on a moonless night, especially if there’s any haze — and there was some haze that night. If he didn’t have a terrain warning alert on his GPS system, or if he hadn’t studied the aviation sectional chart closely — and frankly, the peak altitude of that mountain is printed in very small type — he might not have realized he was headed straight for it.” He paused, gave a pained frown. “On the other hand — the ‘intentional’ hand; the ‘suicide’ hand — if he did intend to take his life, he flew that plane in a way that would guarantee the outcome. And would minimize the risk of killing or injuring anyone else.”
“But he did,” she said. “He did kill someone else.”
“One-in-a-million odds,” Maddox replied. “One in a billion.”