“Such an unusual coloring.” He was simply delighted with the gorgeousness of the dainty insect. “All right, let’s look at specs.” He used the ruler and began to dictate into the phone.
“A. patricia is small for a bee—six millimeters in length. The abdomen is banded with shiny pinkish-red gold at the base of each segment. It shades to a darker color—possibly varying with age; to be determined—at the apical portion of the segment.
“The abdominal hairs are light, golden to rose-gold in color. Suspect that if they break and shear off, the apical portions of the segment would present darker over time or with age.”
He was smiling with pleasure and excitement as he spoke, and yet he was conscious of a heavy weight, like a smothering blanket, hanging over this beauteous discovery. Patty should be here; they should be discussing this together, trading theories and enthusiasm.
Why had she needed to die? What was it about this bee?
He returned to his examination, aware that he had to blink rapidly in order to alleviate the sudden damp in his eyes.
“The abdomen hairs are sparse for an Apis bee. All the legs are a light golden yellow,” he said, his voice rising with surprise. “Very unusual for them to be so light in color—and there is reddish shading at the ends of the segments as well. The rest of the thorax is obscured by the characteristic branched body hairs typical of an Apis bee.”
Gently, he used the makeshift forceps to lift one of the creature’s wings. “The wings are more opaque than transparent—this being unusual, but we can see the veins in the wings, which are…” He squinted through the magnifying glass, but this was a situation where he needed the microscope to see the colors of the wing veins.
He didn’t want to dissect this single specimen, and so he carefully used the tweezers to lift the wing away from the body enough that he could get a glimpse under the microscope. “The veins in the wings appear to be that same rosy-gold color instead of the dark one would normally expect.”
Removing her from the microscope tray, he resumed his examination with the magnifying glass. “The head is typical Apis in shape, with typical hair distribution except with three large seta at the meeting point of every facet of the compound eye!” His voice rose a little even though he was trying to keep the dictation professional and factual. “These setae are vibrantly metallic, rose-gold. There are three ocelli, located in standard arrangement. The ocelli are also this same rose-gold, while the mandibles…” He fumbled for the microscope again, because what he was seeing in the magnifying glass simply wasn’t enough.
He was able to align the specimen on the scope so he could zero in on the head. “The mandibles are deep crimson at the tip, shading to hot pink and then the now-typical rose-gold at their base. The labrum is dark—burgundy—while the maxillae are nearly translucent crimson. Very unusual,” he muttered.
He went on, describing the details of the thorax, coxa, femur, tibia, and tarsus—which was typical Apis.
And it wasn’t until he was nearly finished with his recitation that Eli realized something astonishing about this bee.
It had no stinger.
This bee was unable to sting.
Twenty-Seven
Chicago, Illinois
July 10, midmorning
Special Agent Helen Darrow breezed into the small meeting room carrying a tablet, smartphone, and cup of coffee. Her dark blue mug had the FBI seal on it.
She was an attractive woman in her thirties, probably just past the middle of the decade, Eli figured. She was a balanced mix of cool professionalism, intelligence, and snark. Today she wore a charcoal-gray suit and, beneath it, a silky patterned blouse with pink, blue, and yellow flowers. The neckline showed not even one millimeter of cleavage—but it wasn’t all up-to-the-chin Victorian, either. Her shiny honey-blond hair was twisted into a bun sort of thing at the back of her neck, and the only jewelry she wore was a wide gold band on her thumb and two sparkling stud earrings that might have been real diamonds, but considering what Eli knew about the Feds’ pay scale, he thought not.
“Good morning, Dr. Sanchez,” she said, placing onto the table one by one the items she carried: coffee, tablet, phone. She lined them up next to the pad of paper and holder of FBI-logoed pens that were staples of this and every other meeting room in the office—at least, from what Eli had experienced. “It’s nice to see you again. It’s been, what…three years? Four?”
“Nearly four. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” he replied. He was fully aware that his attire was far less professional than hers—cargo shorts, a CARPE INSECTVM tee, and the most comfortable footwear in the world: his well-worn Birkenstocks.
“Considering how you kept our collective asses from being in a sling over the cuprobeus beetle virus back then, I figured not only did I owe you, but that you wouldn’t ask for a meeting unless it was important.”
He nodded and smiled. “Exactly. So let me tell you why I’m here.”
She sat her tablet up on the table in its stand, revealing a small keyboard attached to it. “I’m going to take notes, but I’m also going to record if you’re agreeable.”
“Definitely. So, here’s the story: I’ll give you the high level first and you can ask questions to fill in the details you need. One of my doctoral students was in India studying Apis bees and mad honey, and while she was there, she messaged me saying she wanted to change her thesis to studying a novel Apis bee that she’d found while there.”
“Mad honey? Is that the honey that causes hallucinations?” she asked, surprising him with her knowledge. “It’s Turkish, right?”
