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Dudley Smits …
She took one step forward and nearly tripped.
Shining her light downward, Amelia Sachs, the woman who rarely gasped, gasped now.
A worker—maybe the one the foreman had sent down here to check for casualties—lay on his stomach. A flashlight lay nearby; it was this beam of light she’d seen.
The man’s eyes were open but unblinking, and it was clear he was dead.
And yet, wait. It seemed his hands were moving. She aimed the beam of her own flashlight at one of them.
And now another raspy intake of breath.
His skin was bubbling and dissolving. The appendage was settling as it liquified.
And the part of his face that rested on the concrete floor was doing the same. From chin to cheek, the flesh was being eaten away and bloody bone and flaps of muscle and ridges of gum were becoming exposed.
Sachs was coughing harder now.
She took a deep breath to clear her lungs …
Mistake.
Bad mistake.
It simply drew in more of the irritant, stabbing her mouth and nose and chest, and she began coughing in earnest.
The searing pain of fire. She had to escape. Fast.
Dropping her gear, Sachs turned and stumbled back into the tunnel. Now the dreaded passageway was her lifeline.
Lurching forward toward the ladder, she tried to push the Transmit button of her Motorola.
She missed.
Her vision was crackling, black on the periphery.
She staggered toward the ladder. The cough had grown into choking.
She took one step forward and, losing yet more of her sphere of sight, realized she was going down.
When she landed, she had a thought: That’s weird. How can I smack the concrete so hard and not feel a—
7.
“DETECTIVE.” RON PULASKIwas speaking into his phone. On the other end of the line was Lon Sellitto, who was—in the ever-changing structure of the NYPD—Pulaski’s sorta-kinda boss.
But job hierarchy didn’t matter at the moment. Pulaski had called Sellitto because Sellitto was senior and respected, and because the news Pulaski was about to share could not be ignored or lost in a report. Sellitto would make sure it was not.
“Pulaski,” Sellitto said without waiting to hear what the patrolman’s agenda was. “I left a message. Lincoln’s going to need you on the crane case.”
“Okay. But you gotta hear this. A scene I just ran?”
“Yeah, Homicide? East Side?”
Pulaski was outside the warehouse where Fletcher Dalton had died. The tape was still up. The emergency vehicles were gone.
“I have a probable ID. It’s Eddie Tarr.”
