In Lethal Design, KC asks Orlando Prime’s forensic analyst to tackle two pieces of evidence: parking-lot footage and a cuff-link photograph. The novel stays with KC when the results arrive. This spoiler-light bonus scene shows what happened in Jack’s lab before he sent his answer.
Jack’s Thirty-Minute Explanation
KC’s message appeared in the corner of Jack’s monitor.
Two requests.
Find camera coverage of the strip mall beside the Garden Inn. Check the status of the cuff-link enhancement.
Jack read it again. “Sure. No pressure.”
The lab was empty, which meant nobody could interrupt a useful explanation of why video enhancement wasn’t magic.
“You can’t create information the camera never captured. You can isolate information. You can clean it up. You can compare frames. But if the pixels aren’t there, neither is your miracle.”
No one answered. Better audience than Damon.
Jack pulled up the available cameras around the strip mall. The pizza place had one mounted above the roofline, aimed across the parking area.
High angle. Wide field. Poor facial detail.
Useful for a car.
He found the woman at 1:47 p.m., walking into frame from the direction of the Garden Inn. Sunglasses. Scarf over her hair. Medium height.
She crossed to a silver sedan near the nail salon.
Jack advanced the footage frame by frame. The plate appeared as the sedan backed out, vanished behind glare, then returned for two frames as the driver turned toward the exit.
He isolated both frames and placed them beside the original footage. Sharpening helped, but the source remained on-screen. Enhancement without comparison invited mistakes.
The characters held.
“One down.”
The cuff link fought harder.
Metal reflected the crime-scene flash across the engraving. Compression had broken the edges into blocky patches. Jack opened the highest-resolution photograph, isolated Simms’s left cuff, and adjusted the contrast in small increments.
Too much produced artifacts. Too little left glare.
He reset the image and tried again.
A rectangular cuff link emerged from the noise. Gold or brass. Engraved.
Jack leaned toward the monitor. “Oh.”
He enlarged the original and the enhancement side by side. The marks were present in both. He wasn’t guessing.
Two requests. Two usable results.
He attached the parking-lot frames and the cuff-link comparison to an email. His explanation could run fifteen minutes. Twenty, if KC asked about interpolation.
But he would expect her to stop him at three.
Jack deleted the paragraph he’d begun and typed three short lines instead.
Source images included. Enhancements attached. Call if you want the methodology.
He sent the email, picked up his phone, and gave KC the only part she would read before opening it.
Two for one special. Check your email.
This scene falls between KC’s request for Jack’s help and the two attachments that arrive later that evening. The answers remain where they belong: inside Lethal Design.
Lethal Design, Book 2 in the KC & Orlando Prime series, releases August 4, 2026. Preorder Lethal Design, start with Fatal Invitation, or join the S.F. Baumgartner reader list for future case files and bonus scenes.