Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle

by Tim Downs

  “That isn’t my problem. I didn’t ask you to come.”

  “Yes, you’ve made that clear.”

  The dogs returned now, panting like the bellows of a furnace. The witch turned without a word and started back into the woods with the four dogs accompanying her.

  “I’m looking for a cadaver dog,” Nick called after her.

  She didn’t reply.

  “I wish you’d let me explain.”

  She had almost disappeared into the shadows again.

  “Hey! Hold on a minute!”

  She turned and looked at him.

  “I feel a little cheated. Aren’t you going to put a curse on me too?”

  “If you wish,” she said, and once again made a slashing X across her chest, followed by a mystical flourish of fingers. “Satisfied?”

  “What does it mean? I’m not very good at interpreting curses.”

  She held up one finger.

  Nick nodded. “Okay—that one I understand.”

  6

  “Morning, Deputy,” Nick said, ducking under the yellow barrier tape.

  “Hi there, Nick. Sleep all right?”

  “It was a short night but an interesting one.”

  “Endor’s a nice little town.”

  “Yeah, there’s no end to the fun. I see several cars in the parking lot this morning—who’s here?”

  “Your people, mostly. A whole crew showed up first thing this morning.”

  “Good. What about Marge and Bosco?”

  “Yep—they’re here too.”

  “Are they having better luck?”

  “Can’t say. They been here since the crack of dawn, though. I sure hope they do better than yesterday.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Nick took his equipment box and headed for the graveyard. When he crossed the small rise he saw a long canvas tent set up at the foot of the four open graves, with the tent flaps pulled back and tied off at the poles. Black power cords ran along the ground like licorice whips, connected to a gas-powered generator a safe distance away. The tent was lined with folding tables covered with digging tools and forensic equipment, but no one seemed to be using them—and Nick knew why. By now he had hoped to find half a dozen forensic technicians scattered over the search area busy at work, but instead he found half a dozen forensic technicians leaning against the tables in the shade of the tent, staring stone-faced at a woman and a dog darting back and forth across an empty field.

  “This is ridiculous,” Nick groaned. His instinct was to head directly for Marge and Bosco the Wonder Dog to ask if the temperature wasn’t quite cool enough for them or if Bosco might need anything else—like a nose transplant. But Nick knew that would only slow things down even more, so he headed instead for the tech tent, where he found a familiar face.

  “Hey, Kegan—how’s it going?”

  “Nick. Nice to see you again.”

  “How’s Charlottesville?”

  “Beautiful, as always. How’s NC State?”

  “Raleigh, as always. So you’re the forensic anthropologist—I was hoping they’d grab you since you’re just down the road.”

  Kegan Alexander was a petite woman, no more than five feet in height, with smooth, fair skin and eyes that were too large for her face, giving her a kind of elfish appearance. She was an endurance runner—a triathlete—and there wasn’t an extra ounce of fat anywhere on her body. Mostly bone, Nick thought, and it seemed somehow appropriate for a woman who spent her time reassembling skeletons and uncovering their secrets. Her hair was brown and straight, cut off just above the shoulders and always pulled back behind her ears, and on the job she always wore a white painter’s cap. Nick had never asked her why; he assumed it was because of all the brushing anthropologists tend to do. Kegan was a professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia, just an hour and a half to the south. Nick had worked with her at least twice before, and he wasn’t surprised to see her here; she was not only good at what she did, she was from Virginia—and knowledge of the local soil is crucial to dating human remains.

  Kegan squinted at the trainer and her dog. “I can’t figure out what she’s doing out there.”

  “Neither can she.”

  “She does this little skipping thing. Watch, she’ll do it again. See, she calls the dog over, and then she hands it some kind of treat. Now she’ll send it off again, and when she does—there! Did you see it? She sort of skips along beside the dog for a few steps—like those people at the dog shows do when they run around in circles with the dogs.”

  “This isn’t a dog show,” Nick said.

  “It is right now.” Kegan pointed to her feet; Nick looked under the table and saw a technician curled up taking a nap.

  “What time did you guys get here?” Nick asked.

  “Seven, seven thirty—she was already here.”

  “She ran you off ?”

  “After about thirty minutes. She said we were a ‘distracting scent.’”

  “That’s what she told me yesterday.”

  “I can understand it with you—me, I bathe.”

  “Did you get a chance to look at anything?”

  “I got a quick look at the first grave.”

  “And?”

  “The skeleton’s in pretty bad shape—somebody stomped all over it. The victim was a male, judging by the head of the femur and the coarseness of the eyebrow ridge. I couldn’t measure the skull—it was smashed flat—but I found the external occipital protuberance, the place where the neck muscles attach. It was large with heavy muscle markings— another male characteristic.”

  “What about age?”

  “The wisdom teeth are fully formed, so it’s definitely an adult. I found a piece of the cranial vault intact; the sutures are mostly fused but still clearly visible—that puts him in his thirties or forties. I’m not sure about his height yet—I’ll know more when I can pull the femur and put it on an osteometric board—but I took a quick measurement. I’d guess he was about six foot, maybe a little less—but that’s just a guess.”

