by Tim Downs
Then she noticed his eyes.
Nick Polchak wore the thickest eyeglasses Riley had ever seen. Behind them his brown eyes floated like two buckeyes, flashing off and then on again as if they might be communicating some mysterious code.
“Dr. Polchak,” Ms. Weleski said in a pleasantly pleading tone. “Perhaps you could make it more—” She held both hands palmdown and made a patting gesture in the air. Nick looked at her blankly, then slowly turned back to the class.
“When you finish with a soda can, what do you do with it?”
“You throw it away,” came a voice from the second row.
“Wrong,” Nick said. “That’s what your parents did with it. What do you do with a soda can when you finish with it?”
“You recycle it,” said another voice.
“Why do you do that? Why do you recycle it?”
“So you don’t waste stuff.” The pace was quickening now.
“Exactly. Now—who can tell me what happens to you when you die?”
There was a long pause here. The class was suspicious, wondering if the man with the buckeyes might be trying to trick them.
“They … bury you,” one brave soul ventured. “Or they burn you up. That’s what they did with my grandpa.”
“Ah!” Nick held up one long index finger. “But what if they can’t find you?”
“Why can’t they find you?”
“What if you’re in the woods, and no one knows you’re there, and you have a heart attack? Or what if someone shoots you four times, dumps your body in a drainage ditch, and covers it with debris? I had a case exactly like that, where—”
Ms. Weleski made a sharp coughing sound in the back of the room.
“Or what if you’re in the woods, and no one knows you’re there, and you have a heart attack?” Nick said again. “What happens to your body then?”
No one had the slightest idea.
“Then you’re recycled,” Nick said triumphantly, “because nature doesn’t like to waste stuff either. And what do you suppose recycles you?” Nick swept the classroom with his huge brown eyes.
“Insects do,” he said. “They eat you.”
There was an audible gasp from the classroom, most notably from the corner where Ms. Weleski sat. It was all Riley could do to keep from laughing out loud.
Suddenly Nick clapped his hands together and the entire class jumped in unison. “Let’s do a little demonstration. I need somebody to be a dead guy.” He turned to a small, doe-eyed boy in the front row. “How about you?”
“Don’t want to be a dead guy,” he grumbled.
“Not a real dead guy—just pretend. Come on up here and lie down on the teacher’s desk.”
Ms. Weleski tried to quickly stand, but the little desk rose up with her like a hoop skirt. “Dr. Polchak,” she protested, “please be careful … I don’t think it’s a good idea if you—” But by now the boy was sprawled out across the desk, staring mournfully at the ceiling above.
“OK, we got a dead guy,” Nick said. “Now, how did he die? Anybody?”
“He got his head chopped off,” one little girl offered cheerfully.
The little boy propped himself up on one elbow. “Do I look like I got my head chopped off?” Nick put one hand on his head and pushed him back down.
“OK, he got his head chopped off,” Nick said. “Now, as soon as he hit the ground, certain kinds of flies began to—”
“What happened to his head?” said a voice in the front row.
“Forget the head. A raccoon carried it away.”
“Raccoons eat heads?” someone whispered.
“Yes—and hands and feet too—but that’s another story. Now, certain kinds of flies will land on the body, and what do you think they do?”
“They eat you?”
“No. They lay eggs on you so their babies can eat you.”
Riley had to cover her face with both hands. She let one long snort escape, which she did her best to disguise as astonishment.
Nick picked up an eraser and held it over the boy. “Here comes the momma fly. She smells blood, she lands, she lays her eggs—thousands of them, and they look just like that cheese they sprinkle on your food at Olive Garden.”
The boy on the desk lifted his head. “I like Olive Garden.”
Nick pushed him back down. “You have no head, remember? Now, when each of the eggs hatches, it becomes a maggot. And each maggot has two little hooks on one end, like this.” Nick held up two curled fingers like quotation marks. “They try to eat you, but you’re too darn tough—so they puke out this digestive fluid, and it dissolves the tissue that’s in front of them.”
