“Oh, goodness me. I’m happy to help.” Mrs. Tong smiled warmly. “Got no kids to hurry home to. No church tonight. Fact is—”

“Thank you.”

The woman’s smile faded under her boss’s flinty glance.

Leclerc turned to LaManche. “Who will handle the subjects?”

LaManche’s gaze rolled to me. I nodded.

“I think this guy slept with a broom up his ass,” Pomier said under his breath as I took the bags from him.

Three pairs of eyes followed Mrs. Tong and me into the scanning room. She started talking as soon as the door clicked shut.

“I call her Felix the Cat.” She flapped a hand at the scanner. “You know, for CAT scan. That’s what they used to be called. It’s silly, I know. But a lot of patients are nervous as jackrabbits when they get shoved into a big whirring box. Naming the thing after a cartoon character helps ease the jitters.”

“Mrs. Tong—”

“What are we, dining with the queen here? Call me Opaline. You know how Felix works?” As she spoke, she adjusted dials and flipped switches.

“I understand—”

“No magic. The old boy uses a computer and a rotating X-ray device to create cross-sectional images of organs and body parts. I’m talking slices with detail that’ll blow your socks off.”

It was clear that Opaline Tong loved to talk. Or was nervous as hell around dead babies. Her eyes avoided mine as I opened the first tub.

“The T in ‘CT’ stands for ‘tomography.’ You know what that means?”

“Imaging by sections using penetrating waves.” I placed the tiny mummy designated LSJML-49277 on the patient couch, face-up, and secured it by buckling the straps.

“OK, then. You’re a smart one.”

Opaline pushed a button to move the couch up, then forward and backward inside the hole. When the baby was properly positioned, she stepped sideways and slapped the donut.

“The scanner itself is this circular rotating frame. It’s got an X-ray tube on one side and a detector on the other that looks kind of like a banana. The rotating frame will spin the X-ray tube and detector around our poor little fella here, creating a fan-shaped beam of X-rays. The detector will take snapshots called profiles. Typically, about a thousand each time around. So with each complete rotation, we’ll get one cross-sectional slice.”

Opaline’s tone had become a little less kindergarten-teacher sweet.

“The computer will use digital geometry processing to generate three-dimensional images of the inside of the body from the series of two-dimensional images taken around our single axis of rotation. Get it?”

“I do. Thank you.”

“You ready?”

I nodded.

“Let’s do it.”

* * *

Forty-three minutes later, we were all in the anteroom with Mrs. Tong seated at the workstation, the rest of us bunched around her. While entering instructions, she’d explained how the data produced by the scanner would be manipulated through a process known as windowing to demonstrate various bodily structures based on their ability to block the X-ray beam. She said that although images generated were historically in the axial or transverse plane, orthogonal to the long axis of the body, modern scanners now allowed data to be reformatted in various planes or even as volumetric—three-dimensional—representations.