“Excuse me?”
“Sometimes believing that people are good inspires them to be good. Inspires them to try harder. Maybe they begin to see themselves the way that you see them; maybe they like what they see, and so they try to become it—try to become honest, or kind, or generous; more noble than they have been before. Sometimes.” She paused, then added, “But other times, believing good things about people allows them to take advantage of you. Or deceive you. Or even destroy you.” She drew another breath, this one long and steady. “Be careful, so this doesn’t happen to you also.”
This conversation was not going the way I’d expected it to. “As I said, Mrs. Janus, I’m not at all sure I can help you. But maybe you can help me. I’m very confused, too. I still feel sure that those were your husband’s teeth in the wreckage.”
“Yes, without a doubt,” she agreed. “Even if the rest of the remains were someone else’s, the teeth were Richard’s.”
“But the spinal cord stimulator,” I pointed out. “That’s evidence that the remains—”
“That,” she interrupted, “is evidence that the FBI cannot be trusted.”
“Why do you say that? The FBI now seems to think that it wasn’t Richard in the plane. But the spinal cord stimulator suggests that it was him.”
Again she surprised me, this time with a brief, bitter laugh. “Not at all,” she said. “Richard did not have a spinal cord stimulator.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, more confused than ever. “I saw his medical records. I saw the x-ray. You saw the x-ray.”
“He used to have a spinal cord stimulator,” she said. “But it wasn’t working, so he had it removed. More than a year ago.”
“Then why didn’t his medical records say that he’d had it taken out?”
“Because Richard decided that the doctor who put it in was a quack. He stopped going to that doctor. He had it taken out in Mexico City, when we were visiting my family.”
My mind was racing. “But why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you say something, when I talked about finding the stimulator in the wreckage? When I showed you the x-ray?”
“You were with the FBI,” she said simply. “I did not trust them, so why would I trust you? Why would I tell you anything? If I thought Richard was still alive—hiding somewhere—why would I tell that to the FBI? They would just keep looking for him.”
My next question seemed the obvious one. “Then why are you telling me now, Mrs. Janus?”
“Because I have changed my mind about you, Dr. Brockton.”
“Why?”
“Two reasons. First, you told me something about yourself that day—a small but important fact, something easy for me to check, to find out if it was the truth or a lie.”
“What fact?”
“You told me that you give money to support Richard’s work. I checked, and it’s true. That tells me that you’re an honest man, and also a good man. That is one reason I changed my mind.”
“What’s the other reason?”
“Because now the FBI has betrayed you, too,” she said, her voice cold with contempt. “There is an old saying, Doctor, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ You know this saying?”
“I know the saying, Mrs. Janus,” I said, suddenly uncomfortable, “but it doesn’t apply here. I don’t think I’ve been betrayed. And the FBI is certainly not my enemy.”
“Are you sure, Doctor? The FBI seems to consider you an enemy.”
I was just about to answer her—disagree with her again—when the building’s corrugated metal siding boomed and rattled so loudly I nearly dropped the phone.
“Dr. Brockton,” I heard a deep voice calling. “Are you in there?”
What the hell? I thought. And who the hell?
As if in answer to my question, a voice called out, “Dr. Brockton, if you’re in there, I need you to open the door. It’s Special Agent Billings. FBI.”
SPECIAL AGENT COLE BILLINGS—A TALL, MUSCLED young man in a suit and a hurry—fixed me with a piercing stare when I tugged open the annex’s rusty door. “I’m glad to see you, Dr. Brockton,” he said, but his tight jaw and hawkish eyes looked the opposite of glad. “We were getting worried. Nobody seemed to know where you were.”
“Oh, sorry to cause a fuss.” I gave him my most conciliatory expression. “I’ve been right here since . . .”—I looked at my watch and gave a vague shrug—“sometime yesterday.”
“You don’t seem to’ve told anybody where you’d be,” he said. “Your wife said she didn’t know. Your secretary, either.”