Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (37 page)

Would the fly have gone into the barrel for any other reason? Not likely—not that species of fly. The deputy killed Teddy, Nick thought. He could smell it. But that’s not enough for Mrs. Guilford—she wants proof.

“But Cain did not master his jealousy; he did not contain his rage. He slew his own brother and thought he could hide his sin from You … From You, who sees all the inward workings of the heart! ‘And the Lord said to Cain, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.“‘”

Nick stopped. “What did you say?”

The old man slowly looked up from his text.

Nick snatched the book from his hand and scanned the facing pages. “Where were you reading?”

“The Book of Genesis,” Dr. Jameson said quietly, “chapter four.”

Nick ran his finger down the text, searching. “Here it is,” he said. “
Vox sanguinis fratris tui clamat ad me de terra
… The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

“What is it?” Kathryn asked.

Nick turned and raced toward the parking lot. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” he called back. “If everything goes well, you’ll have all the proof you need!”

“Nick! Where are you going? Nick!”

Kathryn watched the Dodge belch out of the driveway. She turned back to Dr. Jameson and stared at the leather-bound volume in his hands. “What was it? What did he find?”

The old man smiled. “I believe the young man is going fishing.”

Nick steered his Dodge into the impossibly crowded parking lot at North Carolina State University and double parked behind two university service vehicles. His faculty parking permit had long ago expired, and he had long ago ceased to care. He had come to enjoy this ongoing game of eluding the University Safety Patrol—or the “Parking Gestapo,” as he referred to them. He plucked a small, clear plastic vial from the passenger seat and held it up to the light. He tipped it gently from side to side, searching for its tiny occupant.

He walked briskly across the Brickyard, the central plaza of the North Campus, an acre-wide mosaic of rose-and-cream masonry punctured intermittently by an ancient red oak or a stately wax-leafed magnolia. The western end of the Brickyard was bordered by Gardner Hall, a nondescript monolith of red Carolina brick and limestone-ledged windows, each choked with its own pulsing air conditioner. The second, third, and fourth floors are home to the NCSU Department of Entomology—and on friendlier days, home to Dr. Nick Polchak as well.

The meandering summer students seemed to sense the urgency
in his gait and stepped aside as he strode through the entry door and swung left into the open doorway of the departmental office. A middle-aged woman looked up at him from behind an almond steel-case reception desk.

“Where is Noah?” Nick demanded.

The woman smiled politely. “Why, Nick! It’s been quite a while since—”

“Where is Noah? Does he have a class? Do you have his teaching schedule?”

The smile quickly disappeared from her face. She glanced at the summer schedule tacked to the bulletin board in front of her. “He has ENT 502,” she said dully. “It’s in 3214. Do you want your mail? You’ve got several letters.”

Nick turned without a word and headed for the doorway.

“Nice to see you again,” she called after him.

He stopped in the doorway and turned back, staring at her curiously.

“Who are you?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer he wheeled around again and was gone.

The heels of his loafers clacked and echoed down the hollow corridors of Gardner Hall, largely empty during the hot summer months except for the ever-present graduate students who slumped lethargically in front of computers and laboratory tables. Nick sprinted up a flight of stairs, then down a long, white hallway veined with pipes and ducts and electrical conduit. The floor was a glossy checkerboard of aging brown and black linoleum, and a single row of rectangular fluorescent dashes lined the center of the ceiling. It was an altogether quiet and sterile environment in the summer, and Nick preferred it that way. He enjoyed the teaching profession most when he wasn’t saddled with the annoying distraction of students.

He paused before the door to room 3214 and peered through the translucent glass at the silhouette of a single figure standing motionless behind a lectern. He rapped sharply on the glass, and without waiting for a response, he invited himself in.

The door crashed open, and a half-dozen startled students awakened from their heat-induced torpor. The ancient figure behind the lectern stood oblivious, completely immune to interruption
after more than fifty years of teaching—but as he continued with his lecture on Insect Systematics he gradually became aware that his students’ focus had been thoroughly diverted. He rapped his knuckles sharply on the wooden lectern and flashed his sternest look. A student in the first row helpfully gestured toward the door. The old man reluctantly turned and studied Nick without any sign of recognition whatsoever—and then a light went on somewhere in the vast, endless library of his mind.

He smiled.

“Why Nicholas,” he said with delight.

“Noah.” Nick extended his hand. “I need your help.”

Dr. Noah Ellison was one of the most venerated entomologists in the world. His research on the systematics of medically important arthropod species was legendary. During World War II, Lieutenant Ellison pioneered mosquito-control strategies for the Allied forces in the jungles of the South Pacific, and he almost single-handedly tripled the specimen collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where he was now one of only three curators emeritus. After major field studies and surveys on five continents, he was a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge on the 85,000 species that constitute the order Diptera: mosquitoes, gnats, midges, and—most important to Nick—flies.

Despite the summer heat Noah was dressed as always in a crisp white button-down and scarlet bow tie. Regardless of temperature or humidity, he always dressed the same. He never seemed to chill or sweat; he was timeless, changeless, a mathematical constant in a universe of variables. But age was beginning to take its inevitable toll on Noah Ellison, and in the last few years his colleagues had sadly noticed the first decline in his remarkable intellectual powers. Nick had consulted him many times in his investigations and had always thought of Noah as a kind of timeless reference work that would forever stand on ready reserve. Now Nick thought of him more as a priceless, ancient manuscript, filled with wonders of knowledge and wisdom but rapidly crumbling to dust—which fueled all the more Nick’s sense of urgency in seeking his assistance.

