Her voice faltered as she spotted the severed head resting on the cracked Formica. Smith tensed but then a broad smile spread across her face.

“That thing is too cool! Where did you get it?”

“Off the Internet,” Randi replied casually.

“The weird musty smell…”

“Comes in a little spray bottle.”

“Awesome!”

He was a bit perplexed by the conversation until he remembered Randi’s comment about the calendar. He’d been to immersed in his work with the Merge to bother keeping up with holidays. It was October 30. The day before Halloween.

“I’ll just have a beer,” Randi said. “Don’t care what kind.”

“Same,” Smith agreed.

The girl gave the head one last admiring glance and then returned to the bar. He waited until she was out of earshot before he spoke again.

“What the hell is this? Something for the mantel?” he said.

“Take a closer look.”

“Can I turn my Merge back on?”

“No.”

A quick glance around him confirmed that no one but the returning waitress was paying any attention at all. He waited for her to slide the beers onto the table and disappear again before pulling the head toward him.

“Looks like the spine was severed with a saw of some kind and then it was left somewhere dry. Skin color and features are a little hard to distinguish with the shrinkage, but based on the hair and the beard, I’d say you found it in Afghanistan.”

“Very good. Anything else?”

He kept going over it and was about to say no when the dim light picked up something on the side. He pushed back the matted hair and found himself looking at a Merge stud.

“Christ. They’re already smuggling them in?”

She shook her head. “This man died more than three months ago. On July twenty-first.”

“You have your dates wrong. The Merge didn’t go on the market until after that. Hell, Dresner didn’t even make his announcement until the twenty-second.”

“I don’t have my dates wrong.”

If it was anyone else, he would be asking if she was certain, probing for a mistake in her timeline or logic. But this wasn’t someone else. It was Randi Russell.

“So you’re saying you’ve had this since July twenty-first?”

She shook her head. “I went to a village on the twenty-second that had been wiped out by the Taliban. All the men had been decapitated and the heads were gone. I finally tracked them down in a cave a few days ago.”

“Did they all have studs?” he said, trying to conjure an explanation for what he was hearing. The best thing he could come up with was that someone had snuck into that cave ahead of her and installed studs on a bunch of severed heads. Not particularly high on the plausibility scale.

“I didn’t look. That was just the first one I picked up.”