Mrs. Janus’s voice came through the headset. “That reminds me of Richard. ‘Better to die trying than to live without trying,’ he used to say.”
“Christ, Carmelita,” squawked the pilot, “and you told me not to scare him.”
Ahead of us, I saw what at first glance might have been a pair of immense shopping malls. As we got closer, I noticed tall watchtowers and coils of razor wire, and I remembered passing the entrance road to a prison on my prior trip. “That’s quite a prison,” I said. “State penitentiary—am I remembering that right?”
“The one on the left is,” the pilot answered. “Donovan. The one on the right’s county, mostly, with a little federal thrown in for good measure.” Beyond the prisons lay a blue-green lake, one I’d seen before, but from a different angle, looking down from the crash site.
I pointed. “Otay Lake?”
“Lower Otay Lake, technically. You see the arm stretching to the east? We’ll turn south when we get to the far end of that.” He pointed to a dial on the instrument panel. “Miracle of miracles, we’re almost at thirty-nine hundred feet.”
Mrs. Janus spoke again. “You see the little airstrip just beyond the tip of the lake? And the two hangars? Richard’s maintenance shop is there. ‘Janus Junkyard,’ he called it. You can see a DC-3 carcass he cannibalized for parts, to keep ours flying.”
“Why didn’t he just do everything at Brown Field?”
“Too expensive,” she said. “He bought this whole place from a skydiving school, for about what it cost to park the Citation at Brown Field for a year. He would’ve kept the jet here, too, but the runway’s too short.”
“Damn rough, too,” added the pilot.
“Not as rough as those jungle clearings,” she pointed out.
“Well, no,” he agreed. He glanced down at a chart spread across his lap. “Okay, I’m turning south, descending to thirty-three hundred feet.”
I turned toward him, though his attention was focused on the gauges and the horizon, not on my puzzled face. “Descending? Why?”
“Because that’s what the Citation did that night.”
“But I thought the plane was flying straight and level when it hit.”
“It was,” he said. “For the last two miles. But before that—right after the last turn—it came down five hundred feet, pretty quick.”
“Came down? Why the hell would it do that?” I asked, but immediately, I answered my own question. “To make sure it hit the mountain.” Then, after a moment, another question occurred to me—one I was not able to answer for myself. “Could the plane’s autopilot have made it descend and level off?”
“No,” said the pilot and Mrs. Janus in unison.
“An autopilot’s more like cruise control,” added the pilot. “It can keep the wings level, and keep the plane on course, but it’s not designed to maneuver the plane.”
“Then that tells us something useful,” I said. “Tells us that if somebody bailed out, they didn’t jump until after that maneuver, right?”
“Guess so,” said Skidder.
“Assuming that’s true,” said Mrs. Janus, “what do you make of it? What’s the significance?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “All I know is that I’m looking for something . . .”
“Though you don’t know what it is,” the pilot reminded me.
“I don’t know what it is,” I echoed, “but if you’ll tell me when we level off . . .”
“Right . . . about . . . now.”
“. . . then I’ll know where to start looking.” He gave a nod, and I looked down. Below us, the flat terrain surrounding the lake and the airstrip began giving way to hills and valleys. Somewhere down there must be the spot where a parachute jumper had landed in the darkness. Even in daylight, the terrain looked forbidding. If I searched the terrain below, might I come across a parachute—attached to a man who had broken both legs upon landing, slowly dying on a rocky mountainside? I scanned the ground for signs of a ’chute, but unless it was the color of desert camo, there wasn’t one.