“It covers three thousand acres, stretches from Palmdale in the north down to Quartz Hill,” Kudus said. He zoomed out. There were individual clusters of buildings miles apart. Then several more miles of blank, beige scrub before you got to the double-layered outer fence, where you could just about see security booths on the gates. Mountains to the east created a defensive wall. But even here you could see the fence extended over the rock. Within the perimeter were several individual airstrips, each accompanied by aprons of tarmac and the blank oblongs of vast hangars over a square kilometer each.

“Plant Twenty-One alone, where Moretti was listed, has three hundred square kilometers to play with. It has a runway complex shared between several private contractors. There are eight production sites specially suited for what they call ‘advanced technology,’ leased from the Air Force on a government-owned contractor-operated basis.”

“What’s a psychologist doing there?”

“Fair question. So now Moretti’s family want to see where he worked,” Kudus continued. “And, of course, they’re refused. They ask for access to belongings they say are missing, including a journal of some kind. The Air Force spends three months denying it ever existed, then they say it’s accidentally been destroyed.”

“I bet.”

“It gets stranger. Moretti’s family want to know exactly what he was working on. Did it somehow place him in danger? Or create unnecessary stress, leading him to take his life? Is it even possible he was killed because of objections?

“At this point the government gets involved. They assert executive privilege and claim the federal court has no jurisdiction over the matter. When Becker requests the files documenting the Air Force investigation into Moretti’s suicide, he gets another stone wall. A district court judge takes his side, however, and orders them to be handed over, so now the air force refuses on the grounds of national security. Protocol is that in this kind of situation a judge is allowed to review the documents so any compromising information can be excised, but the air force wouldn’t even permit that.”

“Deep black.”

“Deep black something.”

“Where’s Moretti’s wife in all this?”

“Not sure. The people driving this are his parents. They’re the ones who hire the lawyer. They’re the ones who eventually got paid off. Healthily, it seems. Lake Ravenna kept its secrets. The end. Or, until Rory started thinking about it.”

Taylor lifted the printout. It carried a photo of Moretti wearing a lab coat, pens in the top pocket. He was smiling, a little care-worn, with black hair and thick dark eyebrows. A man who looked like he could have been a GP or a pharmacist but had answered the patriotic call out to the military-industrial desert. To LA’s dark research sprawl.

. . . A psychologist called Jack Moretti—American, I think—can you find out what happened to him?