He noticed the faint line—as thin as a paper cut—and gently parted the wound. He was shocked by its neatness as well as its apparent depth. Eph released her skin, and the breach closed lazily, like a sleepy eyelid or a timid smile.

“What could have caused this?” he asked.

“Nothing in nature, not that I know of,” said Bennett. “Notice the scalpel-like precision. Almost calibrated, you might say, both in aim and length. And yet—the edges are rounded, which is to say, almost organic in appearance.”

“How deep?” asked Nora.

“A clean breach, straight in, puncturing the wall of the common carotid, but stopping there. Not going out the other side, not rupturing the artery.”

“In every case?” gasped Nora.

“Every one I’ve looked at so far. Every body bears the laceration, though if you hadn’t alerted me, I have to admit I might not have noticed it. Especially with everything else going on with these bodies.”

“What else?”

“We’ll get there in a moment. Each laceration is on the neck, either front or side. Excluding one female who had hers on the chest, high above her heart. And one male we had to search, and eventually found the breach on the upper inside thigh, over the femoral artery. Each wound perforated skin and muscle, ending exactly inside a major artery.”

“A needle?” ventured Eph.

“But finer than that. I…I need to do more research into it, we’re just at the beginning here. And there’s plenty of other freaky shit going down. You’re aware of this, I assume?” Bennett led them to the door of a walk-in refrigerator. Inside, it was wider than a two-car garage. There were fifty or so gurneys, most containing a crash bag unzipped down to the corpse’s chest. A handful were fully unzipped, those bodies nude—having already been weighed, measured, and photographed—and ready for the autopsy table. There were also eight or so corpses unrelated to Flight 753, lying on bare gurneys without crash bags, bearing standard yellow toe tags.

Refrigeration slows decomposition, in the same way it preserves fruits and vegetables and delays cold cuts from spoiling. But the airplane bodies hadn’t spoiled at all. Thirty-six hours out, and they looked nearly as fresh as when Eph had first boarded the plane. As opposed to the yellow-tagged corpses, which were bloating, effluvium oozing from every orifice like a black purge, flesh going dark green and leatherlike from evaporation.

“These are some pretty good-looking dead people,” said Bennett.

Eph felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in the cooler. He and Nora both waded in, three rows deep. The bodies looked—not healthy, for they were shrunken and bloodlessly wan—but not long dead. They bore the characteristic mask of the deceased, but it was as though they had just passed over, not thirty minutes ago.

They followed Bennett back out into the autopsy room, to the same female corpse—a woman in her early forties with no distinguishing marks other than a decade-old cesarean scar below the bikini line—being prepped for incision. But instead of a scalpel, Bennett reached for a tool never used inside a morgue. A stethoscope.