mirror mirror on the wall where have you been “You bastard,” I screamed at him.

The day was too much. All of it was too much, and I was achy and woozy and completely fed up. So I should not have gone into that chat room, where I waited for him as if this were the O.K. Corral. I should have left it for another time. But I made my presence known and paced in my mind as I waited for the monster to appear. He did.

DEADOC: toil and trouble

SCARPETTA: What do you want!

DEADOC: we re angry tonight

SCARPETTA: Yes, we are.

DEADOC: why should you care about ignorant fishermen and their ignorant families and those inept people who work for you

SCARPETTA: Stop it. Tell me what you want to make this stop.

DEADOC: it s too late the damage is done it was done long before this

SCARPETTA: What was done to you?

But he did not answer. Oddly, he did not leave the room, but he did not respond to any further questions from me. I thought of Squad 19 and prayed they were listening and following from trunk to trunk, tracing him to his lair. Half an hour passed. I finally logged off as my telephone rang.

“You’re a genius!” Lucy was so excited she was hurting my ears. “How the hell have you managed to keep him on that long?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, amazed.

“Eleven minutes so far. You win the prize.”

“I was only on with him maybe two minutes.” I tried to cool my forehead with the back of my hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But she didn’t care. “We nailed the son of a bitch!” She was ecstatic. “A campground in Maryland, agents from Salisbury already en route. Janet and I gotta plane to catch.”

• • •

Before I got up the next morning, the World Health Organization put out another international alert about Vita aromatic facial spray. WHO reassured people that this virus would be eliminated, that we were working on the vaccine around the clock and would have it soon. But the panic began anyway.

The virus, dubbed by the press Mutantpox, was on the cover of Newsweek and Time, and the Senate was forming a subcommittee as the White House contemplated emergency measures. Vita was distributed in New York, but the manufacturer was actually French. The obvious concern was that deadoc was making good on his threat. Although there were yet no reports of the disease in France, economic and diplomatic relations were strained as a large plant was forced to shut down, and accusations about where the tampering was done were volleyed back and forth between countries.

Watermen were trying to flee Tangier in their fishing vessels, and the Coast Guard had called in more backups from stations as far south as Florida. I did not know all the details, but based on what I had heard, there was a standoff between law enforcement and Tangiermen in the Tangier Sound, boats anchored and going nowhere as winter winds howled.