He chuckled. “Sorry. Slang. Means ‘scary as hell.’ Dark night, rough terrain, fast as he was going? Extremely fascinating. Remember D. B. Cooper—Dan Cooper? Hijacked a commercial airliner about thirty years ago?”
“Vaguely,” I said. “He got money and a parachute, right, and made the plane take off again?”
“Right,” said Maddox. “The plane he picked to hijack was a Boeing 727; damn things had stairs back near the tail that could be lowered in flight. Cooper bailed out around midnight, somewhere over the Columbia River Gorge. To this day, nobody knows whether he survived or not. Maybe that’s where Janus got the idea. In-ter-esting. Fascinating. Risky as hell, though.” He gave a small grunt. “If the Feebies were about to lock him up forever, though, I guess not jumping looked risky as hell, too.”
Two things still bothered me. I asked Maddox about the first. “So how come we didn’t figure this out while we were out there working the scene?” I hoped that the word “we” wouldn’t sound accusatory, but he saw right through my politeness.
“You mean, how come the hotshot crash expert missed something as big as a pair of belly doors in the wreckage?” He sounded surprisingly unruffled by the implied criticism.
“Well, okay. Yeah. How come you missed that?”
He chuckled again. “I dunno. Same reason you missed the tool marks on the teeth, maybe?” He didn’t sound spiteful; he sounded matter-of-fact, or even slightly amused. “For one thing, the fuselage was pretty thoroughly fragmented.”
“True,” I conceded. “Looked like it’d been through a shredder.”
“A shredder plus an incinerator,” he said. “For another thing, the evidence techs—not the ones working with you, but the other four, the ones gathering up the scattered chunks?—they were sending up stuff faster than I could sort through it. I didn’t get a chance to start combing through everything till after the press conference. Two days ago, I saw some parts I didn’t recognize—a couple hinges and latches—so I dug deeper, started asking around. That’s when I found out about the belly door. So I got on the horn to Prescott.”
“What’d he say when you told him?”
“Not much. That’s the weird thing. It was almost like he’d been expecting it; like somebody’d already told him something. He sounded mad when he picked up the phone. First thing he said was, ‘And what’s your good news?’ Like he’d just gotten some other bad news, you know?” He paused. “Maybe he’d just gotten a call about the teeth from Mike Mal-loy, Fox Five News.” He did a pretty good imitation of my imitation of the pushy, self-important reporter.
My second question was one Maddox wouldn’t be able to answer—it was one maybe nobody could answer—so I thanked Maddox and hung up, leaving the question unasked, except in my own frustrated mind: If it wasn’t Janus strapped into the Citation when it hit Otay Mountain, who the hell was it?
Suddenly a third thought struck me. This one wasn’t a question, but an inescapable conclusion, and it was the most disturbing of the three. If he really had faked his death and sent a decoy corpse hurtling into the mountainside, that could mean only one thing: that Richard Janus—a man I had admired deeply—was not just a hypocrite and a drug trafficker, but a diabolical killer, too.
SHE ANSWERED ON THE FIRST RING, HER VOICE AS flat and expressionless as a computer’s. “Yes?”
“Mrs. Janus?” She didn’t respond, so I went on. “Mrs. Janus, it’s Bill Brockton—Dr. Brockton, the forensic anthropologist—returning your call.”
“Oh, thank you, Doctor,” she said, and it was as if a switch had flipped: Her voice was no longer mechanical and flat; now it was warm, expressive, and deeply sad. “Thank you. I am very grateful. No one else will return my calls—no one except reporters, and I don’t want to talk to them. It is extremely painful, this sudden . . . not knowing.”
The phrase, not knowing—or, rather, the deep chord it struck in me—took me by surprise. I’d heard the same phrase many times over the years, most often from the parents of abducted kids, runaway girls, or missing young women; I’d also heard it from the families of Vietnam War soldiers who were still, after decades, missing in action. I had pegged Mrs. Janus as different from such simple, open grievers. I had sized her up as cool, calm, and collected—or maybe I had judged her to be complicit and guilty. Now, in response to her comment, I felt my shields lowering and my sympathy rising.
Still, I knew that if not knowing was her problem, I was in no position to solve it. “Unfortunately, Mrs. Janus,” I said, “I probably can’t tell you anything that will help you. The truth is, I don’t know what’s going on. I no longer have any idea whether your husband is dead or alive. I wish I did. And I’ve got your number. If I find out anything, I promise to call you.”