“There will be enough panic without our overstepping our obligations. I might point out to you, if the other survivors have indeed become ill, why haven’t we heard from them by now?”

Eph had no answer.

“I will be in touch.”

Barnes went off to make his calls.

Nora looked at Eph. She said, “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” She could see right through him.

“Don’t go looking up the other survivors. Don’t screw up our chance of saving Jim by pissing off this lawyer woman or scaring off the others.”

Eph was stewing when the outside doors opened. Two EMTs wheeled in an ambulance gurney with a body bag set on top, met by two morgue attendants. The dead wouldn’t wait for this mystery to play itself out. They would just keep coming. Eph foresaw what would happen to New York City in the grip of a true plague. Once the municipal resources were overwhelmed—police, fire, sanitation, morticians—the entire island, within weeks, would degenerate into a stinking pile of compost.

A morgue attendant unzipped the bag halfway—and then emitted an uncharacteristic gasp. He backed away from the table with his gloved hands dripping white, the opalescent fluid oozing from the black rubber bag, down the side of the stretcher, onto the floor.

“What the hell is this?” the attendant asked the EMTs, who stood by the doorway looking particularly disgusted.

“Traffic fatality,” said one, “following a fight. I don’t know…must have been a milk truck or something.”

Eph pulled gloves from the box on the counter and approached the bag, peering inside. “Where’s the head?”

“In there,” said the other EMT. “Somewhere.”

Eph saw that the corpse had been decapitated at the shoulders, the remaining mass of its neck splattered with gobs of white.

“And the guy was naked,” added the EMT. “Quite a night.”

Eph drew the zipper all the way down to the bottom seam. The headless corpse was overweight, male, roughly fifty. Then Eph noticed its feet.

He saw a wire wound around the bare big toe. As though there had been a casualty tag attached.

Nora saw the toe wire also, and blanched.

“A fight, you say?” said Eph.

“That’s what they told us,” said the EMT, opening the door to the outside. “Good day to you, and good luck.”

Eph zipped up the bag. He didn’t want anyone else seeing the tag wire. He didn’t want anyone asking him questions he couldn’t answer.

He turned to Nora. “The old man.”

Nora nodded. “He wanted us to destroy the corpses,” she remembered.

“He knew about the UV light.” Eph stripped off his latex gloves, thinking again of Jim, lying alone in isolation—with who could say what growing inside him. “We have to find out what else he knows.”

17th Precinct Headquarters, East Fifty-first Street, Manhattan