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“Retracing steps?” Mills said as they climbed the road to Bandelier.

“I can’t see it. Look, we figure the car’s here because the guy needed to get back to the Hill, right? Then why leave the Hill at all? You’ve seen the church. If you were meeting somebody, there are a hundred places on the Hill that would be better. Why go all the way to Santa Fe to a public place?”

“I thought the idea was they didn’t want to be seen together. You know.”

“That was the idea. It’s wrong.” Mills looked from the wheel, surprised. Connolly ignored him. “They could just go into the woods for that. Or for anything.”

“If the other guy was already on the Hill.”

“Exactly. That’s what doesn’t make sense. He was. He must have been. There’s no other explanation for the car. So why go all the way to San Isidro to meet somebody who’s just down the street?”

“I give up. Why?”

“He wasn’t meeting Karl.”

Mills drove in silence for a minute. “Want to run that by me again?”

“He was meeting someone else. Someone off the Hill. It’s the only way it makes sense.”

“But Karl’s the one who’s dead.”

“He wasn’t supposed to be there. It was-a surprise.”

“You don’t know any of this.”

“No, I’m guessing. But follow me. Tonight I stood there in that alley next to the church and I thought, no one in his right mind would pick this place to kill someone. Open like that. A Mex neighborhood. But no one did pick it. It must have been an accident-an accident that it happened there, I mean. But it happens. Then what? Everything has to be done in a hurry. You have to take some risks, even. All along we’ve been trying to follow Karl’s moves. How would Karl see it? What would he do? Like he was the criminal. But all that stops in the alley. It’s the other guy we ought to be thinking about. What would he do? Tonight I was trying to imagine how he saw it.”

“And?”

“I had to get rid of a body. I had to get rid of a car. And I had to get home.”

“I’d say you did a pretty good job.”

“I was lucky too. Nobody saw. The one thing I couldn’t imagine, though, was Karl. If I’d wanted to kill him, I would have done it somewhere else. Why go to San Isidro to see him? Answer: I didn’t.”

Mills thought for a minute. “But he was there anyway. Another accident?”

“No. He followed me.”

“Now you’re really guessing.”

“Why not? He was security, wasn’t he? He was used to tailing people.”

“There isn’t much of that. We go with people. Guards. We don’t usually tail them. That’s FBI stuff.”

“But Karl might. He was capable of that, wasn’t he?” Mills hesitated. “Yes,” he said finally.

Connolly looked at him. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“He did tail people, didn’t he?”

“I guess so. He knew things-where people went, things like that. He liked knowing things. He’d say something once in a while. How else would he know? I guess he must have been following them. I never thought about it before.”

“Yes you did.”

“All right, I did. But it wasn’t official, so what was it? I figured it was just Karl. He liked being the sheriff. You learn not to pay too much attention to things like that.”

“That’s a hell of a thing for a security officer to say. You’re supposed to pay attention.”

“Yeah, well, how did I know he was going to get himself killed, for Christ’s sake? I just thought he was a nut like the rest of them.”

“The rest of who?”

“Security. They’re all a little nuts. Maybe you too. How do I know? Look, I didn’t ask for this assignment. I don’t get shot and I keep my head down. You stick it out and there’s always somebody ready to chop it off. You never know what anybody’s up to. For all I knew, Karl was FBI-he sure acted like it. So you don’t look too closely. Just keep your head down and stay out of the way.”

“He wasn’t FBI.”

“You know that for sure?”

“Groves would have told me.”

“Yeah.” Mills laughed. “Just like he told Lansdale about you, right? You’ve got the head of project security sitting there in Washington and his boss puts an outside man in and he doesn’t know what the hell is going on. He’s a little nuts already. Now how do you think he feels?”

“I don’t know,” Connolly said quietly. “How does he?”

Mills looked ahead at the road, saying nothing.

“He asked you to report on me, didn’t he?” Connolly said, his voice low. Mills still said nothing. “Didn’t he?”

“I’m sorry, Mike.”

“Jesus Christ.” He felt disgust mingled with irrational fear, the way he had felt the time his apartment had been burgled. There was nothing to steal. It was just the fact of someone’s having been there at all. But now there was something. He imagined Emma’s name sitting in a Washington file. “Tell him anything interesting?”

“No, nothing like that,” Mills said. “It’s just the case, Mike. He wants to know what’s going on. He thinks Groves should have put him in charge.”

“So your boss tells you to spy on me so he can spy on his boss. All in the family. Nice.”

“I was ordered, Mike,” he said quietly.

“What a fucking waste of time. And who’s checking up on you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you. That’s what it’s like. Maybe Karl was.”