Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 35507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 178(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 178(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
"It's his name," Banks says. "It's his birth year. The laceration note is generic enough to be real and generic enough to be typed by a committee. I'm on the original file hash. Give me an hour. Don't get on a highway to Halo until I say so."
"Copy," Colt says.
Alden is a shape in the far doorway, talking low into a different phone. I sit where Marin points, which is next to my own drive and a cable she has already claimed.
"Chicago files," Marin says. "All of them. Not only the dock. If Billy left ink in your frames, I want the rest of the accidentals."
The Chicago folder is a year of my life in raw files. Campus exteriors I was paid for. Hallways I wasn’t. A loading bay at the ugly hour. Crates. Clipboards. The helix mark on glass I was told to forget. I work backward from the dock shot we already cropped, then wider, then into the takes I almost dumped because they were "too busy" and "not the assignment."
Busy is where the truth lives. I used to know that. I forgot it when I started running.
I linger on a frame I took because the dim light made the concrete look wet. Nobody is in it. That was the point at the time. Now I hunt the edges, the paper, the marks people hang when they think a photographer is only after the crate stencil. My thumb aches from the trackpad. The mill coffee has gone cold in a mug Marin parked at my elbow without asking if I wanted it. I drink it anyway.
Marin and Banks keep chewing the clinic. Dates. A nurse who no longer works there. I let their voices become back matter and I go frame by frame, the way I used to in a rented studio with bad heat and a deadline, until my eyes catch a thing my brain filed under clutter six months ago.
I pinch in.
Background. A pallet jack. A sheaf of work orders clipped to the handle, half in shadow. The twisted silver helix through a V sits small in the corner of the top sheet, the same mark that was on the shooter's jacket and the same mark that sits on the Northline receipt in Marin's map. I knew that much. I dismissed the rest because I was shooting crates, and crates were the story I thought I had.
Beside the mark, in that slashed impatient hand I already matched to a lunch-note E, there is a string of numbers.
I stare at them. They have to mean something.
"Colt."
He's at my shoulder so fast the chair squeaks. Marin looks up. Banks goes quiet on the speaker, which is how you know a Hawthorne has entered a sentence.
"I thought it was mine," I say. My voice comes out steady and I'm fiercely grateful for that. "Catalog numbers. The way I used to slug selects before I got sloppy and started dating folders. Year and frame range. That's what I told myself when I scrolled past it in April."
"And now," Colt says.
"Now I know my own system, and this isn't it. Too many digits after the decimal. Too clean. It's a pair. Latitude. Longitude. Maybe?"
I pull a browser on the mill network because Marin will yell if I use my own. I type the string. The map jumps.
A pin drops outside Woodbridge Falls, east of the river, in a blank patch the county calls industrial and the trees have been trying to take back. STREET VIEW UNAVAILABLE. The label that loads a second later is faint, bureaucratic, and ugly.
NORTHLINE BONDED / STORAGE YARD 4. ABANDONED.
Colt's hand closes on the back of my chair. I feel the tremor in it. He doesn't let anyone else see it. I do, because I'm close enough.
"He wrote that on Helix paper," I say. "In my shot. On purpose. In a place a camera would have to be to catch the crates."
Colt's throat works. The room waits on him and he hates that, I can tell, the way he hates maybe, the way he hates a picnic that turns into a print.
I turn in the chair so I have to look at his face when I say it. "Your father wasn't hiding from the camera. He was using it."
Something raw moves through him, huge and unwilling. His mouth goes tight around a name he hasn't said that way in years. Then the work comes back into his shoulders. "Billy left breadcrumbs," he rasps out. "In her files. In a rock. On a trail I was too angry to walk until a civilian tripped me onto it."
"Oakley," I correct, because I can't help myself even now.
"Oakley." The correction is part of the hit. "He used you. He used a magazine shoot. He put coordinates on paper he knew Helix would hang in the background, and he counted on somebody like you keeping the raws."