Stinger

by Nancy Kress

  He said to her retreating back, “I was hoping to hire Earl to do some work for me. Work with insects. At seven dollars an hour.”

  She stopped, turned around, and blinked twice. “Seven?”

  “Yes.”

  “You come along.”

  Around the corner was parked a pickup with several more Lesters of various ages in the truck’s bed. They all looked alike, and they all blinked twice at Cavanaugh.

  Miss Lester said to the truck generally, “Earl, you know this guy?”

  “Sure,” Earl said, without expression. “Agent Cavanaugh. FBI.”

  She considered this information. “Then I guess he ain’t no pervert Okay, Earl, get out. He’s got work for you killin’ bugs. Seven dollars an hour. You take my watch.”

  She juggled the baby, unstrapped an $8.99 Timex off her wrist and handed it to Earl. All the Lesters except Earl climbed on or remained in the truck, Miss Lester and the baby in the cab. She drove off. Earl and Cavanaugh were left staring at each other on the hot sidewalk. Earl waited, blinking.

  Cavanaugh said, “The work isn’t killing bugs. It’s about bugs, but it’s not easy to explain because I don’t understand myself what I need you to do until I ask you a lot of questions. Why did you call me a few weeks ago and show up at my house?”

  “Wanted t’offer help on the malaria case,” Earl said. “Like I told you once before, insects tell us a lot about everything. But you din’t get ahold of me.”

  Cavanaugh sensed a grudge. He said, “Well, I’m ahold of you now. And I need your insect expertise. Malaria reading—”

  “You said you got the whole NIH for insect expertise,” Earl said, still expressionless. “Din’t need me, you said. And anyways, the epidemic’s over.”

  Cavanaugh saw he wasn’t going to get off easily. On the other hand, he didn’t really feel like explaining his misconduct, suspension, and OPR investigation to an accusing eighth grader. He said testily, “Well, I need you now. Are you interested or not?”

  Earl still waited. Cavanaugh started to repeat the tactic that had moved his sister: seven dollars an hour. Some instinct told him not to. Instead he said, “This job will need insect equipment I don’t have. But you tell me what you need, and I’ll buy it. Afterward, you can keep it.”

  For the first and last time, Cavanaugh saw Earl Lester’s eyes blaze. Without blinking. It was like looking at a steady pale nova. The boy started around the corner to Cavanaugh’s car.

  Cavanaugh faced his investigative team around a table in Melanie’s motel room, which was considerably nicer than his own motel room. After one look at The Pines, she’d demanded a room for herself someplace else. They’d found a nice bed-and-breakfast two miles away. The room had a working TV, Victorian escritoire, and Jacuzzi bathtub. How much did CDC scientists earn? Never mind; it wasn’t important. “What’s important here is to go back to the site of the start of the epidemic and develop physical evidence that’s been overlooked so far,” he said.

  His team stared back at him: Melanie incredulous and Earl Lester expressionless, except, of course, for blinking twice. His surrogate FBI. Hadn’t there once been a Children’s Crusade? He knew better than to say this aloud.

  She said, “You’ve got to be kidding. Do you know how thoroughly the Anopheles breeding sites have been gone over? By us, by USAMRIID, by infectious-disease researchers around the world, by the media, by gawkers—Robert, there is no ‘physical evidence that’s been overlooked so far.’”

  “There’s got to be something,” Cavanaugh said stubbornly.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. But something at the crime scene.”

  “The crime scene?” Melanie’s tone could have boiled him alive. “The ‘crime scene’ is southern Maryland and eastern Virginia! How do you expect to search an area that size?”

  “Not the whole thing. The epicenter.”

  “The epicenter is exactly what’s been combed by every infectious disease agency on three continents. I myself ran into epidemiologists from Antwerp, Brasilia, Porton Down, Geneva, and Walter Reed. And I don’t even work on the vector end of an epidemic.”

  “All right, then,” Cavanaugh said, “not the epicenter. Somewhere out on the edges, where something might have been overlooked.” He sounded lame, even to himself. But something had to be out there, somewhere. Something.

