"She said I was the only man who could beat her at Scrabble."
"So I have to beef up my vocabulary if I want to get laid?"
Jimmy shrugged. "I cheated."
The car crested the top of the hill. An ancient Volvo with a peeling Greenpeace bumper sticker was parked next to Walsh's trailer. Yellow police-tape streamers rippled listlessly in the breeze. The windows to the trailer were broken, and the door was torn off its hinges. Past the trailer Saul Zarinski waded in the koi pond, a bony intellectual wearing rubber boots, khaki shorts, and a denim shirt.
Rollo parked next to the Volvo and set the handbrake. He reached for his digital video camera, but Jimmy was already out of the van.
The inside of Walsh's trailer had been trashed, the cheap furniture smashed to splinters, the refrigerator overturned, the cupboards empty, the mattress cut open, stuffing clumped on the floor. Graffiti had been sprayed on the walls: pentagrams, gang slogans, profanity, even a call for the Anaheim High School football team to "go all the way!"
Rollo moved around Jimmy with his camera, making a slow smooth pan of the main room, one knee bent, muttering, "Perfect, perfect," as he took in the crushed fish crackers and Ding Dongs smeared into the carpet.
Jimmy walked out of the trailer and headed toward the koi pond. He could see the main house higher up the hill, still vacant, its shutters closed, but the lawn was green and freshly mowed. The smell got worse at he neared the koi pond. "Professor Zarinski?"
Zarinski looked up, blinking. He wore surgical gloves, the breast pocket of his shirt was stuffed with pens, and hair was curling around his ears.
"I'm Jimmy Gage. We met-"
"I remember you." Zarinski wet a pencil in his mouth and wrote in a small notebook.
Jimmy was closer now. A metal screen dangled from the tripod. Something gray and amorphous rested on the mesh, its skin swollen to bursting, maggots wriggling across the surface. Blackflies drifted overhead, their buzzing like static. The stink burned his nostrils, and breathing through his mouth just made him taste it. "What is that?"
"Pig." Zarinski cranked a handle, lowering the pig back into the water. Flies walked through his hair and marched across his eyebrows. "Domestic pig." He made another notation in his book. "Twenty-four point seven grams less pig than yesterday."
"Waste of good barbecue." Jimmy watched a gold-streaked koi poke at the bloated carcass. "This is an experiment?"
"It's not sadism, I can assure you." Zarinski splashed out of the koi pond and over toward some thornbushes. He reached into the brush, slid out a hidden stainless-steel device, and checked the dials. "Hydrothermograph," he said, answering Jimmy's unspoken question. "Measures ambient air temperature and humidity."
"What are you trying to prove?"
Zarinski kept writing. "Finally. Someone who realizes that the purpose of an experiment is to prove something. You have no idea the foolish questions I've had to deal with. 'Do earwigs nest in your ear when you sleep?' he mimicked. 'Do scorpions sting themselves when they're cornered?'" He looked up at Jimmy. "Entomology is the most disrespected specialty in science."
"Not by Katz though."
Zarinski smiled.
"I heard that she and Boone got into an argument in the forensics lab. One of the techs told me it had something to do with you."
"Detective Katz has been very supportive of my research. I wish I could say the same for Dr. Boone."
"That's what you're doing? You're challenging the Walsh autopsy?"
Zarinski pursed his lips. "Let's just say that the man is a very sloppy scientist." Helen Katz backhanded the fly in midair, bouncing it off the wall and onto the bird's-eye maple floor. Then she stepped on it.
The realtor dropped to one knee, wiped up the squashed insect with a pink tissue, and tucked it into the pocket of her navy blue suit with white piping. "Detective, I have a prospective client for the house coming by any moment now."
"This shouldn't take long." Katz saw the realtor glance at her watch and wanted to backhand her too. Skinny-ass broad wearing a thousand dollars worth of clothes on her back-don't get Katz even started about the woman's shoes, some matching blue lizard job with an open toe. Regular pedicures on those dainty toes. They probably didn't even make shoes like that for Katz's splayed feet. Not that she would wear them anyway. She wouldn't. "I wanted to ask you about the last time you saw Walsh."
"I already gave you my statement right after poor Mr. Walsh's body was discovered-"
"Tell me again."
"As previously stated, it was on the sixth. I checked my Day-Timer." The realtor sprayed air-freshener around the living room, a vanilla-cinnamon potion intended to make spending a million dollars on a fixer-upper with no backyard seem like a smart idea. "I was showing the Orange Hill house to a nice Brazilian family. It's an overpriced property, and there hasn't been much interest-"
"You're certain it was Walsh you saw?"
"Who else would it have been?" Zarinski dangled the white maggot in front of Jimmy's face. "This is a first-stage blowfly larva, Chrysomya rufifacies."
Jimmy stared at the maggot squirming between the thumb and forefinger of Zarinski's pink surgical gloves. "Vermicelli."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Vermicelli-the pasta. It's Italian for 'little worms.'"
"I didn't know that." Zarinski looked at the maggot like he wanted to kiss it. "Vermicelli." He nodded. "Thank you for that delightful factoid, Mr. Gage."
"I've always been interested in bugs."
"Insects."
"Right." Jimmy watched the fat white maggot bending back and forth in Zarinski's delicate grasp. The grub reminded him of a tourist doing sit-ups.
"Most laypersons find my research disgusting."
"Sometimes you have to get down and dirty to know what's really going on in the world."
Zarinski beamed.
"So you and Boone disagreed over the results of the autopsy?"
"Dr. Boone is an ignoramus." Zarinski cleared his throat. "Medical examiners depend on data like lividity, organ deterioration, and rigor mortis to estimate time of death, but those measurements are questionable at best with a body half-immersed in water." He held up the maggot to Jimmy. "This vermicelli is the single most precise method of establishing time of death. If Dr. Boone had even a basic understanding of entomology…" He leaned over the koi pond and tenderly replaced the maggot on the pig. "Within ten minutes of death adult blowflies are on the scene, feeding on blood or other body fluids, depositing eggs into the body cavities, either wounds or natural cavities like eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. The blowflies start the clock. Understand?"
"I'm listening."
Zarinski nodded. "During the mean temperature range at this time of year, egg-laying on the corpse would continue for approximately eight days. The life cycle of the blowfly-egg to maggot to pupa- takes eleven days. When I arrived on the scene with Detective Katz, I found discarded pupa cases floating in the koi pond. So eight plus eleven-death occurred at least nineteen days prior to your discovery of the body. That's our baseline. The flesh flies arrive three to four days after the blowflies, as soon as the body begins to putrefy. Local weather conditions are critical to determining the onset of flesh flies. This gives us another temporal line for our calculations. Where those two lines intersect is crucial to determining time of death. Are you with me?"
"I'm tagging along as best I can."
"Good chap. I wish I could say the same for Dr. Boone, but he was threatened by my theory. He actually revoked my privileges at the crime lab."
"What exactly was your theory?"
" 'Forget the fieldwork, Saul, get to the hypothesis.' I've heard that before." Zarinski pulled out his notebook and tapped a line of figures. "I presented Dr. Boone with my research, and he wouldn't even discuss adjusting his report. That's when I redid my experiment." He pointed at the bloated gray mass bobbing in the koi pond. "One thirty-kilo pig, drugged with the same narcotic mixture found in Walsh's toxicology results, the dosage proportionate to body weight-"