As a rookie New York cop so many years before, he'd made this trip a half dozen times, collecting paperwork or dropping things off to help in some busy detective's investigation. He'd enjoyed being part of something outside a patrolman's routine and had found the morgue's forensics aspects interesting and stimulating: all those racked bodies offering entire biographies to those clever and motivated enough to decipher them. These visits had helped him to believe that although at the bottom of the ladder police work left something to be desired, the promises it held justified sticking it out for the long run.

Of course, that was before he'd drowned all such thinking in the bottom of a bottle.

The white-coated attendant greeted him at the reception area with little more than a grunt, and he followed him down a long, windowless, antiseptically white hallway, through a pair of double doors. There they entered a huge enhancement of Willy Kunkle's memory of the place: a tall room, shimmering with fluorescence and equipped with two opposing walls of square, shiny floorto-ceiling steel doors. The sight of it made him stop in his tracks, struck by the image of a storage room full of highend dormitory refrigerators, stacked and ready for shipment, gleaming and new.

The attendant glanced over his shoulder. "You are all right?" he asked in broken English.

Willy sensed the man's concern was purely self-interested. He didn't want to deal with a hysterical next-of-kin and miss more than he already had of the television program he'd been enjoying out front.

"Yeah." Kunkle joined him almost halfway down the row of cold cubicles.

The attendant consulted the clipboard in his hand one last time and pulled open the drawer directly before him with one powerful, practiced gesture.

Like a ghost appearing through a solid barrier, the white-draped shape of a supine woman suddenly materialized between them, hovering as if suspended in midair.