Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  “Do you know Gertrude Perec?” I asked.

  “I know who she is,” he said cautiously.

  “Do you know if she has a connection to Dr. Kiel?”

  He shook his head. “It’s a small town, but still, eighty thousand people give or take, we’re not the KGB with the details of everyone’s love life or whatever. Or the NSA, come to that. What’s Ms. Perec got to do with this?”

  I flung up my hands. “I have no idea. I have no idea about anything right now, except that I’m so bone tired I can’t think. Can I leave? Do you need anything else from me?”

  “Just the address where you’re staying. And, you know, until we see what’s going on with Sonia, I’d appreciate it if you stuck around town for another day or two. Give you a chance to look at the cemeteries. We have two.”

  “Five.”

  I jumped: an African-American officer, who’d been sitting so quietly in the corner that I hadn’t noticed him, was speaking.

  “There’s that little Jewish cemetery out by Eudora and the Catholic cemetery over on Sixth. And don’t forget Maple Grove, Sarge.”

  Everard nodded slowly. “Right, Leonard. It’s not used much anymore for new burials,” he added to me, “but it’s in the old part of town, north of the river. A lot of abolitionists and escaped slaves from when the town was first settled are buried there. If Sonia was going to imagine she had a lover who’d been buried, I bet that’s where he’d be.”

  13

  One Sober Minute

  I slept until close to ten the next morning, but my dreams were unquiet, filled with moody, romantic girls wandering through old cemeteries. When I finally got up, I was as stiff and tired as if I’d never lain down.

  I let Peppy out into the little patio outside my room. If I were home, I could make myself espresso and do my exercises until I felt human enough to face the day. In a strange place, I made do with a hot shower and a few stretches before driving down to the Decadent Hippo. This was my third morning, and the bartender/barista raised a brow and asked if I wanted my usual. There are compensations to small towns.

  The day was overcast and crisply cool. I joined Peppy at the sidewalk tables and did a more strenuous set of stretches and squats. With a second cortado, I felt up to creating a to-do list.

  It was hard to know where to start. Try to see Dr. Kiel, go to the cemeteries, find St. Raphael’s group home, visit Riverside Church on the south side of the river and St. Silas AME on the north, drive out to the old missile silo in case Emerald Ferring had decided to revisit it.

  At least I could do some basic research on people and places while I finished my coffee. Nathan Kiel, Ph.D., not M.D., had multiple listings, from the Society of American Microbiologists to Wikipedia and a whole bunch in between. He’d taught for decades at the University of Kansas and was considered an authority on infectious diseases. I found 113 articles that he’d co-authored, but the titles might as well have been in Farsi for all the sense they made to me. Phosphorylation-dephosphorylation followed by chemical symbols and ending in Y. enterocolitica.

  The Douglas County Herald had written about him several times, most recently over the food-poisoning event that Cady Perec had mentioned last night.

  Eighteen people were infected before the Kansas Department of Public Health called in Dr. Kiel. He’s eighty and no longer teaches formally in the classroom, but he can still show younger people a thing or two.

  The Internet produced a hundred or more images of him, dark-haired as a young man, white-haired now, with a square, serious face. Only a few showed him laughing, one a group photo taken in 1980, over this caption:

  KU Germ Expert Dr. Nathan Kiel with his lab team celebrating their first-place victory in the KU Charity Softball Series.

  He would have been about fifty at the time, but he looked younger. I enlarged the image. The team all wore T-shirts with a caricature of a Jayhawk and the slogan dr. k’s fighting germs. There were four women on the squad, but unfortunately the Douglas County Herald hadn’t included anyone else’s name.

  Kiel’s two sons, Stuart and Larry, were around fifty. Larry the linguist worked for a think tank in Oregon. Stuart the math whiz was teaching high-school math in a private school near Bangor, Maine. Larry was married to a woman, with two children of his own. Stuart was married to a man and didn’t have any children. Did it say something about Kiel that his two sons had moved as far from Kansas as possible, or was that just where their work had taken them?

