McCready had assigned two of the ERT techs to work the perimeter of the debris field, gathering scattered wreckage to load onto the rack and hoist up at intervals. Four more—plus Boatman and Kimball, when they weren’t mapping things with the Total Station—would help me dissect the heart of the debris, in search of human remains. Before we began, I reiterated what I’d said earlier, up top, in my minilecture on osteology. “We won’t find much that’s recognizable,” I reminded them. “Look for bone shards and tissue, but teeth are the big prize. The soft tissue—even the bones—might be too burned for DNA testing. But teeth are tough. Our best shot at a DNA profile is inside the teeth—the molars, especially. But even if we can’t get DNA out of the teeth, we can still make an identification, if we can find fillings or bridgework or something that matches our guy’s dental records.” They nodded and fanned out, and in near-perfect synchrony—as if we’d all been transported to a church service in the smoldering shell of a ruined cathedral—we dropped to our knees.
Four hours later, we were still on our knees, but my prayers of finding Richard Janus had gone unanswered. Over the course of the afternoon, our plywood platform had been filled, hoisted, emptied, and lowered time and again. The two wider-ranging agents had also sent up load after load of bigger pieces on their rack—turbine blades; wheels; sections of wing and tail—and my four assistants and I had contributed plenty of smaller pieces as we’d picked our way into the central pile of debris. But the five-gallon bucket designated for human material remained empty—stubbornly, frustratingly, accusingly empty—and I’d begun to feel less like an anthropologist than like a miner, or a trash picker in a scrapyard. Kathleen and I had recently watched a documentary about poverty-stricken Brazilians who lived beside an immense landfill in Rio de Janeiro, and the people—men, women, even children—spent ten hours a day, every day, picking through load after load of garbage dumped at the landfill—some seeking plastic bottles, others seeking circuit boards, still others in search of scraps of wire: lifetimes of drudgery, dredging through the detritus of modern materialism. Not long before—less than twenty-four hours before, in fact—these bits of smoldering scrap had been a multimillion-dollar jet aircraft. But in one catastrophic instant the Citation had been reduced to trash, and we had been reduced to trash pickers.
Hour by tedious hour, the shadows grew long, and the mountainside began to cool. When the freshly emptied rack descended once more, demanding to be filled again—for the fifteenth time, or the fiftieth?—McCready leaned over the rim and called down to us. “Hey, guys. Six o’clock. Quittin’ time. Come on up.” He didn’t have to tell us twice. Hours before, I had rappelled down, but now that we had an elevator, I would ride up. The ERT techs and I clambered aboard the swaying platform. They sat around the perimeter, legs dangling into space; I stood at the center, straddling the still-empty bucket, and braced myself by holding the cables bolted to the platform’s four corners.
Overhead, the crane rumbled and whined, and with a slight lurch we began rising up the rock face. After we cleared the rim, the crane’s boom pivoted and began easing us down toward the concrete pad—my third landing of the day, I realized, this one a bit more primitive than the prior ones in the Gulfstream and the helicopter. As we hovered briefly, McCready threw us a mock salute, then called out, “You guys look like that painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware.” Glancing around, I saw the visual resemblance—the aging general, my stance wide, surrounded by a boatload of loyal troops. But Washington’s boat had been carrying the Stars and Stripes, while all we had was a plastic bucket. As the platform settled, the cables I was holding went slack, and I staggered forward; only the quick reflexes of the closest agents kept me from falling. “More like Brockton going overboard,” I said, but the joke came out sounding bitter, and it fell as flat as I had nearly done. As I disentangled myself from agents and cables, I said what was really on my mind. “So what if there was nobody in the plane?” Everyone turned, eyeing me intently. “We haven’t found any remains so far. Is it possible he jumped? Maybe he was having engine trouble and bailed out?”
Maddox spoke before McCready or Prescott had a chance. “Jump?” he said. “From a Citation? At four hundred miles an hour?” He gave an amused, dismissive grunt. “First off, you can’t do it,” he said. “The cabin door pivots forward to open; can’t be done in flight—too much air pressure. Second, even if you could do it, which you can’t, it’d be guaranteed suicide to bail out—you’d hit the left engine about a millisecond after you did. Easier to stay on the ground and just blow your brains out. Third, he didn’t do it—that cabin door was sealed tight as a drum.”