Free Ripper by Michael Slade

return.
    "I had a torrid love affair with a zoology prof in my first semester. He didn't last, but his work got under my skin."
    "What became of your brother?"
    "He's a dentist."
    They wormed their way through the corridor maze of SFU, Vancouver's "other university" crowning Burnaby Mountain. Twelve hundred feet above and east of the city, Simon Fraser is a Parthenonlike complex that suffers from too little marble and too much concrete. Wong's office was a cubbyhole tucked away in the Centre for Pest Management, one of SFU's quirky claims to fame. The university offers degrees in pestology, criminology, kinesiology, etc. It's that land of liberal-chic place.
    "Take a seat," Wong said, offering Nick one of the cushioned stacks of books on the floor. "The board keeps promising, but still no space. Instead of furniture, you're sitting on my bookcase."
    Nick passed her one of the slides from the Marsh autopsy. "These were found inside the wounds of a stabbing victim. I'm told they're lice, but not the human kind. If the bugs were transferred on the murder weapon, identifying their host might lead us to the killer."
    Wong positioned the slide on a comparison microscope. While she hunted for a slide of human lice, Nick surveyed her cluttered desk. Animal eyes in the dark peered from the screen-saver of her PC, switching to tropical fish as he watched. Trays of bugs stuck on pins flanked the computer, evidence aids showing the insects plucked from various corpses. The bulletin board sandwiched between her desk and the window was papered with a poster that read Bug Your Parents To Come To The Museum . Stuck to it were phone messages torn from an exterminator's advertising pad: Name of Pest who called; Time Pest called; Pest's supposedly oh-so-important message. The sky beyond the window was dripping gunsmoke gray.
    "So," Wong said, "what do you know about lice?"
    "They give me the creeps and I don't want to get them."
    She motioned Nick to her seat in front of the microscope. "Lice are small wingless ectoparasites," she said as he took a look. "They externally infest skin, as opposed to internal endoparasites. Lice divide into two orders. Anoplura, or sucking lice; and Mallophaga, chewing lice.
    "Sucking lice attack humans and mammals. They have mouthparts adapted for sucking blood. During feeding, three piercing stylets extend from their heads while tiny hooks attach their mouths to the host's skin. The lice on the left are Anoplura. The top one's a human body louse, Pediculus humanus. The bottom one's a genital louse, Pthirus pubis. It and its cohorts we call 'crabs.' The name fits, huh?"
    Staring into the microscope, Nick felt itchier. The body louse was longer and thinner than its pubic cousin, with legs that looked less like claws. The "crab" resembled its namesake, with a rounded body and large pincer-legs. If not for Wong, he'd have indulged the psychosomatic need to scratch his groin.
    "Where was the victim stabbed?" the entomologist asked.
    "In the abdomen, around her womb."
    "Different species of lice attack different hosts, and each species usually infests a particular part of the body. Because the lice in question come from a human corpse, they should match one of these two Anoplura species. The reason they don't is they're chewing lice, Mallophaga.
    "Chewing lice infest animals and birds. They don't attack humans, but people who handle infested hosts occasionally get chewing lice on themselves. When this happens, the bugs don't stay long. You'll note the lice on your slide have mouthparts adapted for biting. Their mandibulate jaws once nibbled bits of hair, feathers, or the host's skin."
    "What host?" Nick said.
    "There's the problem."
    Wong dismantled one of her "chairs" to find a specific text: Borror, Triplehorn, and Johnson, An Introduction to the Study of Insects. Her bookmarks were Far Side cartoons.
    "Examining their host is the only effective way to find lice," Wong said. "Unless the host is domestic, it must be