Nick of Time (A Bug Man Novel)

by Tim Downs

  “Slow down,” Yanuzzi said. “Why don’t we start with your name?”

  “Alena. Alena Savard.”

  “How long has your fiancé been gone, Ms. Savard?”

  “Two days.”

  “And when was your last contact with him?”

  “Two days ago. Didn’t I just say that?”

  “You said he called and left a message. When was that?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “You heard from him just yesterday?”

  “I didn’t hear from him—it was a message.”

  “And in this message, did your fiancé sound unusual in any way? Did he sound confused? Disoriented? Incoherent?”

  “He’s always incoherent,” Alena mumbled. “He’s a man.”

  Yanuzzi quietly set down his pen. “Do you mind if I ask a personal question, Ms. Savard?”

  “That depends.”

  “When are the two of you getting married?”

  “Saturday,” she said glumly. “Why?”

  “I’ll file a missing person report if you insist, but I don’t think it’ll do much good. You just heard from your fiancé a day ago; ordinarily in a situation like this we wouldn’t get involved unless we considered the person ‘at risk.’ You know what I mean: under fourteen, a possible crime victim, physically or mentally impaired—things like that. We don’t get involved at all when we consider the person ‘voluntarily missing.’ ”

  “Voluntarily missing—what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I’m not so sure your fiancé is ‘missing.’ No offense, Ms. Savard, but people get cold feet before a wedding— it happens all the time. Maybe your fiancé just needed a little breathing room. You know—time to think things over.”

  “I never said I wanted to file a missing person report. I said I was looking for my fiancé. Nick’s right about you people— you’re always jumping to conclusions.”

  “If you don’t want to file a missing person, what are you doing here? This is a police station, not a lost and found.”

  “I just thought maybe you’d seen him,” Alena grumbled. “Tall guy, dark hair. Big funny glasses. Real handsome too, if you can get him to take the goofy goggles off. He probably made it up here yesterday afternoon. Nick Polchak.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell—but then, we get a lot of tourists through here.”

  “I just thought maybe he’d stop here.”

  “Why?”

  “Nick’s a forensic entomologist,” she said. “You know—a bug man. A friend of his was murdered, down in Philadelphia. I think he came up here to look into it.”

  “Why here?”

  “I don’t know why. He didn’t say.”

  “And you thought he might have stopped in here to ask for my help?”

  “No,” Alena said. “Nick likes to do things his way. I thought you might have seen him because he gets into a lot of trouble. It’s not like he means to; trouble just seems to follow him around. I figured you’d probably see him sooner or later, so I thought I might as well check with you first.”

  “Sorry,” Yanuzzi said. “I don’t remember seeing him.”

  “You’d remember Nick,” she said. “He makes a big first impression.”

  Yanuzzi nodded to the three dogs waiting patiently by her side. “Those mutts all yours?”

  “Yeah, they’re mine.”

  “Three dogs,” he said. “They could eat you out of house and home.”

  “I have thirty-four more at home.”

  “Wow—does your fiancé know what he’s getting into?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  “Do all your dogs look like those three?”

  “Does it matter?” She rested her hand on the big dog’s head. “This one is the toughest dog in the world. The gray one there, she’s the world’s best cadaver dog. And the little one, he’s the world’s smartest dog—a tracker. It doesn’t matter what they look like, Sheriff—what matters is what they can do.”

  Yanuzzi smiled. “You brought dogs to track down your fiancé?”

  Alena didn’t reply.

  “Mind if I give you a little friendly advice, Ms. Savard?”

  “Are we friends? When did that happen?”

  “Go home—wait for your fiancé there.”

  “I already tried that,” she said. “Any idea where I might start looking?”

  “That all depends,” he said.

  “On what?”

  “On what he’s really doing here.”

  Just then the door burst open and a small man in a greenishgray business suit charged into the room. He was so thin that his neck seemed to stick out from his shirt collar like a spoon from a coffee cup, and the veins on his forehead bulged like purple tree roots. He was nearly bald, and as he crossed the room the few fine hairs that remained drifted above his skull like seaweed in a surf. “Ed!” he blurted out. “He did it to me again!”

  “Charlie, I’m with someone. You’re interrupting.”

  Charlie Dorfman tossed a cursory nod in Alena’s direction.

  “Sorry, but doggone it, Ed, he did it to me again!”

  Yanuzzi let out a long slow breath as a cue to the man to slow down. “Excuse us for a minute,” he said to Alena, and then to the man: “Now, who did what to who?”

  “You know who I’m talking about—it’s the same thing every week or two. It’s that Odell Throckmorton—he broke into my warehouse again! This time he made off with a DVD player. He thinks I won’t notice if he just takes one or two things at a time, but it shows up when I take inventory.”

  “And every time you take inventory you come barging in here and start accusing Odell. Then I go out and have a talk with Odell, but by the time I get there, he’s already sold off whatever he stole from you.”

  “Can’t you just arrest him?”

  “Sure I can, and I can hold him for twenty-four hours—but what’s the point, Charlie? You can’t take a man to trial without evidence.”

