“Now, I assume that, as a true believer—you never said as much, but I believe the inference was there—I assume that he would use human targets at some time in his journey. He believes them to be infidels, has no scruples against using them, and it is easily within the capacity of the Menendez apparatus to arrange such a thing. Everybody with me?”

Nods and mumbles of assent.

“So a question that can be asked is this: who would he shoot? Where could he get living bodies to hit at long range? It’s not the sort of thing you advertise for, nobody’s going to volunteer for it, not even for a large sum to be left to the volunteers’ benefactors. Those selected would almost have to be of a sort who would not be noticed in their absence, perhaps not even reported. They would have to be from a victim pool about which even the police, in reality, wouldn’t care much.”

He waited. Nobody had a thing to say.

“It seems to me,” he said, “or, that is, it seemed to me all of a sudden two hours ago, that the one source without fail would be any city’s population of homeless men. Nobody counts them, nobody really looks at them, American legalism is such that they can’t be rounded up in a tank or beaten until they leave town. So they find an out-of-the-way place and fester. Under the viaduct, by the river, out with the dumpsters, in abandoned factories, zombie neighborhoods, that sort of thing. And so it seems to me that Menendez might assign men to visit these places, drug an already sleeping hobo, and drag him off.

“You can imagine the rest. He awakens a day later in unfamiliar circumstances and finds himself pinned or in some fashion imprisoned, and, from a long way off, our good friend Juba conducts his experiments. The bullets come closer and closer, and if the man screams or begs, no one is there to hear, because the site is clearly wilderness of some sort. When Juba strikes, the cadaver is examined for terminal forensics, then buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of by cartel methodology. I have heard of buzzards.”

“They do use buzzards,” said Nick.