“YOU’RE KIDDING, RIGHT?” SAID MCCREADY WHEN I radioed him about the find. I heard him mutter to someone, “Brockton says he’s found another tooth—from another person, not Janus.” In the background, I heard what seemed to be a string of garbled expletives; I couldn’t quite make out the words, but I recognized the voice. “Maddox says, with all due respect, that your head appears to be inserted into one of your lower orifices,” McCready said. “No offense, but I’m with Maddox on this—it can’t be from somebody else.”
“Maybe it can’t,” I told him. “But it is.”
“We’re still short three of Janus’s teeth,” he persisted. “It’s gotta be one of those.”
“It’s an incisor, Mac. Upper central. We’ve already got those, remember? Both of them chipped. Just like in the photos and the dental records.”
“Then it’s a lateral incisor. Or a lower. Or a canine.”
“Those are all accounted for, too,” I said. “All we’re missing from Janus are two molars and one bicuspid. Besides, this is—trust me—an incisor.”
“You’re absolutely sure?”
“I’d stake my life on it. Yours, too.” I turned the tooth over in my palm. “That’s not all. This tooth is from a Mongoloid.”
The radio went silent for a moment, then he said, “You’re telling me there was a mentally retarded person on that plane with him?”
“No, no,” I clarified. “Sorry, that’s anthropologist lingo. Mongoloid, as in ‘descended from ancient inhabitants of Mongolia.’ Mongoloid, as opposed to Caucasoid or Negroid. Mongoloid, as in Asian or Native American.”
“Sit tight,” he said. “I’m coming down.”
Five minutes later, the rappelling rope twitched and seethed as a grim-faced McCready descended from on high. Without a word, I handed him the tooth—a far less celebratory echo of the way I’d jubilantly turned over the first tooth. This time he did not smile; instead, he took it and stared at it—glared at it—as if it had done him a grievous wrong. Finally he looked up, frowning and sighing. “Well, I’m no dentist,” he said, “but yeah, even I can tell it’s not a molar or bicuspid. But what makes you say it’s Asian or Native American?”
I plucked the tooth from his palm and turned it edgewise to show him the biting surface. “See how curved the edge is? And how the back of the tooth is scooped out?” He took it back and gave it a close look. “It’s called a shovel-shaped incisor,” I explained. “Unique to Mongoloid peoples. And this is a textbook example.”
He nodded in acknowledgment, but the nod was followed by a baffled head shake. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Up to now, we’ve got nothing but white-guy teeth and white-guy bits—specifically, Richard Janus bits.” He gestured at the last remnants of wreckage: shards of instrument-panel glass; bundles of burned wire; control levers and pedals; the empty, mangled framework of the windshield; the crushed cone of the nose. “We’re all but done. How can we just now—just as the buzzer’s sounding—find the very first sign of Running Bear or Miguel or whoever the hell this is?”
“Dunno,” I said. Then I realized that I was a half step behind him. “You’re right, it makes no sense. How could anybody be deeper in the debris than the pilot?” My mind began to race. “Maybe . . .” Bending down, I tugged at the piece, as Kimball had just begun to do when he’d spotted the tooth. “Maybe,” I grunted, “he’s not in the debris. Maybe he’s under the debris.”
“Come again?”
“Maybe he was already here when the plane hit.”
“What are you saying, Doc? You think there’s an old Indian skeleton under here?”
A flicker of movement caught my eye—an iridescent, blue-green flicker, almost like the dot of a laser pointer in midair, just above the edge of the flattened metal—and I felt a rush, as if someone had just injected pure adrenaline into an artery. “No,” I said, pointing at the iridescent dot. “See that? That’s a blowfly. Blowflies aren’t attracted to old skeletons; they go for ripe, juicy carcasses. I’m thinking we’ve got a fairly fresh body under here.”
“What? How?”
“Dunno,” I said again, this time with considerably more excitement. “Who would be up here? A hiker? A hunter?” Suddenly it hit me. “A border jumper. We’re only two miles from Mexico. Maybe it’s somebody who died after sneaking across the border.”
McCready considered this. “Seems like a stretch. A lot of ’em die crossing the desert in Arizona. Dehydration—some of ’em end up walking a hundred miles or more before they keel over. But five miles from Tijuana and the outskirts of San Diego?”
I looked up at the bluff. “Not dehydration. Trauma. A fall—maybe in the dark. If he fell from up there and landed on his head, his skull would’ve burst like a melon.”
McCready looked dubious. “So Miguel here takes a nosedive, and then—a day or a week or a month later—our guy Janus just happens to pile on? Exact same spot? Sounds unlikely to me.”
It sounded unlikely to me, too. But that scenario was only a fraction as unlikely as the death scene we uncovered ten minutes later, when Kimball finished the rigging and the crane peeled the aircraft’s nose from the face of the rock.
“Holy shit,” McCready breathed.