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the TV coverage? They even made a documentary.”
    “The reception was real bad in the DMZ,” Parker said.
    “You ain’t no rock fan, I know that much. West Mesa was a rock concert, one of three everybody’s heard of. Woodstock was dawn and Altamont was dusk and West Mesa was pure, black, nightmarish midnight. Sixty thousand people outside of Albuquerque, September 1971. Small as these things go. The Nazgûl were the headliners. In the middle of their set, somebody with a high-powered rifle blew the skull off their lead singer, Patrick Henry Hobbins. Eight more people died in the panic that followed, but there was no more shooting, just that one bullet. They never caught the killer. He vanished in the night. And the Nazgûl never played again.
Music to Wake the Dead
was already recorded, and they released the album about three weeks after West Mesa. Needless to say, it made a whole shitpot of money. Lynch and the record company put a lot of pressure on the three surviving Nazgûl to follow up with a memorial album for Hobbins, or replace him and keep the group together, but it never happened. Without Hobbins, there was no Nazgûl. West Mesa ended them, and it was the beginning of the end for Jamie Lynch, too. He’d promoted that concert, after all.”
    “Interesting,” Parker said. “So we have two unsolved murders.”
    “What, thirteen years apart?” Sandy objected. “It can’t be connected.”
    “No? Let me tell you about the poster, Blair.”
    Sandy stared blankly.
    “Our fastidious killer pulled a poster from the wall, remember, and used it to cover the desk. Lynch was killed on top of it. It was pretty messed up, but after we cleaned it some we could make out what it was. It was kind of a moody lithograph of a desert landscape at sunset. Above the sun were four dark figures riding some kind of flying lizard things, like dragons or something, only uglier. At the bottom it said—”
    “I know what it said,” Sandy interrupted. “Jesus H. Christ. It said
Nazgûl
and
West Mesa,
right? The concert poster. But you can’t…it has to be a coincidence…” But as he said it, Sandy turned, and realized what had been bothering him before, when Parker had pointed out the blank space on the office wall. He whirled back. “It’s not a coincidence,” he blurted. “Whoever killed Lynch could have used any of the dozen posters that were right behind the desk, in arm’s reach. Instead they walked all the way down there and climbed up on something to pull down the West Mesa poster.”
    “For an old hippie, you’re not so dumb,” Parker observed.
    “But
why?
What does it mean?”
    The deputy got up from the edge of the desk and sighed. “I was sort of hoping you’d tell me that, Blair. I had this fond idea that when I told you about the poster and the album you’d suddenly light up and clue me in on some secret cult that worships these guys and goes around murdering people in time to their music. It would have made my life one hell of a lot simpler, believe me. No such thing, huh?”
    “Not that I know of,” Sandy said.
    “Well, I guess we go to the horse’s mouth, then. We’ll bring in these three musicians and have them questioned.”
    “No,” Sandy said. “I’ve got a better idea. Let me do it.”
    Parker frowned.
    “I’m serious,” Sandy said. “It’s part of my story, anyway. I have to interview people who knew Lynch, work up a sort of retrospective on him and his times. It would be logical to start with the Nazgûl. If any kind of cult has sprung up around them or their music, they ought to know about it, right? I could let you know.”
    “Are you trained in techniques of interrogation?” Parker said.
    “Interrogation my ass,” Sandy said. “I’m me and you’re you, and I’ll get more out of the Nazgûl than you could. We used to have a saying in the old days. Da
Hog
knows things the pigs don’t.”
    The deputy grinned. “You may have a point there. I don’t know. I’ll have