Eph was a moment trying to read the CDC director’s face. He glanced back at Setrakian, but the old man offered him nothing, standing very still with his hat in his gnarled hands.

Eph turned back to his boss. “They have gone home.”

“Home?” said Barnes, turning his head as though trying to hear him better. “To heaven?”

“To their families, Everett.”

Barnes looked at the FBI agent who kept looking at Eph.

“They are dead,” said Barnes.

“They aren’t dead. At least, not in the way we understand it.”

“There is only one way to be dead, Ephraim.”

Eph shook his head. “Not anymore.”

“Ephraim.” Barnes took one sympathetic step forward. “I know you have been under a keen amount of stress recently. I know you have had family troubles…”

Eph said, “Hold on. I don’t think I understand what the hell this is.”

The FBI agent said, “This is about your patient, Doctor. One of the pilots of Regis Air Flight 753, Captain Doyle Redfern. We have a few questions about his care.”

Eph hid a chill. “Get a court order and I’ll answer your questions.”

“Maybe you’d like to explain this.”

He opened a portable video player on the edge of the desk and pressed play. It showed a security-camera view of a hospital room. Redfern was seen from behind, staggering, his johnny open in back. He looked wounded and confused rather than predatory and enraged. The camera angle did not show the stinger swirling out of his mouth.

It did however show Eph facing him with the whirling trephine, jabbing at Redfern’s throat with the circular blade.

There was the flicker of a jump cut, and now Nora was in the background, covering her mouth as Eph stood by the doorway with his chest heaving, Redfern in a heap on the floor.

Then another sequence began. A different camera farther along the same basement hallway, set at a higher angle. It showed two people, a man and a woman, forcing their way into the locked morgue room where Redfern’s body was being held. Then it showed them leaving with a heavy body bag.

The two people looked very much like Eph and Nora.

Playback stopped. Eph looked at Nora—who was shocked—and then at the FBI agent and Barnes. “That was…that attack was edited to look bad. There was a cut there. Redfern had—”

“Where are Captain Redfern’s remains?”

Eph couldn’t think. He couldn’t get past the lie he had just seen. “That wasn’t us. The camera was too high to—”

“So are you saying that was not you and Dr. Martinez?”

Eph looked at Nora, who was shaking her head, both of them too mystified to mount any immediate coherent defense.

Barnes said, “Let me ask you one more time, Ephraim. Where are the missing bodies from the morgues?”