Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (10 page)

Kathryn kicked him under the table.

“You must be just about blind.” The sheriff nodded at Nick’s glasses.

“Oh, I don’t know. You’d be surprised what I can see.”

The sheriff carefully considered each feature of Nick’s face, then turned his attention to the bizarre polyester anachronism Nick wore as a shirt. His eyes moved slowly from button to button, and he smiled and shook his head slightly at the fresh barbecue stain on one side. When his eyes reached the table, he slowly pushed his chair back, bent over, and stared under the table for a good long time.

“I really should learn to cross my legs,” Nick said to Kathryn.

The sheriff sat upright again and stared silently into the enormous eyes for a full minute.

“Hey Kath,” he said, without removing his eyes from Nick, “I saw a bumper sticker the other day on Denny Brewster’s truck. It said, ‘I don’t care how you do it up North.’”

“He’s had that bumper sticker for ten years,” she hissed.

“I know. It just came to mind.”

“That’s a good one,” Nick said, “but my favorite is, ‘Dixie: Where the family tree does not fork.’”

The sheriff squinted. “What’s with all this Bug Man stuff?”

“True bugs belong to the order Heteroptera. I don’t just study bugs; I study other orders of forensic value as well. Bug Man is a misnomer, really—sort of like the term Law Man.”

“Stop it,” Kathryn broke in. “You two hounds can sniff each other all day if you want to. But the fact still remains, Peter”—she leaned forward and looked directly at him—“Dr. Polchak is working for me.”

The sheriff opened his mouth to speak twice, but each time seemed to think better of it. He slumped back in his chair and stared at her.

“As a private citizen, you have the right to investigate anything you want—within limits.” He turned again to Nick as he said this. “If you were a private investigator, I’d say, ‘You could lose your license doing what you did today.’ But you don’t have
a license, do you? So consider your hand slapped—and consider yourself lucky.” Now he turned back to Kathryn. “Investigate away. It’s your money. But I’m telling you, you’re wasting your time.”

“You seem very certain of that,” Nick said.

“You’re a forensic what? Etymologist?”

“No. That would be the study of word origins—not much help in a case like this. I’m a forensic entomologist.”

“Whatever. I suppose from the forensic part that you’ve investigated a few deaths before.”

“Quite a number.”

“Then you’ll be able to appreciate that there was nothing unusual about this one.”

“Convince me.”

“Male caucasian, thirty. Military background, lots of firearm experience. Gulf veteran, posttraumatic-stress victim with long-term depressive tendencies. A hunter, a loner, disappeared for weeks at a time. Turns up in the woods flat on his back, shot once through the head. The handgun was still in his hand—his handgun. No note, but no indications of struggle or conflict—no indications of anything.”

“Did you do a gunpowder residue test on the hand?”

The sheriff paused. “Yeah,” he said. “It was negative.”

Nick raised one eyebrow, and Kathryn looked quickly back at Peter. “When a handgun is fired,” the sheriff explained, “it sometimes leaves a residue of gunpowder on the hand that fired it—sometimes. I tested Jim’s right hand—no gunpowder.”

Kathryn’s eyes widened with excitement.

“But,” the sheriff interrupted, “the better the weapon, the cleaner it fires. Jim had a Beretta nine-millimeter—a fairly clean gun. I didn’t expect to find any gunpowder.”

“So you ran a neutron activation analysis to make sure,” Nick continued.

The sheriff rolled his eyes and sank back into his chair. “Look, I’m the sheriff of a little county with an even smaller budget, which has to cover everything from crime-scene investigation to printing posters that say, ‘Clean up after your dog.’ You got any idea what an NAA costs?”

This time Nick turned to Kathryn to explain. “No matter how clean the weapon, it may leave microscopic traces of barium and antimony on the hand—traces that can’t be detected by traditional tests. What the sheriff is telling us is that he’s very certain about the cause of death—as certain as his budget will allow.”

“I would have run that test no matter what it cost,” the sheriff protested, “if there had been any indication that something was out of line. The coroner checked everything—he says suicide. I talked to Jim’s sister—she buys it too. I asked some questions around town—nobody is surprised, nobody has a doubt—except one person.” He looked directly at Kathryn as he said it. “I’m telling you, there was nothing out of the ordinary, and there was no reason to do any more than I did.”

There was a long silence that followed as the impact of the sheriff’s words sunk in. It was Nick who broke the silence.

“How long had Jim McAllister been using cocaine?”

Kathryn’s mouth dropped open, and she began to blurt out an angry and absolute denial—but she was instantly aware of the silence from the chair beside her. She turned to Peter, and one look at his face told her that the unthinkable was quite true. Even worse, it told her that Peter had probably known about it for quite some time—and for some reason had kept it from her.

Peter could not meet Kathryn’s eyes. He turned to Nick instead. “How did you—”

“Bubba told me,” Nick said, holding up a container with a single plump white maggot within—by far the largest of all the specimens. “Bubba is probably an ordinary blow fly or flesh fly larva, but he is not of ordinary size. An average larva at this stage of development should be about ten millimeters in length. Bubba is close to twenty. I removed him from the nasal septum. The only thing that can account for his accelerated growth is the presence of cocaine in the tissues where he was feeding. Your friend must have ingested within several hours of his death—and I think it’s safe to assume that it probably wasn’t the first time.”

Kathryn continued to stare at Peter, searching his face for some excuse, some explanation.

“It … started in the Gulf,” he stammered. “It wasn’t just
Jimmy—it happened to a lot of boys going into combat for the first time. He thought it would stop after the war. It didn’t …”

His voice trailed off. He looked up into Kathryn’s eyes, but the intensity of her stare drove him away again. Even as a child her pale green eyes could burn like emerald fire when they were fueled by anger or injustice. In this case it was both.

