“Let me close the door.”
With that done, Johnson turned on the flashlight app of his iPhone and panned the illumination around the inside of the cabin. There was a bed in one corner with an end table and a couple of rolled-up carpets next to it. Three rolls of seamless paper lay along one wall, and a fourth roll was mounted on a roller behind the bed. Camera stands with umbrellas and soft boxes were crowded across the room along with their power supplies.
Virgil turned on his own cell-phone light, and said, “I need photos of the bed and the walls.”
“The walls. That oughta do it,” Johnson said, looking at the knotty pine planks that crawled up the sides of the room. “They’re like the world’s biggest fingerprints.”
Virgil pulled off his pack, took the camera out, mounted the compact flash, set everything for automatic, and started shooting.
Quickly.
Efficiently.
He shot everything twice, then packed up.
Two minutes later they were gone, and twenty minutes after that they were talking with Pescoli.
• • •
THE PHONE RANG JUST AS Regan was getting out of the shower. She wrapped a towel around herself, picked up her phone, and sat on the edge of the bed.
“It’s Virgil. I’ve got the photos.”
“Send ’em.”
“I will. But the connection out here at the ranch, in the bar, is slow. Wi-Fi’s not the latest in technology. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll be sending you nine shots.”
“I’ll move them to the FBI guy.”
“Call me in the morning, when you hear back.”
“First thing,” she said and couldn’t wait.
She threw on her pajamas and waited, pumping milk again, of course. Fortunately, the motel had a minibar fridge.
The last of the photos came in a half hour later. They were, she thought, some of the most boring photographs she’d ever seen. But they were sharp, and exactly what the feds had asked for. She sent them on. After a quick call to Santana explaining that she was staying over and would be home the next day, she charged her phone, turned in, and thought about her family, her job, and the balancing act that was her life.
• • •
The feds called at seven o’clock the next morning.
Regan was still asleep and for a second was disoriented, fumbling her phone off the nightstand before answering.
“What time is it?”
Burch, the FBI agent, said, “Nine o’clock.”
“Or seven o’clock, Mountain Time,” she said around a yawn.
She needed coffee.
Then remembered she was still on decaf.
“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” she said into her cell. “Did you see those photographs?”
“I saw them two hours ago, at seven o’clock Eastern Time, because I get up at dawn.”
“Good for you. What do you think?”