“Class,” Dr. Ellison said warmly, “allow me to introduce Dr. Nicholas Polchak, a colleague and member of our faculty. His face
may be unfamiliar to you because he was recently exiled to the wilderness for dabbling in the black arts. Dr. Polchak, you see, is a forensic entomologist. So be on your guard”—he glowered at the most sleepy-eyed of the students—“or you may turn up as one of Dr. Polchak’s field studies.”

The students smiled and nodded their greeting. Nick ignored them and reached into his pocket for the precious plastic vial.

“Noah, I need your help—with this.”

Noah adjusted his glasses and peered at the impossibly small occupant of the vial.

“Nicholas”—he nodded slightly toward the students—“I’m in the middle of something right now—”

“Noah, Dr. Tedesco is dead. Teddy was murdered, Noah, and I’m after the man who did it. I need you to make a species identification for me—I need to be absolutely certain—and all I can give you to work with is this.”

Nick held up the vial containing a single brown speck the size of a grain of rice—the puparial capsule left behind when the final specimen was released.

As they headed down the hallway toward the stairwell, Nick had to double back twice to keep pace with Noah’s ambling shuffle.

“Let’s take the elevator, Noah—just this once.”

“Nonsense,” Dr. Ellison grumbled and began his slow ascent of the twenty-four steps leading to the fourth floor. The Gardner Hall elevator bore a bronze plaque officially denoting it the “Noah Ellison Memorial Elevator,” in honor of the fact that Noah Ellison had never once in more than fifty years employed it.

Room 4321 housed the Insect Collection, a warehouse of gray metal specimen cabinets and shelves that always smelled of mothballs, necessary to protect the thousands of dried specimens from dermestid attack. Noah seated himself with a sigh at a laboratory table bearing a single gleaming microscope. He removed a neatly folded handkerchief from his shirt pocket and spread it on the table before him.

“Now then”—he turned to Nick—“let’s have the little fellow.”

Nick carefully inverted the plastic vial and the tiny brown speck rolled out into the center of the handkerchief. Noah selected a pair
of light tension forceps and turned to the specimen, widening his eyes and craning his head forward and back in an attempt to bring the diminutive object into focus. His hand shook like the tremens of an alcoholic; it seemed laughable that he would ever be able to pinpoint the single elusive speck. Nick held his breath, with visions of the precious specimen flipping onto the floor and disappearing into a vent or crack. To his astonishment, Noah seized the puparium on his very first attempt.

“You seem nervous, Nicholas,” he said acidly, somehow managing to place the puparium in the exact center of a glass specimen slide. “You must learn to relax if you ever wish to reach my age. Now—tell me about Dr. Tedesco,” he said as he adjusted the microscope.

“A body turned up in the woods near our research station just over a week ago. The local coroner botched the examination completely, and I was hired to do an independent investigation—without the permission of the authorities.”

Noah glanced up. “Nicholas, is this your idea of staying out of trouble?”

“I only had time to collect a handful of specimens. We’ve been rearing them in the lab to identify the species. This one came from an isolated wound above the left eye—the kind of wound a good right cross might make. I have reason to believe that the body was moved postmortem, and I was hoping this specimen might confirm that suspicion.”

“And the mature fly?” Noah peered into the lens again.

“Teddy was on watch. He indicated in his log that eclosion occurred the night before last at about midnight. I arrived at the lab several hours later. The back door was open and the fly was gone. I went straight to Teddy’s trailer—”

“Tragic,” Noah said solemnly. “Dr. Tedesco was a fine systematist and an even better human being. I shall miss him.”

“I believe Teddy identified the species, and I think he made the mistake of notifying the wrong person—someone with a motive to cover it up.”

“Someone quite ignorant of our discipline,” Noah murmured. “Someone under the assumption that species can only be determined by the mature specimen and not by the puparial sac it
leaves behind.” He rocked back from the microscope. “Take a look, Nicholas. Tell me what you see.”

Nick groaned. “Noah, please. I’m in a hurry here.”

“Nicholas,” he repeated sternly, “tell me what you see.”

It was Noah Ellison’s most endearing habit, and his most annoying as well. He was, above all, a teacher—and he never gave a simple or direct answer when he could invite the student to learn for himself. Neatly framed above his office desk were the words of E. M. Forster: “Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.” Nick knew it was useless to resist. Noah moved aside, and the student took his place at the master’s knee.

“Now then. As you know, the puparium is formed by the skin of the third-instar larva. This means that the puparium is a kind of shrink-wrap around the maturing fly which retains many of its identifying features—and some of its own morphological uniquenesses as well. Notice first of all the microsculpturing on the cuticle—quite characteristic for this species.”

“I see it.”

“Look at the bubble membrane. Do you see the little globules? Now examine the dorsal lateral surface of segment five.”

“What about this rupture?”

“It is caused by the aversion of the pupal respiratory horn—its location is significant. Now notice some of the other structural features: the scalelike texturing, the tiny projections and processes—”

“I see it.” Nick looked up. “I see it all, Noah—but I need an identification. What species are we looking at here? Can you tell me?”

The old man closed his eyes for several moments and then slowly began to shake his head.

“I cannot,” he said sadly.

Nick’s heart sank.

Noah leaned forward and spoke almost in a whisper. “It shames me to say this, but—” He stopped and glanced back over his shoulder toward the door. “I am going to have to refer to a book.” He stood up without a word and shuffled out into the hallway, with Nick on his heels.

Three doors down Noah rounded the corner into the tiny room that served as his office. It was sparsely decorated, almost empty except for the tidy metal desk and the vinyl visitor’s armchair resting beside it. The one remarkable feature about the room was the complete absence of paper. It was impossibly neat for the office of a scientist—but that was simply because, over the years, Dr. Ellison had carefully transferred the contents of each book and monograph into his formidable memory.