Tomorrow, Sting goes to the truck rental place. Tomorrow, I find a new angle or I run the old ones again. Tomorrow, I sit across from Grudge in church and I don't say I'm sorry, because sorry is for when you're done and I am not done.
The fan turns overhead.
I close my eyes.
Chapter 3
Jesslyn
Iwas still shaking when I got back to the hotel.
Not on the outside. I've always run cold under pressure, the shaking happens somewhere between my ribs and my stomach where fear goes when it has nowhere else to be.
I drove back from the bayou with both hands on the wheel and the radio off, watching my mirrors the whole way. Now I'm standing in a Canal Street hotel room with mud still on my boots and my camera bag on the bed.
I need to look at what I have before I do anything else.
The cards go into the reader in order. Methodical even now, especially now. The files load and I start from the beginning. The blind, the gray pre-dawn light, the herons moving through the cypress like something out of a painting. Good frames. The oldest bird with his neck coiled and his eye catching the first gold of sunrise, exactly whatSouthern Wildlifesent me out here for.
Then the next card.
The cargo lights throwing everything in hard yellow. The men moving between the containers in the kind of organized silence that means they've done this before. I count them. Eight, maybe ten, the angles make it hard to be certain. The shapes being loaded.
I stop on a frame and make myself look at it directly.
The shapes are girls.
I've been telling myself since the bayou that I didn't know that for certain, that it was dark and I was scared and my brain filled in the worst possible explanation for what my lens was showing me.
Looking at these frames now in the flat light of a hotel room, I know what I saw. A girl in a gray sweatshirt with her arms around herself and her head down. Another one behind her. The posture of someone who has been told to move and is moving because the alternative is worse.
My hands are steady on the trackpad. The shaking has gone somewhere deeper.
I keep scrolling.
The man appears in frame twenty-eight. Standing apart from the others. Not working. He’s directing. Tall, dark hair going silver at the temples, the particular bearing of someone accustomed to being in charge. I go to twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one. In frame thirty-one, I have him almost full face, lit clean by the cargo lights, sharp enough to read the expression in his eyes.
A photographer's eye doesn't work like other people's eyes. It doesn't see and move on; it sees, catalogues, files, stores every plane of a face and every specific arrangement of brow and jaw and the space between the eyes with the same precision the shutter used to capture it. I have been training this eye for seven years. I don't forget faces.
I look at frame thirty-one for a long time. Then I find the DEA tip line and dial.
The woman who answers has the patient, professional neutrality of someone trained to take information from frightened people without alarming them further. I tell her what I saw: the location, the time, the containers, the girls. I tell her I'm a wildlife photographer. I tell her I have photographs.
"Can you describe the individuals involved?" she asks.
"One of them clearly. The man who seemed to be running the operation. I have a clean photograph of his face."
There’s the sound of typing, then she says, "Ms. Meyers, I'm going to transfer you to a field agent who handles Gulf Coast operations. He'll want to speak with you directly about what you've documented."
I sit on the edge of the bed, look at frame thirty-one, and wait while the hold music plays.
"Ms. Meyers." The voice that comes on is warm and easy, the kind of voice that makes you feel like capable people are already handling the situation. "This is Agent Delacroix. I understand you may have documented something significant."
I write the name on the notepad by the phone. Force of habit; I write everything down.
"That's right," I say. "I was set up in a blind east of Henderson and I witnessed what appeared to be?—"
"Before we get into the details over the phone," he says, "I'd like to meet with you in person. There's a café on Chartres I use for these conversations. It’s quieter than a field office and easier for everyone involved. Would you be able to come to me this morning?"
