The only pictures that showed any excessive amount of skin were adults, both normal people and Case Fifty-Threes, but I could see the darkness in Gully’s eye, and I could see the defensiveness in the lace-girl Chantilly’s picture. Arms folded, body turned partially away, neck rigid and chin set. It wasn’t a smiling picture. Not a lot of them were. There were a lot of dark, grainy backgrounds.

Gentle Giant was an adult, and the picture had him stand with his back to the camera, and by the look of it, he wasn’t standing tall, but bent forward, head ducked down slightly, his eye glancing over his shoulder in a wary or uncomfortable way. Mottled, mossy skin, with bare back, buttocks, and the backs of his thighs.

Or was I seeing those things only because Sveta hated him so much that I felt obligated to? Because the pictures, when they’d first come up on the scene and started popping up wherever Case Fifty-Threes were involved, were ones that Sveta had dissected while hanging out in the hospital room with me?

That Sveta had seen the feedback from people in her small, insular community, that they’d been paid handsomely for the photos, many of them desperately in need of that money, that the photographer hadn’t done anything wrong that they could put their finger on, and they’d still walked away uncomfortable and unhappy, then been unhappier still when the pictures started circulating in certain circles, and in some select cases, outraged when one picture in particular had taken off and saw the photographer indulging in his fifteen minutes of fame and his weeks of gallery showings. There had been campaigns and outreach to other Case Fifty-Threes to warn them off. But the money drew them in.

The discomfort and outrage had even extended to the way the tame, clothed images like Gully’s had been used. Chantilly’s image being on the wall suggested he’d carried on after getting set up again, because it looked too recent to be pre-Gold-Morning.

I was trying to be fair, to extend a benefit of a doubt. And I was groping beyond the point that there was a logical, empathetic, human rationale for what he did. I was reaching more into the territory that pegged him as stupid, incapable of understanding that he’d wronged people, because the wrong could be the sort that was hard to grasp.

When in doubt, assume circumstances beyond their control, assume context. When that failed, assume ignorance. And even there, seeing how he’d done well, how he didn’t seem stupid or incapable, I couldn’t apply that label. When that failed… I wasn’t sure.

He was exploitative. The fact he wasn’t acknowledging the truly scummy side of Orchard was bothering me more. Brainwashing? The victims hadn’t been willing.

“Who tipped them off, and how?” Tattletale asked.