Chapter 3
Jesslyn
Iwas still shaking when I got back to the hotel.
Not on the outside. I've always run cold under pressure, the shaking happens somewhere between my ribs and my stomach where fear goes when it has nowhere else to be.
I drove back from the bayou with both hands on the wheel and the radio off, watching my mirrors the whole way. Now I'm standing in a Canal Street hotel room with mud still on my boots and my camera bag on the bed.
I need to look at what I have before I do anything else.
The cards go into the reader in order. Methodical even now, especially now.
The files load and I start from the beginning.
The blind, the gray pre-dawn light, the herons moving through the cypress like something out of a painting.
Good frames. The oldest bird with his neck coiled and his eye catching the first gold of sunrise, exactly what Southern Wildlife sent me out here for.
Then the next card.
The cargo lights throwing everything in hard yellow. The men moving between the containers in the kind of organized silence that means they've done this before. I count them. Eight, maybe ten, the angles make it hard to be certain. The shapes being loaded.
I stop on a frame and make myself look at it directly.
The shapes are girls.
I've been telling myself since the bayou that I didn't know that for certain, that it was dark and I was scared and my brain filled in the worst possible explanation for what my lens was showing me.
Looking at these frames now in the flat light of a hotel room, I know what I saw. A girl in a gray sweatshirt with her arms around herself and her head down. Another one behind her. The posture of someone who has been told to move and is moving because the alternative is worse.
My hands are steady on the trackpad. The shaking has gone somewhere deeper.
I keep scrolling.
The man appears in frame twenty-eight. Standing apart from the others.
Not working. He’s directing. Tall, dark hair going silver at the temples, the particular bearing of someone accustomed to being in charge.
I go to twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one.
In frame thirty-one, I have him almost full face, lit clean by the cargo lights, sharp enough to read the expression in his eyes.
A photographer's eye doesn't work like other people's eyes.
It doesn't see and move on; it sees, catalogues, files, stores every plane of a face and every specific arrangement of brow and jaw and the space between the eyes with the same precision the shutter used to capture it.
I have been training this eye for seven years. I don't forget faces.
I look at frame thirty-one for a long time. Then I find the DEA tip line and dial.
The woman who answers has the patient, professional neutrality of someone trained to take information from frightened people without alarming them further.
I tell her what I saw: the location, the time, the containers, the girls.
I tell her I'm a wildlife photographer. I tell her I have photographs.
"Can you describe the individuals involved?" she asks.
"One of them clearly. The man who seemed to be running the operation. I have a clean photograph of his face."
There’s the sound of typing, then she says, "Ms. Meyers, I'm going to transfer you to a field agent who handles Gulf Coast operations. He'll want to speak with you directly about what you've documented."
I sit on the edge of the bed, look at frame thirty-one, and wait while the hold music plays.
"Ms. Meyers." The voice that comes on is warm and easy, the kind of voice that makes you feel like capable people are already handling the situation. "This is Agent Delacroix. I understand you may have documented something significant."
I write the name on the notepad by the phone. Force of habit; I write everything down.
"That's right," I say. "I was set up in a blind east of Henderson and I witnessed what appeared to be—"
"Before we get into the details over the phone," he says, "I'd like to meet with you in person. There's a café on Chartres I use for these conversations. It’s quieter than a field office and easier for everyone involved. Would you be able to come to me this morning?"
A café. Not a field office. Easier for everyone involved.
I write that down too.
"Of course," I say. "What time?"
We agree on nine o'clock. I thank him and hang up. Then I pack every card into the bag, all of them, every frame, pick up my jacket, and go.
The walk from the hotel to the French Quarter takes twelve minutes.
I've made it a dozen times over three years of shooting this city and I know it by feel, by landmark, by the quality of light at different hours.
This morning the light is already thick with humidity, the sky going white at the edges the way it does before a Gulf Coast day commits to being brutal.
I walk and I think about frame thirty-one.
A photographer's eye doesn't stop working just because the camera is in the bag.
The image is still there, still turning.
The cargo lights, the silver at his temples, the specific arrangement of a face in the moment before a man knows anyone is watching.
I've been staring at that face for the better part of an hour. I will know it when I see it.
The café on Chartres is small, with wrought iron chairs, black and white tile, chicory coffee, and the damp of the morning coming in through the open door.
I take the room in before I take anything else: four occupied tables, a couple near the window with a map spread between their plates, two men at the back with their eyes on their phones, a woman alone at the counter.
Front door. Kitchen in the back, which means a back exit.
One window to the street, painted shut by the look of it.
He's at a corner table. He stands when he sees me coming, and the recognition lands before I've taken three steps. Same jaw, same eyes, same precise arrangement of a face I have been carrying in my eye all morning, now standing in a navy suit with a warm, professional smile.
The man from the bayou is a DEA agent.
He's smiling at me like I'm exactly where he wants me.
"Ms. Meyers. Vincent Delacroix." He extends his hand. "Thank you for coming in."
"Of course." I shake it, sit down, and put my bag on the floor between my feet where I can feel it against my ankle. "I wasn't sure who else to call."
"You did exactly the right thing."
He signals the server. I order coffee, wrap both hands around the mug when it arrives to keep them still, and I talk.
I give him the shape of the story and none of the substance: the blind, the pre-dawn drive, the sound of engines in the dark, I was scared and I left.
