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Perry touched the st.i.tches on his lip as he thought. “Me and Bill probably watched football all day.”

“Where?”

Perry shrugged. “Probably just my apartment.”

“Naw, we know you were at a bar that night,” Dew said. His finger traced a line on his flat-panel screen. “Here we go. Where is Big Sammy’s Bar?”

“Westland,” Perry said. “Just about halfway between Ann Arbor and Detroit. Big screens, lots of hot girls.”

“That Sunday night you spent forty-six dollars even,” Dew said. “It’s on your credit-card history.”

Perry thought for a second, then nodded. “Yeah, sure. I do that with the tip, put in the right amount of change so it comes out even. Bill and I went to Big Sammy’s to watch the Lions play the Colts. The late game. They lost.”

“There’s a surprise,” Dew said.

“Come on,” Perry said. “Cut ’em some slack. They only lost by two touchdowns that time.”

“Then what happened?” Margaret said. “Game ended, what did you do?”

As he thought, Perry moved his finger from his st.i.tched lip to his black eye. “I went home. I think I was a little drunk, so I was driving real careful. No, wait, I got hungry so I stopped at a store to grab some munchies.”

“Where did you stop?”

Perry shrugged. “Man, I can’t say. That was like six weeks ago, and I was drunk.”

Dew leaned closer to the flat-panel. “Could it have been the Meijer grocery store, in Belleville?”

“Could be,” Perry said. “That’s on the way home.”

Margaret stood and walked over to stand behind Dew. “Why?” she said. “What’s significant about that particular store?”

Dew pointed to another line. His fingertip left a little smudge on the screen.

“Credit-card history shows Patricia DuMond bought over a hundred bucks’ worth of groceries at Meijer in Belleville,” Dew said. “At ten thirty-one P.M.”

Margaret sat back down in her chair and started pounding on the keys, excitement bleeding through to her fingertips. “That might give us something.”

Now Dew got up from his chair and stood behind Margaret. “So the vector is a grocery store?”

Margaret shook her head. “No, it’s probably not the store itself, or the food it sold. Otherwise we’d have certainly traced other hosts back to it.

But for the first time, we may have two hosts in the same location at the same time.”

She typed a few keys, and the icon denoting Perry and Patricia’s infection slid west to hover over the Meijer store. The icon’s new location instantly created a visual curve, one that started in Whittaker, then moved gradually northeast through the two house icons near Rawsonville, then sharper east toward the Meijer in Belleville.

Perry had been there around 10:30 P.M. So had Patricia. If the hosts that lived in Rawsonville had been home at that time, which was likely . . .

“Clarence,” Margaret said, “can this thing call up historical weather patterns?”