I shook my head, rolling my eyes in what I hoped would pass for embarrassment at my own incompetence. “You know what they say about absentminded professors,” I told him. “And I’ve got plenty to make my mind especially absent lately. A Nashville TV station has opened a real can of worms. Raising a big stink—pardon the pun—about veterans’ bodies at the Body Farm. You seen any of that coverage?”
“A little.” He said it dismissively, so I’d be sure not to make the mistake of thinking it mattered to him in the least.
“What a mess,” I went on. “I’ve been getting phone calls all hours of the day and night. Reporters circling my office, even coming to my house. Driving me nuts.” His eyes flickered impatiently. “Anyhow. I’m glad it’s you that found me, not that damn woman from Nashville. Channel Four.” I motioned him inside. “I’ve actually been working on something for you guys—your San Diego colleagues. Cleaning the teeth and bone fragments.”
If possible, he looked even less glad than before, possibly even alarmed. Apparently this was something he did care about. “From the Janus plane crash?”
I nodded. “I didn’t get a chance to clean them out there. We were scrambling pretty fast. Now that I’ve got the soot off, I can see things I couldn’t see before. Tool marks on the teeth. They’d all been pulled! Damnedest thing I ever saw.” I pointed toward the counter where the material was spread on blue surgical drapes. “Here, let me show you.”
His expression turned stone-cold, and I knew he wasn’t buying my show of uninformed friendliness. “I’m sure that’d be very interesting, Dr. Brockton, but I don’t have time for that. I’m here to pick up that material from you. I’d better just get it and go.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Of course. It’ll take me a few minutes to pack it up. You can help, if you want to, or just look over my shoulder. Make sure I don’t miss anything.”
His eyes searched my face for signs of sarcasm, and it was quite possible that he found them. As I packed and padded the teeth and bits of bone, giving a verbal accounting of the items, he stood at my side, watching closely, and he reread the evidence receipt three times before signing it, bearing down so hard that the point of the pen almost tore through the paper.
BY THE TIME I FINISHED CLEANING THE ANNEX—NOT only the slight mess I had made, but also the accumulated dust, dead bugs, and cobwebs of two prior years of neglect—it was six P.M.; I had been holed up for well over twenty-four hours, scrubbing and studying the teeth, my only sustenance the two apples and the three packs of peanut butter crackers I’d brought from home. Even though I was tired, hungry, and dirty, I hated to leave, because leaving meant plunging into the turbulence of the two storm systems swirling around me: the Janus case, where I was being made to look incompetent, and the Channel 4 ruckus—“Vet-Gate,” one newspaper reporter had dubbed it—where I was being portrayed as uncaring and unpatriotic. Not to mention the other problem, which wasn’t just painful but potentially deadly: Satterfield.
Raising the metal garage door, amid another chorus of metallic banshee shrieks, I stepped outside, blinking and stretching in the golden, slanting light. Drawing a deep breath, I smelled something unpleasant—something that I quickly realized must be me. I took a deep, analytical sniff and came to the conclusion that if I had been the subject of a multiple-choice exam question—“Which of the following does Bill Brockton stink of?”—the correct answer would be “(d) all the above.” Suddenly, to my surprise, I detected a delightful aroma amid the malodorous miasma, and my mouth began to water, as reflexively and reliably as those of Pavlov’s dogs. Ribs, I realized, my nostrils dilating, my head swiveling into the breeze like some ravenous, carnivorous weathervane. A quarter mile away, a thin plume of smoke spooled upward from the kitchen of Calhoun’s on the River and wafted my way. Do I dare, I wondered, dirty as I am? I took another deep drag of the divine scent. I do, I do, I decided; I could ask for an outside table, on the patio overlooking the water, and I could duck into the bathroom on my way into the restaurant and do a bit of damage control at the sink. Life was looking up.