Front Page Teaser lhm-1

by Rosemary Herbert

  Faisal al-Turkait greeted Liz with polite formality at the door of Turkoman Books. Moving a stack of volumes off his sofa, he invited her to take a seat and join him in drinking coffee.

  “This time I was expecting you, you see,” he said as he poured. “I hope you will understand if I am reticent in other regards, though,” he said. “At this time, I would not like to have my name in the paper or even to discuss much of anything over the phone.”

  Liz was shocked. “Do you think you are under some kind of surveillance?”

  “Certainly. This country is under attack by enemies of Middle Eastern extraction. As an American citizen, I applaud this vigilance.”

  “As a person of Middle Eastern extraction, surely you feel uncomfortable about it as well?”

  “I understand it.”

  “I can only express my admiration! I’m not so sure I would feel similarly understanding if the nation were under attack by women with auburn hair and I was hounded as a result.”

  “When I walk down a city street at night and a woman is the only other pedestrian, should I blame her if she crosses the street to ensure her safety from a male stranger? I am no assailant, yet I am not offended to see a woman exercise such caution. The same is true now. In the interests of our nation’s security, I am not offended to see our government scrutinize me. But let us talk of other matters. You have some more words for me to translate, I assume?”

  “Actually, it is the same list of words that concerns me,” Liz said, taking out the grocery list. “Do any of these words have double meanings? I mean, could they refer to some sort of terrorist activity, meeting, delivery, or anything of that sort?”

  “No, I think not. These are the most ordinary of words. Truly, they look like a simple grocery list of fruits.”

  “I guess I’m searching for significance in Ellen’s interaction with the cabdriver, even trying to connect it to the terrorist attacks. That’s a pretty big leap, though, isn’t it?”

  “That’s understandable, particularly after the events of September eleventh. Didn’t you show me, last time you were here, a photo of a book she had that was written for intelligence experts?”

  “Yes, and I still don’t know where she acquired that. I plan to see if they have any record of selling it to her at the Brattle Book Shop in Boston, where, I understand, she purchased something in order to prepare to meet her pen pal.”

  “I know the owner there and I know he now records his book sales on the computer. Most book dealers do, these days, because so many of us also sell on-line. We need to keep track of individual volumes. He might be reluctant to tell you who bought the book, but if I ask him for the book, as though I wish to acquire it, he might tell me if and when it was sold.”

  Putting through a call to the store, the book dealer discovered the book in question had been sold there on October 13, 2000. There was no credit card or check information, since the purchase had been made in cash. But the Brattle’s owner did let on he’d thought the customer was surprising. Most of the time, he told his colleague, he sold odd books like that to professors or students. This customer looked like a suburban housewife.

  The likelihood of Ellen serving as an intelligence operative seemed unlikely now. Surely, if Ellen were a spy, she would be supplied with such books, not reduced to finding one in a used-book shop. Liz returned to the question of the cabbie’s grocery list.

  “Are any of these words also used euphemistically, as sexual slang, I mean?”

  “This is not easy for me to discuss with a lady,” the book dealer said, echoing a similar statement by Ali. “But the answer is yes. Teena, the word for fig, can also be used—man-to-man only, of course—to refer to a woman.” He blushed.

  “What about the other fruits? Here in America a man might say of a woman, ‘Look at them apples,’ for instance,” Liz said.

  Faisal’s complexion reddened further. “No, I wouldn’t say the other words on this grocery list would be used in that way. More coffee?” he said, ducking into the kitchen.

  “I ask because we know that the cabdriver who drove Ellen Johansson in New York, and who also visited her house on the day she disappeared, made her uncomfortable by using that word in a sleazy tone in a two-way radio conversation with another male. She wondered if the cabbie was talking graphically about her, and then, when she heard him continue to use the word, she relaxed a little, thinking he was talking in sexual terms about a woman called Tina.”

  Returning to the room, Faisal underlined Nadia’s view. “I think she was correct in feeling uncomfortable. I think perhaps the driver was talking in a most improper manner about his passenger.”

