Roden was back with the books.
“Ready?” Pilcher said. “Okay, the prothoracic femur is concealed.”
“What about pilifers?”
“No pilifers,” Pilcher said. “Would you turn out the light, Officer Starling?”
She waited by the wall switch until Pilcher’s penlight came on. He stood back from the table and shined it on the specimen. The insect’s eyes glowed in the dark, reflecting the narrow beam.
“Owlet,” Roden said.
“Probably, but which one?” Pilcher said. “Give us the lights, please. It’s a Noctuid, Officer Starling—a night moth. How many Noctuids are there, Roden?”
“Twenty-six hundred and … about twenty-six hundred have been described.”
“Not many this big, though. Okay, let’s see you shine, my man.”
Roden’s wiry red head covered the microscope.
“We have to go to chaetaxy now—studying the skin of the insect to narrow it down to one species,” Pilcher said. “Roden’s the best at it.”
Starling had the sense that a kindness had passed in the room.
Roden responded by starting a fierce argument with Pilcher over whether the specimen’s larval warts were arranged in circles or not. It raged on through the arrangement of the hairs on the abdomen.
“Erebus odora,” Roden said at last.
“Let’s go look,” Pilcher said.
They took the specimen with them, down in the elevator to the level just above the great stuffed elephant and back into an enormous quad filled with pale green boxes. What was formerly a great hall had been split into two levels with decks to provide more storage for the Smithsonian’s insects. They were in Neotropical now, moving into Noctuids. Pilcher consulted his notepad and stopped at a box chest-high in the great wall stack.
“You have to be careful with these things,” he said, sliding the heavy metal door off the box and setting it on the floor. “You drop one on your foot and you hop for weeks.”
He ran his finger down the stacked drawers, selected one, and pulled it out.
In the tray Starling saw the tiny preserved eggs, the caterpillar in a tube of alcohol, a cocoon peeled away from a specimen very similar to hers, and the adult—a big brown-black moth with a wingspan of nearly six inches, a furry body, and slender antennae.
“Erebus odor,” Pilcher said. “The Black Witch Moth.”
Roden was already turning pages. “‘A tropical species sometimes straying up to Canada in the fall,’” he read. “‘The larvae eat acacia, catclaw, and similar plants. Indigenous West Indies, Southern U.S., considered a pest in Hawaii.’”
Fuckola, Starling thought. “Nuts,” she said aloud. “They’re all over.”
“But they’re not all over all the time.” Pilcher’s head was down. He pulled at his chin.
“Do they double-brood, Roden?”
“Wait a second … yeah, in extreme south Florida and south Texas.”
“When?”
“May and August.”
“I was just thinking,” Pilcher said. “Your specimen’s a little better developed than the one we have, and it’s fresh. It had started fracturing its cocoon to come out. In the West Indies or Hawaii, maybe, I could understand it, but it’s winter here. In this country it would wait three months to come out. Unless it happened accidentally in a greenhouse, or somebody raised it.”
“Raised it how?”
“In a cage, in a warm place, with some acacia leaves for the larvae to eat until they’re ready to button up in their cocoons. It’s not hard to do.”