A dead man in an office chair looked very different from a dead man behind the wheel of a car, but thirty-six years of forensic pathology had taught Dr. Victor Corvo that all municipal corpses died of the exact same pathology: un-checked trust in official stationery.
The four-car Budd R-Zero consist came to a full, shuddering halt at Milepost 0.8.
The steel wheels groaned against the rails as the brake shoes settled, locking the consist onto the mainline iron. Through the heavy, dust-caked plate glass of Car #3, the narrow single-track tube expanded into a massive vaulted cavern blasted out of black Manhattan schist.
Old transit blueprints designated this subterranean hollow as Siding #96-A.
It was a staging pocket, four hundred yards long, carved fifty feet beneath the riverbed. Two sets of parallel tracks ran beside their own line. Both were drowned under three feet of stagnant, oily black water that lapped against the granite ballast with a soft, greasy slap.
Corvo adjusted the twin optical barrels of his head-mounted Zeiss loupes.
The five-times magnification brought the parallel siding into razor-sharp focus. Resting on the center siding track, tilted at a twelve-degree list into the black water, sat a ghost.
