She did. “It looks like a flight of stairs.”

“Right in back of the cockpit.”

“What’s ‘OFCRA’ stand for?”

Eph walked down to the galley before the cockpit door. Those very initials were printed on a wall panel there.

“Overhead flight crew rest area,” said Eph. “Standard on these long-distance big birds.”

Nora looked at him. “Did anybody check up here?”

Eph said, “I know we didn’t.”

He reached down and turned a handle recessed in the wall, pulling open the panel. A trifolding door revealed narrow, curving steps leading up into the dark.

“Oh, shit,” said Nora.

Eph played his Luma lamp up the stairs. “I take it that means you want me to go first.”

“Wait. Let’s get somebody else.”

“No. They won’t know what to look for.”

“Do we?”

Eph ignored that, and climbed the tight, curling stairs.

The upper compartment was tight, low-ceilinged. There were no windows. The Luma lights were better suited for forensic examination than indoor illumination.

Inside the first module, they made out two side-by-side business-class-size seats folded down. Behind these were two inclined bunks, also side by side, not much larger than a crawl space. The dark light showed both modules to be empty.

It also, however, showed more of the same multicolored mess they had discovered below. On the floor and tracked over the seats and one of the bunks. But here it was smudged, almost as though tracked in while still wet.

Nora said, “What the hell?”

The ammonia smell was here as well—and something else. A pungent odor.

Nora noticed it too, bringing the back of her hand beneath her nostrils. “What is it?”

Eph stood almost doubled over under the low ceiling between the two chairs. He was trying to put a word to it. “Like earthworms,” he said. “Used to dig them up as kids. Cut them in half in order to watch each section wriggle away. Their smell was earth, the cold soil they crawled through.”

Eph ran his black light over the walls and floors, scouring the chamber. He was about to give up when he noticed something behind Nora’s paper booties.

“Nora, don’t move,” said Eph.

He leaned to one side for a better angle on the carpeted floor behind her, Nora frozen as though she were about to trip a land mine.

A small clump of soil lay on the patterned carpet. No more than a few grams of dirt, a trace amount, richly black.

Nora said, “Is that what I think it is?”

Eph said, “The cabinet.”

They climbed back down the outside stairs to the area of the hangar reserved for cargo, where food-service carts were now being opened and inspected. Eph and Nora scanned the piles of luggage, the golf bags, the kayak.

The black wooden cabinet was gone. The space it had previously occupied, on the edge of the tarpaulin, was bare.

“Someone must have moved it,” said Eph, still looking. He walked away a few steps, scanning the rest of the hangar. “Couldn’t have gotten far.”