Sight Unseen by Brad Latham Read Free Book Online

and as smooth on
     your feet as an angel. What else do you do well?”
    “My father was an astronomer,” she replied. “Mount Wilson. I can find all the named stars with a 50-inch telescope, photograph
     them, develop the negatives, and construct a photo map of the northern hemisphere’s night sky. My mother was a psychiatrist—the
     first female psychiatrist in America. Both my parents believed in giving their child a working knowledge of their disciplines.”
    Lockwood smiled easily and yet shivered at the word “psychiatrist.” “Does this mean you can read my mind?”
    She made a mocking moue in his direction. “Of course! It’s not hard to see that under your veneer of gentleman, a caveman
     lurks—ready to fell the first young miss he spies with his twenty-pound club and drag her back to his cave.”
    Myra’s jibe hit too close to home for Lockwood to contain his blush completely. Already tonight the thought of spending the
     night in her neat cottage had shot across his mind half a dozen times. He smiled to hide how closely she had hit the target.
     Behind her, Lockwood saw their waiter bearing down on their table with their sherry, and he escorted her back.
    As he raised his glass to her, Lockwood said, “To a delightful evening.”
    She raised hers. “May you find me my bombsight fast, Bill. I miss Baby. It’s going to take me months of work—tedious work—to
     rebuild her.”
    “What’s your theory of what happened?”
    She eyed him sharply. “Tell me what you and the G-men have come up with, and I’ll see if it stirs anything.”
    Lockwood unloaded. Myra certainly knew how to listen. She said next to nothing during the ten minutes he covered what he and
     Manners had done during the day, only asking for clarification.
    The oysters arrived, and for a couple of minutes the bombsight was forgotten as they feasted on the sunny wine and the sea’s
     gray dollops.
    “Those four elevator keys are the key,” she said.
    “That’s what we think. So which one of the three of you should we suspect?”
    “Four. Don’t forget Pops. He could have just given them his key—or opened the door himself.”
    “Not so easy. Dzeloski’s no dummy. That key ring that Pops carries is welded together, and the Detex system he carries—”
    “The what?” she asked.
    “Like all guards, Pops has to check in at stations all over the building at certain hours during the night. A clock mechanism
     made by a security company called Detex checks him. When he arrives at a station, like Area C, he puts in the Detex key there—it’s
     chained to the wall—into the Detex clock he carries, and the clock records where and when Pops makes each station during the
     night. His paper record for last night was on target—he was where he was supposed to be.”
    “I don’t understand,” she said. “Suppose he just collected all the keys from the stations along the way and stood in the elevator
     with his elevator key in the lock, punching himself in all night long as he helped the thieves make off with Baby?”
    Lockwood smiled at her ingenuity. “That’s good, very good.”
    “For a woman.”
    “For anybody. I don’t think it happened, but it’s easy enough to check. We can see if the chains on the station keys have
     been tampered with—usually they can’t be easily removed.”
    “But what you really want to know is where Baby is now.”
    “Yep. Tell me who would really want her?”
    “The Germans. The Italians. Maybe even that Franco. Possibly the Japs.”
    Lockwood frowned. “You’re as bad as Manners, and you don’t work for the government. A foreign government would be crazy to
     sneak into your place and steal something like this.”
    “Not really.”
    “Suppose they’d gotten caught? And besides, we’re not involved in this craziness in Europe.”
    “What do you mean we aren’t! Don’t you read the papers? Do you think that that man in Berlin is going to be satisfied with
     Austria and