Her handful of semiclose friends thought Joyce was being trendily retro. It didn’t matter. The place had an air of the melancholy that suited her fascination with things dark and haunting. “This old place” was a reminder of a time when lives that had been upheaved by chaos were set right by love. A time where the pace was slower but hopes were much, much higher. A time when each day was precious because twentieth-century medicine was still in its adolescence.

On her days off, like today, the young woman thoroughly enjoyed staying at home and catching up on current research and reports about bats, answering E-mail from former classmates and other scientists, and then relaxing by reading trashy novels, planning hunting trips, or talking on the phone with her mother or her sister-in-law, Janet.

For reasons she couldn’t quite pinpoint, those calls always left her feeling as if she’d done something wrong.

Both her mom and Janet worried about her living alone and also-more so, she suspected-about herbeing alone. No husband. No boyfriend. No prospects of one. As Joyce had told them both many times, it wasn’t that she was uninterested in meeting men. It was that she was uninterested in seeing most of the men she did meet. Except for a couple of five- and six-year-old gentlemen she’d caught smiling at her from school groups, most of them were aggressive and charmless.

Joyce had been in an unusual relationship during school, followed by years of fieldwork abroad, so she’d missed the “window” of the early twenties that both her mother and sister-in-law had caught. And then she’d been with Christopher, who had heard her give a talk at the zoo. That relationship went from chummy to kinky-it was the only way he could stay interested-and made her question the entire concept of trust. Today, the men who asked her out were either single men in their late twenties or early thirties who were interested in relationships that lasted until the next prospect came along; divorced men who were like concrete, poured and set in bizarre ways; or married men who were interested only in sucking up some passion before going home to familiarity and comfort. None of which was for her. She’d rather stay home or go to a movie or work late. Occasionally she’d have dinner with her mentor, Professor Kane Lowery. She had always been alone, and she functioned just fine that way. Not that she felt her mother or Janet believed her. Joyce could imagine the conversations the two women had with each other.

The telephone rang while Joyce was heating some lentil soup and reading about computer simulations that proved that bats, like dogs, see in very sharp black and white. The caller was Kathy Leung, a TV reporter who covered the Westchester County beat. There had been a large-scale bat attack at a small-town park an hour north of the city. It had sent two people to the hospital in very serious condition. Kathy had gotten Dr. Joyce’s number from the zoo and was calling from the broadcast truck. If they swung by, would she be interested in coming up to provide some professional commentary from the site?

Not really, Joyce admitted, but that’s what she’d do if it were her ticket to the scene of the attack. Kathy said they’d be there in ten minutes. Turning off the burner and covering the soup pot, Dr. Joyce was out the door and on the curb as the van pulled up.

Following this evening’sunprecedented bat attack, which left two people in critical condition, authorities in the small Westchester town are looking foranswers.”

“They oughta be looking for exterminators, Kath,” Robert Gentry said to the TV.

Gentry was leaning back on the sofa. The nineteen-inch TV rested on a typing table on the other side of the snug living room; there was a small desk with a computer next to it. The half-eaten container of mei grob sat on the folding chair to his left. He held a large black decaf, no sugar, in his right hand. The blinds of the one window were pulled up, and he had a partial view of the Hudson and the sparkling lights of coastal New Jersey.

Gentry’s dark eyes lingered on the young Hong Kong-born reporter. Her silky brown hair was bobbed to just above the collar of her maroon blazer, and she had beautiful, dark eyes. He liked Kathy Leung. They had dated several times after meeting at a Police Athletic League function when she came to New York from a Connecticut TV station. It didn’t work out. She went for taciturn lugs like her six-foot-six, red-meat-eating camera operator, Tex “T-Bone” Harrold. But Gentry still liked her.

Kathy was standing in front of a cordoned-off, very flat field. A trio of hefty state troopers stood stiffly behind her. Occasionally they motioned for people off-camera to stay away. Behind the state troopers were rows of parked cars and a dark forest.

“One person who may be able toprovide those answers,” said Kathy, “is Dr. Nancy Joyce. She’s the Bronx Zoo’s expert on chiroptera-bats. We’re with her, live.”

The newswoman turned to a head-taller young woman with short, raven black hair. Nancy Joyce had a long, very pretty face with full lips and large hazel eyes. She looked a little pale, but Gentry didn’t imagine that bat scientists got out much during the day.

“Doctor, I understand you’ll be going into the field when your assistant arrives with protective gear.”

“Correct.”

“At this point, is there anything at all you can tell us about what happened here?”

Gentry nodded. “Yeah. The final score was bats two, people zero.”

The slender scientist squinted as she looked into the TV spotlight. “Only that this attack is not indicative of ordinary bat behavior. Bats are normally quite docile creatures. They live in colonies, but they don’t hunt in packs. And they don’t hunt people.”

Gentry sipped his decaf. “Didn’t, Doctor.”

“Typically,” Dr. Joyce went on, “the worst kind of human-bat encounter is when a bat gets into the house.That usually occurs when the bat pursues an insect through an open window.”

“High-speed chase,” Gentry said. He liked this woman, too. He liked her husky voice and the fact that she seemed a little ill at ease on camera.

“What aboutvampire bats?” Kathy asked. “There’s been some talk of that because of the amount of blood spilled here-”

“No,” Joyce said emphatically. “Sanguivorous bats are found in South America and usually attack sleeping prey. And they don’t inflict the kinds of lacerations that were found here.The incision is so fine, in fact,that most victims seldom even wake.”

“There’s also been talk about microwaves,” Kathy said. “Is there any way that radiation from the town’s cellular phone tower can affect bat behavior?”

“Only if they kept getting disconnected,” Gentry said. This lady, Dr. Joyce, was a professional. He liked people who knew what they were talking about.

“Again, no,” Joyce said. “Those towers put out signals in the one-thousand- to three-hundred-thousand-megahertz range. That’s a lot higher than the thousand-kilohertz upper range of bat echolocation.”

“So, no effect.”

“None,” Joyce assured her.

“Are rabies a concern?”

“We won’t know until we’ve had some medical reports,” Joyce said. “But again, that’s unlikely. Bats are highly symptomatic carriers of the virus. Unlike dogs, which can turn violent, a bat that develops hydrophobia usually becomes very sick and dies. Bats can also carry other diseases, from a protozoal sleeping sickness called Chagas disease to histoplasmosis, an airborne fungus that comes from inhaling dusty bat guano. But those are extremely rare.”

“I see. Finally, Doctor, what exactly are you going to look for here?”

“What I hope to find are one or more of the bats that were involved in this assault,” the scientist said. “With any luck they’ll attack me so I can observe their behavior-”