"Miles, you have to spring me from here. I'm fine."

Miles sat on the edge of the hospital bed and patted her hand, grinning down at her. "You're fine when the doctor releases you, Eva." The smile vanished as quickly as it had come. "Seriously, Eva, you've been through quite an ordeal. If nothing else, you need rest. I know you'd rather be home in your own bed but you should be under observation." He raised his index finger in a mock 'hush' motion as she started to protest. "Just one night. That's all. You can handle that. Can't you?"

Eva slumped back against the pillows with a credible child's sulky expression on her face and her arms crossed over her chest.

"You should have to lie here in one of these beds with people poking you every fifteen minutes, Doctor," she said, grumpily, "then maybe you'd have a little more sympathy for me."

He laughed. "I'll come check on you, I promise–"

The bedside table began to chirp a cheerful tune and he raised one eyebrow at her as she grabbed her purse, pulling her cell phone out of it.

"They didn't say I couldn't have some of the comforts of home with me," she said with her own grin as she answered the insistent ring. "Eva Rossi."

Shaking his head, Miles stood, patted her hand again and headed for the door only to be stopped mid-stride.

"Miles, wait."

He turned back, took his seat on the bed again until she was finished.

"Miles, I have a huge favor."

"Just ask it."

"There's this little old lady that I interviewed when we were first looking for information... she's out in the woods, barely on the roads, no car, no family and kind of agoraphobic."

He was really looking at her curiously now and Eva couldn't blame him. Wait until he heard what she was about to ask him.

"Her name is Elmira Ferguson and I can draw you a map..."

"Draw me a map? As in, I'm going there? And she's really named Elmira?"

"She's 70 years old, Miles, names were different then and, yes, please go there. She thinks she's found something that will help. She is, was, sort of the town librarian, but also historian, and she thinks she's found something that could help us find out who might have been causing people to get sick. She knew, Miles, that someone was spreading the disease, that it wasn't accidental, so she must really have something. I can't go, they won't let me out of there." She was glaring at him as if that was somehow his fault. "And if I send the police she's panic. She's not been out of that house for forty years and she's very fragile. Connor or Frank would scare her to death and Nat–"

"Okay, okay," Miles said, both hands in the air in surrender. "Draw me the map."

xxxXXXxxx

This was his least favorite part of the hunt... the waiting. He'd long ago learned that he had to simply suck it up and endure it and nothing in the rule books said he had to like it. But the bait had been set. It wasn't hard to get the old broad to make the call, say what he wanted her to say, and luck would have it, he got the results he wanted.

People wouldn't admit it, but luck had a lot to do with how their plans matured and turned out. He wasn't afraid to say that he owed huge parts of his success to luck, nor was he above taking every chance that fortune sent his way.

No, it hadn't been difficult at all.

He'd almost been gratified that the little brunette had gotten away. He hadn't really foreseen her managing to dig her own way out of the root cellar, but more power to her. She was pretty damn cute too, would have been a shame if she'd died down there, but he did wonder how her dreams were shaping up tonight if she could sleep at all.

One more of the innocents needed to pay for what Powell and Connor had done and he was on his way right now, then it was down to the main event. Things had fallen into his schedule so far, no reason to think they wouldn't keep right on doing that.

But there was the waiting...

And the rain, beating down on him in the darkness... he hated the waiting, and he hated rain.

xxxXXXxxx

"I have it, Stephen."

Stephen looked up from the borrowed desk. Natalie was leaning against the doorframe, every inch of her body proclaiming exhaustion, but there was a smile on her face.

He stood, took her hand and led her into the office. "What do you have?" he asked, almost afraid she was going to say she had the disease from how weary she looked.

"It's definitely man made, but then we knew that," her voice started to gain speed as she warmed to it, "but I managed to isolate the main components... oh hell, none of the process matters. What counts is that we now have a way to combat the disease. I managed to break it down, slice it up, puree it and sautee it." She laughed. "Sorry, I'm a little punchy. I haven't slept in a while. But the point is that we can now treat it and any new cases that come in."

She looked at him when he stared at her blankly. "We can treat them now, Stephen. We can formulate a cure."

Then added, "Someone did this on purpose, but then we suspected that, but now we know for sure, Stephen, there was no way this occurred naturally in nature. Now, all we have to do is find out who, how and why."

"Oh, you mean the easy part," he gave her a tired grin of his own.

xxxXXXxxx

"Mrs. Ferguson?"

Miles knocked for the third time, harder. The rain was pelting him even under the small porch awning and he was cold through to his bones. Hadn't Eva said the old woman was a recluse who hadn't left the house in forty years? Then where was she? Or was she just a heavy sleeper who had given up waiting for him to get there? With his luck, she'd be sleeping with a merry fire roasting away in the fireplace, warming the entire small house while he was standing in the rain in the dark banging on a door that wasn't going to be answered.

That was when he got uneasy about the whole thing. She'd called, said it was important enough to drag him all the way out here to the middle of nothing and she wasn't answering the door? Just as the thought hit him, a howl that Arthur Conan Doyle must have used for inspiration rose up from inside the house, mournful, intense, urgent. He tried the doorknob and it turned easily in his hand.

"Mrs. Ferguson?" he repeated as he pushed the door open slowly, hoping that she didn't sleep with a shotgun by her side.

Still no answer.

He stepped inside, reached blindly for a light switch, found it, tripped it... nothing. Darkness inside and out. Like everyone else in the world, he somehow believed that the light switch was lying to him and flipped it again, three times. Still no light.

Moving deeper into the dark house, he nearly tripped over a fat tomcat who looked insulted, then scurried away under a table.

"Okay," he thought, "here's where the monster jumps out from behind the furniture and eats you alive, Miles, you idiot."

But no monsters, only a hound, ears all but obscuring its face, mournful notes coming from deep within its throat, the rain playing an eerie accompaniment in the far background, standing over a dark heap on the floor by the dining room table. Miles knelt by the heap, recognized it as an elderly woman a heartbeat before he recognized it as a murder victim.

Elmira Ferguson, 70 years old, who had never harmed anyone in her life, was sprawled on her back with an obscene grin of blood and gore across her neck where someone had taken a knife and ended her long life.

He had only a second to realize that the hairs on the back of the neck really do rise up, before it occurred to him to try the phone, which of course was dead. His cell wasn't any help either, no service in the area. He wondered if the killer was still around, if he knew that there was no cell service and if he was looking for another notch this night. He gave the distraught hound a pat on the head, said, "I'll get someone here for you and the cats, I promise," then with the feeling that eyes were pasted all over his body, he made it to the front door without incident.

By the time he'd made it to his car without anything happening except more rain, he was starting to think that the killer had moved on. He started to open the car door when he noticed it, front and rear... he walked around to the other side... all four tires on the car were slashed. Fear was like a bare wire touched with both hands, sizzling through him with a jolt of current. He considered for a half a second getting inside the car and locking the doors and instantly dismissed that as stupid idea number one. He'd only succeed in trapped himself. A weapon, any kind of weapon?

Digging his keys out of his pocket, he started for the trunk and the tire iron stashed there when he felt the sting and his right leg went out from under him. He found himself on his knees in mud, rain slanting down on his head, a useless set of keys in his hand and blood pouring out of a wound in his thigh, dazed, uncertain right away what had happened to him.

By the time he realized that he'd been shot in the leg, fight or flight had kicked in and since someone was shooting at him and he had nothing at all to defend himself with and one bullet hole already in his body, flight won. Jerking to his feet, he made a hobbling sprint for the treeline, hoping the darkness and rain would obscure the shooter's view.