Dead of Night (31 page)

When I told him about finding the cell phone, though, his tone was anything but breezy. “Are you sure it was Dr. Matthews’s phone?”

“It was the same type. It didn’t look like it’d been in the water long. There’s a good chance that it’s hers.”

“Mr. Ford, I don’t know you from Adam. Now, if Rona gave you my cell number, you’re probably okay. But do you know how dumb it is for amateurs to go around playing detective? Damn. Did you know we can still lift prints from an object that’s been underwater?”

I told him I wasn’t certain.

“Well, we sometimes can. Which you might have completely screwed up. Why the hell didn’t you just call us an’ tell us you had a bee up your butt, thinking the woman was killed not accidental-like. That maybe her phone was in that canal?”

I was tempted to tell him it was because his department hadn’t thought of it.

Instead, I said, “You’re right, the first thing I should’ve done was contact you. I guess I didn’t expect to actually find it. A friend gets abducted and murdered? That’s something that you only read about in the papers.”

“What you did, Mr. Ford, could be called tampering with evidence.”

I was appropriately contrite. “The faster you can get some people on-scene to recover the phone, the better we’ll both feel.”

When he asked me to meet him at the canal in half an hour, I told him that was impossible because a pal was sick and I had to get him to the hospital. But I had the cellular number for Jason Reynolds, who was willing to help.

After I’d given him Reynolds’s number, Picking said he’d have the dispatcher contact their water recovery team and meet them at the canal.

“But don’t go leaving the county without telling me first. If we don’t find it, we’ll need you. If we
still
don’t find it, there’re a bunch more questions I want answered.”

 

 

In the emergency room, the staff gave Tomlinson a shot of painkiller and did a manual examination for testicular torsion—a man’s testicles can twist on the spermatic cord and shut off the flow of blood. It can be fatal if not treated quickly.

The results were negative.

During the examination, they also asked him if he’d ever had gonorrhea.

Groaning, Tomlinson told them no, but it wasn’t through lack of activity.

Next they injected IVP dye and took X rays, looking for kidney stones.

Negative.

It was a good hospital with an energetic staff, and they were not immune to Tomlinson’s charm. Determined to diagnose his mystery ailment, the ER boss, Dr. Mary McColgan, took the initiative and called in a urologist whose name was also Mary—Dr. Mary Ann Shepherd. Laken and I waited in the outpatient surgery wing while the physician used ocular tubing, a cystoscope, to take a look inside the man’s urethra.

Dr. Shepherd came out, still wearing scrubs, smiling, shaking her head: unbelievable. She was an athletic-looking woman, square-jawed, very dark skin—an East Indian or American Indian—her expression telling us the mystery was solved.

The lady doctor’s voice had an upbeat vigor—yes, she’d discovered something unexpected—as she said, “I’ve read about cases like this, but never in my wildest dreams thought I’d get to deal with it in my own practice. The cystoscope moved along just fine until about midway to the bladder. That’s where I found the blockage. Ten years in this business, I thought I’d seen every weird object that can possibly fit inside the sprinkler system of an adult human male—golf tees, lipsticks, marbles. There’s a whole book written by a urologist about strange stuff we’ve found. But I’ve never seen anything resembling what’s inside your friend.”

It was a fish, she said. “Turns out that crazy story he’s been telling isn’t crazy after all. When I got the scope to the blockage, the first thing I recognized was a tail fin. I thought it must be some kind of artificial lure. That he’d stuck it up there himself. Guys do that sometimes, minus the hooks—if they’re smart enough, and not too drunk. But then it moved. I saw it. The darn thing wiggled its way upstream as far as it could. It’s still alive.”

Even with a urologist standing there telling us it was true—even with the plague of exotics we’d been tracking—I still had trouble believing it. “I’ve worked all over the world with fish. I know there’s a rare species of bloodsucking catfish in South America that supposedly swims into human orifices. But that’s a myth. I think it’s been proven to be a myth.”

