are they ragged tears. You see how they almost appear serrated? That was caused by mastication. Think about how many insects it must have taken to kill this many people so quickly. There had to be hundreds of thousands of them, maybe millions. They didn't just swarm in here through the tent flaps. I may not be an expert on bees, but I can't imagine them behaving like that. No. That many individuals? They had to be brought here in some sort of vessel. And I think that's exactly what we're looking at here.'
'Your theory doesn't stand to reason. How in the world do you propose someone was able to make a two-ton pachyderm swallow millions of bees? How would they survive inside of it?'
'That's my job to figure out.' She glanced up at Cranston. 'Have you already photographed this elephant?'
'Yeah...why?'
Lauren removed a scalpel from her briefcase and slit open a length of the small bowel like she was gutting a snake. The inner mucosa was wrinkled and slimy, and dotted with brownish chyme. She sifted through the sludge until she found what she was looking for, pinched it with the forceps, and extricated it from the ileum.
'What is it?' Cranston asked.
She held up the forceps so he could see the small insect. It had curled in upon itself, the nub where its stinger had been tucked over the top of its head. Its long, slender wings iridesced with orange under the spotlight. Its body was jet black with rings such a deep shade of crimson they were nearly indistinguishable. A diminutive orange petiole articulated the tiny thorax with an abdomen that hooked under like a scorpion's tail in reverse. It had a triangular-shaped head with mandibles that looked like those of an ant on a much grander scale.
This was no bee.
Its body was more reminiscent of that of a wasp, sleek and dangerous, but wasps didn't lose their stingers like bees, and bees were hairy to facilitate the collection of pollen.
She slid the carcass into a collection bag and passed it to Cranston, who held it close to his face to study it.
'I don't get it,' he said. 'When a bee loses its stinger, it dies shortly thereafter, right? This one lost its stinger and died inside the elephant. So where are all of their bodies? They should be everywhere.'
Lauren rose and snatched the bag back from him.
'They have to be somewhere around here. We just haven't found them yet. While you're looking, I'm going to see if I can figure out which species this might be, and how it ended up in the digestive tract of this animal.'
She had a hunch, but she wasn't ready to share it. Not yet, anyway. Not until she knew for sure. And if she was right....
'Hey!' one of the gowned men called from the bleachers. He held a black rectangular object over his head. 'Look what I found! And it's still recording!'
He clambered over the bodies and descended to the leveled dirt. Cranston hurried over to meet him. Lauren followed. They were joined by the group of agents in short measure.
Cranston took the camcorder from the forensics tech and turned it over and over in his hands.
Lauren heard it softly whir as it continued to record.
The Special Agent opened the three-inch side-flap view screen, then looked back at the tech.
'See if you can find any more of these.' He pressed the STOP button and the red light over the lens darkened. He turned to face the rest of them. 'Are you guys ready to do this?'
III
Cranston led them out of the big top and into the wash of light where at least the breeze circulated the stench. Lauren breathed a sigh of relief. She had begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable under the blank stares of the dead that packed the bleachers. Consciously, she knew they weren't actually watching her, but that didn't alleviate the crawling sensation on her skin. She didn't suppose the fact that they had all been killed by some sort of wasp helped in that regard either.
The other agents closed rank around Cranston, forcing Lauren to stand on her toes to see between them.
Cranston rewound the recording to the start and pressed PLAY.
The shaky footage began with a close-up of a woman holding a toddler on her hip. The young boy bared a big grin for the camera. Behind them, Lauren saw the ticket booth down the hill through the grove of trees. They were standing at the edge of the parking lot while scores of people who had no idea what fate had in store for them funneled past.
The sound was a continuous low rumble metered by the excited cries of children and the occasional feline roar.
Cut to a jostling view of the inside of the fairgrounds. The woman now held the child's hand as they weaved through the crowd, passing games of chance stocked with stuffed animals bigger than the young boy, various attractions with greasy ticket collectors, and carts selling pretzels, snow cones, and glowing necklaces. The woman held up the child's hand and helped him wave to the camera.
Another cut and they were in a different section of the grounds. This time, Lauren could only assume, the woman held the camcorder while presumably the father piggybacked the boy, who clung to the man's forehead as though his life depended upon it. The man pointed off to his right and the lens followed. A pen had been cordoned off in a broad section of dirt. The sign on the fence promised camel rides for five dollars. A grungy man with a scraggly beard guided the camel in a circle by its reigns, much to the delight of the twin girls perched between its fur-capped humps.
The camera swung again to the right and zoomed in on another enclosure where several men raked hay into piles for the elephant troupe. One of the pachyderms thrust its trunk into the mound, gave it a twirl, and lifted a clump to its mouth. Another man appeared with a hose and sprayed down the smaller elephants in the rear. Flies buzzed around them, causing the enormous animals to flap their ears. Heaps of dung led all the way back to where a fourth elephant rested listlessly on its side. Two more men, who had obviously fallen in the mud several times, pushed and shoved at the behemoth in an effort to force it back to its feet. It didn't even appear capable of standing.
Lauren had a pretty good hunch as to why.
A small crowd had gathered off to the side to watch, among them a couple of teenagers smoking and passing back and forth a water bottle that made them wince with each swig of the spiked concoction, an elderly man with an ornate cane that appeared too short to be of any real use, and a visibly pregnant woman with coffee-colored skin who wore her raven-black hair in a ponytail and an expression of abject horror on her face.
Past the elephant's rear haunches, a man of Middle Eastern descent stood stock-still, staring down at the animal, his features devoid of emotion. He wore a faded ball cap low over his hooded eyes and what looked like a cattle prod in a sheath on one hip and a transceiver holstered on the other.
One of the men who had been trying to make the sick elephant stand rushed up to him, gesticulating wildly with his hands. The man with the ball cap glanced over at the spectators, his gaze lingering on one of them for a long moment, and then ushered the agitated handler toward an unmarked mobile trailer.
The recording darkened. A sudden flash forced the aperture to rectify its focus. The center ring was spread out below, partially obscured by the heads of the people in the row below the cameraman. The ringmaster stepped into the spotlight, but the camera panned left and focused on the young boy's face. He sat in his mother's lap, eyes bright, mouth open wide in wonder.
Cut to clowns piling out of a miniature car. Acrobats flipping and twirling from the high-wires. A lion tamer
