Life is full of coincidences.

"I wouldn't bet on it," he added, gesturing at the passing waitress for a coffee refill.

"You like long odds?" Caroline asked.

"I don't think the odds are all that long," Jack said. "Do you?"

Caroline shook her head no.

After the waitress topped off Jack's cup, he tore open a packet and poured sugar into the coffee, stirring.

"Three people are dead," Caroline said, not looking at Jack, who raised his cup and gazed at Caroline over the rim. "You've been attacked."

"Go back through Frank's papers," Jack said. "Whatever's left at the office. Think you can get into his home? Say you're looking for something relating to a case Frank left pending. I'll hit the library, see what I can find about Gaynor's condition. Her neurological condition. Why she went to the hospital."

3.

The morning Jack started his research, sheets of rain swept over the faade of the public library, a Beaux Arts building four or five times larger than one would expect in a city the size of Mycaenae. Hunching his shoulders, clutching his turned-up coat collar, Jack ran from his parking spot a half block away from the library, up the library's six stone steps, past two human-size saucer-eyed Chinese guard dogs, baring ancient ceramic fangs, and through the new steel-and-glass doors, into the overheated library foyer, which smelled of damp wool. As Jack entered, the rain stopped and the clouds rolled away.

Jack pushed through double doors into the main room, which was flanked by half a dozen narrow two-story-high cathedral windows. In front of him at the far end of the room, towering over the wooden card catalog that no one used anymore, was a Tiffany window: A woman with shoulder-length auburn hair. Draped in what looked like a bed sheet, falling in peek-a-boo folds over her small bosom, she sat in an arbor. The sudden sun passing across the colored glass made it seem as if the grapes, which in the moving light turned from pale gray to purple, were ripening as Jack watched.

"Start with Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine and Mosby's Internal Medicine," said the librarian, a red-faced, red-haired man who looked, Jack thought, like a short-order cook. The sunlight streaming through the windows made the thin red hair on his forearms glow as if they were lightbulb filaments. Each book was eight-and-a-half by eleven, three inches thick, one over two thousand pages, the other just shy of three thousand. Together they weighed twenty pounds.

Jack started with drug addiction-narcotics may suppress the production of endorphins or a craving for narcotics may be caused by a lack of naturally produced endorphins-and worked his way through Jean's symptoms: alcoholism; the causes of headaches from dilation of arteries to inflammation; headaches associated with the eyes or infection or hemorrhage; muscle aches, myalgic states, due to inflammation; systemic infection from Colorado tick fever to glanders (which sounded to Jack like a city in the Netherlands), an initial symptom of rheumatoid arthritis, or, according to Harrison's, "In thin, asthenic adults ... the authors have found it difficult to exclude hysteria or other neurosis or depression," through the rest of the list: dizziness; ringing in the ears; irregular menstruation; irregular heartbeat; hallucinations; and difficulty in concentration....

Each symptom branched out into multiple possible causes. Each cause ramified into other paths to research. Each path led to worlds of pain, misery, and disease. At times, Jack felt like an explorer hacking his way through a dense jungle, where he might find lost tribes or forgotten species. Prehistoric monsters. Insects of monstrous size.

Networks of nerves seemed like spiderwebs. Charts showing spikes of chemicals in the blood seemed like mountain peaks he had to climb. A diagram of "an approach to the evaluation of diarrhea and wasting in AIDS patients" could have been a constellation on a star map. The two ghostly ovals in an illustration of radioactive iodine scanning of the thyroid gland hinted at the wings of fraudulent fairy photographs or ectoplasmic emanations from a nineteenth-century medium. A picture of a "perivenular area with dense collagen (progressive alcoholic fibrosis)" looked pitted like a stretch of dead coral near the seashore on the part of Andros Island Jack had visited.

From Harrison's and Mosby's, Jack went on to other standard medical textbooks, working backwards from symptoms to causes like, he felt, Hansel trying to find his way home through a mazy wood where the birds had pecked up the trail of bread crumbs. Headaches behind each eye made Jack feel as if he were absorbing Gaynor's symptoms.

