As the message began to play, all I heard was random background noise—doors opening and closing; metal chairs scraping on a concrete floor; a staticky, scratchy sound that I finally recognized as the rustle of fabric against a microphone. Decker must have pocket-dialed me, I realized, accidentally hitting “redial” as he’d slid his phone into his shirt. Through the rustle and static, I suddenly heard Decker speaking, and then—to my horror—I heard Satterfield answering. His voice came across the miles and the weeks in a soft, sinister hiss, taunting Decker about his brother’s death. Weeks after their bloody fight, I found myself eavesdropping on their confrontation, as mesmerized and terrified as if I were actually in the room with them.
I expected to hear Decker respond with threats and violence, but he didn’t. Satterfield kept it up—kept goading Decker with cruel details about the agonies his brother had suffered—but Decker wasn’t taking the bait. Suddenly I felt a jolt like an electric shock, as Satterfield said my name. “I’ve got unfinished business with Brockton. I’ll be back to deal with him. All of them. And I’ll take up right where I left off.”
“Don’t even think about it,” said Decker. “I should’ve shot you last time, but I let Brockton talk me out of it. I won’t make that mistake next time.”
“Here’s the thing, asshole,” said Satterfield. “You won’t be around next time. You’re about to bleed out on this floor.” All at once the message erupted into noisy chaos: crashing furniture, thudding bodies, and a strangled shriek of pain. Then, in midshriek, the phone went silent. Two seconds later, a computerized voice prompted me: “To replay this message, press one. To delete it, press three. To save it, press two.” My fingers shaking, I carefully pressed two. Then I dialed Steve Morgan, the former student now working for the TBI. Not surprisingly, I got his voice mail. “Steve, it’s Bill Brockton,” I said. “I’m about to forward you a message—a recording of what went down between Captain Decker and Nick Satterfield. I’d appreciate it if you’d share it with Agent Fielding. And I’d appreciate it if Fielding would get off my ass. If he really wants to do the right thing, he might also drop by Vanderbilt Hospital and apologize to Decker. Who knows, Decker might actually hear it. Might fight a little harder to pull through.”
I ended the call, then returned to my voice mail and forwarded the recording to Steve. That done, and my decks clear, I got back to the business at hand. The business that had brought me back to California, back to Otay Mountain, and back to this seedy motel and this rough-edged border crossing.
Somewhere nearby, I heard a loud bang: gunshot, or backfiring engine? Out here, I was having trouble telling the difference.
THE OTAY MESA BRANCH OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY was just ten minutes west but a world away from the seamy-underbelly freight district where I was staying. Instead of the dilapidated warehouses and rusting shipping containers of my neighborhood, the library nestled amid neat houses, tree-lined streets, baseball fields, and basketball courts. The library’s reference desk occupied a back corner of the main reading room, flanked by low shelves of encyclopedias on one side and bound volumes of old Life magazines, decades’ worth, on the other. “Excuse me,” I said to a reference librarian whose steel-framed spectacles matched the silvery curls of her hair. “Do you keep files of news clippings about local stories?”
“Vertical files? Oh, yes,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Some of them are a bit out of date, though. The Internet, you know—it’s making newspaper clippings obsolete.” She pointed to a set of chest-high filing cabinets, which appeared to be approximately the same age as my own venerable self. “The files are there. Can I help you find something specific?”
“I’m interested in several topics,” I said. “A San Diego man named Richard Janus, who founded a charity called Airlift Relief International. He’s been in the news lately.”
“Indeed,” she said, her radiant smile giving way to a pursed, prunish expression. “Most unfortunate.” I didn’t know if she was referring to the plane crash or the drug-running allegations. Perhaps both.
“I’m also interested in a man who runs a Mexican drug cartel,” I went on. “His name is Guzmán.” I spelled it for her. “El Chapo Guzmán. I seem to remember hearing about some sort of connection between his drug trafficking and Otay Mesa.”
