Using the blade like a spatula, I lifted the lid — a small, rusty pancake — until it cleared the rim. Inside the can, barely visible above the murky water, was the edge of a small, soggy book.
Angie plucked it from its watery grave. It was a hardcover black book, bearing no title or label. It appeared to be a journal or ledger book, but its pages were stuck tight, so its meaning remained as effectively concealed, at least for now, as it had been in its hiding place. Angie carefully bundled it in a double layer of Ziploc bags and labeled a seal on the outer bag with a black Sharpie. “I’d like to get this to the lab pretty quick,” she said. “Maybe air-dry it overnight so it doesn’t start to mold. If our documents examiner’s still there by the time we get back, I’ll hand it straight off to her.”
“You’re the boss,” I said. “And my ride back to civilization. Whenever you want to go, just say the word.”
Five minutes later we were on the road to Tallahassee, with a camera full of photos of ruins and one lone piece of evidence. Potential evidence. For all we knew, the book’s pages — its fused, soggy pages — were as blank as the empty eye orbits of a skull.
Chapter 8
I spent a few hours the next morning catching up, by phone, with Knoxville. First I made sure that Miranda wasn’t fighting any serious brushfires—“No, things are pretty quiet here,” she assured me. “No forensic cases, just a couple of donated bodies that can stay in the cooler till you get back. Between the boys’ skulls and Angie’s sister’s case, sounds like you’ve cornered the market on all the interesting action. I’m envious.”
I laughed. “Come on down; we’ll put you to work. The pay’s great. Even better than the slave wages UT pays you.”
“So that means I’d actually have to fork over money to come work my butt off?”
“Just about. The pay stinks. So does the work. But hey, the hours are long, the air’s like a steam bath, and the mosquitoes hunt in packs.”
“Who could resist?”
Next I spent a while on the phone with my son, Jeff, making sure that my grandsons had not, through some series of unfortunate events, been shipped off to a perilous reform school during my absence. “Gosh, Dad, thanks for the vote of parental confidence,” said Jeff.
“Hey, no offense,” I said. “This case down here just reminds me how fortunate we are, and how vulnerable kids can be. Give ’em a big hug from Grandpa Bill.”
I met Angie at the crime lab at eleven. I was picking her up for an early lunch, at a place she described as “one of Tallahassee’s national treasures.” She wouldn’t tell me what delights the menu held, but she’d sounded so sure I’d like it that I’d skipped my free breakfast in anticipation.
First, though, she signed me into the lab and led me down the hall past the photo lab, to a door marked DOCUMENTS SECTION. She rapped briefly on the door, then led me in without waiting for an answer.
Inside, a gray-haired, bespectacled woman sat hunched over a table, peering through the magnifying lens of a desk lamp. It was exactly the type of lamp and magnifier I had on the desk in my office under the stadium for examining bones. I half expected to see some bone fragment in the circle of light, but the woman was peering — and frowning mightily — at the muddy book I’d fished from the ground the prior afternoon. “Hey, Flo,” said Angie. “This is Dr. Brockton, the forensic anthropologist who found the book. Dr. Brockton, this is Florence Winters, our documents examiner.”
“Nice to meet you, Florence,” I said. Her frown twitched. “You don’t look too happy. Is the book not telling you anything helpful?”
“Call me Flo,” she said, without glancing up. “Unfortunately, I’m afraid it’s telling me I’ve made a mistake. I put it under an exhaust hood overnight to dry out, and now the pages are fused together. So instead of a book, what we’ve got is a brick. A brick of old, brittle paper.” To prove her point, she tugged gingerly at the covers, which refused to part.
On the table beside the lamp was a tray of tools. Two of them resembled miniature kayak paddles made of stainless steel. They sported thin, flat blades at each end, joined by a slender round shaft. One of them was smaller than the other — its blades were about an inch long, and the shaft connecting them measured perhaps six inches in length; I vaguely remembered using something similar in chemistry lab, thirty years before, to scoop bits of powder onto a balance-beam scale. The tray also held an ordinary-looking butcher knife and an implement that appeared to be an oversize letter opener made of white plastic. “I’ve tried prying the pages apart with the microspatula, the regular spatula, the knife, and the Teflon spatula,” said Flo. “The metal spatula blades are so small they just tend to break the paper apart. The Teflon spatula’s too blunt; if I forced that in, it’d turn some of the pages to mush.”
Angie pointed to the butcher knife. “What about that? Can’t you slide that in and give it a twist?”
“That’s what I was hoping,” Flo said, “but the pages aren’t actually flat — see how they ripple? — and the paper’s really fragile. I tried going in at that corner, but instead of separating the pages, the knife was slicing through them.”
I leaned down and studied the corner and saw a small, straight incision cutting through the crinkled layers. “So there’s no way to open it up without destroying it? It might be the Rosetta stone, or might just be a bunch of blank pages, but we’ll never know which?”
Flo smiled slightly. “Never say never. Just before you got here, I was talking with a documents conservator at the National Archives, in Washington. She’s been working on a similar problem — some waterlogged codebooks from World War Two.”
“Codebooks?” I’d not spent a lot of time pondering the work of the National Archives; I knew they had a bombproof vault that contained an original copy of the Declaration of Independence, but aside from that, I suppose that if I imagined anything about the archives, it would be warehouses filled with boring bureaucratic file cabinets. This secret-code project, though, cast a new, moodier, and sexier light on the Archives. “Whose codebooks?”
“The U.S. Navy’s.”
I was puzzled. “But doesn’t the U.S. Navy already know its own codes from World War Two?”
“Probably,” she answered, “but all they could tell from the book’s cover was that it contained classified information. So they needed to see what was on the pages to know what sort of classified information, and whether they could declassify it.”
I’d always had an interest in World War II history, so even though it was a complete digression, I stayed with it. “And where’d they find this soggy codebook?”
“Originally it was on a navy destroyer, the USS Peary, sunk by the Japanese in a surprise attack.”
“The Peary was at Pearl Harbor?”
“No, Australia. Two months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked U.S. and British ships in Darwin. It’s sometimes called ‘the Australian Pearl Harbor’—they actually dropped more bombs on Darwin than they did on Hawaii — but the attack wasn’t so crippling. This destroyer, the Peary, was one of eight ships they sank.”
“Fascinating though the history and cryptology lesson is,” Angie began.
“Cryptography,” I corrected.
“Cryptography. Right. Whatever. How does the Seventh Fleet’s secret code for ‘soggy pages’ help us with this?”
“I was just getting to that,” said Flo, sounding peeved. I wondered if she was peeved at Angie for interrupting, or peeved at me for digressing. She might also, I realized, have been peeved at me for finding such a problematic project for her. “She — Lisa, the woman at the National Archives — suggested a couple of things to try. First thing, which might or might not work, is to soak the book in methanol, then dry it out again.”
“Hmm,” Angie commented. “I’m not sure ‘might or might not work’ inspires a huge amount of confidence. That’s the best the National Archives can offer? Aren’t they the brain trust for this sort of thing?”
“They are. But every pro
ject’s different,” Flo countered. “At least, that’s what she said. The methanol might make the pages a little stiffer. And that might make them easier to pop apart with a knife or a spatula.”
“But it might not,” I said.
“It might not,” she confirmed. “If not, we go to Plan C.”
“I’m afraid to ask,” said Angie. “What’s Plan C?”
“Wet the book again.”
“At the risk of sounding dumb,” I asked, “isn’t Plan C the same as Plan A?”
“Actually, this was Plan A,” Flo observed, rapping a knuckle on the dry book of fused pages.