Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  I returned to the silo and slipped inside through a place where the fence had come unmoored from its post, taking care not to touch the metal, in case Sea-2-Sea’s electrical circuits ran through the Kanwaka fence as well.

  The resurfacing of the tarmac continued beyond the padlocked gates. The road, big enough for a double-wide, ended in the concrete wings of a loading bay. A narrower track branched out from there and led to an enormous concrete circle.

  Broken antennas—what used to be radar, I supposed—stood in the corners of the triangle. An assortment of smaller manhole covers and what looked like fuel or water tanks were spread in a circle around the missile bay itself. The tanks were filled with dirt and weeds that had blown in since the missile was taken away.

  I watched a snake glide past. Were the fields of Kansas home to poisonous snakes? Maybe this was the kind we were supposed to love because they ate rodents, but my toes curled and tingled inside my running shoes. The snake slid onto the oblong lid to some part of the complex, where two other snakes were already resting—perhaps the cover was made of a material that amplified the sun’s weak late-autumn heat.

  I tried singing, to boost my spirits, but the wind swallowed my voice. It ripped through my windbreaker and the thin Hippo shirt underneath. I jogged around the perimeter, trying to warm up, snapping pictures of the different empty tanks, of the snakes, of the loading bay. I didn’t see any place that looked as though Doris and her team had been digging here.

  On the far side of the enclosure I found what looked like a ranch house, wooden, with a concrete step up to the door. The windows had been painted black. At first I thought meth makers had taken over the place, but then I saw a small plaque next to the door: when the kanwaka silo was active, this was the launch control support building, where crew members off duty could sleep. windows were painted black so the owl shift could sleep during the day.

  The door had a new padlock, I noticed, a sophisticated one. Maybe meth makers really had moved in. In which case the SUV that had chased Sonia and Doris’s team across the fields belonged to a drug enterprise with major resources. Good people to stay away from. I sniffed the air and thought I picked up a tangy chemical smell, but not the sulfurous stench that comes with a big drug operation.

  Before leaving the enclosure, I went to look at the high doors to the loading bay. Drops of oil on the tarmac showed that a truck or car had parked here fairly recently, but the doors themselves didn’t look as though they’d been opened in some time. They were too heavy to manage without special winches, and I didn’t see any shiny places in the hinges or massive handles that would show that someone had been operating them recently.

  No one had gone in through that door for some time. So someone was parking here, using this out-of-the-way spot for . . . what? The only thing I could think of continued to be drugs.

  I slid back through the opening in the silo fence and started into the fields, looking either for some sign of tire tracks or Doris McKinnon’s digging or even, vain idea, some remnant of the thirty-three-year-old hippie camp.

  It was hopeless. The rain of the past week had turned the fields into mud baths. Maybe one of those Indian or Bedouin trackers beloved of crime writers could sense where Doris had been digging, but I couldn’t.

  Mud was encasing my running shoes, making them so heavy that I felt as though I were walking through congealed molasses. My socks were soaked through, turning my toes into frozen lumps. I trudged back to my car, stopping again outside the perimeter gates. This is where Emerald Ferring had been photographed in 1983: “Aunt Doris, I owe you much.”

  I was just getting into my car when I saw a dust cloud rolling toward me, the telltale strobes of the law flashing through it. I shut the door quickly, locked it, turned on the engine, and got ready to move. A squad car pulled up alongside me.

  Sheriff Gisborne rolled down his window and signaled me to open mine. “I might have guessed that if there was trouble in Douglas County today, you’d be behind it.”

  25

  Trouble in Douglas County

  “What’s troubling you today in Douglas County, Sheriff?” I kept my voice neutral.

  “You, Warshawski. Douglas County was a pretty calm place until you arrived.”

  “You mean until I arrived, no one would have found Ms. McKinnon’s dead body or tried to rescue Sonia Kiel and the young student, who were overdosing outside that bar?”

  He shifted his gaze. “I mean none of that happened until you showed up.”