Her mouth had gone from slightly pursed to tightly puckered, and not in a kissing kind of way. From the look of prim disapproval, I might have been asking her to help me find pornography. “The files are arranged alphabetically,” she snipped. “You can try looking up the last names of the two . . . people. I believe there might also be a file called DRUGS.” I got the distinct impression that not only did she disapprove of drugs themselves, she also disapproved of news coverage that mentioned them—and of anyone who might have the brass to read such coverage.
“Thank you,” I said pleasantly. “You’ve been most helpful.” She’s no Red, I thought as I walked toward the files. But then again, Red’s no Red either—not the reference librarian she pretended to be, anyhow.
The Richard Janus file contained a thick sheaf of clippings—yellowing with age, untarnished by the recent scandal—praising him for his humanitarian service. During his flying for Air America back during the Vietnam War, several clippings reported, Janus had delivered rice to starving peasants in Laos—experiences that he consistently described as “deeply rewarding” and “the inspiration for Airlift Relief International.” None of the clippings mentioned Air America’s drops of “hard rice”—guns and ammunition—or of homemade napalm, cooked up in oil drums by the CIA and dispersed over villages thought to harbor Communist guerrillas. Had Janus napalmed villages? Had he ferried opium to fund U.S.-friendly warlords in the poppy-growing region known as the “Golden Triangle”? The press clippings shed no light on those questions.
One interesting side note I found in Janus’s file was a brief bio of his wife. As a young woman from an aristocratic family in Mexico City, Carmelita Janus had been a beauty queen, model, and honors law student, well on her way to a promising legal career. She had left Mexico in her early twenties—with Richard Janus—shortly after the murder of her father, a high-ranking judge. In light of the widespread, well-documented corruption of Mexico’s police, army, and prosecutors by narco traffickers, I couldn’t help wondering: Had her father been killed because he’d opposed drug lords like Guzmán? Or had he sold out to one drug lord, then gotten gunned down by a rival?
El Chapo’s file was far slimmer than Janus’s. It contained just three clippings, which had merited clipping and filing, as best I could tell, because each of the three quoted “knowledgeable DEA sources in San Diego.” The first story reported Guzmán’s 1994 arrest and imprisonment; the second recounted his 2001 escape; and the third—the one I recalled Red mentioning—described how DEA agents discovered an elaborate underground railroad, used to haul drugs through a tunnel beneath the U.S.-Mexico border. The drugs—tons of them, according to the “knowledgeable DEA sources”—were loaded into carts beneath a house in Tijuana, wheeled the length of the tunnel, and then unloaded. The rail line’s northern terminus, said the story, was a warehouse fifty yards north of the border, in the industrial sector of Otay Mesa. In the Quality Inn sector of Otay Mesa, I realized with a shock. It was likely that I had wandered past that very warehouse my first evening in town—The fenced building with the guard-dog sign? I wondered—before I’d ended up at the IHOP, overhearing the argument between Miles Prescott and the fat, wheezing warrior from the DEA or the CIA or whatever federal agency it was that waged war on badasses.
The pursed-lipped librarian’s clippings did not, however, shed light on the things that had been gnawing at me all afternoon and evening, ever since I’d found the bit of bone that seemed to have come from the shattered skull of Richard Janus: If Janus had in fact been murdered—if a killer had strapped Janus’s body into the cockpit, aimed the plane at the mountainside, and then parachuted to safety—a whole series of baffling questions reared their heads, clamoring f
or answers. Why had the killer pulled Janus’s teeth? Why had he tucked a spinal cord stimulator behind the body? Why had he told the Fox reporter and the FBI agent that tool marks could be found on the teeth? In short, why had the killer gone to such elaborate lengths to do a double fake: to start out by creating the illusion that Janus had died in the fiery crash, but then to shatter that illusion, replacing it with a second illusion—the illusion that Janus was alive and on the lam somewhere?
For years, I had preached the gospel of Occam’s razor, a rule of logic stating that the simplest explanation that fits the facts is almost certainly the correct explanation. This case, though, seemed to be turning Occam’s razor on its head: the more complex and bizarre the explanation, the closer it seemed to stumble toward some grotesque, distorted, funhouse-mirrored travesty of truth.