  “Race?”

  “The nasal opening is narrow and there’s a horizontal dam at the base—plus the tops of the molars are smooth. Those are characteristics of a Caucasoid skull.”

  “Any chance of getting an ID from the teeth?”

  “It’s possible, but like I said, the skull was crushed flat. That means we’ve lost the tooth alignment and jaw structure. We’ve got the individual teeth, but it’ll take time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. We’ll need an odontologist for that—and even then we might have a problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Time. If this skeleton is as old as I think it is, there won’t be any dental records to match it with.”

  “How old do you think it is?”

  She frowned. “This may come as a surprise to you, but it takes more than thirty minutes to figure that out. I need more time, Nick—and I want to take a look at that second skeleton. There’s probably more we can learn from the first one, but I doubt it’s going to be a slam dunk. These are old bones—there’s only so much we’re going to get from them. The second skeleton might tell us more—and so would any others that are out there. Every one we can find will give us a little more to work with.”

  “Agreed. I want to get a look at that other skeleton too. The first one’s pretty much a write-off for me—they removed all the dirt from around the body. I want to set up a sieve next to the second grave and sift the dirt a layer at a time.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Insect parts and puparia—the little casings that maturing insects leave behind.”

  “Tell me the truth: Can you really tell one fly from another?”

  “Can you really tell a male skull from a female skull?”

  “Of course—male skulls are solid.”

  “Funny.”

  Nick looked out at the dog and its trainer again, scurrying back and forth across the field in their matching orange vests;
there were now two small red flags planted in the ground and fluttering in the breeze. “We’ve got to get back to work,” he said, “and neither one of us can do that until Marge and Bosco wrap things up out there. Look at that— two lousy flags—that’s all they’ve got to show for a whole day’s sniffing around—and I’ll bet you twenty bucks that when we excavate those sites there’s nothing down there.”

  “I’m beginning to think you don’t like that dog,” Kegan said.

  “I dislike animals that dress better than I do.”

  “Well, I feel sorry for them both.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It reminds me of the World Trade Center. Remember? You were there—there were dog teams everywhere. They were the kind that search for survivors—only there weren’t any survivors. By the end the dogs were all getting depressed, so the firemen started hiding in the rubble just so the dogs had someone to find.”

  Nick looked at her. “How do women do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Manage to feel sympathy for someone who doesn’t deserve it. I just can’t do that.”

  “Really? I feel sorry for you.”

  Fifteen minutes went by.

  Kegan looked at Nick and smiled. “This makes you crazy, doesn’t it?”

  “It drives me absolutely bonkers.”

  “I think it’s good for you—you could use more patience.”

  “That’s another thing women do,” Nick said.

  “What?”

  “Take pleasure in a man’s pain because it’s ‘for his own good.’”

  “That’s not true,” she said. “We just like to see men suffer.”

  They watched for another half hour—then Nick saw the trainer remove one of the two red flags from the ground.

  “That’s it,” he said. “I’ve had it.”

  He took out his cell phone and dialed.

  “Whiners Anonymous,” Donovan said. “What’s wrong now?”

  “Send me another dog,” Nick said. “A bloodhound, a poodle, one of those little Taco Bell dogs that talks with a Spanish accent—I don’t care, as long as it has all five senses.”

  “Look—I checked this woman out after the last time you called. The Bureau uses her all the time. This is a FEMA-certified cadaver dog team—you should see their credentials.”

  “You should see mine,” Nick said. “I can’t smell either.”

  “Nick—”

  “I’m telling you, Donovan, this just isn’t working out. Maybe it’s the dog or maybe it’s the trainer; all I know is, I’m standing here with six forensic specialists on your payroll who can’t do their jobs because some dog has a sinus condition.”

  “C’mon, she can’t be that slow.”

  “Two graves,” Nick said. “In twenty-four hours this woman has managed to find two graves—and she just changed her mind about one of them.”

  “Maybe there aren’t any more—maybe that’s what the dog is telling us.”

  “Then I can go home and you can call the backhoe boys and tell them to dig in—but I guarantee they’ll find more graves when they do, and I’ll be back a day later—and we’ll still need a new dog.”

  “Is the dog really that bad?”

  “I’m standing here with Dr. Kegan Alexander, forensic anthropologist and professor of physical anthropology at the University of Virginia. If you like, I’ll put her on the phone and she can give you a second opinion.”

  “Okay, I believe you,” Donovan said. “I’ll see what I can do—but cadaver dog teams are hard to find, and it won’t be easy to find one with better credentials than hers. I’ll put in another request, but it could take a couple of days.”

  “A couple of days?”

  “It’s the best I can do, Nick. Look, I gotta go—I’ve got an appointment with Senator Braden in about two minutes, and these people don’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Then get yourself fifty million bucks and call me back—that’s what Braden did. Money talks, Nick—the rest of us have to listen.”

