Aanya laughed in embarrassment. “Everything that is going on with Dr. Roque’s death and Dr. Hitchcock’s illness is so unreal—I feel as though I’m in one of those spy movies. Anything could happen, and I want to make sure that it does not. But that is not why I called. It’s because of another strange event.

“Ruby and I, we were starting to go through things in Dr. Roque’s lab, to see what open cases he had that needed to be sent to another pathologist. And I found the hand of an infant.”

I pictured a baby’s hand in a jar and asked a startled question.

“No, no, nothing that macabre—you have such a wrong idea of Dr. Roque! It is a tiny set of bones in a specimen case, dated and labeled. It came with the soil from Doris McKinnon.”

The bits of bone Doris had dug up that night in the field. Not a badger or a raccoon but a human baby.

“What . . . Did he . . . Was there a report?” I managed to stammer.

“He estimated the bones to be about twenty-five to forty years old. He was able to get a DNA sample, but there was no match in any databases.”

Another baby at the missile silo, with the age range framing the summer Cady was born. Another baby, one who’d been killed and left to lie there? Had Jennifer Perec produced a stillborn twin to Cady? Or Sonia, with her wild dreams about Matt and that journal entry describing hearing a baby crying—was it possible that Sonia had given birth but that she’d blotted out all memory of a pregnancy and delivery?

“Vic, you are still listening to me?”

“I’m here,” I said, “but so bewildered I don’t have anything to say. Could he tell the child’s sex?”

“A girl, perhaps two or three months old.”

“If I wanted you to try to match DNA from a living person, what would I need to send you? Would hair be enough?”

“Only if it’s a living hair with the root attached. Saliva or blood would be better. What are you thinking?”

“Right now my ideas are like a white sauce that won’t thicken, a mess of lumpy flour and milk. Get that bone case someplace safe, would you?”

I hung up and squatted down next to Peppy. “I wonder if that’s the small object the marauders were looking for when they turned August’s apartment and the Six-Points Gym upside down. Colonel Baggetto said they were missing a canister, but what if it was a baby’s bones?”

Peppy thumped her tail once. Agreement. That meant I should follow my impulse and try to get a DNA sample from both Sonia and Cady, to see if the dead infant was related to either of them, to Cady’s mother, or to Sonia as mother.