Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle Page 8

  “I was on a rooftop just like this one,” the boy said. “These men came along and rescued me, and now we’re here to rescue you.”

  “Where they takin’ you?” one of the men asked.

  “To find my father.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Wherever we need to go—and I’m in a hurry, so if you don’t mind—”

  “We don’t know these boys,” the other man said.

  “You know me,” J.T. said. “You know my people. Now come on, get in. There’s folks on rooftops all over the place, and we got to go. You makin’ ’em wait, and that’s not right.”

  J.T. planted one foot on the edge of the boat and leaned out, extending his hand. The two men hesitated for only a few seconds before relenting.

  Jerry shifted to the opposite side of the boat to offset the weight. Nick took one of the men by the elbow to help steady him; he looked at the man’s forearm as he climbed aboard.

  “Pustules,” Nick said. “I told you so.”

  Two minutes later, they were moving again.

  Nick looked again at the young boy, still standing on the center bench between the two seated men. We might be on to something here, he said to himself.

  Half an hour later, the passenger list included three additional travelers. The boat sat low now, with water almost up to the gunnels in the rear. The wake of a passing boat might have swamped them, but there were no other boats; they were alone on the water, and the water was almost perfectly still. Slowly, cautiously, they motored west toward the earthen levee that separated Surekote Road from the Industrial Canal.

  “Over there!” the boy suddenly announced.

  “Are you crazy?” one of the female passengers said. “This boat is full—one more and we’ll sink.”

  “She’s got a point,” Nick said. “We’d better drop these folks off first, then come back.”

  “Over there,” J.T. said. “That’s the place.”

  “What place?”

  “The place I told you ’bout—the place where I saw the floater.”

  “Where?”

  “Go left after this house, then straight. I’ll show you.”

  Nick paused—then pushed the tiller away from him and slowly brought the boat around.

  “Where we goin’?” another passenger demanded. “Didn’t you hear the woman? This boat is full.”

  “Relax,” Nick said. “We’re only taking a look.”

  In a large, open area created by the intersection of two streets, the body of a man floated faceup in the water. Nick killed the engine well short of the body to keep from disturbing it and let the boat drift slowly forward.

  “What are you doing?” someone asked in horror.

  “What is that thing?”

  “Man, get us out of here!”

  In the watery stillness the body looked like a man trapped beneath a sheet of glass. It drifted just below the surface, as though it couldn’t quite decide whether to rise or fall; only the abdomen protruded above the water. The hair drifted out from the head, but didn’t wave; the clothing billowed out around the arms and legs, but didn’t move; it was like a photograph of a man falling through space, captured by a shutter flashing at a thousandth of a second.

  It appeared to be the body of a Caucasian male, but at a distance it wasn’t easy to tell. The tissues had already begun to turn a greenish-blue, and under the brackish water the color looked even worse.

  Nick turned to the group. “Folks, I need to explain something to you. I’m Dr. Nick Polchak; I’m a forensic entomologist from North Carolina State University. This is Jerry Kibbee; Jerry and I work for an organization called DMORT—the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. Our job is to collect bodies—that’s what we normally do, only there are so many people trapped on rooftops right now that we’ve been asked to help with the rescue efforts first. That’s why we’re here today, and that’s why you’re all in this boat with us; but sooner or later we’ll have to come back for the bodies, and that happens to be one of them right over there. So if you’ll bear with me for just a minute, I need to take a closer look.”

  When they reached the body, Nick stuck an oar deep into the water and pushed forward, causing the boat to come about in a tight J. He leaned over the port gunnels and looked down at the body; he saw a deep, jagged gash down the center of the forehead and a line of plump white maggots wedged into the wound like pebbles in a sidewalk crack. “I need to look closer,” he said.

  “Closer than this?”

  He handed the oar across to Jerry and opened his equipment bag. He took out what appeared to be a tool kit or tackle box. He opened it in his lap and removed a long, slender pair of forceps and a small glass jar filled with a colorless liquid.

  “Get me in close,” Nick said to Jerry.

  Jerry brought the boat around until it was almost touching the head.

  “I need a couple of you to shift to your right to keep us balanced,” Nick told the group. “I need to collect a few maggots.”

  The entire group scrambled to the opposite side of the boat, which lurched precariously to starboard. Two people shouted in alarm; one of them was Jerry.

  “Easy, folks,” Nick said. “Jerry, get a grip—I could use your help here.”

  Jerry shifted his considerable mass around to the port side. The boat struck a tenuous balance again, with five horrified passengers on one side and Nick and Jerry on the other—with J.T. sandwiched between them. Together they slid onto their knees and leaned out over the water and the body just below.

  Nick looked over at the boy. “You okay with this?”

  “Cool,” he said with a grin.

  Nick removed the lid from one of the jars and handed it to J.T. “Hold this,” he said. “Don’t spill it.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s called Kahle’s solution. It’s sort of a preservative.”

  Nick took the silver forceps and flexed them a few times.

  “What’s that?”

  “A light-tension larval forceps—it lets me pick up maggots without squashing them.”

