Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop: 2 Bugman Novels in 1

by Tim Downs

  “In the back of an ambulance? What were you thinking?”

  Three more ER staff came alongside now, and the paramedic and EMT passed off the stretcher like a baton in a relay race.

  “He’s got multiple stab wounds to the chest,” Kaplan announced to the group. “He was in arrhythmia at the scene and went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. I opened him up and checked for cardiac wounds—the vessels were all intact, but I sutured one atrial laceration. I displaced the heart and searched for posterior wounds—there were none. And I’ve been massaging this thing for ten minutes now, and my hands are cramping—somebody want to take over for me here?”

  Kaplan stepped away as the stretcher disappeared into the OR. He stepped to a waste receptacle and began to strip off his dripping gloves.

  “Hey, Rosa,” he called to a passing nurse. “You’re looking good tonight. When are you going driving with me?”

  “When I feel like putting a gun to my head,” the nurse said without turning.

  He was at the sink, scrubbing, when the paramedic and both EMTs approached.

  “I just want to say one thing,” the paramedic growled. “You didn’t have to do that. You can explain it away to the family, maybe even to your doctor friends, but you know and I know. We were two minutes away from a fully equipped ER. You did it the hard way, and you did it just for the doing.” The paramedic shook his head in disgust. “Don’t ever ride on my rig again.”

  Kaplan looked at him without expression, then turned to the EMT at his side. “How did it drive?”

  The EMT dropped the keys on the floor. All three men turned and left.

  Kaplan stepped into the waiting area. In the center of the room, two women stood embracing and weeping. The older woman was fiftyish, heavy and thick-limbed, her eyes bloated and red. Kaplan’s eyes moved quickly to the daughter, who looked twenty, maybe twenty-five, with the face and body her mother might have had a very long time ago. Both women looked up as he entered.

  “I’m Dr. Kaplan,” he said solemnly. “I was the surgeon in charge tonight. I took responsibility for your—” Husband? Brother? Jack never even got a name. No matter.

  “It’s lucky I happened along when I did. I just want you to know, I did everything I could, and he’s in the best of hands now.”

  At this, both women began to weep openly. The mother turned to Kaplan with a look of infinite gratitude, her arms outstretched. Kaplan brushed past her and took the younger woman in his arms, comforting her as best he could.

  There was a beeping sound at his belt. He glanced down at the luminous green LCD. It read, ZOHAR: MANDATORY: THURSDAY 2300: FOX CHAPEL YACHT CLUB.

  The Allegheny River cuts a three-hundred-mile channel from New York state across western Pennsylvania to the city of Pittsburgh. The Allegheny’s riverbed is solid rock, smoothed by some ancient glacier, and the water that flows across its siltless bottom is a clear greenish blue. To the south, the Monongahela River wallows its way toward Pittsburgh through a hundred and twenty-five miles of mud and clay, pumping its red brown water through the old Steel Valley that once belched out so much smoke and soot that the streetlights had to be turned on at noon. Both rivers were once choked with debris and industrial effluent; now both are clean again, lined with marinas and private quays dotted with weekend pleasure boats. The two rivers join to form the mighty Ohio at a place simply known as the Point, at the tip of downtown Pittsburgh.

  Nick Polchak stood with his toes overhanging the concrete ledge, staring into the churning waters. To his right the water flowed clear green; to his left, muddy brown; straight ahead, the two colors swirled together in a watery palette and disappeared into the distance. The Point is one of the most dangerous places to swim in all of Pittsburgh; the two rivers collide like angry storm fronts to spawn tornadolike undercurrents—but the Point is also the most tempting place to swim in all of Pittsburgh, and each year a handful of the brave and the foolish surrender to temptation at the cost of their lives.

  “Thinking of jumping in?” a voice said behind him.

  “Every time I come here,” Nick replied.

