THIRTY MINUTES LATER, AS I WAS PLUCKING BLACKENED shards of bone from the aircraft wreckage once more, I heard the now-familiar whop-whop-whop of helicopter blades approaching. “Criminy,” said Kimball. “Are we working a restricted crash site here, or is this now the approach to LAX?”
I looked up, expecting to see the television chopper again, the new crew waving a Freedom of the Press banner or wielding some sort of injunction giving them permission to ignore the airspace restriction. But instead of the colorful Fox 5 logo, I saw only glossy black paint.
“That must be one of ours,” said Kimball. “No markings.”
A moment later, his guess was confirmed when McCready radioed down, asking for me to come up. “Prescott’s here with the dental records,” Kimball told me.
By the time Kimball finished the sentence, I was already clambering aboard the platform for the ride up.
“GOOD WORK,” SAID PRESCOTT, LOOKING UP FROM the teeth cradled in his palm—the corkscrew canine, the chipped incisors, and the molar with the cusp of Carabelli on the side. “So now we’re positive.”
“Looks like it,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘looks like it’? It’s his plane, his battery-powered spine, and his weird teeth.” He pointed at the molar. “So tell me, what are the chances that this molar, with this bump on the side, came from somebody other than Richard Janus?”
“Oh, virtually zero,” I said. “One in a million, probably.”
He nodded. “And what are the chances that all four of these teeth—which match his dental records perfectly—came from someone else?”
“So small, I don’t even know how to say it. One in many billions.”
“But you don’t sound certain.”
“I am,” I said. “It’s just . . .”
“Just what, Doc?” I’d heard irritation in Prescott’s voice before, so I recognized when I heard it again now.
“It’d be good to confirm it with some soft-tissue DNA,” I told him. “Just to be absolutely certain.”
Prescott glanced at McCready, eyebrows raised. McCready gave a slight shake of his head. P rescott glared at me again. “McCready says the guy’s a crispy critter. Is he telling me wrong?”
“No.”
Prescott was like a dog gnawing a bone, but the bone was me. “Have you got some soft tissue from this guy, Dr. Brockton?”
“Not so far.”
“Are you expecting any, Dr. Brockton?”
“Well, no.”
Prescott raised his hands, as if he were Christ on the cross. “Look, no offense”—a phrase that was nearly always followed by offensive words—“but we’re not living in a perfect world here, or working in some ivory-tower laboratory. We’re at a crime scene that’s one hell of a challenge, and we’ve found multiple bases for identification. Without soft tissue—or some magical video that shows Richard Janus actually steering the plane into the mountainside—this seems about as positive an I.D. as we’re gonna get.”
“You’re probably right,” I conceded.
“Thank you,” he said. “I said it before and I’ll say it again: I appreciate your contribution. And now I’m calling the boss.” Prescott raised his phone, found a number, and pressed “call.” “I’m up at the Janus crash site,” he said. “With the dental records. We’ve got a solid match—it’s a positive I.D. . . . Dr. Brockton, the anthropologist, just walked me through it. It’s solid, sir. Very solid. We’ve got several teeth with very distinctive features. Any one of them would be enough, says Brockton; cumulatively, it’s beyond question. There’s more, too. We’ve also recovered an orthopedic device that Janus had implanted a few years ago.” He listened, nodding. “We can be ready whenever. You want us to brief the widow first? . . . Yes, sir, I agree. But I think we should do them back to back: give her the news first, then—bam!—straight to the press conference. We don’t want her to get out ahead of us and spin it. We need to be the ones shaping the story. . . . Yes, sir, we’ll be ready. . . . Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”
He clicked the phone shut, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
McCready raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like the SAC is keeping a close eye on this one,” he said.
“What’s the SAC?” I butted in.
“Special agent in charge,” he explained. “Head of the field office. The boss.”
“Yes and no,” said Prescott. He no longer sounded irritated. In fact, the smile on his face was growing broader by the second.
McCready frowned. “Huh?”
“Yes and no,” Prescott repeated. “It was the boss. But not the SAC.” His smile widened.
“Then who?” asked McCready. He stared at Prescott, who was now grinning like a Cheshire cat. “Wait—are you kidding me?” McCready shook his head in seeming disbelief. “Whoa,” he said. “That’s major.”
“So who was it?” I looked from one to the other, feeling clueless and stupid.
Finally Prescott took pity on me. “Who gave you a ride out here?”
I pointed at McCready. “Duh. He did.”