The body was floating near the edge, facedown, the exposed skin puffy and red. Small black bodies circled above it, buzzi ng angrily. Nick knelt and pulled the body out of the water and onto the concrete. “Poor kid. Looks like he was stung hundreds of times.”
“Africanized bees are much more tenacious. They would have circled above the water and attacked every time he surfaced… Nick, this isn’t a natural incursion.”
“How do you know?”
“Because this isn’t Apis mellifera scutellata, which is actually a hybrid of African and European bees. It’s Apis mellifera intermissa, a distinct species from North Africa. They’re entirely black in color.”
“But just as dangerous?”
“Oh, yes.”
They climbed the stairs to the second floor. Bees flew in and out of the doorway of room 217. As they walked toward it, there was a loud tapping at the window of the adjoining room; two men, faces bumpy with stings, waved at them. One of them asked, “How long are we going to be stuck here?”
“Not long,” Grissom said, speaking loudly to be heard. “We have an expert coming to remove them soon.”
Grissom pushed the door to 217 open a little wider and stepped inside.
The first thing he noticed was the body. It lay sprawled at the foot of the bed, a man dressed only in a pair of boxers. His face was so swollen it was almost unrecognizable, but the distinctive white beard was enough for Grissom.
Nick was right behind Grissom. “Is that-”
“Yes. It’s Roberto Quadros.”
Grissom knelt and checked for vital signs but found none. “It looks as though he died from envenomation-he was stung thousands of times, more than enough to kill him.” Nick was already taking pictures. “Looks like this is what the bees were transported in.” A large wooden crate stood on the room’s single dresser, its top open. A lamp lay on its side beside the bed.
Grissom stood and moved to the bathroom, where the bees covered the shower curtain like a heavy tapestry, threatening to tear it off its rings. Grissom quickly shut the door. “I think I have the majority trapped,” he said. “Bees need moisture to survive-they’ve congregated in the dampest area available.”
“Well, that should make cleanup easier.” Nick shook his head. “What are we looking at, Grissom? This doesn’t seem like the others.”
“No. There’re no signs of restraint-in fact, it looks as if he knocked the lamp over when he was attacked.”
“Yeah. And why was he in his underwear?”
“He was an experienced entomologist-presumably he knew what was in the case and didn’t feel threatened by it. Maybe he was napping and the bees got loose while he was asleep.”
“And he gets woken up by being stung and panics?”
“An attack could have happened regardless of his reaction. Bees release an alarm pheromone when one of them is agitated; it’s sort of the equivalent of a carny yelling, ‘Hey, rube!’ And African bees not only produce more of this pheromone, they respond more aggressively to it, too-three times as many bees will take flight to defend the hive.”
“So one nervous bug and they all pile on… I’ve got luggage.” Nick checked the suitcase he’d found. “Tag says it belongs to Quadros. Looks like he was staying here.”
“There’s a laptop on the bedside table.” Grissom brushed bees off the keyboard and tapped the space bar. “It doesn’t seem to be encrypted.”
“Think we just got lucky?” said Nick. “I mean, it looks like either Quadros was the Bug Killer, or the real thing decided to thin out the competition-meaning it has to be Vanderhoff.”
“Maybe,” said Grissom. “We’ll know more once we take a closer look at this laptop.”
“Congratulations,” said Ecklie. He smiled at Grissom as if he’d just won an award. Grissom didn’t smile back. “It looks like our killer got so overconfi-dent he solved our problem for us.”
“I’m not so sure that’s the case. In fact, I’m not sure the case has been solved.”
“How can you say that? Your own report lists what you found on that laptop-the text of the lette rs sent to Athena Jordanson, the e-mails used to lure the Harribold vic-even how he planned to poison the buffet at the Embassy Gold.” Ecklie shook his head. “I have to hand it to you, Gil-you were right on target about that. You saved a lot of lives.”
“Did I? I didn’t have anything to do with stopping Quadros-he did that to himself. And that’s what bothers me.” Grissom leaned forward, frowning. “I’m finding it hard to believe that someone who’s demonstrated nothing but careful planning until now would slip up in such an obvious way.”
“They all make a mistake sooner or later, Gil. You know that. Just be glad we caught this guy before it was too late.”
“We only found a small amount of homobatrachotoxin in the room. The evidence points to his manufacturing it in quantity.”
“Homeless people being recruited to process mass amounts of an esoteric poison? Come on, Gil-there’s no proof of that, only a few missing indigents. And you know as well as I do that they could have just as easily moved on. People living on the street don’t usually leave a forwarding address.”
“And experienced entomologists don’t usually die of bee stings.”
“Well, this one did. Unless you have some doubt that the body you found is actually that of Roberto Quadros?”
Grissom shook his head. “The thought had occurred to me-but we got in touch with the Brazilian university he worked for, and they supplied an exemplar of his fingerprints. It’s Quadros.”
“Then the case is closed, Gil. Stop worrying about it.”
“Good to have you back, Al,” said Grissom, standing in the doorway to the autopsy room.
Doc Robbins turned around and said, “Hello, Grissom. Good to be back. Can’t wait to get back to work.”
“Here. A little welcome-back present.” He walked forward and handed Robbins a small cardboard box.
Robbins leaned on his crutch with one hand, took the box with the other. He let the crutch dangle off his forearm by the support as he opened the box.
It was a large tarantula, encased in Lucite. Robbins grinned as he hefted it. “Nice weight,” he said. “Should come in handy the next time I need to squash a pest.”
“ ‘It is difficult to say who do you the most mischief; enemies with the worst intentions or friends with the best.’ ”
“Benjamin Franklin?
“Edward Bulwer-Lytton.”
“Isn’t he the guy who wrote ‘It was a dark and stormy night’?”
“Very good. Most people attribute that line to Snoopy.”
Robbins set the paperweight down on the very same counter the Brazilian wandering spider had leapt from. “S noopy had a better agent. Is this strictly a social call, or was there something else?”
Grissom walked over to the autopsy table, where the body of Roberto Quadros lay. His skin was still red and grossly swollen, dotted with approximately three and a half thousand stingers; the Y-shaped suture on his chest told him that Robbins had finished his autopsy. “Is the tox screen back yet?”
“Just came in. It was definitely the envenomation that killed him, though we did find small amounts of the homobatrachotoxin you told us to look out for.”
“How much?”
Robbins limped over to his desk and picked up a piece of paper. “Point-zero-four micrograms,” he said.
“Not a lethal dose,” said Grissom, “but more than you’d expect from simple environmental exposure.”
“And definitely enough to have an effect.”
“One of the initial symptoms of homobatrachotoxin poisoning is paralysis. I think the amount in Quadros’s bloodstream was enough to produce that.”