Kathryn sat in stunned silence, feeling her face and neck grow redder by the minute. The entire reason for this investigation, which flew in the face of all the available evidence and expert opinion, was her unshakable conviction that Jimmy McAllister would never take his own life. But two minutes ago, it had also been her unshakable conviction that Jimmy would never have used cocaine. If she was so badly mistaken about one part of his character, could she be wrong about another? Her car, her clothes, her mortgage; the fear, the exhaustion, the utter humiliation—had it all been for nothing? Was she nothing more than a stupid schoolgirl acting on an emotional impulse, too simple and naive to accept how the world really works? The tears welling up within her made her feel all the more childish and silly, and she drove them back fiercely with anger and contempt.

“I need some time alone,” she said quietly, rising from her chair. The sheriff rose with her and reached out to put his hand on her shoulder, but she pulled away.

Nick watched until the door closed with a jingle behind her. The sheriff slowly sat down again to face him.

The waitress returned with a brown paper bag rolled down tight and sealed with a clothespin. She opened her mouth to speak, but noting the look on the sheriff’s face, she simply set the bag in the center of the table and backed away.

“That was cute, Doc. Real cute. You remind me of one of those psychic hotline people. You got nothing real to offer so you toss out a bone—that cocaine thing—just to keep her on the line, just to keep her believing—just to keep her paying.”

“You should have told her.”

“Why? What would it have proved? That Jimmy’s depression might have been chemically induced? That his suicide might have been encouraged by the drugs? Let me tell you, his weirdness started a long time before the coke.”

“You should have told her.”

“What do you know about it? Look”—he lowered his voice, glancing around for listening ears—“we all grew up here together—Jimmy, me, and Kath. We were family—about the only family any of us had. She loved Jim like a brother. What good would it do to drag his memory through the dirt by bringing up a drug problem? But I guess you took care of that.”

“So her ‘brother’ had a serious drug problem, and you kept it from her for almost a decade? That’s some family you’ve got there.”

The sheriff looked down at his coffee cup. “Jim made me swear. He would have died before he let her find out.”

“Looks like he did.”

“He thought he could beat it on his own—and he did, a couple of times. He went through rehab a couple of years after the Gulf. He was clean for a year, maybe two. Then he went on it again. He’d kick it for a while, then go back. After a while even I didn’t know how he was doing.”

“Now you know.”

“The point is”—the sheriff leaned in for emphasis—“I knew Jim McAllister since he was a kid. I knew him. He came from one suck-egg family—if you don’t believe me, go meet his twisted sister, Amy. Jim started showing signs of depression real early, and I’m telling you, his depression led to his drug problem and not the other way around. He was headed for a sudden stop anyway. Some of us saw it coming a long time ago.”

“But not Mrs. Guilford.”

“She only saw the good side. That’s all she wanted to see. It’s a bad habit of hers. I wanted to protect his memory for her, so … I kept the cocaine thing quiet.”

“And as a result, she believed that little Jimmy could never have done anything as nasty as suicide. And she hired me to prove it.”

“I guess I owe you an apology for that,” the sheriff conceded. “But at least we know that all this is no longer necessary.” He gestured to the pile of containers still scattered across the table.

“How so?”

The sheriff hesitated. “The cocaine. I told you that—”

“You told me that his depression led to his drug problem and
not the other way around. That means that the cocaine had nothing to do with his death—so nothing new has been introduced into the equation. Mrs. Guilford will still want to know what happened to her friend.”

The sheriff stared blankly at Nick for a long time.

“Don’t take her money,” he said at last.

“Excuse me?”

“I assume she’s offered to pay you. How much? Five thousand? More?”

“That’s between me and my client.”

“Don’t take her money,” he said again. “No matter what you may think, Doc, she’s not a rich woman. She works at a bank, for crying out loud. If she’s offering you that kind of money, she’s putting her house in hock, I can tell you that. Don’t take it.”

Nick leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “Ten minutes ago she couldn’t believe that Jimmy would kill himself, because she knew Jimmy. Now—thanks to you—she isn’t sure what she knows. Unless I miss my guess, she’ll still want to do everything in her power to find out anything she can.”

Nick began to carefully place each container back into the knapsack, followed by the wrinkled paper bag.

“You know”—the sheriff nodded toward the knapsack—“I could confiscate all this and put an end to it right now.”

“But you won’t,” Nick said, smiling, “because she might not forgive you for it. And I have a feeling that’s a risk you’re not willing to take.”

“I won’t let Kathryn be taken advantage of,” the sheriff said without emotion. “I will do everything in my power to protect her.”

“Are you sure it’s Kathryn you’re trying to protect?”

Nick slung the pack over one shoulder and stepped toward the door. He stopped and turned back to the sheriff.

“I intend to take her money,” he said. “And I intend to earn it.”

From each plastic container Nick selected two or three plump maggots, carefully avoiding both the largest and smallest specimens, and dropped them into a small vial of 70 percent isopropyl alcohol to preserve them. Each died almost instantly and floated softly to the bottom. He capped each vial tightly and labeled the victims exactly as he had designated their living counterparts: left ocular, right temporal, left temporal … He treated the hungry survivors in each plastic container to several strips of raw liver and transferred the lot to the wire shelves of the large chrome and glass unit in the corner of the room.

It was after midnight now, and Nick was still hard at work under the glaring blue fluorescent lights of his office lab. He sat down at the gray-and-white dissecting microscope and maneuvered a glass slide directly under the lens. No sooner had he reached for the focus knob than the exterior door to his left suddenly swung open. There in the darkness stood the exhausted figure of Kathryn Guilford.

“Close the door,” Nick said without looking up.

“Are you worried that I might let out some of your precious bugs?”