Joseph Kanon - Los Alamos

Mills nodded. “Not very nice, but not farfetched, I guess. So you think Karl was putting the bite on someone?”

“Let’s just say he sounds capable of it. For all I know, the money was a present. Maybe he had a boyfriend. Maybe there’s no connection at all. But we have a general who’d rather not know, a director who doesn’t want to know, and a police force that wouldn’t know if you showed them ‘cause they’re too busy pretending everyone’s Buster Crabbe. So we’d better start somewhere. You want to get the records?”

“You’re going to need Oppie’s okay on this. Getting Karl’s account is one thing, but my friend Eddie over there isn’t going to turn the whole goddamn project over. That’s pretty personal stuff you’re talking about. People aren’t going to like us sniffing around their money. Hell, I don’t like it.”

“Don’t tell them, then. You don’t make enough to be so touchy,” Connolly said, smiling.

“I just mean it’s personal, that’s all.”

Suddenly the windows shook as the sound of a blast came up from the west.

“What the hell was that?”

“Kisty’s group. Explosives. They use some of the lower canyons around the plateau for testing.” He grinned as another blast sounded in the distance. “You get used to it.”

“How do you keep bombs a secret when you keep shooting them off?”

“These are just the triggers. And how do you test them if you don’t explode them? They used to do it at night, but everybody complained. No sleep as far away as Santa Fe, or so they said. I don’t know who we think we’re fooling.”

“All of the people all of the time.”

“Yeah.” Another explosion went off as Mills turned to go. “Now for the quiet life of a bank examiner.”

The records, when they finally arrived with Oppie’s warning to keep the audit secret, proved more absorbing than Connolly expected. He had imagined tracing tedious columns of numbers, but instead the whole complexity of daily life at Los Alamos seemed to lie there undeciphered, spread across their desks like messages in code. To understand the savings, he needed Mills to explain the expenses. Paychecks were cashed at the commissary, supplies purchased at the PX. Some expenses were fixed: rents pegged to annual salaries-$29 a month at $2100, $34 at $3400, etc.; utilities to space-$9.65 for a three-room McKee. But beyond that, there was the sheer variety of financial lives-the thrifty savers, the spenders borrowing down, the hoarders who must have kept their cash, since none of it appeared in the books. He wondered why auditors were considered boring. Maybe they were simply hypnotized by the stories behind their numbers. He was surprised, though, to see how low the amounts were. They might be making history on the Hill, but no one was making much money. Two hundred dollars should leap off the page. But so far it hadn’t.

The problem with the decoding process, for all its fascination, was that it could take weeks. They needed a smaller test group, like scientists who worked down the table of elements to narrow the possibilities. It was Mills who came up with the morning tagging system, and for the next few days they followed the same routine. Connolly would telephone Holliday to see if the police were any further along, exchanging disappointment over coffee, then sit down with Mills for the quick first pass. Files with regular deposits were immediately put on the return pile. Variations under a hundred dollars were given a quick glance, then returned as well. Anything else was tagged for the afternoon, when they could piece together the file with more care, no longer as overwhelmed by the size of the pile to come. Now it was the exception pile that grew instead, so that they were working out of alphabetical sequence, the names often not even noticed as they looked at the number patterns. A choice few, where the numbers seemed puzzling, went on to the small pile for further investigation. But the Hill’s privacy, thought Connolly, was safe. The names were meaningless to him.

It was only when he examined Emma’s husband’s account that he felt Mills might have been right-this was personal. He felt prurient, like a burglar going through drawers. There was nothing odd about the account-erratic deposits, but marginal amounts-yet he stared at the paper as if he were staring into the marriage itself. Did Emma handle the money? Or did he dole out allowances? Why no deposit one month-a celebration dinner? A weekend in Albuquerque? Did they fight? Did she use up her clothes coupons or wait until she had enough for a splurge? But the paper, typed numbers on army buff, in the end told him nothing. He touched it as if he could coax it to reveal something, but the numbers were simply numbers and the lives were somewhere else. The audit suddenly seemed foolish. What did he expect any of these accounts to reveal? He was looking at the financial life of the Hill, but the people were as unknown as ever. The numbers kept their secrets. Why expect a connection to Bruner anywhere? Here was a file to which he could attach a face, and it told him nothing that mattered. How often did they sleep together? What was it like? Why, for that matter, should he care?

“Got something?” Mills said, looking up.

“No,” Connolly said. “My mind was just drifting.” He put the file on the stack of discards before Mills could see the name and lit a cigarette. “You know, maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way.”

“I told you that two days ago.”

“No, I mean, it’s not what’s in here that’s interesting, it’s what isn’t here.”

Mills looked at him oddly.

Connolly smiled. “I guess I’m not making much sense.”

“No, I was just thinking. Bruner used to say that. ‘It’s what isn’t here.’ Just like that. I remember him saying it.”

Connolly stared at him, disconcerted. They couldn’t possibly have been talking about the same thing. What had Bruner meant?

“When?” he asked.

Mills thought for a minute. “Well, that’s the funny thing. It was just like this, when he was going through the files.”

“These?”

“No, security clearance. Karl liked to go through the files. Of course, it was part of his job, but he said it was a great way to get to know people. So he’d go over them. And when I’d say, ‘You must know everything in there,’ he’d say, ‘It’s what isn’t here.’ Just the way you did.”

Connolly was silent. “Where do you keep them?” he said finally.

“In a safe over in T-1. Oh, no.”

“But he removed them. So there must be a log?”

Mills nodded.

“Let’s see who he checked out over the past six months-no, nine months.”

“Why not a year, just to play it safe?”

“Okay.”

“I was being funny.”

“Be convenient if we found something that matched up with one of our exception files here, wouldn’t it?” Connolly said, patting them.

“A miracle.”

“Anyway, it’s something.”

“Mike, it’s a phrase. It was just something to say. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“Maybe. But he was interested in them. The least we can do is look at what interested him. Maybe it’ll tell us something about him.”

“Want me to get a forklift or bring them over one by one?”

“How about just the log for now? Let’s see if he wanted to get to know anybody real well.”

But Bruner had often been assigned to do vetting-he was one of several security officers who interviewed new employees and did updates on the others-so his initials were all over the log. Even using the same process of elimination they’d fixed on for the bank accounts, they were facing a long list.

“Let’s focus on the repeats,” Connolly said. “Anyone he was particularly interested in. There has to be something.” He looked up to find Mills staring at him. “What?”