  “It isn’t done that way, Robert. And anyway, we don’t have access to labs to analyze anything we do happen to find. You need a scanning probe microscope to identify small changes to malaria parasites. They’re small. And if we did use commercial labs, and your conspiracy theory is right, we’d just tip our hand to these hypothetical government criminals who left this hypothetical biological evidence at your hypothetical crime scene.”

  Cavanaugh started doodling. She sounded logical. Nonetheless, the other evidence—none of which had convinced her, either, nor even convinced Felders—said to him that something was going on here. He was going to find out what. And he couldn’t think of any other place to start to which he had actual access, except with the mosquitoes, where everything else had once started. Once more, from the top. This time with feeling.

  Yes, he was hanging on to this case with one slipping finger, but he was still hanging on. Despite Melanie Anderson’s logic.

  “Robert, you have to see—”

  “No, you have to be willing to explore—”

  “Not to explore totally silly—”

  “It’s only silly if it doesn’t yield—”

  “Don’t you see you’re completely dismissing—”

  This was getting them nowhere. To divert the discussion, Cavanaugh cut her off in midsentence and turned to Earl Lester, who had said nothing.

  “Earl, you’re the field expert on mosquitoes here. What do you have to say?”

  Earl said, “When do we go buy the collecting equipment?”

  Interim

  The family lugged the picnic from the car and plunked it down on a weathered wooden table set under a grove of trees. Tupperware boxes of crab sandwiches, potato salad, fruit, brownies, lemonade. An ice chest with Tequila Sunrises in a tall thermos. And for the grandfather, who would drink nothing else, cold beer.

  “Can we go down to the water, Mommy? Can we? Can we?”

  “I’ll go with them,” the mother said to her husband.

  The three set off for the sandy shore, the children running and shouting, the woman walking sedately behind. The two men settled in at the picnic bench, drinking in companionable silence.

  Suddenly the old man quavered, “Mosquito!” He flapped one thin arm at the air.

  “It’s all right, Dad. The epidemic’s over.”

  “Eh?”

  The man raised his voice. His father was going deaf. “I SAID THE DISEASE IS ALL GONE NOW.”

  “Maybe is, maybe isn’t.” His eyes filled with the easy tears of the very old. “Why we here, Clarence? Why we takin’ a chance?”

  “BECAUSE IT ISN’T A CHANCE. WE WERE TESTED. REMEMBER THE ARMY GUY WHO DREW EVERYBODY’S BLOOD AT THE MALL? AND WE’RE ALL SICKLE-CELL NEGATIVE.”

  “Why we here? We belong at home!”

  “THAT ISN’T EVEN AN ANOPHELES MOSQUITO, DAD. I CAN SEE ITS WING MARKINGS CLEARLY. AND THE PLAGUE IS ALL OVER.”

  “When we goin’ home? It ain’t safe in this here park!”

  The man stopped himself from shrugging. He had told Lorraine this would happen, but she’d insisted on the picnic. They hadn’t done anything as a family in a long while, the kids wanted to swim, Papa would forget about the epidemic like he forgot about so much else lately. It would be fun. She’d promised everybody it would be fun.

  But not if his father kept this up all afternoon. They’d have to take him home before he became too upset, maybe even before they got to eat. The man fished out another beer from the ice chest and opened it.

  “HAVE ANOTHER, DAD.”

  The grandfather sucked appreciatively at the brown bottle. The muscles of his
gaunt face relaxed. His son smiled out at the blue water, the blue sky, the blue bathing suit on his wife’s shapely figure. Lorraine could really wear the hell out of a bathing suit.

  “Sometimes things you think be over, ain’t over at all,” the old man said, with sudden calm, and took another swig of his beer.

  Fourteen

  Every particle of an insect carries with it the impress of its Maker, and can—if duly considered—read us lectures of ethics or divinity.