  I couldn’t find any biographical information about Sonia, except her date of birth: she had recently turned forty-seven. Nothing on going out east somewhere to make a career in the arts. Nothing about a truelove, real or imaginary.

  Kiel’s wife, Shirley, was two years younger than the scientist. She had worked only later in life, when she was in her fifties, for one of the downtown banks, and had retired three years ago. Roughly the same age as Gertrude Perec, although there was no mention of Perec in the Kiel dossier, as friend, lover, or relative.

  I tapped my front teeth with my pen and finally texted Cady: does your granny know dr. kiel? i found his daughter last night close to death outside the lion’s pride.

  Before heading out, I called the local hospital to check on Sonia. She was in the ICU. When the operator put me through to the charge nurse, I identified myself as a detective.

  The nurse said Sonia was still unresponsive but was starting to breathe on her own for longer periods.

  “Did you find drugs in her pockets when she came in? I’m wondering what she took—heroin, Rohypnol, or something I’m not imagining.”

  The charge nurse put me on hold and after a minute a physician came on the line. “Detective, did you say? What’s your name?”

  I spelled it, hoping the doctor didn’t have a Lawrence PD directory in front of her. “And you are Dr. . . . ?”

  “Cordley. We’re doing a tox screen, Detective, but do you have a reason to suspect roofies or heroin?”

  “I always think about roofies when I find comatose women outside bars,” I said dryly. “There was a college student nearby who seemed to be in the same state. She may be in your unit, too—Naomi Wissenhurst? Did Ms. Kiel have any drugs on her when they brought her in?”

  I could hear Cordley tapping on a tablet. “I don’t think so. It’s not listed here, but we’ll double-check the clothes she was wearing.”

  “The department will send someone over when she’s able to make a statement,” I promised, wondering if they would, hoping Cordley wouldn’t mention my name if they did.

  Before I hung up, I asked about the college student. Yes, Wissenhurst was in the ICU, but she was young and healthy; she was making a quick recovery.

  Peppy gave me a few sharp barks: she is not a fan of sedentary detecting. “Right you are, girl.”

  We were only a few blocks from the downtown parks. I jogged over, and Peppy chased a tennis ball for half an hour, with a few breaks for treeing squirrels and running around with other dogs.

  St. Raphael’s, the group home where Sonia Kiel lived, was on the west side of town. According to their website, St. Rafe’s was designed for people in recovery from addictions and people in transition from homelessness to permanent housing. The facility held twenty studio apartments, along with single rooms for sixty more people who shared kitchens and bathrooms. The photographs showed a three-story building made of native limestone. There were prairie grasses and a few deer in the background, while residents chatted in happy earnest groups around a small pond.

  It wasn’t easy to find St. Rafe’s, not because of the wide prairie around it but because a strip mall had sprouted on the land. I finally discovered the entrance behind the back wall of an outsize Buy-Smart. A small sign, with the insignia of the Episcopal Church, announced that we were arriving at St. Raphael’s House and to please turn down all noisemakers. Another sign begged shoppers not to block the driveway.

  As I pulled into the drive, bulldozers were churning up the land west of the home. A pa
rking lot held a handful of cars, most in spaces reserved for staff. Mine was the only car in the visitors’ area. A woman with a small child whose hair was elaborately braided and decorated with plastic butterflies was sitting at a picnic table drinking from a Styrofoam cup while the girl bent over a handheld game, frowning in almost desperate concentration.

  A receptionist at a desk just inside the entrance asked my business with a polite smile that didn’t reach her eyes. I didn’t blame her—I’d hate a job where I had to smile at everyone all day long. When I told her I was a detective from Chicago and why I was in Lawrence, her expression seemed to say that Chicago detectives hunting missing persons grew like ragweed in summer.

  “I found Sonia Kiel last night—early this morning, really—after she had called to say she had information about the people I’m trying to find. She’s in intensive care right now, so I’m hoping there’s someone here who could talk to me about her.”

