I WAS SURPRISED TO FIND A PHONE STILL HANGING on the annex wall, draped in Halloween-worthy cobwebs, and I was downright astonished to hear a dial tone when I lifted the dusty receiver to my ear. Digging deep into my wallet, I found the business card—formerly crisp and imposing, now dirty and crumpled—that I’d gotten from Pat Maddox, the NTSB crash investigator, and dialed the number. The phone rang half a dozen times before a deep, gravelly voice rumbled, “Uh . . . yeah . . . Maddox.”
“Oh hell, I woke you up,” I said. “Sorry, Pat. I didn’t think about the time change. It’s only, what . . .” I glanced at my watch.
“Six fifteen here.”
“I apologize.”
“I might possibly forgive you,” he growled—still sounding like a balky diesel engine on a cold morning—“if you’ll tell me who the hell this is, and what’s so damn important.”
“Oh, sorry, Pat. It’s Bill Brockton. The anthropologist. From Tennessee. I’m calling about the Janus crash.”
“Oh, Doc,” he said, his voice warming up. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “In fact, I don’t have a clue. Which is the problem, I guess. I got a call—a voice mail—yesterday from Miles Prescott, the FBI case agent.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “I saw him on the news last night. Special Agent Prescott, not looking ’specially happy. Was he calling to say ‘thanks again for the great work’?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “How much news coverage have you seen?”
“Not much. Just the one story last night. Talking about the teeth. By that jerk from Fox News.”
“You mean ‘Mike Mal-loy . . . Fox Five News!’?”
Maddox gave a dry laugh. “Yeah. That guy. You’ve got him nailed. He called me yesterday—no, day before—fishing around. Sounded like he had some kinda scoop, but he wouldn’t say what. All I gave him was a suggestion about what he should go do to himself. Not politically correct—not anatomically possible, either—but it made me feel better to say it.”
“You think it was Malloy who told Prescott the teeth had been extracted?”
“Dunno,” said Maddox. “Maybe. Probably. He seems to have a real hard-on for this story.”
“But where’d Malloy get the information? I’ve spent all night looking at those teeth, Pat, and he’s right—they were extracted. Pulled. Thing is, I had to clean ’em off and look at ’em under a magnifying glass before I could tell. It’s not like some reporter could take a quick glance and spot the marks. Besides, how could he have even seen them—the teeth, I mean?”
“Well, I’m guessing you didn’t give him a look,” he said.
“Hell, no.”
“Okay, so who could’ve?”
“Nobody,” I said. “The only people who had access to those teeth were us.” Suddenly something occurred to me. “Wait. Not just us. The medical examiner did, too.”
“Just the medical examiner himself? Nobody on his staff?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “All the material went to the morgue—just overnight—so the M.E. could write up the death certificate. Maybe somebody on his staff snuck the reporter into the morgue.”
“But why?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Malloy’s girlfriend—or boyfriend, or cousin, or somebody—works for the M.E.”
“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “Any chance somebody wanted to make you look bad, Doc? You done anything to piss off the San Diego medical examiner?”
“Of course not. Not that I know of, anyhow.” I thought for a moment. “Unless he felt like I was stepping on his toes just by being there.”
“You mean, like maybe it was an insult—a slap in his face? Like he wasn’t good enough—smart enough—to make the I.D. himself?”
“Could be, I reckon,” I conceded. “I’ve worked with a lot of medical examiners over the years, and most of them are great. But some of ’em are pretty weird.”
“Hell, Doc, what do you expect from guys who spend all their time with dead bodies?” I felt my hackles begin to rise—being a guy who happened to spend a lot of time with dead bodies myself—but then Maddox added, “Only folks weirder than that would be sickos who get their kicks poking around in plane crashes, right?” He chuckled.
“Right,” I said, almost smiling in spite of myself. Maddox’s wit was one of the things I’d liked about him while we were working the crash.
“So what does Prescott want you to do now?”
“Get lost, basically,” I said. “Stay away from the media. Stay away from the case. I’ve got to take the teeth and bones over to the FBI’s Knoxville field office. Should’ve already done it, but I wanted to take a closer look first—see if it’s true about the teeth.”
“And?”
“It is. The damn Fox guy got it right.”
Maddox didn’t speak for a moment. “So . . . I’m guessing this puts you in a kinda awkward spot, huh?”