“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.”

“Oh, so he’s on the road.”

“I guess so.”

“Where will you be?”

“With the squad. I’ll actually be staying in Baltimore, on the harbor.”

“And Lucy?” I asked again, this time in a way she couldn’t evade. “Do you want to tell me what’s really going on, Janet?”

I breathed my filtered air, looking through glass at someone I knew could never lie to me.

“Everything okay?” I pressed harder.

“Dr. Scarpetta, I’m here by myself for two reasons,” she finally said. “First, Lucy and I got into a huge fight about your going online with this guy. So everyone involved thought it would be better if she wasn’t the one to talk to you about it.”

“I can understand that,” I said. “And I agree.”

“My second reason is a far more unpleasant one,” she went on. “It’s about Carrie Grethen.”

I was astonished and enraged at the mere mention of her name. Years ago, when Lucy was developing CAIN, she had worked with Carrie. Then ERF had been broken into, and Carrie had seen to it that my niece was blamed. There were murders, too, sadistic and terrible, that Carrie had been accomplice to with a psychopathic man.