Andi leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. He was obviously thinking hard. “One of them tried to flee. If it was before or after the other two were killed, we don’t know.” He sighed. “And I think it’s safe to assume we’re dealing with sex trafficking here.”
“I’m afraid you’re right. I usually don’t like jumping to conclusions, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck….”
“Then it probably tastes good with blue kraut and potato dumplings.”
George knew he must have looked pretty clueless, because Andi rolled his eyes. “That’s how duck is traditionally eaten in Bavaria, with blue kraut and potato dumplings.”
“Oh. Now I get it. Have you been to Bavaria?”
Andi’s expression became guarded again, as if he was weighing the pros and cons of divulging a particular piece of information. “My mother is German. Her entire family lives in a small village in the Bavarian Alps. It’s all very traditional there. I’ve been a few times when I was younger. Not recently, though.”
That was more than George had hoped for. And he was quick to reveal something personal about himself as well, to keep up the illusion of quid pro quo. “My father is Irish. I haven’t been to Ireland yet, but I want to go one day. Must be nice to connect with part of one’s heritage.”
Andi muttered something unintelligible under his breath, and George was sure it wasn’t in favor of connecting with anything. He smiled. “Back to the case. Sex trafficking?” He wrote the words in red into the upper right corner, complete with a question mark, since they weren’t a hundred percent sure.
“Yes. Sex trafficking.” Andi sounded resigned.
Chapter 6—The Non-Peace of Conferring with Bugs
THEY TOSSEDall kinds of ideas into the air, none of them feasible until they got the report from the coroner. Andi was very careful not to suggest too many things he knew would turn out to be true later. George was a suspicious SOB and already on his case after they found the bodies of the two other girls. But there had been no helping it. Not going into the storage unit would have meant a delay in finding the corpses, which would have hindered their investigation. As things were now, they could work focused on the real direction of the case, even though it was—at the moment—still under the pretense of being a suspicion. Andi knew, though. The ants and flies had told him. Not in terms humans used, but they had witnessed the deaths of the girls, first the one outside, then the other two, when the man with them had panicked. Their fine senses had also picked up on the drugs in the girls’ systems and the stench of the man who killed them, a mixture of booze and cocaine the ants didn’t like.
Screaming, shoving, heavy footsteps disturbing the ground, sending shock waves into the nest, causing some of the older tunnels to cave in in some places, the hurried scuttling of thousands of legs relocating the precious brood, the eggs, while others made sure the queen’s chamber was still intact, still solid. Another scream, experienced by the ants as a disturbance in the air, a thud of something with weight going down, then silence, cursing, a rapid series of swirls in the air, retreating footsteps, the vibrations in the ground gradually fading, leaving peace again. Peace and a meal, still smelling of life, still warm, yet missing the pulsing of something that could fight back.
Later came footsteps again, choking wafts of acid and fermented sugar and sweat and blood, followed closely by the much fainter impression of even more death, even more food for the colony.
If he were still working alone, Andi would already be following that particular lead, checking out the usual haunts in Charleston where alcohol, girls, and drugs went together like Kaiserschmarrn and applesauce, to keep the Bavarian food analogies. With George in the picture, he had to wait for solid proof from the lab before he could go out hunting, a delay he hoped wouldn’t cost them the chance to catch their suspect. It all depended on how nervous the murderer was. If he thought himself safe, he probably wouldn’t try to go into hiding. So far, the murders hadn’t made the news, and Andi hoped it would stay that way for at least a few more days. Anything that bought them time.
A glance at his watch told him it was almost six, high time to leave the precinct and get home to let the events of the day sink in. Time to meditate and calm his inner turmoil, which didn’t just stem from seeing the murder through the eyes of a nest of ants and countless bottle flies this time. Having a partner was grating on Andi’s nerves, even though George was obviously trying to put him at ease. The danger of slipping up and revealing something that could potentially not only cost him his job but also land him in a mental institution was an additional source of stress Andi didn’t need in his life. Perhaps he should have thought his decision to let Chief Norris have her way through more, but it was too late now. If things kept developing at this rate, he would have to resort to alcohol to dull his senses, never a good idea, because the temptation of snuggling into the sweet oblivion offered by beer and schnapps got more irresistible every time he had to call on it for help.
Meditation it was. And a long round of yoga. Just to get his body on different ideas.
“I think I’m calling it quits for today. See you tomorrow. Perhaps the lab will have something for us by then.”
For a moment it looked as if George wanted to protest or, worse, invite him for a beer or something equally tiring, but then the man shut his mouth again and waved. “Fine with me. See you tomorrow.”
The relief of not having to fend off a polite invitation must have shown on his face, because George looked as if he had bitten into a fresh lemon. Before the situation could get any more awkward, Andi hurried out, glad to be finally free.