"That's one way to figure out what Gaynor was suffering from," Jack told Caroline at dinner, after his third day in the library. "Become her and look in the mirror."

"Don't be in such a hurry to do firsthand research," Caroline said. "Remember, Jean's dead."

Sitting in the library at a computer terminal, books stacked on either side of the monitor, Jack scanned dozens of journals on line: The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, International Journal of Medical Science, The Canadian Medical Association Journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, Alcohol and Alcoholism, The Lancet, American Family Physician, American Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Archives of Internal Medicine, Archives of General Psychiatry, Archives of Neurology.

Half of what Jack read, he didn't understand. Even after leafing back through Harrison, other texts, and Stedman's Medical Dictionary.

Jack got up and walked toward the stained glass window, hands behind him on his lower back as he stretched and searched the face of the seminaked woman in the shimmering glass grape arbor. His eyes burned.

"I'm not a doctor," Jack told Caroline on Tuesday. "I flunked high school science. What the hell do I think I'm trying to do?"

"Solve three murders," Caroline said.

"One certain murder," Jack said. "Two maybes."

"Probables?"

"Most of the books I'm checking are ten, fifteen years out of date."

Jack gave himself to the end of the week. Then- "What?" Caroline asked. "You give up?"

"I write off Gaynor's symptoms the same way the doctor at the hospital did," Jack said.

"Why do we even assume whatever's wrong with her can give us a lead?" Jack asked on Thursday night.

"Because otherwise we've got nothing," Caroline said.

"You haven't found anything in Frank's papers?" Jack asked.

"Not yet," she said.

"Diary?" Jack asked. "Date book? Phone book?"

"The police must have all that," Caroline said. "Along with his hard drive, his BlackBerry..."

"Safe-deposit boxes?" Jack asked.

"He apparently emptied everything out," she said.

"He must have known-"

"That someone was going to kill him? Why would that make him empty out his safe-deposit boxes-where things would be safe?"

"Maybe he hid things in a safer place."

"Or there's nothing there," she said.

"Or someone else got there first," Jack said.

"Where?" Caroline said.

"His office?" Jack said. "His files? Wherever he hid things?"

"I'm as tired as you are, Jack," Caroline said.

Across the table Caroline's face was lit by the flickering candle.

Leaning across the table, Jack kissed her.

"You're going to set your tie on fire," Caroline said.

Jack sat back in his chair.

"Tonight," Caroline said, "I think, we should-"

"Go right home," Jack said, studying her. "Me to mine, you to yours. That is what you were going to say, wasn't it?"

Caroline smiled and said, "You'll never know."

The next day, Jack found the article about the dead cows.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

1.

The cow, brown and white, a Jersey-Jack thought-lay on its side, legs stretched out, udder flopped on the dirt like a semi-deflated balloon, cow shit round as croquet balls on the ground by its haunches. In the photograph Jack couldn't see its head.

The headline: SAVE ANIMALS FROM ELECTRICITY.

Sub-head: A SUPPORT GROUP FOR FARMERS WITH POWER QUALITY PROBLEMS.

The posting from a group called SAFE, Save Animals from Electricity, on http://www.safe.goeke.net by Nancy Bellville, dated March 14, 2001, said: My name is Nancy Bellville; I am from Prescott, Mi. For the last 35 years, my husband Brian and I have been dairy farmers. In Dec. of 1998 we looked at our DHIA records and found that we had freshened 39 animals and had removed 45 animals. We no longer were able to maintain our herd size. We had 10 cows not milking waiting to gain enough weight to sell and 6 pens full of sick cows. We knew we had a problem and set about trying to discover what was causing such devastating losses. We discovered another farm in our area that was also experiencing the same symptoms that we were and he believed he had a 'stray voltage' problem ... When the utility company uses the earth as the pathway to transmit the unused electricity back to their substations, they cannot control where it might go and as a result it follows the path of least resistance which in our case is in our barns.

