12
Harvest
Translated by: James D. Jenkins
Two items of interest: (1) Today I’m going to talk to my wife for the first time in two years. (2) My wife is dead. She passed away two years ago under strange circumstances.
It’s my day off and our ‘date’ isn’t until tonight, so I’ll take advantage of my free time to go to the beach. Lucia loved the sea. She wouldn’t swim in it; she had too much respect for it. But she would go for long walks along the shore and loved letting the waves lick her bare feet. Oddly enough, she told me once that when she died, the last place she would want her ashes scattered was the sea. ‘One night I dreamt I was dying, and all I could do was swim and swim through the darkness at the bottom of the ocean, like a blind fish.’ I didn’t pay much attention at the time – nobody takes it seriously when a healthy person talks about their death – but it comes to mind now as I put some cans of beer in the cooler and grab a book to lie down and read in the sun.
I’m a forensic entomologist. My job is to study the insects that overrun cadavers and leave clues behind to help catch killers. The bugs like to lay their eggs on the victim’s face, or in their eyes or nose. The trick is to connect the life cycles of the insects with the stages of the body’s decomposition, which allows you to approximate the time of death. In other words, it’s like a kind of clock. You can even determine whether the body has been moved from another spot. Insects also like to feed on rotting flesh. Among them flies, beetles, spiders, ants, wasps, and centipedes. And they’re voracious: the remains of an adult human left exposed in the open air can be devoured rapidly. Entomologists call this necrophile fauna the ‘squadrons of death’.
My most famous case to date was this: A family moves into a house. Two months later they find the corpse of a murdered child in the basement and report it to the authorities. The police zero in on them as the prime suspects. However, by analyzing the insects that had colonized the body I was able to determine that the crime had been committed before the people in question moved into that residence. So the blame fell on the former tenants – an elderly couple who turned out to be the boy’s grandparents – the true perpetrators. A whole family had their skin saved by a handful of mites.
Six months ago, my friend Leonardo told me he knew a medium. He assured me she wasn’t a fraud and could help me communicate with my wife. I heard him out politely but declined: I belong to the world of science, the rational world. What’s more, I’ve seen too many atrocities and mutilated corpses to believe there’s a God, much less an afterlife. Evil is rampant everywhere, and there’s nothing capable of stopping it. It’s better if there isn’t a life after death, since most likely evil would continue its reign there. He insisted: ‘You’ve got nothing to lose by trying. And if it works, you’ll get the answers to what’s been tormenting you. I’ll pay for the session.’ He failed to convince me. It wasn’t until three months ago, when I decided to take Lucia’s case into my own hands, that I began seriously considering the possibility.
The smell of the gases given off by a corpse is what attracts the first insects. They can detect it well before the human nose can. Sometimes they even swarm a person during his death throes. The eggs laid by certain insects have a short embryonic period and all hatch at the same time, resulting in a mass of larvae moving like an alien entity over the body. The larvae are white and burrow immediately into the subcutaneous tissue. With the help of certain bacteria and enzymes they liquefy it and feed by means of a continuous suction. As time passes and if the corpse isn’t found – after six months, let’s say – other bugs come along that leave it completely dry. Everything is used: hair, skin, nails. Sometimes the forensic examiners find nothing but bones.
I said before that my wife died under strange circumstances. Her body turned up in a forest an hour away from this port city. The night before, I had dropped her off at the airport; she was headed to visit her mother in Mexico City. In the dead of night, when I was asleep, Lucia came back home, saying her flight had been canceled because of the weather and that she’d return to the airport later and catch another plane. I heard her between dreams. She got into bed and laid her head on my chest, as was her habit. When I awoke, she was gone; I assumed she hadn’t wanted to disturb me and had taken a taxi. A few hours later, when I was told of the grisly discovery, I decided I wouldn’t be the one who handled the case. My boss understood and sent Alejandro, one of his students at the Faculty of Medicine, to collect the body. I didn’t want to know a single one of the details. Lucia was dead. She’d been murdered. That was enough for me.
No one knows for sure where insects come from. Some scholars claim that they originated from myriapods, many-legged animals with respiratory tracts. Others speculate they evolved from crustaceans. What is certain is that in the Devonic period, 400 million years ago, earthbound insects already existed in the hottest and wettest swampy regions. And in the Mississippian period, 350 million years ago, they underwent their first evolutionary explosion with the appearance of wings and the ability to fly. The most persistent and evolved of them all is, of course, the cockroach. Interestingly, I’ve never seen a cockroach around a corpse.
Since my wife’s killer hasn’t been found, I decided to review the case. I analyzed the samples collected by Alejandro and found several serious errors. Among them, one that left me puzzled: a mistake in calculating the time of death. Lucia was found in the woods by a group of campers at nine a.m. Alejandro determined she had been dead an hour by then. My analysis indicated that she had been dead at least six hours. That is, she had died in the middle of the night, when she was supposed to be asleep in my arms. And since I didn’t know exactly what time Lucia had left the house that night, everything got quite confusing. Leonardo had a theory: she was already dead when she ‘visited’ me in bed. ‘It’s something the dead often do,’ he told me. ‘They come to say goodbye to those they loved.’ Unhinged by the whole business, I finally gave in to the idea of the medium. We had an appointment two days ago. I brought her some of Lucia’s things she had asked for: clothes, objects, photos. Then she gave me an exact date and time. Tonight at nine o’clock. ‘She’ll call you on the telephone,’ she said in a solemn tone.
I have a recurring dream about Lucia. First I see the insects clandestinely devouring her body. I arrive at the crime scene and realize she’s still alive, and I try to get them off her, but it’s impossible: there are too many of them. She cries out to me: ‘You brought them to me.’ Then she can’t talk anymore because they start coming out of her mouth. That’s when I close her eyes and I wake up.
Only a few seconds until nine p.m. I haven’t eaten anything all day; I’m not hungry. I’m lying in bed. The phone is on the nightstand. I look at the ceiling and notice that it’s cracked and peeling: it needs a good coat of paint. I spot a cobweb in a corner. Some dead insects are trapped in it. Suddenly, one of them trembles: it’s alive and struggling to free itself.
Just then the phone rings.
One . . .
Two . . .
Three . . .
Four . . .
Five times . . .
I pick up.
I hear the sound of the sea.
Harvest
An Attempt at Murder
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