“That’s the most well-known location of what people call mad honey—or deli bal—but there are other areas it can be found, such as northern India and Nepal. It comes from honey made from rhododendrons that have grayanotoxin in their nectars—of which there are very few in the world. A taste of deli bal can give you a wonderful high, but also hallucinations and other unpleasant reactions. The Turks and others who harvest it locally use it for medicinal purposes, but also for the euphoric feelings it can give you.” Eli felt himself go into professorial lecture mode, but he didn’t feel the need to hold back. Helen Darrow was an intelligent woman and seemed interested in what he had to say.
“Have you tried it?” she asked with a sly smile.
“You bet,” he replied. “It went right to my head, but it wasn’t an unpleasant experience. You only take a little of it, often mixed with milk. When you hear about poisoning from deli bal, it’s usually because some yahoo wanted to trip out and had too much of it. In fact, you can build up a sort of immunity to its effect if you take it regularly—which is why it doesn’t affect the locals in the way it might affect someone who’s never tried it before. There’s a legend that when the Romans invaded the Black Sea area to oust King Mithridates in, oh, about the late sixties BCE, some of the king’s men seeded their path with pieces of honeycomb made with deli bal. The Roman soldiers supposedly ate too much of it—fresh honeycomb is really an incredible treat—and they got so intoxicated and high that they were easily defeated.” He took a sip of water. “Incidentally, the makeup of any honey can be very different depending which flowers are used to make it. You can analyze a sample of honey and tell not only where it was made—what region—but also the types of flowers and nectar that were used to make it.”
“That’s fascinating. Really,” Helen replied. “I can tell you love your profession. But I’m not exactly sure what all of this has to do with why you’re here. Your graduate student who was in India contacted you about changing her dissertation, and…?”
“Right. And I had no problem with her changing her dissertation if she wanted to—especially if she was studying an unknown species, which was what she was proposing. But that was the last I heard from her before I learned she’d died in an accident in Ladakh.”
“Ladakh?”
“It’s a region in Northeast India near Nepal and Tibet—in fact, they call it Little Tibet. Very mount
ainous and isolated. That’s where she was. I attended her funeral in Cincinnati—was it only two days ago? Damn—and when I was there, her parents gave me all of the university property that had been sent back to them from India—mainly, her tablet and some notes. When we walked out of the funeral home with me carrying those items to put in the car to go back to Champaign, the car—which was being driven by another student in the entomology department—exploded from a car bomb. A young woman named Tina Janeski died in her own vehicle when she turned the ignition. In the parking lot of a Methodist church.”
“In Cincinnati.” Darrow arched her brow, and he could already see the wheels turning. But it was a credit to her trust in Eli that she didn’t question him yet.
“Not really something you’d expect, right? Once I got past the shock and horror, it occurred to me that it was a strange place for that to happen—but I was mostly devastated that Tina had just been blown to bits. And there was nothing that could have been done about it.”
“If you had been in the car with her, you’d have been blown up as well,” said Darrow.
“That’s beside the point—which is that hers was a senseless death because she simply wanted to drive with me to the funeral.
“It was horrific and awful and I couldn’t believe it, but I didn’t think she—or I—were actually targeted for death until that night at my hotel in Cincinnati. Someone—a man, not white, with dark hair and of indeterminate age—tried to break into my room. He dropped a syringe when I took him by surprise, and he fled because I know how to defend myself. I subsequently had a friend at UIUC test the contents of the syringe, and she informed me there was enough sufentanil in it to kill a horse.”
Darrow’s fingers flew over the keys even as she kept her eyes on him.
“After I calmed down,” he said dryly, “and thought about things, I came to the conclusion that someone wanted Patty’s information—specifically her notes that had come back from India. Because,” he added when Darrow looked like she was going to speak, “I also learned that her parents’ house had been broken into the night before the funeral—the night before the car bomb.
“The only reason the perp didn’t get the information they wanted was because her parents had taken it all to the funeral home and left it there, not knowing which day of the visitations I would be there to retrieve it. I realized that was the only thing that made sense for all three events, because they—whoever blew it up—must have assumed I’d be in the car with the notes when the car bomb went off. And I would have been if Tina hadn’t insisted on pulling the car up to pick me up at the entrance to the church. What other reason would there be to explode the car of a second-year entomology student who didn’t know anyone in Cincinnati?”
“Right. Could they be interested in the mad honey?” Helen asked. “Maybe it’s being used for a newfangled drug. Drug lords are always coming up with new takes on ways to get high and escape.”
Eli shook his head. “I don’t think so, because Patty wanted to change her dissertation from the topic of deli bal to the study of a unique species of bee she learned about while there. So I don’t think it’s related to the mad honey, and anyway, there’s already too much information about deli bal out there.”
“All right, go on,” she replied. Not exactly skeptically, but with reserve in her tone. Yet she waited, obviously trusting that there was more.
“So I got back to UIUC midmorning yesterday— Oh, by the way, I did call and report the attempted break-in to my hotel room to the detective working on the car bomb, but I haven’t actually talked to him. We’ve been playing phone tag. I’m guessing you’ll want to talk to him after this.
