“What about the others?” asked Remo.

  “They had just opened a restaurant that served bugs.”

  “I sure hope the thunderbug isn’t back,” said Remo to Chiun. Chiun made a disgusted face.

  “Ordinarily,” Smith mused, “I would not connect two such dissimilar deaths were it not for the fact that in both cases the medical examiner who autopsied the victims succumbed to bee stings. That is the only link. The cover-up of the attacks. It is wrong.”

  “It’s criminal,” Remo admitted.

  “No, it is wrong in this sense—if a serial killer is at work, his signature should be static. The cause of death—the modus operandi—may vary.”

  “You think we’re dealing with a serial killer?”

  “I am nearly certain of it. And the only connection between the two victims involves insects.”

  “The killer is a bug on bugs, you mean?”

  “An insane person who must be identified and apprehended.”

  “Well, what can we do?”

  “At this stage, little. I believe it is time to bring in the FBI. They have psychological profilers who can glean remarkably accurate information on the subject from details surrounding the killings and crime scene.”

  “What about us?” wondered Remo.

  “Go home. Stand by. I will call upon you when I need you.”

  “What about Wurmlinger?”

  “He is in police custody, according to my sources. He is going nowhere for now.”

  Smith had already turned his attention to his computer system, so Remo motioned for Chiun to follow him out.

  Chiun passed from the room, presenting his disdainful back to the emperor who had neither heeded his wisdom nor understood it.

  Before closing the door, he allowed himself to peek back at Smith the Mad.

  The Mad One was still intent upon his oracles, so Chiun closed the door with a nerve jangling jar.

  No one ignored the Master of Sinanju without penalty. Not even the emperor of the wealthiest empire of the modern world.

  Chapter Twenty

  At FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virgina, Edward E. Eishied received a strange inter-Bureau e-mail message signed ASAC Smith.

  He had heard of Assistant Special Agent in Charge Smith. He had never met him. But Smith was an FBI legend. It was said he was a retired agent given special investigative status by the director. It was also said the faceless Smith was really a cover for whoever sat in the director’s chair, going back to the halcyon days of Hoover—J. Edgar, not Herbert.

  No one knew for sure. But everyone knew that whether it was a cross e-mail message or the man’s graham-cracker voice on the line, what Smith said went.

  In this case, it was an e-mail. The text read, “Require psychological profiles on unknown subject. See attachment for details. Needed ASAP.”

  Eishied snapped to attention. This was his meat. He had worked every serial-killer case from Ted Bundy to the Unabomber and he had nailed the essentials of every psychological profile he ever undertook.

  The weird part was Eishied knew of no case not already under active investigation.

  He sat back, expecting to find details of some horrific new killer of the ritualistic type.

  Instead, he read the incoming data and slowly slumped in his seat.

  “This is a test,” he muttered. “No, it’s a joke.”

  But ASAC Smith had no reputation for humor. In fact, by reputation he was the most button-down SOB in the Bureau hierarchy.

  Downloading the file, Eishied went at it. It was going to take some real brainpower to profile this guy. He picked up the telephone and speed-dialed the Chicago office.

  “Ralph? Eishied here. I need your assist on something.”

  “I was just going to call you. I just received the weirdest request from no less than ASAC Smith himself.”

  “Does it involve killer bees?”

  “Yeah. You on it?”

  “Just downloaded the file into my machine. The question is, are we supposed to work together or independently?”

  “My guess is that Smith’s looking for every pristine angle.”

  “Okay, no communication until we turn in our reports.

  “Good luck.”

  “Same to you,” said Eishied, then hung up.

  As he fired up his laser printer for generating a hard copy, Edward Eishied muttered, “I sure hope we come up with the same profile…”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Tammy Terrill had never seen anything like it.

  “What is with you people?” she complained to the L.A. chief of detectives.

  “We’re not prepared to give a statement at this time,” he returned.

  “I gave my statement to you!”

