I knew I shouldn’t take the bait, but I couldn’t help myself. “And what’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is, when she gets zippy, you know she’s running on empty.”
“Don’t scare him,” said a woman’s voice — Carmelita Janus’s voice — from the cramped rear of the cabin, which she shared with my baggage. “Dr. Brockton needs to concentrate, not worry.”
When I had finally returned her calls, after weeks of ignoring her during Kathleen’s brief, brutal death spiral, Mrs. Janus had sounded shocked and saddened to hear my news. She had also withdrawn her plea for help—“I know you have many other things on your mind,” she’d said — but I had insisted on coming, assuring her that immersing myself in work would take my mind off my troubles. And so at my request, she had chartered a helicopter — piloted, to my surprise, by the off-duty deputy. The deputy’s name was Charles Throckmorton; his nickname, though, was Tailskid — Skidder, for short — a handle whose origins I was afraid to ask about. Skidder had been a friend of Richard’s, I learned — something he hadn’t mentioned to the FBI agents or to me that first day, although he had told us they had flown together a few times. Probably just as well that he hadn’t said they were friends, I realized. As before, Skidder’s mission on this trip would be to fly me back to the crash site. This time, though, we would follow, as precisely as possible, the dogleg route the Citation had flown the night of the crash.
To get to our starting point at Brown Field, we skirted the edge of San Diego Bay, the skyline of downtown out the left side of the canopy’s bubble, the low, narrow strand of Coronado Beach across the bay on our right. When we reached the end of the bay, the pilot banked to the left, and the San Ysidro Mountains — including Otay Mountain — reared up in the distance, high and dry in the August heat. “Brown Field’s straight ahead,” said the deputy. “Six miles.” He pressed a radio-transmitter button on the control stick and notified other aircraft in the vicinity that we’d be making a low pass over the runway from the west and then departing to the northeast. “If we land,” he explained to me, “we’d have to get this thing off the ground all over again. Better to keep flying, so we can pretend we’re rolling down the runway like a jet.” I could see his point.
We skimmed the runway a hundred feet above the asphalt, then began to climb. A half mile beyond the airport, we banked to left, turning northeast, which put Otay Mountain off to our right. “Think of this as a slow-motion replay,” said Skidder. “The Citation was climbing two thousand feet a minute that night, accelerating to three hundred miles an hour. Our rate of climb and our airspeed are about one-fourth of the jet’s. So you’ll have plenty of time to look around.” After a moment, he added, “If you don’t mind my asking, what is it you’re looking for, Dr. Brockton?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’ll know it when you see it?”
I held out my hands, palms up, and shrugged. “Hope so. All I know is, I won’t see it if I don’t look.”
Mrs. Janus’s voice came through the headset. “That reminds me of Richard. ‘Better to die trying than to live without trying,’ he used to say.”
“Christ, Carmelita,” squawked the pilot, “and you told me not to scare him.”
Ahead of us, I saw what at first glance might have been a pair of immense shopping malls. As we got closer, I noticed tall watchtowers and coils of razor wire, and I remembered passing the entrance road to a prison on my prior trip. “That’s quite a prison,” I said. “State penitentiary — am I remembering that right?”
“The one on the left is,” the pilot answered. “Donovan. The one on the right’s county, mostly, with a little federal thrown in for good measure.” Beyond the prisons lay a blue-green lake, one I’d seen before, but from a different angle, looking down from the crash site.
I pointed. “Otay Lake?”
“Lower Otay Lake, technically. You see the arm stretching to the east? We’ll turn south when we get to the far end of that.” He pointed to a dial on the instrument panel. “Miracle of miracles, we’re almost at thirty-nine hundred feet.”
Mrs. Janus spoke again. “You see the little airstrip just beyond the tip of the lake? And the two hangars? Richard’s maintenance shop is there. ‘Janus Junkyard,’ he called it. You can see a DC-3 carcass he cannibalized for parts, to keep ours flying.”
“Why didn’t he just do everything at Brown Field?”
“Too expensive,” she said. “He bought this whole place from a skydiving school, for about what it cost to park the Citation at Brown Field for a year. He would’ve kept the jet here, too, but the runway’s too short.”
“Damn rough, too,” added the pilot.
“Not as rough as those jungle clearings,” she pointed out.
“Well, no,” he agreed. He glanced down at a chart spread across his lap. “Okay, I’m turning south, descending to thirty-three hundred feet.”
I turned toward him, though his attention was focused on the gauges and the horizon, not on my puzzled face. “Descending? Why?”
“Because that’s what the Citation did that night.”
“But I thought the plane was flying straight and level when it hit.”
“It was,” he said. “For the last two miles. But before that — right after the last turn — it came down five hundred feet, pretty quick.”
“Came down? Why the hell would it do that?” I asked, but immediately, I answered my own question. “To make sure it hit the mountain.” Then, after a moment, another question occurred to me — one I was not able to answer for myself. “Could the plane’s autopilot have made it descend and level off?”
“No,” said the pilot and Mrs. Janus in unison.
“An autopilot’s more like cruise control,” added the pilot. “It can keep the wings level, and keep the plane on course, but it’s not designed to maneuver the plane.”
“Then that tells us something useful,” I said. “Tells us that if somebody bailed out, they didn’t jump until after that maneuver, right?”
“Guess so,” said Skidder.
“Assuming that’s true,” said Mrs. Janus, “what do you make of it? What’s the significance?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “All I know is that I’m looking for something…”
“Though you don’t know what it is,” the pilot reminded me.
“I don’t know what it is,” I echoed, “but if you’ll tell me when we level off…”
“Right… about… now.”
“… then I’ll know where to start looking.” He gave a nod, and I looked down. Below us, the flat terrain surrounding the lake and the airstrip began giving way to hills and valleys. Somewhere down there must be the spot where a parachute jumper had landed in the darkness. Even in daylight, the terrain looked forbidding. If I searched the terrain below, might I come across a parachute — attached to a man who had broken both legs upon landing, slowly dying on a rocky mountainside? I scanned the ground for signs of a ’chute, but unless it was the color of desert camo, there wasn’t one.
Two miles ahead of us, up the longest and straightest of the valleys, loomed Otay Mountain. As I stared out at it — its ridgeline stretching from one side of the canopy to the other, its peak aligned directly with the bubble’s vertical center support — I had the uneasy feeling that the helicopter was a rifle scope centered on a target… and that I was a human projectile streaking straight for the bull’s-eye. I thought about the Citation streaking toward it — far faster than this — and I thought about the other jet that had crashed into Otay Mountain earlier, back in 1991. Maybe that crash — clearly an accident — had inspired Janus, or whoever was at the controls that night, to aim the Citation at the same dark peak.