"It's not going to happen," Franco said at length. "At least not tonight. We can't sit here all night."

"The bitch!" Angelo murmured.

"I know it's frustrating. It's as if she were taunting us. I guess she went home early, just before we got here, or maybe she's working late. Either way, I think we should go. The troops behind us are getting antsy."

"I want to stay another fifteen minutes."

"Angelo! That's what you said a half-hour ago. It's time to move on. We'll come back tomorrow morning. You'll get your revenge soon enough."

"Ten minutes."

"No! We're going now! I wanted to leave a half-hour ago. I've already extended our sitting here longer than I feel comfortable with. I don't want someone noticing us and getting suspicious. Start the van and signal the guys in back!"

Angelo got the engine going and then turned the headlights on and off a few times.

"All right, we're out of here."

Reluctantly, Angelo pulled away from the curb. He drove slowly so that when they came abreast of the OCME, he could look through the front door into the building's interior.

"The place looks dead," Franco said. "How appropriate."

As they drove up First Avenue, Angelo broke the silence. "Maybe we'll have to check out the boyfriend's apartment if we can't get her here at the OCME."

"That's on the bottom of the list," Franco blurted with a shake of his head. He and Angelo had visited Jack's apartment ten years earlier, with disastrous results. "Those neighborhood gang friends of his are a menace to society, and they are always on alert for other gangs. We're going to stick with what we got. I mean, it's not like we've been sitting here for a week, you know what I'm saying."

Angelo nodded, but he wasn't happy. He felt like a kid promised a present but being forced to wait.

AS LAURIE CLIMBED out of the taxi in front of her house, she looked over at the lighted basketball court. It seemed like a particularly crowded evening, which always made the competition that much more fierce. As evidence, Laurie could hear that the cries of accomplishment and derision were more strident than usual. Standing on her tiptoes, Laurie scanned the spectators for Jack. As much as he enjoyed the game, she wouldn't have been surprised if she saw him, but she didn't.

A few minutes later, she found him soaking in the bathtub.

"You're early," he said. "With as much work as you looked like you had with your matrix, I didn't expect to see you until after ten at the earliest. Did you finish already?"

"No, I did not finish," Laurie admitted, as she stripped off her coat and tossed it out into the hallway. She shut the bathroom door to keep in the steamy heat. After putting down the toilet seat cover she sat and locked eyes with Jack.

"I'm soaking in antibiotic soap," Jack said, averting his gaze. Laurie's serious expression and the fact that she was willing to sit in the steamy bathroom gave him the uncomfortable feeling that she was in one of her talking moods and, considering the timing, there was only one subject. "I thought you'd like to know how responsible I'm being," he added.

"I didn't finish my matrix because I found more of those diatom-like objects."

"Really?" Jack said without a lot of enthusiasm.

"Really" Laurie repeated. She then went on to describe how she'd first found more in David Jeffries's slides, and then found them in most of the cases whose slides she was able to get.

"Were they in all cases whose slides you had?" Jack asked. Despite knowing where the discussion was going, Jack found himself interested. He'd convinced himself that the object he'd seen was an artifact of some sort.

"Not all but most. And most interesting is that I discovered with the help of my unseen matrix that the shorter the interval from the onset of symptoms until death, the greater the number of these particles were."

"So you just randomly counted the number on each slide."

"Exactly."

"Well, that's hardly scientific."

"I know," Laurie admitted. "It's just suggestive, but it was consistent, and therefore very supportive."

Jack ran a soapy hand through his hair. "This is all very interesting, but I'm not sure how to interpret it. I mean, neither one of us knows what it is."

"I didn't leave it at that. I called up Dr. Malovar, whom you had praised so highly about your liver cyst."

"How is he? He's a trip, isn't he? I admire the guy. I hope I'm still around at his age, much less still contributing."

"He's fine, but don't you want to know what he said?"

"Of course. What was his diagnosis?"

"He said he didn't know."

Jack gave a short laugh of amazement. "He didn't know at all? I'm shocked."

"He said he thought it was a parasite."

"That's more like it. Then did you get Dr. Wiley to look at it?

"Dr. Wiley unfortunately is in New Zealand at a parasitology conference."

"Well, then I guess we'll have to wait, because Wiley in his field is like Malovar in his."

"Dr. Malovar sent a digital photo, so I'm certain we'll hear when Dr. Wiley gets it."

"Of course, there's no accounting of when that may be."

"I'm afraid not."

"Okay, Laurie," Jack said, sitting up. "What's your real point here? Is this another attempt at getting me to cancel my surgery? If it is, out with it!"

"Of course it is," Laurie said with some heat. "How could it not be, I've found an unknown parasite associated with a rapidly fatal postoperative course. What seems to be happening is a synergism with MRSA, which I have agreed is in every hospital. But this unknown parasite is apparently in only three hospitals, one of which you are scheduled to enter and allow yourself to become a potential victim."

"Laurie, let me remind you that I'm going to have my operation with a surgeon who has not had one case of whatever this is, and he's been operating nonstop at the Angels Ortho Hospital. Well, that's not entirely true. He had to stop when they closed the ORs to fumigate them. But since then, he's been back with a full schedule day in, day out, with no problems whatsoever. Secondly, I do not have a parasitic disease. Maybe that's the basis of this outbreak: These people have visited the backwaters of the Amazon and picked up this parasite unbeknownst to anyone. Hey! I commend your work, and certainly keep at it. If it turns out that this unknown parasite is infectious and you've discovered some new illness, all the power to you. Hell, you might even win a Nobel Prize."

Laurie stood up abruptly. "Don't patronize me!"

"I'm not patronizing you," Jack contended. "I'm just trying to fend off your negativity and prepare myself for this operation tomorrow. You know how I feel about it. What I'd really like is some support on your side, not fearmongering."

Laurie felt a rush of emotion dominated, for the moment, by frustrated anger. Yanking open the bathroom door and slamming it behind her, she stalked down the hall to the darkened living room, where she threw herself onto the couch to brood. Jack had touched the sore spot of her ambivalence.

CARLO NOSED HIS Denali into one of the few parking places along the front of the strip mall. What that meant at nine-thirty on a Wednesday night was that the Venetian was doing a brisk business. Both Carlo and Brennan alighted. The weather had completely cleared up. Despite the garish light coming from a neon gondola on the roof, two stars could be faintly seen in the sky.

Brennan stretched with a few noisy grunts and groans as they walked down the sidewalk toward the restaurant's entrance and passed the open DVD rental store in the process. Brennan's whole body was stiff after sitting in the SUV since five o'clock.

Inside, they had to search the crowd for Louie. Carlo finally found him at a four-top table near the bar. "Wait here!" he said to Brennan and struck off, weaving in and out among the tables. Carlo thought it ironic that the restaurant was doing as well as it was, considering it was in reality a cover for the Vaccarro family's real work. Carlo attributed it to Louie's influence. Louie loved good food and red wine, as was suggested by his body's profile.