Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle

by Tim Downs

  “C’mon,” he said to Jerry. “Help me unload.”

  17

  “Find me some containers,” Nick said. “Forget the drawers—they’re all flooded. Check the cabinets above the counters.”

  “What kind of containers?” Jerry asked.

  “Any kind, the smaller the better—glass, plastic, forget the lids. See if you can find any coffee filters—you might have to go across the hall and see if there’s some kind of break room or something. If there’s a fridge, open it up—bring me any leftovers you find.”

  “There’s no electricity. It’ll all be rotten.”

  “I need some rubber bands too. And hurry back with that flashlight—we’ll need both of them to do this. I’ll meet you back here in ten minutes.”

  While Jerry scrounged for the items in the flooded lab, Nick waded out into the hall. In the doorway he stopped and looked back. The scene was utterly surreal: a medical laboratory half filled with water and a fishing boat floating in the center. Beyond the boat was a window with no glass; outside the window was an endless black lake. Nick shook his head; it was like a still photograph from some bizarre dream.

  Even though there were no lights, the room was not completely dark. There was a faint reflection of moonlight that shimmered on the ceiling and walls. But in the windowless hallway there was no light at all except for the narrow beam from Nick’s flashlight; it was like wading through a cave—or a sewer.

  He found the offices they had passed by in the boat. He pulled out one of the desk drawers and held it up to allow the water to drain out, then dumped its contents onto the desk and found an ink pad. He took a tablet of white paper and two pens, then headed back for the lab again.

  While Jerry stood over him with both flashlights, Nick pulled the long zippers on each of the body bags and folded back the flaps.

  “What are you going to do?” Jerry asked.

  “The same thing DMORT does—find out who they are. Let’s see if we can get prints. We’ll do him first—he should be the easiest.”

  The two bodies appeared very different; one was in a much less advanced stage of decay and was largely intact, except for the emaciating effects of a large maggot mass in the abdomen. Nick started with this one; he carefully turned the left hand palm-down and placed the ink pad under the fingertips. He pressed each of them against the spongy black pad, then transferred the prints one at a time to the white paper. When he finished, he took one of the flashlights from Jerry and examined the prints closely.

  “No good,” he said. “The skin is too wrinkled. Find me a syringe.”

  Jerry rummaged through the cabinets again. “I don’t see any.”

  “The looters probably took them,” Nick said. “There’s a Sharpsafe container on the wall—get me a used one. Watch the needles—they’re contaminated.”

  Jerry broke open the red-and-white container and gingerly picked out an intact syringe.

  “I don’t suppose you noticed any saline,” Nick said.

  Jerry shook his head.

  Nick stuck the syringe into the water at his waist and drew back the plunger; the barrel slowly filled with the dark liquid.

  Jerry grimaced. “You’re using that?”

  “Won’t matter to him; he’s been floating in the stuff.”

  Nick held up the cadaver’s index finger and slid the needle under the skin. He gently pushed the plunger and the wrinkled skin began to plump out again.

  “That should do it,” he said. “Let’s try those prints again.”

  A few minutes later, they had a complete set of prints. Nick added a physical description of the victim: male, Caucasian, about six-foot-one, short brown hair. He checked for obvious identifying marks: He found a gold crown on one upper incisor and a faded tattoo that circumscribed the left arm just above the bicep.

  “Okay, let’s get prints from the other guy—if we still can.”

  The second body was in far worse condition. When Nick lifted the right forearm and tried to twist the hand palm-down, the skin sloughed off like a glove.

  “Oops,” Jerry said.

  “Not a problem. Hold the ink pad, will you?”

  Nick took the rubbery tissue and carefully pulled it over his own gloved hand, then rolled each fingertip over the ink pad and pressed it against the paper, just as he would with his own fingers.

  “That’s nifty,” Jerry said.

  “I always thought so.”

  The physical description of this body was limited to height and gender; the skin was too decayed to even show its original color, let alone tattoos or identifying marks.

  “That’ll have to do,” Nick said. “Now for the bugs—grab some containers.”

  He returned to the first body with his larval forceps and searched through the maggot mass inhabiting the abdominal cavity.

  “Same kind as before?” Jerry asked.

  “Some are, some aren’t. This guy hasn’t been dead as long as the one we found the other day.”

  “How do you know?”

  Nick held up a maggot with his forceps. “This is a hairy maggot blowfly—the same kind we found before. The species is both predacious and cannibalistic—that means they’ll eat anything they can find, including each other. Given enough time, they’ll eliminate all the other species on the body. They’re present here, but not in very large numbers; they haven’t had time to take over yet.”

  Nick dropped the maggot into a plastic container and added several more. “We have to keep these separate,” he said. “They’ll eat the other guys.”

  He held up another maggot and studied it. It had a pale, cream color.

  “That one looks different,” Jerry said. “Not as dark.”

  “It’s a sarcophagid—a flesh fly. You can tell by the spiracles on the posterior end. Unfortunately, there are 327 species of flesh flies in the U.S., and they’re impossible to tell apart while they’re still larvae. We won’t know for sure until we rear them.”

