Invasive (2 page)

S
he rents a little four-door Kia sedan just as the place is closing. Smells of cigarette smoke smothered under a blanket of Febreze.

It's late April, and the drive to Little Falls is long and meandering, through thick pines and little hamlets. The GPS tries to send her down roads that are closed (
BRIDGE OUT
) or that don't seem to have ever existed. She's tempted to turn it off. Not because of its inefficacy, but because she knows it's tracking her. Passively, of course. But where she goes, it knows. And if it knows, anybody can know.

She grinds her sharp spike of paranoia down to a dull knob. She is always cautioning her parents not to give in to that anxiety. (Let's be honest, the horse is miles out of the barn on that one.) That is a deep, slick-walled pit. Once you fall into it, it's very hard to climb back out.

She leaves the GPS on and keeps driving.

After another hour, she sees the turn for Jerseyfield Lake. It's another hour to the cabin. The pines here are tall, like a garden of spear tips thrust up out of the dark earth. The road is muddy, and the sedan bounces and judders as it cuts a channel through the darkness.

Then, in the distance, she sees the pulsing strobe of red and blue. As she approaches, a cop stands in her way, waving his arms. He's mouthing something, so she rolls down the window to hear: “—back around, this is a crime scene. I said: turn
back
around, this is not a road, this is a private driveway and—”

She leans out the window: “I'm Hannah Stander.” Her breath puffs in front of her like an exorcised spirit. It's cold. The chill hits her hard.

“I don't care if you're the Pope,” the cop says. He's got a scruffy mustache and beard hanging off his jowls. “You need to turn around.”

“She's with me,” says a voice from behind the cop. And sure enough, here comes Hollis Copper. Tall and thin as a drinking straw. Hair cut tight to his head. Gone are his muttonchops; now there's just a fuzzy, curly pelt on his face.

The cop turns. “She law enforcement?”

“Yeah,” Copper says.

“No,” Hannah says at the same time.

The cop gives an incredulous look. “You know what? I don't give a shit. Park over there—” He flags her toward a puddled patch of gravel tucked tight against a copse of trees whose leaves are just starting to pop. She eases the sedan over there, cuts the engine, meets Hollis. She thanks the cop, still standing next to a cruiser and a couple of black SUVs. He just gives her an arched brow. “Sure, honey.”

“He's an asshole,” Hollis says, not quietly. “This way.”

They head across the limestone gravel toward a pathway cutting through the trees. She can make out knife-slashes of moonlight on distant water and the shadow of a small black cabin. Its windows and doorway are lit up like the eyes and mouth of a Halloween jack-o'-lantern.

“I'm not really law enforcement,” she says.

“You're a consultant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That makes you law enforcement to me.”

“I don't enforce the law.”

“You investigate breaches of the law. That's the first step of enforcement.”

She knows better than to get into a semantic argument with him. “It's not human bodies, is it?” she says.

He cocks his head at her. “Nope.”

The smell is what hits her first. It forces its way up her nose before she even crosses the threshold of the cabin. It's not one odor, but a mélange of them competing for dominance: a rank and heady stink like mushrooms gone mushy; the smell of human waste and coppery blood; the stench of something else behind it, something pungent and piquant, vinegary, acidic, tart.

It does nothing to prepare her for what she sees.

The dead man on the floor has no skin.

He still wears his clothes: a fashionable hoodie, a pair of slimcut jeans. But his face is a red, glistening mask—the eyes bulging white fruits against the muscles of his cheeks and forehead. The skin on his hands is gone. The upper arms, too. (Though curiously, the skin at the elbows remains.) Where the present flesh meets exposed muscle, the skin is ragged, as if cut by cuticle scissors. It looks like torn paper. Dried at the edges. Curling up.

There's one body,
she thinks.
Where are the rest?

It takes her a second to realize she's looking at them. The little black bits on the floor—hundreds of them, thousands—aren't metal shavings or some kind of dirt.

Insects, she realizes. Ants. Dead ants, everywhere.

“What am I looking at?” she says, putting on a pair of latex gloves.

The question goes unanswered. Hollis just gives her a look. He wants
her
to tell
him
what she sees. That's why she's here.

“No tech,” she says. No laptop, no tablet. The cabin is a single room: cot in the corner with a pink sheet on it, galley kitchen at the far end, a cast-iron pellet stove against the far wall. No bathroom. Outhouse, probably. (She's all too familiar with those. Her parents had one for a number of years because they didn't trust any plumber coming into their house.)

If there's no tech, why is she here? She takes a gingerly step forward, trying not to step on the ants. They may contain vital forensic data.

But it's impossible not to step on the ants. They make little tiny crunches under her boot—like stepping on spilled Rice Krispies.

She looks up.
Oh God.
What she thought was a pink bedsheet on the cot is no such thing. It
was
a white sheet. But now it's stained pink. The color of human fluids.

She looks over at Hollis. He gives a small nod. He's got his hand pressed against the underside of his nose to stave off the stench. She doesn't even notice it now. Curiosity's got its claws in.

The sheet on top, the one stained with fluids, is lumpy, bumpy, oddly contoured. She bends down, pinches the edges with her fingers, and pulls it back.