  I laughed. “Come on, Sheriff. Horrible as Ms. McKinnon’s death was, it happened long before I came to town.”

  “And now here you are, trespassing on private property.”

  “This road?” I said. “This road is private property? It looked to me like it was posted as a county road, but you’re right: I’m a stranger.”

  His upper lip curled in a snarl. “We got a call that someone was trespassing on Sea-2-Sea land, and I decided to look for myself, because I had this hunch, this intuition, the kind of thing a lady or a private eye might have, that I’d find you were the perp.”

  “Good thing you’re a guy and a law-enforcement pro who doesn’t have to depend on his hunches, because they’d have misled you: I haven’t been on Sea-2-Sea land.”

  He grinned in an ugly way. “Someone triggered an alarm at this location, and I don’t see anyone else around here, do you?”

  “Sheriff, to the best of my knowledge, I have only been on Doris McKinnon’s land and on my own property. I did not cross that fence, the only one I’ve seen marked as Sea-2-Sea land.” I pointed toward the fence on the south side of the silo.

  “Your property? What the hell are you talking about?”

  I smiled blandly. “I’m a citizen and a taxpayer, and that enclosure is labeled property of the air force, which is part of the U.S. government. Which means I own a one-three-hundred-millionth share in it.”

  “Like fuck you do. Like fuck you do.” He swung open the door to the squad car.

  If he was going to arrest me or beat me up, I wished I’d had time to change out of my wet socks and mud-laden shoes. My feet were acutely uncomfortable. My options were limited: If I took off, he’d flag me down. If I stayed, I was a sitting duck. If I reached for my phone to call Luella Baumgart-Grams, the Kansas City lawyer, Gisborne would enjoy shooting me, with the righteous claim that he thought I was pulling a gun.

  I kept my hands on the steering wheel, looking grimly ahead. Another cloud of dust was rolling toward us. Reinforcements. Great.

  The car rolled to a stop behind Gisborne; the dust settled. It was a dark SUV, not a squad car. Squinting in my side mirror, I couldn’t see the emblem, couldn’t tell if it was a Buick or some other make, but when the door opened, I knew the driver: Colonel Baggetto, back in military dress. The ribbons and medals on his left breast would have sprained a weaker man’s traps.

  When Gisborne turned to look at him, I took my hands from the steering wheel. My fingers were stiff—fear making me clench my muscles—and it was hard for me to open the car door.

  “Colonel Baggetto—I thought you were addressing KU’s soldiers-in-training today.” I’m always grateful when my voice is steady at times like this, my mother’s vocal lessons paying off.

  “We finished about an hour ago. I was on my way back to the fort when I heard there was some kind of fracas at the silo.” He smiled easily at the sheriff and me.

  “It’s posted U.S. Air Force. I thought you were army,” I said.

  “Nearest air base is a hundred and eighty miles away. Someone called someone who knew someone who knew I was in the area, asked me to check on it for them.”

  “It’s under control,” the sheriff said. “You don’t need to stick around.”

  “What happened?” Baggetto asked him. “Don’t tell me Warshawski vandalized the silo—it was decommissioned decades ago, and I’d think she’d have better things to do with her time than spray-paint old concrete.”

  “Decommissio
ned but still dangerous.” Gisborne pointed at a sign on the locked gates with its familiar black fan blades on a yellow background, cautioning us against radioactive material. “Or do Chicago dicks have radioactive shields in their panties?”

  I ignored the gratuitous vulgarity. Vulgarities. “I saw the sign but assumed it dated to when the missile was housed here.”

  “It does,” Gisborne said, impatient, “but there’d been leakage in the missile cradle. That’s why the air force couldn’t sell it to a developer the way they have with a lot of other sites.”

  I didn’t think Gisborne would be standing here if we were in danger, but I shifted my legs uneasily, as if fallout could fall upward, through the hundreds of feet between the cradle and the ground.

  “In that case, why is Sea-2-Sea using adjacent land for their experimental farm?” I demanded. “Are they testing whether some kind of sorghum will grow fat and bushy if it’s got a lot of strontium 90 in it?”

