Lost Light

largest, as Andre Biggar, Burnett’s son. I had never met him but I knew it was him by his size and resemblance to Burnett. Right down to the shaved scalp.
    Introductions were made and Andre explained that he was reviewing a tape showing a burglary of a client’s warehouse. His father explained what I was looking for and the son led me to another workbench, where he could display and review equipment. He showed me cameras housed in a vase, a lamp, a picture frame and finally a clock. Thinking about how Lawton Cross had complained about not being able to see the time on his television, I stopped Andre right there.
    “This will do. How does it work?”
    It was a round clock about ten inches across.
    “This is a classroom clock. You want to put this on the wall of a bedroom? It will stick out like tits on a -”
    “Andre,” his father said.
    “It’s not being used as a bedroom,” I said. “It’s like a TV room. And the subject told me he can’t see the time on the corner of the screen on CNN. So this will make sense when I bring it in.”
    Andre nodded.
    “Okay. You want sound? Color?”
    “Sound, yes. Color would be good but not necessary.”
    “All right. Are you going to transmit, or you want to go self-contained?”
    I looked at him blankly and he knew I didn’t understand.
    “I build these two ways. One is you have a camera in the clock and you transmit picture and sound to a receiver that records it on video. You would have to find a secure place for the recorder within about a hundred feet to be sure. Are you going to be outside the house in a van or something?”
    “I wasn’t planning on it.”
    “Okay, the second option is to go digital and put everything in the camera and record internally to a digital tape or memory card. The drawback is capacity. With a digital tape you get about two hours real time, then you have to change it out. With a card you get even less.”
    “That won’t work. I was only planning to check on it every few days.”
    I started thinking of how I would be able to hide the receiver inside the house. Maybe the garage. I could pretend I was going to the garage to throw something away and I could hide the receiver somewhere Danny Cross wouldn’t see it.
    “Well, we can slow the recording down if we need to.”
    “How?”
    “A number of different ways. First off we put the camera on a clock. Turn it off, say, midnight to eight. We can also stagger the FPS and lengthen -”
    “FPS?”
    “The recorded frames per second. It makes the image jump, though.”
    “What about sound? Does that jump, too?”
    “No, sound is separate. You’d get full sound.”
    I nodded but wasn’t sure I wanted to lose any of the visual recording.
    “We can also put it on a motion sensor. This guy you say is in a wheelchair, does he move around a lot?”
    “No, he can’t. He’s paralyzed. Most of the time I think he just sits there staring at the TV.”
    “Any pets?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “So the only time there is real movement in the room is when the caregiver comes in, and that’s who you want to watch. Am I right?”
    “Right.”
    “No problem then. This will work. We put a motion sensor on it and a two-gig memory card and you’ll probably stretch it out a couple days.”
    “That’ll work.”
    I nodded and looked at Burnett. I was impressed with his son. Andre looked like he should be out breaking quarterbacks in half. But he had found a specialty in life dealing with circuits and microprocessors. I could see the pride in Burnett’s eyes.
    “Give me fifteen minutes to put it together and then I’ll come show you how to install it and how to switch out the memory card.”
    “Sounds good.”
    I sat with Burnett in his office and we talked about the department and a couple of the cases that we had worked together. One case had involved a hired killer who had murdered both the intended target in South L.A. and then his employer in Hollywood when the employer failed to pay the second half of the agreed-upon fee. We had worked it together for a month, my team and Biggar and his partner, who was named Miles Manley. We broke it when Big and Manley, as the pair were called, came up with a witness in the target victim’s neighborhood who remembered seeing a white man on the day of the shooting and could describe his car, a black Corvette with red leather interior. The car matched the vehicle used by the second victim’s next-door neighbor. He confessed after a lengthy