by Tim Downs
“Another one? Am I interfering with your recruiting? I’m so sorry!”
“No need to apologize.”
They had crossed a narrow meadow by this time and began to follow a dirt path that curved back into the woods.
“Are these other clients paying you more than I am?”
“They’re not paying me at all.”
“Then why are you charging me?”
“I’m not charging you. You offered to pay me, remember? Besides, you have the means to pay for my services and they don’t.”
“So I’m subsidizing them?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“Look,” she said, working hard to catch her breath, “I’m the paying customer here, so I come first. That’s only fair.”
“It’s not that simple. My other clients have issues that require my ongoing attention.”
Nick stopped suddenly and swung the knapsack from his shoulder. He pointed to the ground. Beside the path in a sparse patch of weeds lay a colossal, pinkish-gray lump—the cadaver of an enormous sow. Its mottled skin was stretched taut and almost shiny, causing each hair to stand out like a tiny flagpole. At one end the swollen black tongue protruded from the mouth; at the other, the intestines bulged partially from the anus. And everywhere there were flies—black, blue, and iridescent green—circling, feeding, mating, and laying eggs on this most sumptuous of feasts.
“It’s a pig!” Kathryn said in disgust, clapping one hand over her nose and mouth.
“Very good,” Nick said. “You know your mammals.” He bent down, pulled up a handful of grass and tossed it into the air. “I recommend that you stand upwind—over there.”
Kathryn needed no urging, remembering the lesson she learned just a day ago at Schroeder’s Funeral Home.
Nick walked slowly around the immense form. Beside the head a small white sign had been posted, noting the date of acquisition less than a week ago and bearing the name Porky. Below the name were penciled the words, “That’s all, folks!”
“Is this what happens to all of your clients?” Kathryn shivered.
“Only the ones who don’t pay. She came to us about a week ago from a small hog farm near here. She’s much larger than most of the ones I get—I like them at about fifty pounds, but you take what you can get. Sad story, really. She was getting old, had a lot of pain, but she had become a kind of family pet—so no Pig Pickin’ Buffet for her. The farmer couldn’t afford to keep her anymore, so I told the family I’d take her. I brought her here to this lovely spot—and then I shot her.”
Kathryn grimaced.
“I sedated her first,” he said, “if that helps any. Less than a minute after she fell, the first blow fly arrived—less than a minute. A gravid female, so heavy she could barely fly, looking desperately for some place to oviposit her eggs. She’d been hovering in the air for hours, head into the wind, sniffing, sensing, waiting. Suddenly a cluster of scent molecules from the bullet wound came to her. She found her nursery! She followed the scent cluster by cluster to the source a mile away—maybe more. She landed. She knew she had found the right neighborhood, but now she had to decide on a house. The bullet wound was nice but it was so exposed—no trees, no shade. She checked the anal area. Not bad. She was tempted to stay—but she wanted something better for her kids, so she decided to check out a nostril. It’s warm, it’s dark, it’s moist; impressive entryway, cathedral ceilings, large basement. Perfect! She was home at last, and not a moment too soon. She began to drop her eggs—a long line of tiny white specks, sort of like grated cheese. She did her job well, she fulfilled her biological destiny. She made sure her kids would grow up in a decent neighborhood.
“Within minutes there were dozens more. Soon there were hundreds, then thousands. The first to arrive were all friends and relatives—blow flies and flesh flies like the calliphorids and sarcophagids, maybe even a few Muscidae—common houseflies. But then strangers began to arrive. One day she looked across the street, and her next-door neighbors were Staphylinidae—rove beetles—and rumor has it they feed on the eggs and larvae of other species. Then things really started to go bad; the parasites moved in. Ants came in and carried off her eggs. Wasps laid their eggs among her larvae, and when they hatch, guess who’s coming to dinner?