  Baggetto laughed, but Gisborne frowned. “How did you know they’re growing sorghum there?”

  “Are they? I don’t know one crop from another: just a lucky guess from the list of ‘Most Common Plants Under Cultivation in Eastern Kansas.’ I read it in a book at the Lawrence Historical Society,” I added, seeing his scowl deepen.

  “You say.”

  “I can show you the book,” I said earnestly. “You know where the historical society is, right? That old bank building two blocks from your Law and Justice center—red stone, I think it is, or brick—”

  “I know where the damned historical society is,” Gisborne said. “I’m the one who grew up in this town—county—not you.”

  “Someone’s been using the missile site,” I said. “There’s fresh transmission fluid in the loading bay. If you’ve got vandals out here, or meth heads, they must have a key to the lock on the front gates, and they don’t seem scared of the gamma rays or whatever they are.” I should have paid more attention in Professor Wright’s Physics 101 class all those years ago.

  “It’s easy to walk onto the site,” I added, “but you’d need to open the gates to drive in.” I gestured at the place I’d climbed through.

  Baggetto walked over to the front gates and shook them, as I had, and, as I had, inspected the lock. I went over to join him, looking again at the radiation warning sign. The yellows and blacks had faded to tans and grays. Someone had taken a potshot at it, missed a bull’s-eye by a couple of inches.

  “When did they discover that the site was still contaminated?” I asked the sheriff.

  “Why do you care?”

  I could almost see the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. He didn’t like being challenged, but it felt like more than that.

  “The sign is old,” I said, spelling it out. “If it happened recently, why didn’t they put up a bright new yellow sign that would catch people’s attention? You can see empty bottles and condoms and so on here—local people are using the land. If it’s dangerous, doesn’t the county have some duty to warn them?”

  “I’m warning you,” Gisborne growled. “Locals are smart enough to stay off the site.”

  “So it’s those dreaded outside agitators who’ve been littering the silo.” I nodded as if he’d made an important point. “It was good of you to drive all the way out here to alert me to the radiation.”

  “I was already out here,” the sheriff said. “When the call came in from Sea-2-Sea, I said I’d take it myself because I was sure it’d be you, sticking your nose in other people’s business. And don’t give me crap about air force bases belonging to you.”

  It would have been juvenile to whine that as a taxpayer it was hard to pay for things I never got to see or touch, like drones and warheads and so on.

  “You were at the murder scene?” Baggetto asked Gisborne.

  “Yep. We’re not as well supported as city forces, maybe. We don’t get to put sixteen bullets in a suspect, then take a hike, the way they can where this lady comes from, but we do slowly figure out how to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

  The sheriff was trying to goad me, but Baggetto’s knowing the geography out here was what really had my attention. He was in the army, he lived a hundred miles away, but he knew about McKinnon’s murder and knew where her farm was relative to the silo.

  “Did you?” the sheriff said.

  “Did I what?” I’d missed his question.

  “Go into the barn when you were out here yesterday.”

  I shook my head, my stomach clenching: What had I missed? Emerald Ferring’s body?

  “Someone was keeping a car in there. McKinnon had an old pickup and an older Subaru. Subaru’s there, but the pickup’s gone. My techs say the tire tracks indicate a Prius. What do you know about that, Warshawski?”

  “Prius is a hybrid, right? That’s pretty much all I know about them, but a good mechanic could tell you how they work.” I kept forgetting I wasn’t going to bait the sheriff.

  He jammed his hands in the pockets of his football jacket: he wasn’t going to slug me, at least not with Baggetto watching, but the impulse was strong. “You know anyone who drives one?”

  “I don’t think so.” I knew August Veriden owned a Prius, but I didn’t actually know him, and I couldn’t think of anyone in my own circle who did.

  “We checked with Illinois, and this kid you say you’re looking for, this August, he has one registered to his name.”

  “You could be right,” I said politely. “I’ve never met him, so I know less about him than you seem to. Does Illinois believe those are his car’s tire tracks?”