  Riley McKay’s hair was straight and whitish blond, cut off above the shoulders and pulled back from her face with a thin, tortoiseshell band. Nick cocked his head and took her measure, comparing this new image with the one burned into his memory just a week and a half ago. Her cheekbones were high and her skin was fair—the Scots blood in her, Nick thought. Her shoulders were broad, well-boned, and her lean arms hung down from them like stockings from a coat hanger. Her fingertips broke just below midthigh, a bit longer than usual; her hands were long and slender, and her fingernails were cut to the quick like a concert pianist—no, like a forensic pathologist.

  She wore a straight, knee-length skirt with a back vent. Nick looked at her legs; they were tight and sinewy. When she shifted her weight from side to side, he could see the cut between the gastrocnemius and the soleus. Her ankles were slightly thicker than normal—a little swollen, Nick thought—and on her feet she wore a pair of bright white Nike cross-trainers. Her hair, her dress, even her simple jewelry—everything about her was less a matter of style than expedience. Riley McKay was a woman with somewhere to go and something to do.

  Nick’s eyes returned to her face. A spray of freckles lay across the bridge of her nose, the product of countless unguarded hours in the sun, and her eyes—Nick stopped abruptly. Her eyes were two distinctly different colors: one brown and one green.

  “Like them?” Riley smiled. “My dad used to call me Three Rivers.” She leaned forward and peered at Nick’s enormous glasses. “What did your dad call you?”

  “Blind,” Nick said.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  Nick shrugged and handed her a manila envelope. Riley turned and stepped to the edge of the great round basin that occupies the center of the triangular Point. She raised one hand in the air, testing for overspray from the fountain, then sat down. Nick took a seat beside her.

  She opened the envelope and removed the brief report. The title read, “Forensic Entomology Investigation: Report of Diagnostic Laboratory Examination.” Underneath, the traditional demographic information—name, sex, age, case number—was all left blank. Under “Requesting Agency,” Nick had written, “Personal Request.”

  She flipped through the few sheets of paper. “You can sit here and watch me read this,” she said, “or you can tell me what it says. Do you have a postmortem interval for me?”

  “No.”

  “Did you find any indicators regarding the cause of death?”

  “No.”

  Riley looked at him. “Dr. Polchak, is this a social call?”

  “I can’t give you a reliable PMI until I rear the last of the blowflies to maturity. That could take another two weeks. As to cause of death, you’ve given me very little to work with. I can do a toxicology screening—but then again, so can you. You’re from the coroner’s office, aren’t you?”

  “Then why did you call me?”

  “As I recall, you said you were looking for anomalies. I could have waited another two weeks to give you my final report, but I thought you might want to hear what I’ve found so far. After all, a woman who goes outside of regular channels might also be a woman in a hurry.”

  “You found something?”

  “Yes. But if you’d rather wait for the final report …”

  Riley waited, but Nick said nothing more.

  She frowned. “Did anyone ever tell you you can be really annoying?”

  Nick nodded. “Dad called me that too. I was just wondering: Why didn’t we meet at your office today? It’s just five blocks away, right up Fourth Street there. You’ve got reserved parking; you’ve got air conditioning. It’s so hot in Pittsburgh this time of year, don’t you think? Why meet outside? Why in such a public place? Why sit here by a fountain, where it’s so hard to hear?”

  “You have a lot of questions,” Riley said.

  “So do you—time of death, place of death, cause
of death. Hey, I’ve got an idea: I’ll answer one of your questions, and you answer one of mine.”

  “I’m paying you to answer my question,” Riley glared.

  “You’re right, that’s hardly fair. I know—how about a discount? I tell you what, I’ll knock my fee down to two hundred dollars. That’s got to help—how much does a pathology fellow make? And after all, this is a personal expense—”

  “One question,” Riley said. “But you answer mine first—and it better be a two-hundred-dollar answer.”

  Nick smiled. “You told me that the man’s body was discovered in Butler County—that’s a good twenty-five miles from metropolitan Pittsburgh.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He didn’t die there.”

  Riley’s eyes widened.

  “Is that worth two hundred dollars?”

  “That depends,” she said. “Keep going.”

