A prickle of unease and wrong started in Cooper’s throat, and he subconsciously stepped closer to Park, just enough to feel the warmth and constant movement of life radiating from him. Cooper supposed, like the elephant in the rotunda, many of these animals had been hunted, stripped of their skin and stuffed a long time ago, but it was still deeply depressing to be surrounded by dead creatures, so many of them endangered or perhaps even extinct by now. All clustered together unnaturally and positioned into a pantomime of life; any sense of majesty they might have possessed now tawdry, almost grotesque.

They kept walking, and the next room was a large hall but much darker. Here, Cooper could only see the enormous silhouettes of more animals. These all from Africa and not fully encased, but placed behind open-top glass barriers or high up enough not to need any protection at all. A giraffe overlooking all newcomers. A lion posed on top of an information stand. Each of them still, dark shadows. Even the digital informational screens were black, the only sources of light the dim security strips along the floor and the green glow of an occasional exit sign.

Cooper tapped his own ear, asking if Park could hear anything, and Park shook his head in the negative, but he was frowning.

“Something’s wrong,” he murmured to Cooper. “Something’s dead.”

“Everything, I hope,” Cooper whispered, glancing up as they passed under a whole tree branch, where the crouched outline of some kind of feline predator was posed alongside the limp, hanging body of a gazelle.

Park shook his head. “No, it’s—I don’t know. There are too many...unfamiliar, confusing smells in here. I’m having a hard time separating everything. But there’s something...fresh. Bad.”

They continued walking slowly, Park sniffing the air as he went. The rooms appeared to be divided into continents, Africa taking up the largest hall, then to the left a smaller section of rooms for Australia, that led into South America and so on. As they stepped into the North American section, greeted by a standing grizzly bear, Cooper got the feeling they were beginning to circle back around toward Africa, and still had found no sign of the woman.

Then Park stopped abruptly.

There, on top of the information stand, was a gray wolf posed to forever howl at the ceiling panels. Just below it, seated on a large square stone bench, back to them, was a figure. A human figure in dark clothes. His head was tilted back, and he appeared to be staring up at the wolf, hands resting on the bench at either side of him, long fingers curled upward, as if begging for penance.

Cooper took a tentative couple steps forward and recognized the long gray hair pulled into a fashionable topknot. He could also hear the faint drip drip of something spilling slowly to the floor.

“Mr. Crane?”