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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 one building over—her triangles had called to Perry, promising refuge. He’d turned out to be a less-than-pleasant guest, even roughed her up a little. He hadn’t killed her, she’d died when her triangles ripped out of her body, but he sure as h.e.l.l hadn’t done anything to help her. Patty’s ordeal was a major reason Perry killed every host he found—dying at his hands, no matter how brutal, was far, far better than death from a hatching.

“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.”