Now that I had talked with a reporter about my investigation, I felt committed, even compelled to actually start writing a book. I drove back to my motel room and dove into it, banging away on my laptop. I had been wrestling with how to make my observations into a story. But I decided to simply write the events as they were occurring, exactly as it was happening to me, with all the unknowns that came with it. I was living it, so I would just write it that way.
I started with an outline of what had occurred to me over the past several days. Then I went back and started filling in details. After a couple of hours, I started to lose my focus and could not put any more words down.
I called Joseph Custer, hoping he had already learned something. No answer. I left a message.
My mind was still fuzzy. I decided a short hike seemed like the right thing to clear my head and let me refocus.
I grabbed my backpack to stuff in a couple of water bottles. These were bottles that I had used and reused many times, simply refilling them. It was just a small stab at thrift, but every penny helped to slow the decline of my cash reserves.
There were also a couple of empty bottles from one of my previous hikes. As I removed them, I recalled that in another pocket there was also some litter I had picked up from Monarch Trail on Sunday. I normally disposed of such trash the same day it was collected. But my tussle with Deputy Powell and the quality time spent in the Willow Run jail cell had put me off my stride.
As soon as I opened the pocket, something clicked for me. Two seemingly disparate thoughts had found each other. I immediately stopped and went to my car to retrieve a pair of gloves. They were thick-fingered winter gloves and would be clumsy to work with, but the litter was damp and sticky and smelly. I was going to use some measure of protection.
While I had picked up the items as trail trash on Sunday without any examination, I was alertly examining them now. Near the opening of the pocket was what I sought. It was a piece of paper, a piece of brown paper. It was not crumpled, like someone might have bunched it into a ball to discard it. Rather this torn piece of brown paper had been folded, and the other edges had been crimped to make a roughly square sealed pouch, just as might be done with aluminum foil to wrap a sandwich, though one end of this packet was shredded open. There was nothing inside that I could see, but with the end shredded, whatever might have been inside would have spilled out. They were either on the ground where I had found it, mixed in with the other litter in my backpack, or who knows where else in the National Forest.
I uncrimped the edges of the packet to open it. The brown paper was much thicker and tougher than normal writing paper. It was dirty, with some dark-colored smudges. Also on the paper were the two stamped capital letters M and E. The thing that came to mind immediately was medical examiner. ME. But certainly this meant something else, or maybe ME had nothing to do with anything, just imprinted letters on a piece of old brown paper that was used as a wrap. There was also some hand-written scrawl on the paper. It was either really bad penmanship, or it was not English. Beyond English, I had no language skills, so could not decipher what it said.
Regardless, I was certain I’d seen paper that looked exactly like this before. It was lying on the ground under the right hand of the dead Hispanic on Monarch Trail. I took pictures of it with my cell phone. Those pictures had been deleted by the Willow Run police. I needed to see those pictures again to compare. But I couldn’t. They were gone. Even if I could see them again, what did it mean? Did it mean anything at all?
I went into the bathroom for two towels, which I spread out on the bed. I dumped the entire contents of the litter from my backpack into a pile on one towel to inspect it all. I removed each piece from the pile as I did a mental inventory, putting the inspected litter on the other towel. There were two aluminum soft drink cans, which I had flattened before putting in the pack, gum wrappers, an empty plastic Tic Tac container, a tattered trail map, some used facial tissues, a used condom, which I had wrapped in tissue before picking it up, broken plastic sunglasses, and a set of car keys. I had forgotten about the keys, which I found near the parking lot. None of these items seemed relevant to what I was looking for.
I recalled that under the right hand of the dead man had also been what I thought was fresh plant material, leaves and a segment of stem. Images of them were with the now-deleted-from-my-cell-phone photos of the brown paper. I didn’t have a good enough recollection of them to compare mentally with all the bits and pieces of plants that now remained from my original pile of litter on the towel. Did any of these come from the brown paper pouch? Or were they just things that I picked up along with the litter? I didn’t know.
