Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop: 2 Bugman Novels in 1

by Tim Downs

  “OK,” she said abruptly. “Gotta go.” She stepped under his arm and headed directly for the door, exiting without looking back. She stopped briefly at her office, hung up her lab coat, and collected her purse. Then she hurried out of the building, looking for a suitable place to scream.

  There was a steady, insistent rapping on the metal fire door that opened onto the parking lot at the Allegheny County Coroner’s Office. Riley hurried to the corner of the autopsy room and pushed it open. There stood an expressionless Nick Polchak, a canvas backpack slung over one shoulder.

  “Nick, what took you so long? I called you thirty minutes ago!”

  “I live thirty minutes away,” Nick said.

  “You said you were going to be ‘on call.’ ”

  “You mean just sitting around day after day, waiting for you to call? And they say men are demanding.”

  She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside.

  “Where is everybody?” Nick said. “The place is dead—no pun intended.”

  “It was a quiet night—there were no calls coming in—so I gave them some money and sent them all out for pizza and beer.”

  “You seem to personally fund a lot of interesting ventures. Remind me to tell you about a certain grant proposal.”

  “Nick, they left twenty minutes ago. They could be back any moment now.”

  “Then we’d better get busy. What have you got?”

  “We had a body come in this morning. It was a gunshot wound to the rear of the head. He was apparently changing his tire, and they found him slumped over against his car—he picked a bad place to get a flat. Nothing was taken from the victim or his car; it looks like a drive-by shooting, possibly gang related.”

  “And the autopsy? I assume it was Lassiter’s rotation.”

  She nodded. “I offered to assist, as always—this time he sent me to Pitt to teach medical students how to hold a pen. I reviewed the police report just before I called you. Estimated time of death was yesterday, around dusk. They talked to the victim’s wife—he left home at exactly seven p.m. He was due at a poker game by seven thirty, but he never showed up. Lassiter did the autopsy late this morning.”

  “And?”

  “The procedure is to issue a death certificate immediately after the autopsy, but all it indicates is the primary cause of death. The details of Lassiter’s autopsy report won’t come out for a week or two—but I talked to one of his autopsy techs. He said the cause of death was a single bullet through the occipital bone. There was an entry wound, but no exit—it was a small-caliber weapon. The size and shape of the wound suggest a short-to-intermediate firing distance, and it was straight-on—just what you’d expect from a drive-by.”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  “Nothing the tech could see—nothing he was allowed to see. The only way we’ll know for sure is to check for ourselves—that is, if you’re still willing to help.”

  “What can I do?”

  “I need a second pair of eyes. We can’t reopen the body—we can’t even use the autopsy room. We can’t send any tissue samples to the histology lab, and we can’t draw any fluids for a toxicology screen. All we can do is work from the outside. I can check for contusions, abrasions, additional wounds of any kind—I need you to look for evidence of insect activity. I’m looking for anything, Nick—anything that doesn’t look consistent with a drive-by shooting. But whatever we do, we’ve got to do it fast.”

  The cooler door opened with a soft click, and a wall of icy air greeted them. The cooler was a single large room, long and deep, with a series of utility shelves and wire-rimmed, circular fans lining the far end. The walls looked like panels of Reynolds Wrap imprinted with poultry wire, a dull silver gray, and three stark incandescent bulbs dotted the midline of the ceiling. Packed in the center of the room were a half-dozen aging gurneys with white Formica tops and large, narrow wheels. Each one supported a human cadaver, sealed in a glossy blue body bag with a long black zipper directly down the center.

  Riley pulled the door shut behind them and wheeled a single gurney into a small, open area.

  “We have to do our looking in here,” Riley said. “Sorry it’s a bit chilly.”

  “My mom has no air conditioning,” Nick said. “This is heaven.” He pulled the zipper all the way to the feet and began to tuck the vinyl back away from the torso.

  Riley started with the soles of the feet and worked her way up, searching for any telltale mark or scratch that might reveal a struggle, an antemortem wound, or a posthumous relocation of the body. Nick began at the opposite end, checking the eyes, ears, and nasal passages for infestation. He pried open the lower jaw and peered into the mouth with a penlight.

  “This is interesting,” Nick said.

  “What?”

  “There are eggs in the back of the mouth; blowflies go for the natural orifices first, and they often oviposit well back in the passageway. You said the time of death was after seven o’clock, around dusk? Blowflies usually knock off after dark, when the temperatures begin to fall. That would put the time of death as close to seven as possible. Looks like these ladies just got in under the wire.”

  “Hurry, Nick,” Riley said. “We can debrief later.”

  Riley worked her way up toward the neck and cranial area, while Nick headed for the lower orifices; they stumbled into one another at the center of the body. When they bumped against the gurney, a tiny, paste-white object dropped into the crease at the bottom of the body bag.

  “Now that is interesting,” Nick said, smoothing the crease and lifting the edge of the body bag closer to his face.

  “Do you need a magnifier?”

  Nick tapped his glasses. “Got one—it’s one of the perks.” Under the powerful lenses, a single, barely moving larva came into focus.

