“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-”