The eight-minute drive to his home in Stiles Point on St. James Island was so familiar, he barely had to concentrate because he already knew all the impressions the insects were forcing on him.
The sweet, cloying scent of the lantanas and butterfly weeds and tickseeds just starting to bloom, the crumbly quality of the soil in the flower beds of the bigger houses compared to the hardness of the underground stretching into the pavement, the flies caught in spiderwebs, the juicy leaves feasted on by caterpillars, the rotting wood of an old porch….
Of course, there was always something slightly new, but usually never so bad it threw him off-balance. Funnily enough, most insects liked their routines and things to stay the way they were—made it easier to keep up with food sources and safe places to hide.
Insects didn’t have the same kind of awareness other animals, especially mammals, had; their lives were so much shorter and knowledge more fluid. Every species “saw” the world in a different way, and it was the combination of impressions from different kinds of insects that helped Andi find his culprits.
The man who had killed the girls was an undesirable bag of rotten blood to the ants, the kind that was a dime a dozen in certain areas of the city, and with their sensory information alone, Andi would never be able to find the man. But combined with the knowledge of the flies—a dark blob of a man, smelling sweetly of decay; the ticks—not their favorite kind of meal, but worth going for; the moths—nothing of interest, just pheromones that did nothing for them; and a whole bunch of others, like silverfish and roaches, he was able to picture the man quite clearly, and when he saw him, he would immediately recognize him, even though his own eyes worked in a completely different way. Thanks to hisoma, he had learned to translate the language of the insects into images his human brain could understand. Unfortunately, explaining this to George or the chief or any authority wasn’t a viable option.
Andi pulled into the driveway to his one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old plantation-style house, a gift from his American gran, who had made it her mission in life to make things as easy as possible for Andi so he didn’t have to deal with such mundane things as housing or finances on top of hisgeschenk. That he had inherited the beautiful two-story house with the bright white front porch, the wraparound veranda, and the huge garden, not to mention the interior complete with various valuable antiques, had only served to broaden the rift between him and his father that had started to show once it became apparent what he had inherited from his mother’s side. His parents’ divorce when he was ten had been a brutal hit on Andi’s already fragile mind. The constant blame coming from his father, directed equally at him for being an abomination and his mother for passing on her flawed genes, had destroyed something inside Andi. Now he found it hard to trust anybody, and the meaning of kindness was lost to him.
His mother had never blamed him for anything, though she did look at him with a sad expression in her eyes when she thought he wasn’t seeing it. After the divorce, they had visited her relatives in Bavaria for almost a year. The good thing was hisomahad used the time to teach him how to live with thegeschenk.
After they had returned to the States, his gran had taken them in, and the moment Andi hit eighteen, his mother had booked a flight back to Bavaria. They sometimes phoned or even skyped, usually around Christmas, but they didn’t really have anything to talk about. His father called more regularly, every three months, usually when he was drunk, to remind Andi how he had no right to the gorgeous house he was living in. After a call from his dad, the constant assault from the insects always seemed tame in comparison.
He parked his car in the double garage his gran had built when he and his mother had moved in with her. The empty left bay was a daily reminder that the one person who had truly loved and cared for him was gone. Gran had died six years ago, and it still hurt Andi to think about it. Her bedroom on the first floor remained untouched, in an attempt to preserve the illusion of her spirit still being there. Andi knew it would be healthier to repurpose the room, give it a new meaning so he could move on. He also knew it wouldn’t happen anytime soon, most probably never. If things got too bad, if the temptation of drowning his stress and sorrow at the bottom of a bottle became too great, Gran’s room was his fortress, the last defense line against the slide into self-destruction.
Sometimes Andi considered going to a shrink, to have somebody to talk to who was bound by law not to spill the beans about him. The question was, could a psychologist show him any new ways of dealing with his problems? He was already using every possible coping mechanism he could read about, and still the temptation was overwhelming sometimes. No, it was better to just keep going, hoping for the best and knowing, deep inside, that for him a happily ever after wasn’t in the cards.
Andi entered the house, already tuned into the bustling of all the insects living in his home and garden. Hisgeschenkhad an automatic range of about half a mile. He could go farther if he really needed to, though he hadn’t done it for quite some time. It was extremely draining, something he only contemplated when all else failed. Besides, there could be up to two thousand different kinds of arthropods in one square mile, and having all of them practically screaming at him was not on his list of enjoyable things to do regularly. Today everything was fine. The ants, roaches, and silverfish were satisfied with the weather, the atmospheric pressure, and the available food. The wild bees were buzzing away on the spring flowers in full bloom, and the creatures of the soil, worms, centipedes, the larvae of June bugs and others, showed him how wonderfully soft and rich the soil in his garden was.
