“Catch me if you can.”

The lipsticked message on the bathroom mirror harks back to the bloody history of Jack the Ripper. But the dead woman’s computer files point to a high-tech network where lonely people spend solitary nights in steamy talk, sometimes arranging a rendezvous that can lead to love...or murder.

Compu-Mate, run by ex-jockey Max Blinderman and his gorgeous mate, Roberta, seems legitimate enough. The only link among the dead bodies is a bizarre modem operandi and printout of suspects from Compu-Mate’s subscribers that includes an alcoholic English professor, a macho forest ranger, a lonely homicide detective, and a Vietnam vet who may be hiding a secret behind his medals.

Lassiter resists being appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the case. “I always have doubts. I see a glimmer of humanity underneath the mask of evil. I see reasons and causes and justifications. I feel pity.”

But Lassiter takes the job, enlisting the aid of a brilliant female psychiatrist with a dark secret in her past. Sexual mysteries abound, and no one is quite what he or she seems, as Lassiter wanders through a maze of lies and corruption in order to uncover the murderer.