Heat Lightning

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.
    More looks, more sliders, he needed two more letters . . . and got them, first a Y, and then a K, and with another shot, he confirmed the 5 and got a 7.
    Couldn’t get the last number: Had 5(?)7 YKZ, but also the make and color of the vehicle. Should be enough, because he also had a man who could get into the state automobile registration computer.
    The scout picked up the phone, which he’d bought a week earlier at a Wal-Mart, and dialed the number.
    A man’s voice, quiet, cultured. “Yes.” Nothing more.
    “I have a license plate number. I need the name that goes with it.”
    “Give it to me.” The scout read the number, and the man said, “Hold on.”
    A moment later, he was back. “The car is registered to a John Wigge.”
    “Ah.”
    “Good?”
    “No. I’d hoped for another name. Is there a house number with this registration?”
    “Of course.”
    The scout took the number, said, politely, “Thank you,” and hung up.
    Two names, then: Ray Bunton, John Wigge. Names they already had.
    If he did not get more names from the two of them, then his mission would be done, and unsuccessful. He needed to spend some time with one of the men.
    Spend some time with a knife . . .

6
    VIRGIL SAT back in the chair, feet up on Davenport’s desk, and clicked.
    Mead Sinclair never let any grass grow under his feet: Google dredged up stories about him that went back forty years before Google was invented.
    Born in 1943, Sinclair had gone to South America as a high school senior, on a trip sponsored by a lefty educational foundation, to study the economic development of third-world countries. He later spent four years at Michigan, studying economics, then took a PhD at Harvard in economic history.
    He’d apparently dodged the draft.
    As an Ivy League grad student and later as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he’d taught summers during the 1960s and ’70s at a variety of peace camps and academic conclaves. He’d also gone to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, ostensibly as a stringer for Ramparts magazine, a latter-day John Reed.
    According to the Google reports, he’d been wounded in a B-52 strike while touring the southern part of North Vietnam, and, recovering in a Hanoi hospital, he had written a long story about the use of acupuncture in wound care. Back in the United States, he married a Vietnamese-American woman whom he met at a rally in Madison. Their daughter, Mai, was born in Madison.
    Later, because of his connections in Hanoi, he served as a go-between to negotiate the return of the remains of U.S. servicemen killed during the war. He was mentioned in several articles about Vietnamese tourism, and did some work with a consortium of U.S. and Australian hoteliers who wanted to build a new Asian Gold Coast south of Hanoi.
    He wrote the study on the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and published it in 1990. The study was attacked online by another academic, from the conservative Heritage Foundation, who dismissed it as an overreaction to Sinclair’s wife’s death from cancer in 1988.
    In 2004, Sinclair had been ordered to leave Vietnam for supporting a