Deadout (37 page)

We put everything on the table, and Moose started unpacking the box. “We got the mite samples we need,” he said, sliding the glass jars toward her. “We also found some information that could be important, but I'm going to have to get on Benjy's computer and check it out.”

Moose got to work on the computer, and Annalisa started pulverizing the mites with the back of a fork, mixing them with different solutions. At one point she was using the salad spinner as centrifuge. Nola and I got out of their way, but Jimmy stayed right where he was, sitting close by Annalisa's side. I looked back as we walked out of the room, and a tiny wistful pang passed through me, but I put my arm around Nola and she pulled me in tight.

Nola and I found enough canned ingredients in the cupboard to make a passable chili, and we worked quietly but comfortably together in the kitchen. By the time the chili was ready, Annalisa had finished preparing the samples and she and Jimmy were sitting close together, staring at the thermal cycler.

Moose pushed himself away from the computer. “I'm onto something here,” he said, rubbing his face. He paused and looked with a sudden intensity at the chili I'd set next to him, then shoveled in a few quick spoonfuls.

“Okay,” he said around the third spoonful. “So, we've been tracking the bees on the island since Benjy started this project last year, counting the number of bees with these LIDAR units, then mapping out where the colonies are. The LIDAR picks up all the movement around them—a massive amount of data. Then we filter it. We're looking for honeybees, so we filter the data for two hundred hertz, the frequency of honeybee wings. You filter the data, you look at which direction the honeybees are flying, and you plot the line. You do it from a few different locations, and where the lines intersect, is where there's a hive. Then we would go visit it and add it to our census map.”

Jimmy's forehead looked like there was an aneurysm behind it. I wondered if that was how I looked when Moose first explained it to me.

“So a few weeks ago,” Moose said, “the number of bees flying around starts dropping, then the bees stopped showing up altogether.” He sat back and took a deep breath. “Apparently, a few days ago, Benjy started filtering for different frequency signatures. And at two hundred and twenty-five hertz, he got hits. Lots of them. When I plug those numbers in, I get the same result.”

“Could the calibration have been off?” Annalisa asked. “Could it have actually been two hundred, and just registering as two-twenty-five?”

“It's possible. And I'm going to check the LIDAR units to make sure. But it's also true that maybe what he was getting hits from weren't regular honeybees.”

“You mean Bee-Plus bees?” Nola asked.

“Or maybe more accurately Bee-Plus-plus, right?” he said with a bitter laugh. “Because if they're swarming, that means another generation is involved. Stoma said the queens are supposed to be flightless, to prevent that from happening, but they could be wrong. Imagine that: a genetic modification not doing what it's supposed to, right?” he said sarcastically. “Makes you wonder what else they're wrong about. Or lying about. Either way, if these aren't regular bees, it wouldn't be a total shock that they had a different signature.”

The table fell quiet as that sunk in.

“So what do we do now?” I asked.

“We need to check the LIDAR units, that's for sure,” Moose said as he picked up the map we'd found at Benjy's. “But first we need to go check and see if this info is right, because if it is,” he said, poking it with his finger, “there should be a feral hive right here.”

 

69

The lines on Benjy's map converged on a small wooded area fifty yards inside the state forest. Nola looked worried when we left. I kept it light, asked her if she wanted us to bring her some honey, but I was worried, too.

Moose had the coordinates on his phone, and we parked on the side of the road and sat there for a moment.

As he opened the door, I said, “Shouldn't we have beekeeper suits or whatever?”

“Yeah,” he said with a grim smile. “We should.”

Then he got out.

I did, too, thinking that if he'd seen what I'd seen, he wouldn't be so glib. Annalisa had assured me that the alarm pheromone would have long since worn off, and maybe the patchouli had, too, but I swore I could still smell them both, and it was giving me the heebie jeebies.

The forest was buzzing with flies and gnats as we walked as quietly as we could into the woods. The buzzing grew louder, making my hair stand up. When I looked at Moose, I could tell he heard it, too.

That's when I caught the smell. At first so faint that, if I hadn't known what it was, I wouldn't have even noticed. Then Moose smelled it, too, a furrow creasing his brow.

