Michael Connelly (67 page)

“Any one of these was fatal. There were other defensive wounds which you can look at later. Um, he extracted wood splinters
from two of the head injuries. Looks like you are talking about something like a baseball bat, but not as wide, I think. Tremendous
crushing blows, so I think we are talking about something with some leverage. Not a stick. Bigger. A pick handle, shovel,
something like — possibly a pool cue. But most likely something unfinished. Like I said, Sally pulled splinters out of the
wounds. I’m not sure a pool cue with a sanded and lacquered finish would leave splinters.”

She studied the notes a moment.

“The other thing — I don’t know if Porter told you this, but this body most likely was dumped in that location. Time of death
is at least six hours before discovery. Judging by the traffic in that alley and to the rear door of the restaurant, that
body could not have gone unnoticed there for six hours. It had to have been dumped.”

“Yeah, that was in his notes.”

“Good.”

She started turning through the pages. Briefly looking at the autopsy photos and putting them to the side.

“Okay, here it is. Tox results aren’t back yet but the colors of the blood and liver indicate there will be nothing there.
I’m just guessing — or, rather, Sally is just guessing, so don’t hold us to that.”

Harry nodded. He hadn’t taken any notes yet. He lit a cigarette and she didn’t seem to mind. She had never protested before,
though once when he was attending an autopsy she walked in from the adjoining suite and showed him a lung from a forty-year-old,
three-pack-a-day man. It looked like an old black loafer that had been run over by a truck.

“But as you know is routine,” she continued, “we took swabs and did the analysis on the stomach contents. First, in the earwax
we found a kind of brown dust. We combed some of it out of the hair, and got some from the fingernails, too.”

Bosch thought of tar heroin, an ingredient in black ice.

“Heroin?”

“Good guess, but no.”

“Just brown dust.”

Bosch was writing in his notebook now.

“Yeah, we put it on some slides and blew it up and as near as we can tell it’s wheat. Wheat dust. It’s — it apparently is
pulverized wheat.”

“Like cereal? He had cereal in his ears and hair?”

A waiter in a white shirt and black tie with a brush mustache and his best dour Russian look came to the table to ask if they
wanted anything else. He looked at the stack of photos next to Teresa. On top was one of Juan Doe #67 naked on a stainless
steel table. Teresa quickly covered it with the file and Harry ordered two more beers. The man walked slowly away from the
table.

“You mean some kind of wheat cereal?” Bosch asked again. “Like the dust at the bottom of the box or something?”

“Not exactly. Keep that thought, though, and let me move on. It will all tie up.”

He waved her on.

“On the nasal swabs and stomach content, two things came up that are very interesting. It’s kind of why I like what I do,
despite other people not liking it for me.” She looked up from the file and smiled at him. “Anyway, in the stomach contents,
Salazar identified coffee and masticated rice, chicken, bell pepper, various spices and pig intestine. To make a long story
short, it was chorizo — Mexican sausage. The intestine used as sausage casing leads me to believe it was some kind of homemade
sausage, not manufactured product. He had eaten this shortly before death. There had been almost no breakdown in the stomach
yet. He may’ve even been eating when he was assaulted. I mean, the throat and mouth were clear but there was still debris
in the teeth.

“And by the way, they were all original teeth. No dental work at all — ever. You getting the picture that this man was not
from around here?”

Bosch nodded, remembering Porter’s notes said all of Juan Doe #67’s clothing was made in Mexico. He was writing in the notebook.

She said, “There was also this in the stomach.”

She slid a Polaroid photograph across the table. It was of a pinkish insect with one wing missing and the other broken. It
looked wet, as indeed it would be, considering where it had been found. It lay on a glass culture dish next to a dime. The
dime was about ten times the size of the bug.

Harry noticed the waiter standing about ten feet away with two mugs of beer. The man held the mugs up and raised his eyebrows.
Bosch signaled that it was safe to approach. The waiter put the glasses down, stole a glance at the bug photo and then moved
quickly away. Harry slid the photo back to Teresa.

“So what is it?”

“
Trypetid,
” she said, and she smiled.

“Shoot, I was about to guess that,” he said.

She laughed at the lame joke.

“It’s a fruit fly, Harry. Mediterranean variety. The little bug that lays big waste to the California citrus industry? Salazar
came to me to send it out on referral because we had no idea what it was. I had an investigator take it over to UCLA to an
entomologist Gary suggested. He identified it for us.”

Gary, Bosch knew, was her estranged, soon to be ex-husband. He nodded at what she was telling him but was not seeing the significance
of the find.

She said, “We go on to the nasal swabs. Okay, there was more wheat dust and then we found this.”

She slid another photo across the table. This was also a photo of a culture dish with a dime in it. There was also a small
pinkish-brown line near the dime. This was much smaller than the fly in the first photo, but Bosch could tell it was also
some kind of insect.

“And this?” he asked.

“Same thing, my entomologist tells me. Only this is a youngun. This is a larva.”

She folded her fingers together and pointed her elbows out. She smiled and waited.

“You love this, don’t you?” he said. He drafted off a quarter of his beer. “Okay, you got me. What’s it all mean?”

“Well, you have a basic understanding of the fruit fly right? It chews up the citrus crop, can bring the entire industry to
its knees, umpty-ump millions lost, no orange juice in the morning, et cetera, et cetera, the decline of civilization as we
know it. Right?”

He nodded and she went on, talking very quickly.

“Okay, we seem to have an annual medfly infestation here. I’m sure you’ve seen the quarantine signs on the freeways or heard
the helicopters spraying malathion at night.”