  “Well, can’t you do something?”

  “You know who’s doing it, Charlie—why don’t you do something? I keep telling you, buy yourself some security cameras and set ’em up around the place. Get some pictures of the guy— then we’d have something to work with.”

  “And I told you before, that costs money. Security cameras are expensive.”

  “So is theft—but you can write that off, can’t you? That’s really the problem here, isn’t it, Charlie? It’s just cheaper for you to take a tax write-off than it is to set up a security system.”

  Charlie just stood there getting hotter and redder until Yanuzzi wondered if steam might start venting from the gap in his collar. He eventually just wheeled around and charged out with the same frenetic energy he had entered with.

  Yanuzzi turned to Alena again. “Every week like clockwork—the guy never learns. Now where were we?”

  “You were about to recommend a hotel,” Alena said. “It’s already afternoon—I might not be able to find him today.”

  “Then you’re not taking my advice.”

  “People love to give advice,” Alena said. “That’s ’cause they don’t have to take it.”

  “Charlie Dorfman never learns,” he said. “That’s because he’s Charlie Dorfman. I was hoping you were a little brighter.”

  “I like to make my own mistakes,” she said. “That way I’ve got no one to blame.”

  “Well, you’re about to make a big one.” He paused and stared at her, hoping that his final warning might have some effect—but the woman showed no sign of changing her mind. “Paradise Motor Lodge,” he said. “Best hotel in town. It’s on the south side—you probably passed it on the way in.”

  “Got it,” she said, and with a quick wiggle of her fingertips she took the dogs and left.

  Yanuzzi picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. “It’s me,” he said. “You’re not gonna believe who just walked in here.”

  ***

  Alena spotted
Charlie Dorfman a couple of blocks away, steaming down the sidewalk toward some unknown destination; he was facing a headwind and those few remaining hairs were standing almost vertical. Alena looked down at little Ruckus and snapped her fingers—the dog came to immediate alert. She made a tugging gesture, like an engineer blowing a train whistle, then pointed down the sidewalk at Charlie. Ruckus took off like a rifle shot; the pads of his tiny paws made no sound at all on the concrete.

  Alena followed.

  It took the dog only a few seconds to catch up with Charlie, intercepting him midstride and grabbing hold of the back of his pant leg near the ankle. Charlie let out a shriek and went into an embarrassing little dance, frantically attempting to shake the dog loose, but the determined Ruckus just set his jaws and hung on like a tick.

  Charlie was almost hysterical by the time Alena caught up with him. “Is this your dog?” he shouted. “It bit me! The thing won’t let go!”

  “He just bit your pant leg. Man up, will ya?” She snapped her fingers and made a gesture like dropping a ball; the dog obediently released its grip, trotted over to Alena, and sat down.

  Charlie pulled up his pant leg and searched for signs of blood. “That thing is a menace! It should be put down!”

  “Stop whining—this town’s got mosquitoes bigger than he is. He grabbed your leg because I told him to, okay?”

  Charlie stopped and looked at her. “Why?”

  “That guy you mentioned—the one who keeps robbing your warehouse. I can catch him for you.”

  18

  Nick eased the knob forward on the microscope and brought the puparium into sharper focus. It was smaller than that of most flies, not much larger than a grain of rice, but the microscope’s powerful lens brought out every detail. The puparium was dark brown in color and slightly tear-shaped, with one end rounded and the other slightly tapered. The tip of the rounded end was missing; that was where the cap had been that had kept the developing larva safely sealed inside the puparium until it was ready to emerge as an adult fly. When its development was complete, the fly had a clever technique for escaping the puparium—it simply inflated a balloonlike organ on its head called the ptilinum, blowing off the cap like the escape hatch from a space capsule. Nick thought it was truly one of nature’s wonders, but few people he had ever met seemed capable of appreciating it.

  He heard muffled conversation and glanced up from the microscope. Across the lab, two Penn State entomology graduate students were staring at him and trading comments under their breath; the moment he looked up they fell silent and returned to their work. They’d been doing this ever since Nick arrived half an hour ago and it was beginning to annoy him; he was starting to feel like a freshman with a volcano-sized zit.

  Nick used his larval forceps to remove the puparium from the microscope and replaced it with another from the envelope of specimens he had collected from the lake house. He peered into the lens and focused again . . . This puparium had the same basic characteristics as the others: dark brown in color and small in size, no more than six or seven millimeters in length. But what interested Nick most were two morphological features that all the puparia had shared: They were all slightly flattened in shape, and they all had rings of long hairlike projections that covered the surface of the shell. They were clearly all the same species— and they were not the species Nick was expecting to find.

  When he heard a sound like a snicker from across the lab he finally rose up from the microscope and confronted the students. “Is there a problem? I have permission to use the lab, in case you’re wondering. I graduated from Penn State—I did my doctorate here.”

  One of the students elbowed his colleague and then approached Nick. “You’re him, aren’t you? You’re Nick Polchak.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  The student grinned and tapped the bridge of his nose.

