The thick concrete walls are acoustically dead, and the dark fabric-covered fiberglass insulation seems to suck in all light. I have the sensation of being at the bottom of the sea, underground or lost in the cosmos. I always feel as if I’m passing into the unknown like Alice through the looking glass. And in a way I am because the world Ernie navigates can’t be managed without instruments capable of detecting particles as small as one-billionth of a meter or seventy-five-thousandth the diameter of a human hair.

I could fit thousands of skin cells and specks of dust on such minuscule and ubiquitous evidence, what I think of as the universal detritus shed by negativity and bad karma. People leave all sorts of seemingly undetectable trash in their wake, and it’s constantly recycled. It can end up in the damnedest places as we track the tiniest tattletales in and out, passing them from one person or object to another, from one continent to the next.

I think back to when I saw Ernie last, maybe a month ago, and since then his blond-streaked graying hair has gotten longer. I notice that peeking out under his lab coat are a black suit and a bolo tie with a silver-and-turquoise arrowhead slide. He has on a black lizard belt, matching black cowboy boots, and I’m betting his black Stetson with its gambler crease is in his office. He must have court later today, a deposition or some other reason to dress up, and I ask him that.

“Nope.” His blue eyes sparkle in his weathered face. “Something much more important. I was planning on heading over to the Kennedy School after work to hear your talk. I doubt I’ll have time to go home first. A bunch of us are going from here.”

I’m touched and overwhelmed by sadness as I sit down. I tell him about Briggs.

“Goddamn,” Ernie swears under his breath as I brief him on what I fear we might be dealing with.

“Energy or electricity that’s been weaponized somehow,” I tell him what Benton suggested.

“Well in a bizarre way that would make sense,” Ernie says.

“You’ve found something that might hint at such a thing?”

“Not exactly and maybe. I actually got onto this yesterday before I left,” he refers to the Molly Hinders case as I continue scanning the bank of monitors overhead, not making much sense of what I’m seeing.

Displayed are peculiar shapes illuminated in black and white, some in the nano range and magnified two hundred thousand times. I’m confronted by spectra that are puzzling as I recognize the atomic symbols for nickel and aluminum recovered from the burn on the scalp, and also the presence of silica and iron.