Jack looked back at the photograph of the dead cow, two other cows standing to the left of the picture turned away like bystanders who didn't want to know. On the right, in the background, was a live cow looking at the dead cow from a distance. Four other live cows stand by the dead cow, their heads lowered like gossipy neighbors discussing the strange death of a friend.

The stray voltage shocked the cows, which caused them to stop eating and drinking and to produce less milk. In some cases, the shocks shut down their immune systems, causing them to die.

A later posting on the same site said: Along with sick animals there is also a human health epidemic.... No one wants to investigate why so many farm families and people in and around these farms are experiencing health problems.

The health problems included headaches, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness, ringing in the ears, irregular menstruation, irregular heartbeat, hallucinations, difficulty in concentration....

Jean Gaynor's symptoms.

2.

Grotesque masks covered one wall: A Jew with a hooked nose, a drunken Irishman, a pinched German, an Italian, an African-American, a Swede.... The paint was faded and flaking. The mouths stretched up in ghastly grins or down in terrifying scowls.

"From vaudeville," the professor of biology at Highland Community College explained. "Turn of the century. The last century. Performers wore them when they did ethnic humor."

The professor-Dr. Matthew Shapiro-took down the mask of the Jew and held it in front of his face.

"A Jew comes home and finds his best friend screwing his wife. Leo, he says, I have to, but you...!"

Shapiro held the mask in his lap like a cat. "Nineteen-oh-one," he said, "that used to kill them."

"Electrical pollution," Jack said.

"My grandfather was the Goldman half of Goldman and Webber," Shapiro said. "Changed it from Gordon. Which was a Jewish name in Lithuania. Gordon. Don't ask. There were two famous Gordons in Vilna in the eighteen-eighties, sometime around then, both writers. A journalist and a poet."

"I found some of your articles on electrical pollution online," Jack said.

"Tell me, Mr. Slidell," Shapiro asked, "why would a guy change his name from Gordon to Goldman? In America? In the late eighteen hundreds?"

"You were an expert witness in a lawsuit against Mohawk Electric," Jack said.

"I helped bring the suit," Shapiro said. Fondly, he looked at the mask in his lap. "Goldman and Webber were one of the biggest comic teams in vaudeville until Webber got shot. A guy came home and found him schtupping his wife. Killed him while he was on top of her."

"I'm investigating a murder," Jack said. "Maybe more than one murder."

Shapiro swiveled in his desk chair away from Jack to face a window that opened onto the campus. The sky was low. A breeze that smelled of mud wafted in. In the window was Shapiro's face reflected, masklike. He leaned forward and pulled the window shut.

"My father started collecting the masks when his father, my grandfather, died," Shapiro said. "My wife won't let me keep them at home. She finds them offensive."

"I can see that," Jack said.

"They're history," Shapiro said. "People hear my grandfather was in vaudeville, they think, How cool, begin romanticizing the past." Shapiro nodded at the masks. "Nothing romantic about them." He swiveled his chair back to face Jack. "I'm sorry these people died, but I'm not a cop."

"One of the victims was complaining of symptoms that sounded like electrical pollution," Jack said. "Like what you reported in your research." He flipped open his notebook and read, "Headaches, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness, ringing in the ears, irregular menstruation, irregular heartbeat, hallucinations, difficulty in concentration..."

"A lot of things could cause those symptoms," Shapiro said.

"I wish you could be more help," Jack said.

"The last time I tried to help somebody prove electrical pollution," Shapiro said, "I lost my federal grant."

"This is life and death," Jack said.

"And my job," Shapiro said. "At Cornell. I'm lucky to have landed here. Since then, I mind my own business. And teach freshman courses. Twenty-six, twenty-seven in a class. Do you know how boring it is to teach freshman bio?"

"The girl with the symptoms was living under high-tension wires," Jack said.