Chapter Text
The morning had a rhythm to it, and Vera Ashford had long since stopped fighting it.
“Socks,” she said from the kitchen, not bothering to turn around.
“No,” told Murphy, from the living room with the cheerful absolute certainty only a 4 year old could have.
“Socks, Murph. It’s October.”
“Feet are hot.”
“Your feet are going to be cold at daycare, and then you’re going to tell Miss Nina, and she’s going to call me, and I’ll have to leave work to bring you socks, that's a lot of socks for a morning.” Vera poured coffee into her travel mug one-handed while responding to a text from Marcus with the other. Something about a shipment of pinned specimens finally clearing customs, a small piece of good news before eight a.m. She didn’t look up because the trick with Murph in the mornings was to never look like the sock issue was a big deal. Murphy loved to make big deals out of small things. The only way they could get him to daycare on time was to act casually indifferent to his tantrums.
There was a thump, a grunt, and the rustle of a small person pulling on socks angrily. Vera smiled to herself and took a victorious sip of her coffee.
By the time she got him to the kitchen table, hair sticking up in 3 directions despite brushing it down minutes ago, he’d already changed topic entirely. Like he did every morning.
“Ma, do beetles have blood?”
“They have something called hemolymph. It's kind of like blood, but it's usually green or yellow instead of red.” She slid a plate of toast cut into triangles and scrambled eggs over to him, and checked the clock over the stove. Seven fifty two. They had eight minutes before this went from a leisurely morning to a frantic one.
“Where’s beetle blood come from?”
“You didn’t watch that bug show without me, did you?”
Murphy shakes his little head and Vera smooths down his hair again, “Miguel said beetles have red blood like people, but I said no they don’t, I said my mom knows things about bugs, and he said his mom said so, and I said my mom actually is a bug doctor—” he said this with a mouthful of toast at top volume, “So who’s right?”
“You’re right, bug. Chew before you speak, please.” She wiped his mouth before going to find his shoes, which for some reason she found under the couch. “Next time just tell him that hemolymph is usually yellow or green because most insects don’t carry oxygen like we do, they have a different system. Little tubes. It's called the tracheal system.”
“Traykeel system,” Murphy repeated with wonder.
“Tracheal. Close enough.” She wrestled his shoes on, and glanced at the clock again — seven fifty six. “Come on, bug. Jacket. Backpack. We’re leaving in sixty seconds or Ms. Nina will be mad at your Ma again.”
“You always say that,” he giggles.
“And she’s always mad at me anyway,” Vera smiles back, unable to resist his little laugh. She swung her backpack over her shoulder after checking her badge and keys were where they should be, and ushered her son out the door. The morning was already starting to feel less like chaos and more like the life she's always wanted to build. Nobody handed this to her, she built it one toast triangle at a time. There was a specific pride in that, one she never said out loud to anyone.
The drive to daycare took 5 minutes if the light on Randolph held, 8 if it didn’t. It didn’t. Murphy narrated the wait from his car seat— a squirrel, the number of red cars they passed, and his theory about why the moon followed our car. Vera answered all his questions on autopilot, like she always did. Half her brain on drop-off logistics and half genuinely charmed by her little boy.
Drop-off itself was its own little ritual: his backpack cubby with his name on a laminated pencil cutout, the hug that had to happen once, no more, no less, or the day was ruined, and the wave through the window that he pretended not to care about but always waited for.
“Bugs today, ma?” he asked, foot already through the doorway.
“Bugs today,” Vera confirmed.
“Thats gross.”
“It’s science.”
“It’s gross science,” He said this, pleased with his new phrase, and disappeared through the daycare doors before she could correct him. Most of their conversations ended this way, mid-sentence, halfway through a thought, on his terms, leaving her smiling at a shut door.
She checked her watch, eight ten. If traffic held, she’d make it to work with plenty of time to refill her coffee and put away her coat before nine, instead of shrugging it off at her desk like she always did.
The museum at eight forty-five was quiet in the way it could never be when they were open. No field trip chaperone yelling, no guide giving a tour, just the quiet hum of the building preparing for its doors to open. Vera scanned her badge into the staff entrance, waved to the morning security guard and the guest relations staff. It was ten steps into the entomology wing, coffee in hand and coat away, mentally already elbow deep into her duties for the day, when Marcus caught her by the specimen room door.
