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.