The second was more pragmatic: fund-raising. Burning Man, despite its ban on commerce, wasn’t cheap. Admission to the event was upward of three hundred dollars, and even though you might not spend a dime for a week you still had to invest in all the resources necessary to travel to and spend seven days in the desert.

That was only the bare minimum, though. Theme camps could spend tens of thousands of dollars bringing their vision to life, and that amount went up by a factor of ten when it came to some of the big art installations.

Greg had never actually made it out to the playa, but it was time to talk to a few people who had.

Doc Robbins was in the groove.

He was listening to the Doors on his new iPod-a birthday present from his youngest child-and nodding along as he got ready for the next autopsy. “Riders on the Storm,” one of the great oldies, with Jim Morrison not so much singing as chanting a dire description of imminent doom and killers with toads in their brains. It was a dark piece to listen to in a morgue, but that just added to its power. Robbins was kind of sorry Morrison had died in Paris instead of Vegas; this town seemed far more suited to the singer’s dramatic lifestyle and death than any place in France.

And Robbins would have loved to add Jim’s picture to his collection.

Never mind that Robbins was only nineteen and still in medical school when Jim died. Robbins figured that if Vegas could keep Elvis alive until he was forty-two, it could have done the same for the Lizard King. Which meant Morrison would have survived until ’85-still a number of years before Robbins hit town, but maybe he would have been here visiting, even here to catch Morrison performing at Caesars or the MGM Grand. Jim could have collapsed onstage, ODing right before everyone’s eyes, and Robbins would have responded to the call of “Is there a doctor in the house?” by leaping to the rescue…

By the time the fantasy played itself out in his mind , the song was nearly over and he and Mr. Mojo Risin’ were jamming together at the Copa. He smiled to himself, had Jim expire mid-poetic rant, and got down to work.

“Body is that of a young African-American male, approximately midthirties,” he said, enunciating clearly for the recording. “Cause of death appears to be a single gunshot wound to the anterior portion of the skull.”

And now for the interesting stuff. “There’s a twelve-inch-long incision from the navel to the base of the breastbone that’s been sewn up with green thread. Lack of a vital reaction along the edges of the wound indicates it was made postmortem. I’m cutting the thread and will send it to Trace for analysis.”

He did so, using a scalpel to sever the crude stitches and a forceps to pluck out the strands, placing them in an evidence bag. He’d seen bodies with these sorts of postmortem cuts before-usually on drug mules who had died when one of the heroin- or cocaine-stuffed balloons they’d swallowed had burst. Whoever had hired them to carry the drugs in the first place would simply extract their product from the body’s intestinal tract, slicing open layers of flesh like a bubble-wrapped FedEx package.

He had to admit, though, this was the first one he’d seen that had been resealed.

“It appears that a small white plastic cylinder, three to four inches in diameter and approximately six inches in length , has been inserted in the abdominal cavity. One end of the cylinder has a much thinner, transparent tube feeding into another incision in the esophagus. Opening the mouth-no sign of the tube’s end. It looks as if it’s been fed all the way into the sinus.

“The other end of the cylinder appears to be open. Taking a closer look…”

Doc Robbins was not a squeamish man. Years of experience in dealing with corpses in states that ranged from dismembered to liquefied had given him a strong stomach; nevertheless, there were still certain things that unnerved him.

In particular, he hated rats.

He dealt with their leavings often-he could spot rat predation on a body with a glance, even tell you how big a specimen had been gnawing on the remains from the size of the tooth marks. He’d found rat droppings on and in corpses many times. But all that was simply physical evidence-it didn’t affect him the way the sight of one of the filthy, evil rodents themselves did. Loathsome, disease-ridden, foul vermin, each and every one…

What leapt out of the cylinder and sank its fangs into Doc Robbins’s hand wasn’t a rat.

The Thunderbolt Lounge was old-school Vegas. Pictures on the wall behind the massive bar showed the celebrities who had frequented the bar in the past: the Rat Pack, Jerry Lewis, Rita Hayworth, Jimmy Durante. One framed picture hung in an odd spot, near the ceiling, and was no more than a clear pane of glass in a wooden frame; it was there to show off the two bullet holes in the wall behind it, put there during a dispute between Maximillian “Maxy” Fratoni and Joey “One Roll” Lido in 1956.

The dance floor was small and concrete, the lighting was dim, the fixtures old and badly in need of repair; but the place sprawled out over several rooms, built when land in Vegas was cheap, and featured three different stages. It was one of Greg’s favorite spots in Vegas, and he wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

Tonight the place was full of Burners. They dressed the same way they would out in the desert, in costumes that ranged from the practical to the bizarre: cargo shorts and mesh tops; leather chaps and chain-mail vests; Hawaiian shirts and grass skirts; Star Wars stormtrooper outfits; Santa suits. There were people dressed as winged fairies, as kung-fu monks, as zombie cheerleaders, as space pimps, robot gorillas, mad scientists, and evil clowns.

Greg paid the door fee to a large, hairy man wearing a torn wedding dress and foot-long glow-in-the-dark antennae. “Slow night, huh?”

The doorman shrugged. “What can you do?”

Greg strolled inside and glanced around. A DJ was spinning house music, something catchy and hypnotic with samples of an old M arx Brothers routine for lyrics. He grinned and looked around, then spotted a fire spinner he recognized as Glowbug.

He showed her the picture he’d brought along of Hal Kanamu. “Yeah, I know him,” Glowbug said. She wore a short silver wig, a silver Mylar corset, bright orange fishnets, and five-inch platform boots. “That’s Kahuna Man. Met him at the Burn last year.”

“Yeah? What was he like?”

“He seemed okay. He was a first-timer, so he was really into it. Didn’t see him that much at the festival, but that’s how it is-you can spend the entire week camping with the same group of people and be so busy you never see them twice.”

“How about since then?”

“Yeah, he came to the decompression party in October. He seemed a lot more intense then.”

Greg nodded. Decompression parties were usually thrown a month or two after the event itself, functioning as the sociological equivalent of a hyperbaric chamber that gradually introduced a diver to increasing levels of pressure so he wouldn’t suffer from the bends. The festival itself was such an intense and all-encompassing experience that the return to normal life-what some Burners called “the default world”-could be something of a shock. Decompression helped lessen that.

But Hal Kanamu had experienced another massive shock to his system by then-he was seve ral million dollars richer. “Intense how?”

She shrugged. “Hey, I don’t want to get the guy in trouble with the cops.”

“You can’t,” said Greg. “He’s dead. I’m trying to find out how it happened.”

Her eyes got wider. “Oh, wow. Was he… was it drugs?”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because the last time I saw him he was using. Hey, I try not to judge, but meth will kill you, man. There are other ways to have fun, you know?”