“Woman and child, a family thing? Yeah, I know we talked about that but I’m having my doubts, Alex. I just can’t see a father processing his own kid’s bones then strewing them like garbage. Speaking of which, Liz Wilkinson called me just before you got here, totally beating herself up. Apparently, there’s a technique for cleaning bones that she missed.”

He pulled two sheets of paper out of his printer. One contained a pair of split-frame photos: on the left, half a dozen small, glossy, hard-shelled brown insects, to the right a single, spiky, caterpillar-type creature.

The second sheet was an order blank for “high-grade, mite-free dermestid beetles” from a lab supply company in Chicago.

I said, “Flesh-eating bugs?”

“Flesh, hair, wool carpeting, any sort of animal matter, wet, dry, or in between. Not bone and teeth, because the little buggers’ jaws can’t handle anything that hard, but anything short of that. The adults like to snack, but it’s the larvae—the ones with the whiskers—that are the serious gourmets. Set ’em loose and they can munch a bear skull sparkling clean within twenty-four hours, inflict no damage on the skeleton. Which is exactly why taxidermists and museums and scientists use ’em to spruce up specimens. Liz called it anthro for dummies, said two babies in a row probably clouded her judgment.”

He swung his feet onto the desk. “Does the use of creepy-crawlies spark any ideas?”

I said, “Set the beetles, then wax and buff? It’s starting to sound ritualistic.”

“Beetles and beeswax,” he said. “Maybe I should be looking for a deranged entomologist.”

“Or one of those guys who like to mount heads over the mantel. Her I.D. was missing, same for jewelry, if she was wearing any.”

“Trophy-taking.”

“Maybe not in the sense of a sexual sadist evoking a memory,” I said. “If that was his aim, he’d have held on to at least some of the bones. Family or not, this one’s rooted in intimacy and specific to these victims. Can purchasers of the beetles be traced?”

“If only,” he said. “They’re legal and not protected like toxic chemicals so anyone can buy them. No way could I get a subpoena that broad.”

“You could narrow the search,” I said.

“How?”

“Order your two geniuses not to leak the information then sit back as the tips pour in.”

He started with laughter, ended with a coughing fit. When he recovered, he said, “How do you see the first bones fitting in, if at all?”

“Reading about them could have been the trigger that got our bad guy to dump his bones nearby.”

“And shoot and dump the woman the same night. What, he got a message from God? Time to take out the garbage?”