Ms. Weleski was free of her desk now. “Thank you, Dr. Polchak! Thank you, thank you for coming to see us today—”
“And then the maggots begin to scrape, and scrape, and—”
“Class, can we all say a nice thank-you to Dr. Polchak for visiting our health fair today?”
Nick blinked at her. “But I haven’t explained the life cycle of the maggot yet, and how we use it to determine postmortem interval.”
“Thank you, Dr. Polchak! Thank you!” Ms. Weleski led the stunned class in a chorus of appreciation, while at the same time beckoning Nick cheerfully toward the door.
“OK.” Nick shrugged. He turned to the class one last time. “Don’t forget, when it’s time to go to graduate school, remember NC State. Go Wolfpack.”
Riley watched as the door closed behind Nick, and Ms. Weleski momentarily braced herself against it as if to prevent a forced reentry. She turned to Riley with a look of utter despair. “Dr. McKay,” she said, “what is your topic?”
A tiny voice inside of Riley longed to say, “The Autopsy: A Guided Tour.” But her kinder self got the best of her, as it always seemed to do with Riley, and she simply said, “Cribs for Kids, Ms. Weleski. How your second-graders can help contribute cribs to underprivileged families with infants.”
Ms. Weleski heaved an audible sigh and stepped away from the door, but Riley stared at the door a moment longer.
He’s the one, she said to herself.
Tarentum, Pennsylvania, June 2003
Riley knocked on the front door of the tiny brick-and-siding split-level, then turned and stood with her back to the door. Before her, row after row of gray shingled rooftops descended away from her, down toward the mountainous coal pile and the railroad tracks that snaked along the Allegheny River.
There was no answer. She followed the sidewalk around the left side of the house and there, tucked back among the sycamores along the steep hillside, she saw a lovely old greenhouse that must have been constructed decades ago. The frame was made of flaking iron once painted a pale shade of green. The panels looked to be the original glass, spotted and speckled and smoky around the edges, as though only the centers were ever wiped clean. Down the center of the ridge line ran a pair of hinged panels that could be opened or closed to control the temperature inside. Riley thought it looked very much like the town that contained it: once a thing of beauty, now just a skeleton, a monument to better days and more bountiful times.
In the midmorning sun, the glare from the glass was blinding. Riley lowered her sunglasses, ducked her head, and stepped inside. Even with the ridge vent wide open, the heat was sweltering and the humidity even worse. Standing in the center of the greenhouse, oblivious to her presence and to the tropical climate around him, was the man with the enormous glasses. Beside him stood a man of similar age and of Indian descent, who mopped constantly at his dripping brow.
“This is oppressive. Worse than Kolkata in May,” the man complained. “Nick, why don’t you open a window?”
“There are no windows,” Nick said.
“This is a house of windows. Do they have no hinges in Tarentum?”
In the doorway, Riley reached out and rapped against the glass wall. “Dr. Polchak? I’m Dr. Riley McKay. I’m a pathology fellow at the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office. May I come in?”
“
You are in,” Nick said. “Dr. Riley McKay, meet Dr. Sanjay Patil: molecular biologist, Pitt Panther, and part-time whiner.” Nick turned back to his overheated companion and handed him a plastic container. “Tuesday,” he said. “No later.”
“Impossible,” Sanjay replied. “You have given me half a dozen specimens, and you want an RFLP on each of them by Tuesday? I tell you it is not possible.”
“Let’s ask her,” Nick said, nodding toward Riley. “When you order a DNA typing at the coroner’s office, how long does it take to get lab results?”
“Two weeks,” Riley said. “And that’s only if you flirt with them.”
Nick looked at Sanjay. “Do you want me to flirt with you?”
Sanjay placed the container in a black specimen case, exactly like the one Riley held at her side, and headed for the door. “It was a pleasure,” he nodded to Riley as he passed. “See what you can do for him; it is truly a job for a pathologist.”
