I drank wine and pushed that ugly thought away.
Albritten’s son, Jordan, had played with Emerald when they were toddlers: she would do what she could to protect Emerald, from the sheriff and the Lawrence police. As she should: Sergeant Everard had said Emerald and August were the persons of interest in the murder. Even if the Lawrence PD were more enlightened than Staten Island or Ferguson—or Chicago—forces, it would still be mighty convenient to have a young black man from Chicago around to take the rap.
I dismissed the possibility that August was guilty. I’d never met him, of course, but I didn’t believe that the quiet, methodical young man who brought flowers to his janitor’s sick wife could bash in the head of an old woman. He might strike someone in self-defense or even to defend Emerald, but not “Aunt Doris,” to whom Emerald “owed much.”
In the warm glow of food and wine, I had grandiose fantasies: Tomorrow morning I would imagine a way to get Nell Albritten to confide in me. I would similarly persuade the Perec women, Cady and her doughty grandmother, to tell me what secrets they were keeping.
My food came as I was reading e-mails and texts. I had highly punctuated messages from Bernie: what are you doing???? i’m taking a leave of absence so i can come down to kansas because you aren’t making progress!!!!
I wrote Troy a detailed message about Doris McKinnon’s relationship with Emerald and her mother, about going out to the farm and finding a dead body but discovering only a putative connection to Ferring and August. if she and august were here, they’ve disappeared. i’m wondering if they returned to chicago. if they’re hiding, do you know who they’d turn to?
I was curter with Bernie. do not come here. if you show up, your dad will be on the first flight out of montreal to collect you. no arguments. Not that anything short of a crowbar over the skull had much effect on Bernie.
Lotty called as I was signaling for the bill, to check on me and to tell me she’d talked to the doctors at the Lawrence hospital. Nell Albritten was doing well; she’d be released in the morning. The news was less promising for Sonia Kiel. The hospital had shared the toxicology report with Lotty.
“Your guess about flunitrazepam—roofies—was correct. Sonia still had Depakote in her bloodstream and a terrifying blood-alcohol level, point two-six. She didn’t seem to have other recreational drugs in her, but the alcohol with the roofies and her depleted immune system have left her seriously compromised. The only hopeful news is that they do have positive readings on the EEGs.”
It warmed me more than wine and food, hearing from Lotty and knowing she’d made these calls out of love for me. We chatted longer, on general topics. She tactfully avoided Jake’s name but hoped I would return home soon.
I signed my credit-card receipt and pushed my sore feet back into my boots. As I gathered up my belongings, I saw I’d dribbled vodka sauce onto my phone. If I was not a clever enough detective to eat and text at the same time, how could I possibly find Emerald Ferring before the law did?
22
Barflies
The hotel bar was on my left as I headed to the front door. I glanced in idly, the way one does. The bartender was watching an NBA game on the TV, desultorily wiping glasses, as bartenders everywhere do when trade is slow. The only customers were a quartet of men deep in conversation in the corner. They looked up as I peered in, and their faces congealed, as if I’d brought an arctic wind with me.
I wouldn’t have stopped to stare if they hadn’t looked so furtive, but after a second I realized that the oldest man in the group was Nathan Kiel. This morning he’d been wearing a sweat suit and slippers, but here he was all decked out in a shirt and tie. It took a moment longer, but I also recognized the man on his left. When I’d seen Colonel Baggetto at Fort Riley four days ago, he’d had on khaki with lots of medals and ribbons, but tonight, like Kiel, he was in civvies.
When I started toward the table, the colonel got to his feet, frost melted, smiling as if I were his long-lost sister. “Ms. Warshawski. I thought I recognized you. We met a few days ago—”
“At Fort Riley.” I smiled but couldn’t emulate his warmth. “I didn’t recognize you at first without your birds and medals and stuff.”
“Even colonels get to take nights off, which means shedding the plumage. Come and have a drink.”
