When she decided to risk talking to me, we had to do it through Skype, so she could see my face; she needed to be sure I was who I said I was, not someone in a government office with a soothing voice tricking her into talking about Dr. Roque.

I set up a temporary Skype account on the library server and let Malik see me against the background of the library’s computer room. “Someone, either the sheriff or the army, has planted malware on my own computer, so I have to use public ones.”

Malik herself was in her home, sitting on a couch in what I judged was her living room. She was young, perhaps thirty, hair cut short around a narrow face, dark eyes rimmed red from weeping.

“Of course I remember Doris McKinnon. That was the woman Dr. Roque was starting to work on when he collapsed. He dictated his preliminary notes, which came to me: the budget cuts in the state have left him—had left him,” she corrected herself mournfully, “short-staffed at the KBI lab, so I often typed his autopsy notes for him.”

“Were you there when the body disappeared?”

“Not with him: I am not—was not—allowed in the Topeka lab because I do not work for the state: my salary is paid by the doctor’s research grants. However, his dictation came to me through a conferencing app, so I know exactly what he said.

“He was puzzled indeed by what he was seeing. He did not believe that the body could belong to Ms. McKinnon, because she was old, perhaps ninety. The woman he was examining was also old, but she was closer to his own age, around seventy. He also was puzzled by her teeth, so he sent me the X-rays—he took those before he started the actual autopsy, that and he took scrapings from the fingernails.”

Malik fiddled with her computer and sent me a copy of the jaw X-rays. “He had to take those himself because there was no lab tech available in Topeka that day. The state budget cuts mean the techs can only work twenty hours a week. The dead woman’s teeth were bad—she had not seen a dentist probably for many years. Another thing also was strange: some of the dental work Dr. Roque thought had been done in Eastern Europe or possibly Greece. When he sent me the X-rays, he asked if I could do some deeper research on them.”

I looked at the X-rays, but they told me nothing, except that there were teeth involved. “What did you find?”