“But his widow—Michelle—the woman I met with here in this cabin . . .”
“You mean Janelle? Janelle’s an old friend from the Bureau too—she works undercover. She said you were kind of attractive in a weird, repulsive way—my words, not hers.”
As each man explained his part, Nick kept shaking his head in confusion. Somehow in a matter of minutes he had managed to go from a mental state of perfect enlightenment to a condition of complete bewilderment. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why would you guys go to all this trouble? Why would you bother to make all this up? What was the point?”
“I told you,” Donovan said. “I’m your best man and I get to throw your bachelor party.”
“This is my
bachelor party
? What kind of bachelor party from hell is this?”
“Exactly the kind you needed,” Donovan said. “I’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since you proposed to Alena. That proposal of yours was pretty spontaneous—like everything else you do—and I knew you’d be having second thoughts about marriage. I figured you might need a little help making up your mind. That’s why I put this whole thing together, to help you figure out what it is you really want—and I think you figured that out tonight, didn’t you?”
“Did you have to make me think I was about to die?”
“You can be pretty thickheaded. I kept asking you all along the way, ‘What are you doing here, Nick? Why aren’t you back home with Alena?’ I was hoping you’d stop and ask yourself, ‘What
am
I doing here?’ and then maybe you’d turn the car around and go home—but you never did. Each of us asked you that same question, remember? Me, Ed—even Janelle.”
“Janelle—what was she for?”
“Janelle was my idea,” Yanuzzi said. “She was the siren.”
“The what?”
“Donovan told me you weren’t so sure about marriage. I said maybe you weren’t so sure about your fiancée—so we decided to let you find out.”
“That’s why she was flirting with me?”
“She said you passed the test with flying colors. She said to tell you your fiancée is a lucky woman.”
“But what if I had
failed
the test? What if I—you know— put the moves on her?”
“Nick—do you
have
any ‘moves’?”
“I was speaking theoretically.”
“If you had ‘put the moves on her,’ she probably would have punched you in the nose. More important, you’d have realized that you’re not ready to settle down yet.”
Nick looked at them. “You guys were serious.”
“I’ve been a Marine and I’ve been an FBI agent,” Donovan said. “I’ve seen a lot of marriages go down the drain, and believe me, it isn’t pretty. I should know—I went through it once with Macy. A guy has to be willing to hang in there when things get tough—so I figured you’d better make up your mind about what you want going in.”
The door suddenly opened and Blake Brenton poked his head into the cabin. “Am I late? Did I miss anything?”
The three men laughed again and welcomed their colleague to the party.
Nick looked at the new arrival. “Who are you? I’ve never seen you before.”
“But I’ve seen you,” Brenton said, twisting the cap off a bottle and taking a drink. “I saw you through the scope on my Remington.”
“
You’re
the guy who took a shot at me?”
“I took a shot at a wood post—if I took a shot at you, you wouldn’t be here.”
Donovan slapped Brenton on the back. “Nick, I want you to meet Blake Brenton—Blake’s with the Bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team down in Quantico. Blake used to be with the Fifth Marine Scout Snipers—I asked him to come up for a little target practice.”
“I don’t get it,” Nick said. “If you guys went to all the trouble to get me up here, why was Brenton trying to run me off?”
“He was egging you on,” Donovan said. “I knew if somebody took a shot at you, you’d figure you must be getting close to something.”
“Which reminds me,” Yanuzzi said. “Thanks a lot for announcing my fictional ‘affair’ in front of the whole diner—my wife got half a dozen phone calls before the end of the day. Now I have to take her to see
Riverdance
.”
“But what about that cold case?” Nick asked. “The lake house, the old man who died in the bedroom—what was that all about?”
“That was just a red herring,” Yanuzzi said. “We just needed something to get you up here—and something to occupy you while you were here. That old case was as good as any.”
“You made the whole thing up?”
“Nah, it was a real case. The old guy died, his nurse was accused of negligence, but there wasn’t enough evidence to bring charges. Not much of a case, really—so we gave it a conspiracy angle to make it look bigger than it was.”
“And the whole thing went off without a hitch,” Donovan said. “Nick, if I live to be a hundred, I will never forget the look on your face when Pete stuck that beer bottle in the back of your head and said, ‘This is for you.’ It took everything I had not to bust out laughing.”
“I thought that was very clever,” Pete said. “It was a wonderful double entendre if I do say so myself. I think we all did very well, considering the amount of improvisation required of us.”
“Pete’s right,” Donovan said. “This is no time for critical reviews—we should all be celebrating. Gentlemen, I propose a toast to our guest of honor, Dr. Nick Polchak—a man who finally knows what he wants. That’s no small accomplishment, Nick—here’s to you.” The four men raised their bottles in salute.
Nick just stared off into space.
“And thanks for holding still,” Brenton added. “Things could have gotten very messy and I would have had a lot of explaining to do.”
They all laughed—except for Nick.
“Here’s to
us
,” Donovan said, “and to the Bureau’s most elaborate sting operation since Robert Hanssen. I think we made history tonight, gentlemen—this has got to be the most ingenious bachelor party ever conceived by the mind of man.
