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up, carried him over and set him inside. He had never concealed his strength from his assistants. Foolish pride, no doubt. A man near eighty, with orthopedic braces on his right ankle, who handled cadavers like a youngster carrying his bride across the threshold. Power. It craves to be known, hungers for the awe of others.
    He wiped his eyes. Was this purely grief over Jack that racked him? Or was it also a selfish dread that his power— and his life— might soon end together?
    No, Jack. No, my only love. You’re gone and all that’s left of me is desolation… .
    And thus it was that Marty Carver, stepping into the morgue, found him weeping afresh, leaning on the autopsy table, choking out rusty sobs, and mixing his tears with the Pakistani’s blood in the table’s gutters.
    “Dr. Harst.” Harst turned and met the Assistant Chief Deputy’s chilly smile, his barely-concealed disgust. Harst wiped his eyes on his sleeve, polished his glasses. As Marty started for Jack’s drawer, the old man blurted harshly, “Don’t get near him! I’ll carry him.”
    “Suit yourself, Doc.” And Marty had to marvel a little in spite of himself, watching this codger lift the bagged bulk from the drawer and hinge it at the waist across his shoulder— all in one smooth hoist. The corpse, half-skulled and all, had to weigh two-thirty at the least. Harst faced him, one arm hooked over his burden.
    “Jack Fox carried me like this, through a half mile of jungle, under heavy fire, and me with a thirty-cal round in my leg. You think you know some shit, Carver, but you don’t know shit. You’ve got the keys— let’s go.”
    The morgue occupied the west half of the County Building’s basement floor, but the entire building was partly foundationed on an older structure. A big fieldstone-and-concrete cider warehouse had been sited here, one of Gravenstein’s first large municipal works, springing up near the railroad line shortly before World War I. It was razed in the post-World War II boom, but the massive walls of its big cellar offered support the architects of the County Building incorporated into their new structure. The old civic center was found to occupy an ancient river bed. Riparian gravel underlay it, honeycombed, not far beneath, by major channels of the water-table.
    Marty led the way through a door in the morgue’s west wall. A short corridor past the darkened offices of Maintenance brought them into the utilities plant. Fuse-boxes, steam heaters, fans, generators, tool benches bulked in the shadows. Conduit, pipes and ducts branched up the walls and across the ceiling, like roots sent down by a forest of steel. Marty heard the implacable limping gait of Harst behind him and couldn’t help glancing back at this gnome, face all wrinkles in the half-light, tirelessly bearing his great burden, the glint of his glasses accentuated, no doubt, by further tears.
    From the utilities plant’s far corner, another exit opened onto a dim-lit stairwell. At the foot of one short flight was a padlocked double metal door, cold to the touch. The chain rattled out of the doors’ bars, Marty thrust both open, and touched a switch.
    It was a vast space, feebly starred by bulbs along the girders raftering its concrete ceiling. The floor of the former warehouse— of much older, buckled concrete— lay twenty feet below. They descended an antique staircase of stamped black iron, the soft boom of their tread like distant funeral bells.
    Marty hastened now as they set out towards the far wall, Harst lagging more with every step, hating the younger man’s eagerness. Near the wall, the materials for their rite were already in place. Marty fired up a generator and switched on a pair of contractor’s floodlights, spotlighting a portable compressor and a forty-pound jack-hammer against the wall. He turned on the compressor and over its stutter said, as Harst came up, “There’s a spot right here— just like Jack said— that echoes when you