MY RETURN TO SAN DIEGO, SIX WEEKS AFTER MY first visit, felt like a low-rent case of déjà vu: Instead of landing in a posh Gulfstream V, I thumped down in a weather-beaten 737, my knees bruised by the seatback ahead of me, my elbows chafed by the men seated on either side of me, their rolls of fat spilling over the armrests and into my personal space.
Thirty minutes after landing, I was in a helicopter once more, headed back to Otay Mountain. This time, though, instead of the combat-grade Bell 205 from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, I strapped myself into a civilian chopper whose cockpit appeared to have both the shape and the structural strength of an eggshell. The craft offered seating for four people, but horsepower for only two. With three adults and one suitcase aboard, the thing hesitated, as if considering whether to lift off or simply sit and tremble on the tarmac. Finally, with funereal slowness, we slipped the surly bonds of earth and crept off the ground, though the word “skyward” would have been a wild exaggeration. “Not quite as sporty as the one I rode in last time I was here,” I told the pilot. “But maybe that’s a good thing. That last ride scared the crap out of me.”
It was only when the pilot laughed and apologized that I recognized him as the very same pilot who had scared the crap out of me. He wasn’t wearing a deputy’s uniform this time, but he was definitely the one whose hovering above the burning Citation had damn near killed three FBI agents and me. “Only scary thing about this machine is how underpowered she is,” he said. “The good news is, she gets pretty zippy once we burn off about forty gallons.”
I knew I shouldn’t take the bait, but I couldn’t help myself. “And what’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is, when she gets zippy, you know she’s running on empty.”
“Don’t scare him,” said a woman’s voice—Carmelita Janus’s voice—from the cramped rear of the cabin, which she shared with my baggage. “Dr. Brockton needs to concentrate, not worry.”
When I had finally returned her calls, after weeks of ignoring her during Kathleen’s brief, brutal death spiral, Mrs. Janus had sounded shocked and saddened to hear my news. She had also withdrawn her plea for help—“I know you have many other things on your mind,” she’d said—but I had insisted on coming, assuring her that immersing myself in work would take my mind off my troubles. And so at my request, she had chartered a helicopter—piloted, to my surprise, by the off-duty deputy. The deputy’s name was Charles Throckmorton; his nickname, though, was Tailskid—Skidder, for short—a handle whose origins I was afraid to ask about. Skidder had been a friend of Richard’s, I learned—something he hadn’t mentioned to the FBI agents or to me that first day, although he had told us they had flown together a few times. Probably just as well that he hadn’t said they were friends, I realized. As before, Skidder’s mission on this trip would be to fly me back to the crash site. This time, though, we would follow, as precisely as possible, the dogleg route the Citation had flown the night of the crash.
To get to our starting point at Brown Field, we skirted the edge of San Diego Bay, the skyline of downtown out the left side of the canopy’s bubble, the low, narrow strand of Coronado Beach across the bay on our right. When we reached the end of the bay, the pilot banked to the left, and the San Ysidro Mountains—including Otay Mountain—reared up in the distance, high and dry in the August heat. “Brown Field’s straight ahead,” said the deputy. “Six miles.” He pressed a radio-transmitter button on the control stick and notified other aircraft in the vicinity that we’d be making a low pass over the runway from the west and then departing to the northeast. “If we land,” he explained to me, “we’d have to get this thing off the ground all over again. Better to keep flying, so we can pretend we’re rolling down the runway like a jet.” I could see his point.
We skimmed the runway a hundred feet above the asphalt, then began to climb. A half mile beyond the airport, we banked to left, turning northeast, which put Otay Mountain off to our right. “Think of this as a slow-motion replay,” said Skidder. “The Citation was climbing two thousand feet a minute that night, accelerating to three hundred miles an hour. Our rate of climb and our airspeed are about one-fourth of the jet’s. So you’ll have plenty of time to look around.” After a moment, he added, “If you don’t mind my asking, what is it you’re looking for, Dr. Brockton?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’ll know it when you see it?”
I held out my hands, palms up, and shrugged. “Hope so. All I know is, I won’t see it if I don’t look.”