“You’ve got a visitor,” he said, with a small smile. There was something about the way he said it that made her stop.
“I don’t have anyone on my schedule today. The grad students won’t be in until next week. And,” she checks her watch again, "it's not even nine.”
“This one’s got a badge”
Vera tilted her head.
“FBI, I think. He asked for ‘whoever handles forensic entomology inquiries’, I told him that’s a very specific ask for a natural history museum. And he said, ‘I know that’s why I’m confident I’m in the right place.’” Marcus looked more unsettled by the confidence than by the fact there’s an FBI agent in the building. “He’s at the guest information desk. I told him I’d check to see if you’re available. He’s quite tall.”
Vera set her coffee down in her office, “Thanks Marcus.” He walked off and she fixed her hair before heading to the entrance to meet the agent.
The entrance was completely empty aside for the few staff members and a tall, cardigan-clad man. The marble floor still held the cool of the night before, the morning light came down through the skylights in long bright rectangles. Standing in the middle of one of them, reading a brochure with an intensity usually reserved for legal documents, was the lanky man in a cardigan.
Vera had pictured someone different. Not that she had pictured much else beyond than the stereotypical government agent— dark suit, earpiece, sunglasses indoors, slightly ominous briefcase in hand. The man that stood before her was so far from that description that she spent a minute looking around for someone else. Had he not had a holster on his hip, she wouldn’t have known this was the agent she was looking for.This man had a satchel instead of a briefcase, hair that needed a trim, and was currently reading…was he reading the brochure for the second time?
“Excuse me,” she said, coming to a stop a respectful distance away. “I’m told you’re from the FBI? Looking for forensic entomology help?“
He turned, and it was immediate, the calibration — she watched him look over her glasses, her lab coat, the ID badge clipped to her belt. Something in his posture adjusted, like he realized he was finally talking to the right person.
“Dr. Ashford?” He asked in a way that sounded like he already knew exactly who she was.
“Vera’s fine. I don’t really love ‘doctor’, it makes me feel like I should be talking to you about your blood pressure.” She smiles and holds out a hand.
He hesitates. “I don’t do handshakes. The amount of pathogens in a handshake is staggering, it’d be safer to kiss.”
“I’m assuming that’s not a proposition,” Vera smiles.
“N-no no, I’m sorry,” he sputters out as the tips of his ears and cheeks grow red. Vera chuckles. They only just met but there was just something about him that made it so fun to tease him.
“I’m only joking,” she glances down at the ID badge clipped to his sweater, “Dr. Reid. Oh, two doctors. We should start a club,” she smiles in hopes of easing his embarrassment.
He clears his throat. “Statistically, that’s not as rare as it sounds. Roughly one percent of the U.S. population holds a doctoral degree, and museums disproportionately employ—” he stopped himself, like someone catching a glass before it hit the floor. “Sorry. That– I do that sometimes. When I’m nervous, or when I'm trying to buy myself a second to figure out what I’m actually supposed to be saying.”
It was such a strange thing to just tell her. Most people spend their lives hiding the mechanism, not narrating it. Vera found herself smiling before she decided to.
“Are you nervous now?” she asks with a head tilt.
“A little. I don’t love asking for help. It implies I’ve reached the limit of my knowledge, which is a limit I try very hard not to have,” he said with the faint self aware embarrassment of a man who clearly practiced saying all this more casually than it was coming out. “But, entomology’s not really my area.”
“What are your areas then?”
“Statistics. Behavioral analysis. Seven languages, conversationally. Chess, though nobody wants to play me anymore.” A beat. “Not insects.”
“Well,” Vera gestures to the hall behind her, the one she just came from and the one that leads back to the quiet of her office. “You’re in luck. That happens to be my one area. Also, coincidentally, my son’s new favorite party trick, as of a few days ago,” she smiles as she mentions him.
“You have a son.”
“Mhm. Murphy, four years old. Currently at war with a boy at daycare over the color of beetle blood.” Vera started walking, expecting Dr. Reid to follow. He does. “Its called hemolymph. It's usually yellow-green.”
