I looked around. “Where’s the camera?” I demanded. “We gotta have pictures. Otherwise nobody will ever believe this.”
I needn’t have said it. Kimball was already snapping pictures. As the camera click click clicked, behind me and beside me, images of the tableau began etching themselves indelibly on my mind: the hunched, crouching position of the flattened man; the arms, flung upward in a frantic, futile attempt at self-preservation; inches above the bones of his hands, the head and forelegs of a mountain lion, caught in midair, crushed against the rock. Shielded from the worst of the fire by a layer of aluminum, these two corpses—man and beast; prey and predator—had escaped the incineration that had consumed the fragmented remains of Richard Janus.
I had worked a few other death scenes that had preserved, with freeze-frame precision, the drama of the deaths. I’d uncovered one of those in the rubble of a house that had burned near the Tennessee-Virginia border four years before, in the spring of 2000. Deep in the smoldering basement, seared to the concrete slab, I’d found the bones of a man’s pelvis and legs—and, oddly, only his pelvis and legs. Thirty minutes later, and ten feet away, I found the rest of his skeleton—his skull, spine, and arms—as well as a nickel-sized disk of melted lead pooled beside the vertebrae. The man had been shot first, I realized, then blasted in half by dynamite, in an attempt to destroy the body. When that had failed—it’s actually quite difficult to destroy a body—the killer had finally torched the house, hoping to make the death look accidental. He might have had a better chance of getting away with it if he’d reunited the two halves of the corpse . . . and if he’d removed the bullet from the dead man’s spine. Fortunately for our side, most killers aren’t geniuses.
My thoughts flashed back to ancient Pompeii, where an entire city had been entombed in volcanic ash: people lying side by side in bed, or sitting on their doorsteps; even dogs dying on their backs, pawing at the choking air. Then my mind took me back even further—nearly three thousand years back, to ancient Persia, where an invading army sacked and burned a citadel called Hasanlu. As the fire raged around the warriors, the citadel’s main tower collapsed, toppling onto a stairway, flattening three soldiers in midstride as they ran for their lives. Two of them were side by side; the third man—slightly faster, and forever a few feet ahead—carried a large, ornate vase of pure gold. He clutched the vase—a death grip, in the most literal sense—for thirty centuries, as armies and empires and religions rose and fell above him, just as Hasanlu itself had arisen and flourished, then fallen and vanished. In the end, the gold vase was wrested from the soldier’s grasp, not by a pursuing warrior, but by an invader of a very different sort: a scrawny, twentieth-century American archaeologist, armed only with a trowel and a camera—a man who was every bit as astonished by the transaction as the skeletal soldier himself would have been.
Motionless on the California mountainside—part of the tableau myself, though only temporarily—I stared at the dead predator, then at the intended prey. “Lucky guy,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Kimball. “He was real lucky.”
I smiled. I hadn’t meant the dead man. I’d meant myself, for having lived to see such a thing. So very unlikely. So very dreadful. So very beautiful.
My bubble of gratitude burst a moment later, when McCready added, “Prescott is gonna hate this.”
AS I STEPPED THROUGH THE GREEN-GLASS DOOR AND into the green-glass lobby of San Diego’s federal courthouse, I had the odd sensation of plunging into an aquarium, surrounded on all sides by glossy walls, through which I could see brightly lit people outside in the open air, some of them peering through the glass at the submerged specimens. After days in the windswept wilderness atop Otay Mountain, being downtown and indoors was doubly disorienting. The tie I’d cinched around my neck felt more like a noose than a fashion accessory.
The FBI had scheduled a noon press conference at the courthouse to report the positive identification of Richard Janus’s body. The plan was straightforward: As the case agent, Prescott would make a brief statement, then hand the microphone to Maddox, the NTSB investigator, to summarize his preliminary crash findings; after that, I would explain the specifics of the identification. It was a no-nonsense, tightly scripted affair, one that would answer a few basic questions but leave others hanging, cloaked in the mystery of an ongoing investigation.