  “Rear them?”

  “Raise them to adults. What did you think we were collecting them for?”

  Jerry shrugged. “I’ve learned not to ask you a lot of questions.”

  Nick dropped the maggot into a second container.

  “There are calliphorids too,” he said. “Those are the blowflies. We’ve probably got green bottles, oriental latrine flies, and secondary screw-worms—we’ll have to rear a cross section and see what we find.”

  By the time he finished he had eight containers, each containing a small collection of wriggling larvae about half an inch in length.

  He looked at Jerry. “Now—did you find a fridge?”

  “Yeah. Man, did that thing stink.”

  “Worse than yours?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Show me what you found,” Nick said.

  Jerry slid a pile of plastic bags and crumpled brown sacks across the counter. Nick began to open the sacks and dump the contents onto the counter; he nodded for Jerry to do the same.

  “Find me some meat,” he said. “Take it off the sandwiches if you have to.”

  He peeled back the translucent blue lid from a square plastic storage container; inside was a slab of meat loaf dotted with bristling tufts of green and white mold.

  “Dinner is served,” he said. “Talk about your meals ready to eat.”

  Jerry sneered at the moldy slab. “That is the grossest thing I’ve seen all day.”

  “Some would find that ironic.” Nick crumbled the meat loaf into smaller pieces and dropped a chunk into each of the containers.

  “They’ll eat that stuff ?”

  Sarcophagid means ‘corpse-eating.’ I don’t think they’ll mind a few “leftovers.”

  Now he took a coffee filter and placed it over the top of each container, securing it in place with a rubber band.

  “What’s that for?” Jerry asked.

  “They have to breathe, just like you do.”

  When the containers were all prepared, Nick turned his at
tention to the second cadaver. He bent over and examined it carefully, moving down the body from head to foot. He found several smaller maggot infestations along the way.

  “He was a refloat, all right,” Nick said.

  “How do you know?”

  “The maggots are all dead. That means the body was on the surface long enough for flies to find it and colonize it, but then the body submerged again. The maggots must have drowned. These are all terrestrial species; they can’t live underwater any more than we can. This man’s been dead for quite a while.”

  “You can tell that just by looking at him,” Jerry said.

  “Yeah. I was hoping we could tell a little more.”

  Nick began to carefully pull back the creases in the remaining clothing and look inside the folds.

  “Bingo,” he said. “That’s what I was looking for.”

  “What is it?”

  “Trichoptera—a caddis fly larva, just like the one we found the other day. Check the body bag—see if you can find any more.”

  “Why the body bag?”

  “Maggots hang on to a body even when it’s moved, but aquatic insects tend to let go the minute they sense motion. If there are any more, we’ll probably find them in the bag.”

  Jerry pointed to a tiny tubular object. “Is this one?”

  Nick looked. “That’s it—find me some more.”

  “It looks sort of like a pecan roll.”

  “Leave it to you to think of food.”

  “What’s all that junk stuck on the outside of it?”

  “Gravel, sand, wood—anything the caddis fly finds on the bottom.”

  “The bottom of what?”

  “The lake, or stream, or pond. See, the female caddis fly lays her eggs on water; the eggs hatch into larvae and sink to the bottom. The larvae make silk—they have a modified salivary gland that produces it. They use the silk to build a protective case around themselves, and they glue on little bits of whatever they can find to act like armor plating. That’s why it looks like a pecan roll—that’s its case.”

  Within minutes they had found a dozen more.

  “How does the larva find the body underwater?” Jerry asked.

  “It doesn’t. It just sinks straight down—or drifts sideways if there’s a current. When it finally hits bottom it just grabs on to whatever happens to be there—including a body. It’s purely random.”

  Nick opened his equipment bag again and took out one of the small glass vials of preservative. He opened it and began to drop the caddis-fly larvae in one by one. “There,” he said. “That should be enough.”

  “Want some containers?” Jerry asked.

  “Wouldn’t do us any good,” Nick said. “They’re already dead. They’re aquatic—they have to be kept in water.”

  “Too bad.”

  “It doesn’t matter—they wouldn’t have told us much anyway. Forensic entomology is based on the life cycles of terrestrial insects—mostly blowflies and flesh flies. We’ve studied hundreds of species; we’ve timed each stage of their development—that’s why we can use them to determine time of death. All we have to know is the species, the local temperature, and the exact time the maggot develops into an adult fly; from there we can count backward and determine when the eggs were laid on the body—which is usually very close to the time of death.”

  “That’s why you put all those maggots in containers.”

  “‘Maggot motels,’ we call them. Once the maggots mature, we’ll know what species they are—and we should be able to calculate the victim’s time of death. The problem is, very few aquatic insects have been studied; only 3 percent of all insect species are aquatic, and some of them have twenty different stages of development. We just don’t know enough about them to use them to determine an accurate postmortem interval.”

  Nick looked around the lab. “Well, I think that’s all we can do for tonight.”

  “For tonight? You’re thinking of coming back here again?”

  “Of course—we have to check on the maggots.”

  “Nick, we can’t keep coming back here.”