Nick turned to Riley. “Thanks a lot, Dr. McKay. Sanjay used to do the impossible for me all the time because he didn’t know any better; now you’ve told him it’s impossible. What am I supposed to do now?”
“I guess you’ll just have to start being reasonable,” she said.
Nick cocked his head and looked at her. When he did, Riley saw his eyes begin to dart and roll—like the BBs in a little puzzle, she thought, only infinitely larger. The soft brown orbs first traced the contour of her body, then slowly scanned her vertically from head to foot, halting momentarily at special points of interest. Suddenly they slashed back and forth across her, as if making a series of surgical incisions; then the eyes made a sequence of slow, sweeping motions over her, wiping up after the procedure, coming to rest at last on her face.
Riley exhaled sharply, unaware that she had been holding her breath. No one had ever looked at her—no one had ever looked through her like that before. It was like having a CAT scan. No—it was like having an autopsy. He was taking her apart and reassembling her with his eyes. She felt that somehow Nick Polchak knew her now, knew her inside-out, and she had some catching up to do.
“You look … familiar,” Nick said.
“I should. I was in Ms. Weleski’s class the other day at Fairview Elementary School.”
Nick let out a groan.
“I thought it went very well,” Riley assured him. “Especially the part about the little hooks on the maggots that scrape and scrape.”
“What was your topic? What’s the coroner’s office handing out these days?”
“‘Cribs for Kids.’”
“See, that’s not fair,” Nick said. “You probably use PowerPoint, don’t you? With slides of pathetic little toddlers sleeping on tile floors. Let’s see what you can do with a maggot infestation.”
Riley smiled. “You know, I had a little trouble finding this place.”
“What, you mean Tarentum? Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.”
“It’s a little … tucked way.”
“‘Tucked away’ as in ‘buried.’ Dead things deserve to be buried, Dr. McKay. Tarentum is almost a ghost town—but you should have seen it seventy-five years ago, before the steel mills and glass factories began to close down.”
“Riley.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re a doctor, I’m a doctor. We cancel each other out. Let’s make it Riley and Nick, OK?”
Nick nodded. “I assume you didn’t come all the way from Pittsburgh just to critique my classroom presentation. What have you got for me?”
“Red off that table and I’ll show you.” She stepped forward and lifted the black valise.
“Wait a minute,” Nick said. He carefully moved a glass terrarium containing a single black spider, rearing up on its hind legs like a lion.
“What’s that?”
“An Atrax robustus—a Funnel Web Spider. It’s one of the two deadliest spiders on earth. It’s killed thirteen people in Australia, one in less than two hours.”
She stared at him, blinking.
He shrugged. “I just thought you might not want to knock it over.”
“Good idea. Thanks.” Riley looked the table over a little more carefully this time, then set down the valise and began to remove a series of containers: the smaller ones were made of glass, the larger ones plastic; some had screw-on lids, and others had snap-on tops with holes punched in the center. Nick picked up each one and examined it carefully. In the bottom of each glass vial was a pile of paste-white larvae of different sizes and shapes. He carefully pried back the lid from one plastic container and peered inside. In the bottom was a layer of brown-and-white vermiculite; on top of it rested a piece of aluminum foil folded up on the sides and crimped at the top like a little lunch sack. Nick didn’t have to open it; inside would be a small square of damp paper towel, a palm-sized slab of beef liver, and a handful of maggots eagerly scraping and scraping …
“This is very good,” he said. “Who did the collecting?”
“I did.”
“No kidding? Hats off to your fellowship program. You wouldn’t believe some of the garbage I get from coroners and crime-scene investigators: unlabeled specimens, leaking jars, containers full of dead larvae because they had no air holes, completely desiccated specimens … and then they say, ‘Analyze this for us!’”
