“If you’re looking for Dr. Chin,” a young man with very thick glasses told them, “he’s in Bio Lab Three, downstairs.”
Dr. Chin was supervising student projects, bending over an array of Petri dishes as he gripped a male student’s arm, shaking him. “Don’t rush it. Sometimes the fastest way to get your answer is to move very slowly.”
“Dr. Chin?”
The doctor stood up and flipped his ponytail over his shoulder. “Who are you?”
“I’m Detective Cardinal, Algonquin Bay Police. This is Detective Arsenault from our ident section.”
“Really. How pleasant.”
“Can we talk someplace else?”
Chin beckoned to an older student a few desks away, a man with rubbery features that gave him an unhealthy, boneless look.
“This is Dr. Filbert,” Chin said. “It won’t hurt him to meet our local detectives. Dr. Filbert is a former student of mine and now my unfortunate post-doc. I keep him around solely for purposes of torture.”
“You make me wash test tubes that haven’t even been used yet.”
“Post-docs don’t wash test tubes,” Chin said. “Dr. Filbert is prone to exaggeration. Nevertheless, I’ll allow him to join us if he promises to behave.”
“What about the students?”
“They can survive without us for a few moments, I think.”
Chin led them to an adjoining lab and hung his white coat on the back of a chair. He was slender, even skinny; at five-six or -seven, he couldn’t weigh much over one-twenty. Cardinal wondered about the tapeworm.
Chin sat at a desk equipped with a large magnifier. “All right. Show me what you have.”
Arsenault handed the professor a vial.
Chin switched on the magnifier and held the vial under it.
“Very interesting. You have a nice collection of maggots here. Nice work,” he said without looking up. “Good label.”
“My partner calls me Avis,” Arsenault said. “I try harder.”
“Okay, you’ve got a body found outside. Probably in the woods. Somewhere pretty cool, right? Maybe hidden among rocks? Near water, too, I think.”
Arsenault looked at Cardinal and back to Dr. Chin. “You can really tell all that?”
“Simple. You’ve got Calliphora celliphoridae vomitoria. It’s common in wooded areas.”
“Gotta love that name,” Filbert said. “Did you know Linnaeus named it?”
“Not everyone is a fly geek, Dr. Filbert.” Chin was still staring at the vial under his magnifier. “You also have Phormia regina. That’s a blowfly that you’re going to find absolutely everywhere. But you’ve also got Calliphora vicina. That tells us what, Dr. Filbert?”
“Vicina is another blowfly. It only goes places that are shady and cool.”
“That’s why Dr. Filbert gets the big grants,” Dr. Chin said. “Justice Department, no less. They wouldn’t give me dick, pardon my French.”
“Justice loves DNA,” Filbert said cryptically.
“I’m not seeing any other species here. Is that all you have?”
Arsenault handed him three more vials. Chin examined them one after another under the magnifier. “Okay, now you have Cynomyopsis cadavarina. Shiny bluebottle. You only get this fly in advanced stages of decay. You’ve also got rove beetles and staph beetles, short for Staphylinidae. They feed on maggots.”
“Normally, you’d expect a lot more species than that at an outdoor site,” Filbert said. “Especially in the late stages.”
“The body was behind a waterfall,” Cardinal said.
“Hah!” Chin waggled a finger. “The flies couldn’t find it. Couldn’t smell it. Makes perfect sense.” He rolled his chair back from the magnifier.
“Can you give us anything on time of death?” Arsenault asked.
“What am I—Mr. Wizard? Obviously I have to put these under a microscope to be absolutely sure what they are. And even then, for court purposes, you’re going to need them to hatch. That way you nail down the species beyond a doubt. But you’ve got third-instar Cynomyopsis and you’ve got rove beetles; you’re looking at about fourteen days since time of death.”
“Can you narrow it down any more than that?”
“Come back next week, gentlemen. I’ll be able to tell you a whole lot more.”
The double doors of the lab were swinging closed behind them when Arsenault suddenly stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I gotta ask.”
Before Cardinal could prevent him, Arsenault yanked open one of the doors. “Hey, Doc. I gotta ask you something. Rumour I heard.”
“Arsenault,” Cardinal said. “For God’s sake.”
“What rumour would that be, Detective?”
Arsenault appeared to think a minute. “Is it true that blackflies always come out before Victoria Day?”
“In this region? That’s not a rumour, Detective. That’s a fact.”
“Well, thanks for setting me straight. It was bothering me.”
“Very amusing,” Cardinal said once they were in the parking lot. “Really, you could sit in for Conan O’Brien sometime.”
“I gotta tell Delorme,” Arsenault said. “The look on your face.”
12
DELORME HAD OTHER THINGS on her mind. The body removal service had come and gone (with appropriate expressions of horror and disgust), and the remains of Wombat Guthrie were now in transit to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto. That left the rest of the evidence to gather up.
With the help of Ken Szelagy and Bob Collingwood, she was collecting gum wrappers, bits of foil, cigarette packs of various ages and conditions, a rusted Dr Pepper can and countless cigarette butts. There were bits of Kleenex, the odd heel print, a handful of beads and a postcard depicting the citadel at Quebec City. This Delorme retrieved from under a rock.
On the back, written in French in a feminine hand: Dear Robert, Quebec is a fantastic city. Wish you were here with me. I’m missing you all the time.
“Hey, Bob,” Delorme said to Collingwood. “This a letter from your girlfriend?” She held it up for him to see. Collingwood, whose sense of humour had been surgically removed at birth, shook his head.
Delorme slipped the postcard into an evidence bag and tagged it.
A few minutes later she discovered a condom underneath a bush. Even wearing latex gloves, she wasn’t about to touch that one. She picked it up with a pair of ident’s tongs. “Probably belongs to the same guy as the postcard,” she said. Collingwood looked up for a moment, then went back to sifting dirt with a sieve.
“Collingwood, did anyone ever tell you you talk too much?” Delorme dropped the condom into an evidence bag.
Half an hour went by, then Collingwood offered up a single syllable: “Hair.” He held a pair of tweezers in the air; Delorme couldn’t see anything else.
“How long?”
He shrugged. “Twelve, fourteen inches. Black.”
“Good. Let’s hope we can eventually connect it to a person.”
Another half-hour.
“So, you don’t make anything out of these drawings?” Szelagy said. Ken Szelagy, the biggest man on the detective squad, was usually the most talkative. But today he was fascinated by the cave wall, and it had been keeping him uncharacteristically quiet. “You don’t find something creepy about all these weird birds and snakes? Don’t you think they mean something?”
“Yes, I think they mean something,” Delorme said, “to whoever drew them. But personally I don’t make anything out of them because I’m not into astrology or whatever they’re about, and until we find someone who is, I’m not even going to hazard a guess.”
“What’re those things?”