“True, but they probably don’t manufacture it either-the likely culprit is thought to be even farther down the food chain. And a little farther up from the frogs are the Ifrita and the hooded Pitohui-both birds that eat Melyrid beetles and process the poison into their feathers.”
“Making them the, uh, only poisonous birds in the world,” said Hodges, clearly derailed. “But it looks like you’re already well aware of that.”
Grissom gave Hodges a small smile. “Good work, Hodges.
10
GRISSOM COMPARED THE boot print Nick had lifted from McKay’s supply-room shelf to the one he’d taken from Gustav Janikov’s boots, then placed it back on the light table. “We have a match. Good work, Nick.”
“Thanks. But with Janikov dead and buried, he can’t tell us who told him to steal that thread.”
“The same person who gave him enough money to buy Richard Waltham’s gun and obtained it either before or after Janikov overdosed.”
Riley strode in. “Sorry I’m late. I’ve been all over town trying to source that bottle, but there are just too many places that carry it. The stamp that would have told us the batch number and expiration date was on the part of the bottle that was cut off-I narrowed it down to brand, but that was it.”
“It was a long shot,” Grissom admitted. “But you can never tell when you might get lucky.”
They brought her up to speed. “So Janikov got the gun from Waltham but was dead bef o r e it was used on Paul Fairwick,” she said. “The killer could have gotten it from his body.”
“Possible,” said Grissom. “Janikov was clearly being paid to work for the killer-he was sent specifically to obtain the surgical thread.”
Nick nodded. “He might have been killed for refusing to follow orders. Maybe he was supposed to shoot Fairwick himself but wouldn’t.”
“I don’t think so,” said Grissom. “The killer’s plans are intricate; I don’t think he’d leave such an important element to someone else. In fact, Janikov’s involvement doesn’t really fit with the pattern the killer’s established thus far.”
“Maybe it does,” said Riley. “Janikov wasn’t the only person involved in the robbery. There were the two transients who staged the fight.”
“Easy enough to do,” said Nick. “Janikov probably paid them off with drugs or booze.”
“Unless our killer has more than one person on his payroll,” said Riley. “He’s imitating insect b ehaviors, right? Well, colony insects send out workers to obtain supplies.”
Grissom looked thoughtful. “True. Which would imply a nest or hive location-as well as a larger scale of operations. Even given his obsession with insects, he wouldn’t acquire his own drones unless he needed them. But what for?”
“Bees go out and collect pollen,” said Nick. “Maybe he’s got his people doing something similar.”
“No,” said Riley. Both Grissom and Nick turned to look at her. “I know what this reminds me of. Large-scale cocaine processing labs need a significant workforce. They’re sealed in a building and guarded by soldiers.”
“Not collecting pollen,” said Grissom. “Making honey. Ants do much the same thing, but with slave labor-drones kidnapped from other colonies are imprinted chemically and put to work.”
“So our serial is a drug lord, too?” said Nick.
“Whatever he’s producing,” said Grissom, “I don’t think profit’s his motive. In fact, if he is processing large amounts of a particular chemical, I very much doubt it’s one anyone would take willingly.” He paused. “In fact, it might be the very same thing that killed Gustav Janikov.” He told them about the homobatrachotoxin.
“Dangerous stuff,” said Nick. “What’s the lethal dose, five hundred micrograms?”
“One hundred,” said Grissom. “Around the equivalent of two grains of table salt. If our Bug Killer is attem pting to produce this poison in quantity, we have an extremely serious problem.”
“Hey, Monkeyboy,” said Catherine, taking a seat across the table in the interview room. “Guess what? The sample of wax we took from your warehouse was just full of stuff: industrial effluents, food-grade shellac, perfume, metals…”
Monkeyboy, aka William Wornow, looked distinctly uneasy. “Well, that’s because of where I get it. All over the place. I mean, I scavenge from Dumpsters, industrial waste sites, wherever I can get access. None of it’s stolen, I swear.”
“Oh, I believe you. The thing is, you’ve mixed up a particularly distinctive batch for your fake volcano, and it just happens to be an exact match for the wax we found hardening in Hal Kanamu’s lungs.”
“What?”
She smiled. “Yeah. And since that’s what actually killed him, your whole art project is now officially a murder weapon. Afraid you’re going to be skipping your trip to Black Rock City this year.”
“Whoa!” He held up both hands, clearly frightened. “Maybe Hal did die in that volcano, but I had nothing to do with it. I was out of town!”
“Maybe. You better hope you can prove that, because until you do you’re our prime suspect. And we’re going to be taking a very, very close look at Mount Pele…”
Dale Southford looked up from his newspaper when Grissom walked into the Pet Cave. “Hello, Mr. Grissom. Back to pick up your order?”
“Afraid not, Dale. I’ve got another question for you. Ever have someone ask you about Melyrid beetles?”
The chubby man looked surprised. To one side of the counter, a cocker spaniel puppy gave a mournful little howl that ended in a much more upbeat yip. “Funny you should ask. Had a guy call a couple months back asking about the very same thing. Said he was a researcher, needed a large representative sample. I got in touch with a guy I know in New Guinea.”
“Did he want live samples or dead ones?”
“Both. I asked him how many he wanted, and he said at least a hundred had to be alive.”
“And dead?”
Southford shrugged. “He said he’d take as many as I could get. Turned out to be around a thousand.”
A thousand beetles. Grissom knew they could produce about ten micrograms of HBTX each, which meant ten beetles’ worth could kill a human being. A thousand was enough for a hundred fatalities.
But it was the live ones that bothered him the most. If the Bug Killer established a successful breeding program, he could process a hundred times that.
“What was his name?” asked Grissom.
“Just a sec.” Southford turned to his computer. “Ah, here it is. L. W. Smith. No address, just a contact number. Paid in cash.”
“What did he look like?”
“Well, I don’t think he picked them up himself-pretty sure the guy that dropped off the cash and took the beetles was homeless. He told me he was just running an errand for a friend.”
“Thanks for coming in again,” said Nick, shaking McKay’s hand.
“Glad to help,” said the oral surgeon. “I don’t know how much use I’ll be this time, either, though. None of the faces in all those mug shots jumped out at me a month ago, and I doubt if my memory’s gotten any better.”
“We’ll see,” said Nick. “You might surprise yourself.”
He led the surgeon from the front counter to the AV lab. Archie nodded at both of them. “Hey, Nick. This our witness?”
Nick introduced the two. “Doc, Archie here is gonna take you through a new program we just got. Hopefully, it’ll help us ID the two guys you saw fighting.”
“So he’s an artist?”
Archie grinned. “Yes, I am-but my area of expertise is software as opposed to pen and ink. I’m going to be using a program called EvoFIT to come up with a facial composite of our suspects.”
He had McKay sit down in front of a workstation. “Okay, here’s how this works. Some studies have shown that regular sketches done by police artists only have a success rate of around ten percent. That has nothing to do with t he skill of the artist; it’s just how our brains work. In the process of trying to remember the features of someone, we wind up changing them-the image that’s finally produced is something the subject has actually been building as opposed to recalling. Going feature by feature, the way the old Identi-Kit worked, just reinforced that.”