I also didn’t know plants. Botany was not my strong suit. So I didn’t know what I had in front of me. It was just a pile of stuff that was brown and crinkled, or rapidly heading toward that fate. But I got to thinking about coincidences. I picked up some litter that may be similar to what was under the dead guy’s hand. On first finding the body, I was not certain if the brown paper had anything to do with him. He could have simply landed next to it when he ran off the cliff. Then I just happened to pick up another one just like it, thinking it was ordinary litter, probably just moments before while hiking. I did recall that I’d found it near the cliff face. Coincidence? Possibly. But probably not. And then there was this plant material thing. Maybe this whole connection that had just clicked in my head was taking me somewhere. Or not.
Yet I had to pursue this as far as it would go. This paper may have been handled by the dead guy. That would leave fingerprints. Maybe the guy had a criminal record, or had been deported back to Mexico previously, or had been screened as part of a job interview. Then there would be prints on file somewhere. Of course, my prints might be on the paper too. I had picked it up off the ground on Sunday. But I had been wearing gloves today. So at least there were no new prints added. This was worth exploring. I called Ed Garvey, but it went right to message.
“Ed, this is Nathan. I’m sending you a letter overnight with an explanation. Maybe you can just add it to my tab. I wanted to explain before sending it, but I think this is really, really important. Give me a call when you get a chance. Thanks, buddy.”
I had some old plastic shopping bags in my luggage. I picked up the towel with what I thought was the irrelevant litter and dumped it into one of those bags. I took some pictures of the plant material and then dumped it into a second bag. Both bags then were returned to my backpack, my evidence locker. I tossed the towels into the bathroom.
It was not quite 4 PM. I could still get this to the Post Office for overnight express mail delivery. Ed would get it tomorrow morning. I jotted a note requesting that he check for fingerprints and that he should expect to find mine also. Then I realized there might be another known set of prints on it, those of Deputy Powell. Since he had searched my backpack when I was a guest in his jail, he may well have touched the litter in the pack also. So I added a sentence that Enid Powell might also have left his mark.
I took a picture of the brown paper with my cell phone camera. I nudged the brown paper onto a blank sheet of paper, and then folded them together. It was a bit presumptuous of me that Ed would do yet another favor, this time without actually discussing it beforehand. But I hoped our friendship would permit taking advantage of his connections to the crime lab in Cincinnati yet again. My investigation was so reliant on him. I hoped my requests had not reached the limits of his generosity in helping me.
The Willow Run Post Office was still open when I arrived, though the clerk just inserted a key into the door’s lock when I rushed in. She didn’t object verbally to my last-minute arrival, though she seemed impatient for me to be done with my business. She seemed even less pleased when I went to the coin-operated color photocopier, particularly since I then had to ask her for the appropriate change. Again, there was no verbal objection, though she wore a tight-lipped grin of annoyance.
I had not brought my gloves into the post office, so had to gently prod the brown paper onto the photocopier glass with my car key to copy one side, and then flip it over to copy the other side. Even though only one side contained any writing, the ME and the scrawls, I wanted to have a complete picture of it before letting it out of my hands. All this painstaking effort for a piece of scrap paper only added to the postal employee’s impatience with me since it extended the time it took me to finish.
I then asked her for an envelope, which she pointed out to me on a display rack near the copier. I slid the brown paper back into the blank piece of paper, refolded it, and then put my note to Ed Garvey on top. I slid these into the appropriate envelope, addressed it to Ed’s home, and paid the clerk. She stiffly assured me he would get it Friday morning.
While the entire process probably took less than five minutes, it seemed much longer because she had been hovering, impatient for me to finish so she could go home. In spite of her attempt at intimidation, I thanked her and left the post office at one minute before closing time, so there was no need to feel guilty about delaying her intended early departure. Most importantly, the letter was on its way to Ed.