“He wasn’t on it,” he said, and she looked baffled—as baffled as I had felt the day before, when we’d found the bodies of the man and the mountain lion. “Apparently he was on the ground when the plane hit,” Prescott explained. “Wrong place, wrong time. We think he’d crossed the border recently—possibly even the night of the crash. If Dr. Brockton is correct, the man took a fall in the dark and was lying there, injured, when the plane hit.”
“My God,” she breathed. “That poor man.” Oddly, she seemed more upset by this stranger’s death than by her husband’s. I remembered Prescott’s questions about Richard’s life insurance policy, and for the first time I found myself wondering if she might have had something to do with her husband’s death. Was she unhappy in the marriage? Could she—a Mexican, after all—be the real link to the drug lord Guzmán? I felt her eyes on me, and I realized that I was staring at her intently. I flushed, hoping she wasn’t able to read my suspicious thoughts. After a moment, she turned back to Prescott. “Are you sure that this other man’s death was just a coincidence?”
“Not a hundred percent,” Prescott conceded. “But it’s the best explanation for what we found. I’ll let Dr. Brockton explain it in more detail.”
She looked at me again, her face neutral and masklike now. Opening a second manila folder, I pulled out four photos and slid them across the table to her. “The picture on top shows the wreckage of the aircraft’s nose. The nose hit first, obviously, so it was the last layer we got to as we excavated down through the debris.” Her eyes flicked rapidly across the image, scanning and then lingering, scanning and then lingering, and I wondered if she was searching the image for traces of her husband’s remains. When she looked up, I continued. “The next picture shows what we found underneath the nose—crushed between the nose and the rock face of the mountainside.” She flipped to the second photo. As she studied the image, her eyes narrowed, and I could tell that in spite of herself, she, too, was fascinated by the grim tableau. “As you can see, the man wasn’t alone on the mountainside when the plane hit. There was a mountain lion just above him—in the act of pouncing on him, as best we can tell—at the moment of impact. It’s like a freeze-frame image of the moment they died.” She shook her head slightly—not in doubt, I sensed, but in wonder. “The last two pictures are close-ups. As you can see from those, the man and the mountain lion were crushed directly against the mountainside—frankly, if you’ll forgive my bluntness once more, we had to scrape them off the rocks. That tells us they were definitely outside the plane, not inside.”
I was about to launch into more detail when I felt Prescott’s foot nudging me under the table, and he smoothly took the reins from me. “Obviously this was not the focus of our work up there, Mrs. Janus—far from it, but it’s the sort of thing the media is likely to play up, so we wanted to make sure you knew about it.”