“That's good. Good that he knows now,” he said like he hadn’t expected the conversion to go there and was glad it had. “Insects use an open circulatory system— hemolymph bathes the tissues directly instead of moving through vessels the way blood does in a closed system. Different oxygen delivery method entirely. Tracheal system.”
Vera listens to every word, despite knowing everything, she can’t help but lean in. “Murphy just learned that word this morning.”
“Its a good word.”
“It is,” she agreed, and pushed open the door to the back hallway, badge scanner beeping green. This was shaping to be a stranger morning than she had prepared for.
Vera led him back through two sets of doors, past the prep room where an intern was working, and into her office. Well, her lab. Which was smaller than she was sure Dr. Reid had pictured— one long counter, a wall of specimen drawers, a microscope, dozens of pinned insects in frames on the wall, and a corkboard covered in photos of beetles that looked slightly like a crime board.
He noticed the board immediately. Of course he did.
“That’s not what it looks like,” she said before he could ask.
“I wasn’t going to say anything.
“You were absolutely going to say something.”
“I was going to say it's a remarkably well-organized specimen taxonomy display. Only slightly does it look like an evidence board.” He was already moving toward the corkboard, hands clasped behind his back like he was looking at another museum exhibit. She doubted anyone had to teach such etiquette. “Is this a research project?”
“Insect succession on carrion. Which species show up when, in what order, what stage of decomposition. It’s basically a clock, if you know how to read it that is.” She pulled out a stool and gestured for him to sit, though he didn’t yet. “I’m guessing this has something to do with why you’re here.”
“A body was found 3 days ago in Fairfax county. Rural property, heavily wooded. The local ME estimated time of death, but it doesn’t line up with witness statements. I suggested that insect activity might be able to narrow the window. I said I’d find out.”
“You didn’t know anyone.”
“I knew that natural history museums often employ entomologists, and that the public sector experts are generally more time-flexible for consults than university faculty during the semester, and that this museum was 15 minutes away.” He said all of this like it was a perfectly normal way to have found her. She supposed, in a sense, that it was perfectly normal.
“So I’m the fastest option, not the best one.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It was implied.”
“I implied speed got me here. I have no idea yet if you’re the best option. That’s what this conversation is for.” There was something in the way he said it— not an insult, not even close, more like a scientist’s respect for a hypothesis— that made her decide that she liked him.
“Fine,” Vera said, “show me what you’ve got.”
He had printed photographs, not digital. Which struck her as old fashioned until she realized it was probably a chain of custody thing. He laid them out on her counter with the same careful movements he used for everything, like he was perpetually aware of how much space he was allowed to take up.
Vera pulled a loupe from a drawer and bent over the first photo. The room went quiet except for the hum of the specimen fridge.
“Blowfly pupal casings,” she said pointing to the pale, husk-like shapes scattered near the wound site. “Multiple generations, by the looks of it. That's really useful. That means we’re not looking at a single wave of colonization. This body had buggy visitors more than once, at different points.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the estimated time of death solely based on decomp might be off. The body was probably stored or covered or moved at some point after death or if weather interrupted colonization…” Vera closes her eyes and holds her chin. She looks up at him, “Do you have temperature data for the 3 days prior? Insect development is temperature dependent. I need a weather report to build an accurate timeline.”
“I have hourly data from the nearest station, 6 miles out.” He was already pulling another folder from this satchel, like he anticipated this. “I assumed you’d want this.”
“You assumed I’d need weather data for a forensic entomology consult. I thought you said bugs aren’t your area?”
“I read two papers on forensic entomology this morning before I came here.” Dr. Reid confessed, “I wanted to be useful, not just present.”
“Two papers. This morning.”
“They were fairly short.”
“Dr. Reid—”
“Spencer’s fine, if ‘doctor’ bothers you as much as it seems to.”
“Spencer,” Vera set the loupe down and looked at him properly for the first time. Properly, as a man standing in her lab holding a weather printout. “Most people want a one-line answer they can quote for a report. You read papers this morning.”
“I like knowing what I’m asking someone to do. It feels disrespectful to not understand at least the shape of it,” He shrugged. “I also find it genuinely interesting. The idea that you can read the timeline of decomposition off of which insects showed up when. It's pattern recognition, which is basically what I do.”