  “The maggots you collected represent four different species of blowfly. You were lucky. All four can be distinguished in their larval form—I didn’t have to wait for them to mature. The first was Phaenicia coeruleiviridis—a green bottle fly. It’s a common carrion fly, one of the first to arrive after death. The second species was Phormia regina, the black blowfly. They usually arrive twelve to twenty-four hours after death. Both species are very common, very predictable, exactly what you’d expect to find in a rural setting.”

  “And the other two?”

  “Phaenicia sericata is another type of green bottle fly. It’s sort of the city cousin of Phaenicia coeruleiviridis. It’s not unusual to find a few in a rural setting—maybe 5 percent of the specimens—but sericata made up half of the maggots you collected. You’re sure you took a representative sampling of all the maggots that were present? You didn’t give preference to any particular size or shape?”

  “I was careful to include the largest specimens,” Riley said, “but I also included a sampling of everything I saw, all sizes and shapes. That’s the way they taught us.”

  Nick nodded. “The clincher was Calliphora vicina, the blue bottle fly. Blue bottles like shady places and urban habitats. Find a body in a basement, and you’ll find blue bottles. The funny thing is, they make up 10 percent of your specimens. The presence of sericata in such high numbers might have been a fluke—I doubt it, but it’s at least possible—but when you add the presence of blue bottles, there’s no other explanation. Your boy spent some time in the city—some time after death. What was the cause of death listed on the autopsy report?”

  “Is that your one question?” Riley asked.

  “C’mon, that’s hardly worth two hundred bucks. It’s just a simple question.”

  “AMI—acute myocardial infarction,” Riley said. “He was only thirty-five.”

  “Statistically unusual, but not unheard of,” Nick said. “Here’s the real problem: either the victim perished in an urban area and was later moved to the country, or he died in the country and was transported to the city and back again.”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  “Beats me.” Nick shrugged. “That’s the sort of thing the coroner’s office investigates, isn’t it? One thing is for sure: someone else was involved in the circumstances surrounding this man’s death, and that seriously calls into question the diagnosis of ‘death by natural causes.’ I’d take another look at that AMI if I were you.”

  Riley said nothing. The wind shifted slightly, and mist from the fountain drifted down on them like a descending cloud.

  “And now for my question,” Nick said brightly. “The category is ‘Nagging Suspicions’ for two hundred dollars, and the question is: Why don’t you trust your supervising pathologist?”

  Riley turned. “I never said I didn’t trust—”

  “You’re a pathology fellow,” he said. “That makes you low man on the totem pole at the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office. These questions you’re asking, they’re very good questions—the kind of questions you should be asking the pathologist in charge of your fellowship program. But for some reason, you don’t want to ask your senior pathologist. You don’t want him to know you’re asking these questions at all, do you? So you collect your own evidence—entomological evidence, the kind no one will miss. Very shrewd, Dr. McKay. Then you find your very own bug man, and you offer to pay him out of your own pocket. It looks to me like you want answers, but for some reason you can’t find them in your own office. For two hundred dollars, my question is: Why not?”

  Riley paused.

  “Look,” Nick said. “You went outside of normal channels to get an expert opinion. OK, here I am. I’m an outsider. I don’t know anyone at the coroner’s office, they don’t know me, and I report only to you. If you can’t talk to me, who else can you talk to?”

  Riley looked at Nick’s eyes, as if hoping to take some reading on the soul behind those enormous lenses.

  “It started about three months ago,” she began. “I was barely into my fellowship program. A man passed away at Allegheny General, a head trauma victim. When the call came in, the pathologist on rotation was my supervisor, Dr. Nathan Lassiter. He ordered an autopsy. That was strange enough, since it was a physician-attended death. But then he denied me access to the autopsy—he gave me some nonsense about its utter simplicity having ‘no instructive value.’ He practically shut the door in my face.”

  “Is this your first experience with arrogant authority figures?” Nick said. “Welcome to my world.”

