Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle (20 page)

“Dinner is served,” he said. “Talk about your meals ready to eat.”

Jerry sneered at the moldy slab. “That is the grossest thing I've seen all day.”

“Some would find that ironic.” Nick crumbled the meat loaf into smaller pieces and dropped a chunk into each of the containers.

“They'll eat that stuff ?”

Sarcophagid
means ‘corpse-eating.' I don't think they'll mind a few “leftovers.”

Now he took a coffee filter and placed it over the top of each container, securing it in place with a rubber band.

“What's that for?” Jerry asked.

“They have to breathe, just like you do.”

When the containers were all prepared, Nick turned his attention to the second cadaver. He bent over and examined it carefully, moving down the body from head to foot. He found several smaller maggot infestations along the way.

“He was a refloat, all right,” Nick said.

“How do you know?”

“The maggots are all dead. That means the body was on the surface long enough for flies to find it and colonize it, but then the body submerged again. The maggots must have drowned. These are all terrestrial species; they can't live underwater any more than we can. This man's been dead for quite a while.”

“You can tell that just by looking at him,” Jerry said.

“Yeah. I was hoping we could tell a little more.”

Nick began to carefully pull back the creases in the remaining clothing and look inside the folds.

“Bingo,” he said. “That's what I was looking for.”

“What is it?”

“
Trichoptera
—a caddis fly larva, just like the one we found the other day. Check the body bag—see if you can find any more.”

“Why the body bag?”

“Maggots hang on to a body even when it's moved, but aquatic insects tend to let go the minute they sense motion. If there are any more, we'll probably find them in the bag.”

Jerry pointed to a tiny tubular object. “Is this one?”

Nick looked. “That's it—find me some more.”

“It looks sort of like a pecan roll.”

“Leave it to you to think of food.”

“What's all that junk stuck on the outside of it?”

“Gravel, sand, wood—anything the caddis fly finds on the bottom.”

“The bottom of what?”

“The lake, or stream, or pond. See, the female caddis fly lays her eggs on water; the eggs hatch into larvae and sink to the bottom. The larvae make silk—they have a modified salivary gland that produces it. They use the silk to build a protective case around themselves, and they glue on little bits of whatever they can find to act like armor plating. That's why it looks like a pecan roll—that's its case.”

Within minutes they had found a dozen more.

“How does the larva find the body underwater?” Jerry asked.

“It doesn't. It just sinks straight down—or drifts sideways if there's a current. When it finally hits bottom it just grabs on to whatever happens to be there—including a body. It's purely random.”

Nick opened his equipment bag again and took out one of the small glass vials of preservative. He opened it and began to drop the caddis-fly larvae in one by one. “There,” he said. “That should be enough.”

“Want some containers?” Jerry asked.

“Wouldn't do us any good,” Nick said. “They're already dead. They're aquatic—they have to be kept in water.”

“Too bad.”

“It doesn't matter—they wouldn't have told us much anyway. Forensic entomology is based on the life cycles of terrestrial insects—mostly blowflies and flesh flies. We've studied hundreds of species; we've timed each stage of their development—that's why we can use them to determine time of death. All we have to know is the species, the local temperature, and the exact time the maggot develops into an adult fly; from there we can count backward and determine when the eggs were laid on the body—which is usually very close to the time of death.”

“That's why you put all those maggots in containers.”

“‘Maggot motels,' we call them. Once the maggots mature, we'll know what species they are—and we should be able to calculate the victim's time of death. The problem is, very few aquatic insects have been studied; only 3 percent of all insect species are aquatic, and some of them have twenty different stages of development. We just don't know enough about them to use them to determine an accurate postmortem interval.”

Nick looked around the lab. “Well, I think that's all we can do for tonight.”

“For tonight? You're thinking of coming back here again?”

“Of course—we have to check on the maggots.”

“Nick, we can't keep coming back here.”

“Why not? This place is perfect: The whole floor is abandoned, all the lights are out—we've got the whole place to ourselves. It's even got a drive-thru window.”

“What about the bodies?”

“When we're sure we're done with them, we'll put them back where we found them. Until then, we'll leave them here. It's a hospital, isn't it?”

“Nick—what's the point of all this? Suppose you are able to figure out a time of death for that guy—then what? You can't tell DMORT what you've been doing.”

“I don't know yet,” Nick said. “All I'm doing is saving forensic evidence before it gets destroyed; I'm not sure what happens next.”

“And what about the fingerprints? How are we supposed to process them? DMORT sure won't do it for us.”

“I've thought about that one,” Nick said, “and I think I might know a way.”

18

Beth opened her eyes and looked at the clock. It was 3:00 a.m. For the last hour she had lain perfectly still in her cot, hoping that her body might convince her mind to follow—but it was no use. There were nights when her mind just refused to remain shut down, like a trick birthday candle that constantly reignites. Sometime during the night her dreams gave way to conscious thought, like a bubble rising up from a dark pool. Once that happened, she knew that sleep was over for the night—regardless of the clock.

She sat up in her cot and used her middle fingers to wipe the sleep from the corners of her eyes. She brushed her hair back tight and secured it behind her head with an elastic band—except for the one rebellious strand that always refused to be corralled and hung like a comma over her right eye. She pulled on a pair of powder-blue scrubs, gathered a stack of case files from the floor beside her cot, and tiptoed out of the makeshift dormitory.

