To my surprise, she gave a small, ironic smile. “Not much comfort to that unlucky one.”
“No, ma’am, I suppose not.” A long silence ensued. Finally he prompted, “Did you have another question for me, Mrs. Janus?” She looked puzzled. “You said you had two questions for me. The first was whether it was murder, an accident, or suicide. Is there something else you’d like to ask me?”
“Ah. Yes. Was my husband’s death painful?”
Maddox shook his head emphatically. “No, ma’am. As I say, that mountain’s essentially invisible. He might not have seen it till the last second; maybe not at all. And at that speed — four hundred miles an hour — he would have died instantly. A millisecond. Less than the blink of an eye.”
She shifted her attention to me. “Dr. Brockton? Do you agree?”
“Absolutely,” I assured her. “He didn’t feel a thing.” I believed — and I prayed — that it was the truth.
Prescott had scheduled the press conference for the building’s largest courtroom. Even so, it was jammed. A forest of camera tripods had sprung up around the perimeter and in the aisles, and nearly every seat was taken. On the cameras, as Prescott led Maddox and me to a podium in front of the judge’s bench, I saw logos for CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, E! and a dozen other cable networks and local stations.
“Good afternoon,” Prescott began briskly. “I’m Special Agent Miles Prescott of the FBI’s San Diego field office. With me are Mr. Patrick Maddox, a crash investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board, and Dr. William Brockton, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Tennessee. Mr. Maddox and Dr. Brockton will brief you on their findings, but before I turn the podium over to them, I’ll start by confirming that we have positively identified the remains of Richard Janus. Mr. Janus was the pilot of the jet that crashed the morning of June 19. He did indeed die in the crash, and he was the only person aboard the aircraft.”
The reporters shouted questions, but Prescott motioned for silence. “Please hold your questions until the end.” He then summoned Maddox to the podium to reprise what he’d told Mrs. Janus, and once Maddox was done, he brought me up to do the same. After I’d finished, Prescott opened the floor for questions. Maddox swiftly dispensed with the idea that the plane had been shot down or sabotaged or bombed, as well as the suggestion that Janus had lost control of the aircraft, and then I answered a few basic questions: yes, I was confident that teeth were as reliable as DNA for purposes of identification; no, I didn’t think DNA testing would be possible, though we would certainly give it a try; yes, it was true that I ran a facility called the Body Farm, where corpses were allowed to rot in the name of research.
Then Prescott himself asked a question — one that he’d told me to expect, asking me to save my final images until he gave me the go-ahead. “Dr. Brockton,” he said, “did you find anything noteworthy at the crash site besides the remains of Richard Janus?” I raised my eyebrows inquiringly, to make sure I understood his cue correctly, and he gave a slight nod.
“Noteworthy? Yes,” I said. “In fact, I’d say it was quite remarkable. Under the wreckage, crushed by the nose of the plane, we found the body of another man — a Mexican immigrant, as best we can tell. We also found the body of a mountain lion, which appeared to be pouncing on the man at the moment of the crash.” The end of my sentence was nearly drowned out by a chorus of gasps, exclamations, and questions as I flashed the image of the two carcasses flattened against the rocks. If Prescott had intended to create a stir, his strategy had succeeded in spades. Catching my eye, he pointed to the screen and spun an index finger in a go-ahead signal. I clicked forward to the close-ups, and the room buzzed again. When the buzz subsided, I described in more detail how we’d found them — man and beast — plastered to the bluff’s bare rock, and how the insect activity confirmed the freshness of their deaths.
After a barrage of questions, Prescott returned to the podium, checked his watch conspicuously, and began winding things down. I was admiring his media-management savvy — if he’d scripted the entire event, it couldn’t have gone more smoothly — when a voice from the back of the room interrupted brashly. “What about the FBI’s arrest warrant for Richard Janus?” Everyone, including Prescott, suddenly sought the speaker. The crowd parted slightly as a young reporter — the reporter the FBI agents had frog-marched to the TV news helicopter a few days before — stepped into the center aisle. “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News,” he announced. Prescott raised both hands, pointed to the rear corners of the room — corners where two FBI agents were standing — and then aimed both fingers at Malloy. “My sources tell me the FBI was planning to arrest Richard Janus the night he died,” Malloy shouted over the din. “What role did the FBI play in Richard Janus’s flight, and his crash? Did the FBI drive him to suicide?” By now the two agents had muscled through the crowd and taken hold of Malloy’s elbows. But the damage was done: half a dozen television cameras had swiveled toward the reporter and recorded the dramatic turn of events, and Prescott — his jaw clenched, a large vein at his forehead standing out like a purple tree root — gestured to the agents to release the reporter.
Prescott gave the microphone three quick, attention-getting taps — taps so hard, they popped like gunshots. “As most of you know,” he said, “we have a policy of not commenting on open criminal investigations. But in view of the inflammatory, irresponsible nature of the question, I will respond briefly.” The crowd fell silent. “We have no indication that Richard Janus meant to commit suicide. In fact, we believe he was attempting to flee to Mexico. As you’ve heard, he had filed a flight plan to Las Vegas, Nevada. Almost immediately after takeoff, though, he changed course, turning directly toward Mexico. He was less than two miles from the border when the aircraft struck the peak of Otay Mountain. A hundred feet higher and twenty seconds more, and he’d have made it.” Again the room buzzed; again Prescott signaled for quiet, waiting for quite a while before he got it. “The night of his death, we were indeed preparing to take him into custody, on charges of drug trafficking and money laundering, among others. Behind the façade of a humanitarian organization, Richard Janus was a drug trafficker. He faced multiple felony charges; he faced millions of dollars in fines — and life behind bars.” Over the din of shouted questions and whirring cameras, Prescott raised his voice one more time. “That concludes this briefing. No more questions.” He stepped away from the podium, beckoned curtly to Maddox and me, and led us toward the side door.
We were followed by a hail of questions about the criminal allegations — amid the din, I heard the words “cocaine” and “DEA” and “cartel” and “Guzmán”—but Prescott paid no attention. As he opened the door, I glanced back at the clamoring throng, and suddenly I caught sight of a familiar face at the edge of the crowd — a face that looked oddly out of place in the scrum of scrubbed young journalists. The face belonged to a man who was fat and aging; even from a distance, his reddish-gray hair and sallow skin looked unkempt, unclean, and greasy. And somehow, over the noise of the crowd, I heard — or imagined I heard — a moist, whispering sound: the sound of labored breath, wheezing in and out of a mountain of flesh.
It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I froze. A moment later, I felt Prescott’s hand on my elbow, leading me out of the room. Ten minutes later, still shaky, I was in a black Suburban, with one of the younger agents driving me to the airport. This time the airport was San Diego International, not Brown Field; this time my ride wouldn’t be the FBI director’s sleek Gulfstream, but a cattle-car commercial airliner — one where I’d been assigned a middle seat in the last row.