Back in his criminal past, Simon Canderous never imagined himself to be in a nine-to-five job - much less a nine-to-five-am one. But that's what you get when you work on the side of good for Manhattan's woefully underfunded Department of Extraordinary Affairs. Using the power of psychometry - the ability to divine the history of an object by touching it - Simon discovers that a boatful of dead lawyers found in the Hudson river was sabotaged by something that had sucked all the blood out of the passengers on board.