“Hello,” I said, extending my hand, as I had hundreds of times in the past two hours. “Thank you for coming.”
“We haven’t met, Dr. Brockton, but we’ve talked on the phone,” she said, and I knew her voice instantly. She must have seen the shock of recognition on my face, because the next thing she said was, “Yes. I’m Red. I’m not really a reference librarian, and I apologize for misleading you. The phone was ringing, you seemed to need some help, and . . . I . . . I just got carried away. It was just so . . . fascinating.”
“Fascinating,” I said, smiling. “I’ve been hearing that word a lot lately. It’s my new favorite word.”
She looked confused, which was understandable. “Anyhow, I’m very sorry you lost your wife.”
“Thank you. Me, too.”
“And I’m sorry I tricked you.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You helped me a lot, too. A lot more than the actual reference librarian I talked to, out in Otay Mesa.”
“Otay Mesa? That’s the place where El Chapo—you know, ‘Goose Man’—ran that underground railroad under the border from Tijuana!”
“See,” I said. “You’re good, Red. The offer’s still open. If you want to switch fields—turn anthropologist—let me know.”
She blushed, and she smiled shyly. “Actually,” she said, “I’ve sent in my application.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I’ll look for it. Will I find it filed under R, for Red?”
“No,” she said. “You’ll find it in the Ls. Under Lovelady. Miranda Lovelady. Does this mean I’m in?”
“I’m like the FBI, Miranda,” I said, grinning. “I don’t make promises. But I’ll recommend you to myself. In the strongest possible terms.”
During ten years of writing Body Farm novels, I’ve often noted the blurred boundary—the semi-permeable membrane; the oft-crosssed border—between fact and fiction in the books. Given that the stories are informed by years of Dr. Bill Bass’s forensic casework, how could it be otherwise?
This book is no exception. One factual underpinning is the death of Ann Bass, Bill’s first wife, who died in 1993. Our fictional character Kathleen Brockton is not interchangeable with the late Mrs. Bass, but she obviously shares traits with her, just as Dr. Brockton—who is not exactly interchangeable with Bill Bass—shares many traits in common with him. The specifics of Kathleen’s illness and of Dr. Brockton’s grief are products of my own writerly imagination.
Tragically, the 1991 crash on Otay Mountain that’s mentioned in the book was not a product of my imagination. Country music singer Reba McEntire lost seven musicians and her band’s road manager in the early morning hours of March 16, 1991, when a twin-engine jet—piloted by a crew unfamiliar with the mountainous terrain to the east of San Diego—took off from Brown Field Municipal Airport and slammed into the dark peak of Otay Mountain. Astonishingly, in October 2004, another twin-engine jet—this one an air ambulance—hit the mountainside in the dark, killing the pilots and three medical crew members. After the 2004 crash, the Federal Aviation Administration revised its procedures and charts to reduce the chances of additional collisions with the dark, dangerous terrain lurking to the east of Brown Field.
Four decades ago, Dr. Bass investigated the high-velocity crash of an Air Force plane high in the Great Smoky Mountains, and that case clearly took root somewhere in the nooks and crannies of my mind. But I have a deeper, more personal interest in aviation crashes, too: As an amateur pilot myself, I’ve read numerous NTSB crash-investigation reports, partly in hopes of learning lessons, and partly because of morbid fascination with the fate that has come close—terrifyingly close—to claiming my own life on several occasions.