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future.
        I did dread the light, and now the perfect darkness of this cool windowless room was, to me, like quenching water to a man dying of thirst. For a minute or longer I relished the absolute blackness that bathed my skin, my eyes.
        Reluctant to move, I remained beside the door, my back against the wall. I half expected the orderly to return at any moment.
        Finally I took off my sunglasses and slipped them into my shirt pocket again.
        Although I stood in blackness, through my mind spun bright pinwheels of anxious speculation.
        My father's body was in the white van. Bound for a destination that I could not guess. In the custody of people whose motivations were utterly incomprehensible to me.
        I couldn't imagine any logical reason for this bizarre corpse swap-except that the cause of Dad's death must not have been as straightforward as cancer. Yet if my father's poor dead bones could somehow incriminate someone, why wouldn't the guilty party let Sandy Kirk's crematorium destroy the evidence?
        Apparently they needed his body.
        For what ?
        A cold dew had formed inside my clenched fists, and the back of my neck was damp.
        The more I thought about the scene that I had witnessed in the garage, the less comfortable I felt in this lightless way station for the dead. These peculiar events stirred primitive fears so deep in my mind that I could not even discern their shape as they swam and circled in the murk.
        A murdered hitchhiker would be cremated in my father's place. But why kill a harmless vagrant for this purpose? Sandy could have filled the bronze memorial urn with ordinary wood ashes, and I would have been convinced that they were human. Besides, it was unlikely in the extreme that I would ever pry open the sealed urn once I received it-unlikelier still that I would submit the powdery contents for laboratory testing to determine their composition and true source.
        My thoughts seemed tangled in a tightly woven mesh. I couldn't thrash loose.
        Shakily, I withdrew the lighter from my pocket. I hesitated, listening for furtive sounds on the far side of the locked door, and then I struck a flame.
        I would not have been surprised to see an alabaster corpse silently risen from its steel sarcophagus, standing before me, face greasy with death and glimmering in the butane lambency, eyes wide but blind, mouth working to impart secrets but producing not even a whisper. No cadaver confronted me, but serpents of light and shadow slipped from the fluttering flame and purled across the steel panels, imparting an illusion of movement to the drawers, so that each receptacle appeared to be inching outward.
        Turning to the door, I discovered that to prevent anyone from being accidentally locked in the cold-holding room, the dead bolt could be disengaged from within. On this side, no key was required; the lock could be operated with a simple thumbturn.
        I eased the dead bolt out of the striker plate as quietly as possible. The doorknob creaked softly.
        The silent garage was apparently deserted, but I remained alert. Someone could be concealed behind one of the supporting columns, the paramedics' van, or the panel truck.
        Squinting against the dry rain of fluorescent light, I saw to my dismay that my father's suitcase was gone. The orderly must have taken it.
        I did not want to cross the hospital basement to the stairs by which I had descended. The risk of encountering one or both of the orderlies was too great.
        Until they opened the suitcase and examined the contents, they might not realize whose property it was. When they found my father's wallet with his ID, they would know I had been here, and they would be concerned about what, if anything, I might have heard and seen.
        They had killed a hitchhiker not because he had known anything about their activities, not because he could