James Merritt
The surveyor always knew where he stood.
Justice || History || Resolution
His briefcase was in the chamber. Forty feet underground, on a shelf behind a server rack, sealed in a plastic evidence bag that someone had labeled — with the dark bureaucratic tidiness of an organization that documented its own wrongdoing — JM — Personal Effects — March 1995. Inside: his personal surveying notes, a photograph of his daughter who had been three years old in March 1995 and was now thirty-three, a half-eaten granola bar of such antiquity as to have achieved a kind of archaeological significance, and a folded letter addressed to no one, the first line of which read: If someone finds this: I’m James Merritt, federal land surveyor, and I’m about to go underground in every sense of the phrase.
Elena was not present when the briefcase was found. She was told about it by Diaz, in the careful way Diaz told her things: fact first, implication second, emotion left entirely to Elena’s discretion. “He knew,” Elena said. “He knew something might happen to him and he went anyway.” “The notes in that briefcase would have been enough to trigger an investigation in 1995,” Diaz said. “They’re more than enough now.” “His daughter,” Elena said. “Does she know?” “She’s been notified that her father’s personal effects have been located,” Diaz said. “That’s all I can tell you.” Elena thought about what it meant to be told, at thirty-three, that your father’s half-eaten granola bar had been sitting in a plastic bag underground for thirty years. That his last act had been to document the truth carefully, in case someone later needed it. That he had not, after all, walked into the forest and simply disappeared. He had walked in with his eyes open and his notebook ready and his pen moving.
She wrote a piece about James Merritt that was not part of the investigation series. It was just about him. His daughter agreed to an interview. It was the hardest piece she ever wrote and the best one.