  Chapter 26

  After leaving the book dealer, Liz drove the Tracer to the Banner parking lot and stopped in at the city desk, only to learn that she’d been put on another mall story. This time the assignment was to interview store managers about the drop in customer numbers in response to terrorist-inspired fears of gathering in public spaces. Liz drove to the closest mall she could think of, the CambridgeSide Galleria, a snazzy shopping complex in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston.

  Inside the mall she met Banner photographer Jim Collins, who shot photos of the unpopulated place from the top of an escalator. This turned out to be a good spot to get comments from a sampling of the few who had decided to shop, terrorist threat or not.

  “I’m getting married next week,” one young woman told Liz defiantly. “I’m not letting al-Qaeda prevent me from buying my bridesmaids their gifts!”

  “Let ’em try to shoot me!” a belligerent older man wearing a Veterans of Foreign Wars baseball cap declared. “They’ll regret it!”

  Despite the small number of shoppers, excellent quotes were easy to get. With time to spare, Liz and Jim decided to cover two more shopping venues, Boston’s upscale Newbury Street and then more humble Washington Street, also known as “Downtown Crossing.” Thanks to the dearth of shoppers, it was unusually easy to find parking spaces on Newbury Street. They decided to walk a block over to Boylston Street, where the very posh toy emporium FAO Schwarz seemed a great choice to represent this shopping district. What did well-heeled parents think about spending big bucks on playthings now?

  “You can’t buy security, I know,” one mother said, “but you can buy together time. I’m purchasing this horribly complicated Taj Mahal model to show my son the beauty of another culture’s architecture and to give our family something to do together. I’m uneasy about taking my kids to public places at the moment, so I figure we’ll be spending more time together at home.”

  With answers like this, Liz knew she had the makings of a sidebar, if hard news about the terrorist attack aftermath didn’t grab all the space in the paper. Thinking ahead, she got contact information from the woman for a possible family page piece about family time as an antidote to terror. The toy store interviews were so productive and time-consuming that Jim Collins had to leave her so he could cover another story. Outside the store, feeding the parking meter, Liz realized she did not have enough time to walk to Downtown Crossing after all, a pedestrian mall where parking was nonexistent.

  Instead, she returned to Newbury Street and strolled along it for several blocks. Rejecting a ladies’ hat shop, several beauty salons, and some art galleries that were all too posh to provide contrast with FAO Schwarz, she made her way on foot back to Boylston Street. Running parallel to Newbury Street, this thoroughfare offered a mix of shopping, from the posh toy shop and elegant Shops at Prudential Center mall to discount pharmacies. Scanning the stores, she made her way to a place bearing the sign “Puttin’ on the Ritz: Off-Price Remainders.” The customers here were all female, and the well-heeled matrons and homeless women seeking warmth in the chill of the autumn afternoon represented two extreme ends of the economic scale. None of them seemed eager to talk with Liz, so she killed fifteen minutes by pushing designer leather jackets around on their rack, while trying to overhear shoppers’ chatter about what was on their minds.
The effort was fruitless for the purposes of Liz’s article, since the bargain hunters were mostly shopping solo and those who spoke to one another seemed absorbed in talking about the fact that the shop stamped the word “Ritz” in hot pink on the trendy designer labels, but she did get a great buy on a leather jacket.

  If anyone were to interview me about this expenditure, she thought, I’d say it is an indulgence along the lines of comfort food. A guilty pleasure.

  Before Liz could return to the Tracer, her cell phone rang. It was Cormac Kinnaird.

  “Where are you, Liz?” he demanded. “Have you heard the news?”

  “Has there been another attack?”

  “No, thank God, no. But some hikers in a state park out near Plymouth have turned up the remains of two bodies in a wooded area. I’m surprised your editor hasn’t called you.”

  “Someone else might be assigned to this. When and how did you hear about this?”

  “Just now, on the radio. I know I won’t have access to the heart of the scene, but I’m heading out there anyway. You might be able to barge in on it better as a reporter.”

  “What do you know about the scene?”

