Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle

by Tim Downs

“Yeah, that’s a tight spread—and judging by the spacing of the guy’s footprints, it looks like he might have been on the run.”

  “He was,” Nick said. “See the slide pattern in the dirt? He was moving pretty fast when he was hit, probably at a dead sprint. He was obviously trying to get away from someone. Did you find any footprints from the perp?”

  “None—and the dirt’s pretty soft, so we figure the shooter must have fired from the grass at the end of the row.”

  Nick turned and looked; it was a good thirty yards to the end of the row. Beyond it he could see a farmhouse with white siding and a gray aluminum roof. “I’d look for a hunter if I were you. Whoever did this was no stranger to guns—he got off two shots before the victim even dropped.”

  “A hunter,” Massino said. “Gee, thanks. That narrows it down to every man in Sampson County—and half the women too.”

  “I’d be nice to your wife if I were you. Any ideas about a motive?”

  “We think it might have been drug-related.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “This is a farm community, Polchak—people know each other out here. Michael Severenson grew up on this farm; he inherited it from his folks. That’s how most people end up with farms these days ’cause the land’s getting too pricey to buy. Severenson had a drug problem and everybody around here knew it—so did we. He had a couple of priors for possession; nothing major. He went through rehab a couple of times, but it never took.”

  “Was he married?”

  “Yeah—got a kid too.”

  “Was his wife the one who found him?”

  “Yeah. Stumbled onto him this morning. That’s gotta be tough.”

  Nick frowned. “The woman didn’t miss her husband for three days?”

  “They’ve been separated for about a year. Not legally—he just up and took off one day. They’ve got a little workers’ cottage over behind the barn, a place where the migrants used to live; whenever he dropped by he stayed there. She didn’t see much of the guy—sometimes for weeks at a time.”

  “Do you think he was dealing?”

  “We don’t know yet. We think maybe he was trying to break into the business. If he was, he might have stepped on somebody’s toes.”

  “You have that kind of problem out here?”

  “They have that kind of problem everywhere—Sampson County’s no different. We won’t be positive about the drug angle until we can go over the place with a narcotics dog team. We’re looking for one in Charlotte, but we’re not having much luck.”

  “You need a good dog team? I can recommend one.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know a woman up in northern Virginia. She trains the dogs herself. I’ve worked with her. Never saw anything like it—her dogs can practically talk.”

  “Think she’s available?”

  “I can give her a call.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  Nick opened a large plastic toolbox and removed a long slender forceps and a series of small bottles half-filled with a clear liquid. “Hold these,” he said, handing the bottles to Massino. “Take the caps off and set them down. Be careful not to spill them.”

  Next he took out a sleeve of small Styrofoam cups, a stack of coffee filters, and a ziplock bag filled with dark red meat cut into mediumsized cubes. He separated the cups and lined them up in front of them; he opened the plastic bag and dropped a cube of meat into each one.

  “What is that?” Massino asked.

  “Beef liver.”

  “What are the cups for?”

  “They’re known as ‘maggot motels,’” Nick said. “Here—take a couple.” He handed two of them to Massino, then leaned out over the body and began to examine the wounds, sorting through the wriggling mass of maggots with the forceps.

  Massino grimaced. “What are you doing?”

  “Searching for the largest specimens.”

  “Why?”

  “They’ll be the oldest. They were the first ones here.”

  Nick carefully plucked a particularly plump specimen from the roiling mass. He held it up to his glasses and examined it, then reached across and dropped it into one of the Styrofoam cups. When each cup contained three or four of the hardiest specimens, Nick took the cups back from the detective, stretched a coffee filter across the top of each of them, and secured it in place with a rubber band. Then he repeated the process, collecting specimens from each of the wounds until all the motels were occupied.

  “Now the bottles,” he said, depositing two or three specimens into each of them and labeling them with the location of the wound where they were found.

  “What are these for?”

  “To identify species. The liquid is a preservative.”

  Massino swatted at a fly buzzing around his face.

  “Don’t do that,” Nick said.

  “Why not?”

  “Those are specimens too. I need to net a few.”

  “Don’t they ever bother you?”

  “Does physical evidence bother you?”

  Massino watched as Nick carefully returned each item to the toolbox. “What happens now?” he asked.

  “Certain insects are attracted to decomposing bodies,” Nick said. “Blowflies and flesh flies, for example—those things buzzing around your head. The females are looking for places to lay their eggs. They look for soft tissues that their babies won’t have trouble chewing—open wounds and decomposing flesh are just the thing. The eggs hatch into maggots; the maggots grow and develop; they pass through distinct developmental stages that are easy to recognize; finally they pupate and emerge as adult flies. Are you following me?”

  “So far.”

  “We’ve studied the life cycles of several different species, and we know exactly how long it takes for the insects to develop from egg to mature adult—exactly. So here we are; we’ve got a dead guy and he’s got maggots. But how long has the dead guy been dead? When was he killed? To find out, I collect the oldest maggots from the body and take them back to my lab. I rear them—I allow them to continue to grow in exactly the same conditions I find here. I time them—I count the precise number of hours until those maggots crawl out of their puparia as adult flies. After that, it’s just mathematics. I identify the species, I look up the total time it takes for them to develop, I subtract the time it took for me to rear them, and I count backward. Bingo—we know the postmortem interval, the precise amount of time between death and the discovery of the body.”