  “The glasses,” Nick said. “Yes—they tend to give me away.”

  “My name’s Manoush. I’m working on my PhD here.”

  “What’s your dissertation topic?”

  “Microflora associated with honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder.”

  “Important topic. Good luck with your research.” Nick bent down over his microscope again, but when the student made no motion to leave he looked up again. “Is there something else?”

  “You did your research under Dr. Kim, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Dr. Kim as in ‘The K. C. Kim Anoplura Collection’ over at the Frost Entomological Museum?”

  “That’s him. You know, that’s one of the largest collections of sucking lice anywhere in the world.”

  “Wow. You know, some people say you practically invented forensic entomology.”

  “That’s a gross exaggeration,” Nick said. “But feel free to repeat it.”

  “Are the stories they tell about you true?”

  “They tell stories about me?”

  “They do in this department.”

  “Do the stories make me look good or bad?”

  “Are you kidding? You’re practically a legend around here.”

  “Then they’re true, every one of them.”

  “Did you really leave a dozen decomposing pigs in the woods across from the Business Building just before a big alumni reception?”

  “It was only four pigs,” Nick said. “I was studying rate of decomposition in a shaded environment. How was I supposed to know the wind would shift?”

  “They say the whole place emptied out.”

  “They say the whole place emptied “Well, when pork goes bad . . .”

  “They say you did some of your research down at the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee.”

  “I didn’t have much choice—Tennessee was one of the few states where it was legal to do research on human remains. Somebody had to prove that insects are attracted to pigs and human beings in similar ways—that way the rest of us would be able to use pigs in our own research. I remember I was bent over this cadaver once, counting blowflies and flesh flies as fast as I could, and the flesh flies went into this birthing frenzy. As you know, flesh flies give live birth—the females hover over the cadaver and squirt out tiny little maggots like bombers. And they all give birth at the same time, because when the first female drops her maggots she releases a birthing pheromone and it signals all the other females to do the same. So all of a sudden it was raining maggots—I had maggots in my hair, maggots in my ears, and there was nothing I could do because I was bent over this cadaver and I didn’t want to lose count.” Nick smiled and stared dreamily into space. “Yeah,” he said, “the good ol’ days.”

  “So what brings you back to Penn State? I heard you were teaching somewhere down south.”

  “At NC State in Raleigh,” Nick said, “but I’m working on something over in the Poconos and I needed access to a lab and a good specimen collection. Penn State’s got both; plus, I know my way around.”

  “The Poconos.” The student grinned. “Honeymooning?”

  “That’s next week.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I’m getting married on Saturday.”

  “Congratulations,” Manoush said. “What’s your fiancée’s field?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Is she an entomologist too? Where did she do her doctorate?”

  Nick looked at him. “This may surprise you, but not everyone has a doctorate. Some people are actually able to live full and meaningful lives without one.”

  “Well, sure, but you being a researcher and all, I just figured anyone you’d want to marry . . .”

  “My fianceé trains dogs,” he said.

  “Really. Well, that’s great.”

  There was an awkward pause, and then Nick added, “She does have an undergraduate degree—a BS from Virginia Tech.”

  “Virginia Tech—terrific school. Go Hokies.”

  Nick found himself suddenly irritated. “Look, if you don’t mind—”

  “Oh
, sorry, I should let you get back to your work. Nice to meet you, Dr. Polchak.”

  “Same here.”

  Four hours later Nick was back in his car again, making the three-hour trek back from Penn State to the little town of Pine Summit. Driving was fast and easy and he made good time across most of the state on I-80 East, but traffic picked up and he had to slow down working his way north through the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. Now he was headed east again, following the narrow winding roads up into the mountains, and he was driving as fast as the roads and the darkness would allow. It was almost eight o’clock and he had less than thirty minutes left to go to reach Pine Summit; he began to relax a little, but he kept his foot on the gas.

  He kept thinking about the puparia he had identified that afternoon. There was no doubt as to their species—they were Fannia scalaris, the common latrine fly. At first he thought they might be Fannia canicularis, the lesser housefly, since the two species are similar in size and appearance and canicularis is much more likely to be found in an indoor habitat like the lake house. But the tip-off was the color; the puparia of the lesser housefly are usually reddish brown in color, and the specimens Nick collected were a much darker brown. No, they were definitely latrine flies, every last one of them—and that was a big red flag.

  Though he tried to keep his mind focused on the puparia, Nick’s thoughts kept returning to the annoying questions that nosy grad student had asked back at the lab that afternoon: “Is your fiancée an entomologist too? Where did she do her doctorate?” Nick had always thought of Alena as a very bright woman, but in point of fact, there was a huge discrepancy between their educational levels. Does that matter? he wondered. I’m not looking for a research assistant, I’m looking for a . . .

  A what? Strangely, the thought had never crossed his mind before. He wanted a wife, of course, but that was just a job title, not a job description. What did he really want from a wife? Was it merely companionship? Was it professional partnership? Was he looking for stimulating conversation or intellectual challenge?