Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  The camera shifted. Sonia was on the ground, rocking back and forth, crooning, “Hey, nonny, nonny, hey, daddy, daddy.”

  My skin crawled. She hadn’t known she was being filmed, poor thing. It was physically painful to watch her expose herself.

  Headlights suddenly swept the field, the light breaking into halos in the camera lens. A pickup or an SUV.

  The headlights picked up Sonia, who cried out and started running away from them, straight at the camera, yelling, “Fire, fire!” and then, as she caught sight of the photographer and his entourage, “What are you doing here? This land is sacred! Get off, go away, go away, go away!”

  The drive didn’t hold anything else. The date stamp on the videos meant August must have shot it two days after he and Ferring had been at Fort Riley.

  I went through all the stills, hoping for shots of the bag tags showing the latitude and longitude of the digging, but couldn’t see any. It was maddening: I was looking at the place where Sonia thought Matt Chastain was buried, but I still had no idea where it was.

  The more I thought about it, the less I believed it could be a cemetery, at least not one in current use. Headstones would have stood out, paler stone against darker soil, even in the poor light. The arrival of the SUV or truck, coupled with the fact that they were working in the dark, made it pretty clear that Doris and her guests were trespassers.

  I stood, stretching the kinks in my neck and hamstrings, pressing my palms together to straighten my fingers. I wandered to the patio door. It was satisfying to find evidence that August and Emerald had been here. Satisfying to find evidence that Sonia really had seen them. I toyed with sending the video of her to her parents or Randy Marx, to show she had in fact seen August and Emerald. Bad idea, I finally decided: they would only pay attention to her crude dance as an excuse to mock her further.

  I pulled on the blind cord over the patio door, jamming the slats. I’d gotten so focused on Sonia, along with all the other oddly behaving people in Lawrence, that I’d lost track of the problem that had sent me to Kansas in the first place: the wanton destruction in August’s home and at the Six-Points Gym.

  Was this thumb drive what the thugs had been looking for? The search at the McKinnon farm hadn’t been as destructive as the damage in Chicago—except, of course, for the murder of Doris McKinnon.

  They would have searched Doris’s home first and not found what they wanted. They thought August must have it; when he and Emerald disappeared, the creeps thought they’d gone back to Chicago. They became increasingly enraged, so they’d ripped apart August’s home and then the gym. Why hadn’t they torn up Emerald Ferring’s house as well? Maybe Ferring’s watchful neighbors kept invaders at bay. If vandals had been prowling around, it would help explain the neighbors’ hypervigilance toward me.

  I wondered about the SUV that had arrived in the field. Was it the Buick Enclave that had followed me yesterday? The sheriff claimed he wasn’t tailing me. I believed him, if only because I’d checked on him in my databases. His personal SUV was a Ford Explorer, and the county budget definitely didn’t run to Enclaves. Maybe I’d imagined yesterday’s tail: no one had followed me to the McKinnon place after all.

  I fiddled with the blinds cord but only made the tangle worse. I thought about the quartet I’d encountered in the Oregon Trail’s bar this evening: Army, Academy, and Agribusiness huddling together. Colonel Baggetto said he was lecturing on campus in the morning, but he might have arranged that simply as an excuse to come to Lawrence when he learned about Doris McKinnon’s dead body.

  He’s worried about hippies, Baggetto had said. Nobody talked about hippies these days, but Roswell certainly didn’t want trespassers on Sea-2-Sea land.

  The soil samples were the crux. Doris wanted evidence about what contaminants were in the soil. The bags she’d collected hadn’t been in her house when Peppy and I got there this evening. Either the killers had found the samples or she’d gotten rid of them before she died.

  I was forgetting the metal container McKinnon had found. Doris had said she was going back for it the next day. I hadn’t seen any metal object in her home big enough to be the samovar or whatever they’d stumbled on—maybe that was what her killer had snatched.

  It was maddening that I couldn’t talk to Sonia—she’d know who had driven onto the field in the middle of August’s video. She might even know about the soil samples.

