Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle (22 page)

20

Friday, September 2

Nick waded out into the water at the end of St. Claude Avenue. The water came almost to his chest before he reached the old magnolia tree and ducked under its branches. He found the boat where he had left it the night before, still chained to the trunk of the tree. He removed the chain and tossed it into the bottom of the boat; when he did, J.T. sat up and rubbed his eyes.

“Where you been?” he asked.

“J.T.—what are you doing in there?”

“Sleepin'.”

“I can see that. How long have you been here?”

He shrugged. “All night.”

“I dropped you off at the Convention Center.”

“You dropped me on the street.”

“You know what I mean—you were supposed to go to the Convention Center and wait for me there.”

“Didn't like that place.”

Nick looked in the boat; it was empty except for two oars and a couple of old bench pillows. “You like this better?”

“It's okay.”

“How did you get here?”

“I walked.”

“You walked five miles?”

Nick tried to visualize the route the boy must have taken: He couldn't have backtracked the way they'd come—it was all underwater. He must have followed the levee along the Mississippi River, then headed north when he came to the Industrial Canal. But there were no roads and no lights, and there was no one to help him if he couldn't find the way. The more he thought about it, the angrier he became—but he knew he had to let it go. After all, the boy did make it; no sense yelling at the kid because of his own unrealized fears.

“How did you get out to the boat?”

“I walked.”

“The water's over your head. What did you do, use a snorkel?”

“I swam a little too.”

Now something else occurred to Nick: If the boy had bypassed the Convention Center, he had also bypassed dinner and breakfast too. He rubbed the boy's head. “You hungry?”

“A little.”

“C'mon, let's get you something to eat. Jerry's probably got a couple of MREs stashed away in his equipment bag.”

He pulled the boat out from under the branches and guided it back to the boat ramp; Jerry was waiting for them there.

“Look what I found,” Nick called out.

“What the—how did you get here?”

“We've been over all that,” Nick said. “He's a little hungry—see what you can dig up, will you?”

A few minutes later, they were on their way back into the Lower Nine, with J.T. devouring his MRE directly from the bag.

Nick looked at him. “There's something we need to get straight,” he said.

J.T. looked up.

“From now on, you need to follow orders.”

“You don't.”

“That's one of the benefits of being a grown-up: I don't have to do everything I tell you to do.”

“How come?”

“Because I'm big, and you're small, and that's how the universe works. Stop asking questions and eat. But next time I tell you to go somewhere, you go—understand?”

Beth pulled her car into the parking lot of the Life Sciences Building at LSU, a massive six-story structure in the center of campus that serves as home to five different fields of scientific endeavor—including the Department of Entomology. She took the stairs to the fifth floor, though the building had an elevator—a discipline she maintained to keep her calves looking trim. On the fifth floor she found the Louisiana State Arthropod Museum, which occupied four thousand square feet of collection and laboratory space.

“I'm here to see Dr. Benedetti,” she announced to a work-study student serving as receptionist du jour. She handed the student her business card, an impressive-looking piece of vellum with raised lettering; the student rubbed his thumb over the letters as if they were braille.

A minute later a door opened, and an attractive young woman stepped out; she was holding the business card.

“Nice card,” she said. “Mine has a
Coleoptera
on it.”

Beth paused. “Dr. Benedetti?”

“That's right. Nick told me you'd be stopping by.”

The woman looked to be about the same age as Beth, but she wore no makeup—which meant that she was probably five years younger. She was dressed plainly, in an LSU T-shirt and jeans, and she wore an open denim button-up with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Beth suddenly felt a bit self-conscious; the woman looked as good as she did, but with half the effort—which was always annoying.

“Nick was right about you,” the woman said.

“Right about what?”

“He said you were pretty.”

Beth blinked. “Did he say anything else?”

“He said you would ask, ‘Did he say anything else?'”

She frowned. “I guess the joke's on me.”

“If Nick's around, the joke is always on you. That's Nick for you.”

“Yes. That's Nick.”

“Your card says ‘MD'—you're a doctor?”

“I'm a psychiatrist.”

She let out a snort. “Then you should have a field day with Nick.”

Beth paused. “It sounds like you know him pretty well.”

“You don't have to know Nick very well to know he needs a shrink. Oops, sorry—hope you don't mind the term.”

“I've heard it before.”

“Did you meet Nick through DMORT?”

“That's right. How about you?”

“A couple of years ago the museum did a project at Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. We were documenting beetle diversity in the park. Nick came over from NC State and helped out.”

“Sounds like a party.”

“A big camping trip is what it was. Ask him about the night my tent collapsed.”

“I'll be sure to do that. So you're an entomologist too?”

“I'm a systematist—I identify and classify different species of insects. That's what the museum does: We're the principal repository for insects and related arthropods in Louisiana. We've got five hundred thousand specimens pinned and mounted here, mostly from around the Gulf Coast. If you can catch it, we can tell you what it is. Speaking of which: Nick said you've got something to show me.”

She reached into her purse and took out the glass vial.

Dr. Benedetti held it up to the light.

“Nick thinks they might be caddis flies,” Beth explained.

“He doesn't need me to tell him that—he's looking for something else.”