  The woman’s plastic mask cracked into real feeling: annoyance. Yes, the police had been out first thing, they’d talked to Randy Marx, the facility manager. This was just one more way that Sonia Kiel showed why she had no business being at St. Raphael’s.

  “How long has she been living here?” I asked.

  “Too long!” the receptionist snapped. “On and off for three years now. Everyone here has a story, everyone here is a diva one way or another, but most people understand that our rules are for the benefit of the whole community. And most people who violate them don’t get ten chances to redeem themselves.”

  “I’m sure that’s frustrating,” I said with spurious sympathy. “Is there a therapist or social worker I could talk to about her? I’m hoping I can find someone to give me some context for what she said on the phone.”

  “I’ll get Randy for you. He’s a social worker besides being the day manager. Sorry to lose my cool.” She forced another smile. “I guess I should sit in on the anger-management session.”

  The woman gestured at a whiteboard on the far wall, and I saw the day’s schedule written in blue. R. Marx was currently leading an anger-management group in the Buffalo Grass Room. L. McCabe would conduct group art therapy at 1:20 in the Arrowfeather Room.

  The receptionist phoned down to Marx. They’d be finishing in ten minutes; I was welcome to wait in the Sprangletop Room. She pointed toward a hall. Sprangletop was at the end; I was welcome to coffee from the kitchenette along the way. I poured a cup from the outsize urn, even though I knew it would be overboiled and bitter. Prediction confirmed and then some.

  Slogans were taped on the walls, reminding us that recovery is a marathon, not a sprint; one day one minute at a time; every recovery begins with one sober minute. In between the slogans were photos of groups and of families, everyone smiling, even the receptionist. One set was labeled “Labor Day Picnic at Lake Clinton.” I squinted at the volleyball players and barbecuers, trying to see if Sonia was in any of the shots.

  “Are you the detective?” Randy Marx had come into the kitchenette behind me, his Birkenstocks noiseless on the linoleum floor.

  I jumped, splashing some of the thin coffee onto the floor. Marx was a tall man in his thirties or early forties, wearing a blue T-shirt with the ubiquitous Jayhawk striding across the front. He was pale, so pale he looked ghostlike, his thick lips barely darker than his cheeks. He shook hands, smiling perfunctorily, but his eyes were watchful.

  He refilled his coffee cup, which read get off your cross: we need the wood! and ushered me on down the hall to the Sprangletop Room. Its windows looked out at the bulldozers on one side but faced a small park on the other. The park held more playground equipment, a baseball diamond, and a garden where birds swooped among prairie grasses or pecked at the frost-burned remnants of sunflowers.

  “That’s all that’s left of the land that St. Rafe’s used to stand on.” Marx nodded at the park. “We grow ten different varieties of native grasses there. The meeting rooms are named for them. That’s sprangletop.”

  He pointed at a patch in the garden. I nodded respectfully, as if I knew which particular plant he was looking at.

  “Anyway, St. Rafe’s started as a retirement home about fifty years ago—of course, I wasn’t here then—but we rethought our mission when addictions and homelessness became a bigger problem in Douglas County. About ten years ago, the board voted to change the building. They added more single rooms and treatment rooms and sold twenty acres to pay for it all. It gave St. Rafe’s a respectable endowment, but the trade-off was to put us in the middle of big boxes and tract houses. So it goes. Life is full of trade-offs, we keep telling our residents.”

  “Sonia Kiel,” I said. “The sergeant who came to the Lion’s Pride when I called 911 said she’d done this before.”

  Marx ran a finger around the rim of his mug, not looking at me. “She knows she’s not allowed to stay here if she’s drinking, but sometimes that urge gets too strong for her. She’ll leave, go out on the streets, stay in a church basement if the weather’s bad—a lot of the downtown churches have a strong sense of community service. Then she’ll be ready for another stint at sobriety and come back here. She’s been hospitalized before, but it was for exposure, not an overdose.”

  “You must believe in her recovery if you let her keep coming back,” I said.

  He looked up briefly. “I don’t know what I believe about Sonia. I— You don’t live here, do you?”