  “Why not? This place is perfect: The whole floor is abandoned, all the lights are out—we’ve got the whole place to ourselves. It’s even got a drive-thru window.”

  “What about the bodies?”

  “When we’re sure we’re done with them, we’ll put them back where we found them. Until then, we’ll leave them here. It’s a hospital, isn’t it?”

  “Nick—what’s the point of all this? Suppose you are able to figure out a time of death for that guy—then what? You can’t tell DMORT what you’ve been doing.”

  “I don’t know yet,” Nick said. “All I’m doing is saving forensic evidence before it gets destroyed; I’m not sure what happens next.”

  “And what about the fingerprints? How are we supposed to process them? DMORT sure won’t do it for us.”

  “I’ve thought about that one,” Nick said, “and I think I might know a way.”

  18

  Beth opened her eyes and looked at the clock. It was 3:00 a.m. For the last hour she had lain perfectly still in her cot, hoping that her body might convince her mind to follow—but it was no use. There were nights when her mind just refused to remain shut down, like a trick birthday candle that constantly reignites. Sometime during the night her dreams gave way to conscious thought, like a bubble rising up from a dark pool. Once that happened, she knew that sleep was over for the night—regardless of the clock.

  She sat up in her cot and used her middle fingers to wipe the sleep from the corners of her eyes. She brushed her hair back tight and secured it behind her head with an elastic band—except for the one rebellious strand that always refused to be corralled and hung like a comma over her right eye. She pulled on a pair of powder-blue scrubs, gathered a stack of case files from the floor beside her cot, and tiptoed out of the makeshift dormitory.

  She headed for the cafeteria, which was nothing more than a handful of folding tables and chairs—but at least it was quiet and brightly lit. She took a cup of coffee to cement her decision to forgo any further attempt at sleep and turned her attention to the case file folders.

  From a psychiatrist’s perspective, the psychological problems during a DMORT deployment were fairly predictable and mundane: sleep disorders, stress-related issues, and separation anxieties caused by leaving loved ones on short notice—things that could usually be resolved just by managing medications or lending a listening ear. There were always boundary issues too: the need to help dedicated DMORT employees maintain a healthy distance from the suffering of those they served—to fulfill their duty without taking on their pain. That line was never easy to draw, but it was an essential one if you wanted to keep your sanity. Compassionate people pay a price for caring, and Beth’s job was to make sure the price wasn’t more than any individual could afford to pay.

  Some of the problems weren’t caused by DMORT at all; they were brought to DMORT by the people who volunteered to work there. Those were the most serious problems—and, for Beth, the most interesting problems too.

  She slid the stack of file folders in front of her. There were eight or ten folders in the pile, but she knew that only the top one could hold her attention at three o’clock in the morning. The label read: POLCHAK, DR. NICHOLAS. She opened it and had just begun to read when, as if on cue, Nick walked through the doorway and swung his equipment bag onto an empty table.

  She shut the file folder and looked up. “Well, hello. Are you just getting in?”

  “I needed the overtime,” Nick said. “I’m saving up for a bigger boat.”

  She glanced at her watch.

  Nick poured himself a cup of coffee. “I know what time it is, Mother. I told you not to wait up.”

  “Can you sit down for a minute?”

  “Is that an official request?”

  “It’s a friendly request. Why can’t you take it that way?”

  “Because it doesn’t sound friendly.” He
hesitated, then pulled up a chair across from her and sat down.

  “How are you doing, Nick?”

  “Look—if it’s a friendly request, then let’s have friendly conversation. No psychiatric questions, okay? No compassionate looks, no understanding nods.”

  “Somebody’s in a good mood.”

  “I haven’t had my coffee yet.” He took a sip. “There. I love you.”

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning—”

  “—and only seriously deranged people are still up. So what’s your excuse?”

  “I was about to say, ‘Are you planning to get any sleep?’”

  “There’s not much point—I have to be up at six.”

  “Why did you bother to come back?”

  “Three blessed hours of air-conditioning—and the pleasure of your company.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “I like air-conditioning.”

  “There was a time when you did enjoy my company—remember?”

  Nick didn’t reply.

  “I thought you wanted friendly conversation.”

  “Men and women have different concepts of ‘friendly.’ I was hoping for man-friendly.”

  “As in cold, detached, and superficial.”

  “There you go.”

  “I liked that boy you brought in the other night. He was very bright.”

  “Because he thought you were pretty?”

  “He seems to think highly of you. When I asked him to describe his father, he said, ‘He’s like Nick.’ That’s quite a compliment.”

  “His father could be in prison.”

  “Stop deflecting everything with humor. Accept the compliment.”

  “J.T.’s a good kid. Have you found out anything from the Department of Social Services?”

  “I think they’ve shut down along with the rest of the city. I called and left a message; I’m not sure when I’ll hear back.”

  “Let me know, will you? I told the kid I’d help him.”

  She paused. “Where is he now?”

  “I took him to an evacuation center. Why?”

  “I thought you might still have him with you; I thought you might try to sneak him into your trailer. It’s the sort of thing you’d do.”