Then I noticed Prescott’s gaze lifting and shifting, refocusing on something beyond the journalists, and I saw four ERT techs edging up behind them. Prescott gave a slight nod—a gesture so subtle that I wasn’t sure whether I’d actually seen it or just imagined it—and the four agents swiftly closed the gap, grabbing the TV guys by the arms and force-marching them back to the helicopter. Just before the reporter was pushed into the cabin, he shouted a final question, and the flicker in Prescott’s eyes as he heard the last three words sent a shock wave coursing clear through me.
“Do you consider Richard Janus to be the victim,” the reporter had yelled, “or the criminal?”
BACK AMID THE SWELTERING WRECKAGE, THE AIR-CONDITIONED comfort of lunchtime soon seemed a distant memory, and by midafternoon, even Kimball and Boatman had stopped bantering. We worked in steady silence, punctuated only by the thud of metal bumping metal, the rasp of metal scraping rock, the clink of rock rolling against rock. We’d still found no signs of hair or teeth or sinew, and as I stooped and straightened, stooped and straightened, I settled into a trancelike rhythm, moving like some assembly-line automaton: a metal-sorting machine, my clawlike hands gripping scraps and shards and depositing them on the rack, which—every twenty minutes or so—ascended into heaven, or into what passed for heaven out on the hellishly hot hillside. Only moments after disappearing, it seemed, the rack would return, its maw empty and mocking, sneering, So, ready to pack it in?
“So, ready to pack it in?” I heard the question again, this time coming from outside my head, not inside. Startled, I looked around, then looked up. McCready was peering down at me from the rim, his expression quizzical and amused.
“Sorry,” I said. “What?”
“Ready to call it a day? It’s after five.” The insatiable rack had just come down once more, and McCready pointed toward me, then pointed toward the rack, and then mimed the act of reeling in a fish. I was exhausted, true; I’d spent most of the night fretting rather than sleeping, and I’d been keyed up all day as well.
But I was loath to end a second day without finding something: that, too, was true—truer, or at least more compelling at the moment, than my fatigue. I suspected that Prescott was still pressuring McCready, but if he was, McCready was shielding us from it. “Don’t forget, it’s the solstice,” I called up to him. “You promised us extra fun in the sun today.”
“Go for it,” he said. “The rest of you guys got a little more in you?” I heard a smattering of sures and why nots from the ERT team; they sounded halfhearted, at best, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to let the sun set without finding something—even if that “something” was only clear evidence that, despite Maddox’s confidence, there was nothing in the wreckage to be found.
We worked for another hour without talking, the quiet broken at intervals by sighs and grunts and occasional muttered curses; by the tin-roof clatter of scraps raining onto the platform; by the rumble and whine of the crane as it hoisted another load from the base of the bluff to the top of the ridge.
Despite my resolve not to end the day empty-handed, I realized—as the emptied platform descended for the thousandth time of the day—that I was pooped. Exhausted. Out of gas. “Okay,” I groaned, “stick a fork in me, ’cause I’m done.” All around me, I heard what sounded like sighs of weary relief.
“Just in time,” said Kimball. “By now I wouldn’t know a femur if it hit me upside the head.” He radioed up to McCready. “Hey, boss, Doc’s pleading for clemency. Any chance you can let us off with time served?” I didn’t hear McCready’s response, but a moment later, the platform eased a step closer to the ground, and Kimball offered me a hand climbing aboard.