  I shook my head. “Chicago, where I sit on the board of a shelter for domestic-violence refugees. I confess to a big-city bias about how generous shelters can afford to be with limited resources.”

  His wide lips twisted in a bitter smile. “We have limited resources, too. Do you know the Kiels?”

  “I’m only slowly meeting people in town.” I explained my mission yet again. “I want to talk to Sonia, if she recovers, because she phoned me early this morning claiming she’d seen my missing persons. I haven’t met Dr. or Mrs. Kiel, but I do plan to talk to them after I leave here.”

  He started to speak, grimaced again, got up, and shut the conference-room door. “Even when you think the halls are empty, someone manages to listen in on confidential conversations. Sonia Kiel is an odd duck by any standard. She shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t stay here—I mean, because she is often drunk, which is in violation of our rules. I make her leave when she’s drunk, but I have to take her back.”

  He fiddled with his coffee cup again: he was pushing himself to reveal confidences. “The psychiatrist involved with our residents is a Dr. Chesnitz. Ernst Chesnitz. He’s been treating Sonia for a lot of years, he’s on our board, and he’s close to Nathan Kiel. The Kiels made a substantial donation to St. Rafe’s when we agreed to take Sonia. It was a condition of taking her. Tough love, which is possibly the only kind they know how to manifest.”

  His expression became bleaker, which I wouldn’t have thought possible.

  “You don’t want her here, do you?” I asked.

  “She doesn’t belong here. It’s true she’s got an addiction problem, but we’re only equipped to handle addicts or homeless people who are trying to stay sober. Sonia needs help that we can’t provide, and the help she does need isn’t available in Lawrence, at least not in my opinion.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Back when she was a teenager, Sonia had what Chesnitz considered a psychotic break. The Kiels called him in, and he prescribed lithium. He made a diagnosis of bipolar disorder with paranoid tendencies, and every time he examines her, which might be once a year or whenever Dr. Kiel can force her to see Chesnitz, he says there’s no reason to change that diagnosis.”

  “She’s forty-something now,” I said. “Chesnitz has been her physician all this time?”

  Marx hunched a shoulder. “I suppose he’s seventy. Maybe it’s strange, but it’s not improbable.”

  “Is she still taking lithium?”

  “Lithium requires a lot more patient cooperation than Sonia will provide. You can’t drink, you have to have
regular blood work, and it’s dangerous to your whole body if you go off it cold turkey. Anyway, it’s not used much these days. We have her on one of the new generation of atypical antipsychotics—Depakote, if you want to know. You shouldn’t drink alcohol with Depakote either, but it doesn’t stay in the system the way lithium does, and you can’t go into shock the way you can when you stop lithium abruptly.”

  I described how I’d found Sonia, barely breathing under the iron staircase leading up to the floor above the Lion’s Pride. “Would that be the interaction of Depakote with alcohol?”

  He shrugged again. “It could be. She’s not in good shape, and thirty years of antipsychotics, even with her going off them for five years when she went out east . . . it makes her more vulnerable to side effects. And her drinking, of course. When the police officer came this morning to tell me Sonia was hospitalized, I phoned the ward head and the on-call doctor, but there’s not a lot they can do until they get the tox screen back, except see that she remains hydrated and breathing.”

  “You keep taking her back here because of Chesnitz and Kiel?” I ventured.

  He nodded. “It’s not fair to the other residents. We get complaints in group meetings, and I try to be honest, not to sugarcoat it. I’m not sure it’s a bad thing for them to see that everyone with a job faces unpleasant choices. Or that’s my rationalization.”

  We sat silent for a minute. I was watching the birds in the grasses, but Marx was staring at the bulldozers. His jaw worked in rhythm with their teeth, as if he’d like to chew something or someone up the way they were chewing the ground.

  He roused himself at length. “I have another group-therapy session in five minutes. Do you have what you came for?”

  “Sonia talked on the phone about seeing my missing pair at a cemetery where her truelove died. I need to know where that cemetery is. The cops told me there are five in town.”