Free When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery by Christine Barber

the state highway to the mesa top, the road hugged white cliffs of soft rock made of tuff—a hardened volcanic ash into which Anasazi Indians were able to carve entire cliffside villages such as at Bandelier National Monument, just a few miles away. Where the cliffs of Pajarito Mesa met the flat mesa top, it looked like one giant step led up to the Jemez Mountains’ eastern slopes, where the highest peak reached more than 11,500 feet. On top of the mesa, where the trees became much taller and the snow a foot deeper, there was the city of Los Alamos, which surrounded the lab like a protective coat. The lab itself had been safely built miles away from the mesa edge, in the crook of the steep Jemez Mountain slopes to the west. As the town of Los Alamos grew up around the lab, it had nowhere to go but closer and closer to the top of the steep cliffs to the east. Now it looked like half the city would go tumbling down the mesa edge with the next strong gust of wind.
    When Robert Oppenheimer was looking for a place to build the lab in 1944, he picked Los Alamos for several reasons. The main one being that access to the site could be easily controlled should the Germans or Japanese invade. Its location on the mesa meant there were only two roads in, both of which had cement guard stations to keep watch. State Highway 4 came down from the Jemez Mountains and into Los Alamos from the west, while State Highway 502 came into town from the valley below to the east. Oppenheimer knew what the Pueblo and Anasazi tribes knew before him: mesas make for good defensible positions.
    Unlike the rest of Northern New Mexico, the houses in Los Alamos were not built in the flat-topped Santa Fe style. Instead, they were the type you might see back east, with pitched roofs and more than one story. And almost no houses were painted any shade of beige, but were white or yellow with neat trim. Many were ranch-style from the 1970s, when the lab had started to grow. The trees here were different from Santa Fe as well. The high elevation allowed for more precipitation and thus more variety. There were elm, tulip trees, and even some weeping willows with branches straining under a heavy layer of snow. All of the houses were well maintained; no foliage overhung the sidewalks. Every now and then, through a hole between houses, Gil could see down to tribal land of San Ildefonso Pueblo in the valley a thousand feet below. When it came to household income, Los Alamos County was the fifth wealthiest in the country, whereas almost a quarter of the people in San Ildefonso Pueblo lived below the poverty line.
    Gil drove through a manned gate that looked more like a bunker, past a sign welcoming them to a place W HERE D ISCOVERIES A RE M ADE. The gates looked like they had been built in the 1950s, but Gil knew they were outfitted with state-of-the-art radiation detectors and surveillance equipment. The town likely was under twenty-four-hour watch by a host of satellites.
    “They have you go through a guard post just to get into town?” Joe asked after being waved through by an armed officer. “We’re not even at the lab yet.”
    “Welcome to Los Alamos,” Gil said. The town of Los Alamos within the county of Los Alamos was supposedly separate from Los Alamos National Laboratory, but with almost ten thousand employees, everyone within a twenty-mile radius—with the exception of Pueblo tribal members—was connected to the lab in one way or another.
    They passed through another gate to get into Los Alamos lab proper, showing their ID and badges to another security guard. He directed them to the correct building and sent them off with a brisk wave.
    “I think I should warn you that they do things differently up here,” Gil said.
    “How so?” Joe asked.
    Gil hesitated, not sure how to explain. The lab was one of the largest scientific centers ever created and one of only two places in the country where nuclear weapons were designed. By necessity, that made it