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“We both get started. Six hundred bucks shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

“Assuming it’s someone with an account. Assuming they took the money out. Assuming it’s someone up here.”

“Assuming all that.”

“I didn’t know we were assuming it was someone on the Hill,” Mills said pointedly.

“We’re not. We’re looking for six hundred dollars, and this is somewhere to start. You can eliminate all the women, too.”

Mills looked up at him. “So that’s where you’re going. You think Karl would do that?”

“What would have happened to him if he’d been exposed as homosexual?”

“He’d have been discharged.”

“So he’d want to keep it very quiet then, wouldn’t he? Anyone like him would. He’d understand that. He knew what that felt like. What if he wasn’t the only one up here who needed to keep things quiet? What if he thought that might be-well, an opportunity. Is that so farfetched?”

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.