E Is for Evidence

charged, Kinsey. Arson and fraud, and you're being named as co-conspirator. Mac turned everything over to the D.A. this morning. I thought you'd like to know in case you need to talk to an attorney."
    "What's the timetable? Do you know?"
    "Mr. Motycka isn't in today, but I can leave a message on his desk," she said.
    "Is that Mac?"
    "He didn't say exactly, but we're expecting him some time today. Uh-hun. Yes, I'll do that. All right, thanks," she said and hung up.
    I put a call through to Lonnie Kingman and alerted him. He said he'd check with the D.A.'s office and find out if a warrant was being issued. His advice was to surrender voluntarily, thus avoiding the ignominy and uncertainty of a public arrest.
    "Jesus, I can't believe this is happening," I said.
    "Well, it hasn't yet. Don't worry about it until I tell you to," he said.
    I grabbed my handbag and car keys and headed out the door. I had disconnected my emotions again. There was no point in letting anxiety get in my way. I hopped in my car and drove over to an electrical-supply place on Granita. My knowledge of electronic surveillance was bound to be out-of-date, limited to information picked up in a crash course at the Police Academy nearly ten years before. The advances in miniaturization since then had probably revolutionized the field, but I suspected the basics were always going to be the same. Microphone, transmitter, recorder of some type, probably voice-acti-vated these days. The planting can be done by a technician disguised as any commonly seen service person: telephone lineman, meter reader, cable-television installer. Elec-tronic surveillance is expensive, illegal unless authorized by the court, and looks a lot easier on television than it is in real life. Bug detection is another matter altogether. It was always possible, of course, that Lance Wood was imagining the whole thing, but I doubted it.
    The small all-band receiver I bought was about the size of a portable radio. While not truly all-band, it was sufficient to cover most bugging frequencies-30-50 MHz and 88-108 MHz. If the bug in his office was wired, I was going to have to find the wire myself, but if the bug was wireless, the receiver would start emitting a high-pitched squeal when it was within range.
    I drove out to Colgate with my windows rolled down, parched air whipping through the interior of the VW like a convection oven. The weather forecaster on the car radio seemed as baffled as I was. It felt like August, asphalt shim-mering in the heat. January in Santa Teresa is usually our best month. Everything is green, flowers in full bloom, the temperatures in the low seventies, mild and pleasant. The time-and-temp sign on the bank building was showing 89 degrees and it wasn't yet noon.
    I parked in front of Wood/Warren and went in. Lance came out of his office in a wilted shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
    "Do we need to watch what we say once we go in there?" he asked, indicating the office door.
    "I don't think so. Let's let 'em know we're hot on the trail. Maybe it'll shake 'em up."
    Before we started work, I did a quick check of both interior and exterior office walls on the off-chance that someone had installed a spike mike, a small probe that can be inserted between the studs, or hidden in a hollow door, the door panel itself serving as a diaphragm to transmit sound. Lance's office was located in the right-front corner of the building. The construction on those two sides was block and fieldstone, which didn't lend itself to easy instal-lation. Somebody would have had to drill through solid rock. Inside, one office wall was contiguous with the recep-tion area, where the pickup unit would have been difficult to conceal. The fourth wall was clean.
    Company employees watched the two of us incuri-ously as we moved through the preliminary phases of the search. If anyone was worried about surveillance equip-ment coming to light, there was no indication of it.
    We went into the office. I examined the telephone first, taking the plate off the bottom, unscrewing the mouth and ear pieces. As far as I could tell, the instrument was clean.
    "I take it it's not the phone," Lance said, watching me.
    "Who knows? The bug might be downstream," I said. "I don't have any way to find out if somebody's tapped into the line at the pole. We'll have to operate on the premise that the bug's somewhere in the room. It's just a matter of coming up with it."
    "What exactly are" we looking for?" Lance