John Sandford - Heat Lightning

“Who’s the professor? You say they were arguing?”

“Not arguing, just kinda… getting into it. One of those Vietnam discussions, where not everybody sees things the same way.”

“I need that,” Virgil said. “What’s the guy’s name? The professor’s? Is he really a professor?”

“Yeah, he is. University of Wisconsin at Madison. Mead Sinclair. He’s doing research on long-term aftereffects of the Vietnam War, is what he says,” Grogan said. “This last meeting, we were pushing him, and he said he actually was an antiwar guy during Vietnam, and then he says he was in Hanoi with the Jane Fonda group during the war.”

“Bet that made everybody happy,” Virgil said.

“A couple guys wanted to throw his ass out on the street-but most of them, you know, say, whatever . Jane Fonda’s old and that was a long time ago. Anyway, he sort of got into it with Ray and Bob. Maybe something came up…”

“That’s Mead Sinclair.” Virgil wrote it in his notebook.

“Yep. Pretty snazzy name, huh?”

Two names: Mead Sinclair, Ray Bunton.

Virgil was out the door, halfway to his car, when Grogan called, “Hey, wait a minute. I might have something for you.” Grogan walked up the side of the building to an ancient Nissan pickup, popped open the passenger-side door, and took out an old leather briefcase. He dug around inside it for a moment, then pulled out a sheaf of xeroxed papers, stapled together. “When the professor asked if he could sit in, he sent me a paper he wrote on Vietnam… I never read it. Maybe it’d be of some use.”

He handed it over: a reprint from Mother Jones magazine, “The Legacy of Agent Orange.”

BACK ACROSS TOWN to BCA headquarters. Virgil left the truck in the parking lot, climbed the stairs to Davenport ’s office, asked his secretary, Carol, where he could sit with a computer.

“Lucas said you can use his office until he gets back. After that, we’ll find something else,” she said. “He said not to try to pick the lock on the gray steel file. Nothing else is locked.”

“The gray steel one,” Virgil said.

“Yeah. It’s got employee evaluations and that sort of thing in there,” she said. Carol was one of the rubbery blondes who dominated the state bureaucracy; sergeant-major types who kept the place going.

“Okay. I won’t,” Virgil said.

He sat in Davenport’s chair, took a good look at the lock on the gray steel cabinet, and Carol asked from over his shoulder, from the doorway, “What do you think?”

“Not a chance,” he said. “If it was standard file, I could pop it. This is more like a safe. Lucas’s idea of a joke.”

“I’ve never figured out where he keeps the key,” she said.

“Probably on a key ring.”

“Huh. I doubt it. A key ring would break the line of his trousers.” She did a thing with her eyebrows, then said, “Ah, well,” and, “Rose Marie’s in the building.”

“She’s not looking for me?” Rose Marie was the state commissioner of public safety, the woman who got Davenport his job, with overall responsibility for the BCA and several other related agencies, like the highway patrol.

“Hard to tell,” Carol said, and she went back to her desk.

Virgil turned to the computer, wiggled his fingers, called up Google, and typed in Mead Sinclair.

THE SCOUT sat at a laptop and worked over the photographs he’d taken outside Sanderson’s house two nights before the killing. The photos had been taken with a Leica M8 with a Noctilux 50mm lens, with no light but that from nearby windows and, in two shots, from the headlights of a passing car.

He’d taken them in the camera’s RAW format, which would allow him to enhance them in a program called Adobe Lightroom. He had a problem: the reflectivity of the 3M paint used in Minnesota license plates was too strong.

He had been exposing for the extreme low light, and the passing car had caught him by surprise. The direct light, from the headlights, had blown out the plates, leaving nothing but white rectangles on the back of the car. He hadn’t had a chance to reduce the exposure before the passing car was gone.

Actually, he admitted to himself, he did have time, but hadn’t thought to do it in the few seconds before the opportunity was gone.

The scout knew cameras, but he was not a photographic professional. He was, however, a professional in his own fields of reconnaissance and interrogation, and unrelentingly self-critical. Self-criticism, he believed, was the scout’s key to survival. He’d not done well with the photography. He would work on it when he had a chance.

He worked through Lightroom’s photo library, enlarging one shot after another, looking for the one shot that might have caught light from the passing car as it turned a corner, or light reflecting off the houses as the car went past, enough light to bring up the number, but not so much that it blew it out.

And he stopped to look at faces.

Three men, arguing on a T of concrete, where Sanderson’s front walk met the public sidewalk, in a shaft of light from the door of Sanderson’s house, with a little additional light from two front windows over the porch.

The tough-looking man in beaded leathers, who’d come in on a motorcycle, must be Bunton. He’d left the bike the best part of a block away-the scout had heard it but dismissed it, as its growl died away. Then, a couple of minutes later, Bunton showed, ambling down the sidewalk, looking like an advertising prototype of the aging Harley-Davidson dude.

He’d left the bike in the dark somewhere, the scout realized, and done a recon on foot. Bunton was being careful for some reason. The Utecht killing? The scout hadn’t expected the targets to get worried until the second man went down. Of course, the lemon, if they knew about the lemons…

The blond man arguing with Bunton and Sanderson could be John Wigge, the third man named by Utecht. Or Wigge could be the man who hadn’t gotten out of the car. That man, from the scout’s angle, had never been more than a smear of white face in the back of the Jeep.

The scout hoped that Wigge was the man in the backseat. If he was, then the man on the sidewalk would be one of the unknowns, and that man had been driving the Jeep. If he could get the plate number, he might have one of the two missing names, he thought.

He let the license plate go for a moment and carefully snipped the face of the blond man from a half-dozen shots, brought them up one at a time, played with exposure and fill light, with brightness and contrast, with clarity, moving the sliders this way and that. When they were as good as they’d get, he added a bit of noise reduction and sharpening, and finally sent the pictures off to a diminutive Canon printer that pooped out photos like eggs out of an aluminum chicken.

When he was done, he collected the six four-by-sixes, spread them under the desk lamp, and inspected them. They’d never be accepted as passport photos, but they were good enough. When he saw this man again, he’d recognize him.

Hoped that the blond was one of the unknowns-but had the feeling that he was Wigge. Wigge had been a policeman, and the blond on the sidewalk had smelled of the police.

Back to the license plates. He went through each exposure with maximum care, and then, laughing quietly at his own obtuseness, realized that he didn’t need to read all the numbers from one shot. First he’d had a problem with the simple photography, and now this. Getting old, scout?

He went back, found a leaf of light on one part of the plate, brought it up, played with the software sliders, got two and maybe three letters-he thought the third one was a Z, but it could have been a 2. Found another plate, more fiddling, confirmed the Z, got a 5 from the other side of the dash. Could have been an S, but that wouldn’t fit with what he’d seen of Minnesota license-plate style. Three numbers, three letters.