Nick of Time (A Bug Man Novel)

by Tim Downs

  “Hold it,” Nick said. “Something’s wrong.”

  35

  The smile faded from Donovan’s face. “C’mon, Nick, you’re not gonna be a bad sport about this, are you?

  We did this whole thing for you—lighten up.”

  “No—something’s wrong.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I went to that lake house and I looked at that bedroom—I had a copy of one of the crime scene photos, so I knew the disposition of the body. The body was found in close proximity to a wall, so I pulled off the baseboard and ripped up the carpet.”

  “You what? Where was the owner when you were trashing his house?”

  “He was standing right there.”

  “And he was okay with that?”

  “Better to seek forgiveness later than to ask permission in advance,” Nick said. “I call that the ‘Polchak Principle.’ ”

  “Why would you tear up the guy’s wall?”

  “To search for puparia, of course—and I found them. That’s when I first suspected something was wrong.”

  “Whoa,” Brenton said. “I’m a shooter, remember? Can somebody tell me what we’re talking about here?”

  “Certain species of flies are attracted to human remains,” Nick explained. “The females lay their eggs in decomposing tissues so the developing maggots will have a readily available source of protein. When the maggots are ready to pupate into adults, they crawl away from the body and look for a secluded spot where they’ll be safe from predators—in this case, the joint between the floor and the bedroom wall, because the wall was the only place close enough for them to hide. That’s why I pulled off the baseboard—to look for the puparial casings they left behind.”

  “Wow,” Brenton said. “They told me you were weird, but I had no idea.”

  “I took the puparia to an entomology lab at Penn State and identified them. I found only one species present: Fannia scalaris, the common latrine fly.” He looked at Pete Boudreau. “Latrine flies are Muscids, Pete—and you know what that means.”

  “Maybe Pete knows,” Donovan said, “but those of us who don’t speak Latin have no idea what you’re talking about. Would you mind translating?”

  “Different species of flies are attracted to different things. Calliphorids and Sarcophagids—those are the blowflies and flesh flies you normally find on bodies—they’re attracted to decomposing tissues. But the latrine fly isn’t interested in decomposing tissues—it’s only attracted to feces and urine.”

  Nick stopped to allow the significance of that revelation to sink in, but Pete was the only one who showed any sign of comprehension—so Nick continued. “Feces and urine—that means the old man had been neglected for quite some time before his death—I estimate about six or seven days.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because the flies need at least that much time before they begin to pupate. Are you getting it now? The latrine flies were attracted to the old man’s soiled body while he was still alive. That’s when they laid their eggs on him, and that’s when they did most of their development. The old man fell to the floor shortly before he died—that’s when the maggots left the body and crawled off to the wall to hide.”

  “How do you know the flies didn’t land on him after he died?” Yanuzzi asked.

  “Because the autopsy report said the old man had only been dead for a couple of days, but it takes eight or nine days for a latrine fly to develop from an egg to the pupal stage. The old man had been dead for a couple of days before they found him; subtract those two days, and bingo—the eggs must have been laid on him at least six or seven days earlier. That was while he was still alive—and that’s definite proof of neglect.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” Yanuzzi asked.

  “Because you made me think you were behind it,” Nick said.

  “Wasn’t that the whole idea of your ‘conspiracy angle’?”

  “Unbelievable,” Yanuzzi mumbled. “I dig up some dead-end cold case nobody ever made any headway on, and you manage to solve the thing in two days.”

  “He has a habit of doing that,” Donovan said.

  “So the nurse really did neglect the old guy—and you can prove it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I guess I’ll have to look up that nurse and ask him a few questions.”

  “Don’t bother,” Nick said. “He’s dead.”

  Yanuzzi looked at him. “How do you know?”

  “Because I went up to see him this evening while you guys were making party arrangements. He has a place up in Honesdale. I knocked on the door, but—”

  “Don’t tell me,” Yanuzzi said. “Nobody answered, so you let yourself in.”

  “No, I walked around to the back of the house and looked in through a window. I saw him slumped over the kitchen table with his head in a pool of blood—then I let myself in. Somebody shot him in the right temporal lobe and then made a very clumsy attempt to cover it up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I checked the skull. No contact wound—the gun wasn’t pressing against the skin when it was fired. There were powder burns, but they were too widely dispersed; my guess is that the gun was fired from at least six inches away, maybe even a foot— and that’s almost physically impossible to do by yourself. Even the position of the body was suspicious—neatly slumped over the table like that. In an actual suicide the impact of the bullet against the skull would have very likely knocked the body sideways out of the chair. People are such amateurs when it comes to staging a suicide; I should really do a seminar sometime.”

  “Any idea how long he’d been dead?”

  “I found blowfly eggs around the entry wound and in the corners of the eye sockets, but none of them had had time to hatch despite the warm temperatures. Judging by that and the general appearance of the body, I’d say he’s been dead no more than two days—and I think we all know who did it.”

  The men all looked at one another, but no one said anything.

  Nick rolled his eyes. “I’m glad you guys are so good at party planning, because I don’t think you have much of a future in law enforcement.”