She headed for the cafeteria, which was nothing more than a handful of folding tables and chairs—but at least it was quiet and brightly lit. She took a cup of coffee to cement her decision to forgo any further attempt at sleep and turned her attention to the case file folders.

From a psychiatrist's perspective, the psychological problems during a DMORT deployment were fairly predictable and mundane: sleep disorders, stress-related issues, and separation anxieties caused by leaving loved ones on short notice—things that could usually be resolved just by managing medications or lending a listening ear. There were always boundary issues too: the need to help dedicated DMORT employees maintain a healthy distance from the suffering of those they served—to fulfill their duty without taking on their pain. That line was never easy to draw, but it was an essential one if you wanted to keep your sanity. Compassionate people pay a price for caring, and Beth's job was to make sure the price wasn't more than any individual could afford to pay.

Some of the problems weren't caused by DMORT at all; they were brought to DMORT by the people who volunteered to work there. Those were the most serious problems—and, for Beth, the most interesting problems too.

She slid the stack of file folders in front of her. There were eight or ten folders in the pile, but she knew that only the top one could hold her attention at three o'clock in the morning. The label read: POLCHAK, DR. NICHOLAS. She opened it and had just begun to read when, as if on cue, Nick walked through the doorway and swung his equipment bag onto an empty table.

She shut the file folder and looked up. “Well, hello. Are you just getting in?”

“I needed the overtime,” Nick said. “I'm saving up for a bigger boat.”

She glanced at her watch.

Nick poured himself a cup of coffee. “I know what time it is, Mother. I told you not to wait up.”

“Can you sit down for a minute?”

“Is that an official request?”

“It's a friendly request. Why can't you take it that way?”

“Because it doesn't sound friendly.” He hesitated, then pulled up a chair across from her and sat down.

“How are you doing, Nick?”

“Look—if it's a friendly request, then let's have friendly conversation. No psychiatric questions, okay? No compassionate looks, no understanding nods.”

“Somebody's in a good mood.”

“I haven't had my coffee yet.” He took a sip. “There. I love you.”

“It's three o'clock in the morning—”

“—and only seriously deranged people are still up. So what's your excuse?”

“I was about to say, ‘Are you planning to get any sleep?'”

“There's not much point—I have to be up at six.”

“Why did you bother to come back?”

“Three blessed hours of air-conditioning—and the pleasure of your company.”

“That's hard to believe.”

“I like air-conditioning.”

“There was a time when you did enjoy my company—remember?”

Nick didn't reply.

“I thought you wanted friendly conversation.”

“Men and women have different concepts of ‘friendly.' I was hoping for man-friendly.”

“As in cold, detached, and superficial.”

“There you go.”

“I liked that boy you brought in the other night. He was very bright.”

“Because he thought you were pretty?”

“He seems to think highly of you. When I asked him to describe his father, he said, ‘He's like Nick.' That's quite a compliment.”

“His father could be in prison.”

“Stop deflecting everything with humor. Accept the compliment.”

“J.T.'s a good kid. Have you found out anything from the Department of Social Services?”

“I think they've shut down along with the rest of the city. I called and left a message; I'm not sure when I'll hear back.”

“Let me know, will you? I told the kid I'd help him.”

She paused. “Where is he now?”

“I took him to an evacuation center. Why?”

“I thought you might still have him with you; I thought you might try to sneak him into your trailer. It's the sort of thing you'd do.”

“That's against the rules.”

“When did you start following rules?”

“I'm a big rule-keeper. For example, rule number one: Be careful what you say to a psychiatrist.”

“I thought we were speaking as friends.”

“Come off it, Beth—we're not friends. A friend doesn't psychoanalyze you; a friend doesn't keep a list of all your neuroses, like the one you've got in that folder there in front of you. May I?”

Before she could protest, he slid the file folder across the table and opened it. He began to scan the neatly typed pages of performance reviews and exit interviews and the numerous handwritten notations that filled the margins.

He glanced up. “Does everybody in DMORT merit such careful scrutiny?”

“You're not like everybody in DMORT.”

“‘Altruism,'” he read. “Sounds like a good quality to me.”

“In your case, it's a form of sublimation—channeling your negative emotions into socially acceptable behaviors. You're driven by principle, but at times you become fixated on that principle. It's all you see; you shut everything else out—friends, coworkers, even other principles.”

“That's called
focus
,” Nick said.

“There's a fine line between focus and fixation. It's a matter of flexibility.”

“I'll have to do more stretching. What's this one—‘depersonalization'?”

“It means you've been hurt so many times that you've formed an emotional callus to protect you from contact with the rest of the world. Nobody can hurt you because nobody gets close—you won't let them.”

“This one sounds great: ‘dissociation.'”

“That means you deal with your differences by telling yourself that you're not like other people. You are different from other people, Nick—you're brilliant, and you're analytical, and you're fascinated by things that most people can't even bear to look at. How do you explain someone who's so unlike other human beings? You do it by telling yourself that you're not human. You think of yourself as a bug.”