Read Online Watch You Die by Katia Lief - Free Book Online

had
I
survived?” my father had asked me rhetorically when as a girl I snuggled in his lap as he revealed verbal snapshots of his history. He believed in sharing it, teaching it, so its lessons wouldn’t be forgotten. “Why me and not them?” And then, after a pause, “Some questions have no answers.”
    I put the camera on the floor next to my purse. Folded down the top of the bag and resealed the tape. Replaced the lid, tightly. Took two no-flash photos of the outside of the barrel, making sure to get the whole voucher number. Pushed the barrel back on the shelf and carefully, slowly moved the other barrel back into its place as concealer of a mystery. But not for long.
    Emerging from the aisle into the cavernous space, I could see Courtney far away at the other end of the warehouse sitting on the edge of Anand’s desk swinging her crossed legs. The three of them were playing cards.
    “Done!” My voice echoed in two, three, four, five waves of sound.
    Courtney slid off the desk and said something that made the men laugh. Then she strode across the space and joined me. We didn’t speak until we were outside , walking to the main drag where we hoped we could find a cab. The clouds of earlier had vanished and a strong sun now burned off the residual humidity. We hailed a livery car, got into the ripped back seat and gave the driver our office’s address. Then I handed Courtney the camera and she looked at the pictures I’d taken in the warehouse.
    “Wow,” she said.
    “I was tempted to take one of the bones to get it dated at a lab.”
    “But you didn’t, I hope.”
    “Of course not.”
    “Good. Though I understand your temptation.” Courtney scrolled again and again through the four photos, a deep vertical crease forming in her pretty brow.
    “We don’t know if the bones are from the site,” I said, “except that my source said they are.”
    She looked at me, the crease deepening. “Exactly.”
    “How do we find out?”
    “I’m thinking we try to get our hands on the transit records for the supposed toxic drums dug up at the site. Mr Livingston and his sons didn’t cart the drums or the bones or whatever off the site themselves, and neither did the suits at Buildings. They got someone else to do it. So we find out who did the transporting and see if we can connect any dots.”
    “All those jobs are bid out. It should be matter of public record.”
    “Unless they used someone else, to cover their tracks … which would look really suspicious, so maybe they didn’t. It could go either way. But somewhere there’s got to be a record of the delivery to Pearson, if it came from the site, so let’s start with that.”
    I nodded agreement. Paper trails, computer records, voicemails: hard facts. It sounded good to me. For years, until recently, I had to work around the facts. Too many people didn’t believe the scientific data about the environment until Al Gore’s movie. Now, finally, facts were carrying some weight.
    “Our goal is to expose this,” Courtney said, “if there’s anything to expose. If the city admits to finding the bones in the lot and gets them IDed, we’ll have done our job. The whole mess will come spilling out, whatever the hell it is. After that all we do is write it up and collect kudos all around.”
    She was right. Pulling back the veil of secrecy was our only goal. If we managed that, it might even advance our careers a few notches. I had loved writing about the environment all these years and I intended to continue but I yearned to incorporate more of the larger picture. I had developed an awareness that behind every wind farm and every oil spillage and every organic farmer and every sewage disaster there was a human drama that had come to impact the environment. I had long wanted the opportunity to widen my scope to examine the social and political context of environmental issues. This story, I hoped, would give me the leverage I needed to make it happen on a national