Eph frowned, reminded that they were gone. “It’s not like Jim to screw up like that.”

Nora wanted to defend Jim. “If they’re getting sick, they’ll come back.”

“Only—it might be too late. For them, and for us.”

“What do you mean, for us?”

“To get to the bottom of this thing. There’s got to be an answer somewhere, an explanation. A rationale. Something impossible is happening, and we need to find out why and stop it.”

Up on the sidewalk at the main entrance on First Street, news crews were set up for live remotes from the medical examiner’s office. That attracted a sizable crowd of onlookers, whose nervousness was palpable from around the corner. Lots of uncertainty in the air.

But one man broke from the crowd, a man Eph had noticed on the way in. An old man with birch white hair, holding a walking stick that was too tall for him, gripping it, like a staff, below its high silver handle. Like a dinner-theater Moses, except that he was impeccably dressed, formal and old-fashioned, in a light black overcoat over a gabardine suit, with a gold watch chain looped on his vest. And—oddly for the otherwise distinguished wardrobe—gray wool gloves with the fingertips cut off.

“Dr. Goodweather?”

The old man knew his name. Eph gave him another look, and said, “Do I know you?”

The man spoke with an accent, maybe Slavic. “I saw you on the box. The TV. I knew you would have to come here.”

“You’ve been waiting here for me?”

“What I have to say, Doctor, it is very important. Critical.”

Eph was distracted by the handle on top of the old man’s tall walking stick: a silver wolf’s head. “Well, not now…call my office, make an appointment…” He moved away, dialing rapidly on his cell phone.

The old man appeared anxious, an agitated man striving to speak calmly. He put on his best gentlemanly smile, including Nora in his introduction. “Abraham Setrakian is my name. Which should mean nothing to you.” He gestured, with his walking stick, at the morgue. “You saw them in there. The passengers from the airplane.”

Nora said, “You know something about that?”

“Indeed,” he said, sending a grateful smile her way. Setrakian glanced at the morgue again, like a man who, having waited so long to speak, was uncertain where to start. “You found them not much changed in there, no?”

Eph turned off his cell phone before it rang through. The old man’s words echoed his own irrational fears. “Not changed how?” he said.

“The dead. Bodies not breaking down.”

Eph said, more out of concern than intrigue, “So that is what people are hearing out here?”

“No one had to tell me anything, Doctor. I know.”

“You ‘know,’” said Eph.

“Tell us,” said Nora. “What else do you know?”

The old man cleared his throat. “Have you found a…coffin?”