  “It’s a first-instar maggot,” he said, “the earliest stage of larval development. There are two possibilities: Either the temperatures remained warm enough last night to allow a blowfly egg to hatch, or it’s a sarcophagid—a flesh fly. Blowflies lay eggs; flesh flies give live birth. They sort of squirt the maggots out, sometimes without even landing on the body. The big question for us is: where did it come from?”

  “You already found eggs in the oral cavity.”

  “Yes—deep in the oral cavity. Flesh-eating flies are attracted to openings in the body—usually the natural orifices first, because that’s where the gases are released that are the by-product of decomposition. But there are no orifices in the middle of the body, and yet we seem to have dislodged this little guy from somewhere.”

  Nick stooped down and grasped the thorax with both hands, hooking his thumbs under the lower back, rolling the body slightly onto its left side. On the back, just below the rib cage, was a long, curving wound that was roughly sutured shut. In the center of the wound, wedged tightly between the lips of flesh, were two more tiny maggots.

  “Bingo,” Nick said.

  Just then they heard the click of the cooler door. Nick released the body, which settled thickly onto its back again. Riley lunged for the zipper, tugging it shut. She gave the gurney a shove with her hip, sending it rolling into the others. The cooler door began to swing open.

  Nick turned to Riley, took her roughly in his arms, and kissed her.

  Riley was so astonished that for the first instant she stood with her eyes bulging, her arms thrust down and back like a gymnast finishing a dismount, as rigid as one of the cadavers around her. Then, just as suddenly, she realized what was taking place and understood her part in it. She swung her left arm up around Nick’s neck, closed her eyes, and kissed him back hard.

  She heard a kind of snort from the doorway behind her, and then a giggling sound from out in the hall. “Sorry,” a voice said. “Bad timing.”

  She turned to face them. Two deputy coroners and the dispatcher stood in the doorway holding a white cardboard box.

  “We brought you back some pizza,” one of them said. “Guess we should have brought
extra.” There was a smothered laugh and a trading of elbows.

  “You two better take it easy,” said another. “We can’t have the stiffs thawing out in here.”

  Riley’s face felt flushed and hot—something she hadn’t experienced in a long, long time. She felt like a schoolgirl who had been caught behind the lockers with her boyfriend. She despised their adolescent snickering, and even more her temporary loss of hard-earned status—but there was nothing to do now but play her part out to the end.

  “We’ll be through here in a minute,” she said.

  “Doesn’t look like it to me,” someone whispered.

  “Do you mind? Close the door on your way out.”

  The door closed firmly, abruptly cutting off the sound of rising laughter.

  Riley glanced at Nick, peeled off her glove, and wiped her index finger across her lips.

  “Well,” Nick said. “I’d say this was very productive time.”

  Riley stepped through her apartment door, pausing to wrestle her keys from the deadbolt. Nick stepped into the doorway behind her and stopped, his eyes taking in the room in broad strokes.

  “Nice place,” he said. “It’s a little Spartan.”

  “That’s because I don’t live with my mother.”

  “Ouch.”

  As Nick stepped into the room, he shoved his hands deep into his pockets, like a little boy cautioned not to break anything. He stood in the center of the room, turning and looking.

  “You almost lost me on the way over here,” he said. “You drive pretty fast. Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “I couldn’t lose sight of you,” Riley said. “There was a big blue cloud of smoke behind you. What in the world are you driving?”

  “A car,” he said.

  “What kind of car?”

  Nick frowned. “I really don’t know.”

  Riley flopped onto the sofa and folded her legs underneath her. She straightened stiffly and grimaced, massaging her lower back with her thumbs.

  “Back trouble?” Nick said, taking a seat across from her.

  “Too many hours on my feet,” she said. “What about that dorsal wound? I barely got a look at it.”

  “Very strange. You said Lassiter listed a gunshot wound as the primary cause of death. On the autopsy tape, there was no mention of any other major wounds?”

  “None at all.”

  “Would a pathologist neglect to mention a wound just because he thought it had nothing to do with the cause of death?”

  “Of course not. For a pathologist, the issue isn’t simply the cause of death, but all the circumstances surrounding death. The very presence of a secondary wound makes it important. It would take the world’s worst pathologist to make that kind of omission.”

  “Do you know what they call the guy who graduates last in his class in medical school? Doctor.”

  Riley shook her head. “I don’t suspect Dr. Lassiter of incompetence.”

  Nick leaned forward. “What do you suspect him of?”

  Riley said nothing.

  “I know,” Nick said. “You’re ‘not ready to answer that question.’ ”

  She smiled slightly.

  “There are three things that are significant about that wound,” Nick said. “First of all, it was more of an incision than a wound—the edges of the tissue were too smooth to have been caused by any street weapon. Second, the wound was sutured closed—not surgically, like in a hospital, but the way your people do after an autopsy—just enough to hold it shut. Finally—and most important of all—Dr. Lassiter didn’t make that incision.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because there were larvae in the wound—we dislodged one of them, remember? I found two more still intact. If Dr. Lassiter made the incision during the autopsy, there would be no maggots present.”

  “Could the maggots have moved there from some other part of the body?”