  He reached down to the body and began to pluck maggots from the center of the ragged wound. He held the first one up close to his enormous lenses and rotated it back and forth, studying it.

  “I thought so,” he said.

  He removed several more maggots and dropped them one by one into the waiting jar.

  “See how the wound looks kind of ragged? That means the tissues were torn, not cut. That’s what they call a ‘blunt-trauma’ wound.”

  Nick twisted the lid back onto the jar and turned to the other passengers. “That’s all I needed,” he said. “Thanks for your patience. There’s just one more thing: I need to bring this body with us.”

  “Say what?”

  “We’ve got plenty of room if we lay it along the left side. I’ve got a body bag right here.”

  “Lord have mercy,” someone groaned.

  Even Jerry looked astonished. “Nick, what are you doing? You know what DMORT told us: first the living.”

  “This can’t wait,” Nick said. “It’s the water, Jerry—it’s speeding up decomposition.”

  “We should at least come back for it. These people have a point. Let’s take a GPS reading and come back later.”

  “It can’t wait,” Nick said. “Those are third-instar maggots, Jerry—that means they’ve been there for a while, and there should be a lot more of them. They’re dying off in the toxic water, or maybe they’ve just washed off—either way, we’re losing forensic evidence by the minute. The body has to come with us.”

  One of the men glared at Nick. “You ain’t haulin’ that thing in the boat while I’m sittin’ here.”

  “It’s just a body,” Nick said. “That ‘thing’ was one of your neighbors just a few days ago.”

  “Well, it ain’t my neighbor now! Now, you take me to that levee, or you take me back to my roof—but I ain’t sharin’ this boat with no dead man. That’s moodee, man�
�that’s bad mojo.”

  Nick considered his options.

  A few minutes later, they were slowly motoring toward the levee again. Behind them, a black body bag rode like a surfboard in the boat’s gentle wake, tethered to the stern by a length of nylon cord.

  “I don’t get it,” J.T. said.

  “Get what?”

  “You said it takes a couple days before a body floats.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Couple days ago, there was no water here.”

  Nick nodded. “You really are a smart guy.”

  10

  “You disobeyed my direct orders,” Denny said, glaring across the desk at Nick. “What did you think you were doing?”

  “I was doing what we came here to do—collect bodies.”

  “You’re not here to collect bodies, Nick. You’re here to do whatever DMORT tells you to do—whatever I tell you to do, because I’m the boss.”

  “Come on, Denny, the body was sitting right there in front of me.”

  “According to Jerry, you went out of your way to find it.”

  “A couple of blocks, that’s all. I only wanted to take a closer look.”

  “You weren’t supposed to be looking.”

  “You didn’t say we couldn’t look.”

  “Stop acting like my six-year-old, will you? You know what I meant—you were supposed to be assisting with rescue efforts.”

  “We were! We had a whole boatload of people—you can ask Jerry. But there was this kid in the boat, and he happened to mention a floater he saw yesterday.”

  “So?”

  “Think about it, Denny: Katrina didn’t hit until yesterday morning—and just a few hours later there’s a body already bloated enough to bring it to the surface? There’s no way—not even in this water. That body’s been decaying for a few days at least. That’s what I wanted to check out, and it’s a good thing I did.”

  “You disobeyed my orders: first the living.”

  “What was I supposed to do, just sail off and leave it there?”

  “That’s exactly what you were supposed to do—that’s what I told you to do, remember?”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “I don’t care if it makes sense to you, Nick. I care about your following orders—my orders.”

  “Other bodies have been collected. I’ve seen them here at the morgue.”

  “Those are bodies that were turned in to us, not bodies we collected ourselves.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “It makes a big difference. You have no idea what’s going on here, do you? Not just in the Ninth Ward, or even in New Orleans—I’m talking about nationwide. It’s those fish-eye glasses of yours: You can’t see a thing unless it’s right under your nose. You can’t see the big picture.”

  “Let me tell you what I can see, Denny: I see maggots—and not the kind that were supposed to be there. The body was still submerged, all except for the abdomen—but I found the maggots in the head area, under an inch or two of water. They were infesting a blunt-trauma wound—the kind that might have been made by a club or a bat.”

  “Or a falling tree limb or flying debris.”

  “Shut up and listen, will you? The maggots were Chrysomya rufifacies—hairy maggot blowflies. The larvae are unmistakable—they’ve got these little fleshy spikes all over their bodies. The hairy maggot blowfly is not an aquatic insect—it’s terrestrial. The adult blowflies that laid their eggs in that wound found the body on land, not in water.”

  “So maybe this guy died on land but the rising water just carried his body away.”

  “That’s possible,” Nick said. “But when did he die? That’s the issue here. A maggot passes through three stages of development before it pupates into an adult—three instars, they’re called, and it takes a specific amount of time for the maggot to reach each instar. Those were third-instar maggots, Denny—it took several days for them to reach that stage of maturity. That guy had been dead for days before we found him, and that means he wasn’t a hurricane victim. He might have died from that blunt-trauma wound—or he might have been murdered.”

