It took twenty-one minutes for Richie to call me back. When he did, it was on a video call.
I hit the button to accept, and the familiar look of a cadaver lab flickered across the screen. “You’re on with me, Frank, and Deputy Director Poulton,” I said. We were standing in the conference room near Marly’s office. “What have you found?”
Richie’s phone moved across the room, and our view settled on a square pewter tub, in which Fisher’s heart lay.
The organ we had found in the refrigerator in New Mexico had been kept fresh by being frozen. Now, days later, it had lost its reddish luster and turned a brownish color. The arteries protruding from it looked like saggy orange rubber tubing.
“Okay,” Richie said. “So Dr. Monsher here laterally sliced open each of the major arteries feeding the heart.”
“He found something,” I said.
The phone flipped, and we saw a microscope set up on a table. The side of Richie’s face. He swiveled the camera just slightly. “It was inside the left anterior descending artery. A piece of vegetation, one centimeter square.”
“One centimeter?” Poulton said.
We saw a petri dish. Something tiny and green in the center.
“Can you see that?” Richie asked.
“No,” Frank said.
Richie adjusted the focus. “It’s a piece of evergreen,” he said. “Except half the size of a peanut—and paper thin.”
“You’re saying that was inside Fisher’s heart?” Poulton said.
Richie nodded. “All the doc can say for sure is that there’s no way it got pumped in there. Someone placed it inside the artery after the heart was cut from the body.”
“Evergreen as in the tree?” Frank asked.
“Yeah,” Richie said. “And there’s something else … bugs.”
“Something other than Calliphoridae?” I asked.
Calliphoridae, or blowflies, arrive on a dead body within minutes and begin laying eggs.
“Different insect,” Richie said. His phone zoomed in on a second petri dish, and we saw what looked like a fly. Except the markings on the petri dish indicated the insect was miniscule. Two to three millimeters at most. Too small to be a blowfly.
“We don’t know what kind of insects these are,” Richie said. “But Doc Monsher thinks that they came in with the plant.”
For decades, scientists have studied how insects are carried long distances, sometimes inside the husks of plants. Other times they are eaten by birds and their eggs survive undigested, spawning in the birds’ own excrement.
“Pack the leaf and bugs up,” I told him. “Head to the airport.”
“Where am I going?” Richie asked.
“When I know, you’ll know,” I said. “Wherever it is, I’m meeting you there.”
Richie hung up, and I turned to Poulton.
“You need an expert,” he said.
“I do. But there are dozens of types of evergreens. Until we know more, I need the preeminent expert on all of them. Conifers, pine, hemlock, live oak, angiosperms, club mosses.”
The deputy director glanced out at the hallway, flipping his key card in his hand. “Text me that list,” he said.
He took two steps away, then turned back to face us. “You’re smart, Camden,” he said. “Bet if I give you forty-eight hours, you’ll prove how valuable this group of yours is. And we’ll have this guy in cuffs.”
Was this a challenge to show what PAR could do—directly from the top?
“Absolutely,” I said.
Poulton turned to Frank, who had a smirk on his face.
“It’s hard to say, isn’t it, Craig?” he said. “The word ‘sorry’?”
The deputy director’s forehead creased into lines. “How ’bout we hold apologies until we actually catch this guy.”
Poulton turned and left.