  “How precise?”

  “This should be a textbook case,” Nick said. “A body in the open air during warm weather—it doesn’t get any easier than this for a guy like me. I should be able to calculate a postmortem interval that’s accurate within a few hours. That should help you narrow your field of suspects.”

  “Yeah—that would help a lot.”

  “I’m a little confused,” Nick said. “You don’t seem to know anything about forensic entomology.”

  “Never had much use for it.”

  “Then why did you send for me?”

  “I didn’t—she did.”

  “Who?”

  “The wife.”

  Nick paused. “The victim’s wife requested a forensic entomologist?”

  “She requested you—specifically.”

  “Me?” Nick stopped to think. “Severenson . . . I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Well, she knows you. She seemed to know all about you—and this weird business of yours. She told us, ‘After seventy-two hours of death, forensic entomology is the most accurate way to quantify the postmortem interval.’”

  “She said that? She used the term ‘postmortem interval’?”

  “Yeah, just like that.”

  Nick paused. “I think I’m in love.”

  “She seemed to know what she was talking about, and she was insistent. We figured, ‘Hey, it’s her husband—why not humor the woman? What can it hurt?’”

  “Your confidence is overwhelming,” Nick s
aid. “You might be surprised to know that—”

  “Uh-oh,” Massino interrupted.

  Nick looked up. Massino was staring over Nick’s shoulder at something behind him. He twisted around and saw a young girl standing in the center of the row about thirty feet away.

  “Is that the kid?” Nick asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “She can’t see her father like this—cover him up.” He raised his voice and called out to the little girl. “Hey, go back—go back to the house.”

  The little girl didn’t move.

  She was young, no more than three or four, with a very slight build that made her look even younger. She wore a broad, floppy sun hat that covered most of her face and dark sunglasses with thick frames that were too old and too big for her face. She had thick auburn hair pulled behind her in a ponytail that stood out like fire against her creamy skin. She was dressed in a sleeveless cotton sundress the color of the Carolina sky and, strangely, a pair of thick socks but no shoes.

  Nick scrambled to his feet and hurried toward her. “Did you hear what I said? You shouldn’t be here—go find your mother.” He did his best to block her view of the grisly scene behind him, but she didn’t seem to be trying to look. She wasn’t looking at Nick either; she seemed to be staring just off to the side. The little girl stood with her arms bent at the elbows, rotating both hands in constant circles as though she were trying to limber up her wrists.

  Nick knelt down in front of her. “Excuse me—I’m talking to you.”

  Still she refused to make eye contact, and her little hands kept circling.

  “Hey! Little girl!” Nick reached out and gently touched her right arm with his fingers; the instant he did she let out a piercing shriek that made him jerk back. The little girl turned on her heels and ran back toward the house, making intermittent shrieks as she went.

  Nick turned to the detective. “What was that all about? I barely touched her.”

  “Better go find the mom,” Massino said. “We don’t want her getting the wrong idea.”

  Nick let out a groan and reluctantly started down the row after her. The wrong idea, he thought. What’s the kid’s problem, anyway? And what’s with the mom? She lets her daughter go wandering around a crime scene? That’s just what you want—to let your little girl find her dad’s dead body. If the kid wasn’t damaged before, she would be after that.

  Nick came to the end of the row and stepped out onto the grass. Halfway to the farmhouse he saw the mother kneeling in front of the little girl. Terrific, he thought. He could just imagine the story the girl was probably telling her mother—about the bad man with the scary eyes who squeezed her arm until blood shot out of her fingertips. Nick had never been good with children. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them; they just didn’t seem to like him. Maybe it was the glasses—he should have remembered to take them off. The glasses never helped. He made the mistake of bending over a baby crib once and the kid went ballistic, as if Nick were the baby mobile from hell. It took the mom an hour to calm the kid down again—he was probably in therapy now. And moms are so defensive; they’re like mother bears protecting their cubs. You can’t reason with them—they’re too busy ripping open your bowels with their claws. How am I going to explain this? he wondered.

  “Lady, I barely touched your daughter.”

  “Then why is she screaming her head off?”

  “How would I know? Maybe she’s weird.” Great—that’ll go over big.

  The woman stood up as Nick approached and he braced himself for a verbal barrage—but she said nothing.

  Her face seemed strangely familiar . . .

  She stepped in close to him and looked up into his enormous eyes. She rested her hands on his chest, stretched up on her tiptoes, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Hello, Nick. It’s been a long time.”

  4

  I can’t believe it,” Nick said. “Kathryn Guilford—I haven’t seen you in years.”

  Guilford,” she said. “Funny—it’s been Severenson for so long that it sounds like somebody else’s name.”

  Nick sat at the kitchen table and watched her fill the kettle from the sink. “I’m . . . sorry about your husband,” he said.

