The pursed-lipped librarian’s clippings did not, however, shed light on the things that had been gnawing at me all afternoon and evening, ever since I’d found the bit of bone that seemed to have come from the shattered skull of Richard Janus: If Janus had in fact been murdered — if a killer had strapped Janus’s body into the cockpit, aimed the plane at the mountainside, and then parachuted to safety — a whole series of baffling questions reared their heads, clamoring for answers. Why had the killer pulled Janus’s teeth? Why had he tucked a spinal cord stimulator behind the body? Why had he told the Fox reporter and the FBI agent that tool marks could be found on the teeth? In short, why had the killer gone to such elaborate lengths to do a double fake: to start out by creating the illusion that Janus had died in the fiery crash, but then to shatter that illusion, replacing it with a second illusion — the illusion that Janus was alive and on the lam somewhere?
For years, I had preached the gospel of Occam’s razor, a rule of logic stating that the simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost certainly the correct explanation. This case, though, seemed to be turning Occam’s razor on its head: the more complex and bizarre the explanation, the closer it seemed to stumble toward some grotesque, distorted, funhouse-mirrored travesty of truth.
That night, in my lumpy bed in my shabby motel, I dreamed of Janus — not the American pilot Janus, but the Roman deity, the one with two faces. That Janus, the one who gazed unblinkingly at both the past and the future, had been the guardian of doorways and transitions and transformations; he’d been both the keeper of the key and the wielder of the cudgel. In my dreams, the key to the mystery remained just out of reach, my fingertips not quite touching it as first my hand, then my entire arm, plunged into the Mouth of Truth.
I knew that the key must be close at hand, though, because as I groped blindly, my motions accompanied by the soft rattlings of dry pupa cases or snake tails, I felt myself being cudgeled. Rhythmically, ceaselessly cudgeled.
Chapter 39
After an early breakfast of petrified bagel, I stocked up on water and snacks at a nearby convenience store — a place sporting so many signs in Spanish, I half wondered if I had somehow strayed through a gap in the border fence — and aimed the rental car toward Otay Mountain, guided by the detailed topographic map I’d gotten from Carmelita Janus.
The topo map confirmed what I had already noticed: The area around the airfield and my motel was pancake flat, the streets following straight gridlines. To the north and east of town, though, the terrain began to rise and the roads began to undulate, following the contours.
My first stop was the grass airstrip at the eastern end of Lower Otay Lake — the home of “Janus Junkyard,” where Airlift Relief had kept spare parts, picked-over airplane skeletons, and a maintenance shop. Pat Maddox, the NTSB expert, had sounded certain that the airstrip was where the Citation’s pilot — the actual, living pilot — would have steered his parachute. It made sense, I’d agreed, as I’d studied the topo map: the airstrip and the area around it were flat and free of hazards, except for a couple of hangars, a windsock tower, and a handful of airplane carcasses. Would I be able to find evidence of a parachute landing somewhere out there, in forty acres of grass and weeds? Or was I wasting time and energy on a fool’s errand? “Only one way to know,” I muttered, turning down the dusty dirt lane that led to the airstrip.
I’d gone only a hundred yards when I came to a farm gate that blocked the road, a thick chain and padlock cinching the gate to a stout fencepost. The gate itself wasn’t much of an obstacle; its construction — horizontal tubes of galvanized steel, spaced eight or ten inches apart — made it a makeshift ladder. No, the real obstacle was the yellow-and-black crime scene tape stretched across the gateway, along with a laminated notice bearing the FBI logo and a stern NO TRESPASSING warning. I cast a furtive look around, found the coast was clear, and stepped onto the gate’s second rung, my hands gripping the top crossbar.
One step up, I paused, partly because of the NO TRESPASSING notice — specifically, its mention of video surveillance — but also partly because of something I remembered from the prior day’s flight retracing the jet’s route. According to Skidder, an expert pilot, the Citation was still maneuvering when it crossed the airstrip. In fact, the jet’s five-hundred-foot descent and leveling off had occurred only after it had made its turn toward the mountain. The jumper must not have landed here.
Returning to the car, I pulled out the topo map and spread it on the hood, studying the lay of the land and the way the roads wrapped around its contours. Shortly before I’d reached the turnoff to the airstrip, I had passed another dirt road — this one heading south, into the broad valley that funneled up to the peak. The day before, retracing the Citation’s route in the air to the crash site, I’d hit pay dirt. Maybe I’d get lucky again this time, following the ground track.
As I doubled back and entered the mouth of the valley—the Mouth of Truth? I heard myself wondering — I quickly realized my rental car was a poor steed for this ride. I had asked for an SUV, but the Hertz counter at Brown Field didn’t have any; instead of a Jeep Cherokee or Ford Expedition, I was bucking up a washboard road in a low-slung Chevy Impala, dodging football-sized rocks and wincing with every scrape of the oil pan against jutting ledges. The road ended a half mile up the valley, in a wide hollow with a flat, sandy turnaround area. Stopping thirty yards short of the turnaround, I got out and walked, my eyes scanning the ground. I could see tire tracks, but unlike the crisp tread marks I’d left in my FBI training exercise at the Body Farm, these furrows — plowed in dry, soft sand — revealed nothing about the tires or vehicles that had made the marks.
As I neared the turnaround, where the tracks looped back, I saw other signs of disturbance: sandy heaps and hollows, which I suspected had been sculpted by the scuffing of feet. Then I spotted something that made my heart race: a midden of cigarette butts strewn beside the tire tracks, as if someone had emptied an ashtray there… or had parked and waited for an hour or two, chain-smoking an entire pack, using each cigarette’s final embers to light the next, then dropping the dying butt to the ground beneath the car’s open window.
Suddenly I stopped, my eye caught by what appeared to be another artifact — an odd, enigmatic, and therefore electrifying creation. At the center of the wide turnaround, five fat cigar butts, each as thick as my thumb, jutted upward from the sand a couple of inches apiece. With one at the center and the other four radiating outward from it — each five feet or so from the center — they formed a large, precise geometric shape: like the five dots on dominos or dice… or like a giant + sign, measuring ten or twelve feet from tip to tip. A small circle of sand at the base of each stub was black with soot, and as I edged closer, I saw that the cigar butts weren’t cigar butts at all, but the remnants of signal flares stuck into the ground. Set alight in the blackness of this wilderness, they would have created a blazing bull’s-eye here: here in the softest, safest spot for a parachutist leaping into the blackness from a streaking jet.
Hands shaking, I dialed Skidder’s number. Deputy Skidder’s number. Given that he was briefing the sheriff — had probably briefed the sheriff the day before — about the piece of skull, he’d need to relay this information, too. But my call didn’t go through, and when I looked at my phone I saw why. Down in this hollow, miles from town, I had no signal. Zero bars. “Crap,” I muttered; I’d need to return to civilization to make the call. As I turned back toward my car, I spotted signs of civilization — a grim sort of civilization — on the skyline only a few miles away: the guard towers of the state prison. My first thought was a bad pun: plenty of bars at a prison. My second thought was less silly, and maybe even usefuclass="underline" Maybe one of the guards saw something that night.