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children’s author,” I said. “She wrote
Peter Rabbit
.”
    He wasn’t interested. “What kind of dogs are those?”
    “Pekingese.”
    “It’s a great picture of them.”
    It is, in fact, a terrible picture of them. One of them has wrenched his face away from the camera, and the other sits grimly in her owner’s hand, waiting for its chance. Obviously neither of them liked having its picture taken, though you can’t tell that from their expressions. They reveal nothing in their little flat-nosed faces, in their black little eyes.
    Beatrix Potter, on the other hand, comes through beautifully, in spite of the attempt to smile for the camera and the fact that she must have had to hold on to the Pekes for dear life, or maybe because of that. The fierce, humorous love she felt for her fierce, humorous little dogs is all there in her face. She must never, in spite of
Peter Rabbit
and its attendant fame, have developed a public face. Everything she felt was right there, unprotected, unshuttered. Like Katie.
    “Are any of these your dog?” Hunter asked. He was standing looking at the picture of Misha that hung above the couch.
    “No.” I said.
    “How come you don’t have any pictures of your dog?” he asked, and I wondered how he knew I had had a dog and what else he knew.
    “He didn’t like having his picture taken.”
    He folded up the readout, stuck it in his pocket, and turned around to look at the photo of Perdita again. “He looks like he was a real nice little dog,” he said.
    The uniform was waiting on the front step, obviously finished with whatever he had done to the car.
    “We’ll let you know if we find out who’s responsible,” Hunter said, and they left. On the way out to the street the uniform tried to tell him what he’d found, butHunter cut him off. The suspect has a house full of photographs of dogs, therefore he didn’t run over a poor facsimile of one on Van Buren this morning. Case closed.
    I went back over to the developer and fed the eisenstadt film in. “Positives, one two three order, five seconds,” I said, and watched as the pictures came up on the developer’s screen. Ramirez had said the eisenstadt automatically turned on whenever it was set upright on a level surface. She was right. It had taken a half-dozen shots on the way out to Tempe. Two shots of the Hitori it must have taken when I set it down to load the car, open door of same with prickly pear in the foreground, a blurred shot of palm trees and buildings with a minuscule, sharp-focused glimpse of the traffic on the expressway. Vehicles and people. There was a great shot of the red tanker that had clipped the jackal and ten or so of the yucca I had parked next to at the foot of the hill.
    It had gotten two nice shots of my forearm as I set it down on the kitchen counter of the Winnebago and some beautifully composed still lifes of Melmac with Spoons. Vehicles and people. The rest of the pictures were dead losses: my back, the open bathroom door, Jake’s back, and Mrs. Ambler’s public face.
    Except the last one. She had been standing right in front of the eisenstadt, looking almost directly into the lens. “When I think of that poor thing, all alone,” she had said, and by the time she turned around, she had her public face back on, but for a minute there, looking at what she thought was a briefcase and remembering, there she was, the person I had tried all morning to get a picture of.
    I took it into the living room and sat down and looked at it awhile.
    “So you knew this Katherine Powell in Colorado,” Ramirez said, breaking in without preamble, and the highwire slid silently forward and began to print out the lifeline. “I always suspected you of having some deepdark secret in your past. Is she the reason you moved to Phoenix?”
    I was watching the highwire advance the paper. Katherine Powell, 4628 Dutchman Drive, Apache Junction. Forty miles away.
    “Holy Mother, you were really cradle-robbing. According