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The original drawing looked water stained. Whoever had drawn it had done so quickly, yet there was no mistaking the artist’s skill — the subject’s open eyes looked lifeless, stared out into nothing.

Why were the men hidden under the blanket? No, it wasn’t a blanket at all … it was a membrane of some kind, wrapped around dead bodies, parts of it attached to the wall, to the floor. It wasn’t an impressionist’s take; the artist had seen this, or at least thought he’d seen it.

“Murray, what the h.e.l.l is this?”

“One of the bodies we recovered from the Los Angeles had that on her person,” he said. “The artwork is good enough that we were able to confirm visual ID — the subject of the drawing is Ensign Paul Duchovny, who served onboard the sub. Obviously there are others in there with him, but since we can’t see their faces we can’t identify them.”

“Did you send divers into the sub?”

“No one has gone near it,” Murray said. “The sub is off-limits until we get our a.n.a.lysis team set up. It’s nine hundred feet deep, so people can’t go down without specialized equipment. On top of that, there’s a radiation leak. We don’t even know if it’s safe to enter the wreck. Right now all our intel is coming from UUVs.”

Margaret looked up. “UUVs?”

Clarence answered. “Unmanned underwater vehicles. Sometimes autonomous, like a robot, but most of the time they’re controlled from a person on a surface s.h.i.+p.”

Margaret again looked down at the picture. “Who drew this?”

“Lieutenant Candice Walker,” Murray said. “She escaped the sub, made it to the surface. Unfortunately, she died before divers could get her to medical attention. She was just as crazy as Dawsey — cut off her own arm with a reciprocal saw just below the right elbow. She used her belt for a tourniquet and cauterized the wound, but it wasn’t enough. She escaped the sub by wearing an SEIE suit, a bulky thing that lets submariners rise up without suffering pressure effects. We think her tourniquet came off when she was exiting the sub, or maybe while she ascended. Since she was in the suit, she had no way of tying the belt off again. Her picture is next.”

Margaret flipped to the next page, then hissed in a breath. A dead girl wearing battered, blood-streaked dark-blue coveralls. A lieutenant in the navy, based on her insignia — a highly trained adult, although her face looked all of eighteen. The girl’s right arm was a horrid sight: seared flesh and protruding, blackened bone. Extensive blood loss made her skin extremely pale. She had a bruise under her right eye and a long cut on her left temple.

Margaret thought of the first time she met Perry Dawsey.