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of the car. It was of the fresh grave with the massive headstone. "Aileen
Bennett, Beloved Wife, 1965-1998" and "Max Bennett, Beloved Husband, 1965-"
Indigo shivered in his arms and flipped the otherwise blank page. The next
page was also blank.
"No more?"
"He skipped a few pages." Ukiah flipped over the next five empty pages. "I
think he has a roll of film he never developed that he left space for. Here,
this is where the pictures with me start." He tapped the first photo, him
looking unsure at the camera, looking only twelve. "I remember Mom Jo giving
him this photo the first time he came to the farm, so I think this was what he
used as a reference when he worked my case."
"Who is this kid with you here?" She pointed to the second photo, taken at a
party.
"Johnny Libzer, the first case that I worked on with Max. The family asked us
back a week later for this party. It was kind of embarrassing how much fuss
they put up."
The initial few pages, he noticed for the first time, focused on the people
they had found.
Sometimes Ukiah was in the frame, sometimes not. They were stilted, forced,
posed things that Ukiah vaguely recognized as a typical snapshot. Max, though,
liked to take "unguarded moment" pictures, and took them in quality par to a
professional. Slowly Max's normal photos drifted in and took over and for a
while they focused only on Ukiah. Ukiah on a lookout point, eyes closed in
focus, nose to the wind that blasted back his hair. Ukiah lost among the giant
hemlocks of Cook Forest, looking at the camera with wolf intensity through a
screen of ferns. Ukiah supporting one of the Boy Scouts he rescued from the
Yellowstone wildfire, both covered with black soot. Ukiah on one of the large
stone outcroppings at
McConnell's Mill, muddy from two days of searching the creek bottoms, asleep,
half-curled about recently
found, blonde moppet Sarah Healy.
"These are beautiful," Indigo whispered as she reached the last page. "Do you
think I could get copies?"
"I guess so." Ukiah handed her the next album. "I'm afraid I took a lot of the
photos in this one, and it shows."
In the second book, Max expanded first to Ukiah's family and then to their
range of friends. Mom
Lara asleep on the front porch with Cally in her arms, the sunlight brilliant
in her hair. Mom Jo perched in the tree house. Chino blending with the
woodwork. Janey, regal and proud. Kraynak breathing smoke like a dragon. Their
Friday night poker gang, lit only by the hanging light, caught in midlaugh.
Ukiah's photos were clumsy imitations. He had tried for Max's style but missed
somehow. Looking at them now, Ukiah realized that one of his mistakes had been
that he tried too often for a subject in motion.
Parts were blurred, details were lost. He needed to catch the subject in a
moment of stillness, wait until they stopped.
The last photos had actually been taken by a professional. They were used in a
magazine, accompanying a story on the agency. He and Max had taken the
photographer on a search-and-rescue into a freshwater marsh. On
black-and-white film, he had caught the marsh's stark eeriness and the
grueling nature of the track. Ukiah had had to all but crawl through every
inch of the trail, and only Max's backup from a punt-boat had kept him going
until they found the missing girl. They were, Ukiah realized, the only
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pictures of Max and him working together.
Indigo shook her head. "It's strange to flip through the two albums and see
Max come back from the dead." She opened the first book and then laid beside
it the second one. The gravestone on a sterile page. Max leaning against the
Cherokee, laughing as Ukiah sprawled muddy and exhausted on the hood.
"You love him, don't you?"
Ukiah nodded. "When I was young, going to church, doing stuff with the scouts,
playing baseball, I
saw the other kids with their dads and I wanted" he scrambled for the right
word "needed so bad to have a father too. I'd make up stories for myself about
what my father was like." He shrugged. "Maybe it was like a chick imprinting.
Max was the first guy to show up and feed the need. Somewhere along the way,
he's become all the father that I wanted, needed." He grinned and whispered.
"But don't tell Max. It's not a manly thing to talk about."
"Sometimes," she whispered back as she kissed his neck, "it really shows that
you were raised by two women."
***
It was nearing two o'clock when they disentangled themselves from the couch.
"Are you going to be in trouble for taking such a long lunch?"
Indigo shook her head. "I've been pulling fourteen-hour days this week so far.
When I said I was taking a long lunch, the only thing that they said was not
to go out alone. They've tightened up security on the offices and are
double-teaming everyone. Things are tense right now."
Ukiah considered his new memories. "This is really weird for the Ontongard.
Normally they would do anything not to attract attention to themselves. They
have time and patience usually to do things right.
It's how they've stayed invisible for so long."
Indigo shrugged. "Statistically, they couldn't stay invisible forever. Wil
Trace almost disappeared mysteriously with his death blamed on the Pack. They
didn't count on the speed trap. They didn't expect you to be at the police
station. Those two points are the only things that brought them to the
forefront."
"And Doctor Haze."
Indigo's eyes narrowed as she considered the dead robotics engineer. "Doctor
Haze is a tricky mystery. If you assume that the Ontongard were going to use
her, the question becomes how. She was
working on several top-secret projects with broad military applications, but
the more we looked at those, the less likely they were the target. Her family
is comfortably wealthy, but not the Rockefellers. She has an uncle who is a
judge on the state court, but his caseload has nothing of importance right
now."
"The Ontongard work in the far future. They might have been setting up with
something five years from now being the target. What are the projects she was
working on?"
Indigo winced slightly.
"I
can't discuss them with you. I can tell you that they're years from being in a
working prototype stage, and Doctor Haze was barely involved in them until
recently. She was only bumped up the promotion ladder a few weeks ago when her
immediate supervisor was killed." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]