“I don’t think anything.” Gelman paused. “Let me rephrase that.”
“Too late.” George snickered.
“Agent DeCapristo thinks it’s because one of the victims is a retired judge from North Carolina—there’s your jumping of state lines in case you were wondering—who was known to be mercilessly strict with certain groups of people.”
“You mean he was an asshole toward anybody who wasn’t White, male, straight, and Christian? Or was it just straight? Or just male? Or just White?” Andi might not be as good as George when it came to reading between the lines of polite bullshit, but he knew what Gelman wasn’t saying. Sadly, it was always the same or varying degrees of the same.
“Your words, not mine,” Luke said calmly. “But yes, he was that kind of fucker. Anyway, the reason I’m here is the way those people died.” He pulled out photographs of six men and three women, all very dead, all very obviously taken on morgue slabs. “They were killed by insects.”
“Sorry, I just heard you say these people were killed by insects.” George stared at the photos, all headshots, no bodies visible. Andi could see that Gelman was growing agitated. The man didn’t know what to make of the whole situation.
“You do know that death by arthropod is always an accident?”
“I knew it until I saw several swarms of bees killing a killer. Bees called by you.”
Ah, that was the crux of the matter. Andi felt George’s hand on the small of his back. His partner was in defensive mode already.
“You’re saying that because you’ve seen one incident where arthropods were used as a weapon, you think it’s possible? After you’ve told us how unbelievably unique Andi is?”
Luke lifted his hands in a placating gesture. He was very adamant about respecting George’s role as Andi’s caretaker. “It’s not just that.” He shuffled through the photos. “Look at these two, Matthew Blank and David Tennet. They died last year in April, when they accidentally destroyed a beehive on a property they were preparing for groundbreaking.”
“That’s a classic. Bees don’t like being disturbed.” It was a fact quite a lot of people learned the hard, painful way, Andi had found out.
“Yes, a classic. And then you have Albert Dunhill, the judge, and his pal Trevor Asten, who were fishing on a lake when they were attacked by a swarm of hornets. On the water.”
“And that’s unlikely?” George looked at Andi.
“Very. Non-water-dwelling arthropods rarely have a reason to fly across it, especially not an entire swarm. Especially not hornets. It’s…unlikely.”
“Which is why I need you to take a look.”
George was already shaking his head. “Six weeks ago? Let me guess, the hive was either destroyed or removed? Or not found at all? And the corpses? What happened to them? If neither the victims nor the reason for their demise is present, how is Andi supposed to do this? What do you think he is? A wizard?”
Strictly speaking, there were quite a few things Andi would be able to determine if he went to the site. Other arthropods would fill him in. Something as major as somebody dying always left an impression. And if they knew where the hive was or had been, Andi would surely be able to get some answers. Hives, even abandoned ones, always left imprints. Something about the presence of a swarm, the combined sensory impressions of hundreds of individuals. It might not be very clear, but there would be hints.
The reason George was against it was that purposely going back almost two months to look for a specific event was bound to cost Andi. With his geschenk growing stronger seemingly each day, navigating time in addition to the battering of everything else was something he preferred to avoid.
“I don’t know what Andi is.” Gelman shrugged. “Apparently not even Andi knows it.” The small smile playing around his lips at his own joke vanished when he saw their serious expressions. “Sorry. You must understand that the situation in Spartanburg is on the fast track to becoming volatile. Chief Savalle is young, only thirty-five, and finds it extremely offensive that the FBI is insinuating he didn’t do his job. Agent DeCapristo, on the other hand, only came down because the dead judge was from another state and, you know, a judge. She should be elsewhere entirely but now needs to prove her hunch was spot-on to justify the spending of money for her trip there, and all this negativity on top of not knowing if there even is a case to speak of has everybody close to exploding.”
“And you want to put Andi in the middle of that? You must know that’s like pouring gasoline onto a fire.” George shook his head with even more emphasis than before. Andi briefly wondered whether he should be offended or flattered and decided it wasn’t worth the hassle either way.
Luke shook his head. “No. I want you to march in there while Andi quietly does his thing, and once it’s determined whether we’re really talking freak accidents or murder, we’ll continue from there.”
“I don’t like it.” George folded his arms in front of his chest, a display of body language he usually tried to avoid. He wasn’t one for giving things away so easily, at least not when dealing with potential wrongdoers. Luke was a potential threat. George’s pheromones and the impatient flickering in his electric field, like fireworks on LSD to the pill bugs, attested to that. Andi inched close enough to feel George’s body heat, which immediately calmed his partner down. His rigid stance loosened just a bit. It still amazed him how readily George went to war for him, how willing he was to do everything in his power to protect Andi. It was such a new thing to Andi. He still didn’t know how to handle it, so naturally, he ignored it.
“Me neither.” Luke shrugged, his expression too empty, his heartbeat just a tiny bit too fast, his scent, gray smeared with purple through the eyes of the moth, not in accordance with what his words and body language tried to say. It was like listening to the refrain of a song, where the same note was off and irritating enough to tempt Andi into saying something.
“You don’t think there’s anything to this, do you?”
Luke opened his mouth, no doubt to protest, then looked first at George, then Andi, and sighed. “No, I really don’t think there’s anything substantial going on. Freak coincidences do happen, and the laws of probability don’t exclude such a clustering of insect-related deaths. I even checked the International Classification of Diseases, cross-referencing it with the death statistics for accidents with wasps, bees, and hornets. Even the distribution of the victims is close to the 80 percent male casualties the US sees in this field on average per year.”
“Arthropods,” Andi corrected absently. Luke was of course right. His tiny informants would never kill a human because they felt like it. Usually they were provoked, the blobs stumbling around like the clumsy bags of flesh they were.
George kept his gaze on Luke. “But you’re sending us, nevertheless.” He took a sharp breath. “You want to do a trial run.”
Andi knew George wasn’t sure if he should be offended or amused, his tells oscillating between the two emotions. He thought it was prudent, seeing how the two newbies were doing without the pressure of something big looming over them.
Luke lifted his hands in surrender. If anything, he seemed to be relieved that the cards were on the table now. “Hear me out. Yes, you could say it’s a trial run, but there’s a lot of positives. First,” he lifted the index finger of his right hand, “it’s not far away. If need be, you could even commute to Spartanburg. Well, if you fancy three hours on the road, one direction. Second, since this is likely nothing, you can test the waters of your new status without the need to bring forth a solution. Third, the office can do the FBI a favor, which can be cashed in at a later time. See, it’s a perfect opportunity.” Now Luke was grinning broadly.