  “Two sets of skeletal remains, that’s all the police are saying.”

  “Let me contact the newsroom and I’ll call you right back.”

  Liz was in luck. Thanks to the fact that Dick Manning was following up on a bomb scare, Dermott okayed her heading out to Forges Field Recreational Area in Plymouth County, where the remains had been found.

  It was midafternoon as she drove southeast from Boston, leaving the urban scene behind and entering a sandy landscape of scrub pines, blueberry bushes, and cranberry bogs. Ordinarily, a visit to such a scene would provide welcome recreation, but that was not the case now. Grateful that this was not happening a few weeks later, when the change from daylight-saving to standard time would plunge the area into darkness within an hour, Liz nevertheless made haste to arrive while a reasonable amount of daylight remained.

  The recreational area was well named. Home to a playground, two baseball diamonds, and a few soccer or football fields, it looked like a regional gathering place for team practices and intramural sports. Extensive parking lots were filled with vehicles that spoke of school sports and the suburban lifestyle: bright yellow school buses, minivans, and SUVs. Parents, team coaches, and uniform-clad kids were now clustered in the playground area, the children’s faces rosy with excitement. Unable to approach the scene of the crime, they focused their attention on the access road to the recreational area. It was lined with police and rescue vehicles, the latter sadly useless in the circumstances. Flashing lights and radioed conversation kept the scene lively.

  Pulling on her new jacket against the afternoon chill, Liz clipped her Banner I.D. card on her chest pocket, grabbed a reporter’s notebook, and strode into the underbrush far to the left of the obvious path to the crime scene: Liz knew it was unlikely she would get very close to the scene before being barred by the police, but at least she might get a sense of the lay of the land.

  And, covered with white pines, pitch pines, and tangled underbrush, the landscape could only be described as undulating. Visible chiefly because of bright lights set up in advance of dusk, the center of police activity was located at the bottom of a depression. Liz shivered to think it was walking distance from a center of kids’ activity and wondered if the hikers who had come across the skeletons were young people—and if they remained in the vicinity.

  “Hey, you!” a policeman bellowed at her just then. “This is a crime scene. You can’t walk in here.”

  “I know, detective,” she said, looking at his badge. “I’m Liz Higgins from the Beantown Banner and I was trying to get a sense of the lay of the land here.”

  “I’m not in charge of talking with the press. You’ll have to talk with the sergeant.”

  “Can you just confirm a few things that are already reported, like who found the remains?”

  “I guess so, but don’t use my name. It was a pair of bird nuts and their daughter.”

  “Are they still here? Do you know their names and the girl’s age?”

  “You’ll have to ask them. They’re sitting in a cruiser back there.” He nodded toward the line of police cars along the access road. “You’d better get out of here, now.”

  Thanking the detective, Liz made her way to the last cruiser in the line of police cars. Leaning on its trunk, Mick Lichen was haranguing a police officer about getting access to the trio of hikers. Clad in jeans, hiking boots, and fleece jackets in complementary colors, and wearing horrified facial expressions, the family looked like an L.L. Bean ad gone wrong. The red-eyed daughter, who clung to her father, looked to be about fourteen years old.

  “It’s a free country. You can’t prevent them from commenting on what they saw,” Lichen argued loudly.

  “No, I can’t, Mr. Lichen. But I can make a request, and these good people can choose to honor it in the interest of seeing this crime solved.”

  “Is that what you want? To be silenced?” Lichen said to the family.

  “Leave us alone, please,” the mother said.

  Lichen stalked off too soon. His challenge seemed to stir the fourteen-year-old.

  “Why are you letting the police shut us up?” she demanded, wrenching herself free of her father’s embrace and getting out of the cruiser.

  “If the criminal doesn’t know everything the police have discovered, it may make it easier to catch him,” her father began.

  “But it’s too late for the dead people, anyway, isn’t it?” the teen cried. “I want to tell what I saw. It was gross stepping on those bones. Really gross!”

  “You can tell me,” Liz said, stepping in to introduce herself.

