The Black Box

with the same sinewy passion. He looked at his daughter, who was lying on the couch reading a book. Another school assignment. This one was called The Fault in Our Stars .
    “This is about his daughter,” he said.
    Maddie looked over the book at him.
    “What do you mean?”
    “This song. ‘Patricia.’ He wrote it for his daughter. He was away from her for long periods in her life, but he loved her and he missed her. You can hear that in it, right?”
    She thought a moment and then nodded.
    “I think. It almost sounds like the saxophone is crying.”
    Bosch nodded back.
    “Yeah, you hear it.”
    He went back to his work. He was going through the numerous story links that Bonn had supplied in an email. They included Anneke Jespersen’s last fourteen stories and photo essays for the Berlingske Tidende as well as the ten-years-later story the newspaper published in 2002. It was tedious work because the articles were in Danish and he had to use an Internet translation site to piece them together in English two or three paragraphs at a time.
    Anneke Jespersen had photographed and reported on the short first Gulf War from all angles. Her words and pictures came from the battlefields, the runways, the command posts, even the cruise ship used by the Allies as a floating R&R retreat. Her dispatches to the BT showed a journalist documenting a new kind of war, a high-tech battle launched swiftly from the sky. But Jespersen did not stay at a safe distance.When the battle moved to the ground in Operation Desert Sabre, she found her way into the action with the Allied troops, documenting the battles to retake Kuwait City and Al Khafji.
    Her stories told the facts, her photographs showed the costs. She photographed the U.S. barracks in Dhahran, where twenty-eight soldiers died in a SCUD missile attack. There were no photos of bodies, but the smoking hulks of destroyed Humvees somehow imparted the human loss. She shot the POW camps in the Saudi desert, where Iraqi prisoners carried constant weariness and fear in their eyes. Her camera caught the billowing black smoke of the Kuwaiti oil fields burning behind the retreat of the Iraqi troops. And her most haunting shots were of the Highway of Death, where the long convoy of enemy troops as well as Iraqi and Palestinian civilians had been mercilessly bombed by Allied forces.
    Bosch had been to war. His was a war of mud and blood and confusion. But he saw up close the people they killed, that he killed. Some of those memories were as crystal clear to him as the photographs now on his screen. They came to him mostly at night when he couldn’t sleep or unexpectedly when some everyday image conjured up a somehow connected image from the jungles or tunnels where he had been. He knew war first hand, and Anneke Jespersen’s words and pictures struck him as the closest he had ever seen it through a journalist’s eyes.
    After the cease-fire, Jespersen didn’t go home. She stayed in the region for months, documenting the refugee camps and destroyed villages, the efforts to rebuild and recover as the Allies transitioned into something called Operation Provide Comfort.
    If it was possible to get to know the unseen person on the other side of the camera, the one holding the pen, it was in these postwar stories and photos. Jespersen sought out the mothers and children and those most damaged and dispossessed by war. They may have just been words and pictures but together they told the human side and cost of a high-tech war and its aftermath.
    Maybe it was the accompaniment of Art Pepper’s soulful saxophone, but as he painstakingly translated and read the stories and looked at the pictures, Bosch felt that he somehow grew closer to Anneke Jespersen. Across twenty years she reached forward with her work and tugged at him, and this made his resolve stronger. Twenty years earlier he had apologized to her. This time he promised her. He would find out who took everything away from her.
    The last stop on Bosch’s digital tour of the life and work of Anneke Jespersen was the memorial website constructed by her brother. To enter the site, he had to register with his email address, a digital equivalent to signing the guest registry at a funeral. The site was then divided into two sections: photos taken by Jespersen and photos taken of her.
    Many of the shots in the first section were from the articles Bosch had already seen through the links provided by Bonn. There were many extra photos from the