The physician looked to be in her mid-thirties, had a good face, and her Cherokee hair caught the light when she shook her head. She was shaking it now. “Just the opposite’s been proven. I proved it myself today. Other doctors have documented it before me—but only within the last couple of years. That’s
exactly
what the fish does. I just looked it up. The thing’s called a ‘candiru.’ Kan-di-ru. I think that’s how it’s pronounced.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d read about it, she said.

“A year or so ago, a Brazilian physician—I can’t remember his name—published an article in the
American Journal
of
Urology.
He’d removed a candiru from the penis of a teenage boy. The article included ultrasonographic prints that showed the fish burrowed in the urethra, up near the prostate. There were photos of the thing after it was removed.

“The fish was a lot bigger than I would’ve believed—nearly six inches long, I think, and half an inch wide. That stuck with me because it indicated how tenacious that damn thing had to be to work its way up that far.”

Dr. Shepherd said she’d read the entire piece, it was so unusual, but it’d been a while ago, so some of the details had faded. The boy had been wading in the Amazon and stopped to urinate. Candiru were attracted to the scent of uric acid because they are endoparasitic creatures—they feed from inside their hosts. Locating body openings would be key to their survival.

The boy was in thigh-deep water. He saw the fish leap out of the water into his urine stream. It clung to the penis opening for a moment, then burrowed up his urethral canal.

“I think the article said the kid actually grabbed the fish and tried to pull it out. But it was slippery, and candiru have gills or spines or something they stick up so they’re impossible to remove.”

In the Amazon, she added, indigenous people were the most common victims. No doctors for them, which is why we heard of it so rarely.

“There’s some kind of herb they use to dissolve the fish, but the pain’s so bad that males sometimes resort to self-inflicted penectomy. You can ask your friend about that.”

Catfish have saw-edged spines, sharp as a hypodermic, and secrete a complicated protein poison. Thinking about it made me cringe.

She told me she’d bring a copy of the article when she came back that night to do the minor operation required to remove the candiru. She’d managed to get a catheter in Tomlinson; had the outpatient surgery reserved for 7:00 P.M. The phenomenon had so seldom been documented, she said, that she wanted to videotape the procedure. Other physicians were already asking to attend.

“But it’s not serious. I want to stress that. Within two days, maybe three, he’ll be completely recovered.”

As she was leaving, I said aloud, “A parasitic catfish from the Amazon? Jesus, bizarre.”

I was talking to Lake, but the woman stopped, laughing in a way that communicated congenial sarcasm. “Finding an illegal exotic species in
this
part of Florida? That
would
be shocking—if it wasn’t an almost daily occurrence. All right, I’m exaggerating, but not much. The ER staff will tell you: ”

She said that, over the last week, the emergency room had treated five people who’d been bitten by nonnative spiders. Entomologists at the University of Florida had identified one as a Calcutta scorpion. She couldn’t remember the name of the other spider. It was from Africa, and two of the patients nearly died.

“Crab spider? Maybe that was it.”

I said, “A six-eyed crab spider? That’s African—and dangerous. A lot more poisonous than a black widow, or brown recluse.”

“
Yes.
That’s the one. There were the spider bites and then, three days ago, a grade school janitor drives himself to the ER. He comes in, face white as a sheet, carrying a garbage bag that has a fifty-pound snake in it. The thing was more than eight feet long.

“He said he found it on the playground. The guy killed it when it came after him. One of those guys who carries a shotgun in his truck. His words: ‘It charged me and struck.’ It did sort of graze him, but no venom. Thank God, because we got a positive ID on that, too. African again. An illegal exotic. It was an African mamba, which they tell me is potentially lethal.”

Something—the intensity of my expression, perhaps—had caused her to focus on me rather than on what she was saying, and so she spoke more slowly, almost by rote, as she finished, “The Disney World area’s filled with exotics. Human and animal.”

I said, “This has all been in the last week?”

