Buried on Avenue B by Peter de Jonge Read Free Book Online Page A

and dumps each small scoop into a basket covered by a fine-mesh screen. It’s slow, tedious work, even more so for the gallery of detectives, like watching a man empty a bathtub with a spoon. The temperature is rising quickly, and because of the tarp, there’s no breeze. Kelso in particular grows restless.
    â€œAny chance we could goose this up a little?”
    â€œExcavating is a destructive process,” says Bradley without turning. “You only have one chance to do it right.”
    Bradley works briskly but carefully, the sweat stain on his shirt expanding at about the same rate as the hole. It’s at least half an hour before he comes into contact with anything other than dirt, but when he does, the sound is so sharp, everyone but Bradley jumps. “We got a body,” says Bradley. “Naked, topless, headless. Petite.”
    Bradley twists on his knees and extends his arm. Lying tits up on the trowel is a cigarette lighter in the shape of a female torso.
    In the next hour, Bradley and the mesh catch one stray item after another—an old subway token like the ones O’Hara saw in Henderson’s cigar box, a couple foreign coins, a marble, a folded-up $20 bill, a tiny plastic bag of weed, and then a couple larger objects: a CD, a Swiss Army knife, and a pint of whiskey. As they’re found, the intern deposits them in a plastic container, and in one of the many lulls O’Hara wanders over for a closer look. They are such a motley assortment, and in an effort to make some sense of them and their possible connection, O’Hara pulls out her notebook and lists everything Bradley has unearthed so far: “1 cigarette lighter, 1 subway token, 2 coins—5 pesos, 25 yen—1 roach clip, 1 marble, $20 bill, pint of Ballantine’s, 1 Swiss Army knife, 1 synthetic pearl, 1 CD, 1 small bag of weed.”
    Of the objects in the Tupperware, the pint of Ballantine’s gets O’Hara’s attention first, not because it’s good and alcoholic, but because it’s unopened. Why would someone throw away a brand-new bottle? That it’s unopened differentiates it from the rest of the items, which seem like random urban debris accumulated over the years. But when she scrutinizes the others more closely, she notices that the tiny plastic bag of pot is also sealed. As O’Hara pores over the collection as best she can through the plastic lid, the intern adds another New York artifact—a ticket stub from Sunshine Cinema for a movie called the The Lives of Others dated 6/11/07. The date surprises O’Hara. That’s less than three months ago, and when she combines it with the pristine condition of the pint and some of the other items, it doesn’t jibe with a seventeen-year-old homicide. Then O’Hara recalls Bradley’s comment about “opportunistic growth.” There may be nothing quite like human fertilizer, but would it still be pushing up daisies after seventeen years? While the intern is nearby, O’Hara asks her to flip over the CD. O’Hara sees that it’s Coldplay, something called X&Y , which according to the label came out in 2005, but O’Hara is distracted from her calculations about dates and timing by word from Bradley of another find.
    â€œThis is soft,” says Bradley almost to himself. Till now, everything Bradley has found has been hard and quite small.
    After Bradley climbs out of the grave, O’Hara sees that the entire length and width of the hole has been taken down more than two feet. Bradley, who is drenched in sweat, takes a long pull from a bottle of water, then goes back to his lunchbox and removes a brush and a single chopstick, this time a wooden one. Back in the hole, Bradley uses both to pick and whisk away the dirt from the soft thing he has found.
    â€œIt’s some kind of fabric,” he says, and a couple minutes later, “It’s the bill.”
    He backs away to give the lieutenant and