  Donovan groaned. “I hate it when he starts gloating.”

  “This case has been dead for three years,” Nick said, “and suddenly someone has motivation to commit murder? Why now? Because I stirred things up, that’s why—I uncovered evidence that could directly implicate the home-care nurse in the old man’s death. But why would anyone want to kill the nurse?

  The only possible reason would be if the nurse could implicate someone else—someone who shared responsibility for the old man’s death.”

  “Who?”

  “The only one besides the five of us who knows about those puparia is the current owner of that lake house—Duncan Malone. He was standing right there when I pulled back the carpet and found them.”

  “But why would Malone want to kill that nurse?”

  “Because he knew the evidence would point to the nurse, and he knew the nurse would point the finger back at him.”

  “For what?”

  “For hiring the nurse to help kill the old man—to speed up the old man’s demise by neglecting his care.”

  “Why would Malone want the old man dead?”

  “Cui bono? ” Nick said. “That’s the question I always ask about your species.”

  Brenton looked at the others. “Our species?”

  “I’ll explain it later,” Donovan said. “Go on, Nick.”

  “It means ‘To whose benefit?’ What would Duncan Malone stand to gain from the previous owner’s death? Answer: the lake house. Malone told me himself that he got the house for a bargain from the old man’s estate. Maybe he approached Hotchkiss while he was still alive; maybe the old man refused to sell, so Malone figured he’d have better luck dealing with the old man’s estate. And there’s something else: Malone’s strapped for cash. He managed to come up with the purchase price,
but now he’s out of money—and I noticed that the lots on either side of him are in development. I’ll bet that property came with the lake house; I’ll bet Malone’s the one doing the developing. I think Malone saw this whole thing as one big real-estate opportunity:

  He’d get the house of his dreams, he could develop the lots on either side, and then he’d have the house and money too. There was only one thing standing in his way: the previous owner, George Hotchkiss—and I think he hired the nurse to help with that little problem. Not by killing Hotchkiss himself—that would have been too obvious—but by denying him basic care to accelerate his decline.”

  “Can you prove Malone’s involvement?” Donovan asked.

  “We’ve got means, motive, and opportunity,” Nick said. “And more than that, we’ve got one very poorly staged suicide—I’ll bet Malone left evidence all over the place. That’s one murder they’ll be able to pin on him, and that one will explain his involvement with Hotchkiss.”

  No one said anything for a moment . . .

  And then for the first time that evening Nick raised his own bottle of beer into the air. “Now I’d like to propose a toast,” he said. “To the unsung heroes of the evening, to the little guys who spend their lives in our garbage and latrines, Fannia scalaris, whose flat little bristly bodies make positive identification possible.”

  “You’re welcome,” Donovan said.

  “Lighten up, Donovan—it’s a party, remember?”

  They all laughed again—this time all except for Ed Yanuzzi.

  Donovan slapped him on the shoulder. “What’s the matter, Ed? You look like you swallowed one of Nick’s flies.”

  Yanuzzi said only one word in reply . . .

  “Alena.”

  36

  Malone kept the gun pointed in Alena’s direction while he pulled back the bedroom blind and looked out at the sky.

  “What do you keep looking at?” Alena asked from the edge of the bed.

  “Shut up.”

  “You’re waiting until it gets dark, aren’t you?”

  Malone turned and leveled the gun at Alena’s head. “Don’t push it, lady. It wouldn’t take much for me to pop you right here.”

  “You’re not that dumb,” Alena said. “Shoot me here and you’ll get blood all over the place—you can clean it up all you want, but they’ll still find traces. That’s why you’re waiting until it gets dark—you can’t afford to take a chance like that.”

  Malone said nothing.

  Through the window Alena heard a high-pitched whine coming from the driveway. “Those are my dogs,” she said.

  “They’ve been cooped up in that truck for hours—they need air.”

  “How stupid do you think I am?” Malone grumbled.

  “I’ve been asking myself that question. You know, when you first pulled that gun on me I couldn’t figure you out. So an old man dropped dead in your bedroom—what’s it to you? So some home-care nurse didn’t take care of him—that’s his problem, not yours. But then I realized it must be your problem too. I couldn’t figure out what this whole thing had to do with you . . . Then I remembered what you told me: That old man was the guy who owned this house before you did. He died, and you ended up with the house . . . Maybe that home-care nurse didn’t take care of him on purpose—maybe that was your bright idea. Maybe that’s why you can’t have anybody find out about the nurse.”

  Malone pulled back the blind again.

  Alena could see that the sky was completely dark now. “Let me know when he gets here,” she said.

  “When who gets here?”

  “Sheriff Yanuzzi. I came from his office, you know—I told him I was coming here.”

  “Yeah—he seems real worried about you.”

  “Why should he be? He doesn’t know what you did—not yet. But when I don’t come back, where do you think he’s gonna look first?”

  “If he does, he won’t find anything,” Malone said.

  “What about my truck?”

  “It’s a big lake.”

  Alena’s face dropped. “You let my dogs go first,” she said.

