“Where’s Lucy?” I asked.

“Well, actually, both of us are up here in Maryland, outside Baltimore, with Squad Nineteen.”

“Is she all right?”

“Yes,” Janet said. “We’re working on your files, trying to trace them through AOL and UNIX.”

“And?”

She hesitated. “I think the quickest way to catch him is going to be online.”

I frowned, perplexed by this. “I’m not sure I understand . . .”

“Is that thing uncomfortable?” She stared at my mask.

“Yes.”

I was sorrier for the way it looked. It covered half of my face like a hideous muzzle and kept knocking the phone as I talked.

“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 lower-case 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.”