tight, low-ceilinged. There were no windows. The Luma lights were better suited for forensic examination than indoor illumination.
Inside the first module, they made out two side-by-side business-class-size seats folded down. Behind these were two inclined bunks, also side by side, not much larger than a crawl space. The dark light showed both modules to be empty.
It also, however, showed more of the same multicolored mess they had discovered below. On the floor and tracked over the seats and one of the bunks. But here it was smudged, almost as though tracked in while still wet.
Nora said, “What the hell?”
The ammonia smell was here as well—and something else. A pungent odor.
Nora noticed it too, bringing the back of her hand beneath her nostrils. “What is it?”
Eph stood almost doubled over under the low ceiling between the two chairs. He was trying to put a word to it. “Like earthworms,” he said. “Used to dig them up as kids. Cut them in half in order to watch each section wriggle away. Their smell was earth, the cold soil they crawled through.”
Eph ran his black light over the walls and floors, scouring the chamber. He was about to give up when he noticed something behind Nora’s paper booties.
“Nora, don’t move,” said Eph.
He leaned to one side for a better angle on the carpeted floor behind her, Nora frozen as though she were about to trip a land mine.
A small clump of soil lay on the patterned carpet. No more than a few grams of dirt, a trace amount, richly black.
Nora said, “Is that what I think it is?”
Eph said, “The cabinet.”
They climbed back down the outside stairs to the area of the hangar reserved for cargo, where food-service carts were now being opened and inspected. Eph and Nora scanned the piles of luggage, the golf bags, the kayak.
The black wooden cabinet was gone. The space it had previously occupied, on the edge of the tarpaulin, was bare.
“Someone must have moved it,” said Eph, still looking. He walked away a few steps, scanning the rest of the hangar. “Couldn’t have gotten far.”
Nora’s eyes were blazing. “They are just starting to go through all this stuff. Nothing’s been taken out yet.”
Eph said, “This one thing was.”
“This is a secure site, Eph. That thing was what, about eight by four by three? It weighed a few hundred pounds. Would have taken four men to carry it.”
“Exactly. So somebody knows where it is.”
They went to the duty officer manning the hangar door, the keeper of the site log. The young man consulted his master list, a time log of everyone’s and everything’s entrances and exits. “Nothing here,” he said.
Eph sensed Nora’s objection rising and spoke before she could. “How long have you been here—standing right here?”
“Since about twelve, sir.”
“No break?” said Eph. “What about during the eclipse?”
“I stood right out here.” He pointed to a spot a few yards away from the door. “No one went by me.”
Eph looked back at Nora.
Nora said, “What in the hell is going on?” She looked at the duty officer. “Who else might have seen a great big coffin?”
Eph frowned at the word “coffin.” He looked back into the hangar, and then up at the security cameras in the rafters.
He pointed. “They did.”
Eph, Nora, and the Port Authority site log duty officer walked up the long, steel staircase to the control office overlooking the maintenance hangar. Below, mechanics were removing the aircraft’s nose for a look at the internals.
Four drone cameras ran constantly inside the hangar: one at the door leading to the office stairs; one trained on the hangar doors; one up in the rafters—the one Eph had pointed to—and one in the room they were standing in now. All displayed on a four-square screen.
Eph asked the maintenance foreman, “Why the camera in this room?”
The foreman shrugged. “Prolly ’cause this is where the petty cash is.”
He took his seat, a battered office chair whose armrests were striped with duct tape, and worked the keyboard beneath the monitor, expanding the rafter view to full screen. He scanned back through the security recording. The unit was digital, but a few years old, and too distorted to make out anything clearly during the rewind.
He stopped it. On the screen, the cabinet lay exactly where it had, on the edge of the off-loaded cargo.
“There it is,” said Eph.
The duty officer nodded. “Okay. So let’s see where it went.”
The foreman punched it forward. It ran more slowly than the rewind, but was still pretty fast. The light in the hangar darkened with the occultation, and when it brightened again, the cabinet was gone.
“Stop, stop,” said Eph. “Back it up.”
The foreman backed up a little, pressed play again. The time code on the bottom showed the image playing more slowly than before.
The hangar dimmed and at once the cabinet was again gone.
“What the—?” said the foreman, hitting pause.
Eph said, “Go back just a bit.”
The foreman did, then let it play through in real time.
The hangar dimmed, still lit by the interior work lights. The cabinet was there. And then it vanished.
“Wow,” said the duty officer.
The foreman paused the video. He was confounded too.
Eph said, “There is a gap. A cut.”
The foreman said, “No cut. You saw the time code.”
“Go back a bit then. A bit more … right there … now again.”
The foreman played it again.
And again the cabinet disappeared.
“Houdini,” grumbled the foreman.
Eph looked at Nora.
“It didn’t just disappear,” said the duty officer. He pointed out the other luggage nearby. “Everything else stays the same. Not a flicker.”
Eph said, “Back it up again. Please.”
The foreman ran it yet again. The cabinet disappeared yet again.
“Wait,” said Eph. He’d seen something. “Step it back—slowly.”
The foreman did, and ran it again.
“There,” said Eph.
“Christ,” exclaimed the foreman, almost jumping out of his creaky seat. “I saw it.”
“Saw what?” said Nora, together with the duty officer.
The foreman was into it now, rewinding the image just a few steps.
“Coming …,” said Eph, readying him. “Coming …” The foreman held his hand over the keyboard like a game show contestant waiting to press a buzzer. “… there.”
The cabinet was gone again. Nora leaned close. “What?”
Eph pointed to the side of the monitor. “Right there.”
Just evident on the wide right edge of the image was a black blur.
Eph