He placed a hand on the small of my back, propelling me toward the table. The touch was light, but there was muscle behind it. He pulled a chair over for me, but I didn’t sit, just nodded to his drinking buddies. One of the strangers was perhaps my age or a bit older, with the leathery skin of someone who spent a lot of time outside. The other was young, young enough to be Kiel’s grandson. I had a fleeting thought that I’d seen him before, but I couldn’t place him.
“Dr. Kiel. And . . . ?”
Baggetto performed introductions. The leathery face was Bram Roswell. “He does something important at Sea-2-Sea, so important that I can never figure out what it is. And this is Marlon Pinsen, who’s a student here. Gentlemen, this is Ms. Warshawski—sorry, I’ve forgotten your first name. She visited me at the fort a couple of days ago.”
Roswell nodded at me, not interested, but young Pinsen half stood, with a respectful “How do you do, ma’am?”
“I’ve been in so many places in Lawrence this week that I can’t remember whom I’ve seen where,” I said to Pinsen. “But we’ve met, haven’t we?”
“I don’t think so, miss . . . ma’am,” he said, after a pause that lasted a hair too long.
“Best not to admit it if you have met her,” Kiel said. “She’ll start imagining she has a right to tell you how to live your life. Whose business have you been interfering with this evening?”
“Someone who was past any advice, good or bad,” I said. “I discovered Doris McKinnon’s dead body on her kitchen floor. I didn’t realize that you knew her.”
“I? You’re badly mistaken. Which seems habitual with you.”
I put my chin in my hand, exaggerated Rodin Thinker. “You’re right. This morning when I mentioned that I’m in town looking for Emerald Ferring, you didn’t react. You must not have realized that Lucinda Ferring was her mother. Not a common name, but perhaps you didn’t know your lab tech’s surname.”
“You came to me with wild questions about my daughter. Forgive me if those seemed more important than someone who worked for me decades ago.” Kiel’s voice dripped heavy sarcasm.
I nodded judicially: good point. “Did you stop at the hospital to see your daughter on your way here? I know it’s hard for you and Mrs. Kiel to get over there, but I visited her at the end of the afternoon.”
“How is she doing?” the young man, Pinsen, asked.
Again the nagging thought crossed my mind that I’d seen him before, but it came and went so quickly I couldn’t hold it.
“Not well. She’s breathing on her own. That’s the best the ICU nurse could tell me.”
“The dead woman at the farm,” Roswell said. “How did you know to look for her?”
I stared at him, astonished. “Why do you care?”
His leathery skin darkened. He didn’t answer immediately but seemed to be fishing for words. “Her land abuts one of our experimental farms. If a killer is running loose, I want my farmhands to be on the lookout. The sheriff tells me it was the black kid from Chicago who killed McKinnon.”
“You’re sure you don’t want a drink?” the colonel interjected.
“I’m over my limit, and my dog is waiting for me,” I said. “The black kid from Chicago, Sheriff Gisborne said? There’s a specific youth he knows about?”
“Don’t play games, Warshawski,” Kiel said. “You’ve broadcast all over town and the university that you’re here hunting for a fugitive couple.”
“People tell me you’re a careful and knowledgeable scientist,” I said. “So you know how important it is not to use language carelessly. The people I’m looking for have disappeared. They are fugitives, but not from justice. Their friends believe they are in
danger, either from a trigger-happy lawman or from the people who killed Ms. McKinnon.”
I turned to Roswell. “Why did the sheriff report Ms. McKinnon’s murder to you? As far as I can tell, the story hasn’t even made the local news. Are you some kind of special deputy or Gisborne’s nephew?”
Roswell swirled what was left of his drink and drank it down. “Dr. Kiel has already said you like to butt into other people’s business, and I see what he means. Why the sheriff chose to call me has nothing to do with you, but if you know where your missing friends are, you’d do well to produce them.”
I laughed. “You sound like someone out of one of those old westerns where the town bully tells the sheriff to ‘String ’em up. They’re half-breeds, no better than savages, and they belong on the end of a rope.’”
