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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?”

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