Joseph Kanon - Los Alamos

“Why the road?” Connolly said.

“Probably an old logging road,” Holliday said. “They used to take a fair amount of timber out around here. You notice that canyon just before this one? There’s a real road there. They probably just gave up on this one.”

“That’s the test range,” Connolly said.

“What exactly they firing there?”

“I don’t know.” Then, catching Holliday’s look, “Honestly.”

“They’re measuring projectile velocity,” Mills said.

They looked at each other, then at him. He laughed. “Well, I asked. That’s what they told me.”

“You mean like how fast an arrow goes when you shoot it?” Holliday said.

“Something like that.”

“Sure are chewing up the trees to find out.” He pointed toward the end of the canyon, where a series of test explosions had opened a rough clearing.

“But why come here?” Connolly said.

“Well, if they hadn’t started shooting things up around here, nobody would have found it.”

“You know what I mean.”

Holliday looked at him. “You mean why so close to the Hill.”

Connolly nodded.

“I don’t know. Let’s see what we got first. Maybe it’s not even his.”

But there had been no attempt to disguise the car; the Hill license plate, the glove compartment registration were intact. The paint in front had been scratched by the drive through the brush, but otherwise the car was as Karl might have left it. The keys were still in the ignition switch.

“That’s a nice touch,” Holliday said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

“Can you have them checked for prints?”

“I could, but I’ve got no jurisdiction here.”

“Nobody does. You’re just assisting the Manhattan Project of the Army Corps of Engineers.” Connolly smiled at him. “War work.”

“You got a paper if I need it?”

“We’ve got nothing but paper.”

“I think there’s some blood here,” Mills said, looking at the back floor.

“Yes, sir,” Holliday said. “Don’t touch that, now-we’ll see if we can get a match.”

“Try a church parking lot,” Connolly said. “I guarantee it.”

There was nothing unusual in the trunk. Aside from the bloodstains in the back, where Karl’s head must have been laid, the car was clean.

“Let me try something,” Connolly said, taking a handkerchief in his right hand. He got in and twisted the key. The motor turned over and started. He sat at the wheel for a minute, listening to the hum, running Karl’s car as he had worn his boots. When he turned it off, the canyon was quiet enough to hear the birds.

“Why save the key?” he said, handing it, wrapped, to Holliday.

“Why anything?” Holliday said. “These things-they don’t have to make sense.”

“Yes they do. They don’t have to be sensible, but they have to make sense.”

“I’ll get the boys to go over the whole thing for prints,” Holliday said, ignoring him. He was searching the ground. “Too much traffic here.”

“Kisty’s men,” Mills said. “They didn’t know it was a crime scene.”

“Let’s check it anyway,” Connolly said. “You never know. You want to square it with the guard?” he said to Mills. It was a polite dismissal and Mills took it, moving back to the road.

“What’s on your mind?” Holliday said.

“I can’t see the logistics of this,” Connolly said, staring at the car as if there were a visible answer. “Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, you kill Karl at San Isidro. You put him in the back and then you dump him in the park. Why not just dump him here?” He looked up at Holliday’s stare. “Okay, you want him found, just the way you said. Like that, like it was something else. Why not find the car too? Why not just leave it in Santa Fe near the park? The blood, I guess,” he said, talking to himself.

“Maybe he needed the ride.”

Connolly looked up. “So where was his own car?”

Holliday shrugged. “He could have walked to the church.”

“If he was already in Santa Fe. How did he get there?”

“You’re assuming the guy was from here.”

“Yes.”

“Bus. They’ve got buses running from here, don’t they? Saturday night. You got a few people on passes, right?”

Connolly nodded, thinking. “Then why not take a bus back? Just leave the car.”

Holliday leaned against the car, staring at the ground. “Well, what did we think happened? When we found him?”

“That it had been stolen.”

“Uh-huh. Which fit, right? That kind of crime. Bump him off and the next thing you know you’re in Mexico. Valuable thing, a car in wartime. You leave it on the street, you’ve got somebody asking questions. Plus you’ve got the blood,” he said, nodding to him.

“So you’ve got to get rid of it.”

“Seems a shame, a nice new car, but I guess you do.”

“But there are lots of ways to do that. Leave it in the desert, push it over a cliff.”

“Well, the trouble is, you never know how that’s going to turn out. It falls wrong or the damn thing catches fire. You don’t want to attract any notice, you just want it to disappear. For good. Or a good long while, anyway. And maybe you don’t have time for any of that. Maybe you don’t even have time for all the thinking we’re doing about it. You just hide it.”

“Here.”

“Here. Like I said, maybe he needed the ride. He comes here, the gate is closed. Nobody around. Maybe he knew the gate was closed.”

“Then he’d still have to get over to the east gate. The only way to do that—”

Holliday nodded. “That’s right. If somebody else was driving his car.”

Connolly stared at the ground, silent. “Two. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I don’t say it happened that way. Just that it could have.”

“It makes sense. There had to be another car.”

“Could be and had to be are two different things.”

But Connolly dismissed him with a wave of his hand, still thinking. “Okay, he gets the car here and someone else gets him back on the Hill. You agree he’s on the Hill?”

“I’d say it was indicated,” Holliday said, a cop giving testimony.

“So why leave the keys? Why not just throw them away?”

Holliday sighed and took out a cigarette. “Yeah, why not? I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe just force of habit, you know? You don’t throw keys away-what for? You don’t want them on you, but you don’t know if you’re going to need them again either.”

“You think he was going to use the car?”

“No, I was thinking of something else.” He looked up, searching the canyon rim with a turn of his head. “Must have been pretty dark when he parked it here, right? So he can’t tell if it’s been hid real good. I mean, that time of night, you can’t see anything. So I think-it’s just a guess, now-that he wanted to take another look in the day, see what he could see. What if you look down from up there,” he said, pointing to the rim, “and there’s this shiny new car. Even just a piece of it. You’d have to move it, make sure it was really out of sight. So he might’ve left the keys just in case. ‘Course, he never thought you boys would be shooting up the place.”

“He’s on the Hill,” Connolly said.

“Yes, he is,” Holliday said quietly. “Or was.”

“He’d be taking a hell of a chance, coming back for the car.”

“Mister, he took a hell of a chance when he murdered a man.”

As a V-E celebration, he took Mills to dinner in Santa Fe, following Holliday’s car down the back road, past Bandelier and the Rio Grande Valley and the humpy stretches of twisted pinon and red earth. The plaza was crowded, the sleepy square awake with people waving little flags and drinking openly, shouting victory with the bells of the cathedral. It was early, but La Fonda was packed, and they spent an hour at the bar before they could get a table.