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gesture that merged into a quick handshake—then he pulled the door closed and latched it. “Thanks again,” he said. “We figure this I.D. will be quite a challenge. Glad you can help us out on such short notice.”
    “Anytime,” I said. “I sure didn’t expect to see you again so soon. Where’d you just come from, anyhow? We were out at the Body Farm till four yesterday. Did you even have time to get back to Quantico last night?”
    He gave a rueful smile. “I had just enough time to take a shower and unpack.” He turned and pointed to two closely cropped young men in the second row of seats. I recognized them both from the prior day’s training at the Body Farm. “Doc, you remember Kimbo—Kirby Kimball—and Tim Boatman from yesterday?”
    “Of course,” I said. Kimball stretched out a bronzed paw and gave me a crushing handshake. Mercifully, Boatman, thin and sallow, had a grip that was as limp as Kimball’s was fierce.
    McCready added, “You saw how good they are with the Total Station. Best in the Bureau, actually.”
    I nodded, projecting more knowledge than I felt. I understood what a Total Station was—a high-tech mapping system, one that could record and document, in three dimensions, the exact position of bodies, bones, bullets, and other pieces of evidence at a large, complex crime scene—but I’d never witnessed one in action until the prior day’s training exercise. “A crash site,” I said to Kimball and Boatman. “I’m guessing you guys’ll have your work cut out for you.” They grinned, and I understood the sentiment behind their happy expressions. It wasn’t that they were pleased someone had died; it was, rather, that they loved the challenge of helping solve the puzzle that awaited them at the scene. The truth was, I felt exactly the same way, and I also felt honored by the FBI’s confidence in my identification skills.
    The engines spooled up and the plane began rolling, so McCready motioned me to my seat. In less than a minute we turned from the taxiway to the runway, and without even stopping, the Gulfstream hurtled forward, the acceleration pressing me deep into the glove-soft leather, as if I were on some luxurious theme-park ride. “This thing has some good giddyup,” I remarked as the plane leapt off the runway, still accelerating.
    “Sure beats a Crown Vic,” McCready replied. “Took me eight hours to get home last night. Took me forty-five minutes to get back here this morning. This thing climbs four thousand feet a minute. Has a five-thousand-mile range. Top speed of nearly six hundred miles an hour.”
    “No offense,” I said, “but since when does the FBI have such a need for speed?”
    “Since 9/11. Gives us quick-response capability to terrorist threats anywhere in the world.”
    I nodded reflexively, then—when his words sank in—I narrowed my eyes and stared at him. “Wait. Are you saying Richard Janus’s plane was brought down by terrorists?”
    “God, no,” he replied, then hedged, “I’m not saying it wasn’t, either. All I’m saying is, when the G5 isn’t needed for a national security mission, we can deploy it for other high-priority investigations.”
    “And an accident involving a private plane is a high-priority investigation because . . . ?” He didn’t answer, so after a moment’s thought, I answered my own question: “. . . because the accident wasn’t actually an accident?”
    He shrugged. “Too soon to know.”
    “But you have reason to think Richard Janus was murdered?”
    He shrugged again.
    I’d worked on enough FBI cases over the years to know that the Bureau liked to hold its investigative cards close to the vest. So I wasn’t surprised that McCready didn’t seem inclined to show his hand. Nor was I surprised, a moment later, when he pulled a laptop from the briefcase beneath his seat, mumbled something about catching up on paperwork, and busied himself with the computer.
    I opened the outer compartment of my bag