Contagious

“Well, you’re the one that can make it happen,” Murray said. “You sure as h.e.l.l aren’t on this job because of your good looks or your physical prowess. You’re old, you’ve got a gut, and you have a bad hip. You have only two things that make you worth a squirt of p.i.s.s—you shoot when you’re told to shoot, and you figure things out. Get Dawsey to play ball, and get . . .me . . . a . . . live . . . host.”

Murray broke the connection.

Maybe he was an a.s.shole, but that didn’t shake a nagging feeling that he was right.

“That’s why they give you the tough jobs, old boy,” Dew said to the empty room. “Because you can figure things out.”

So how the h.e.l.l was he going to get through to Scary Perry Dawsey?

THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY

Sometimes having a black budget was fun.

Bob’s Breakfast Shack wasn’t a shack at all. It was actually part of the motel—a nice little greasy spoon with twenty tables, four of which were kind of off in their own room. For the small price of five Ben Franklin portraits, Dew’s people had the room to themselves.

f.u.c.k it. It was only taxpayer money.

You could spend just so much time in the MargoMobile’s computer area. Buying out the diner’s back room let them talk openly. Dew sat at a table with Clarence Otto, Amos Braun and Margaret Montoya. Gitsh, Marcus, the black-eyed Milner and the nose-braced Baumgartner sat at another. Marcus was quietly whistling the melody from the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun.”

Dew had sent the other men home last night after they secured the scene. They were local talent, which he used for muscle when he needed it—the tactic gave him just-in-case firepower yet cut down on people who knew the whole story.

Amos had the menu open in front of him. He could barely see over the top. Dew considered making a crack about a child seat, but he a.s.sumed Amos had heard that one a million times. They didn’t get to do this often, maybe two or three days a week. Dew not only looked forward to it, he found time to make it happen. The whole situation had grown so dark, so desperate, that they needed a release. Breakfast meetings provided a rare chance to do something normal, to laugh and joke, even if it was gallows humor most of the time.

“Okay, Margaret,” Dew said. “Give me the rundown on last night’s autopsies.”

She looked up from her menu. “What, here?”

“Yep, right here,” Dew said. “I’m pretty sure the Russkies haven’t bugged Bob’s Breakfast Shack.”

“Russkies?” Otto said. “Doesn’t that phrase show your age?”

“Actually, my uneducated friend,” Amos said, “Russkies is accurate, since we now have a country called Russia. Commies would be inaccurate, since it’s the USSR that’s no longer around.”

Otto frowned, then smiled. “Say, little white man, don’t you owe me twenty bucks?”

“Aw, c.r.a.p,” Amos said. “That’s right.” He fished out his wallet and handed over a well-folded twenty.

“What’s that for?” Margaret asked.

Otto pocketed the twenty. “He bet that Dawsey would kill me last night.”

Margaret took in a gasp of astonishment. “Amos! You didn’t!”

“I paid him, didn’t I?”

She shook her head and scowled at both men. “Seriously. That’s not something to joke about.”

“If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry,” Otto said. “Or something like that. I won twenty bucks—what else matters?”

The waitress came to take their orders. They sat in silence until she’d worked the room and left.

“Okay,” Dew said. “Let’s get back on task here. First of all, Margo, congrats on developing that triangle test.”

Otto and Amos both applauded lightly.

Margaret blushed. “Oh, it’s a team effort.”

Amos laughed. “Give it a rest, Miss Modesty. It was all your idea, and it works.”

“What else did you find from the corpses?” Dew asked.

“Nothing completely new,” Margaret said. “Although we refined a lot of our knowledge. Amos and I got great pictures of the parasite’s nerve inter face, the best yet. Same thing for the circulatory tap. I think we’ve pretty much doc.u.mented how the thing interacts with those systems, although the disturbing part is still the brain interaction. These parasites clearly know more about the inner workings of our brains than we do.”

“What about the vector?” Dew said.

She shook her head. “Still nothing. So much of that comes from interviewing disease victims, finding out what they ate, drank, where they went, who they touched, things like that. The only person who can talk about it won’t talk about it.”

“G.o.dd.a.m.n Dawsey,” Dew said. “What about the number of hosts this time? There were three of them, and we had those three old ladies that Perry torched. Any significance to that number?”

“Probably not,” Amos said. “There’ve been cases with just one host, like Perry, or with two and even three. What’s more significant here is that this was one family, living under one roof, so they probably ate the same food, traveled in the same patterns. The three old ladies all lived at the same retirement home. They took walks together every day. That shows that whatever the vector is, it can hit some or all of the people in a specific area.”

“Could they have given it to each other?” Dew asked. “One gets infected, gives it to the rest?”

Margaret shook her head. “All the McMillians’ triangles were at the same stage of development, which indicates they all contracted the disease at the same time. Add to that three people under the same roof who did not have triangles. As far as we can tell, it’s not contagious.”

“Which brings up an interesting point,” Amos said. “The gate was finished, right? Built by hatchlings that had already hatched. So if all the McMillians were at the same stage of development, they must have caught it after the other hosts. Why were they behind the times, so to speak?”