  —Sir Thomas Pope Blount, A Natural History, 1693

  * * *

  In the end they chose three sites. A patch of low, scrub-wooded, freshwater marsh in Virginia, at the far eastern edge of what had been the epidemic area. A similar locale in northwestern southern Maryland, on the border of Charles and Prince George’s Counties at the western edge. And, over Melanie’s protests, the epicenter near Newburg, which did indeed look as if it had been trampled by a retreating army. Tire ruts crossed the fields. Ecologically correct synthetic powder, designed to kill Anopheles larvae but little else, floated on pools of standing water. Litter dotted the ground: soggy film boxes, soda cans, a pair of green plaid boxer shorts.

  “Bet there’s a hell of a story there,” Cavanaugh said, trying to lighten Melanie’s mood, but she didn’t even answer. Cavanaugh would have shrugged, but he was loaded down with the first set of bug paraphernalia, all of which was awkwardly shaped, large, heavy, or poisonous. Melanie and Earl both wore sturdy boots, but Cavanaugh’s sneakers squished with every step through the muddy marsh. They also serve who only slosh and stagger.

  Earl Lester was actually smiling. At least, it might have been a smile. The bottom half of his pale, bony face lifted a little at the sides, slightly pulling his mouth upwards. He unfolded the first of the three Malaise traps, which Cavanaugh had bought and paid for. Along with everything else.

  This was an automatic collecting device for daytime use. Green netting made a tall pyramid over a tripod whose legs pushed deep into the mud. On two sides of the pyramid, the netting touched the ground. On the other two, it ended three feet above ground. At the top of the tripod was a large, elaborately mazed box impregnated on the inside with potassium cyanide.

  Setting this up, Earl suddenly became talkative, an event as startling as if he’d suddenly flown into the Malaise trap himself.

  “See, insects, they tend to fly upward when they encounter a barrier,” the boy said, sounding as if he’d memorized some book. “So they’ll fly right up into the killing jar on top. There are eight hundred thousand species of the class Insecta, which is about eighty percent of all the animal species on this here planet. We’re after phylum Arthropoda, class Insecta, order Diptera, family Culicidae, genus and species Anopheles quadrimaculatus.”

  Melanie finally smiled. Cavanaugh hadn’t been able to soften her, but the boy did. Well, as long as something did.

  “See that there?” Earl pointed. “That itty bitty orange bug on that leaf? That’s a Metrior hynchromiris dislocatus. They eat plants, includin’ crops. The Miridae are the biggest family of true bugs. Bring along that light trap to the patch of dry up-ground yonder, Agent Cavanaugh.”

  Cavanaugh obeyed. The light trap hung suspended from a pole, which Cavanaugh hammered into the ground under Earl’s direction. The insects, attracted by the circular light, would hit an upright baffle and drop into a pail of alcohol below.

  “We gonna get a lot of moths and beetles in this,” Earl said. “Can’t be helped none. But we want a good cross-section of whatever’s flying here by night, as well as by day. But we’ll get us some mosquitoes. You know what a female potter wasp does? Eumenes megaera. She constructs a little pot out of clay on some branch to put her eggs in. Then she fills the pot with a mess of paralyzed caterpillars and seals it up. If you cut the bottom off the pot, she’ll still put them caterpillars in it, even though they’re all just fallin’ out the bottom. Instinct. But she only puts in so many, and then stops. Some other species that do egg pots, they go on puttin’ in caterpillars and puttin’ ’em in and puttin’ ’em in until they die of exhaustion. E. megaera is right smart.”

  “Unlike some people,” Melanie murmured, “who just go putting evidence in leaky vessels until death by exhaustion.”

  Cavanaugh ignored her. By now his socks were completely sodden. Earl finished setting up the light trap and turned to Cavanaugh.

  “Now for the fun part. You take that net, Agent Cavanaugh, and you take this killing jar, Miss Melanie.”

  Cavanaugh waited for her to say coldly, “Dr. Anderson, please,” but she didn’t. She must really like the kid.

  “Don’t you go breathing in that killing jar, now. Potassium cyanide is serious poison.”

  “I know,” Melanie said, still smiling. She must really like him.

  “I’m gonna take the water net and get us some aquatic specimens,” Earl said. “Agent Cavanaugh, Miss Melanie’ll show you what to do. Looky there—a Papilio glaucus. Only one other butterfly, swallowtail butterfly, got as much yellow at the base of the front wing, excepting P. rutulus. Did you know that if anything bothers them two butterflies, they attack with a foul-smelling scent off’n their heads?”

