On the afternoon of December 13, 1989, two young men were taking a shortcut through a wooded lot in Volusia County, Florida,

when one of them noticed what looked like a piece of carpet lying in the underbrush.

The carpet was old and dirty.

A remnant somebody might have rolled up and dumped

from a truck. The wooded lot ran alongside Interstate 95, the same stretch of highway that carried

tourists down from Daytona Beach towards the Cape, and that on most nights, hummed with the

low sound of long-haul trucks.

The lot itself was a green margin between exits, a place nobody walks through unless they

have a reason.

It was a normal December in Volusia County, low 70s in the early afternoon.

The humid weight that sits over the central part of the state from May through October has finally backed off,

leaving the air still humid by anywhere else's standards, but dry by Florida's.

The light at that hour is long and flat, coming in at a low angle off the Atlantic,

catching the saw palmettos and slash pines, and turning the whole

roadside scrub, a pale gold for a few hours, a breeze off the ocean. The trade wind along the

Florida East Coast does not stop for the season, but it does slow down a little. The wooden lot

itself was mixed scrub of the sort that grows in the disturbed soil

along an interstate corridor in central Florida, pine, palmetto, a few scrub oaks,

Spanish moss hanging where the canopy thickened, the understory of vines and dead palm fronds

that turns any walk off the shoulder into a careful one. The lot was bordered on

one side by the interstate, on another by a service road, and on the other two by more of the same scrub.

It had the anonymity of land nobody owns in any way they bother to enforce. People dumped things in there,

...