“To be honest, I’d rather have her alive and pissed off than dead and happy,” I said, putting my hands flat on the table before I could grab hold of Becks again. “If you’ve seen her file, you must know she suffered from retinal Kellis-Amberlee.”

“Yes, I saw that. It’s amazingshe accomplished so much, given her disability.”

I somehow managed to smile at him. I may never know how I did that. “She did a lot with her life, it’s true. Now I’ve got to soldier on and take care of the things she wasn’t able to finish.”

“Oh?” Director Swenson gave me an attentive look. “What was she working on?”

“Reservoir conditions. See, she knew a lot of people through her support groups and mailing lists—”

Support groups? asked George, sounding horrified. I never joined a support group in my life.

I ignored her. “—and she started noticing this crazy pattern.” Was it my imagination, or was Director Swenson going still? “It was like her friends died faster than anybody else’s. I mean, even faster than my friends, and most of my friends are Irwins, which is sort of like waving a big red flag in the face of Darwinism. So she started to dig.”

“Funny, I don’t remember seeing any received queries in her file,” said Director Swenson. His voice had gone completely blank, neither excited nor cold. The voice of a man in the process of disconnecting.

“She didn’t query the CDC,” said Becks, before I could open my mouth. I decided to let her take the conversation and run. Her training was better for this bluff than mine was. “She figured that if there wasn’t a pattern, she didn’t want to bother you, and if there was…” She let the sentence trail off before lifting her shoulders in a “What are you going to do?” shrug, and said, “It was a pretty big scoop. If the reservoir conditions were that dangerous, and somebody was going to break the story, why couldn’t it be her?”

“I suppose her notes were lost along with your address book,” said Director Swenson, looking at me.

“Oh, no, not at all,” I replied. “I’ve been studying them, actually. I mean, they’re a little outside my reading level, but hey, what’s life without learning? She’s right, too. The death rate is, like, crazy. Some of these people, statistically, should have lived to see their great-grandkids. Which means either the overall mortality rates for the country need to be recalculated, because we’re calibrating something really, really wrong, or folks with reservoir conditions are dying at a really accelerated rate.” I gave him my best big-dumb-Irwin face, and asked, “Which do you think it is?”