The Black Ice (hb-2)

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