Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

“Jackals,” I said. “You’re sure it wasn’t the vidcam footage?” There wasn’t anything in the eisenstadt shots except Mrs. Ambler and Taco, and even Hunter couldn’t have put that together, could he?

“Of course I’m sure,” Ramirez said, her voice bouncing off the walls. “It was one of the prints from the eisenstadt. I never even saw the vidcam stuff. I sent it straight to composing. I told you.”

I went over to the developer and fed the cartridge in. The first dozen shots were nothing, stuff the eisenstadt had taken from the backseat of the car. “Start with frame ten,” I said. “Positives. One two three order. Five seconds.”

“What did you say?” Ramirez demanded.

“I said, did they say what they were looking for?”

“Are you kidding? I wasn’t even there as far as they were concerned. They split up the pile and started through them on my desk.”

The yucca at the foot of the hill. More yucca. My forearm as I set the eisenstadt down on the counter. My back.

“Whatever it was they were looking for, they found it,” Ramirez said.

I glanced at Katie. She met my gaze steadily, unafraid. She had never been afraid, not even when I told her she had killed all the dogs, not even when I’d shown up on her doorstep after fifteen years.

“The one in the uniform showed it to the other one,” Ramirez was saying, “and said, ‘You were wrong about the woman doing it. Look at this.’”

“Did you get a look at the picture?”

Still life of cups and spoons. Mrs. Ambler’s arm. Mrs. Ambler’s back.

“I tried. It was a truck of some kind.”

“A truck? Are you sure? Not a Winnebago?”

“A truck. What the hell is going on over there?”

I didn’t answer. Jake’s back. Open shower door. Still life with Sanka. Mrs. Ambler remembering Taco.

“What woman are they talking about?” Ramirez said. “The one you wanted the lifeline on?”

“No,” I said. The picture of Mrs. Ambler was the last one on the sheet. The developer went back to the beginning. Bottom half of the Hitori. Open car door. Prickly pear. “Did they say anything else?”

“The one in uniform pointed to something on the hardcopy and said, ‘See, there’s his number on the side. Can you make it out?’”

Blurred palm trees and the expressway. The tanker hitting the jackal.

“Stop,” I said.

The image froze.

“What?” Ramirez said.

It was a great action shot, the back wheels passing right over the mess that had been the jackal’s hind legs. The jackal was already dead, of course, but you couldn’t see that or the already drying blood coming out of its mouth because of the angle. You couldn’t see the truck’s license number, either, because of the speed the tanker was going, but the number was there, waiting for the Society’s computers. It looked like the tanker had just hit it.

“What did they do with the picture?” I asked.

“They took it into the chief’s office. I tried to call up the originals from composing, but the chief had already sent for them and your vidcam footage. Then I tried to get you, but I couldn’t get past your damned exclusion.”

“Are they still in there with the chief?”

“They just left. They’re on their way over to your house. The chief told me to tell you he wants ‘full cooperation,’ which means hand over the negatives and any other film you took this morning. He told me to keep my hands off. No story. Case closed.”

“How long ago did they leave?”

“Five minutes. You’ve got plenty of time to make me a print. Don’t highwire it. I’ll come pick it up.”

“What happened to ‘The last thing I need is trouble with the Society’?”

“It’ll take them at least twenty minutes to get to your place. Hide it somewhere the Society won’t find it.”

“I can’t,” I said, and listened to her furious silence. “My developer’s broken. It just ate my longshot film,” I said, and hit the exclusion button again.

“You want to see who hit the jackal?” I said to Katie, and motioned her over to the developer. “One of Phoenix’s finest.”

She came and stood in front of the screen, looking at the picture. If the Society’s computers were really good, they could probably prove the jackal was already dead, but the Society wouldn’t keep the film long enough for that. Hunter and Segura had probably already destroyed the highwire copies.

Maybe I should offer to run the cartridge sheet through the permanganate bath for them when they got here, just to save time.

I looked at Katie. “It looks guilty as hell, doesn’t it?” I said. “Only it isn’t.”

She didn’t say anything, didn’t move.

“It would have killed the jackal if it had hit it. It was going at least ninety. But the jackal was already dead.”

She looked across at me.

“The Society would have sent the Amblers to jail. It would have confiscated the house they’ve lived in for nearly twenty years for an accident that was nobody’s fault. They didn’t even see it coming. It just ran right out in front of them.”

Katie put her hand up to the screen and touched the jackal’s image.

“They’ve suffered enough,” I said, looking at her.

It was getting dark. I hadn’t turned on any lights, and the red image of the tanker made her nose look sunburned.

“All these years she’s blamed her husband for her dog’s death, and he didn’t do it,” I said. “A Winnebago’s a hundred square feet on the inside. That’s about as big as this developer, and they’ve lived inside it for fifteen years, while the lanes got narrower and the highways shut down, hardly enough room to breathe, let alone live, and her blaming him for something he didn’t do.”

In the ruddy light from the screen she looked sixteen.

“They won’t do anything to the driver, not with the tankers hauling thousands of gallons of water into Phoenix every day. Even the Society won’t run the risk of a boycott. They’ll destroy the negatives and call the case closed. And the Society won’t go after the Amblers,” I said. “Or you.”

I turned back to the developer. “Go,” I said, and the image changed. Yucca. Yucca. My forearm. My back. Cups and spoons.

“Besides,” I said. “I’m an old hand at shifting the blame.” Mrs. Ambler’s arm. Mrs. Ambler’s back. Open shower door. “Did I ever tell you about Aberfan?”

Katie was still watching the screen, her face pale now from the light blue One-Hundred Percent formica shower stall.

“The Society already thinks the tanker did it. The only one I’ve got to convince is my editor.” I reached across to the phone and took the exclusion off. “Ramirez,” I said, “wanta go after the Society?”

Jake’s back. Cups, spoons, and Sanka.

“I did,” Ramirez said in a voice that could have frozen the Salt River, “but your developer was broken, and you couldn’t get me a picture.”

Mrs. Ambler and Taco.

I hit the exclusion button again and left my hand on it. “Stop,” I said. “Print.” The screen went dark, and the print slid out into the tray. “Reduce frame. Permanganate bath by one percent. Follow on screen.” I took my hand off. “What’s Dolores Chiwere doing these days, Ramirez?”

“She’s working investigative. Why?”

I didn’t answer. The picture of Mrs. Ambler faded a little, a little more.

“The Society does have a link to the lifelines!” Ramirez said, not quite as fast as Hunter, but almost. “That’s why you requested your old girlfriend’s line, isn’t it? You’re running a sting.”

I had been wondering how to get Ramirez off Katie’s trail, and she had done it herself, jumping to conclusions just like the Society. With a little effort, I could convince Katie, too: Do you know why I really came to see you today? To catch the Society. I had to pick somebody the Society couldn’t possibly know about from my lifeline, somebody I didn’t have any known connection with.