That night, in my lumpy bed in my shabby motel, I dreamed of Janus—not the American pilot Janus, but the Roman deity, the one with two faces. That Janus, the one who gazed unblinkingly at both the past and the future, had been the guardian of doorways and transitions and transformations; he’d been both the keeper of the key and the wielder of the cudgel. In my dreams, the key to the mystery remained just out of reach, my fingertips not quite touching it as first my hand, then my entire arm, plunged into the Mouth of Truth.
I knew that the key must be close at hand, though, because as I groped blindly, my motions accompanied by the soft rattlings of dry pupa cases or snake tails, I felt myself being cudgeled. Rhythmically, ceaselessly cudgeled.
AFTER AN EARLY BREAKFAST OF PETRIFIED BAGEL, I stocked up on water and snacks at a nearby convenience store—a place sporting so many signs in Spanish, I half wondered if I had somehow strayed through a gap in the border fence—and aimed the rental car toward Otay Mountain, guided by the detailed topographic map I’d gotten from Carmelita Janus.
The topo map confirmed what I had already noticed: The area around the airfield and my motel was pancake flat, the streets following straight gridlines. To the north and east of town, though, the terrain began to rise and the roads began to undulate, following the contours.
My first stop was the grass airstrip at the eastern end of Lower Otay Lake—the home of “Janus Junkyard,” where Airlift Relief had kept spare parts, picked-over airplane skeletons, and a maintenance shop. Pat Maddox, the NTSB expert, had sounded certain that the airstrip was where the Citation’s pilot—the actual, living pilot—would have steered his parachute. It made sense, I’d agreed, as I’d studied the topo map: the airstrip and the area around it were flat and free of hazards, except for a couple of hangars, a windsock tower, and a handful of airplane carcasses. Would I be able to find evidence of a parachute landing somewhere out there, in forty acres of grass and weeds? Or was I wasting time and energy on a fool’s errand? “Only one way to know,” I muttered, turning down the dusty dirt lane that led to the airstrip.
I’d gone only a hundred yards when I came to a farm gate that blocked the road, a thick chain and padlock cinching the gate to a stout fencepost. The gate itself wasn’t much of an obstacle; its construction—horizontal tubes of galvanized steel, spaced eight or ten inches apart—made it a makeshift ladder. No, the real obstacle was the yellow-and-black crime scene tape stretched across the gateway, along with a laminated notice bearing the FBI logo and a stern NO TRESPASSING warning. I cast a furtive look around, found the coast was clear, and stepped onto the gate’s second rung, my hands gripping the top crossbar.
One step up, I paused, partly because of the NO TRESPASSING notice—specifically, its mention of video surveillance—but also partly because of something I remembered from the prior day’s flight retracing the jet’s route. According to Skidder, an expert pilot, the Citation was still maneuvering when it crossed the airstrip. In fact, the jet’s five-hundred-foot descent and leveling off had occurred only after it had made its turn toward the mountain. The jumper must not have landed here.
Returning to the car, I pulled out the topo map and spread it on the hood, studying the lay of the land and the way the roads wrapped around its contours. Shortly before I’d reached the turnoff to the airstrip, I had passed another dirt road—this one heading south, into the broad valley that funneled up to the peak. The day before, retracing the Citation’s route in the air to the crash site, I’d hit pay dirt. Maybe I’d get lucky again this time, following the ground track.
As I doubled back and entered the mouth of the valley—the Mouth of Truth? I heard myself wondering—I quickly realized my rental car was a poor steed for this ride. I had asked for an SUV, but the Hertz counter at Brown Field didn’t have any; instead of a Jeep Cherokee or Ford Expedition, I was bucking up a washboard road in a low-slung Chevy Impala, dodging football-sized rocks and wincing with every scrape of the oil pan against jutting ledges. The road ended a half mile up the valley, in a wide hollow with a flat, sandy turnaround area. Stopping thirty yards short of the turnaround, I got out and walked, my eyes scanning the ground. I could see tire tracks, but unlike the crisp tread marks I’d left in my FBI training exercise at the Body Farm, these furrows—plowed in dry, soft sand—revealed nothing about the tires or vehicles that had made the marks.
