Chapter 4 #2
“Thank you so much, Chief Savalle.” George took the file with a nod and a polite smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
“Now, if you would excuse us, my partner and I came here immediately to meet with you. I hope it’s okay with you if we check into our hotel and go over the file and reports.
First thing tomorrow, we’re going to inspect the places where the deaths occurred.
If you need to reach us before we’re done with our investigation, please feel free to call me or Detective Hayes.
” George handed DeCapristo and then Savalle their cards.
Andi very much hoped neither would bother them anytime soon.
He also knew it would be a miracle if they didn’t get a call from both before this day had ended.
Another thing to look forward to. After a round of stiff goodbyes from Chief Savalle, Agent DeCapristo, and Luke Gelman, they left the Spartanburg precinct to find their hotel, a Best Western on Mobile Drive.
Traffic was reasonable, and they reached their destination within twenty minutes.
The check-in went without a hitch, and the hotel room wasn’t too overrun by creepy crawlers.
They had gotten a bit of a look when the receptionist, a woman in her late fifties, had handed them the keycards, but it was nothing Andi wasn’t used to.
She had been more curious than hostile, no doubt wondering what an attractive man like George saw in somebody like Andi.
During the serial killer case a few months ago, Sandra Mescew compared Andi to a fictional character named John Constantine, a supernatural detective who didn’t suffer fools lightly.
Andi looked him up and couldn’t argue with Sandra.
There was a certain similarity between the two, not just in looks but in attitude as well.
George had laughed and said he preferred Andi’s brand of crazy, and that was that.
Since George was busy unpacking—his man was meticulous when it came to clothing, a trait Andi understood well when it came to George’s things because everything he owned was either new or so well-cared for it appeared to be new—Andi grabbed the file on Judge Dunhill and the reports about the arthropod related deaths before he sat down on one of the two queen beds.
The world tipped and shockwaves went through his bodies, so many, fresh food, delicious skin cells shedding on the bed, not yet in reach, he had to wait, pressure, so many of them, bustling inside the mattress, he was one of them, all of them, sensing himself through their reception, telling him he was reasonably healthy, his skin a little too dry, the organic soaps and shampoo George insisted on were delicious, no superficial, acidic stench or taste on him, no, he was hungry, his mind shattered into thousand directions, he was a male depositing his spermatophore somewhere in the mattress, he was the female picking it up, he was the larva hatching from already fertilized eggs, crawling around with only six legs, he was the Nymph, now with eight legs, already greatly resembling the adults, he was devouring whatever he found, munching on dead skin cells and dust particles, his entire focus on growing and reproducing, the sudden pressure on the mattress a nuisance his tiny bodies could easily compensate, the flood of new impressions unbalancing him, feeling his own weight while being the weight, sensing his body’s shape through their senses, overlaying that picture with what he knew from his daily looks in the mirror, it all blurred, the picture too sharp for his limited brain space, too much information, too non-sensical, who was he if not them, but if he was them, then what was that blob on the mattress, he fell, and fell, deeper into the fabric, tiny threads building the jungle in which he now lived, wasn’t he supposed to be in a room, no, this was the room, he needed to lay his eggs, he—
“Andi?” George’s voice pried him back from the mini cosmos of mite life, back into the room and the world of the blobs, where everything was different, yet the same, if only he broke it down to the smallest components.
George was looking at him with that expression of mild worry paired with curiosity.
“It’s fine, just got sucked in by the mites.” Andi patted the dark blue throw on the bed that matched the blue pattern on the gray wall-to-wall carpet, which was another paradise for the mites and in need of a steam-clean in the near future.
George shuddered. “How many?”
“A healthy colony.”
“Healthy for us or for them?”
Ah, his man was so smart! He had quickly learned to ask the important questions. Andi smiled. “For us. This mattress has been changed recently. They’re currently building up.”
“Sometimes I wish I could just erase this knowledge from my mind.”
“You did it before you met me. I’m sure you knew about mites, but you were perfectly capable of ignoring them.”
“That was before I had you to create a tangible connection. Well, at least hypothetically tangible.” George shrugged. “It never ceases to amaze me how the term willful ignorance can have so many different facets I’ve never thought of before.”
“Well, there’s never a dull moment when you’re with me,” Andi said the words only half-jokingly.
He knew life with him wasn’t easy. He still marveled that George hadn’t left him yet.
On the contrary, his man seemed to become more invested in them the more time they spent together.
And he couldn’t attribute that solely to George’s stubbornness, which rivaled his own.
If Andi were honest, and he usually was, because lying to oneself never amounted to anything good, he was afraid of the day George would realize exactly what he had gotten himself into.
While Andi didn’t wish for that day to come, he still mentally prepared himself for being alone again.
Nothing good had ever lasted for him. Certainly nothing as good as having George Donovan in his life.
“No, no dull moments with you.” George leaned down to press a kiss on Andi’s forehead.
The new wave of scents and movement that swept through the mattress was almost enough to let him spin out of control again, but as long as George maintained skin contact, he could focus on him as his anchor. “Are we going through the files?”
“Yes. Let’s.” Andi scooted back on the bed that was closest to the door and therefore would be their designated ‘office’ for the duration of their stay as opposed to the second queen closer to the window, which would be their sleeping place.
Of course he shook off his shoes because nobody wanted street dust in their office, and then, after some wiggling, his back found the headrest to lean against. George shimmied up next to him, their legs and hips touching, and together they opened the first report about the most recent death by arthropod.
A man named Jagger Thomasin, age fifty-two, had died two weeks ago at home from a black widow bite.
Apparently, the spider had been in a drawer in the kitchen, and when Thomasin reached inside to get a knife, he was bitten.
Andi furrowed his brow. Several things didn’t ring right with him.
“What is it?” George, attentive as always, had picked up on his mood.
“This doesn’t sound right for multiple reasons.
” Andi tapped the report. “First, even though female black widows do produce a potent venom, most of the roughly 2200 people who get bitten every year survive and recover within twenty-four hours after receiving medical treatment. The fact alone that Thomasin died is—unusual. Especially since it says nowhere in the report that he had any allergies or other pre-existing diseases to facilitate the impact of the toxin.”
“Well, he didn’t get treated within fourteen hours.
It says here that his girlfriend found him after coming home from work.
When she had left in the morning, he was fine, and the coroner speculated that the bite must have happened shortly after the girlfriend, Rosalie Byrnes, left, which was around eight o’clock.
She came back at ten p.m., at which point Thomasin was already dead.
” George flipped to the second page of the report, where a list of the toxins found in the blood was added.
“He was chock-full of alcohol. Would that have made the toxin more potent?”
Andi shrugged. “To be honest, that’s a question for Evangeline.
I have no clue how alcohol affects alpha-latrotoxin, which is the main agent in a black widow’s venom, along with some other toxins that boost its effectiveness.
The coroner didn’t do a very thorough job.
He seemed to think this was all perfectly normal, which tells me he’s either lazy or, more likely, had the same state of half-knowledge most people sport when it comes to black widows.
Dangerous, lethal. He probably didn’t even think about digging deeper once it was confirmed that Thomasin had been bitten. ”
“Hmm. You’re right. I mean, I did the same. If it weren’t for you, I’d have said, okay, the guy got up too close to a dangerous spider and is now dead. End of story.” George went back to the first page. “What else bothers you?”