Soon they brought another body from the outbuilding, and after loading in the camping equipment, they got in the truck and disappeared up the driveway.

I stepped into the clearing, the fawns still picking at the grass, and checked my phone. There was service, enough to place a call to Gordon. The ring got choppy and I thought the signal would die, but he answered.

“Hell—”

“Gordon?”

“—ney?”

“I want to tell you where I am.”

“Where—”

“Gordon?”

“Whit—”

“Just listen.” I explained as best I could: the road from Arcade, the driveway, the house and outbuilding. I hoped some of it got through. “Hello?”

I looked at the phone. The call had ended, the service whisked away on a changing wind.

—

I entered 1488 into the keypad and turned the handle. It was pitch-black inside. I felt along one wall, then another, and found the switch. Rows of fluorescent lights shuddered on, except toward the very back. By now my respirator mask was wet, and I was relieved to take it off and inhale crisp AC.

The building contained one large room, concrete walls and concrete floor, roughly divided into three areas. Near the entrance, an industrial fridge loomed beside a laboratory bench. In the middle of the room, something was surrounded by a white privacy screen of the sort you’d find between beds in a hospital ward. Beyond that, drab shadow cloaked the back.

If this was where Dr. Kriss had manufactured the solution—the closed quarters of her trade secrets—there wasn’t much left of the operation that had churned out enough white blood to keep three trials supplied. The fridge was humming, and when I opened it, I saw about a dozen bags of solution on mostly empty shelves. Others were heaped in a stainless steel sink, squeezed dry.

From the impressions on the floor, I could tell that laboratory benches had once stood all around, but now just one remained. In cardboard boxes stashed beneath it, I found piles of broken glass. Some shards had printed measurements; I assumed they’d been beakers and flasks. She’d gotten rid of almost everything.

I took out the camera and snapped pictures. Sneakers squeaking on cool concrete, I approached the privacy screen. It rested on black plastic wheels. When I rolled it aside, I was smacked with the reek of blood, sickly metallic, and had to turn away. Holding the mask to my mouth, I breathed deep and faced the wooden table.

Blood slathered the surface, coursed down the legs, and emptied into a drain in the floor. Some of the blood had dried, but in spots it was still sticky. A couple IV stands flanked a trolley carrying heavy-duty saws and serrated blades, unwashed, bits of flesh caught in the teeth, black hair stuck to the metal.