One of the crewmen was slouched over a small table, head resting on arms as if he were asleep. His clothes were damp and stained. Pitt placed his hand on a shoulder and gave a slight shake. There was no firmness to the flesh. It felt soft and pulpy. An icy shroud fell over him that lifted goose bumps on every inch of his skin, yet the sweat was trickling down his body in streams.

He turned his attention to the ghastly apparitions seated at the controls. Their faces were covered by a blanket of flies, and decomposition was eating away all traces of life. The skin was slipping from the flesh like broken blisters on burns. Jaws hung slack with mouths agape, the lips and tongues swollen and parched. Eyes were open and staring into nothingness, eyeballs opaque and clouded over. Hands still hung on the controls, their fingernails turned blue. Unchecked by enzymes, bacteria had formed gases that grotesquely bloated the stomachs. The damp air and the high temperatures of the tropics were greatly speeding the process of putrefaction.

The rotting corpses inside the Prosperteer had flown from some unknown grave, a macabre crew in a charnel airship on a ghostly mission.

<<5>>

The naked corpse of an adult black woman lay stretched on an examining table under the glaring lights of the autopsy room. Preservation was excellent, no visible injuries due to violence. To the trained eye the state of rigor mortis indicated she had been dead less than seven hours. Her age appeared to be somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. The body might have drawn male stares once, but now it lay undernourished, wasted, and ravaged by a decade of drug intake.

The Dade County coroner, Dr. Calvin Rooney, wasn't too pleased about doing the autopsy. There were enough deaths in Miami to keep his staff working around the clock, and he preferred to spend his time on the more dramatic and puzzling postmortem examinations. A garden-variety drug overdose held little interest for him. But this one was found dumped on a county commissioner's front lawn, and it wouldn't do to send in a third-string quarterback.

Wearing a blue lab coat because he detested the standard white issue, Rooney, a home-grown Floridian, U.S. Army veteran, and Harvard Medical School graduate, slipped a new cassette in a portable tape recorder and dryly commented on the general condition of the body.

He picked up a scalpel and bent over for the dissection, starting a few inches under the chin and slicing downward toward the pubic bone. Suddenly Rooney halted the incision over the chest cavity and leaned closer, squinting through a pair of wide-lensed, horn-rimmed glasses. In the next fifteen minutes, he removed and examined the heart while delivering a running monologue into the tape recorder.

Rooney was in the midst of making a last-minute observation when Sheriff Tyler Sweat entered the autopsy room. He was a medium-built, brooding man, slightly round-shouldered, his face a blend of melancholy and brutish determination. Methodical and shrewdly earnest, he enjoyed great respect from the men and women under him.