  “Tell the senator something for me, will you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Tell him his entire construction project has ground to a halt because of one dog—see what he has to say about that.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that. In the meantime I suggest you let this woman keep working.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it might just take a little longer than you think. Face it, Nick, you’re a bug man, and you don’t know squat about dogs—now do you?”

  “I’ll be waiting,” Nick said. “There’s not much else I can do.”

  Nick dropped the phone into his shirt pocket and looked at Kegan. “Did you hear all that?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Can you believe it? A couple of days.”

  “He’s right, you know.”

  Nick frowned at her. “What happened to all that sympathy?”

  “Entomologists are always in a hurry,” she said. “I suppose it makes sense, since you people work with things that hatch and grow up and die in just a week or two. But anthropologists work with bones, so we tend to take a longer view. Relax, Nick. These graves have been here for a long time—they’ll be here for a couple more days.”

  “You can be really annoying sometimes.”

  She grinned. “Something else that women do?”

  Nick glared at Marge and Bosco. They were taking a break now under the shade of a nylon lean-to set up on the opposite side of the field; the dog was lapping water from its trainer’s hand. “I hate to wait,” Nick grumbled.

  “Sorry. Looks to me like you’re out of options.”

  “There are always options,” he said. “It just depends on how far you’re willing to go.”

  7

  “Mr. Donovan, the senator will see you now.” The woman made a come-with-me gesture with two fingers, flashing a brilliant and orthodontically perfect smile.

  Donovan rose from his leather chair and followed her down the corridor. She looked to be in her early twenties, probably just out of college, like most of the aides and legislative assistants who worked on the Hill. She was probably a political science major, pre-law, trying for one more impressive entry on her résumé before she sent off her application to Georgetown or UVA. Not Harvard—definitely not Harvard—at least that’s what she probably told the guy who hired her, since this was the office of the senior senator from Virginia, and a man with the deep roots of John Henry Braden wouldn’t want a Virginia malcontent on his staff. She was probably grossly underpaid too, like most of the bright young men and women who took these staff positions. But money was beside the point here; the point was just to get a leg up— either on the Hill or someplace else.

  The corridor was lined with black-framed photographs showcasing the beautiful state of Virginia: a determined-looking man in breeches and a red hunting coat gliding across a hedge on a chestnut mare; the mist-covered Shenandoah Valley in summertime as seen from Skyline Drive; a sprawling antebellum plantation along the James River; and, of course, the glittering jewel in Virginia’s crown—Monticello and its famous west front. They’re not making it up, Donovan thought, Virginia is one beautiful place. Whoever selected these photos could have chosen from a hundred other scenic wonders; Donovan wondered if the Patriot Center would ever be considered one of them.

  The hallway widened into a large foyer, with five separate offices that opened off of it. The walls were covered in raised panels of matched-grain cherry, giving the room an incredibly rich and aristocratic feel— like the cigar room of some exclusive men’s club that Donovan would never be asked to join. There were two secretaries’ desks that faced each other, one on the left and one on the right, forming a kind of aisle-way that carried the eye directly to the door on the opposite wall—the office of Senator John Henry Braden.

  The aide turned and smiled. “Mr. Donovan, how long do you expect to be with the senator this morning?” The question was w
orded carefully, and it was asked in an unctuous tone of voice that seemed to suggest, “How long can we hope to enjoy your delightful company?” In reality the question meant something very different: She was asking how much of the senator’s precious time Donovan intended to waste, and at what point she could interrupt and tell Donovan to take his things and clear out.

  “I’m here at the senator’s convenience,” Donovan said with a smile of his own. Positioned in front of the senator’s door was a somber-looking man striking the unmistakable pose of a security guard: feet shoulder width apart, hands in front, one resting on top of the other, suspended just below the waist. He wore a black jacket with a matching crewneck shirt and slacks, which was a little over the top; a security officer should dress like an employee, not like Johnny Cash. He was thirtyish and lean, with broad shoulders and a muscular neck and jaw. He had thick black hair swept over to the side, forming a well-placed comma over his left eyebrow, and just enough length in back to allow a few curls to fall on his neck.

  Man, Donovan thought, was I ever trying that hard?

  He stepped up to the security guard and held up his FBI credentials.

  The man gave it the barest of glances and said, “You’ll need to leave your weapon here with me, sir.”

  Donovan raised one eyebrow. “Sorry?”

  “Your handgun—you’ll need to leave it with me.”

  Donovan smiled and held his credentials a little higher. “Maybe you need to take a closer look at this.”

  “I saw it.”

  “You’re not Secret Service, are you?”

  “No, sir. Private security.”

  “Uh-huh. That explains why you just asked an FBI agent to surrender his weapon. That’s a big no-no where I come from.”

  “It’s standard procedure, sir.”

  “For you maybe; not for me.”

  “I’m sorry—there are no exceptions.”

  Donovan stepped a little closer and lowered his voice. “Look—I know you’ve got a job to do here, and I can see that you’re a real eager beaver, but I need to explain something to you: I’m an FBI agent, and an FBI agent will not hand over his weapon to you or anyone else. So what do you want to do now?”