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through the images, the circles got smaller and smaller.
    “Calvin,” she was saying. “It’s impossible. It has to be an artifact.”
    “You ask me to review the data,” he said, “and then you don’t believe me? I’m telling you, Bev, it’s not an artifact. It’s real. Here, look at the other hand.”
    Chee tapped the keyboard, and now a horizontal oval appeared on the screen, with five pale circles inside it. “Okay? This is the palm of the left hand, seen in a midsection cut.” He turned to Wauneka. “Pretty much what you’d see if you put your hand on a butcher block and chopped straight down through it.”
    “Very nice, Calvin.”
    “Well, I want everybody to be clear.”
    He turned back to the screen. “Okay, landmarks. Five round circles are the five palmar bones. These things here are tendons going to the fingers. Remember, the muscles that work the hand are mostly in the forearm. Okay. That little circle is the radial artery, which brings blood to the hand through the wrist. Okay. Now, we move outward from the wrist, in cut sections.” The images changed. The oval grew narrower, and one by one, the bones pulled apart, like an amoeba dividing. Now there were four circles. “Okay. Now we’re out past the palm, and we see only the fingers. Small arteries within each finger, dividing as we go out, getting smaller, but you can still see them. See, here and here? Okay. Now moving out toward the fingertips, the bones get larger, that’s the proximal digit, the knuckle . . . and now . . . watch the arteries, see how they go . . . section by section . . . and now.”
    Wauneka frowned. “It looks like a glitch. Like something jumped.”
    “Something did jump,” Chee said. “The arterioles are offset. They don’t line up. I’ll show you again.” He went to the previous section, then the next. It was clear — the circles of the tiny arteries seemed to hop sideways. “That’s why the guy had gangrene in his fingers. He had no circulation because his arterioles didn’t line up. It’s like a mismatch or something.”
    Beverly shook her head. “Calvin.”
    “I’m telling you. And not only that, it’s other places in his body, too. Like in the heart. Guy died of massive coronary? No surprise, because the ventricular walls don’t line up, either.”
    “From old scar tissue,” she said, shaking her head. “Calvin, come on. He was seventy-one years old. Whatever was wrong with his heart, it worked for more than seventy years. Same with his hands. If this arteriole offset was actually present, his fingers would have dropped off years ago. But they didn’t. Anyway, this was a new injury; it got worse while he was in the hospital.”
    “So what are you going to tell me, the machine is wrong?”
    “It has to be. Isn’t it true that you can get registration errors from hardware? And there are sometimes bugs in scaling software?”
    “I checked the machine, Bev. It’s fine.”
    She shrugged. “Sorry, I’m not buying it. You’ve got a problem somewhere. Look, if you’re so sure you’re right, go down to pathology and check the guy out in person.”
    “I tried,” Chee said. “The body was already picked up.”
    “It was?” Wauneka said. “When?”
    “Five o’clock this morning. Somebody from his company.”
    “Well, that company’s way over by Sandia,” Wauneka said. “Maybe they’re still driving the body—”
    “No.” Chee shook his head. “Cremated this morning.”
    “Really? Where?”
    “Gallup Mortuary.”
    “They cremated him here?” Wauneka said.
    “I’m telling you,” Chee said, “there’s definitely something weird about this guy.”
    Beverly Tsosie crossed her arms over her chest. She looked at the two men. “There’s nothing weird,” she said. “His company did it that way because they could arrange it all by phone, long-distance. Call the mortuary, they come over and cremate him. Happens all the time, especially when there’s no family.