The Ridge(28)
“What’s going on, Kimble?”
“Taking bets on the Wolverine. First race is only a few months away. Figured you’re in for, what, a hundred?”
The Wolverine was the department’s nickname for the sheriff’s current racehorse. Troy, whose ability to name a horse was only slightly more advanced than his ability to breed a winner, had named the animal Wolf and Steam for logic that only he could follow, and his deputies had quickly altered it.
Abel smiled. “Not a jockey alive who can handle the Wolverine. But assuming the sheriff finds such a wrangler, I’m in for a thousand, of course.”
“Noted.” Kimble waved a hand at the monitors that showed images from every security camera in the jail and said, “Got a question for you.”
“Shoot.”
“You use infrared illuminators for some of these, right?”
“In some cases, yeah.”
“What’s their purpose?”
“Lets us see in the dark,” Abel said, and smiled. “To keep a camera going, you’ve got to have light. The infrared illuminators provide it, but it’s invisible to the naked eye. So it’s not light that disturbs anyone. Perfect for security cameras, or military ops.”
“The ones I saw had these lenses that were, I don’t know, like… textured. Kind of speckled glass?”
“That’s an LED illuminator, probably. Some of them use halogen bulbs and filters, but the more expensive, better ones are LED. Light-emitting diode. Where’d you come across them?”
“You ever see that lighthouse out on Blade Ridge?”
“I have. The thing is… curious.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“But that’s not an infrared light, Kimble.”
“I know the main one isn’t. But here’s the deal: he had the main bulb, and then surrounding it this ring of infrared illuminators.”
“That is bizarre. And expensive.”
“Yeah?”
“If it’s an LED illuminator of the sort you were telling me about, I’d say each unit went close to a thousand bucks. Could be more. Lot of scratch for a man like Wyatt French to invest in lighting.”
Yes, it was. Wyatt French had tried to purchase his bourbon with scrounged change. It was one hell of a lot of money to invest in invisible lighting.
“What would those be accomplishing that the main bulb wouldn’t be?” Kimble said.
“Had to be using them with cameras,” Abel said confidently.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Security cameras are my business, Kimble. The only purpose for infrared illuminators is cameras or rifle scopes. I mean, what they would have been accomplishing was keeping the place lit, even if nobody could tell. The area within range of those illuminators would never be truly dark. It would be dark to the naked eye, but not technically dark. But there’s no gain to that unless you’ve got them paired with cameras, is there?”
“I’ll have to take a better look for cameras,” Kimble said, more to himself than Abel. He’d given the lighthouse a cursory search yesterday, but he could have missed a concealed camera easily enough. There had been the distraction of the corpse, after all.
“To see what, unchanging images of the woods at night?” Abel asked.
“The infrared lights were in the top of the lighthouse, and that’s where he shot himself. Maybe there’s video of it.”
“And you want to watch that little snuff film?”
Kimble looked at him, remembering Wyatt’s voice coming at him on the dark highway. If the victim were somehow compelled…
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I ought to.”
13
THE MOVE WAS GOING far more smoothly today. The rain had let up, the cats were agreeable, and Wes was his usual precise and competent self, although unusually quiet, often seeming lost in his own thoughts. Audrey watched the old preserve empty out, this place where she had met her husband, fallen in love, and spent such happy years. Everyone from friends and family to complete strangers had urged her not to allow herself to feel obligated to follow through with the relocation when David died. She understood their reasoning: it was his passion project, not hers. What they didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, was that the cats were all she had left of David. They had no children—that part of the five-year plan would never be completed—and now the remnants of her marriage were memories and sixty-seven exotic cats rescued from a variety of terrible circumstances. They were the legacy. And, oh, how he had loved them.
She’d had other options. One of David’s dear friends, a man named Joe Taft, ran a cat rescue center in Indiana. He’d been David’s mentor, and he’d offered to take the animals, all of them.