“Well, I’ll tell you. Maybe post security should be checking with us, instead of telling us how top secret they are and what a bunch of assholes we are. Besides, if they’ve got somebody missing, we’ll hear about it-not so easy to get lost up there, I wouldn’t think. Place is a fort. Meanwhile, all I’ve got here is a John Doe with a cracked skull. A month ago some queer down in Albuquerque gets knifed and it makes all the papers, and now I’ve got a boy looks like he was up to the same fun and games. So before I take on the U.S. Army and all the crap we usually have to take from our secret project friends, I think I’ll have a little talk with Albuquerque and see if they’d like to take this off our hands.”

“Suit yourself. They find the guy who did it in Albuquerque?”

“Not yet. But maybe they haven’t been looking very hard.”

“So it might-”

“I don’t know. But I’m going to check it out before I tell anybody on the Hill we’ve got a dead pansy and by the way are they looking for one. I can hear them yelling now. Just in case, though, you’d better do a good job on the autopsy. Don’t want your cleaver work making us look bad up there.”

Ritter laughed. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, be sure to check for any anal penetration.”

O’Neill, who had been standing quietly at his side, looked up. “What do you mean?”

Holliday laughed. “Tommy, you need to have a talk with your dad someday so he can explain things.” Then he looked down at the body, still twisted and pale and dead. “Poor son of a bitch. I wonder what he did to deserve this.”

1

Santa Fe gave its name to a railroad, but the train itself stops twenty miles to the southeast, at Lamy, a dusty town in the high desert that seemed to have been blown in by the wind and got stuck at the tracks. Michael Connolly thought he’d arrived in the middle of nowhere.