“They make me dream of Vietnam,” Harry said.

“You must have also seen or read about the movement against malathion spraying. Some people say it poisons people as well
as these bugs. They want it stopped. So, what’s a Department of Agriculture to do? Well, one thing is step up the other procedure
they use to get these bugs.

“The USDA and state Medfly Eradication Project release billions of sterile medflies all across southern California. Millions
every week. See, the idea is that when the ones that are already out there mate, they’ll do it with sterile partners and eventually
the infestation will die out because less and less are reproduced. It’s mathematical, Harry. End of problem — if they can
saturate the region with enough sterile flies.”

She stopped there but Bosch still didn’t get it.

“Geez, this is all really fantastic, Teresa. But does it get to a point eventually or are we just —”

“I’m getting there. I’m getting there. Just listen. You are a detective. Detectives are supposed to listen. You once told
me that solving murders was getting people to talk and just listening to them. Well, I’m telling it.”

He held his hands up. She went on.

“The flies released by the USDA are dyed when they are in the larval stage. Dyed pink, so they can keep track of them or quickly
separate the sterile ones from the nonsterile ones when they check those little traps they have in orange trees all over the
place. After the larvae are dyed pink, they are irradiated to make them sterile. Then they get released.”

Harry nodded. It was beginning to sound interesting.

“My entomologist examined the two samples taken from Juan Doe #67 and this is what he found.” She referred to some notes in
the file. “The adult fly obtained from the deceased’s stomach was both dyed and sterilized, female. Okay, nothing unusual
about that. Like I said, they release something like three hundred million of these a week — billions over the year — and
so it would seem probable that one might be accidentally swallowed by our man if he was anywhere in, say, southern California.”

“That narrows it down,” Bosch said. “What about the other sample?”

“The larva is different.” She smiled again. “Dr. Braxton, that’s the bug doctor, said the larval specimen was dyed pink as
to USDA specifications. But it had not yet been irradiated — sterilized — when it went up our Juan Doe’s nose.”

She unfolded her hands and put them down at her sides. Her factual report was concluded. Now it was time to speculate and
she was giving him the first shot.

“So inside his body he has two dyed flies, one sterilized and one not sterilized,” Bosch said. “That would lead me to conclude
that shortly before his death, our boy was at the location where these flies are sterilized. Millions of flies around. One
or two could have gotten in his food. He could have breathed one in through the nose. Anything like that.”

She nodded.

“What about the wheat dust? In the ears and hair.”

“The wheat dust is the food, Harry. Braxton said that is the food used in the breeding process.”

He said, “So I need to find where they make, where they breed, these sterile flies. They might have a line on Juan Doe. Sounds
like he was a breeder or something.”

She smiled and said, “Why don’t you ask me where they breed them.”

“Where do they do it, Teresa?”

“Well, the trick is to breed them where they are already a part of the natural insect population or environment and therefore
not a problem in case some happen to slip out the door before getting their dose of radiation.

“And, so, the USDA contracts with breeders in only two places; Hawaii and Mexico. In Hawaii there are three breeding contractors
on Oahu. In Mexico there is a breeder down near Zihuatenejo and the largest of all five is located near —”

“Mexicali.”

“Harry! How did you know? Did you already know all of this and let me —”

“It was just a guess. It fits with something else I’ve been working on.”

She looked at him oddly and for a moment he was sorry he had spoiled her fun. He drained his beer mug and looked around for
the squeamish waiter.

She drove him back to get his car near the Red Wind and then followed him out of downtown and up to his home in the hills.
She lived in a condo in Hancock Park, which was closer, but she said she had been spending too much time there lately and
wanted a chance to see or hear the coyote. He knew her real reason was that it would be easier for her to extricate herself
from his place than to ask him to leave hers.

Bosch didn’t mind, though. The truth was, he felt uncomfortable at her place. It reminded him too much of what L.A. was coming
to. It was a fifthfloor loft with a view of downtown in a historic residence building called the Warfield. The exterior of
the building was still as beautiful as the day in 1911 it was completed by George Allan Hancock. Beaux Arts architecture with
a blue-gray terra-cotta facade. George hadn’t spared the oil money and from the street the Warfield, with its fleurs-de-lys
and cartouches, showed it. But it was the interior — the current interior, that is — that Bosch found objectionable. The place
had been bought a few years back by a Japanese firm and completely gutted, then retrofitted, renovated and revamped. The walls
in each apartment were knocked down and each place was nothing but a long, sterile room with fake wood floors, stainless-steel
counters and track lighting. Just a pretty shell, Bosch thought. He had a feeling George would’ve thought the same.

At Harry’s house they talked while he lit the hibachi on the porch and put an orange roughy filet on the grill. He had bought
it Christmas Eve and it was still fresh and large enough to split. Teresa told him the County Commission would probably informally
decide before New Year’s on a permanent chief medical examiner. He wished her good luck but privately wasn’t sure he meant
it. It was a political appointment and she would have to toe the line. Why get into that box? He changed the subject.

“So, if this guy, this Juan Doe, was down in Mexicali — near where they make these fruit flies — how do you think his body
got all the way up here?”

“That’s not my department,” Teresa said.

She was at the railing, staring out over the Valley. There were a million lights glinting in the crisp, cool air. She was
wearing his jacket over her shoulders. Harry glazed the fish with a pineapple barbecue sauce and then turned it over.

“It’s warm over here by the fire,” he said. He dawdled a bit over the filet and then said, “I think what it was is that maybe
they didn’t want anybody checking around that USDA contractor’s business. You know? They didn’t want that body connected to
that place. So they take the guy’s body far away.”