  “The thing is, the victim was carrying a valid organ donor card, and a request was made for his kidneys while he was still at Allegheny General—but Lassiter refused to release the organs for transplant. That happens from time to time: a pathologist can refuse to release organs for transplant when she thinks removal of the organ could destroy forensic evidence. But denying a kidney over a head trauma?”

  “And when you asked him about it, he said …”

  “That I was still in my residency, that I had a lot to learn. That some of these judgments require years of experience, et cetera, et cetera. It was all bluster and bravado. So I went over his head; I appealed to the coroner himself.”

  “I’ll bet that went over big.”

  “My supervisor threw a fit. He started throwing around terms like lack of respect, professional courtesy, and a track record of incontestable judgment—that was my favorite. What was the coroner supposed to do, side with a wet-behind-the-ears resident over one of his senior pathologists? He backed his homeboy, of course, and I had to eat crow. It’s been a steady diet ever since.”

  “There are other means of appeal,” Nick said.

  “Question the coroner’s judgment?” Riley groaned. “Now there’s a career move for you. Look, Nick, the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office is one of the top five in the nation. Two of our senior pathologists are former fellows themselves, and—”

  “And when you finish your fellowship, you’re hoping to land a job there. I don’t blame you. It would be nice, you being from Pittsburgh and all.”

  “How did you know—”

  “You said, ‘Red off that table,’ remember? That’s Pittsburgh talking.”

  “Dr. Lassiter has shut me out of a couple of autopsies,” Riley said, “and he keeps pushing me out of the office, sending me out on errands or to do those community educational programs.”

  “You’ll learn to love those,” Nick said. “I know I did.”

  “It was a mistake to go over Lassiter’s head. At least, I think it was a mistake. When he didn’t back down at all—not even an inch—that’s when it hit me that either he’s hiding something, or he’s just a sexist, egotistical, scum-sucking pig.”

  “Which is a very real option,” Nick said. “Trust me, I know that species.”

  “I don’t know what it is, but there’s just something about him …”

  “He smells funny.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know how blowflies are attracted to a body? The decomposing tissues emit a kind of chemica
l indicator—no one knows exactly what it is. The blowflies lay eggs, the eggs become larvae, the larvae pupate and produce a new generation of flies. But the next generation will not be attracted to the same body. Do you know why? Because the tissues have been breaking down and drying out, and now they’re emitting a different indicator. Blowflies find bodies because of the smell—something only they can detect—and it only lasts for a short time.”

  “You’re saying that I should act quickly? Or that I remind you of a blowfly?”

  “I’m saying that smells are reliable indicators of decay. And yes, Dr. McKay, you do remind me of a blowfly; after all, aren’t you both forensic investigators in your own way? If Dr. Lassiter smells funny to you, I’d go with your instincts—the rest of the animal world does.”

  Nick watched Riley slide the report back into the manila envelope, then stare off toward the confluence of the two rivers. He looked into her eyes, one green and one brown, and he wondered what sort of turbulence lay behind them.

  “I have another question,” Nick said.

  “The deal was for one.”

  “I’m willing to pay for it. The category is ‘Hidden Motives’ for a hundred dollars. The question is: Why does this bother you so much? What’s in it for you? What do you care if an arrogant pathologist makes a bad call?”

  Riley paused for a long time. “I’m not ready to answer that question,” she said at last. “I don’t know you that well.”

  “That’s a fair answer,” Nick said, “but hardly worth a hundred bucks. How about one more try? My final category is ‘Occupational Hazards’ for a hundred, and the question is: How far are you willing to go with this?”

  “I don’t know,” Riley said. “I guess it depends on what I find.”

  “Then you plan to go on looking?”

  “Would you?”

  “I once dissected an undergraduate student just to get out of teaching,” Nick said. “I’m not the best person to ask about boundaries.”

  “I’m not very good at knowing when to quit either,” Riley said. “But what am I supposed to do next? So I’ve got an anomaly. Am I supposed to run back to the coroner’s office and start blowing the whistle again? That would finish me.”