His face was screwed up at the stench, and he was opening his mouth to speak when I pointed out a deer lying at the base of a large pine tree twenty yards away, its stomach grotesquely bloated.

Moose saw it and looked back at me. I held up a finger, for him to wait, but when I walked over to it, he followed. The smell was intense. Maggots squirmed around the animal's eyes, nose, and mouth. It was peppered with dead bees and stingers.

Moose was trying to keep cool, but his eyes were wide with fear. I hoped my own efforts to fake it were more successful.

He took out his phone and checked the GPS. Then he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Still looking at his phone, he turned to lead the way, then tripped and went sprawling. I reached out to grab him but missed, and he tumbled over a fallen tree and down into a slight gully.

Almost immediately, a scream tore through the forest, loud and high and chilling. I jumped over the downed tree after him, and when I landed, I saw Moose, on his hands and knees, his face inches away from what was left of Benjy's.

It was bad. Worse than the deer. Benjy was slumped against an old tree trunk. His flesh was bloated, but it was also swollen beyond that, misshapen and covered with stingers. His beard was a tangle of dead bees.

The scream shut off, and I thought he was done, but he was just catching his breath. When he resumed it was less high-pitched surprise and more ragged horror and anguish. I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to the other side of the gully, stumbling backward until we fell onto the roots of another tree several yards away.

I held him until he stopped screaming, trying to calm him down. But when he finally stopped, through the sound of his sobs and my soothing whispers, I heard another sound.

Looking up, I saw a branch hanging low under the weight of a large papery hive with thousands of bees pouring out, filling the air above us. When Moose looked up and saw them, he started screaming again.

I pulled him to his feet, but he didn't need any more coaxing. He took off like a jack rabbit through the woods. I trusted he was going in the right direction, because I was following him. The old joke went through my head about how you don't have to run faster than the bear, just faster than your friend. I felt an unreasonable resentment against Moose, now fifteen feet ahead of me.

I had just spied his truck, maybe sixty feet away, when the first bee got me in the back of the neck. I swatted it and crushed it and threw it to the side. I slowed a step when I did, but the pain inspired my legs, and I made it to the truck at the same time as Moose.

A couple of bees followed us into the truck. The first one was no match for my frantic freak-out jujitsu. But the second one was—penetrating my defenses while I was dispatching its cousin. It stung me on the shoulder.

Between the fact that Moose had outrun me and the fact that we weren't driving away at a high rate of speed, I was almost annoyed with him. But when I killed the second bee and turned to ask him if perhaps we could leave, I saw that his face was a silent mask of anguish, and I remembered he had just come face-to-face with a dead friend.

I patted him on the shoulder and tried not to panic as the cloud of bees outside the car thickened. Moose's sobs entered the audible range, and we sat there for a few more awkward seconds. Then he opened his eyes and saw the bees crawling on the windshield. “Oh, shit,” he said. He fumbled for the keys, and we were off.

 

70

When we walked through the front door, Nola took one look at Moose and wrapped him in a hug. I could have used a hug myself, but when you're supposed to be a tough guy, sometimes you have to wait. Annalisa looked at me, concerned, but she stayed where she was. Jimmy came over and slapped my shoulder.

“You okay?” he said. “You look a little freaked out.”

I guess that would have to do.

“We found Benjy,” I said.

“He's dead,” Moose blurted out.

“We also found a big hive of angry bees.”

“A feral hive?” Annalisa asked. “Of Bee-Plus? Then the queens aren't flightless.”

“Wait,” I said. “I thought the old queen and the old bees left the hive to the new queen and the new bees. So the bees that left should be the less aggressive ones, right?”

She bit her knuckle, thinking. “That is true, usually. Although it's possible for a single hive to send out multiple swarms, even over the course of a couple of days. All but one of those are going to be the next generation. It's rare, but with these bees, who knows?”

Moose got himself together enough to pull away from Nola and shake his head. “I don't know if they're the Bee-Plus bees, the next generation, or what. They're very aggressive.” He started losing it again. “They killed Benjy.”