  “Or it might have been an accidental death—or even a suicide.”

  “Maybe. An autopsy might tell us more—if the tissues haven’t decomposed too badly. That’s why I brought the body back. ”

  Denny shook his head. “Nick, you’re missing the point.”

  “Missing the point? What other point can there possibly be?”

  “Let me try to explain something to you—something you might not have thought of before: Hurricane Katrina—the city of New Orleans—it’s all a kind of test.”

  “A test of what?”

  “A test of how federal, state, and local authorities respond to a catastrophe after 9/11. Did you catch that last phrase? After 9/11—that means everything. For the last four years, every politician in America has been talking about homeland security and disaster preparedness and emergency contingency plans. Entire agencies have been created since 9/11; DHS didn’t even exist four years ago, remember? Everybody feels like we got caught with our zipper open on 9/11, and no one wants to see it happen again. So after four years and a few billion dollars, what have we learned? Here comes Hurricane Katrina—let’s find out. So everybody and his brother throws a sleeping bag in the trunk of his car and heads for New Orleans—including the media.”

  “The media,” Nick said. “Is that what this is all about?”

  “Give me a little credit, will you? This is not about trying to impress somebody. You know DMORT, you know our policy: the utmost respect for the dead and their families. So when the media showed up and asked to take pictures of bodies, you know what we said? We made a simple request: ‘Please, no photographs of bodies. No coverage of victims.’ That’s all it was, a request—but they ignored us; they did it anyway. You’ve seen the pictures on TV: bodies on rooftops, bodies on sidewalks. So then we made it more than a request—we made it a ‘zero access’ policy.

  “You know what CNN did? They filed suit against FEMA in federal court in Houston—they said we were trying to ‘control content,’ like we had something to hide. Hey, I’ll let anybody look over my shoulder. I’m proud of DMORT, and I’m proud of how we do things around here. We just didn’t want to see people exploited, that’s all—we didn’t want the suffering sensationalized. But the media—hey, they’re just people like everybody else: There’s good ones and there’s bad ones. Some of those vultures would film the autopsies if we’d let them.

  “The point is, now there’s going to be a camera on every corner, watching everything we do. Whatever the camera sees, America sees—and Americans need to see us making every possible attempt to save the living. That’s the test we have to pass here, Nick. Nobody’s going to be satisfied if all we’ve learned to do since 9/11 is collect the dead more efficiently. We’ve got to show people that we’ve learned to protect the living.”

  Nick shook his head. “In a few days the bodies of the hurricane victims will reach a stage of decomposition known as floating decay. That’s what Americans will see then: decaying bodies floating everywhere, because we’ve made no attempt to recover them.”

  “Fair enough,” Denny said. “But right now, we want them to see rescue boats filled with grateful survivors. No bodies—not yet.”

  “How long will this policy remain in effect? When will we be able to start recovering the bodies?”

  “The Corps of Engineers says 80 percent of the city is underwater. There are six thousand homes in your neighborhood alone; in St. Bernard Parish next door, there are forty thousand more. You tell me.”

  Nick took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “The guy was murdered, Denny. I feel it in my gut. I can smell it.”

  “You might be right. It’s a definite possibility.”

  “And you’re willing to let that go?”

  “No—but I’m willing to place other priorities ahead of it.”

  “So we
just let a murderer walk away.”

  “We’re not here to solve the crime problem in New Orleans, Nick. Like you said, they’ve got one of the highest murder rates in the U.S. They’re going to have to take care of that themselves.”

  “They can’t do it without evidence,” Nick said. “The way we’re going, there won’t be any.”

  “I hope you’re wrong about that. But for now, we have to let it go.”

  “That goes against everything in me.”

  “And when you disobey my direct orders, that goes against everything in me. I told you before, Nick, I need you to play ball this time. If the coach shows you the bunt sign, you better bunt. I don’t care if the all-time home-run title is on the line—you bunt. You do it for the good of the team, and you do it because he’s the coach—that’s the bottom line here. Are we clear about this?”

  “Right, Coach.”

  “I’m not kidding around.”

  “I get it, Denny, I get it.”

  Nick stopped in the doorway on the way out. “What happens to the body I brought back today?”

  “You know the process. We’ll do our best to identify it.”

  “And the blowfly larvae I collected?”

  “That’s none of your business. You’re doing search and rescue, remember?”

  Nick reluctantly nodded. “I heard the mayor’s casualty estimate on the way back up here. He figures between two and ten thousand victims. Ten thousand victims . . . it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “How many of them might have been murdered.”

  “Get some sleep, Nick.”

  Nick stepped out of the warehouse and into the darkness. It was almost midnight now; he stopped for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the light. Across the parking lot, he could hear the low rumble of the tractor trailers all lined up and waiting to transport the dead—instead, they were little more than minimotels. Like the man said, he thought, first the living. At least the air-conditioning would feel good tonight.

  “How’d it go in there?”

  Nick turned to find Beth Woodbridge standing behind him.

  “I have to stay after school,” Nick said.

  “You’ve had worse.”

  “I forgot—you keep the school records.”