As I neared the turnaround, where the tracks looped back, I saw other signs of disturbance: sandy heaps and hollows, which I suspected had been sculpted by the scuffing of feet. Then I spotted something that made my heart race: a midden of cigarette butts strewn beside the tire tracks, as if someone had emptied an ashtray there . . . or had parked and waited for an hour or two, chain-smoking an entire pack, using each cigarette’s final embers to light the next, then dropping the dying butt to the ground beneath the car’s open window.
Suddenly I stopped, my eye caught by what appeared to be another artifact—an odd, enigmatic, and therefore electrifying creation. At the center of the wide turnaround, five fat cigar butts, each as thick as my thumb, jutted upward from the sand a couple of inches apiece. With one at the center and the other four radiating outward from it—each five feet or so from the center—they formed a large, precise geometric shape: like the five dots on dominos or dice . . . or like a giant + sign, measuring ten or twelve feet from tip to tip. A small circle of sand at the base of each stub was black with soot, and as I edged closer, I saw that the cigar butts weren’t cigar butts at all, but the remnants of signal flares stuck into the ground. Set alight in the blackness of this wilderness, they would have created a blazing bull’s-eye here: here in the softest, safest spot for a parachutist leaping into the blackness from a streaking jet.
Hands shaking, I dialed Skidder’s number. Deputy Skidder’s number. Given that he was briefing the sheriff—had probably briefed the sheriff the day before—about the piece of skull, he’d need to relay this information, too. But my call didn’t go through, and when I looked at my phone I saw why. Down in this hollow, miles from town, I had no signal. Zero bars. “Crap,” I muttered; I’d need to return to civilization to make the call. As I turned back toward my car, I spotted signs of civilization—a grim sort of civilization—on the skyline only a few miles away: the guard towers of the state prison. My first thought was a bad pun: plenty of bars at a prison. My second thought was less silly, and maybe even useful: Maybe one of the guards saw something that night.
It took every particle of patience I had to thread the car slowly back down the rocky road and out of the hollow. Once I reached the main road, I floored the gas pedal, gunning the small-caliber engine. I made a skidding turn at the sign pointing toward the prison, then—glancing at my phone and seeing that I had four signal bars—I pulled to the side and phoned the deputy to tell him what I’d found. “This is Skidder,” said the voice-mail greeting. “Leave me a message and I’ll call you back.”
“Deputy, this is Bill Brockton,” I said. “I think I found where Richard’s killer came down when he bailed out that night. Call me back soon as you can.”
Next I scrolled down my list of contacts until I found Special Agent Miles Prescott. I debated the pros and
cons of calling him. On the one hand—the call-now hand—an FBI Evidence Response Team would have the best shot at finding any significant evidence, if indeed I was right about what I’d seen; with luck, there might even be recoverable DNA on the cigarette butts, and possibly fingerprints on the unburned bases of the flares. On the other hand—the slow-down hand—the San Diego County sheriff was supposedly engaged in some delicate interagency diplomacy with the FBI, possibly even at this very moment; if I called Prescott directly, rather than letting the sheriff finesse things, I might accidentally sabotage his efforts to refocus the investigation.
I decided to seek a second opinion. This time the call was answered by a human, not a recording. “Safety Board. Maddox.”
“Pat,” I said. “Bill Brockton here.”
“Doc,” he said heartily. “How the hell are you?”
“Well, I’m okay,” I said. “It’s been rocky lately. My wife passed away recently. Unexpectedly.”
“What? Did you just say your wife died?”
“Yes. But—”
“My God, Doc, I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks, Pat. I appreciate that. But that’s not what I’m calling about.”
“Well, no,” he said, “I realize I might not be your main go-to guy for emotional support. What’s up?”