Baggetto held up a hand. “Whoa, let’s put away the heavy artillery and the drones and so on. Bram, we’re concerned at the fort because the woman Warshawski is trying to find is the daughter of one of our own. He died at the Battle of the Bulge, so we want to make sure no harm comes to his daughter. We’re here to give Ms. Warshawski any help she needs.
“Ms. Warshawski, Bram has an interest in what happens at the McKinnon farm because there are patents involved in the crops they’re experimenting with. They want to know of any criminal activity in the area, so the sheriff’s office sends them security alerts.”
“Then he’s got the right person’s ear.”
I headed for the door, but Baggetto got up to walk out to the street with me.
“Sorry if Roswell was a bit heavy-handed there. Sea-2-Sea execs get goofy about security because their corporate history includes hippies running amok in their operations back in the Vietnam era. Not to mention bomb threats from people who are opposed to genetically modified food.”
“Yep. As a nation we get hysterical over anticorporate protesters, but if a state government pollutes a city’s drinking water, the law-and-order brigades are strangely quiet.”
Baggetto shook his head. “I’m not going to debate politics with you, Ms. Warshawski. I just want to assure you that if the army can do anything to help you locate Emerald Ferring, all you have to do is call me.” He handed me a card with his cell-phone number on it.
I stuffed it into my jeans pocket and opened my car door. Peppy stuck her head out. “Is that why you drove over to Lawrence? I gave your CO’s secretary—the captain, Arata is it?”
“Arrieta,” he corrected.
“Right. I gave Captain Arrieta my contact information. You could have texted or e-mailed me.”
He laughed. “I came here to help out young Pinsen—he’s the senior cadet in the Army ROTC up on the hill. I’m giving a lecture there tomorrow, the Signal Corps and modern intelligence intercepts. You’re welcome to sit in.”
“That’s your specialty? Modern intelligence? I ought to sit in. The modern detective is probably like the modern army officer: these days we do most of our work at computers, not out on the ground.”
Baggetto bent to scratch Peppy’s ears. “You seem to be covering a fair amount of ground, Ms.— What can I call you? My name is Dante.”
I thought of all the names I’ve been called during my life, from the “Iffy-Genius” taunts of my childhood to “Pit-Dog,” “Donna Quixote,” or “Interfering Bitch.” I said, “Vic will do. . . . My mother used to quote Dante to me. She was Italian.”
He shook his head again, this time with regret. “I’m third-generation. I can order five different kinds of pasta, but that’s about it.”
I climbed into the car. Baggetto shut the door for me. “Good night, Vic.” He sketched a salute.
“Night, Dante.”
I drove off, thinking of the pet names my mother used for me. My father called both of us his pepper pots, because we were so hot-tempered. My mother used to quote Dante only to me, saying that her love for me was l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle—the love that moves the sun and all the other stars.
I felt a spurt of anger toward the Kiels: they were both living into old age, they still had their daughter. Didn’t either of them know what they were squandering?
23
Picture Perfect
The thumb drive I’d found at the bottom of Doris McKinnon’s stairs fell out of my jeans when I tossed them at the little room’s armchair—my long evening had pushed it from my mind. I put the drive on top of my phone, so I’d see it first thing, and slid under the covers, Peppy curled around my feet. I’d taken her into the bathroom shower with me, scrubbing the day’s grime from us both, and we lay under the covers smelling sweetly of lavender.
Despite a fatigue that seemed to dig into my bone marrow, I couldn’t relax into sleep. I finally got out of bed and powered up my laptop. Peppy opened an eye, wondering if I was stupid enough to be on the move again, and gave a sigh of relief when she saw me sit at the corner table. Perhaps in some future life I’d come back as a golden retriever, able to sleep the sleep of the just and good.
For a mercy, the drive wasn’t password-protected. It also wasn’t labeled, but my heart beat a little faster when I saw it held a series of photo and video files—it must have been August’s, something he dropped as he fled the house.