  “That’s different. You’re a witness. You’re obligated to give your statement.”

  Tammy stared at the transcription of her statement, which lay on Chief of Detectives Thomas Gregg’s desk, along with a pen so she could sign it. They were in a brightly lit interrogation room in the downtown L.A. police headquarters. It looked nothing like the interrogation rooms Tammy had seen on TV. It was too nice.

  “If you don’t give me an interview, I won’t sign that,” she warned.

  Chief of Detectives Gregg eyed her with no flicker of emotion. He didn’t look much like a cop, though he talked just like one. He was too tanned to be a cop, and his hair was too sun bleached. Even for a California cop.

  “Gary, have Miss Terrill here held as a material witness.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  Gregg looked Tammy dead in the eye the way a bird looks at a worm. “We need a signed statement or we need you. What’s it going to be, Miss Terrill?”

  Tammy signed the statement. “This is under protest.”

  “Just spell your name right,” Gregg said woodenly. They had all been like that, wooden and unemotional, when they had descended upon the L.A. County Morgue and sorted through the bodies.

  Tammy had tried to get their theories on the case before they got too busy.

  “We just got here,” Gregg had said.

  “I saw it all,” Tammy told him. “It was killer bees. Ask him. He’s big on bugs.”

  At that point, Dr. Wurmlinger introduced himself and threw cold water on Tammy’s new lead. “I confess I have no explanation for what has happened here,” he said in a helpless voice.

  “Tell them it was killer bees. You know it was killer bees. I know it was killer bees. Just tell them.”

  Wurmlinger looked as lost as a termite on plastic. “The bee that stung them could not have killed them. Other than that, I am at a loss for an explanation,” he said.

  After that, Tammy and Wurmlinger were separated and taken downtown. There, Tammy told them everything she had seen to the point when Dr. Krombold had succumbed, finishing with, “It stung me, too, but I have the skull of a crockery pot, so I didn’t die.”

  Chief of Detectives Gregg seemed unimpressed by any of it. He just asked methodical questions and expressed doubt only when Tammy failed to identify her cameraman by name.

  “They’re so...common,” she explained. “Like they’re pod people, or something.”

  Now, with her statement signed, Tammy was being released. Out in the corridor, she hunted up Wurmlinger. He was coming out of another interrogation room and looked as lost as a cockroach in an hourglass.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello,” he said dispiritedly.

  “Time for our interview.”

  “The police asked me to make no public statement.”

  “I’m the media. We outrank the cops.”

  Wurmlinger shook his long head slowly. “I am sorry. I must return home. I have had a very trying day.”

  “It’s about to become the greatest day of your life. Because you’re about to become Fox News Network’s resident bug expert.”

  “No.”

  “Just think of it!” Tammy said, throwing her arms wide. “Your face will be telecast from coast-to-coast. You’ll be famous. You’ll be asked to lecture. Hey, maybe you’ll even get a date or two.”

  Wurmlinger winced. “Goodbye,” he said, exiting the building.

  Tammy watched him get into a cab and overheard him ask the driver to take him to the airport.

  Tammy whistled up a cab and gave her driver the same instruction.

  There was no way she was going to lose her story now.

  . . .

  Wurmlinger was so preoccupied that Tammy had no trouble trailing him to the American Airlines counter, where he offered his return ticket to a clerk.

  After he left for his gate, she barged into line and accosted the same reservations clerk.

  “I need to go where that tall drink of ugly is going.”

  “Brownsville, Texas.”

  “Right. Texas. I’m going there.”

  The reservations clerk cut her an open-ended return ticket to Brownsville, Texas, and Tammy loitered at an adjoining gate until the last boarding call came. She slipped aboard and took her seat without being noticed by Wurmlinger.

  At Brownsville, she was one of the first off the plane, which put her in a position to grab a cab before Wurmlinger collected his luggage.

  The cabbie wanted to know where she was going.

  “Just get me out of the airport, and I’ll get back to you,” Tammy told him, snapping open her cell phone.

