“I understand,” she said. “And you don’t. But tell me, please — at the meeting, you sounded convinced that it was Richard in the plane.”
“At the meeting, I was,” I said. “But now? Now I don’t know.”
“The media and the FBI are saying that it wasn’t Richard,” she said. “That it was someone else. That Richard had his teeth pulled, and he killed someone else, and pulled that man’s teeth, too. But how can this be, Doctor? It cannot be.”
“It might be,” I said, thinking — just as Maddox had, one phone call and five minutes earlier — that I shouldn’t say anything more. But then, just like Maddox, I kept talking. “The only new information I have is this. I just now reexamined the teeth — your husband’s teeth — and it’s true that they had been pulled. Extracted.” I heard what sounded like a soft gasp on the other end of the line. I went on: “I couldn’t see that when I found them in the wreckage, because the teeth were covered with soot and grease. But I just now finished cleaning them. And when I looked at them under a magnifying glass, I could see marks — little scratches and cracks — made by forceps or pliers or some other tool.”
“Dios mío,” she whispered. My God. “But who could have done this? Could… Richard do that himself? Pull all his own teeth, so he could fake his death?”
I hadn’t even considered this grisly possibility. “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I’ve never heard of anybody pulling out all their own teeth. One or two, sure, but a whole mouthful? There would be a lot of pain. And a lot of blood. I suspect the body would go into shock long before all the teeth were out.”
“So if Richard did this — if he faked his death — he would have needed help. An accomplice.”
“I think so,” I said, wondering if she might be the accomplice. I tried to imagine Carmelita Janus — the elegant woman I’d sat across the table from only a few days before — yanking tooth after bloody tooth from her husband’s mangled mouth. I couldn’t picture it. Suddenly I recalled the FBI’s struggle to obtain Janus’s dental records. “He might have had a dentist do it. To minimize the pain and the damage. Even so, it would have been a drastic step.” I recalled stories I’d heard about coyotes and wolves, caught in traps, gnawing off their own legs to free themselves, but I stopped myself from mentioning those to her. Instead, I simply said, “He would have to be very desperate to do that. But it sounds like maybe he was.”
“No. He wasn’t,” she said. Her voice broke, and her breath turned quick and ragged and jerky, like that of a hurt child or an injured animal. “He… was worried, yes. Afraid, even. He had agreed to do something dangerous… to… help someone. But it was almost over, he said, and everything was going to be all right. That was the last thing he said to me. ‘I’ll be back soon, and everything will be all right.’ And then he said, ‘I love you so much.’ And then… he was gone.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I kept quiet, and she kept sobbing. Finally she spoke again, her voice now thick and gluey. “To think that he was dead — it broke my heart. To think he might be alive — it would make me… happy…” Something about the way she said it — the pause before she said the word; the upward inflection that left the end of the sentence hanging in midair — seemed to contradict her words. “But it also makes me very confused. I thought I knew my husband, Doctor — I thought I knew, absolutely, who he was. Now, I cannot say that, not with conviction. But not to know the truth? That is the worst of all. It will drive me insane. And that is why I beg you to help me.”
Perhaps she was just a practiced liar and a good actress, or perhaps I was reacting out of my own wounded pride, but I found myself believing her — and wanting to ease her pain. “Mrs. Janus, I would help you if I could,” I said. “But frankly, I don’t see how I can. I’ve been taken off the case. The FBI thinks I botched it. And maybe they’re right.”
“The FBI.” Her voice had turned steely. “The FBI wanted Richard dead. Maybe enough to kill him.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “They’re a law enforcement agency. They’re the good guys. They would never do that.”
I heard a sharp exhalation. “I see that you’re an idealist, Dr. Brockton.” There was a note of sadness, or even bitterness, in her words. “Just like Richard. You believe in the goodness of people. And sometimes, yes, that is a gift. A prophecy and a catalyst.”
“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.”