There was a pause. Not an awkward one per se, but the kind that happens when people realize the conversation drifted somewhere they hadn’t meant it to.
“What else do you need to build the timeline?” Spencer asked, now a little flushed. “Besides the weather.”
“Give me 24 hours, the case number so I can request the specimen jars if they were collected— please them me someone collected specimen jars—”
“They did. I made sure of it before I came.”
Of course he did. “Also, I’ll need to know exactly where the property the body was found is and where on the property. Think sun exposure, ground cover, whether it was near standing water. Microhabitat matters as much as weather.”
He was writing all this down, longhand, in a small notebook produced from his pocket. Vera found herself watching his hands for a beat longer than necessary.
“This is going to take real work,” Spencer observed, almost apologizing.
She shrugs, “That’s the job. And for the record, you could’ve called this in. You didn’t have to come here in person.”
“I could have,” he was quiet for a moment. “But, I’ve found that consults go better when the other person can see that I’m taking this seriously. Photographs and phone calls make it easy to be a name on a form. I’d rather not be a name on a form.”
She smiles, “That’s either very considerate of you or a mild control issue.”
“It’s probably both,” he said without missing a beat. Vera laughs, a real one, short and surprised out of her. She looks back up at him and rethinks her initial observations. He wasn't standing like he is careful about how much space he takes up. He was standing like he was used to being underestimated and was quietly pleased when someone recognized it.
By the time he was leaving, the light through the entrance skylights had shifted from pale morning light to the fuller gold of midday. Vera walked Spencer to the front doors more out of momentum than necessity.
“24 hours,” she reiterated, mostly to remind herself.
“I appreciate this. Genuinely. I know it wasn’t your case to take.”
“Wasn’t any entomologist's case, technically. Until you decided it was worth chasing down,” she tucked her hands into the pockets of her lab coat. “You could’ve let the ME’s estimate stand. Nobody would’ve faulted you for it.”
“The timeline didn’t fit. If the timeline is wrong, someone’s alibi that should be in question isn’t, or someone who should be cleared isn’t,” he said matter of factly. “I’d rather do the extra work than get it wrong.”
“That sounds like an exhausting way to live.”
“So I’ve been told.” A small smile, there and gone. “Frequently, actually. By everyone I work with.” He was almost through the doors when he stopped and turned back. “Can I ask you something not case related?”
“You can ask.”
“The beetle. I mean, one of the ones in a frame,” he pointed down the hall, “The American burying beetle. It's federally endangered. Why does the museum have a specimen collection of them at all, if they’re that rare?”
She wasn’t expecting that all, which seemed to be a common theme of her conversations with Spencer. It wasn’t the content of the question that threw her off, it was that he even noticed that specific beetle and knew what it was. At a glance, among other insects.
After recovering, she answers “Pre-listing specimens, mostly. Or legacy collections, decades old. Most of it’s before anyone knew they’d be this rare.” To her surprise, she found herself wanting to respond in earnest. “It’s a little bit of a graveyard, if I’m honest. A record of what used to be common.”
“That’s… That’s sad,” and he meant it.
“Well, you can’t protect what you don’t understand. And you can’t understand what you didn’t document while it still existed.” She shrugged, “I try to think of it that way, anyway. Some days it’s easier than others.”
He nodded, mentally filing it away, the way she was starting to understand he filed everything.
“I’ll call you when I have the specimen jars processed through evidence. Or…is email better?”
“Either is fine,” Vera patted her pockets for a pen and paper. Spencer quickly pulled out his notebook and she muttered thanks under her breath. She jotted down her contacts and handed it back. “24 hours, Dr. Reid.”
“Spencer,” he corrected gently, tucking the notebook and pen back into his pocket.
“24 hours, Spencer,” she smiled.
Vera watched as he left, satchel over one shoulder. She stood in the doorway longer than she needed to, watching a man in a cardigan cross the parking lot, gears visibly turning in his head.
She checked her watch, only half past ten. The morning had gone as mornings usually did lately and now this. She turned and went back to her office, back to her drawers and her dead bugs. She told herself firmly, that this was simply what a consult was like.
She’d have 6 hours before daycare pick up to convince herself of that.