Heat Lightning by John Sandford Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

5
    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