  I didn’t believe that the vandals who’d turned August’s home and the Six-Points Gym upside down were looking for dirt. The thumb drive was a real possibility. I needed to get it to a safe place. Cheviot, the private forensics lab I use, has the equipment and the expertise to bring the photos into better focus. They could analyze the drive itself for prints or DNA. They might even be able to bring up a license plate or a make and model number on the vehicle. They could perform a miracle and identify the samovar.

  I copied the file to Dropbox and stored it in that mythic cloud. It sounds like a fluffy bit of white floating overhead, but of course it’s really a massive data farm, some big power grid that’s polluting some other person’s river.

  In the morning I’d do a property search for the boundaries of Doris McKinnon’s land, check the boundaries of Sea-2-Sea’s experimental farm.

  I climbed back into bed, moving Peppy so that I could lie in the place she’d made warm. The handful of little bones that Doris had found floated through the cloud of my own mind. Those bones, we all come to those dusty remains. Even Jake’s beautiful fingers, touching his bass strings, touching me, would one day be gray bones in a piece of soil.

  24

  Trespassers W

  It took me a long time to relax into sleep. I felt vulnerable in this rented room, with its flimsy set of locks. I finally drifted into feverish dreams: The earth had swallowed me. Jake sat on the ground overhead, playing his bass for a twenty-year-old cellist whose golden hair flowed below her waist.

  I was able to sleep only long enough to take the edge off my weariness. When I woke a little after seven, I hotfooted it downtown to a FedEx store, where I sent the original thumb drive to Cheviot. I used a store computer, not my own, to type the cover letter explaining what I wanted them to do. I even paid cash for the shipment, instead of billing it through to my credit-card account.

  I felt foolish being so cautious, but I had no idea what direction violence was coming from and had no secure place to store either my own electronics or any evidence I came upon. If I lost my computer, I didn’t want anyone to be able to trace my actions. Colonel Baggetto came to mind: a guy like him, with his training and access to government resources, could break into a computer like mine one-handed.

  When I finished, my T-shirt was damp with sweat, clinging clammily to my skin. I zipped up my windbreaker and ran Peppy down to the river, where the morning wind off the water cut through my jacket to freeze my damp shirt. I ducked behind a scruffy bush and undressed, pulling off the shirt and shoving it into a pocket. Still cold, but not so bitter.

  We ran back into the town, to the Decadent Hippo: when you’re alone and forlorn, little routines become sources of comfort. The bartender/barista cocked an eye at her bean grinder. I nodded, and she made me a cortado. They sold long-sleeved T-shirts, which showed a pink hippo lounging in a hot tub drinking a cappuccino. Twenty-five dollars bought me a coffee and something warm for my cold back.

  I took my coffee to a stool in the window, where Peppy and I could see each other through the glass, and started answering e-mails. Freeman Carter, my lawyer in Chicago, had found a good criminal-defense lawyer about twenty-five miles away, in a suburb of Kansas City. He’d written Luella Baumgart-Grams about me; she’d be happy to help if the need arose. I sent her a follow-up message with a few details about the job that had brought me to Kansas and added her to my speed dial, because you never know. When I’d caught up on queries from Chicago clients, I tried to plan my day.

  First stop: day care for Peppy. There were a number of day boarders in town, but t
he one that got the best reviews was Free State Dogs: Where Dogs Run in a Free State. They had space if I could get my vet to fax them her health record and if her temperament passed muster.

  “And if your environment works for her,” I said sharply.

  After I finished with my vet, I called Lawrence’s hospital for humans. Sonia was no worse, still breathing on her own but no better. The ward head told me briskly that one shouldn’t give up hope, as if I were her sister, which made me think I was the only person concerned enough about her health to call the hospital. How sad, especially since my chief concern wasn’t her well-being but whether she would ever recover any memory of whom she’d encountered in the bar or of the field where she’d spotted August filming her.

  The hospital also told me that Nell Albritten had been discharged; her son, Jordan, had escorted her home. This afternoon, after I’d inspected Sea-2-Sea’s experimental farm, I could pay a neighborly visit to check up on her.