  “Not a chance. The only other infestation was still in the egg stage, and even if there were other larvae, maggots stay very close to where they’re deposited—they don’t go wandering around the body.”

  “Then the incision must have been made earlier—before our office picked up the body—and before dark, because you said flies cease activity at night. But, Nick, that pushes the incision all the way back to the time of death.”

  Nick nodded.

  “Could it have been made even earlier? Say, the day before?”

  “It’s possible, but highly unlikely. For the wound to be infested, it had to be exposed. Don’t forget, when flies approach a body they have a choice of egg-laying locations. All they need is warm, dark, and moist—that’s why they like the mouth so much. But the only maggots on this body were on a wound near the center of the back. At some time after death, that wound was as open and available as the eyes, ears, or mouth.”

  “Then I have some questions,” Riley said. “What role did this wound play in the overall death scenario? Why would anyone bother to suture a wound on a dead man? And most of all, why would Dr. Lassiter choose to overlook it?”

  “Good questions,” Nick said.

  Riley slumped back against the sofa. “Then we’re right back where we started from—we’ve got a bunch of questions and no answers.”

  “We’ve got a different set of questions,” Nick said. “Now you have a second anomaly—an actual, physical anomaly—and now it looks much more certain that Lassiter’s apparent negligence is intentional. I call that progress.”

  “So what do we do next?”

  “It’s a question of access. We can’t go back to the crime scene, and we can’t re-examine the body, so we go with Lassiter. Let’s see what we can dig up about his possible motives.”

  “And the way we do that is?”

  “I’ve got a couple of ideas.”

  Riley shook her head. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  Neither one said anything for a minute.

  “You kissed me,” Riley said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “In the cooler. You kissed me.”

  “Are you just noticing this now? I’ve got to work on my technique.”

  Riley squinted at him. “The way I see it, Nick, there are only two options: either you’re incredibly quick and able to think on your feet, or you’re a big, fat coward.”

  Nick stared at the ceiling for several seconds, then slowly began to nod his head. “Yes,” he said, “those would be the options.”

  Nathan Lassiter stepped out his front door and tiptoed barefoot down the herringbone brick sidewalk that led to his driveway and the morning PostGazette. He wore a fading Penn T-shirt tucked into the powder blue surgical scrubs he always used as pajamas. The shirt did nothing to conceal his sizable paunch. His shoulders were narrowing and rounded, and his once-prized pecs—no longer able to be sustained by a dozen monthly bench presses—were fast becoming nothing but nipples. He was unshaven, uncombed, and thanks to Dr. Atkins, his breath reeked of ketones.

  He stopped abruptly. In the center of his driveway was a bright orange pickup truck with a generic black insect on top, smiling and doffing its hat to passersby. The truck was empty, and the windows were rolled down. Lassiter looked around and noticed that the gate to his backyard hung open.

  Halfway down the side of the house, Nick Polchak knelt beside the open door to the crawlspace that ran underneath the house. He wore blue coveralls with an embroidered logo representing a company called “Bug Off,” and he was busy making notations on a silver metal clip box.

  “Hey, you,” Lassiter said, picking his way across the dewy grass. “What do you mean by just walking in here and—”

  “You want the damage report?” Nick said. “You paid for it.”

  “What? I didn’t pay for anything.”

  “Are you Nathan Lassiter? You got a five-year service contract with our company.” Nick waved the paperwork in the air and then tossed it facedown on the grass. “Once a year we check under the house for termites, wh
ole house wood bores, the whole shebang.”

  “I’ve never seen you here before.”

  Nick shrugged. “You never had a problem before. You think we’d knock on your door just to say, ‘Everything’s peachy’? If you got no problem, we’re invisible—just like your termites.”

  “I never paid for any service contract.”

  “Is there a Mrs. Lassiter?”

  Lassiter closed his eyes.

  “Well, there you go,” Nick said. “A smart woman, Mrs. Lassiter.”

  Lassiter glared at him. “What’s this about termites?”

  “Not just termites. You got carpenter ants—those are really tough to get rid of. I found powderpost beetles—with beetles you got to kill the eggs too, ’cause baby beetles can raise themselves, not like kids these days, huh, Nate? And then you got brown recluse spiders—I never seen so many of ’em. You ever seen someone bit by a brown recluse? I heard about a guy up in Blawnox, he crawled under to check his furnace, took a bite right here on his thumb. They say it looked like a gunshot wound, the whole hand practically rotted away—”

  “Look, do I really need to deal with this right now?”

  “Not if you don’t mind your house being eaten out from under you. Hey, you got a floor joist down there that looks like a twenty-foot loofah.”

  Lassiter muttered a colorful phrase to no one in particular. Nick watched him. His toes were hanging over the edge; all he needed was one more push.

  “If it makes you feel any better, you already paid for it.”

  “What? When?”

  “It’s part of your service contract. You know how it works, sort of like a homeowner’s warranty. You pay the cash up front; we cover the service if you need it. Some people win, some people lose—you’re about to win big time.”

  “OK then,” Lassiter shrugged. “Go ahead and spray.”

  Nick threw back his head and let out a laugh.