“Soon the place is a ghetto,” he said with increasing passion, pacing and gesturing as he spoke. “All the decent housing is taken. There’s crowding and tension and fighting everywhere. As time passes the whole place begins to dry up. As the tissues continue to decompose they emit different odors, attracting new and unfamiliar species. Soon all the blow flies will be gone—moved out to the suburbs. A few carrion beetles will stick around to carry off what’s left of the tissue and bury it nearby, but soon there will be nothing but dermestids like common clothing moths to feed on the hair and hide. By the time they’ve all finished and moved on, this body will be reduced to nothing but a pile of bones and barely enough skin to make a football. Less than a week ago dear Porky departed our world—but she has become an entire world to thousands of others.”
Nick shook his head in wonder. “Planet Porky.”
His lecture finished, he looked silently at Kathryn for some response, some indication that she, too, cherished the biological marvel that lay before her.
“You,” she said slowly, “are a very sick man.”
“Mrs. Guilford”—Nick gestured to the swollen mass before him—“this is how a forensic entomologist learns his trade.”
“By shooting helpless pigs?”
“By studying faunal succession—the natural order in which different species of arthropods occupy a decomposing body. From studies like this we know the exact order of succession—and we also know exactly how long it takes each species to lay eggs, hatch, and develop to maturity.”
Kathryn shook her head. “This is what you do? You go around dropping dead pigs off everywhere, then come back to watch them rot?”
“The hog farmers lost a hundred thousand of them in the floods after Hurricane Floyd. I can get one for you cheap.”
Nick removed the notebook from his knapsack and jotted a few notations while Kathryn glanced at the moldering cadaver in disgust.
“So this is your other client,” she grumbled.
“This is one of them.” He slung the knapsack over his shoulder again. “Would you like to meet the other?”
As they continued down the path, Kathryn glanced from one side of the road to the other, studying each passing clump of brush or grass for a telltale patch of pink or gray …
“If you’re searching for a body, don’t look down,” Nick said. “Look up.”
Kathryn raised her eyes and looked ahead down the path. About twenty yards ahead the path came to a rise and then disappeared. Just over the rise, to the left, a black cloud of flies hovered in silent circles.
The cadaver lay under a tree in a patch of tall grass. As they approached, Kathryn caught a glimpse of the now familiar pinkish-gray skin stretched taut.
“We try to deposit them in different environments to study the effects of temperature and exposure,” Nick said as they waded into the grass. “Porky was deposited in full sunlight. This one we placed in the shade. Someday I’d like to study one left in the trunk of a car. That’s where many murder victims are discovered.”
They stood directly over the cadaver now. It had the same mottled and swollen appearance, but Kathryn noticed it was much smaller and somehow different in proportion. Her eye followed the bloated contour of the body. The right end was partially covered by the tattered remains of a flannel shirt.
Kathryn gasped and stumbled back out of the grass onto the path behind her.
“That … That’s a man!”
“That was a man.” Nick walked around the cadaver, pushing back the tall grass to expose the body to full view. Just like the sow, a small white sign had been posted to the left bearing the date of acquisition, just over two weeks ago. Beneath it was adhered a blue-and-white nametag that
read, “HELLO! My name is—” with the name Bob handwritten below. In the corner was a round, black sticker festooned with pink confetti that said, “This is what 50 looks like!”
“How did you … where did you …?”
“Igor brings them to me from the graveyard,” Nick said casually—then seemed to reconsider his choice of words. “Actually, they’re very difficult to obtain.”
“But how—”
“I request unclaimed bodies through the medical examiner’s office in Chapel Hill. There’s tremendous demand and a very limited supply. Sometimes there’s an organ donor whose cause of death renders his organs unusable, or a migrant worker whose family never learns of his death. On rare occasions there’s an executed criminal. Everybody wants them. You just have to wait in line.”
“Thanks. I’ll take a number.”