  This meant identifying the property lines both for Doris McKinnon and for Sea-2-Sea. I was only two blocks from the Lawrence Public Library, so I went there first, before dropping off Peppy.

  A reference librarian helped me find Doris McKinnon’s farm and stepped me through decades of records, with their changing property lines. I had always imagined farms as static, land handed down unchanging across the centuries. Instead pieces were always being bought and sold, not all of them contiguous.

  Most of McKinnon’s land was a substantial chunk around the farmhouse where I’d found her body yesterday. In 1967 the U.S. government had seized three acres from her through the right of eminent domain for the Kanwaka Missile Silo. As I inspected the maps over the next several years, it looked as though special roads had been constructed, one from the west and one from the south, to connect the silo to existing county roads.

  In 1967 Emerald Ferring was in Hollywood, just starting her career with Jarvis Nilsson. Her mother was probably still pipetting specimens for Dr. Kiel—I doubted that Emerald was making enough money at that point to support Lucinda. Doris McKinnon herself would have been in her thirties, fully capable of working her land on her own.

  Over the next sixteen years, Doris bought and sold smallish parcels that lay in other parts of the county. Then, in September 1983, the United States took another fifteen acres from her, to the south and east of the silo. The southern edge now abutted one of the east-west county roads.

  That was 1983—the year of the abortive effort to reenact Greenham Common, the year of Matt Chastain’s disappearance (his death?), Jenny Perec’s death, Cady Perec’s birth.

  Correlation does not mean causation, I know that in my head, but in my gut, that famous residence of detective intuition, I couldn’t help wondering if all these things were tied together.

  While I tried to find Sea-2-Sea’s experimental farm, the helpful librarian printed out the most current map for McKinnon’s holdings. I would start my search at the fields near the silo and hope I didn’t have to go riding all over Douglas County looking at her other land.

  Sea-2-Sea’s farms weren’t listed under their name, but Emigrant Bank and Savings was the trustee for 160 acres along McKinnon’s southern border, at the edge of the Kanwaka silo. Good bet that they were acting for Sea-2-Sea. The reference librarian printed out that map for me as well.

  She was gathering them all into a folder when we were joined by a third woman, an African-American whose name badge identified her as phyllis barrier, head librarian.

  “What are we working on here, Agnes?” Barrier asked the reference librarian.

  Her tone was genial, but the look she gave me was searching—not unfriendly exactly, but the kind of expression my mother took on when she was sure I’d been doing something dangerous with my cousin.

  “I’m V.I. Warshawski,” I said. “Ms. Chercavi has been helping me understand some property documents out near the Kanwaka silo.”

  “May I?” Barrier held out her hand; the reference librarian perforce gave her the folder.

  Barrier thumbed through the pages, then smiled at me. “We love to have people use our library, and we consider our patrons’ needs private, but I confess I’m curious. You’re visiting from Chicago, as I understand. Why are you interested in these property maps?”

  The smile signaled that we weren’t in a hostile encounter, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

  “If you know I’m from Chicago, then you know I’m the person who found Doris McKinnon’s body yesterday. Before she died, she was worried about activity on the land that abuts the silo, and I wanted to see where her property ended, whether the piece she was concerned about was actually hers. The Kanwaka silo sits on land that McKinnon used to own, but the rest of it now seems to belong either to Sea-2-Sea or to the air force.”

  Barrier studied me again, flipped through the pages again, before handing them to me and telling me to enjoy my time in Lawrence. As I walked away, I wondered if I’d seen her before. Her face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Maybe she’d been at the hospital yesterday when I went there with Nell Albritten.

  Lawrence was getting to be full of specters for me—first Marlon Pinsen and now the head librarian. I didn’t have any familiar faces around me—maybe my unconscious was creating phantom friends.

  Before I drove Peppy to her day-care appointment, I circled the downtown but didn’t see any obvious signs of a tail. Yesterday’s Buick Enclave wasn’t parked nearby either. Another phantom?

