Janice looked up from her desk. Her dark circles were as impressive as always. Jack couldn’t help but wonder if the woman slept at all.

“Thanks,” Janice said.

“You’d better get some rest,” Jack said.

“I’ll be leaving as soon as I wrap up this case.”

“Anything extra we should know concerning Papparis?” Jack asked.

“I think it’s all there,” Janice said. “Except for the fact that the doctor I talked with was pretty upset. He told me he’d never seen a more aggressive infection. In fact, he’d like a call after you do the autopsy. His name and number are on the back of the information sheet.”

“I’ll call him as soon as we have something,” Jack promised.

Once in the elevator Vinnie spoke up. “This case is starting to give me the creeps. It’s reminding me of that plague case we had a few years ago. I hope this is not the start of some kind of epidemic.”

“You and me both,” Jack said. “It reminds me more of the influenza cases we saw after the plague. Let’s be extra careful about contamination.”

“That goes without saying,” Vinnie said. “I’d put on two moon suits if it were possible.”

Vinnie was already in his scrubs, so while Jack went into the locker room to get out of his street clothes, Vinnie went to don his moon suit. Then while Vinnie went into the autopsy room, or pit as it was called, Jack went through all the material in the folder, particularly Janice Jaeger’s forensic investigator’s report. On this more thorough reading Jack noticed something that he’d missed the first time through. The deceased had been in the rug business. Jack wondered what kind of rugs and where they were from. He made a mental note to bring the question up with the forensic investigators.

Next Jack snapped Papparis’s morgue X-ray onto a view box. As a total-body film the X-ray was not much good diagnostically. In particular, the chest detail was indistinct. Regardless, two things caught Jack’s attention. First, there was little evidence of pneumonia, which seemed surprising in view of the history of the patient’s rapid respiratory deterioration; and second, the central part of the chest between the lungs, known anatomically as the mediastinum, seemed wider than usual.

By the time Jack got himself suited up in his biocontainment moon suit, with its hood, plastic face mask, and battery-powered HEPA filtered ventilation system, Vinnie had the body on the autopsy table and all the appropriate specimen jars lined up.

“What the hell have you been doing out there?” Vinnie complained when Jack appeared. “We could have been done by now.”

Jack laughed.

“And look at this guy,” Vinnie added, nodding to the corpse. “I don’t think he’s going to get to go to the prom.”

“Good memory,” Jack said. Jack had used that line when they’d started the plague case Vinnie had referred to earlier and it had become a staple of their black humor.

“And that’s not all I remembered,” Vinnie said. “While you were out there dicking around I looked for arthropod bites. There aren’t any.”