Contagious

Perry nodded. “Push-ups and sit-ups, actually.”

“I think you’re studly enough for the moment,” Margaret said. “We have access to a lot of data about the individual triangle hosts. I’m hoping that adding details of your experience can help us locate the source of the infection.”

Perry shrugged. “I’ll do what I can.”

Margaret tapped at the keyboard, calling up a map on the flat-panel monitor in front of him.

“This is a map of the homes of the seven known triangle hosts from the Ann Arbor area,” she said.

She moved the mouse and hit a selection on the screen. Seven house icons appeared on the map.

Perry saw that two icons, one stacked on the other, sat over his apartment complex between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Those two formed the point of a triangle, with the second point almost in downtown Ann Arbor, and the third point south of Ann Arbor in Pittsfield.

The other three house icons looked more random: one in Whittaker, about five miles south and a little east of Perry’s apartment complex, then two very close together in the farmland just south of Ford Lake and Rawsonville.

“What’s the pattern?” Perry asked.

“There isn’t one,” Margaret said. “These are just the home addresses of the victims. We can also add work or school addresses.” She clicked the mouse again, and seven blue dots appeared. “We can also add any known locations of the hosts for the two weeks prior to the day you started itching, but the map gets kind of crazy if we do that.

“The problem is, we can’t find any correlation in these locations. We still have no idea exactly when or where people were infected. We need to use your memory of the days before you started itching, and compare that to the information we have. Hopefully, we can make a connection that points us to the time and source of infection.”

Perry nodded.

“Okay,” Margaret said. “For starters, you and Patricia DuMond both lived in the same apartment complex.”

“Who is Patricia DuMond?” Perry asked.

“I believe you called her Fatty Patty,” Margaret said.

Perry had fled his own apartment shortly after killing his friend Bill, just before the police arrived. He’d had only moments to hide and nowhere to run. Fatty Patty lived

“Oh,” Perry said quietly. “Yeah, her. Okay.”

“So that’s two hosts living in the same apartment complex,” Margaret said. “But only two. If the vector was in the complex, or went through the complex, we would a.s.sume there would be more hosts.”

“Unless you were banging her,” Dew said. “Which means you could have been infected at the same time.”

Perry shook his head. “Hate to admit it, but I hadn’t been laid in weeks. I might have seen her around from time to time, but I’m not sure. The apartment complex was pretty big. I can say for certain I never spoke to her, though.”

“She worked in Royal Oak, you worked in Ann Arbor,” Margaret said. “So you traveled in opposite directions for work.”

Margaret tapped the keyboard, and two of the blue dots started pulsing, one on the location of American Computer Solutions, where Perry had worked as a support rep.

“We’re trying to figure out where you and Patty might have crossed paths,” Margaret said. “We know roughly where she was in the days before the Monday you started itching, because this database has her cell-phone records and credit-card receipts.”

“Is that legal?” Perry asked.

Dew laughed. “Don’t worry about it, kid.”

“I wondered the same thing,” Margaret said. “But stopping this thing from killing people takes priority, wouldn’t you say?”

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,” Perry said. “The Fourth Amendment; you guys ever heard of it?”

Margaret stared at the big, beat-up man crammed into the tiny chair. He only looked like a dumb jock. Dew was equally speechless.

“Don’t be so shocked,” Perry said. “I went to college, remember?”

“Tell you what, college boy,” Dew said. “You find the history book that talks about Thomas Jefferson having blue triangles growing on his nut-sack, then you can quote the founding fathers all you want.”

Perry leaned back in the chair and sighed. “All right, fine, whatever. Let’s get on with it.”

Margaret continued. “Your records aren’t as detailed as Patricia’s. The only person you seemed to call was Bill Miller. We show you made ATM withdrawals every week in the same amount, from a machine near your apartment, but you have almost no credit-card purchases.”

“I only use credit cards at the bar,” Perry said. “When I’ve had a few, I tip too much on each round. With the credit card I only tip once and I don’t overspend on my drinks. I use cash for everything else. That’s how I stayed on budget. When my weekly cash ran out, I stopped spending.”

Margaret nodded, feeling a flutter of hope. If Perry had shopped somewhere and come into contact with another triangle host, Cheng might have missed it simply because Perry had used cash.

“Since we don’t know what causes the infection, we don’t know the length of the gestation period,” Margaret said. “Maybe the vector hit you the day before, the week before or the month before, so let’s take it one day at a time. You told us you started itching on a Monday, so try and remember—what did you do that Sunday?”