the stomach contents, Salazar identified coffee and masticated rice, chicken, bell pepper, various spices and pig intestine. To make a long story short, it was chorizo— Mexican sausage. The intestine used as sausage casing leads me to believe it was some kind of homemade sausage, not manufactured product. He had eaten this shortly before death. There had been almost no breakdown in the stomach yet. He may've even been eating when he was assaulted. I mean, the throat and mouth were clear but there was still debris in the teeth.
"And by the way, they were all original teeth. No dental work at all—ever. You getting the picture that this man was not from around here?"
Bosch nodded, remembering Porter's notes said all of Juan Doe #67's clothing was made in Mexico. He was writing in the notebook.
She said, "There was also this in the stomach."
She slid a Polaroid photograph across the table. It was of a pinkish insect with one wing missing and the other broken. It looked wet, as indeed it would be, considering where it had been found. It lay on a glass culture dish next to a dime. The dime was about ten times the size of the bug.
Harry noticed the waiter standing about ten feet away with two mugs of beer. The man held the mugs up and raised his eyebrows. Bosch signaled that it was safe to approach. The waiter put the glasses down, stole a glance at the bug photo and then moved quickly away. Harry slid the photo back to Teresa.
"So what is it?"
"Trypetid," she said, and she smiled.
"Shoot, I was about to guess that," he said.
She laughed at the lame joke.
"It's a fruit fly, Harry. Mediterranean variety. The little bug that lays big waste to the California citrus industry. Salazar came to me to send it out on referral because we had no idea what it was. I had an investigator take it over to UCLA to an entomologist Gary suggested. He identified it for us."
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."