  Free State Dogs was the kind of place you could get only in a small town with a lot of open space—huge runs where the staff could sort dogs into compatible packs for play and rest. The staff seemed to know how to work with the animals, but I still felt a wrenching as I finally let Peppy trot off with one of their crew.

  I guessed she’d be okay. I hoped she’d be okay. The third time I checked that they had my cell-phone number and would text me if anything went wrong, the manager patted me on the shoulder.

  “Every parent feels like this the first time they leave their baby alone. She’s a sweetheart; we’ll take good care of her.”

  Free State was on the main east-west artery that led from Lawrence out to the McKinnon farm and the Kanwaka silo. I unfolded my paper maps and checked the roads against the property lines on the documents the library had printed for me. Folded them up, cast a last longing look at Free State Dogs, and put the car into gear, singing, “Hey, said I, for the open road and the open camp beside it.”

  Traffic was heavy on the highway, but as soon as I turned onto the county roads, I was alone. One good thing about the country, I guess, is that it’s easy to spot a tail. Unless you counted the circling hawks, I was on my own. I didn’t even see tractors in the fields I was passing, just the occasional herd of morose-looking cows.

  At a crossroads near the McKinnon farm, I pulled over and took out my tablet, bringing up the stills that August had shot in the dark. I tried to compare them with the land around me. The ditches on either side of the road were filled with wild grass, brown now at winter’s approach. A heavy wind blew through the grasses, creating waves that looked like Lake Michigan in a storm. The wind buffeted the Mustang, increasing my sense of vulnerability. I turned on the radio just to hear the sound of a human voice.

  “And God said, the unclean shall you cast from you. When Jesus told us he brought not peace, but a sword—”

  I turned off the radio: I’d risk going mad on the prairies.

  All the land around me resembled the photos: the ground plowed or harrowed or whatever they did after they’d harvested the crops, leaving behind little hillocks with tufts sticking up. I wasn’t looking for a needle in a haystack but a haystack in a land of hayfields. Impossible.

  I’d start with the one place I could identify, the missile silo. I’d had vague Dr. Strangelove images in mind, so the actual site was a letdown: no giant Atlas rockets thrust their noses skyward, no heavily armed soldiers patrolled the perimeter. In fact, I almost missed the turnoff, it was so unobtrusiv
ely marked—just an old metal sign on a fence post, with the U.S. Air Force logo and faded letters announcing the Kanwaka Missile Silo.

  The county road wasn’t paved, just had a coating of gravel on it that had been dinging my car as I bumped along, but the access road to the silo was covered in tarmac. Newly surfaced, by the look of it, although the installation itself seemed run-down—everyone was tired of nuclear weapons, even the land around the old missile. A twelve-foot-high cyclone fence enclosed the land, but sections had fallen over.

  Cady Perec had said how vulnerable it made kids feel when they saw it every day on their way to school. In my childhood we’d grown up with a vague fear of nuclear war, but a fully loaded Minuteman right by your school bus—that was the stuff of permanent nightmare.

  I pulled over onto the verge and started to walk the perimeter. Although the fence had collapsed in places that would make it easy to enter the site, the front gates still stood padlocked.

  The odd thing about the layout, at least to my urban mind, was the way the property was cut up. The missile had sat in a triangle, with the apex pointing at Doris McKinnon’s house. A barbed-wire fence ran along the same parallel as the triangle’s base, smack in the middle of a field. If I had worked out the maps properly, the land beyond the fence belonged to the fifteen acres the air force had seized from McKinnon back in 1983. The conveyancing reports didn’t show it as being redeeded to Sea-2-Sea.

  When I walked along McKinnon’s side of the barbed wire, I saw medallions every twenty feet or so, labeling the land beyond as private property, no trespassing. The medallions were stamped with the Sea-2-Sea logo—wheat sheaves crossing a stylized map of the United States.

  I wondered if McKinnon had marked her own land on the opposite side. When I bent over to look, my skin tingled and I jumped back: the fence was electrified. Curiouser and curiouser.