four

She had been at this for three years. The boxes filled a room in her apartment that had once been meant for a child. The child had not come and the marriage had not lasted and now there were only the boxes. The files. The silence of a story that did not want to be told.

The documents arrived in batches. FOIA requests that took months. Court filings that cost money she did not have. Brown envelopes from sources who would not give their names. She had learned to wait. She had learned that this was a story measured in years not months and that the people who had tried to tell it faster had failed or quit or simply gone silent.

She spread the pages across the floor. Hundreds of them. Thousands. And everywhere the black bars.

The redactions were their own language. She had learned to read them. The length of a bar told you something. The placement told you more. When a name was blacked out at the top of a page and the same length bar appeared in the middle you could start to see the shape of a person moving through the text. A ghost made of absences.

She had a wall covered with photographs and string. She knew how it looked. She knew what they called people who did this. But the string was not madness. The string was the only way to see it. The connections that existed beneath the surface of the world.

-----

There were patterns.

Flight logs with destinations redacted but timestamps intact. You could chart the frequency. You could see when the trips increased and when they stopped. You could cross-reference with other documents—calendars obtained from a lawsuit, photographs with metadata intact, the rare unredacted page that slipped through because someone had been careless or brave.

Names surfaced at the edges. Partial names. First names only. Initials that matched initials in other documents. She kept a list. She kept many lists. At night she dreamed in black bars and woke with her hand reaching for a pen.

The island appeared in almost everything. Never named directly but present. A location marked only by coordinates in one document. A reference to “the property” in another. Flight plans that ended at a small airstrip that served no other purpose. She had found a photograph once, satellite imagery purchased from a company that sold such things. White buildings in green jungle. A temple that was not a temple. Roads that led to structures she could not identify.

What had happened there was redacted. What had happened there was always redacted.

-----

The death had made it harder not easier.

She had thought—everyone had thought—that the boxes would open. That the witnesses would speak. That the names would finally be pulled into the light where names are made to answer.

Instead the boxes sealed tighter. The witnesses went quiet or went away. The lawsuits settled for amounts that were themselves redacted. The names that should have surfaced sank deeper into the black.

She was not the only one who had noticed. There was a phrase she had come across in her research. A legal term. Prosecutorial discretion. It meant that someone decided what cases to bring and what cases to let go. It meant that justice was not blind but rather looked where it was told to look.

The man in the cell had been arrested once before. Years earlier. He had done the same things then that he was accused of doing now. There had been evidence then too. Victims willing to testify. A case that should have ended him.

Instead he had served thirteen months. He had been allowed to leave the facility six days a week for work release. He had continued doing what he did. And the prosecutor who had made this possible had risen to great heights. Had been given positions of extraordinary power. Had helped place judges on courts where cases might one day be heard.

She had this prosecutor’s name. It was not redacted. It was on the record for anyone to see.

But the name meant nothing without the other names. Without the hand that had reached down from somewhere high and signaled that this man was protected. That this man was useful. That this man should be allowed to continue collecting and collecting until his collection became too dangerous to let him live.

-----

She stood at the window. The city lights below her. Somewhere out there the men whose names she sought were sleeping in beds that cost more than her apartment. They were waking in the morning and reading newspapers that did not mention them and going to offices where they made decisions that shaped the lives of millions.

They had been to the island. She was certain of this. She had fragments. Partial flight logs. A photograph where a face was blurred but a ring was visible. A ring she had seen in other photographs on fingers attached to hands that shook the hands of presidents.

The black bars protected them. The black bars would always protect them. This is what the black bars were for.

But black bars had edges. And at the edges, if you looked long enough, you could see the outline of what was hidden. Not the thing itself. Just the shape. The shadow it cast.

She went back to the floor. Back to the pages. Somewhere in the redactions was a seam. A place where the black bars did not quite meet. A name that would lead to another name that would lead to the names that mattered.

She had time. She had nothing but time.

She began again.