Prescott shook his head. “Who gave you and Mac a ride? Who let you borrow his ride?”
I furrowed my brow at him, still playing catch-up. “His ride? You mean the jet—the Gulfstream?” Finally I got it. “Are you telling me that was the director—the director of the FBI—on the phone just now?” I felt myself starting to smile, too. “Whoa,” I said. “That is major.”
AS THE AFTERNOON WORE ON, WE CONTINUED PICKING our way through the crumpled shell of the cockpit and instrument panel—a mixed-media collage of burned wires, melted knobs, shattered glass, splintered circuit boards. We found a few more shards of bone and a handful more teeth—including the other chipped incisor, which brought our total to twenty-nine of the thirty-two teeth.
Tangled amid the wiring, I came upon a pendant on a thin steel chain, the clasp still fastened around a throat that wasn’t there. A neckless necklace, I thought ironically. At first glance, the pendant appeared to be a cross. Looking closer, I saw that the lower end had small tailfins; the pendant was an airplane, suspended from its nose in a perpetual climb. But when I rubbed it against the leg of my pants to remove the soot, I noticed that it was engraved—not with initials or an inscription, but with an etched outline of Jesus: an aeronautical crucifix; Christ on a flying cross. I held it in my palm as Kimball photographed it in detail, then I slipped it into my pocket, to give to McCready. We’d found a set of keys earlier, a charred cell phone, and the mangled remains of a stainless-steel wristwatch. The pendant, though, was the only truly personal effect we’d found, and I hoped McCready would give it to Janus’s widow. What had it meant to him, I wondered: an emblem that melded elements of work and worship, worn around the neck of a man who seemed equal parts humanitarian and drug smuggler? A man is a mass of contradictions, I thought—a well-worn quotation, but no one had ever embodied it better than Richard Janus, I suspected—up until the split second he no longer embodied anything at all.
By now we were mining the lowest layer of wreckage—the floorpan of our excavation, down in the land of diminishing returns—and bit by bit, piece by piece, I began to smell the metaphorical barn. Finally we reached the aircraft’s nose, its outer skin, which was molded to the contours of the bluff almost as closely as human flesh adheres to cheekbones, forehead, jaws. “Okay, fellas,” I said, straightening up and twisting—left, right, left—to wring the kinks from my back. “Anything we haven’t found by now is either decimated or incinerated. Or both. I think I smell the barn. Or maybe it’s just us.” My announcement was greeted by a chorus of grateful sighs and weary cheers. I stepped back and took a critical look at the nose, the last large piece of wreckage to go up. “This is gonna be tough to get onto the platform,” I said. “Take some finagling to work it through those cables.”
“How ’bout we just hang it underneath?” suggested Boatman.
“Be easier—more stable, anyhow—if we took the platform off altogether,” said Kimball. “Fasten it right to the cable.” He explained how he would do it, pointing and motioning to show places he could attach straps to the piece, and everyone agreed that the plan made sense. Kimball made a solo trip topside to unhook and park the platform. Ten minutes later he rappelled back down, followed by the crane’s steel cable, the big U-shaped shackle dangling from the line like a giant fishing hook.
Kimball had brought down a half-dozen neon-hued nylon straps, which he began threading around and through the flattened nose cone. As he bent over the mangled metal, tugging and tussling to work a strap beneath the bottom edge, he paused. “Hey, Doc. Got another one for you. A stray.” He reached a thumb and forefinger beneath the jagged edge of metal and plucked a small object from a recess in the rock. I held out my hand, palm upturned, and into it Kimball dropped the object: a tooth, one that had been snapped off at the gum line. I stared, blinked hard, stared again.
“Doc? What’s up? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I think maybe I have,” I said. “It’s an incisor. An upper central.” I tapped my front teeth.
Kimball’s brow furrowed. “Huh? I thought we already found both of those.”
“We did.” I studied the faces of Kimball and the other agents as they leaned in for a better look. “This is a third one. From a second person.”