In a significantly more buoyant mood, Jack returned to his paperwork. With enhanced efficiency, he completed yet another of his cases. After placing it on top of the completed pile, he tried the Brighton Beach number again. He got the same busy signal.

Jack wasn’t surprised. He imagined the man had a lot of calls to make in the aftermath of his wife’s death. But as the morning wore on, and Jack continued to try to place the call with the same lack of success, he finally lost patience. He dialed the operator and asked for Yuri’s telephone to be checked. A few minutes later the operator returned to say there was no conversation on the line.

“What does that mean?” Jack asked.

“It’s either off the hook or out of order,” the operator said. “I can connect you to repair if you’d like.”

“Never mind,” Jack said. He realized that Yuri was most likely at home but unwilling to talk to anybody. As understandable as it might be for the man to take his phone off the hook, it still frustrated Jack not to be able to get through; sometimes it seemed that nothing was easy. All he wanted to do was contact the man to warn him about possible botulism infection. Having put the case back in Randolph Sanders’s lap, he expected the Brooklyn office to follow up with the case as they were legally bound to do. That meant alerting the Department of Health and ultimately Jack’s nemesis, Dr. Clint Abelard, the city epidemiologist. As Jack had been duly informed on several occasions, it was Clint’s job to do the follow-up, which, of course, included contacting Yuri Davy-dov. Yet, as a physician, Jack felt honor-bound to notify the widower himself.

Jack absently played with the telephone cord while pondering the situation. There was always the chance that the Brooklyn office could run into trouble by not getting the body back. After all, Jack reasoned, the body could have been cremated. If that was the case and no further samples were available to confirm the diagnosis, a delay would be inevitable. What it all boiled down to was that Yuri Davydov might not learn about his risk in time to make a difference.

Pulling open one of the drawers of his desk, Jack took out a map of New York City. He opened it to the Brooklyn section and searched for Brighton Beach. The assumption it was somewhere on the waterfront helped; he found it next to Coney Island, jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Jack estimated that Brighton Beach was about fifteen miles away. He’d never ridden out to that area on his bike but he’d been as far as Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on several weekend occasions and remembered how to get there. From the map he could see that Brighton Beach was a straight shot down Coney Island Avenue from the base of the park.