Bodies lay upon eight guttered tables of cold stainless steel. The airline fatalities were in various stages of autopsy, two of them fully “canoed”: that is, their chests had already been eviscerated, the removed organs laid out on an open plastic bag on their shins, a pathologist paring away samples on a cutting board like a cannibal preparing a platter of human sashimi. The wounded necks had been dissected and the tongues pulled through, the faces folded halfway down like latex masks, exposing the skullcaps, which had been opened with the circular saw. One brain was in the process of being severed from its attachment to the spinal cord, whereupon it would be placed in a formalin solution to harden, the last step of an autopsy. A morgue attendant was standing by with wadding, and a large curved needle threaded with heavy waxed twine, to refill the emptied skull.

A long-handled pair of hardware-store pruning shears was being passed from one table to the next, where another attendant stood on a metal footstool over an open-chested body and began cracking ribs one at a time, so that the entire rib cage and sternum could be lifted out whole. The smell was an absorbing stew of Parmesan cheese, methane, and rotten eggs.

“After you called, I began checking their necks,” said Bennett. “All the bodies so far present the same laceration you spoke of. But no scar. An open wound, as precise and clean as any I’ve ever seen.”

He showed them to an undissected female body laid out on a table. A six-inch metal block beneath her neck made her head fall back, arching her chest, extending her neck. Eph probed the skin over the woman’s throat with his gloved fingers.

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?”