When I started opening the file, though, my spirits sank: I was looking at blank frames. Apparently even pros like August can act like the rest of us, pressing the camera button a zillion times without knowing it. I scrolled through to the end of the file just to make sure and finally realized I actually was looking at photos. They’d been taken in a field at night, without a flash. About halfway through the series, predawn light began clarifying a picture of dead plants and overturned earth.
I turned to the videos. There were seven clips in all. The sound was muffled, but I was pretty sure I could make out three voices—one male, two female.
“How much do you need?” The first woman spoke in a rich contralto; she’d had serious vocal training. Emerald Ferring, I presumed.
“Not much, I just want to collect a good cross section. Hold the bag for me.” The other woman’s voice was thin with age. Doris.
“Just a second.” August, in an urgent undertone. “I heard something.”
Emerald whispered, “Where?”
“In the field, right behind you.”
A brief silence, then a soft chuckle from Doris. “That’s a badger, city boy. They have a burrow around here. You got this?”
The question seemed directed at August, because he held the camera for a few seconds over what I’d first thought was empty air but now saw was a black plastic bag, held by gloved hands while someone else dumped soil into it.
“How will you know where you took your samples from?” August asked.
“Just like a sailor,” Doris said. “Latitude and longitude readings. Put this first tag on this first bag. I worked out where to dig before we came out, you know. We’ll move on here, about fifteen steps to the left. Let me check my little GPS doohickey.”
The camera shut off while someone wrapped the tag around the bag and Doris checked her GPS. The next two video clips looked the same, no real conversation except murmured directions between August and Doris. At the fourth, though, Doris asked for a light.
“It’s a risk, but I want to see what I’ve found.”
A narrow beam shone on crumbly dirt in the palm of Doris’s hand. She brushed the top of it with gentle fingers to expose what looked like tiny twigs. I paused the video, tried to enhance it, but the flashlight hadn’t carried enough wattage.
“What is it?” Emerald asked.
“Bones,” Doris said. “Raccoon, maybe, or badger. I’ll just slip them into their own bag, see if they have a story to tell about what’s in this dirt.”
As she sealed the bag, her trowel fell, hitting something with a thud. She handed the bag to Emerald and grunted, straining to heft whatever it was from the ground. August turned off the camera—I was guessing to lend her a hand. I held my breath, wondering, until the camera came back on
. Doris was shining her flash on some large object—metal, from its dull gleam, so something that didn’t corrode.
Maybe it was a solid-gold samovar that a Russian immigrant had buried to keep out of the hands of the pro-slavery forces during the Civil War. He’d died at Antietam, and his widow hadn’t known where to look for it.
“This reminds me of something,” Doris said. “I can’t place it, and it’s stuck in here pretty good. We’ll make a note where it is and see if we can come back in the daytime. Emerald, it’s next to where we tagged the fourth sample.”
The clip ended there. The next segment started about ten minutes after Doris had demanded a light. We were still in the field, but the camera was focused on a distant point. The predawn light was making it possible to see in the distance; I could tell that a person was there, someone whose pale skin was faintly visible.
It wasn’t possible to discern the person’s sex, let alone age, creed, or place of national origin. The camera followed as the figure raised and lowered its arms, moving about in a clumsy mimicry of a ballet dancer. It looked as though the dancer was flinging things, but in the miserable light I couldn’t be sure. August must have worked some magic with his mike, because the distant voice came hoarsely to life.
“‘Rosemary, that’s for remembrance, and pansies for thoughts, and columbines and rue, that’s for memory. I remember you, I do, I do, you will not come again, no, no, he is dead.’”
“Ophelia,” Emerald muttered. “Sort of Ophelia. She’s left out a section. ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember. There is pansies—’”
Doris urged her to keep her voice lowered. The clip ended there.
Ophelia? I looked up Ophelia’s lament over Hamlet, right before she drowns herself. She’s strewing herbs around, rosemary and fennel and rue—whatever that might be.
Sonia Kiel, it had to be, dancing where she believed her truelove was buried. Perhaps this was an old cemetery, where wheat or corn or just weeds had grown up around grave markers too old to be visible in the grainy footage.
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