“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.”
Chapter 26
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.”
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.
Reflexively I reached for my cell phone to call Kathleen. She probably wouldn’t want ribs again so soon (had our anniversary dinner really been less than two weeks ago? It seemed like months). But my hand came up empty, and I remembered that I’d left my phone on the counter at home, so that Kathleen and I could both truthfully say that I didn’t have it with me. What was the phrase the CIA had coined back in the 1960s — when they were hatching political-assassination plots they didn’t tell the president about? Plausible deniability: the I-didn’t-know legal loophole. I’d left my cell phone at home so I could say I didn’t know that the FBI was looking for me, but now plausible deniability was circling back to bite me in the butt — or at least to make it hard to score a dinner date with my wife. “Crap,” I muttered, ducking back inside to call her from the annex phone.
Kathleen didn’t answer her cell or the house line. Finally I remembered that she’d mentioned being off the grid today, too — something about a journal article she desperately needed to finish writing. I dialed her office on campus, on the off chance that she was holed up there, now that everyone else had likely left for the day. No luck. “Crap,” I repeated, not wanting to eat alone. Deflated again, I backed my truck out of the corrugated cave, wrestled down the screeching door and locked it, heading for home and for leftovers in lieu of ribs by the riverside.
On an impulse, instead of heading directly home, I detoured to Kathleen’s building, hoping for a chance to tell her about my conversations with Maddox, Mrs. Janus, and Special Agent Billings. I didn’t see her car in the parking lot, though, and her office window looked dark. Only then did I remember that she had planned to hole up in the library.