“I’m definitely going to try. Anything new from the precinct?”
“Except for Norris hounding us to solve the case yesterday? No. Neither Shireen nor Evangeline were helpful this time, though Shireen is very busy digging deeper into the lives of our victims. She said it takes longer because there’s so much.” George added some herbs to the stir-fry.
“Norris really has it out for us. I’m sorry, George. That’s not what you need.” Andi sounded exhausted, and George wasn’t sure if it was an aftermath of yesterday’s trip or something deeper.
“I’m fine, Andi. Don’t forget, I’m an adult and I can take care of myself. As is the chief, who should know better than to pursue personal vendettas just for the heck of it. Speaking of which—” He made a face. “—I need to write a memory protocol about today’s meeting with her.”
“That bad?”
“Let’s just say I think it’s a good idea to get our ducks in a very neat row.” George got out plates and forks and ladled generous portions of the stir-fry onto them.
“Which makes it even more important to find our killers.”
“Don’t start stressing over it, Andi. Now let’s eat, and you can tell me exactly how you know what heroin or crack look like when you see it through the eyes of your creepy crawler friends.” George put the plates on the kitchen bar, motioning for Andi to sit down. “Are you well enough to talk to me, or should we wait until tomorrow?”
“I’m good.” Andi took the first bite of his food and moaned happily. “Do you want to move in?”
George grinned. “As tempting as that offer sounds, I’m afraid we’d kill each other within a week.”
“What makes you think that?” Andi raised a brow. George wasn’t sure if he was teasing or genuinely interested.
“Well, for one, I’m afraid our view on tidiness differs too greatly, and no amount of good cooking on my part will make you put up with me constantly nagging you to pick up after yourself.”
Andi took a moment to chew and swallow his food. “You could just pick things up yourself, you know.”
“I’d be your roommate, not your cleaning service.”
“There’s no chance you’d want to be both?” The longing in Andi’s voice could have fooled George if he hadn’t seen the twinkling in his eyes.
“Uh, let me think about it… no. I do my housework, but I don’t like it.”
“And it was such a good idea,” Andi murmured. “You would save on gas as well.”
“It’s not worth the potential fallout, believe me.”
“You’re probably right.” Andi started eating in earnest. When his plate was half-cleared, he looked up at George again, who had done his best to fill his own stomach as well. “Okay, we can start. What do you want to know?”
“You already explained to me how you learned to recognize all kinds of drugs and some diseases through knowing what it was and then comparing it to what impressions the insects gave you. Like Dominic McHill’s alcohol addiction. Though I’m not sure if that’s a disease or a drug.”
“Both, I’d say. And yes. The first drug I learned to distinguish was heroin. There was this huge raid we did when I was still a beat officer, just fresh from the academy. The warehouse was chock-full of mosquitoes, termites, ticks, pill bugs, spiders, flies, and moths. Each of them has a different way of recognizing chemical signatures, and from what I gleaned from them, I was able to get a 3D model of the drug. It’s similar to how I can recognize humans. A bit like one of those pictures where you can see different things from different angles. Heroin, I know from almost every angle. The same goes for crack, weed, LSD, angel dust, and some others. I also know quite a lot of pills and diseases. Hospitals are great places to learn.” Andi shuddered.
“Okay. I get that, I think. Can you tell mewhatit is you see?”
Andi hesitated. “I can try and put things into terms you would be able to work with.”
George nodded encouragingly.
“Okay. So let’s take weed. It’s not artificial but something that has grown. I can always sense that. It’s not something I can put into words at all, just a feeling I get. Insects are very good at distinguishing between natural and artificial, and they don’t use a sense I can pinpoint. They just seem to kind of know?”
“That actually makes sense. I mean, our senses are very different and probably not as fine-tuned, but we can tell, for example, if a cloth is sheep wool or cotton or polyester.” George looked at Andi, asking him silently to either affirm or negate his words.
“It’s close. And yes, their senses are much finer. But that’s how I know the substance is natural.”
“Good, that’s good. Now, when you identify something, like weed, what else do you see?”
Andi started drawing circles with his fork on the empty plate. “You know how there’s different ways to represent an element or a chemical compound?”
George nodded. “You have the name, like oxygen, then you have O2, and those complicated patterns of letters and lines to depict what it looks like.” George made a face. “One of the worst chemistry tests I ever had to do.”
