The seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks, though solemnly anticipated, lacks the necessary immediacy to eclipse Hannah Mayhew’s ongoing plight, especially once the story of the missing girl metastasizes into that of a botched task force investigation. Stoked by rumors of a Fontaine lawsuit and steady leaks from the Sheriff ’s Department, the story grows more legs than a caterpillar, forcing a series of awkward press conferences in which Mosser and Villanueva stand awkwardly behind a cluster of microphones, fielding increasingly strident accusations from both the local and national press.
If not for Charlotte, I would remain blissfully ignorant of these developments. While I quietly labor away on the Thomson case, hoping the lack of closure will be taken by my colleagues as a sign that I’m overly thorough or perhaps a bit rusty, she spends each night in front of the television, switching from the local broadcasts over to cable, then back to the local stations when they wrap up for the evening. On the rare occasions I’m home, nothing I do can wean her off the remote control.
“There’s hardly anything about it,” she says, meaning the anniversary. “It’s like they’ve all forgotten and don’t want to be reminded.”
“It’s Hannah Mayhew’s fault.”
She frowns. “Don’t blame her.”
We sit together in silence, bathed in the screen’s flickering blue light, not speaking of the anniversary’s private significance because we almost never do. Not that we’ve forgotten. Our omission signals many things, but not that.
On the day itself, we will keep our annual vigil, returning together to the graveside, leaving behind fresh flowers and tears and knee prints in the soft grass. Our grief will feel especially acute because it will be ours alone, unobserved by a world whose attention will be rightly fixed on commemorating the day’s larger tragedy. The Pearl Harbor of our generation will swallow up all the rest, including the random passing of a ten-year-old Houston girl, killed instantly when a drunk driver T-boned her mother’s car.
“Dying that day,” Charlotte once said, when the event was still fresh enough to talk about, “it’s like being born on Christmas, isn’t it?”
Meaning people have bigger things on their minds. There’s only so much room in the ledger, and some entries require it all, leaving no space for smaller tragedies, even as footnotes.
Tonight something has changed, though. As Charlotte flips through the channels, instead of Hannah, everyone’s talking about the latest hurricane brewing out in the Gulf, picking up speed as it approaches. Since Katrina, every swirl of clouds on the Doppler screen merits reverent attention, and the weathercasters speak almost hopefully about the potential for a Category 5 landfall, putting the New Orleans debacle to shame.
“It’ll fizzle out like all the others,” Charlotte says.
“Maybe.”
Deep down, I find myself rooting for the storm, or at least for the breathing space it will afford people like Wanda Mosser and Theresa Cavallo. Fewer press conferences would mean more time for investigation, not that I hold out hope that any amount of extra effort will produce Hannah Mayhew, safe and sound or otherwise.
To my surprise, Cavallo’s pledge to devote her free time to spadework on Salazar pays quick dividends. He rents a thirty-foot slip at the Kemah Boardwalk Marina, housing an old but well-maintained cabin cruiser, a more substantial and significantly pricier boat than I’d imagined. A call to the marina confirms the whole place is monitored by video cameras. After explaining who I am to the head of security, who has his hands full preparing for the impending hurricane, I get an open-ended invitation to review the footage.
“You have Labor Day weekend on tape?”
“I’ll spool it up for you,” he says. “But do me a favor and leave it till next week, huh? We’ve got our hands full at the moment.”
“I wish I could oblige, but… How about tonight?”
He pauses long enough for me to consider the various ways he could make my life difficult, like demanding a warrant or hitting the delete key to save himself the inconvenience. But some people will bend over backward to cooperate with the police, and he happens to be one of them. We agree on a time and I drive down to Kemah full of hope, imagining a video image of Keller and Salazar hoisting a shrouded corpse aboard the boat.
The fantasy is dashed the moment the security chief, a gray-haired man in white shorts and a potbellied polo shirt, cues up the appropriate footage. Like the surveillance tape from the Willowbrook Mall parking lot, like Joe Thomson’s cell-phone snap, the image is grainy and indistinct.
“Is there a particular slip you’re interested in?” he asks, stroking his chin.
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
He’s disappointed, but in spite of the man’s willingness to help, I don’t want to single out Salazar’s boat. There’s always the chance they know each other, and the last thing I want to do is put my suspect any more on guard than he already is.
We buzz through the footage, which is displayed in split screens on a computer monitor, starting midday on Thursday even though the shooting off West Bellfort didn’t go down until later. Approaching ten, the chief pauses.
“The marina lights go off at ten,” he says, and sure enough the screens go black.
After that, the only usable footage is of the well-lit parking lot. We fast-forward through a whole lot of nothing, and then he stops just after three in the morning, running the tape back a bit.
“Look at that.”
A black extended-cab pickup rolls into the parking lot, the truck bed enclosed by an aftermarket hardtop, turning into an empty space. Two figures get out, moving around to the tailgate. They’re too far from the camera to identify, but I’m certain the truck is Salazar’s, and there’s nothing about the figures to suggest they aren’t Keller and Salazar.
“What’re they doing?” he asks.
I lean closer to the screen. They reach into the bed, sliding out a long white form. I don’t say anything to the security chief, but it looks like a body bag to me. Between them, the two men heft the bag, carrying it off-screen in the direction of the marina. They return hours later, just before daybreak, and drive away, no sign of the body bag they’d been carrying before.
After burning the relevant footage onto a DVD, he hands it over wide-eyed, under no illusions about what he’s just witnessed.
“If you talk about this,” I tell him, “you’ll be jeopardizing an ongoing investigation.”
He promises not to, punctuating the words with a dazzled gulp.
The temptation to board Salazar’s boat is strong, but for that I really will need a warrant, otherwise anything I find will be inadmissible. Still, I gaze out over the marina awhile, the bobbing boats illuminated by strong stadium lights, thinking about how easily I could slip through for a little preview, just to make sure the search warrant is worth the effort. The only thing stopping me is my conscience. That and the thought of the security cameras overhead.
“Seven years,” the captain says, shaking his head at the muted television on the credenza, where a platform of politicians take turns reading memorial speeches before a gathered crowd and the ubiquitous media. The ticker crawling across the bottom of the screen recaps a National Weather Service warning that Galveston, just south of us, is where the hurricane will make landfall, whipping up a catastrophic storm surge.
He turns his chair to face me, momentarily uncertain why I’m here. Then he remembers.
“About Thomson’s body,” he says. “You haven’t released it yet.”
“No.”
“Any particular reason? The man’s wife wants to bury him. It’s hard enough on everyone, a brother officer going out like that. No need to prolong the suffering, March.”