THE NEXT MORNING at 6:00, Kelso, O’Hara, and Jandorek stand beneath the willow in the community garden at Sixth Street and Avenue B as Lucas Bradley makes his first incision in the downtown dirt. To thwart rubberneckers, an orange tarp went up around the tree overnight, along with a new padlock on the gate and notification that the garden will be closed for forty-eight hours so Con Edison can repair a gas leak. To give the cover a ring of truth and further impede the view, half a dozen Con Ed trucks are parked along the perimeter. The thirty-four-year-old Bradley, who has lank brown hair and the kind of open boyish face rarely seen on a native New Yorker, was hired to oversee the sifting and identifying of remains at the base of the World Trade Center towers. He made such a good impression, he was appointed the city’s first full-time forensic anthropologist. O’Hara heard that he got his PhD from a department at the University of Tennessee known as the Body Farm, because of a wooded plot strewn with stiffs where students can observe them in various states of rot. To O’Hara, he looks like a kid in a sandbox, particularly when he unzips his nylon backpack and removes a Teenage Ninja lunch pail. It would drive O’Hara crazy to work with strangers looking over her shoulder, but Bradley seems to appreciate an audience. As he strips away the topmost layer of soil, he points at the hardy weeds around the base of the tree.
“Normally, you wouldn’t have this much grass or weeds near the base of a tree, but sometimes you see opportunistic growth above a grave site,” he says. “There’s no better fertilizer than a juicy corpse.”
With the help of an intern, Bradley exposes an area of dirt about the size of a picnic blanket. The outer ring of dirt is darker than the area inside it, and according to Bradley that’s another propitious sign. “When you dig a hole and refill it, the dirt from various levels get mixed together. Overall that makes it lighter.” The intern sets aside the loose sections of sod. Bradley opens his juvenile lunchbox and extracts a handful of plastic chopsticks. He sticks them into the dirt about sixteen inches apart around the border of the possible grave.
“I don’t think I’ll be going Chinois for a while,” whispers Jandorek to O’Hara.
“You don’t eat it anyway,” says O’Hara. An Asian guy would kill himself before he shared his marital woes with Jandorek.
Using the trowel like a shovel, Bradley begins to dig, and dumps each small scoop into a basket covered by a fine-mesh screen. It’s slow, tedious work, even more so for the gallery of detectives, like watching a man empty a bathtub with a spoon. The temperature is rising quickly, and because of the tarp, there’s no breeze. Kelso in particular grows restless.
“Any chance we could goose this up a little?”
“Excavating is a destructive process,” says Bradley without turning. “You only have one chance to do it right.”
Bradley works briskly but carefully, the sweat stain on his shirt expanding at about the same rate as the hole. It’s at least half an hour before he comes into contact with anything other than dirt, but when he does, the sound is so sharp, everyone but Bradley jumps. “We got a body,” says Bradley. “Naked, topless, headless. Petite.”
Bradley twists on his knees and extends his arm. Lying tits up on the trowel is a cigarette lighter in the shape of a female torso.
In the next hour, Bradley and the mesh catch one stray item after another—an old subway token like the ones O’Hara saw in Henderson’s cigar box, a couple foreign coins, a marble, a folded-up $20 bill, a tiny plastic bag of weed, and then a couple larger objects: a CD, a Swiss Army knife, and a pint of whiskey. As they’re found, the intern deposits them in a plastic container, and in one of the many lulls O’Hara wanders over for a closer look. They are such a motley assortment, and in an effort to make some sense of them and their possible connection, O’Hara pulls out her notebook and lists everything Bradley has unearthed so far: “1 cigarette lighter, 1 subway token, 2 coins—5 pesos, 25 yen—1 roach clip, 1 marble, $20 bill, pint of Ballantine’s, 1 Swiss Army knife, 1 synthetic pearl, 1 CD, 1 small bag of weed.”
Of the objects in the Tupperware, the pint of Ballantine’s gets O’Hara’s attention first, not because it’s good and alcoholic, but because it’s unopened. Why would someone throw away a brand-new bottle? That it’s unopened differentiates it from the rest of the items, which seem like random urban debris accumulated over the years. But when she scrutinizes the others more closely, she notices that the tiny plastic bag of pot is also sealed. As O’Hara pores over the collection as best she can through the plastic lid, the intern adds another New York artifact—a ticket stub from Sunshine Cinema for a movie called the The Lives of Others dated 6/11/07. The date surprises O’Hara. That’s less than three months ago, and when she combines it with the pristine condition of the pint and some of the other items, it doesn’t jibe with a seventeen-year-old homicide. Then O’Hara recalls Bradley’s comment about “opportunistic growth.” There may be nothing quite like human fertilizer, but would it still be pushing up daisies after seventeen years? While the intern is nearby, O’Hara asks her to flip over the CD. O’Hara sees that it’s Coldplay, something called X&Y, which according to the label came out in 2005, but O’Hara is distracted from her calculations about dates and timing by word from Bradley of another find.
“This is soft,” says Bradley almost to himself. Till now, everything Bradley has found has been hard and quite small.
After Bradley climbs out of the grave, O’Hara sees that the entire length and width of the hole has been taken down more than two feet. Bradley, who is drenched in sweat, takes a long pull from a bottle of water, then goes back to his lunchbox and removes a brush and a single chopstick, this time a wooden one. Back in the hole, Bradley uses both to pick and whisk away the dirt from the soft thing he has found.
“It’s some kind of fabric,” he says, and a couple minutes later, “It’s the bill.”
He backs away to give the lieutenant and two detectives an unobstructed view. O’Hara can see that he’s referring to the bill of a cap, the leading edge of it, which is pointing straight at the sky. In the next ten minutes the entire navy blue lid is revealed, then the crown, with the “NY” of the New York Yankees. The style of the hat is quite current; it’s certainly not a seventeen-year-old cap. Apparently Kelso has noticed that too, because she can feel his glare on the back of her neck. But neither has long to concentrate on the other. Less than a minute later, Bradley sits back on his heels and announces, “We’ve got remains.”