“My apologies, Lionel. You go ahead.”

The man led another cow and then a third and still another up onto that scale, and Luther wondered just how much weight that scale could take, if it could weigh a ship and the people on it.

He’d fallen back of Walter and hurried to catch up as the man took a right turn down a path between yet more pens, and when Luther reached him, Walter said, “The key man takes responsibility for all the livestock comes off the trains on his shift. That’s me. I lead them to their catch pens and we keep ’em there, feed ’em, clean up after ’em until they get sold, and then a man shows up with a bill of sale and we release them to him.”

He stopped at the next corner and handed Luther a shovel.

Luther gave it a bitter smile. “Yeah, I remember this.”

“Then I can save me some breath. We in charge of pens nineteen through fifty-seven. Got that?”

Luther nodded.

“Every time I empty one, you clean it and restock it with hay and water. End of the day, three times a week, you go there”—he pointed—“and you clean that, too.”

Luther followed his finger and saw the squat brown building at the west end of the yard. You didn’t have to know what it was to sense its mean purpose. Nothing that squat and unadorned and functional-looking could ever put a smile on anyone’s face.

“The killing floor,” Luther said.

“You got a problem with that, son?”

Luther shook his head. “It’s a job.”

Walter Grange agreed with a sigh and a pat on the back. “It’s a job.”

Two days after Danny and Nora’s wedding, Connor met with Attorney General Palmer at his home in Washington, D.C. The windows were boarded up, the front rooms had been obliterated, their ceilings caved in; the staircase just past the entrance hall was shorn in half, with the bottom half indistinguishable from the rest of the rubble and the top half dangling above the entranceway. D.C. police and federal agents had set up a command post in what had once been the parlor, and they moved freely through the house as Mitchell Palmer’s valet led Connor to the office in the rear.

Three men waited for him there. The eldest and fleshiest of them he recognized instantly as Mitchell Palmer. He was round without being quite portly and his lips were the thickest part of him; they sprouted from his face like a rose. He shook Connor’s hand, thanked him for coming, and introduced him to a thin BI agent named Rayme Finch and a dark-eyed, dark-haired Justice Department lawyer named John Hoover.

Connor had to step over some books in order to take his seat. The explosion had shaken them from their shelves, and the built-in bookcases sported great cracks. Plaster and paint had fallen from the ceiling, and the window behind Mitchell Palmer bore two small fissures in the panes.