Kathryn stood squinting, slowly shaking her head from side to side. What was she to think of this man? A moment ago he was just a perverse and twisted little boy playing with his cameras and containers and tweezers. But with each new revelation he seemed more sordid, more despicable, like a spook house that grew more macabre around every bend. This was not just another experiment. This was not just another geriatric sow.
“Look at it this way,” Nick said. “Bob here donated his body to science. But science didn’t want it—at least, not the traditional sciences. So Bob agreed to join me here to advance the emerging science of forensic entomology.”
“Did Bob really agree to join you here? Did you say to Bob before he died, ‘I’m going to throw your body on the ground and let insects consume you’?”
“Of course not—no more than a medical school would say to him, ‘We’re going to let ignorant first-year students cut you apart to see what you’re made of.’”
“I just don’t think he would have wanted to end up like … this.”
“Like what?” Nick said in disdain. “Decomposed? Decayed? Rotten, putrid, rancid, and rank? What is this ‘thing’ your species has about death? Everybody ends up like this, Mrs. Guilford.” He swept the tall grass to one side and pointed to the swollen abdomen. “This is what happens when you die. Bacteria in the intestine begin to multiply and consume you from the inside out—first the intestines and the blood and then the surrounding organs. These runaway organisms produce sulfides—gas—that bloats the abdomen and stretches the skin until it splits. If you’re here at just the right time, you can actually hear it rip.” He released the grass and stepped onto the path in front of Kathryn.
“The way I see it, you’ve got two choices: You can be eaten by little bugs, or you can be eaten by big bugs. Either way, you’re just shoofly pie.”
“Nobody should end up as—what did you call it? Shoofly pie. This man deserved a decent burial.”
Nick let out a laugh. “What do you think is different if they place you in a shiny copper coffin with a satin lining? Do you think biology stops if they powder your face and fill you with embalming fluid? Did you know that coffins are designed to burp—to let out the gas that’s produced inside? They bury the bugs with you, Mrs. Guilford. You can slow things down, but you still end up like this. Insects are just nature’s way of speeding things along. The arthropod motto is, ‘Don’t throw it away—recycle.’”
He took out his notebook once again and began to make notes. Kathryn glared at him as he finished his observations and began to repack his bag. It wasn’t the nature of his study that bothered her most, it was his annoying flippancy, his arrogant callousness toward the objects of his study—toward aging sows, and unwanted old men, and Jimmy McAllister, and a young woman with a pathological fear of insects—toward life and death itself.
Nick swung the knapsack over his shoulder and started down the path again. As he passed, Kathryn said, “I just don’t think you should treat a human being this way.”
He looked around in mock confusion. “What human being?”
“That human being.”
“That? That’s bug food, Mrs. Guilford—nothing more—and the sooner you understand that, the sooner we can get to work.”
Is this the meadow?”
“Yes ma’am,” Casey said. “That’s the spot where me ’n Griff found him over there.” The young man pointed to a rise where a tangle of yellow ribbon fluttered between sticks placed in some unrecognizable geometric pattern. “You need anything else?”
“No thanks,” Kathryn said. “We can find our way back from here. Oh, there is one more thing”—She tucked a twenty-dollar bill into his breast pocket and straightened his shirt—“Mr. Schroeder doesn’t need to know you helped me today—does he?”
Casey grinned, nodded to Kathryn and Dr. Tedesco, and headed back into the woods.
Dr. Tedesco dropped two bulky black valises and pulled a white handkerchief from his shirt pocket.
“How much farther?” he wheezed, dabbing at his face and forehead with the folded cloth. “It seems like we’ve been walking for an eternity.”
“Why don’t you give me one of those?” She picked up one of the black valises and turned toward the open meadow.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve never truly been a field man. I’m really more of a researcher—a taxonomist, to be precise. Give me a collection of third-instar larvae and a dissecting microscope and I’m as happy as—”
“A bug?” Kathryn finished the sentence for him.
“All of this—the hiking, the exploring, the collecting—this is really Dr. Polchak’s forte.”
