Authors: Katia Lief
“Princess!” His voice was the high squeal of a eunuch. He crossed the small room to greet us, one of his hands grasping Courtney’s shoulder with sausagy fingers and squeezing the delicate fabric of her blouse. She held her bright pink smile. Behind the Plexiglas I saw Tanisha roll her eyes.
“How am I so lucky today? What brings you? You know I would kill someone myself if that is what it took to get you hunting for evidence.”
“You don’t need to go that far to get my attention, Anand. I always look forward to seeing you.” And on his round cheek she planted a kiss that left a pursed set of bubblegum lips on his skin. He must have known it was there and yet he did nothing to wipe it off; in fact, that kiss stayed on his cheek throughout our visit.
“I see you brought a friend,” he said.
Oh, this was ridiculous. We were
colleagues
. But I went along with it and introduced myself. We pressed our palms together in a damp handshake.
“Anand,” Courtney said, “we’re doing a follow-up on the Innocence Project. It seems like there’s been a lot of activity in the past year on DNA testing of old evidence. We’re working on a chart. Mind if we poke around in the stacks and check some of the voucher logs for dates?”
“Why should I mind? Come, come.”
We followed Anand through the door and into a huge warehouse filled with metal shelving on which large cardboard barrels were stacked. There were thousands of barrels and on each one black handwritten numbers had been scrawled. Voucher numbers, I presumed, like the one Abe Starkman had given me. I wondered why Anand didn’t question us for coming to the warehouse for this information when certainly it was available in a database. But the deeper we walked into the yawning space and the more I listened to him prattle with Courtney, the better sense I got of what she had alluded to on the taxi ride over. An atmosphere of unprofessionalism permeated this place. Which explained why someone had chosen to send the alleged bones here instead of to another one of the city’s evidence storage facilities … because, as Courtney had explained, this was where it was easiest to lose evidence you weren’t keen on being found.
The mildew smell in the giant warehouse was worse than in the reception area; here it had a ripe
pungency
that seemed to seep into my skin. The air itself felt soggy. The walls were raw cinderblock and the floor was covered in cracked linoleum that bulged upwards in places.
“Go to town, Princess. If you need me, you know where I’ll be.” Anand waved us toward the barrels and walked off in the opposite direction. At the far end of the warehouse I saw another officer seated at one of two pushed-together desks. He had what appeared to be a thermos. A newspaper was spread open in front of him. The other desk held an open laptop and this, I assumed, was where Anand intended to post himself.
“That was too easy,” I said to Courtney when Anand was out of earshot.
She grinned. “You see what I mean about this place?”
“I do. So where do we start?”
“The barrels are stored chronologically, so we’ll start with the latest arrivals.”
We walked past four empty rows of shelving where evidence from as yet uncommitted crimes had been allotted real estate, until we reached the beginning edge of a sea of barrels. We checked each voucher number that had come in over recent weeks but the one Abe had recited, 12-84992, was not among them.
“It’s not here,” I whispered. “So maybe it doesn’t exist.”
“This is Pearson. We have to keep looking.”
We finally located it in the third row on the ground level shelf, tucked behind another, older barrel that had arrived here over a year ago. One detail Abe had neglected to tell me was that someone had assigned this voucher number the wrong date. Unless he hadn’t known about it.
“We need to open it,” I said.
“I’ll go talk to Anand and the other guy for a little while. You walk the aisles. Pretend to take some notes. Then see if you can get the lid off. Don’t make any noise if you can help it. Here.” She reached into her purse and handed me a tiny digital camera.
“Are we allowed to take pictures?”
She tilted her head and gazed at me in wonderment at my naiveté. “Darcy, welcome to New York City. Take pictures if you find bones. Quickly. Then cover the barrel back up and come find me.”
She walked off, loudly saying, “Keep on going, Darcy. I’ll be right back.”
“OK!” My voice echoed three times through the warehouse.
I listened to her footsteps walk the long way across the warehouse as I moved slowly through the aisles with pen poised over pad, leaning in to see the long white activity tags on every barrel and scribbling as I went. It worried me that there might be a surveillance camera monitoring the aisles until
I
looked up at the fifty-foot-high ceiling: an endless field of stained dropped ceiling but not a piece of electronics in sight.