  For the next half hour Cavanaugh tramped around after Melanie, helping to free bugs from her net and dropping them into a succession of killing jars. When that was done, the three of them beat vegetation for a while, making insects drop onto white drop cloths and then sucking them up with aspirators before the bugs could recover. When that was done, they set up pitfall traps and Berlese funnels. Cavanaugh learned earwigs never actually crawled into campers’ ears, that damselflies had been seen settling on ships far out at sea, and that brown-banded cockroaches liked to hang around electrical appliances. Also that the male scorpion fly brought a present of a captured insect to the female he was courting.

  “Sensible,” Melanie said, who seemed more relaxed dropping bugs into a killing jar than Cavanaugh had ever seen her before. “I personally would have a lot of trouble resisting a man who brought me a nice juicy insect for a present.” She grinned at Earl, who blinked twice and blushed.

  Each time more equipment was needed, Cavanaugh trudged back to Melanie’s rental car. His own car was still jammed with everything he owned that wasn’t in storage. By the third trip his wet socks itched, his insect repellent had failed, and he felt as if a foul-smelling scent was attacking off’n his head.

  When they finished at the epicenter, they repeated the whole thing over again. Twice.

  It was late afternoon before they stopped at a Wendy’s for hamburgers, then took the insects gathered so far to Cavanaugh’s motel. At Melanie’s trim place, several thousand extra bugs would be noticed, whereas at The Pines they would blend right in. Melanie and Earl immediately spread out a batch of dead specimens on a white sheet on the floor and began counting and analyzing. Abigail watched with interest.

  This left Cavanaugh the car, where he played over the tapes of the hate calls to Melanie. He didn’t want Earl to hear. Or any other kid within earshot.

  The tapes were nasty, especially cumulatively. He began to sense the kind of tension Melanie had lived under. When he’d played every tape, he started over again, this time listening for any unusual background sounds. However, his small tape recorder couldn’t distinguish among the many indistinct sounds.

  Finally Cavanaugh picked four tapes and slipped them into a padded mailer. He wrote the note to Felders by hand:

  Marty—

  I know you said you wanted nothing to do with my requests on this case. But this does not involve any other governmental agencies, although I don’t have the authority to order it myself. I’d really appreciate a psycholinguistic analysis of the enclosed tapes by Dr. Pritchard at Syracuse. The tapes are hate calls made to a young woman while she was in my jurisdiction. There are twenty-seven tapes, but these four have clear, inflected speaking and some background noise.

  Please.

  —Robert Cavanaugh

  Cavanaugh studied the
note. A letter, rather than a phone call, would give Felders more room to decide if he was willing to help. This letter seemed specific enough for Felders to comply—or not comply—but general enough so that if anyone else read it, Felders would not be implicated in anything. Cavanaugh couldn’t think of any way to improve the note. It would have to do.

  The FBI had worked with the Psycholinguistics Center at Syracuse University since 1974, and with Dr. Jonathan Pritchard since 1991. Pritchard was astounding. He listened to a tape of a kidnapper, a terrorist, or a bank robber, and then told law-enforcement agencies the perp’s social class, home state, state of mind, motivation, and probable fate. He paid attention to the way phrases were constructed, pronounced, stressed, and a half a dozen other things. From the background noise, Pritchard suggested locations and time of day where the call might have been made. And if he didn’t know these things, he was modest enough (unlike the profilers at Quantico, Cavanaugh thought) to not guess.

  From phone-call tapes, Pritchard had successfully predicted two callers’ suicides, three escapes, and a score of surrenders. He’d identified innumerable locales from which perps had made their calls. No other linguist came close to matching his record.

  Cavanaugh mailed the package and strolled back to the motel. It was full dark; he had to get Earl back home.

  “You tie up that dog now, Agent Cavanaugh. Otherwise she’s goin’ to get into our bug piles and mess ’em up good. Might even eat a few specimens.”