  “My name is Jessica Sobel,” the girl announced, thrusting away the hand her father raised to signal her to keep quiet.

  “Maybe it’s better that she talks, John,” said the woman. “I’m Joy Sobel and this is my husband, John,” she said to Liz.

  “My dad’s a science teacher,” Jessica said. “He’s always dragging us along on nature hikes.”

  “In preparation for my classes at Plymouth High School,” John explained. “We were looking for birds that migrate and birds that remain here through the winter. Down in that protected hollow we found plenty of chickadees—that’s our state bird you know—as I expected we would.”

  “Why would the chickadees favor that hollow?”

  “It’s the site of an ef—”

  “Of f-ing corpses!” Jessica interrupted. “Cut the lecture, Dad! Those birds were flying around landing on the bushes and trees, probably eating bugs from the bodies.” Jessica shivered.

  “No, no, Jessica,” John said. “Any insect life associated with the deceased was long gone. There were only bones there, Honey.”

  “‘The deceased’!” the teen mimicked her father. “Always the professor! Can’t you just say ‘dead guys’?”

  “Jessie, Jessie!” her mother soothed. “Try not to upset yourself.” She turned to Liz. “It seemed so idyllic at first,” she said. “John was just pointing out the tall grass all pressed down where the deer had slept on it, and then my daughter stumbled on the bones.”

  “Did you see anything else, Mr. Sobel?”

  “If you mean did I see a murder weapon, the answer is no. Naturally, we were trying to rush our daughter away from the area.”

  “What about clothing, shoes, a handbag—anything like that?”

  “Nothing. I’m no expert, but I thought the bones looked very old. They were very brown, as if they were tea- or coffee-stained. I guess they looked so old, I didn’t expect to see any clothes or shoes with them.”

  As more reporters discovered the family’s location, René DeZona arrived and joined the crush of press focusing in on the family. Liz lingered long enough to take down her sources’ ages, as told to a television anchor, and then returned to the Tracer to phone in her story. Dusk was falling when she arrived back
at her car, where she found Cormac Kinnaird tying his shoe with his foot up on her bumper.

  “Any luck viewing the scene?” he asked.

  “No. You?”

  “No access either, but I talked with one of the officers. The ME for Plymouth is in Manhattan helping out at Ground Zero. They’ve got a new guy covering this. He’ll likely keep information close to his chest, hoping to make a name for himself here.”

  “That’s not good news.”

  “You’re right about that. But the weather report is. With a downpour predicted for tomorrow afternoon, he’ll make haste to move those bones. We’ll have to be ready to reconnoiter as soon as the police finish scouring the area.”

  “Won’t that leave us without the hope of finding any evidence? They will have grabbed it all.”

  “Take a look around you. It’s a tall order to thoroughly scrutinize this place, and remember, it’s a green medical examiner on this case. By the way, did you find out what took those hikers to this particular spot?”

  “The man’s a high-school science teacher. He was making a dry run for a school nature walk, with his wife and reluctant daughter in tow.”

  “If he knows the area, he might be useful to us. See if you can get him to join us when we come back here.”

  “Good idea. Why are you so interested in these remains, Cormac? Do you think they could belong to Ellen and the cabbie?”

  “From what we know, the bones sound older than nine months old. That would seem to eliminate Ellen. Let’s just say, I’m eager to see a certain reporter at work.”

  Before calling in her story, Liz made an effort to get a comment from the police spokesman and to talk with Stu Simmons, the assistant medical examiner on the scene. The former offered, “No comment,” and the latter remained with the remains. After Jared Conneely took her information over the phone, Liz made the hour-and-a-half drive back to Gravesend Street while listening avidly to the radio all along the way. Amid much focus on September eleventh aftermath stories—especially interviews of New Englanders whose kin had been killed in the hijacked jets or in the Twin Towers—little attention was paid to the discovery of human remains in the Forges Field Recreational Area. Brief reports added little to the facts Liz had already gleaned at the scene. Liz did learn, however, that police planned to scour the woods around Forges Field at dawn.