“I think he followed the same data we did and went looking for them,” I said, now pretty much just talking to Jimmy. “I guess he found them.”

“So are these bees all over the island now?” Jimmy asked, anger mixing with the alarm in his voice. He looked down at Annalisa, then over at me. “We're not going to make any friends, and I don't know if it will do any good, but if these bees are killing people, it's time to kick this thing upstairs.”

*   *   *

Jimmy drove with his arm locked and his jaw set, the muscles in his temple visibly throbbing.

“This is going to get me in all sorts of shit with people who already don't like me,” he said, “so I need to know that you're not going to get cute. I need to know you're going to tell what you know, and play it straight. Don't give them any reasons to blow us off. Are you ready for that?”

I did a quick mental calculation of all I had done, what I could bend the truth about, and which parts of it could get me in trouble. “Yeah, okay. What's this guy like?”

“Chief Wilks is a tool,” he said. “The worst kind of simpering kiss-up political animal. Everything he does is calculated, every decision based on how it impacts his career objectives. And frankly, I hope it works out for him. I hope he gets whatever job is next on his ladder of success, so at least he'll be out of my hair.”

Wilks's office was in the same building as Jimmy's, across from the ferry terminal in Vineyard Haven. Wilks sighed when he saw Jimmy, and he frowned when he saw me.

“Hello, Jimmy,” he said with a big, insincere smile. “Thought I told you to go home and get some sleep.”

“There's some shit going on we need to talk about.”

Wilks winced at the expletive, and I almost did, too. Not in front of the children, I thought.

“Who's your friend?” Wilks asked, looking at me.

“Doyle Carrick. He's with Philly P.D. He's involved in some of this, so I brought him along.”

I didn't like the way he said I was involved in it. Sounded guilty.

Wilks put down his pen. “You were involved in that home invasion, right?”

I nodded.

“This is about the bees,” Jimmy said, lowering his voice.

Wilks grimaced and closed his eyes. “What have I told you about the bees?” he snapped.

“But this—”

“What have I told you about the bees?”

“There's a body.”

“What?”

“In the woods. One of the bee researchers, Benjy Hazelton, stung to death by the bees, from a hive there.” He put a slip of paper on the desk. “Here are the GPS coordinates.”

Wilks gave me the same smile he'd given Jimmy when we walked in. “I'm sorry. Could you please excuse us for a few moments?”

As soon as I was out in the hallway, Wilks started in on Jimmy. I could hear the whole thing.

“This is exactly what I didn't want to hear about, Sergeant Frank. This is big, these people are big. And sometimes, you got to let the big kids play and stay out of the way so you don't get hurt. Have you not been listening to me? I thought I'd made myself very clear.”

“A body, Wilks. Are you listening to
me
?”

“And how did this body die?”

“Looks like it was stung to death.”

“Well, that sounds like an awful way to go, but hardly a police matter. Sounds like you need to call animal control, and the medical examiner.”

“I guess I'll do that, then.”

“Good. And now you better get home and rest up. You know I need you back in Katama first thing.”

Jimmy flashed me a look as he stormed out of the office. He was too angry to speak. He might have been too angry to drive, too, but at least we were getting where we were going in a hurry.

“Sorry,” I told him. “If it's any consolation, my lieutenant's an asshole, too.”

Jimmy took out his phone and dialed as he drove. Sitting in the passenger seat, I had my foot jammed on the imaginary brake pedal. I wondered if this was how Nola felt when I was driving “impatiently.”

“Hi, Letitia,” he said, cradling the phone between his jaw and his shoulder while he pulled out the piece of paper I'd given him. The car veered perilously close to the edge of the road as we bounced up the winding hill. “I need to report a body.… It's just west of the state forest. I got GPS coordinates for you … appears to be natural causes … No, I'm not a doctor, but apparently Wilks is, and he assures me this is not a police matter and I should just report it to you. Looks like he was attacked by bees.… That's right, and you need to tell whoever is going out there they should be prepared for very aggressive bees, make sure the same thing doesn't happen to them. You ready?”