  She dialed Clyde Smoot in New York.

  “What is Dr. Wurmlinger’s address again?”

  “Didn’t you find him?” Smoot asked.

  “I’m on center stage in something bigger than ‘X-Files.’ Just give me the address, Clyde.”

  After it hit her ears, Tammy repeated it to the driver, and he gave the cab real gas.

  “This,” Tammy said, “is the way to cover breaking news.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Remo Williams was walking the halls of Castle Sinanju in North Quincy, Massachusetts.

  He was bored. There was nothing to do. Chiun was closeted in his private room doing God alone knew what while Grandma Mulberry—or whatever her name was—haunted various rooms like a cantankerous Korean ghost.

  Remo avoided her at all costs, but it was hard. She roamed from room to room dusting and cleaning and cackling to herself. Chiun claimed she was singing an old Korean love song. To Remo, it sounded like a hen cackling.

  At six o’clock, he checked in with the local news. Since Chiun was busy, that meant Remo could watch the newscaster of his choice. That meant Channel 4. The other two channels both boasted a reporter named Bev Woo. They were not the same person. It was a local oddity that created no end of problems for Remo if they had to watch any Woo. Chiun insisted on watching the dumpy, middle-aged Bev Woo, whom he had dubbed the incomparable Woo. Remo preferred the lithe and chipper Bev Woo, whom Chiun detested. But since he had a real choice, Remo went with the third option, Channel 4, where a new Asian anchorette with the unlikely name of Dee-dee Yee held sway.

  It turned out to be a slow news day. A drunken car crash led the top of the news. A record-sized blue shark had been captured in a Kingsport fisherman’s net, and the weather for tomorrow was promised to be “springlike.” Since this was New England, that probably meant rain. Maybe even hail. Brimstone was also possible.

  At the end of the broadcast, the anchor said goodbye, and the station immediately cut into a bumper that rehashed the lead stories the station had recapped two seconds earlier, adding, “Tune in at eleven for details.”

  “Why do they always do that?” Remo muttered. Increasingly, it seemed that the news had more teasers for the next segment or the next newscast than hard news itself. He wondered if there was some kind of plot afoot by commercial advertisers to hook America into watching what was fast becoming a perpetual, round-the-clock newscast. On second thought, maybe they saved more money teasing than reporting.

  Then he remembered he had a fourth option. The Fox News Network.

  The Fox report started with an update on the Is-There-Life-On-Mars? controversy and segued into a story about an Iowa corn farmer who claimed a “windless wind had devoured his crop.”

  “Are space aliens responsible for these mysterious events?” the reporter intoned. “Stay with Fox News for the other side of the news. The news the other networks dare not tell. Fox is committed to tracking down the stories no others will report. For news, think Fox.”

  There was nothing on the killer-bee story or the strange serial coroner deaths on both coasts. And no sign of Tammy Terrill. Remo wondered if maybe she had succumbed to delayed bee-sting shock after all.

  Bored, Remo decided to rattle Chiun’s cage.

  “Hey, Chiun. You busy?” asked Remo, knocking on the door.

  Chiun’s querulous voice came through the panel. “Go away!”

  “What do you mean, go away?”

  “Go away. I am improving my mind.”

  “You’re what?”

  “Reading a book,” Chiun explained.

  “All right. All right. Sheesh.”

  After that, Remo decided to go for a walk.

  He happened upon Grandma Mulberry, who stuck her tongue out at him and said, “Good riddance.”

  “Who said I was going out?” growled Remo.

  “You wearing kiss-me-pretty-boy face,” she tittered.

  “That’s it! I’m getting a room.”

  “Better than crouching in bush with other faggots,” she taunted.

  “Remind me to string you up in the nearest tree for a scarecrow,” Remo snapped.

  Grandma Mulberry then bestowed upon Remo a very respectable Bronx cheer. She sounded like old buzzard with stuttering gas.

