‘How can you catch him online unless he’s still sending messages to me?’
She opened a file folder on her Formica ledge. ‘Do you want to hear them?’
I nodded as my stomach tightened.
‘Microscopic worms, multiplying ferments and miasma,’ she read.
‘Excuse me?’ I said.
‘That’s it. E-mail sent this morning. The next one came this afternoon. They are alive, but no one else will be. And then about an hour after that, Humans who seize from others and exploit are macro parasites. They kill their hosts. All in lowercase with no punctuation except spaces.’ She looked through the glass at me.
‘Classical medical philosophy,’ I said. ‘Going back to Hippocrates and other Western practitioners, their theories of what causes disease. The atmosphere. Reproducing poisonous particles generated by the decomposition of organic matter. Microscopic worms, et cetera. And then the historian McNeill wrote about the interaction of micro and macro parasites as a way of understanding the evolution of society.’
‘Then deadoc has had medical training,’ Janet said. ‘And it sounds like he’s alluding to whatever this disease is.’
‘He couldn’t know about it,’ I said as I began to entertain a terrible new fear. ‘I don’t see how he possibly could.’
‘There was something in the news,’ she said.
I felt a rush of anger. ‘Who opened his mouth this time? Don’t tell me Ring knows about this, too.’
‘The paper simply said your office was investigating an unusual death on Tangier Island, a strange disease that resulted in the body being airlifted out by the military.’
‘Damn.’
‘Point is, if deadoc has access to Virginia news, he could have known about it before he sent the e-mail messages.’
‘I hope that’s what happened,’ I said.
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ I was worn out and my stomach was upset.
‘Dr Scarpetta.’ She leaned closer to the glass. ‘He wants to talk to you. That’s why he keeps sending you mail.’
I was feeling chills again.
‘Here’s the idea.’ Janet tucked the printouts back inside the file. ‘I could get you in a private chat room with him. If we can keep you online long enough, we can trace him from telephone trunk to telephone trunk, until we get a town, then a location.’
‘I don’t believe for a moment that this person is going to participate,’ I said. ‘He’s too smart for that.’
‘Benton Wesley thinks he might.’
I was silent.
‘He thinks deadoc is sufficiently fixated on you that he might get into a chat room. It’s more than his wanting to know what you think. He wants you to know what he thinks, or at least this is Wesley’s theory. I’ve got a laptop here, everything you need.’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t want to get into this, Janet.’
‘You’ve got nothing else to do for the next few days.’
It irritated me when anyone ever accused me of not having enough to do. ‘I don’t want to communicate with the monster. It’s far too risky. I could say the wrong thing and more people die.’
Janet’s eyes were intense on mine. ‘They’re dying, anyway. Maybe others are, too, even as we speak, that we don’t know about yet.’
I thought of Lila Pruitt alone in her house, wandering, demented with disease. I saw her in her mirror, shrieking.
‘All you need to do is get him talking, a little bit at a time,’ Janet went on. ‘You know, act reluctant, as if he’s caught you unaware, otherwise he’ll get suspicious. Build it up for a few days, while we try to find out where he is. Get on AOL. Go into the chat rooms and find one called M.E., okay? Just hang out in there.’
‘Then what?’ I wanted to know.
‘The hope is he’ll come looking for you, thinking this is where you do consultations with other doctors, scientists. He won’t be able to resist. That’s Wesley’s theory and I agree with it.’
‘Does he know I’m here?’
The question was ambiguous but she knew who I meant.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Marino asked me to call him.’
‘What did he say?’ I asked into the phone.
‘He wanted to know if you were okay.’ She was getting evasive. ‘He has this old case in Georgia. Something about two people stabbed to death in a liquor store, and organized crime is involved. In a little town near St Simons Island.’