I don't tell him about the memory cards. I don't tell him about frame thirty-one, the one with his own face lit clean in the cargo light, sharp enough to count the silver in his hair.
He asks careful questions. Geography, timeline, how close I was, what I could make out in that light.
The questions of a trained investigator establishing the reliability of a witness, and underneath them the questions of a man checking what I know against what I'm not supposed to.
I answer with enough to seem cooperative and nothing he can use.
He has kind eyes. I notice the craft of them; warmth built in deliberately, the way a set decorator builds warmth into a room, every element chosen and placed.
I've photographed enough people in enough situations to know the difference between eyes that are kind and eyes that have learned to perform it.
His have learned.
After twenty minutes I set my mug down. "I'm sorry, but could I use the restroom? I've been anxious all morning."
"Of course." He gestures toward the back.
I pick up my camera bag. His eyes move to it just for a second, the flicker of a man who wants to say something and can't find the framing that wouldn't give him away.
I give him the slightly apologetic smile of a woman who takes her bag everywhere out of habit, and I walk toward the back of the café.
The kitchen is narrow and loud, two cooks and a dishwasher, nobody paying attention to me. The back door is propped open with a milk crate, the alley behind it bright and already stinking in the morning heat.
I go through it without looking back.
I walk at a steady pace for four blocks before I start running.
Not a sprint. A jog, purposeful, the way a woman runs when she's late for something ordinary.
I know this city. Three years of shooting it means I know which streets move, and I take those, cutting through alleys until I come out on Bourbon where it's already filling up with tourists finding their bearings.
I find a bar that's dark, cold, and half-empty and slide into the corner booth with my back to the wall. I pull out my phone and call David.
He picks up on the second ring. "Jesslyn. How'd the shoot go?"
The normalcy of it — his voice, that question, the assumption that I'm calling to check in the way I always check in after the first day of a shoot — almost breaks me. I press my hand flat on the table and breathe.
"I need you to listen to me," I say. "Something happened this morning and I need you to listen before you say anything."
After a beat, the tone of his voice shifts. Not alarmed yet, just attentive. "I'm listening."
I tell him everything. The blind, the engines, the containers, the girls.
Frame thirty-one. The tip line, the agent, the café on Chartres where I sat across from the man I photographed in the bayou, smiled at him, gave him nothing, and walked out the back.
I tell it fast, in order, because that's the only way I know how to tell it.
When I finish, David is quiet for a long moment.
"You're sure it was him," he says. "The same man."
"I spent an hour looking at his face on a laptop screen before I walked into that café. Yes. I'm sure."
Another silence. I can hear him thinking, the particular quality of David's silences when he's not stalling but actually working something through.
He was a wire photographer for twenty years before he became an editor, and he has the specific load-bearing steadiness of a person who has been in bad situations and knows that panic is something you afford yourself afterward, when there's time.
"Where are you right now?" he asks.
"A bar on Bourbon Street, in a booth in the back. My back's to the wall."
"Good. Stay there." I can hear him moving, a chair scraping. "Don't go back to the hotel, don't use your credit cards, don't call anyone else until you hear from me. Do you have cash on you?"
"Some."
"Order something. Look like you belong there." He pauses. "Jesslyn. My nephew Daniel, you've heard me mention him."
"Vaguely."
"He's with a motorcycle club out of Magnolia Bend, Mississippi. The Saints Outlaws." He says it carefully, like he's listening to see how I take it. "They're not law enforcement. But they're not the kind of people a dirty DEA agent can reach, either, and right now that's what matters."
I look at the bar around me. The tourists. The bartender. The absolute ordinary midmorning hum of a city that has no idea what I'm sitting in the middle of.
"A motorcycle club," I say.
"I know."
"David, I photograph herons."
"I know what you photograph." His voice is gentle in that immovable way he has, the tone that means he's already decided and is waiting for me to get there too.
"Someone will contact you. He'll say I sent him.
That's how you'll know. You did the right thing, getting out of that café when you did. Don't second-guess it."
He hangs up.
The bartender brings me a club soda I didn't order. I put a ten on the table and watch the door.
Every person who comes through gets thirty seconds of my full attention before I file them.
Tourists with lanyards. A man in his sixties in a linen shirt.
Two women with market bags. A kid who can't be more than twenty.
I catalogue every face the way I catalogue everything — automatic, thorough, the eye doing its job whether I ask it to or not — and none of them are Delacroix, none of them are anyone he sent.
I pull out my camera anyway. Not to shoot.
Just to hold. The weight of it settles something in my chest the way it always does.
The familiar solid heft that has been with me in the Atchafalaya at three in the morning, in drought-cracked fields in west Texas, in a December Chesapeake with ice forming on the reeds. It has never once let me down.
The card inside it has frame thirty-one on it. Delacroix in the cargo light, full face, no question and no ambiguity.
He knows someone was in that bayou. He doesn't know what I have.
I put the camera back and watch the door.
Magnolia Bend is four hours from New Orleans.
I have no idea when someone is coming, and the morning is sitting on me with both hands.
I think about the heron, the great blue that's been working that section of the bayou for two full seasons, the one I've made three separate trips trying to catch in the right light.
This morning I had him. The light was exactly right, the bird was still in the water doing what herons do when they think no one is watching.
Then the engines started.
I keep my back to the wall.
It's going to be a long time before anyone says David sent me.