I returned to the low shelf with barrel number 12-84992. Carefully and quietly, I slid out the barrel blocking it, then slid 12-84992 forwards enough to reveal the round lid. It did not appear to be sealed with anything more than pressure.
Laughter echoed across the warehouse. Courtney was keeping the officers busy.
Wedging my fingertips under the metal rim, I tried to pry it off but it was pressed tightly on and wouldn’t budge. I reached into my bag for my house keys. After a minute of loosening the seal in minuscule increments with the tip of a key, I was able to widen an opening enough to fit my fingers under the lid’s edge, and push. There was a slight popping sound. I waited, listened: no echo. My hands shook as I lifted off the lid and set it on the floor beside me.
Inside the barrel was a large brown paper bag with the same voucher number scrawled on its side. The top had been rolled down and sealed with a single band of plastic tape. I was afraid that taking out the bag itself would make too much noise so instead I reached in, detached the tape and slowly unrolled the bag.
I could see a haphazard pile of something sticklike inside the bag but it was too dark to tell if it was
a
pile of bones. I couldn’t make out color or shape except that some appeared longer than others. Positioning Courtney’s camera over the barrel, low enough to conceal a flash, I took a picture. And for the instant of the flash I saw them: the bones. I took another picture for another glimpse and saw them again: a heap of dirt-stained femurs and tarsals, costals and carpals, mandibles, tali, humeri.
To make sure the photos had come out I checked them in the camera and now saw the images in greater detail: some with a creamy natural hue, some streaked with black, some bulbous at one end, some jagged where they had snapped. In the bag, lit by the flash, they appeared vividly and irreverently tossed together. And I thought of the only thing such an image could evoke in someone of my background. I thought of my father and his boyhood job as a digger in the camps. How many heaps of bones had he seen with his own eyes? And then my imagination, my
memory
, though in fact this was not
my
memory, built the bones into the skeletons of people as my father might have seen them. Recognized them. Friends, neighbors, colleagues … family. How had his young brain processed so many thousands of bones? Had he rebuilt them, given them flesh and sight and sound and language? Had he given them the music of life as he dug and buried, dug and dug and buried and buried and buried? These random bones in the bag in the
barrel
came to life before my eyes as I imagined my father’s skeletons had come to life before his. Know them or not, you recognized them, these people robbed of life. They were his echoes.
“Why had
I
survived?” my father had asked me rhetorically when as a girl I snuggled in his lap as he revealed verbal snapshots of his history. He believed in sharing it, teaching it, so its lessons wouldn’t be forgotten. “Why me and not them?” And then, after a pause, “Some questions have no answers.”
I put the camera on the floor next to my purse. Folded down the top of the bag and resealed the tape. Replaced the lid, tightly. Took two no-flash photos of the outside of the barrel, making sure to get the whole voucher number. Pushed the barrel back on the shelf and carefully, slowly moved the other barrel back into its place as concealer of a mystery. But not for long.
Emerging from the aisle into the cavernous space, I could see Courtney far away at the other end of the warehouse sitting on the edge of Anand’s desk swinging her crossed legs. The three of them were playing cards.
“Done!” My voice echoed in two, three, four, five waves of sound.
Courtney slid off the desk and said something that made the men laugh. Then she strode across the space and joined me. We didn’t speak until we were
outside
, walking to the main drag where we hoped we could find a cab. The clouds of earlier had vanished and a strong sun now burned off the residual humidity. We hailed a livery car, got into the ripped back seat and gave the driver our office’s address. Then I handed Courtney the camera and she looked at the pictures I’d taken in the warehouse.
“Wow,” she said.
“I was tempted to take one of the bones to get it dated at a lab.”
“But you didn’t, I hope.”
“Of course not.”
“Good. Though I understand your temptation.” Courtney scrolled again and again through the four photos, a deep vertical crease forming in her pretty brow.
“We don’t know if the bones are from the site,” I said, “except that my source said they are.”