  On the way out, Remo noticed a book lying on the kitchen table. It was entitled The Joy of Astral Sex. Curious, he opened it up.

  A quick scan showed it was some kind of New Age self-help book. Most of it concerned instructions on how to achieve an out-of-body experience. The rest focused on finding the proper disembodied sex partner, and how to do it the ectoplasmic way.

  “It’s the only way the old bat’s going to get any,” grumbled Remo, who rolled the book into a tight cylinder and fed it into the garbage disposal with grim glee.

  He found himself walking along Wollaston Beach a few minutes later. The wind was flattening the gentle ripples of Quincy Bay, and in the distance Logan Airport’s squat concrete control tower showed clearly.

  There was no getting around it. He would have to move. Strangling the old bat was out of the question. Chiun would make his life even more miserable than she did. There was no way he was going to win. And he still didn’t understand why Chiun had hired a housekeeper in the first place. They had gotten along fine, just the two of them, for more years than Remo cared to count.

  It would be hard to live apart from the old reprobate, but it was either that or put up with snide insults for the rest of his days.

  Remo was so intent on his thoughts he didn’t notice the auburn-haired woman until she practically stood in his path.

  He looked up. She had long shimmering hair and wore a look that would make a Boston cop flinch. She was pretty. No, wait. Make that gorgeous. Her eyes were warm and brown, and she was wearing a blue spring dress that hugged her body like fresh linen. She looked young yet mature. Fresh but seasoned. Her face was radiant, but without that dewy look very young girls possessed.

  “Excuse me,” Remo said. “I didn’t see you.” He started to walk around her.

  Shifting, she got in his way again. “You look bored,” she said.

  “That’s me,” admitted Remo.

  She looked him dead in the eye. “Fine. Marry me.”

  Remo said, “What?”

  She waved a ticket. “Look, I just won the lottery. Mass Millions.”

  “Good for you.”

  “And I quit my job.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “But I’m bored.”

  “It’s a long line,” said Remo, “and I was ahead of you.”

  She got in his way and fixed him with her striking eyes, which were growing steely. “Did you hear anything I just said?” she demanded.

  “I have stuff on my mind.”

  “I just won seven million dollars and I’m free as a bird.” She smiled. “And you look like my kind of bird.”

  “Sorry. I fly alone.”

  “Don’t tell me I’m not your type. I know different.”

  Remo decided she was crazy and turned on his heel, walking the other way. She followed along, growing more insistent. She had the slightly husky voice of a former smoker. That was a strike against her in Remo’s eyes. He didn’t care for smokers.

  “I don’t have a type,” said Remo, wondering if the shark effect was wearing off. He found if he ate shark every other day, it quenched his powerful pheromones.

  “Look, I’m not kidding about winning the lottery. It happened last week. See, this is the winning ticket. I’m afraid to turn it in. So I come here and try to think. Aren’t you even slightly impressed?”

  “I have my own problems,” said Remo.

  “Look, if you won’t marry me, how about a date?”

  Remo blinked. He stopped in his tracks. A cunning gleam grew in his deep-set dark eyes.

  “I gotta take you home to meet someone first,” he said quickly.

  Her voice took on an edge. “If it’s your wife, I withdraw the offer.”

  “No. Come on.”

  They walked back to Castle Sinanju. She told Remo her name was Jean and she had six kids and one grandson. “No two alike,” she added.

  “You don’t look that old,” he said.

  “I’m not. I was just testing your nerve. How is it?”

  “Holding up.”

  “You’re doing better than most guys I meet. For some reason, guys are intimidated by me. Puts a big damper on my love life.” Her smile turned sly. “By the way, how’s yours?”

  “Ever hear of astral sex?”

  Her eyes bloomed. “You can do astral sex? I thought I was the only one who knew that stuff.”

  “I just read about it,” Remo lied. “What’s it like?”

  “You lie in separate beds, sometimes separate homes. You never touch in the physical sense. But your souls mate.”