As they walked easily across the open meadow Kathryn looked at him. “May I call you Teddy?”
“I suppose it’s inevitable.”
“Would you rather I didn’t? It’s just that I heard Dr. Polchak call you Teddy.”
“That was his little invention. Nicholas just loves to name things. I suppose there’s a little taxonomist in his blood as well.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Eustatius,” he said under his breath.
“I’m sorry?”
“So am I. It means peaceful. My family is Pennsylvania Dutch.”
“Then you’re from Pittsburgh, like Dr. Polchak?”
“What makes you think he’s from Pittsburgh?” he said with a wink. “Haven’t you noticed? Even his honeybees wear black and gold.”
They arrived at the perimeter and set down their equipment. Kathryn wasn’t sure what she had expected to find at a death scene, but she was surprised at how completely ordinary everything appeared. In the center of the ring was a small depression where the grass was matted and yellow, indicating the original location of the body—but nothing more to indicate that someone she loved had died here only a week ago.
“Nicholas and I met in graduate school at Penn State,” Teddy said, unpacking the first of his valises. “We were both studying entomology, and it was there that we both became interested in the forensic aspects of our field. That’s when Nicholas and I became friends.”
“Dr. Polchak has a friend?”
Teddy smiled. “Have you ever observed a drone fly? It isn’t likely—but if you had, you probably would have thought it was a wasp. A wasp makes a distinctive sound. The buzz of a wasp wing registers at about 150 hertz. The drone fly has learned to mimic the wasp’s sound almost exactly—147 hertz, to be precise. Listening to them, you cannot tell them apart. The drone fly sounds like a wasp, and he acts like a wasp—but he is in fact a harmless fly. He has no stinger. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this field, it’s that appearances are often deceiving. That is the first principle of taxonomy: Nevermind what a thing appears to be—what is its true nature?”
Kathryn lifted one leg and began to step across the yellow police line.
“Wait! Don’t!”
“What’s wrong? Aren’t we allowed?”
“We are allowed, but it would not be wise.”
Teddy walked slowly around the perimeter eyeing the yellow patch carefully. “Here,” he said at last, “we’ll approach from here. When approaching a deat
h scene the first order of business is to establish a single line of approach. That protects the surrounding area from unnecessary disturbance. See there?” He pointed to a wide area of bent and broken grass that surrounded the yellow. “That’s where our foolish hunters trampled the area while they were observing the body. I’m afraid they didn’t do us any favors.” He stepped gingerly across the line and Kathryn followed behind, feeling as though she had just stepped out onto a tightrope.
Teddy studied the shape of the yellowish impression. “The head was up there, and the legs here. Notice the deeper imprint left by the torso. That’s where we’ll focus.”
Kathryn’s eyes followed the faded area to where the right leg must have rested. She saw no signs of branches or rocks or objects of any kind.
“I see it too,” Teddy nodded. “There’s no indication of anything that might have held the knee erect prior to fixed lividity. That is most enigmatic.”
They carefully made their way back to the valises, and Teddy began to unpack a bizarre selection of devices and paraphernalia. Most of the space seemed to be reserved for a half-dozen quart-sized containers, much larger than any Kathryn had seen yet. He also removed two small hand trowels, some type of long metallic probe, a magnifying glass, and a strange glass cylinder topped with a black rubber cork and a flexible hose.
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re doing,” Kathryn said.
“How much has Nicholas told you about this whole process?”
“Dr. Polchak tells me nothing—except that he likes to shoot family pets and collect dead bodies.” A twinge of remorse came over her as she remembered who she was talking to. “I’m sorry. It’s just that—is Dr. Polchak so annoying to everyone? Is it just me or what?”
“Don’t take it personally.” Teddy returned to the approach point with an armload of gear, depositing it in a heap just outside the fluttering yellow tape. He selected a trowel and a container and stepped carefully across the barrier once again. “Nicholas is not a cruel man. He simply has difficulty relating to … your species.”