"He diabetic?"

"No."

"Raynaud's?"

"No."

Nieto went over to the bedside, looked at the fingers. "Only the tips are involved. All the damage is distal."

"Right," she said. "If he wasn't found in the desert, I'd call that frostbite."

"You check him for heavy metals, Bev? Because this could be toxic exposure to heavy metals. Cadmium, or arsenic. That would explain the fingers, and also his dementia."

"I drew the samples. But heavy metals go to UNH in Albuquerque. I won't have the report back for seventy-two hours."

"You have any ID, medical history, anything?"

"Nothing. We put a missing persons out on him, and we transmitted his fingerprints to Washington for a database check, but that could take a week."

Nieto nodded. "And when he was agitated, babbling? What'd he say?"

"It was all rhymes, the same things over. Something about Gordon and Stanley. And then he would say, " `Quondam phone makes me roam.' "

"Quondam? Isn't that Latin?"

She shrugged. "It's a long time since I was in church."

"I think quondam is a word in Latin," Nieto said.

And then they heard a voice say, "Excuse me?" It was the bespectacled kid in the bed across the hall, sitting with his mother.

"We're still waiting for the surgeon to come in, Kevin," Beverly said to him. "Then we can set your arm."

"He wasn't saying `quondam phone,' " the kid said. "He was saying `quantum foam.' "

"What?"

"Quantum foam. He was saying `quantum foam.' "

They went over to him. Nieto seemed amused. "And what, exactly, is quantum foam?"

The kid looked at them earnestly, blinking behind his glasses. "At very small, subatomic dimensions, the structure of space-time is irregular. It's not smooth, it's sort of bubbly and foamy. And because it's way down at the quantum level, it's called quantum foam."

"How old are you?" Nieto said.