Nick held one small glass vial up to the light. In the bottom of the ethanol lay a half-dozen plump, white maggots. A neat, handwritten label encompassed the vial, and a second label stuck out of the fluid inside.
“You even double-labeled.” Nick smiled. “Smart girl.”
“And I wrote the labels in pencil so the ethanol doesn’t eradicate the ink.”
“Well, thank you for coming all this way to show me your Diptera collection,” Nick said, handing the vial back to her. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes.” Riley smiled. “Analyze this for us!”
Nick smiled back. “For us? Or for you?”
The smile disappeared from Riley’s face.
“The Allegheny County Coroner’s Office is a big operation,” Nick said. “Forensic entomology isn’t new to your people. Who’s your regular bug man? Who do you use?”
Riley set the vial down with the rest of the containers. “Sometimes Neal Haskell out of central Indiana. Sometimes Steve Bullington from Penn State.”
“I know them both,” Nick nodded. “Good men. So tell me, Dr. Riley, why does a pathology fellow go outside of regular channels to request an entomological evaluation? And why does she drive twenty miles all the way from downtown Pittsburgh just to deliver the specimens herself? Don’t they have UPS at your office?”
Riley said nothing.
“And why do I bet that you’ll be paying me by personal check, and not by a bank draft from Allegheny County?”
“Those are good questions,” Riley said. “Do you need answers before you’ll do my evaluation?”
Nick paused. “Not as long as you have two pieces of identification with your check. So what are you looking for—a postmortem interval?”
“I’m looking for … anomalies.”
“Anomalies—as in, ‘something out of the ordinary.’ I assume you collected these from a dead person? Something was out of the ordinary.”
“I want to know everything an entomological evaluation can tell me. Time of death, place of death, manner of death.”
“All of which can ordinarily be determined by the coroner’s office.”
“Ordinarily.”
Nick studied her intently. “I have so many questions,” he said.
“So do I. Will you help me?”
“Three hundred and fifty dollars,” Nick said. “I’ll need a week. Maybe two.”
“That long?”
“I’m just being reasonable. It’s the new me.”
“Can’t your assistant help out?”
“You mean Sanjay? He can’t make larvae grow any faster. Besides, Sanjay is not my assistant. We went to grad school together at Pen
n State. Now he’s a research biologist at Pitt. He’s helping me with a little research project: We’re doing DNA fingerprints on flies of forensic significance. In their larval form, most flies are impossible to tell apart. The DNA sequences will let us distinguish different species even in their earliest stages of development. Cutting-edge stuff.”
Just then there was a sound from the doorway. Riley turned to see the figure of a short, stout woman in a screaming floral dress, beaming from ear to ear. She was—loud, that’s the only word Riley could think of. Her lipstick was too red, her pearls were too large, and her hair was too high—but she had an altogether warm and inviting manner. The woman cleared her throat a second time.
“Nicky, aren’t you going to …” She gestured to Riley.
Nick said nothing.
“Nicky! Who is this lovely woman? Tell your mother.”
“Mama, I’d like you to meet Dr. Riley McKay. Dr. McKay, the flashing siren standing in the doorway is Mrs. Camilla Polchak, ruler of all Poland—or at least all the Polish people living in Tarentum and Natrona Heights.”
“Mama?” Riley whispered to Nick.
“Four hundred dollars,” Nick whispered back. “Keep it up.”
“A doctor,” Mrs. Polchak beamed. “And not just one doctor, two doctors, in fact! Just look at the both of you!”
“Mama,” Nick said. “Why don’t you just throw rice on us and get it over with? We’ll try to produce a grandchild by Christmas.”
“What are you talking about, grandchild? Did I say grandchild? I just like to have a pretty face to look at sometimes, not just those two big portholes of yours.” She dismissed Nick with a wave of her hand and took Riley by the arm. “Such a pretty face,” she said. “And what do I have to look at around here? Bugs. Flies and spiders and things I don’t want to tell you.”