“Seven, eight days, yes. That’s why it hasn’t made the national news yet. This county depends on tourism, so the local weeklies aren’t going to put it in the headlines. But word’s bound to leak out.”

A South American fish, she added, was no surprise to her.

“Once I remove the candiru, I’ll let you examine it,” she said. “Get your professional opinion.”

It was an hour before his surgery, and Tomlinson was his abnormal, cheery self. Cheerier. He sat in his private room, bed cranked up like a lounge chair, wearing a gown that tied at the back. There was a big, familiar grin on his face. A drunken grin.

The PCA system to which he was attached had everything to do with his good mood. PCA as in “patient-controlled analgesia.” It allows the patient to administer his own pain medication.

When they told him about it, Tomlinson stopped groaning long enough to say, “If the gadget works, I’ll have one installed on my boat. I’ve got
money.”

The nurses set up an intravenous morphine sulfate drip overhead, found a vein, inserted a needle, and taped it to his arm. Within easy reach, they placed a button connected to the PCA system. As long as he didn’t breach the preset lockout parameters, Tomlinson could get additional morphine by pushing the button.

During the first hour, he’d drummed on the thing like it was the flipper of a pinball machine. Now, though, with the pain finally masked, he sat happily in his bed, grinning, flirting with nurses, using the phone whenever it came into his mind to call someone new.

That was often. Drunks get phone-happy in the early stages of a binge. Tomlinson is among the most phone-loving of drunks. In the right mood, he’s also funny as hell. He plays the caricaturized role of the mind-zapped hipster so naturally that I’m never sure when he’s acting or just being himself. The lines between the two are blurry.

Lake and I sat bedside as the man chatted and laughed into his cellular phone. My son read a magazine while I sat thinking, making notes in my log, preoccupied with the string of poisonous exotics that Dr. Shepherd had listed. Spiders, scorpions, a snake, parasitic worms: all species from either Latin America or Africa.

Both regions house outlaw governments and violent extremists.

The exotics had other characteristics in common. With the exception of the snake, they all produce a prodigious number of eggs or larvae—life capsules so tiny that tens of thousands of each could be easily smuggled into the country. They wouldn’t take up much more space than a paperback book. Once hatched, each species would also adapt to Florida’s subtropical environment.

That was the most unsettling similarity. Multiply X thousands of breeding pairs, then multiply again by X hundreds of thousands of offspring. The population would grow exponentially.

Harrington was right. This wasn’t biovandalism, this was a biological attack. The perpetrators had chosen well. A species that produces many thousands of offspring is an “evolutionary responder.” It is a fecund, or reproductive, response to predators who’ve adapted specialized feeding abilities—“phenotype characteristics”—that make the fecund species easy prey.

It’s called “fecund selection.”

But when a fecund-select species is introduced into a region where there are no predators, it is an environmental catastrophe. Historically, people responsible for these catastrophes have not been terrorists. They’ve been well-intended government officials, or private importers of plants and animals.

I’m a scientific journal junkie. I know that four or five thousand exotic plant species have already established themselves in the United States, along with a couple of thousand exotic animals, all reproducing. I’d read that, annually, these exotics cost us millions a year, because we must assume the aggressive role of artificial predator.

Devastating examples of fecund-select exotics came to mind:

The gypsy moth was brought to the U.S. from France by an entomologist who hoped to cross them with indigenous moths and create better silk. A few gypsy moths escaped, multiplied, multiplied again. They were soon an unchecked cloud that defoliated entire forests throughout New England.

In the 1950s, government biologists turned calamity into cataclysm when they began spraying DDT to kill the moths. It took much too long for officials to admit that DDT also decimated our native insect and bird populations. Several species were poisoned to the brink of extinction—eagles, brown pelicans, and osprey among them.

Dragonflies, which prey voraciously on mosquitoes, were among the earliest of DDT’s casualties, so mosquitoes bred out of control—which required spraying heavier concentrations of the chemical.