Her gorge rises. This smell won't be ignored. A wall of it hits her: something formerly human, but something fungal, too. A sour bile stink filled with the heady odor of a rotten log. Her arm flies to her nose and mouth and she chokes back the dry heave that tries to come up.

Under the sheet, she finds a good bit of what remains of the victim's skin. All of it clipped off the body in tiny swatches—none bigger than a quarter, most smaller than a penny. Tattered, triangular cuts. Half of it covered in striations of white mold—like fungus on the crust of bread. The white patches are wet, slick. The air coming up off it is humid.

Amid the hundreds of little skin bits: More dead ants. Hundreds of them.

Hannah pulls out her phone, flicks on the flashlight. The light shines on the glossy backs of the ants, each a few millimeters long. Many are covered with a fine carpet of little filaments: red hairs, like bits of copper wire. Some of those filaments are covered in the same white fungus.

And in some of their jaws—their prodigious jaws, jaws like something a morgue attendant would use to cut through flesh and bone—are snippets of dried skin.

Hannah's head spins as she tries to imagine what happened here. A man dies. Natural causes? Falls forward. Ants come in—

A memory passes over her like the shadow of a vulture:

She's young, not even eight, and she's out at the mailbox (before
Mom chopped the mailbox down with an ax), and she pops the lid and reaches in—suddenly her hand tickles all over. Hannah pulls her hand out and the tickling bits turn to pinpricks of pain. Her hand is covered in ants. Little black ones. Dozens of them pinching her skin in their tiny mandibles. She screams and shakes her hand and ants are flung into the grass as she bolts back to the house, forgetting to close the barbed-wire gate—Mom would give her no end of dressing down over that because you never leave the gate open, never-never, ever-ever, because then anybody can get in . . .

She stands up. The smell recedes. She gently sets the sheet back over the battlefield of ants, fungus, and human skin, then turns to Copper. “Is this even a crime scene?”

“That's what I'm waiting for you to tell me.”

She looks around. The pellet stove is cold—the air here almost the same temperature as outside—but she sees ash spilled on the floor in a little line.

Hannah takes a knee next to the body. Most of the skin on the scalp is gone, as is most of the hair. The skull underneath is exposed: pinkish-brown, like the sheet on the cot. But no sign of injury. No broken bone. “Any injury to the body?” she asks, taking a pen and poking around.

Hollis tells her no, nothing.

The dead man's ears are gone, mostly. Holes leading into the side of the head. As she nudges the skull with her pen, more ants spill out of those canals. All dead. Were they eating the brain, too? Or just trying to nest in there?

The dead body doesn't bother her, but that thought does.

Outside, the air is cold and crisp—like a hard slap against her cheek. She paces out front a little. After a few moments, Hollis joins her, thumbs a piece of hard gum through its foil backing, offers it to her. She takes it. Wintergreen.

He pops a piece into his mouth and gives a hard crunch. “What am I looking at in there?”

“I don't know.”

“You're supposed to know.”

“I don't see any tech inside. I don't see any . . . anything. There's no
there
there. This isn't my world.”

“Just tell me what you saw.”

Is he asking because he knows something she doesn't? Or has Hollis Copper lost a step? She's heard rumors. Last year's fiasco with Flight 6757 was hell on him. Brought down by hackers, the story goes. Nobody brought her in to consult on that one—to her surprise.

Whatever it was, Hollis had to take some time off before the NSA lobbed him back to the Bureau like a hot potato. When he came back, he seemed the same at first, but something lives behind his eyes now.

“Again, I don't see any tech. But who doesn't have a phone? Everyone has a phone. You didn't find one?”

He shakes his head.

“How'd you even find this? This is way off the beaten path.”

“Cabin's a rental. And nobody is renting it. The owner got a call from someone across the lake, said he saw lights here. Thought it might be squatters.”

“But the dead man in there isn't a squatter.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He's got money. The boots are Lowas. Boots for rich-kid backpackers. Three hundred a pop, easy.”

He snaps the gum. “You got a photographic memory I don't know about? Or are you just a boot fetishist?”

“I hike. Those are hiking boots. Overkill, really, and whoever that corpse was, he didn't get much use out of them. And his jeans are fashionably ripped, not worn from use. The vest is nice, too—an Obermeyer. Also not cheap. I'd say the vic is a young man. Under thirty, at least. Probably not under twenty.”

“Agreed. Go on.”

“The owner found the body?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He see anybody else here?”

“Nope.”

She
hmm
s. “He complain about an ant problem?”

“No. But he did puke.”

“I don't blame him.” She pauses, considers. “It's early for ants.”

“What?”

“Ants hibernate over the winter. Argentine ants, carpenter ants.”

Hollis blows a bubble. “It's spring, though.”

“But spring in upstate New York. Snow belt.” Something nags at her. “When did the owner find the body?”

“This evening.” He looks down at his watch. “
Yesterday
evening. It's already past midnight. Jesus.”

“The man was dead when the owner found him. The ants were dead, too?”

“So he says.”

A thought occurs to her. Hannah heads off the meager porch at the front of the cabin and stoops by a small bundle of early greens growing up out of the limestone gravel. Little yellow flowers sit on top, withered and cold. She rubs her thumb across a burgeoning, uncurling leaf. Wet. Cold. Not icy. Not yet.