HE WAS LICKING THE last of the mayonnaise and mustard off his fingers when Dr. B walked into the bone lab, looking surprised. “Tyler—I thought you were in lockdown across the river.”
“I tunneled out,” Tyler said. “Actually, I’m about to do an experiment.” He reached into his backpack and fished out the jar. “These are my guinea pigs. I mean, my rigorously screened research subjects.”
“What’s the research question? What’s your hypothesis?”
“The question is, how far away can blowflies smell a corpse? My hypothesis is, if I release these little guys over here, they’ll follow their noses and show up over there again. Maybe even before I do.”
“Hmm. Interesting.” Brockton took the jar from him and peered through the glass, scrutinizing the bugs. “How will you know? I’m sure their mommas can recognize ’em, but to me, they look just like every other blowfly I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe now, but in five minutes, I bet that anybody—even you—can pick these flies out of a lineup.”
“You’re on,” said Brockton. “I need to run upstairs and check the mail. When I come back, we’ll put your recognition hypothesis to the test.” He ducked out the steel door of the basement lab, and Tyler heard his footsteps jogging up the two flights of stairs to the Anthropology Department’s main office.
Ten minutes later he heard footsteps jogging back down, and the steel door banged open. “Time’s up. You ready?”
“One. More. Second. Okay, ready.” Tyler straightened and rolled his chair sideways, so Dr. B could get at the jar. “There’s been a slight revision to the research protocol,” he added with exaggerated academic pomposity, “due to attrition in the study sample size. The original cohort was eleven. Now the n is five.”
“Five?” said Brockton. “Out of eleven? Good God, your research subjects are dropping like flies.” Tyler groaned, as Brockton had surely hoped he would. “Remind me never to be one of your guinea pigs.” Dr. B picked up the jar and carried it to the large bank of windows lining the lab’s south wall. Holding it up to the light, he tilted it, turned it, and then grinned at it. Six flies lay dead or dying in the bottom of the jar, but the other five were buzzing or crawling, vigorously and vividly. Each of them sported a small but prominent dot on its thorax: a distinctive dab of UT orange.
“GOD DAMN IT,” TYLER muttered, pinching the sides of his nose fiercely. He had scarcely settled back into his folding chair after his lunch break, and already his nostrils were being invaded again. The first fifty times it had happened, he’d puffed air out his nose to blast the intruder loose without inflicting damage. By now, though, he was in a murderous mood, and was more than happy to turn his nasal passages into death chambers. Releasing the nostril that had been violated, he blew, and the crushed fly shot out and landed on the concrete. Tyler leaned down, the nail of his middle finger circling to the tip of his thumb, coiled to flick the fly through the fence and into the woods. Then he froze, staring, and burst into a laugh. “I’ll be damned,” he said.
The dead fly was wearing UT orange.
CHAPTER 17
Brockton
“EXCUSE ME?” I SAID into the telephone handset.
“I said, ‘Good fences make good neighbors,’ ” the dean repeated, the edge in his voice growing even sharper.
“I heard what you said,” I told him, “and I even know it comes from a poem, but I don’t quite get what you mean by it.”
“I mean what the hell were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry,” I floundered, “but I still don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean I just spent half an hour on the phone with one of the groundskeepers from the Medical Center,” he snapped. “He’s trimming weeds at the edge of a parking lot, and he steps into the woods to take a leak. Guess what he sees?”
I had an uneasy feeling that I knew, but I decided to play innocent, in hopes that I was wrong. “Uh . . . a marijuana patch?”
“No. Wait—what? Are you growing pot in the woods now, too?”
“No!” Perhaps I should’ve chosen my alternative scenario more carefully. “No, of course we’re not growing pot in the woods.”
“Well, thank God for small favors,” he said. “So this poor, unsuspecting bastard goes behind a tree to pee and nearly craps his pants instead, because he suddenly finds himself face-to-face with a human corpse. A very nasty-looking, nasty-smelling human corpse.”
“Ooh,” I managed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You’ll be even sorrier if he files a lawsuit. Which he’s threatening to do.”