“What?”

“Let's find out.”

Beth followed Benedetti into a laboratory, where she opened the vial and removed several specimens. She carefully mounted each on a glass slide, then placed the first slide under a microscope and adjusted the focus.

“So how long have you known him?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Who do you think?”

“Oh, Nick—about ten years. We've been on several DMORT deployments together.”

“Funny, he never mentioned you. How much do you know about caddis flies?”

“I'm a psychiatrist,” she grumbled. “Four years of medical school plus three more for a psychiatric residency—at Stanford.”

“Well, Doctor, take a look.”

Beth stepped up to the microscope and peered through the eyepiece. She saw what looked like a piece of spaghetti rolled in bread crumbs—only they weren't bread crumbs. They were tiny bits of wood and sand and other debris.

“What you're looking at is a kind of protective case,” she said. “The larva itself is inside. The female caddis fly lays her eggs on top of the water in a gelatinous blob; when the eggs hatch they sink to the bottom, and the larvae build these little cases to protect themselves. They also serve as ballast to help weight them down.”

“I don't understand. Why are these important?”

“That's what Nick wants to know.” She stepped in front of the microscope again and replaced the slide with a second specimen. “It's the same thing,” she said. “This case is constructed of the same materials as the first one. That means they must have come from the same area; the question is, which area?”

“Can you determine that?”

“If we're lucky. The caddis-fly larva spins silk to make itself sticky; then it picks up anything it finds around it to construct its case—so the case is a sort of sampling of whatever occurs naturally in that area.”

She used a probe to begin to pick apart the tiny particles comprising the case. “He's kind of attractive, isn't he?”

“Who?”

She glanced up from the microscope.

“Oh. I suppose he is—in a weird sort of way.”

“You could say that about all men. I think it's his eyes—you have to see them without those glasses.”

Beth thought for a moment; she had known Nick for ten years and had never seen him without his glasses. He was practically blind without them—his medical reports confirmed that. Beth wanted to ask, “How did you manage to see him without his glasses?” but she didn't—she didn't particularly care to hear the answer.

“This is cypress wood,” Benedetti said. “There are slivers of it on each of the larvae.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nick said he collected these cases in the city—in the Lower Ninth Ward. That's a densely populated area; I doubt you'd find a lot of cypress trees there.”

“Where would you find them?”

“New Orleans is surrounded by cypress swamps. I'd say these cases probably came from there.”

“How would they get into the city?”

She looked up. “I'm assuming Nick collected these from a body—I mean, that's what he does, right?”

“I'm sorry, but I'm not free to discuss that.”

“Whatever. All Nick told me is that he collected these cases from an ‘object' floating in ten feet of water in the Lower Ninth Ward. You can tell Nick that he may have found this ‘object' there, but it didn't originate there.”

“How do you know?”

“I see some sand particles, but they're the wrong kind; if these cases originated in the city, I should see construction-grade sand—the kind they use for roads and buildings. I see bits of seashell too. And frankly, I don't think all these larvae would have collected on a single object in ten feet of water. It's just too deep; the water would have to have been much shallower.”

She studied the specimen again. “Well, what do you know? This may be Nick's lucky day after all.”

“What is it?”

“If I'm not mistaken, it's a flake of copper. I can have it tested to make sure.”

“What does that tell us?”

“The land around the city of New Orleans is sinking—the city itself is sinking about a third of an inch every year. That may not sound like a lot, but think about it: In a hundred years, that's over thirty inches. The reason it's sinking is because of the levees; for thousands of years the Mississippi used to flood every spring, and when it did it covered the floodplain with silt—that kept the land built up. But when people built the levees to control the flooding, they also caused the land to start sinking. The bayous are constantly rising, and areas that used to be workable land are now underwater—they've been taken over by the bayous. As I recall, there used to be a copper mine somewhere south of the city—I'll have to check with one of our geologists to make sure. If I'm right, we might be able to pin these caddis flies to a very specific area of cypress swamp.”

“Then the body was moved,” Beth said.

“What body? You mean the ‘object.'”

“Oh. Right.”

“Tell Nick I'll confirm all this by this afternoon—and tell him he got lucky this time.”

“Nick tends to be lucky.”

“Except in love—but hey,” she said, wiggling her empty ring finger, “who is?”

It was a fifteen-minute drive back to St. Gabriel, following the interstate along the Mississippi. Her mind meandered in and out with the river; she kept thinking about Nick and what he might be up to this time.
This time
—the phrase brought back to mind a dozen past deployments together and a long string of strange and convoluted involvements. Each time, Nick seemed to get himself into trouble—not because of a flagrant violation of any regulation or law, but because of his dogged determination to finish the job no matter what the cost, and the cost was always high—sometimes higher than anyone wanted to pay.

The cost was high for Nick too. Once he had a goal in sight he became relentless, like a machine with no off switch. He stopped sleeping; he stopped eating; he began to exhibit erratic behaviors that bordered on the truly psychotic. She first became concerned when she heard Nick refer to human beings as “
your
species.” She wondered if that expression was just a quirky affectation, or whether it was an indication of something deeper—perhaps a fragmentation of his personality due to stress.