She looked at me, the crease deepening. “Exactly.”
“How do we find out?”
“I’m thinking we try to get our hands on the transit records for the supposed toxic drums dug up at the site. Mr Livingston and his sons didn’t cart the drums or the bones or whatever off the site themselves, and neither did the suits at Buildings. They got someone else to do it. So we find out who did the transporting and see if we can connect any dots.”
“All those jobs are bid out. It should be matter of public record.”
“Unless they used someone else, to cover their tracks … which would look really suspicious, so maybe they didn’t. It could go either way. But somewhere there’s got to be a record of the delivery to Pearson, if it came from the site, so let’s start with that.”
I nodded agreement. Paper trails, computer records, voicemails: hard facts. It sounded good to me. For years, until recently, I had to work around the facts. Too many people didn’t believe the scientific data about the environment until Al Gore’s movie. Now, finally, facts were carrying some weight.
“Our goal is to expose this,” Courtney said, “if there’s anything to expose. If the city admits to finding the bones in the lot and gets them IDed, we’ll have done our job. The whole mess will come spilling out, whatever the hell it is. After that all we do is write it up and collect kudos all around.”
She was right. Pulling back the veil of secrecy was our only goal. If we managed that, it might even advance our careers a few notches. I had loved writing about the environment all these years and I intended to continue but I yearned to incorporate more of the larger picture. I had developed an awareness that behind every wind farm and every oil spillage and every organic farmer and every
sewage
disaster there was a human drama that had come to impact the environment. I had long wanted the opportunity to widen my scope to examine the social and political context of environmental issues. This story, I hoped, would give me the leverage I needed to make it happen on a national scale at the
Times
.
But it wasn’t going to be easy. So far we had one anonymous source, two sets of lies and a bag of bones. Those things together didn’t paint a complete picture. We had a lot more work to do.
“Listen,” Courtney said, “before I knew I’d be on this, I made an appointment for two o’clock. Mind if I keep it?”
“Not at all. We don’t have any deadline, to say the least. We might not even be able to sell Elliot on doing this story.”
“With those bones? We’ll sell him.”
Courtney leaned toward the driver to give him her revised destination, the Cornelia spa on Fifth Avenue. Thus I learned how she liked to pamper herself after meeting a hard-won deadline as she had earlier today: with a massage and a facial. After she got out and shut the door, she leaned back in through the open window.
“Come with me? I bet they could squeeze you in.”
“Thanks, but no. I think I’ll just head back to the office.”
Stationed at my desk in the newsroom, I ate a tuna sandwich and made some notes in my laptop, transferred the photos from Courtney’s camera onto my hard drive and then emailed them to her and Elliot, who had gone out to a lunch meeting. Then I phoned Russet, thinking I’d give them the benefit of the doubt and let them prove they had received a shipment of drums full of toxic chemicals from my lot at the Yards. Instead of asking for Lenny, this time I spoke with Bruce, the guy who happened to answer the phone. I explained who I was and requested a copy of the bill of lading because I was “anal” and liked to “cross all my t’s and dot my i’s” before submitting even the smallest article to my editor. Most people accepted it if you claimed to be neurotic and afraid of a tyrannical boss; I had used this excuse many times to extract seemingly insignificant information from sources. As in the past, it worked this time, except for one thing: Bruce couldn’t find a receipt of delivery anywhere. He said “it happens sometimes” and “our secretary stinks with paperwork”. I accepted his claim of disorganization as easily as he had accepted mine of punctiliousness. We laughed and said goodbye. My next thought was to find a bill of lading on the other end, at the Pearson warehouse. If the bones had been brought there over the last couple of days, even with an incorrect voucher date, the delivery receipt might
still
be unfiled and if the people at both ends had done their jobs it would show point of pickup as well as drop off. But I would leave that to Courtney, given her way with Anand.
After that I tried to focus on more research but had trouble concentrating. I couldn’t stop seeing the bones. In my mind they were becoming links in an Erector set connecting me to my parents and their histories. I kept hearing the echoes. I wanted it to stop.