I want to congratulate each of you on a stellar performance; please leave your contact information with the stage manager and we’ll be in touch.” Their bottles clinked again.
“Director!” Pete shouted. “Let’s not forget you, Mr. Nathan Donovan. We were all merely players, but you were the genius behind this production. Without your vision and inspired guidance—”
“Hold it,” Nick said. “Something’s wrong.”
T
he smile faded from Donovan’s face. “C’mon, Nick, you’re not gonna be a bad sport about this, are you?
We did this whole thing for you—lighten up.”
“No—something’s wrong.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I went to that lake house and I looked at that bedroom—I had a copy of one of the crime scene photos, so I knew the disposition of the body. The body was found in close proximity to a wall, so I pulled off the baseboard and ripped up the carpet.”
“You
what
? Where was the owner when you were trashing his house?”
“He was standing right there.”
“And he was okay with that?”
“Better to seek forgiveness later than to ask permission in advance,” Nick said. “I call that the ‘Polchak Principle.’ ”
“Why would you tear up the guy’s wall?”
“To search for puparia, of course—and I found them. That’s when I first suspected something was wrong.”
“Whoa,” Brenton said. “I’m a shooter, remember? Can somebody tell me what we’re talking about here?”
“Certain species of flies are attracted to human remains,” Nick explained. “The females lay their eggs in decomposing tissues so the developing maggots will have a readily available source of protein. When the maggots are ready to pupate into adults, they crawl away from the body and look for a secluded spot where they’ll be safe from predators—in this case, the joint between the floor and the bedroom wall, because the wall was the only place close enough for them to hide. That’s why I pulled off the baseboard—to look for the puparial casings they left behind.”
“Wow,” Brenton said. “They told me you were weird, but I had no idea.”
“I took the puparia to an entomology lab at Penn State and identified them. I found only one species present:
Fannia scalaris
, the common latrine fly.” He looked at Pete Boudreau. “Latrine flies are
Muscids
, Pete—and you know what that means.”
“Maybe Pete knows,” Donovan said, “but those of us who don’t speak Latin have no idea what you’re talking about. Would you mind translating?”
“Different species of flies are attracted to different things.
Calliphorids
and
Sarcophagids
—those are the blowflies and flesh flies you normally find on bodies—they’re attracted to decomposing tissues. But the latrine fly isn’t interested in decomposing tissues—it’s only attracted to feces and urine.”
Nick stopped to allow the significance of that revelation to sink in, but Pete was the only one who showed any sign of comprehension—so Nick continued. “
Feces and urine
—that means the old man had been neglected for quite some time before his death—I estimate about six or seven days.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because the flies need at least that much time before they begin to pupate. Are you getting it now? The latrine flies were attracted to the old man’s soiled body
while he was still alive
. That’s when they laid their eggs on him, and that’s when they did most of their development. The old man fell to the floor shortly before he died—that’s when the maggots left the body and crawled off to the wall to hide.”
“How do you know the flies didn’t land on him
after
he died?” Yanuzzi asked.
“Because the autopsy report said the old man had only been dead for a couple of days, but it takes eight or nine days for a latrine fly to develop from an egg to the pupal stage. The old man had been dead for a couple of days before they found him; subtract those two days, and
bingo
—the eggs must have been laid on him at least six or seven days earlier. That was while he was still alive—and that’s definite proof of neglect.”
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” Yanuzzi asked.
“Because you made me think you were behind it,” Nick said.
“Wasn’t that the whole idea of your ‘conspiracy angle’?”
“Unbelievable,” Yanuzzi mumbled. “I dig up some dead-end cold case nobody ever made any headway on, and you manage to solve the thing in two days.”
“He has a habit of doing that,” Donovan said.
“So the nurse really did neglect the old guy—and you can prove it.”
“That’s right.”
“I guess I’ll have to look up that nurse and ask him a few questions.”
“Don’t bother,” Nick said. “He’s dead.”
Yanuzzi looked at him. “How do you know?”
“Because I went up to see him this evening while you guys were making party arrangements. He has a place up in Honesdale. I knocked on the door, but—”
“Don’t tell me,” Yanuzzi said. “Nobody answered, so you let yourself in.”
“No, I walked around to the back of the house and looked in through a window. I saw him slumped over the kitchen table with his head in a pool of blood—
then
I let myself in. Somebody shot him in the right temporal lobe and then made a very clumsy attempt to cover it up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I checked the skull. No contact wound—the gun wasn’t pressing against the skin when it was fired. There were powder burns, but they were too widely dispersed; my guess is that the gun was fired from at least six inches away, maybe even a foot— and that’s almost physically impossible to do by yourself. Even the position of the body was suspicious—neatly slumped over the table like that. In an actual suicide the impact of the bullet against the skull would have very likely knocked the body sideways out of the chair. People are such amateurs when it comes to staging a suicide; I should really do a seminar sometime.”
“Any idea how long he’d been dead?”
“I found blowfly eggs around the entry wound and in the corners of the eye sockets, but none of them had had time to hatch despite the warm temperatures. Judging by that and the general appearance of the body, I’d say he’s been dead no more than two days—and I think we all know who did it.”