“Anyway, I got back to Champaign and went into my office, and while I was there I checked my email—out of habit, but I was still really out of sorts because of Tina, and I guess I needed some normalcy. There was an email from the friend of a friend of mine here at U of C asking me about an unusual bee. I took one look at the photo she sent and realized it’s the same bee that Patty found—in India.
“And that’s where I really, really effed up,” he said, feeling miserable and horrifically guilty. Not only was Tina Janeski’s death on his hands, but he believed Jill Fetzer’s was as well. “I didn’t shut down my computer because I got the call from my friend in the lab that she could help with the testing of the syringe—I didn’t know at that point whether the person breaking into my hotel was trying to kill me or just trying to hurt me. But either way, I was certain by then that their purpose was to obtain Patty’s notes. There was simply no other reason for someone to try to break into my room at the freaking Holiday Inn in Cincinnati. Anyway, I left in a hurry without logging out.”
“So someone must have seen the email on your computer,” Darrow said. “And knew someone else had information about this bee. The same bee? That’s a little bit of a coincidence. And whoever it was got the name and location of the person at U of Chicago.”
“They must have walked into my office and seen it—I mean, I never lock my door. Why would I? I’m an entomologist, for God’s sake. Not like I deal with IT trade secrets or weapons of mass destruction.” His voice was grim with irony, because they both knew that the cuprobeus beetle had, in fact, been a weapon of mass destruction.
“Or they hacked into your email themselves and got the information that way,” she said. “Not necessarily anything you could have done about it.”
He shrugged, not quite willing to let himself off the hook. “So I got in contact with the woman at U of C who has a specimen of this bee. It is a coincidence, I guess, but it seems to be the same bee based on Patty’s—that’s my grad student—notes. Our mutual friend said it was shipped by someone in Paris a hundred years ago; but that simply doesn’t make sense.
“Anyway, she was very upset because someone had been lurking outside her house as if prepared to break in. They must have been after the bee—and this was an actual specimen of the Apis, not just a photo.” He couldn’t help that his voice got a little high with excitement.
Now Darrow lifted a brow. “Timing’s off on that, Dr. Sanchez. How could someone have looked at your email or hacked in and suddenly gone from Champaign—where they had presumably followed you, if your theory is correct—and then showed up near the University of Chicago, more than three hours away, so quickly?”
“Because there was an over six-hour time lag between when I opened the email and when I had the chance to contact her. I didn’t actually look at the photo till late afternoon. But it was on my computer as of the morning.” He grimaced.
The special agent nodded in acknowledgment and waited for him to continue.
“Her name is—was—Jill Fetzer,” he said, and noticed that Darrow’s mouth tightened when he corrected the tense. “Yeah. She’s— Well, let me finish. So we made arrangements to meet at a twenty-four-hour diner just outside Libertyville, where she lived and where the man was presumably trying to break in—she reported it, by the way, and I happened to call her when she’d just finished contacting the local police. So I’m on my way back to my house to get Juanita—”
“Your…dog?” she ventured.
“My Jeep. And on the way, I notice I’m being followed. So I did a little Jason Bourne thing and lost the guy—or so I think—then I come around the corner and nearly run into him. Before I could react, he grabbed me by the neck and did that tactical move, you know, right there at the pressure point on the neck? Dropped me to the ground. When I came to, my bag—with Patty’s stuff in it and an excellent bottle of tequila—was gone. And I’m almost positive it was a different guy than the one who’d attacked me in the hotel.”
“All right. That explains why you’re talking to me and not the local cops.”
“Right. I called Jill Fetzer to make sure she was all right, and she was still fine and ready to meet me, but obviously tense and anxious. Then I hightailed it up to Pete’s All-Niter—you’ll want to make a note of that, because I’m pretty sure someone killed Jill Fetzer in t
he ladies’ room there last night.”
“Before or after you got there?”
“Before. But,” he said, aware that his eyes were shining with excitement, “whoever it was grabbed her purse and her coat but did not know to take—or to look for—the small cardboard box that holds the Apis bee that everyone seems to be interested in.”
“So you have this bee that potentially three people have died over, and one other—you—has been assaulted. If I were anyone else, I’d probably never believe people could kill over an insect…but I clearly know otherwise.” Her smile was wry and cool. “So what’s so special about it?”
“I don’t know yet,” he confessed. “I mean, I took a really close look at her last night. I grabbed a few things from Walmart, and, well, essentially, she’s atypical of the species in many ways—including that she has no stinger. I would agree with Patty’s assessment that she’s a novel Apis—and that’s just with a cursory physical exam, not even investigating her society and habits. I haven’t gotten her into a full-blown lab because I don’t know if someone’s going to ambush me and run off with or destroy her. Oh, by the way, I should mention—she’s not a living specimen.”
“The one in the cardboard box.”
“Correct.”
Darrow eased back into her chair and folded her arms over her middle, looking at him speculatively. “So we have explosives, three murders, assault, two states, and potentially a second nation—India—involved in this morass. Over a bee.”
“That would be correct.”
“How soon will you be able to tell whether—and why—this bee is so special?”
Sanskrit Cipher: A Marina Alexander Adventure Page 17
