the valves? Almost as if they have grown open. Now, they couldn’t have operated like this in life. Not closing and opening and pumping blood. So this can’t have been congenital.”
Eph was aghast. This abnormality was a fatal defect. As every anatomist knows, people look just as different on the inside as they do on the outside. But no human being could conceivably have survived to adulthood with this heart.
Nora asked, “Do you have medical records for the patient? Anything we can check this against?”
“Nothing yet. Probably not until morning. But it’s made me slow this process down. Way down. I’m stopping in a little while, shutting down for the night so I can get some more support in here tomorrow. I want to check every little thing. Such as—this.”
Bennett walked them down to a fully anatomized body, that of a midweight adult male. His neck had been dissected back to the throat, exposing the larynx and trachea, so that the vocal folds, or vocal cords, were visible just above the larynx.
Bennett said, “See the vestibular folds?”
They were also known as “false vocal cords”: thick mucous membranes whose only function is to sit above and protect the true vocal folds. They are a true anatomical oddity in that they can regenerate themselves completely, even after surgical removal.
Eph and Nora leaned in closer. Both saw the outgrowth from the vestibular folds, a pinkish, fleshy protuberance—not disruptive or malformed like a tumorous mass, but branching from and within the inner throat, below the tongue. A novel, seemingly spontaneous augmentation of the soft lower mandible.
They scrubbed up outside, more diligently than usual. Both were deeply shaken by what they had seen inside the morgue.
Eph spoke first. “I’m wondering when things are going to start making sense again.” He dried his hands completely, feeling the open air against his gloveless hands. Then he felt his own neck, over the throat, approximately where the incisions were all located. “A straight, deep puncture wound in the neck. And a virus that slows antemortem decomposition on the one hand, yet apparently causes spontaneous antemortem tissue growth on the other?”
Nora said, “This is something new.”
“Or—something very, very old.”
They started out the delivery door, to Eph’s illegally parked Explorer, his EMERGENCY BLOOD DELIVERY pass on the dash. The last streaks of daytime warmth were leaving the sky. Nora said, “We need to check out the other morgues, see if they are finding the same deviations.”
The alarm went off on Eph’s cell phone. A text message from Zack:
whre R U ???? Z
“Shit,” said Eph. “I forgot … the custody hearing …”
“Now?” Nora said, before catching herself. “Okay. You go. I’ll meet you after—”
“No, I’ll call them—it will be fine.” He looked around, feeling himself splitting in two. “We need to take another look at the pilot. Why did his puncture close up, but not the others’? We need to get on top of the physiopathology of this thing.”
“And the other survivors.”
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?”
Eph felt Nora rise up almost three inches off the sidewalk. Eph said, “What did you say?”
“A coffin. If you have it, then you still have him.”
Nora said, “Him who?”
“Destroy it. Right away. Do not keep it for study. You must destroy the coffin, without delay.”
Nora shook her head. “It’s gone,” she said. “We don’t know where it is.”
Setrakian swallowed with bitter disappointment. “It is as I feared.”
“Why destroy it?” asked Nora.
Eph cut in then, saying to Nora, “If this kind of talk is getting around, people will panic.” He looked at the old man. “Who are you? How did you hear these things?”
“I am a pawnbroker. I heard nothing. These things I know.”
“You know?” said Nora. “How do you know?”
“Please.” He focused on Nora now, the more receptive one. “What I am about to say, I do not say lightly. I say it desperately and with utter honesty. Those bodies in there?” He pointed at the morgue. “I tell you, before this night falls, they must be destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” said Nora, reacting negatively to him for the first time. “Why?”
“I