It was those two areas of expertise--criminology and history--that brought a handsome, mysterious woman to my office on Sept. 13, 2023. From the first it was obvious that she was deeply upset, and I tried to be as gentle as possible as I led her to a chair. She asked in a hushed tone if I was indeed Dr. Gideon Wolfe; assured that I was, she informed me that she was Mrs. Vera Price, and I recalled instantly that she was the wife of a certain John Price, who'd been one of the movie and theme-park industry's leading special-effects wizards until he'd been murdered outside his New York apartment building a few days earlier. Murdered, I might add, in a particularly unpleasant way: his body had been torn to such tiny pieces by some unknown weapon that only recourse to his DNA records had made identification possible. I offered my condolences and asked if there'd been any progress on the case, only to be told that there hadn't been and would probably never be--not unless I helped her. "They," it seemed, wouldn't permit it.

Wondering just who "they" might be, I continued to listen as Mrs. Price explained that she and her husband had had two children, the first of whom had died, like 40 million other people worldwide, during the staphylococcus epidemic of 2006. The Prices' second child, a daughter, was now in high school in the city, and even she, Mrs. Price claimed, had been threatened by "them."

"Who?" I finally asked, suspecting that this might be a case of hysterical paranoia. "What do they want? And why come to me about it?"

"But--"

"Not now. I just wanted to bring you the disc. Come to my house tonight, if you think there's any way you can help. Here's the address."

The flutter of a slip of paper, and she was back out the door, leaving me nothing to do but shake my head and slip the disc into the drive of my computer.

It took all of one minute to look at the images that were burnt onto the thing; and then I found myself grabbing for the cell phone in my wallet in a state of agitated shock. I began punching a familiar sequence of numbers, until Vera Price's words about "them" came back to me. I ended the cell call and picked up the land line on my desk. Whoever "they" were, they couldn't have tapped it--not yet.

I redialed the number, then heard a disgruntled voice: "Max Jenkins."

"Max," I said to my oldest friend in the world, a former city cop who was now a private detective. "Don't move." MORE>>

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