  “I wish I could have done something—God knows I tried.” She stared out the kitchen window until the kettle began to overflow. “Do you still prefer tea to coffee?”

  “Either one is fine,” Nick said. “I’ve become less discriminating over the years—I’ll take caffeine in any form these days. The kids are all into energy drinks now—Red Bull, Rockstar, things like that. They guzzle the stuff all morning, then show up for my afternoon class in a coma.”

  “It couldn’t be the teacher,” she said. “You always kept me awake.”

  Kathryn Guilford, Nick thought. The woman hadn’t changed a bit—at least not in Nick’s memory. She still had the same thick auburn hair with just a few coarse strands of gray mixed in now. She had the same waspish figure and she moved with the same graceful rhythm. Whenever she stepped to the side her hips swung like a pendulum slowing to a stop—it surprised him that he still remembered that. Her face looked a little leaner now, but despite all the years her fair skin was only just beginning to show the weathering effects of the sun. The freckles across her nose and cheeks were more prominent than he remembered them. He always liked those freckles—he remembered that too.

  Kathryn leaned down and set a steaming cup in front of him.

  “The last time I saw you was in Holcum County,” he said.

  She nodded. “Do you remember the first time we met?”

  He remembered very well. It was several summers ago, when Nick was doing research at one of NC State’s extension research stations in Holcum County. A young Kathryn Guilford came walking up to his door one day and wanted to hire him. An old friend of hers had died—suicide, the county coroner said, but Kathryn didn’t buy it. She offered Nick twenty thousand dollars to give her a second opinion—but she wanted to make sure her money didn’t go to waste, so she insisted on working with Nick every step of the way. There was one small problem: Kathryn was entomophobic—she had a deathly fear of insects, and in Nick’s line of work you tended to run into a few. But she hung in there every step of the way and she earned Nick’s respect. He remembered that, because not many people did.

  “How could I forget?” he said. “You fell off my porch and landed flat on your back in the driveway. I heard the crash and came out and I stood there looking down at you. I remember thinking, ‘Not a graceful woman.’”

  She managed a smile. “You were always looking down at me.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “You turned out to be a credit to your species.”

  “Your species—are you still doing that?”

  Nick just shrugged.

  There was a small bay window beside the kitchen table. The little girl sat cross-legged on a flowered seat cushion with a stack of books in her lap. With her left hand she turned the pages at an impressive pace. With her right hand she continued to make the same strange circular motion that she had made in the field.

  “She looks just like you,” Nick said to Kathryn. “She could be your clone.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment. The truth is, she has a lot of Michael in her. It worries me sometimes.”

  Nick leaned toward the little girl. “You’re a very fast reader.”

  The little girl didn’t respond.

  Kathryn clapped her hands twice and the girl looked up at her. “Callie, this is Nick. Say, ‘Hi, Nick.’”

  Callie turned toward Nick but didn’t quite meet his eyes. “Hi, Nick.”

  “Hi. How old are you?”

  But she was already lost in her reading again.

  “Callie has autism,” Kathryn said.

  Nick cocked his head at the little girl. “Autism. I know it’s a brain development disorder, but not much else.”

  “I didn’t know much about it either, but I’m learning fast. Callie was
just diagnosed recently. Her father had ADD—we just thought Callie had the same problem. But one of her teachers had an autistic nephew and she recognized the symptoms. We took her to a pediatric neurologist at Duke, and sure enough. It’s officially known as ‘autism spectrum disorder’—that means there’s a whole spectrum of possible behaviors, so autism looks different with every child. They have a saying: ‘If you’ve seen one kid with autism, you’ve seen one kid with autism.’ Some kids have obvious disabilities; others seem pretty normal. They’re still trying to figure out what Callie is capable of. She can talk, but she mostly just repeats what she hears. She lives in her own little world. I have to clap just to get her attention—sometimes she doesn’t even respond to her own name.”

  “She seems to like to read,” Nick said.

  “She mostly likes to turn the pages. Autistic kids can often learn to read, but they have difficulty conceptualizing what they’re reading. They don’t use the same logic we do; they can’t think abstractly. They don’t understand metaphors, and they can’t use slang. It’s very strange—like talking to someone from another planet sometimes.”

  “She came up behind me in the field,” Nick said. “I told her to go back to the house. I didn’t want her to see . . . you know.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Kathryn said. “She runs off sometimes—I guess she got that from her father too. It’s like her legs have a mind of their own and she just takes off. I do my best to keep an eye on her, but there’s a lot to do around here.”

  “She didn’t like it when I touched her. I was only trying to—”

  “Don’t take it personally, Nick. Autistic kids are often hypersensitive—it’s like all their senses are dialed up a couple of notches. Callie’s sensitive to touch, especially if she’s not expecting it. She wears a sleeveless dress year-round, even in the winter. You know why? She can’t stand anything touching her arms. She’s sensitive to light too—that’s why she wears the silly hat and glasses.”

  “She doesn’t seem to make eye contact.”

  “Don’t let her fool you—she sees everything. She just looks at you out of the corner of her eye because direct eye contact feels too intense to her.”