Gary, Bosch knew, was her estranged, soon to be ex-husband. He nodded at what she was telling him but was not seeing the significance of the find.

She said, “We go on to the nasal swabs. Okay, there was more wheat dust and then we found this.”

She slid another photo across the table. This was also a photo of a culture dish with a dime in it. There was also a small pinkish-brown line near the dime. This was much smaller than the fly in the first photo, but Bosch could tell it was also some kind of insect.

“And this?” he asked.

“Same thing, my entomologist tells me. Only this is a youngun. This is a larva.”

She folded her fingers together and pointed her elbows out. She smiled and waited.

“You love this, don’t you?” he said. He drafted off a quarter of his beer. “Okay, you got me. What’s it all mean?”

“Well, you have a basic understanding of the fruit fly right? It chews up the citrus crop, can bring the entire industry to its knees, umpty-ump millions lost, no orange juice in the morning, et cetera, et cetera, the decline of civilization as we know it. Right?”

He nodded and she went on, talking very quickly.

“Okay, we seem to have an annual medfly infestation here. I’m sure you’ve seen the quarantine signs on the freeways or heard the helicopters spraying malathion at night.”

“They make me dream of Vietnam,” Harry said.

“You must have also seen or read about the movement against malathion spraying. Some people say it poisons people as well as these bugs. They want it stopped. So, what’s a Department of Agriculture to do? Well, one thing is step up the other procedure they use to get these bugs.

“The USDA and state Medfly Eradication Project release billions of sterile medflies all across southern California. Millions every week. See, the idea is that when the ones that are already out there mate, they’ll do it with sterile partners and eventually the infestation will die out because less and less are reproduced. It’s mathematical, Harry. End of problem-if they can saturate the region with enough sterile flies.”

She stopped there but Bosch still didn’t get it.

“Geez, this is all really fantastic, Teresa. But does it get to a point eventually or are we just-”

“I’m getting there. I’m getting there. Just listen. You are a detective. Detectives are supposed to listen. You once told me that solving murders was getting people to talk and just listening to them. Well, I’m telling it.”

He held his hands up. She went on.

“The flies released by the USDA are dyed when they are in the larval stage. Dyed pink, so they can keep track of them or quickly separate the sterile ones from the nonsterile ones when they check those little traps they have in orange trees all over the place. After the larvae are dyed pink, they are irradiated to make them sterile. Then they get released.”

Harry nodded. It was beginning to sound interesting.

“My entomologist examined the two samples taken from Juan Doe #67 and this is what he found.” She referred to some notes in the file. “The adult fly obtained from the deceased’s stomach was both dyed and sterilized, female. Okay, nothing unusual about that. Like I said, they release something like three hundred million of these a week-billions over the year-and so it would seem probable that one might be accidentally swallowed by our man if he was anywhere in, say, southern California.”

“That narrows it down,” Bosch said. “What about the other sample?”

“The larva is different.” She smiled again. “Dr. Braxton, that’s the bug doctor, said the larval specimen was dyed pink as to USDA specifications. But it had not yet been irradiated-sterilized-when it went up our Juan Doe’s nose.”

She unfolded her hands and put them down at her sides. Her factual report was concluded. Now it was time to speculate and she was giving him the first shot.

“So inside his body he has two dyed flies, one sterilized and one not sterilized,” Bosch said. “That would lead me to conclude that shortly before his death, our boy was at the location where these flies are sterilized. Millions of flies around. One or two could have gotten in his food. He could have breathed one in through the nose. Anything like that.”

She nodded.

“What about the wheat dust? In the ears and hair.”

“The wheat dust is the food, Harry. Braxton said that is the food used in the breeding process.”

He said, “So I need to find where they make, where they breed, these sterile flies. They might have a line on Juan Doe. Sounds like he was a breeder or something.”

She smiled and said, “Why don’t you ask me where they breed them.”

“Where do they do it, Teresa?”

“Well, the trick is to breed them where they are already a part of the natural insect population or environment and therefore not a problem in case some happen to slip out the door before getting their dose of radiation.

“And, so, the USDA contracts with breeders in only two places; Hawaii and Mexico. In Hawaii there are three breeding contractors on Oahu. In Mexico there is a breeder down near Zihuatenejo and the largest of all five is located near-”

“ Mexicali.”

“Harry! How did you know? Did you already know all of this and let me-”

“It was just a guess. It fits with something else I’ve been working on.”

She looked at him oddly and for a moment he was sorry he had spoiled her fun. He drained his beer mug and looked around for the squeamish waiter.

10

She drove him back to get his car near the Red Wind and then followed him out of downtown and up to his home in the hills. She lived in a condo in Hancock Park, which was closer, but she said she had been spending too much time there lately and wanted a chance to see or hear the coyote. He knew her real reason was that it would be easier for her to extricate herself from his place than to ask him to leave hers.

Bosch didn’t mind, though. The truth was, he felt uncomfortable at her place. It reminded him too much of what L.A. was coming to. It was a fifth-floor loft with a view of downtown in a historic residence building called the Warfield. The exterior of the building was still as beautiful as the day in 1911 it was completed by George Allan Hancock. Beaux Arts architecture with a blue-gray terra-cotta facade. George hadn’t spared the oil money and from the street the Warfield, with its fleurs-de-lys and cartouches, showed it. But it was the interior-the current interior, that is-that Bosch found objectionable. The place had been bought a few years back by a Japanese firm and completely gutted, then retrofitted, renovated and revamped. The walls in each apartment were knocked down and each place was nothing but a long, sterile room with fake wood floors, stainless-steel counters and track lighting. Just a pretty shell, Bosch thought. He had a feeling George would’ve thought the same.

At Harry’s house they talked while he lit the hibachi on the porch and put an orange roughy filet on the grill. He had bought it Christmas Eve and it was still fresh and large enough to split. Teresa told him the County Commission would probably informally decide before New Year’s on a permanent chief medical examiner. He wished her good luck but privately wasn’t sure he meant it. It was a political appointment and she would have to toe the line. Why get into that box? He changed the subject.

“So, if this guy, this Juan Doe, was down in Mexicali -near where they make these fruit flies-how do you think his body got all the way up here?”

“That’s not my department,” Teresa said.

She was at the railing, staring out over the Valley. There were a million lights glinting in the crisp, cool air. She was wearing his jacket over her shoulders. Harry glazed the fish with a pineapple barbecue sauce and then turned it over.