  “Just take them out in the woods somewhere and let them go— they won’t hurt you unless I’m there to tell them to. Promise me—promise you’ll let them go.”

  “I’m not promising anything—now shut up.”

  Alena suddenly stood up.

  “Hey!” Malone barked. “Sit down!”

  “Why should I? You’re planning to kill me no matter what I do—why should I make it easy on you? Maybe I should just walk right out that door—then you’d have to shoot me, right here in your precious little lake house. Then they’d catch you for sure, because you can’t hide bad blood.”

  Alena took a step toward the door.

  Malone raised the gun. “Stop or I’ll drop you where you stand.”

  Alena looked at him. “I wonder if you would . . . See, you didn’t kill that old man yourself—sure, you made it happen, but you didn’t pull the trigger. There’s a big difference between pulling the trigger yourself and getting somebody else to do it for you . . . I wonder if you’re that kind of guy?”

  She took one more step.

  “I’ll kill you,” he said. “I’m not kidding around.”

  “So what? You’ll do it anyway.”

  Another step . . .

  “I’ll kill your dogs,” he said.

  She stopped.

  “You take one more step and I swear, I’ll shove a rag in the gas tank and set the thing on fire—they’ll roast like pigs in the back of that pickup.”

  Alena turned and looked into his eyes; they were dark and steady and there was something there she had seen many times before—it was the look a wounded dog gave you when you made the mistake of backing it into a corner. But there was something even worse in his eyes—something she had seen in shelter dogs that had been horribly abused, a look that told her the dog’s spirit had been broken beyond all hope of redemption.

  “You’d do it,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes—you’re that kind of animal.”

  “You better believe it.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “Now we go for a little walk,” he said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just walk ahead of me; you’ll know when we get there.”

  Malone guided her through the house and into the garage where he took a pointed shovel from a tool rack and handed it to her. “Carry it in one hand,” he said, “and don’t even think about it.”

  “Are we doing some gardening?”

  “You might say that.”

  He opened the garage door and waved her out into the driveway; the sky was dark but clear, and there was a threequarter moon just above the horizon that cast long shadows but still provided adequate light. Alena spotted her truck parked about fifty feet to the left and she immediately thought about swinging the shovel at her captor and bolting for the truck—she wondered what her chances would be of making it to the tailgate and releasing the dogs before Malone shot her dead. The closeness of the truck triggered a rush of panic and desperation shouting to her that she had nothing to lose, but Malone was only a few feet behind her and she knew she wouldn’t make it ten feet before he put a bullet in the middle of her back—so she just kept walking. Alena didn’t mind the thought of dying, but she wasn’t thinking about herself right now—she was thinking about her dogs. She knew Malone would torch that truck just as he had threatened, or maybe just roll the whole thing into the lake and let them all drown—and that was a thought Alena couldn’t bear. Her only chance of saving them was to save herself, and that wasn’t going to happen if she did something stupid.

  “How far are we going?” she called over her shoulder in a loud, clear voice.

  The three dogs responded to the sound of their master’s voice by beginning to bark—a soprano, a tenor, and a bass.

  “Shut them up,” Malone said.

  “They only respond to visual commands,” Alena sai
d. “I’ll open the truck.”

  “Just keep walking—and keep your big mouth shut.”

  They turned right and headed toward the trees at the edge of the property. When they stepped into the shadow of the pines the night suddenly became twice as dark. She wondered if this was where he was planning to do it—here in the darkness of the woods. She could hear his footsteps close behind her, crunching on the twigs and pine straw that surrounded the trees. She could feel his eyes on her body, and she couldn’t help wondering what part of her he watched as they silently made their way together. She walked stiffly with the muscles of her back tensed—as if that might be enough to stop a bullet. She found herself taking a breath and holding it as long as she could, anticipating the moment when a gunshot would shatter the night. She wondered if she would hear the blast before she felt the bullet, or if both would seem to happen at the same instant—as if the bullet were an explosion going off inside her body. He’s going to do it now, a voice inside her shouted. No, he’ll do it now. No—now! Alena couldn’t decide what made her hate Malone more—that he was going to kill her, or that he was taking so long to do it.

  “Was it worth it?” she said over her shoulder.

  There was a long silence before Malone said, “Was what worth it?”

  “The house.”

  Another pause. “He was an old man. He was dying anyway—I just put him out of his misery.”

  “I’ll bet he appreciated that.”

  “He didn’t belong there—he couldn’t enjoy it. Nicest place on the lake and all he did was lie in bed all day—one little window and it didn’t even face the water. Somebody shoulda put him in a home a long time ago.”

  “You couldn’t just wait for him to die?”

  “The economy was bad—I needed him to sell before the housing market turned around. It was just business.”

  “Remind me not to do business with you,” she said.

  They reached the edge of the trees and stepped out into the clearing of the adjacent lot. The land sloped sharply from left to right in the direction of the lake; in the center of the lot Alena saw a yawning rectangular excavation carved into the hillside. She recognized the place—it was the same lot where she had stopped to photograph the bug things earlier that day. The bulldozer and backhoe were silent now, hunched like sleeping dinosaurs around a cave.