Chapters 1 through 6 Summary

Snow is on his first dive with a New York Police Scuba squad and is going into a waterway called the Cloaca Maxima. It's filled with sludge and debris with almost a zero visibility. He and the other divers are searching for a large brick of heroin that was part of a police shooting. While he doesn't locate the drugs, he does encounter a skeleton and then realizes there is another, then becomes entangled in them and loses his guide rope as his mask is torn from his face. He manages to rise to the surface and then helps retrieve the two skeletons, held together by sinew but both missing their heads. The police officer in charge, Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta, notes that the heroin has also been recovered but that it is now much less interesting. He tells the divers that...