I gave a half shrug. “Sometimes. Not always. It’s a last-resort kind of thing, when ordinary back surgery hasn’t worked.”
He peered at the computer screen, where Kimball was displaying the image we’d just received from the field office. It was an x-ray of a man’s spine; of Richard Janus’s spine, to be precise. Floating just above the left hip was an electronic circuit board, its metal connectors and battery showing up crisp and white against the muted grays of x-rayed flesh and bone. A pair of thin wires, attached to the circuit board, angled toward the lumbar spine and then threaded up the thoracic vertebrae, terminating in a series of flat electrical leads laid out in a geometric pattern that hopscotched from the tenth vertebra up to the eighth.
Maddox couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “It looks just like somebody’s connected him to a computer mouse,” he said. “So you just wear that generator on your belt, like a pager?”
“Oh, no,” I corrected. “It’s internal. The surgeon cuts a slot in the skin—a hip pocket, literally—and sutures it inside. Looks and feels a little odd, probably—a hard, square thing just under the skin—but I don’t guess anybody would’ve noticed it except him and his wife.”
McCready appeared mesmerized by the x-ray. “And how’d you know it’d be so easy to confirm that Janus had gotten one of these things—this thing—put in?”
“The media loved Janus,” I said, “and he loved the media. I remembered reading that he’d hurt his back in a crash, and that he’d had some kind of surgery to try to make it better. I figured there must’ve been a press release or a news report about that. So I suspected it wouldn’t take much digging to find out if he’d gotten one of these.” McCready nodded. “What I didn’t expect,” I admitted, “was that we’d get an actual post-op x-ray so fast.”
McCready clapped me on the back. “Well, all I can say is, you’re a wizard, Doc. And Prescott’s gonna be a happy guy when I tell him we’ve made the I.D.” He lifted his phone to make a call.
My head snapped around, and I grabbed his arm. “Wait. Don’t tell him that.”
“What? Why not?” He stared at me as if I’d gone mad. “You just pulled this rabbit out of the hat, and now you’re saying ‘never mind’? What the hell, Doc? Is it Janus, or isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s him,” I said, “but it’s not admissible. It’s a presumptive identification—we can presume it’s him—but it’s not a positive identification, one that would stand up in court.” He still looked confused, so I went on. “The x-ray image seems to match the burned stimulator, and Janus’s medical records will probably confirm that he got this brand, and this model. But unless his surgeon kept better records than any other surgeon on the planet, the records won’t tell us the individual serial number—the DNA, so to speak, of this one device. And without a unique serial number, we can’t prove that it’s him.”
He sighed. “Well, hell, Doc.”
“I know, I know. But hey, look on the bright side. We know it’s him; now all we gotta do is prove it. We just need more teeth. You’ve got the dental records now, right?”
He frowned: sore subject. “Working on it. The dentist is dragging his heels.”
“So pull on him harder.” His frown turned to a scowl, which meant I’d drilled into a nerve. I shrugged apologetically. “Hey, cheer up,” I said, holding up a thumb and forefinger, separated by a hairsbreadth. “We’re this close.”
Only after I said it did I realize why the phrase—this close—came so easily to my lips. Prescott had used it to threaten the pushy Fox News reporter.
I had also heard another federal agent use it—the wheezy fat man who had ripped into Prescott at the IHOP—to describe how near he’d been to nailing not just Janus but Guzmán, too.
This close. Maybe the phrase didn’t exactly mean what I thought it meant.
This close. It echoed in my mind. Presumptive, but not positive.
DURING MY TIME TOPSIDE WITH THE SPINAL CORD stimulator, the evidence techs had begun to mine a rich vein of skeletal material: splintered ribs; incinerated vertebrae; fractured long bones. By the time I rejoined them amid the wreckage, our five-gallon bucket—what I’d taken to calling our “special bucket”—was half filled with pieces of burned bone. As I studied the bucket’s contents, gently lifting and sifting my way downward, I was impressed by what they’d found—and fascinated by what they hadn’t. “Hmm,” I said. “So far, everything’s from the postcranial skeleton.”