Agent Herschler was contacted at his home by a ghost named Sam, with the news that Bozzie had information regarding the whereabouts of Donald Sanderson. Sanderson had recently been spotted haunting an empty brownstone apartment in Eastside, looking worse for the wear but otherwise relatively serene. Although he admitted that he had received this information from an anonymous, disembodied voice on the radio, Bozzie assured Agent Herschler that, in his opinion at least, the information was legitimate.
Meanwhile, at Orpheus Group Headquarters, Agent MacMillian was trying to locate Walter Hanley. Hanley had not returned to the office after attending the funeral of Agent Amy Rodriguez (who was killed during the Elsevier Heights School incident) that morning, and was not answering his home phone or his pager. Both Doug Sands and Kate Hennisson had seen him at the graveside service, but neither had seen him leave.
After convincing Jimmy Spengler to activate and trace the GPS-locator in Hanley's pager (in clear violation of company policy), Herschler and MacMillian drove to the cemetary, where they found Hanley's car still parked in the lot, his keys lying on the ground nearby. Herschler spotted a nearby traffic camera that might have captured part of the parking lot in its field of view. When Spengler examined the camera's image archives, they saw a white van parked near where Hanley's keys had been found, timestamped a few minutes before Kate Hennisson had talked to him; in an image taken a few minutes later, the van was gone, but the keys were visible on the ground.
By the time MacMillian and Herschler returned to Headquarters, Kate Hennisson had already begun organizing the manhunt. The GPS locater had fixed Hanley's position to a 5-block radius at the edge of the Gardens, and Herschler's discovery narrowed the search down to a white van with partially identified tags.
Herschler and MacMillian immediately projected and had Tommy Fabrosi drive them to the search area. They found the white van parked outside a dry-clean shop. Herschler inhabited the building, and found Walter Hanley's disembodied ghost held captive by a circle people chanting in a low, continuous rhythm. Hanley's body lay on a dirty mattress nearby. Herschler subdued the cultists by repeatedly reversing gravity in the back room, while MacMillian immobilized the ringleader by manifesting as a cloud of stinging insects. With some assistance from Herschler, Hanley was able to reintegrate with his body. Fabrosi transported him back to Headquarters while Herschler and MacMillian kept the cult leader contained until other Orpheus Agents arrived to take him into custody.
Interviews with cult leader, named Curtis Prester, revealed that the cult was a small, disorganized group of people who had experienced mystical hallucinations while under the influence of pigment. At Prester's insistence, they had started kidnapping people and forcibly injecting them with huge doses of pigment in order to show them, in Prester's words, "The pure abyss beneath the skin of the world." Prester himself had no explanation for how his people learned their peculiar chant or why the sound of it seemed to be able to hold spirits at bay. Agent Herschler attempted to puppeteer Prester and examine his memories, but encountered a large "black spot" in Prester's recall. Herschler himself was knocked unconscious for two minutes after examining the black spot, and no further puppeteering was attempted.
Walter Hanley is currently in stable condition, and will remain under observation in Orpheus Group's infirmary until the pigment dose is determined to have left his system.
Curtis Prester has been turned over to City Police. Charges (with certain details altered or omitted to minimize Orpheus involvement) have been pressed.
After rescuing Hanley, Agents Herschler and MacMillian drove to the brownstone apartment where Donald Sanderson had been spotted. Since this was not an officially sanctioned mission, they did not project.
The brownstone had been Donald Sanderson's place of residence before he died. It was now vacant and for sale. The Agents broke in through the back door.
In a hidden compartment in an upstairs bedroom, the Agents discovered a cache of documents painting an incomplete picture of Sanderson's motivations and activities prior to their meeting in the boiler room of an unfinished tenement building. There were several PET-scans of Sanderson's wife, depicting a progressive brain tumor. There was a pamphlet for a mysterious company called "Eurydice." There was a tape that seemed to imply that Sanderson and Paul Ritter had been investigating something together. On the tape, Sanderson mentioned that NextWorld was actually a front for a company called T&S Pharmaceuticals. Finally, there was an address for a self-storage facility on the outskirts of the City, and a key.
Herschler and MacMillian drove out to the storage facility and located the unit that belonged to the key.
Inside, they found several cryogenic creches similar to those used by Orpheus to allow sleeper-class Agents to project. All of the creches were running on some unseen power source, and each of them contained a body. Standing over the creches and peering into them through the glass face-plates was the ghost of Donald Sanderson. He took no notice of the Agents. "She's not here," he muttered to himself, again and again. "She's not here."
Quietly, the two Agents closed the storage unit door and retreated from the scene.
Although Herschler has submitted a brief report outlining Sanderson's current whereabouts and behavior, Kate Hennisson has yet to sanction any mission in response to the information, or even acknowledge that she has received it.