  “I know you think you’re the cleverest person to appear in Kansas since Dorothy and Toto came home, but we aren’t total idiots in law enforcement here. We’ve caught a lot of murderers who think they’re too smart for the law to get them.”

  I hung my head, duly chastened. “Has your pathologist given you a cause of death for Ms. McKinnon yet?”

  “Last I heard, you were not on any need-to-know list. Just because you discovered her the first time doesn’t give you—”

  “The first time?” I interrupted. “Has there been a second time?”

  “I meant in the first place. And basically you get to mind your own business, which has nothing to do with the cause of death.”

  “What about the truck?” I asked. “Ms. McKinnon’s pickup?”

  He was starting to shout me down when Baggetto repeated the question. “Do you have her truck?”

  Gisborne hated having to answer while I was listening, but he snarled, “That’s missing as well. We’ve put out an APB. If it’s in the county, it’ll turn up.”

  “What are we looking for?” Baggetto asked.

  “A 2002 Dodge Ram. Came from the manufacturer in red, but neighbors tell me the paint was pretty much worn off by now. Of course, Warshawski here, she might just trip on it taking her dog for a walk down by the river.”

  I didn’t like anything about this story. Gisborne knew I’d been walking Peppy along the river. Maybe it was a lucky guess—as he himself said, he wasn’t a lady or a PI who could rely on his hunches. But maybe he’d had a deputy in the Buick that was following me around yesterday.

  Why would the Prius and the pickup both be missing? That didn’t make sense, unless Emerald and August had thought they could ditch the Prius and make a more anonymous escape from the county in McKinnon’s old truck. I refused to believe that Emerald or August could have attacked Doris McKinnon. I also didn’t like to think they’d stood idly by while someone else killed her. Maybe they’d been out, come back and seen her body, and realized that August would be the prime suspect.

  Sonia Kiel had been on the land. Could she have had some kind of psychotic break and attacked McKinnon, thinking that the old woman had been responsible for her supposed lover’s death?

  I shook my head, annoyed with myself: I’d lectured Sergeant Everard for profiling August, but here I was, profiling Sonia—last night I’d wondered if she’d killed Cady Perec’s mo
ther, and now I wanted to frame her for Doris McKinnon’s death. It would be more to the point if I could find out who had fed her roofies at the Lion’s Pride the other night—someone had tried to silence her, and it could well be the person who’d actually killed McKinnon.

  26

  Patriots Care

  Neither Gisborne nor Baggetto tried to stop me from getting into my car. As I bounced down the gravel road to the highway, I kept checking my rearview mirror, but neither of them was following. I got off at the first exit and doubled back, pulling onto the shoulder on top of an overpass, watching the silo through my binoculars.

  Baggetto was just leaving. I watched the dust cloud he stirred up until he reached the paved road and turned westbound onto the highway, where I lost him in the mass of cars. He might be going to Fort Riley or Lawrence, or taking the long way around to circle back on me.

  Gisborne stood by his squad car, talking on his phone, then went into the missile site. If he had a key to the gate, he didn’t use it—like me, he sidled through a gap in the fence. Once inside, he walked over to the loading bay, but the concrete wings blocked my view, so I couldn’t tell what he did there. After a few minutes, he wandered around to the side, to the surface where the snakes had been resting, and tapped it with his boot. My binoculars weren’t strong enough to see whether the snakes scampered off. He walked around to the annex with its black-painted windows and tried the door, which didn’t open.

  As if he could feel my eyes on him, he scanned the landscape before sidling through the gap in the fence and returning to his car. I watched him drive down the county road and turn south, past the silo, toward the highway entrance. I thought maybe he’d spotted me, but he continued south, turning into a building complex at the limit of my vision’s range.

  Local offices for Sea-2-Sea, my map app told me, where Bram the hippie hater hung out. I didn’t need to gate-crash—I could picture what I’d find, Gisborne and Bram powwowing over what I’d been doing at the silo. They’d look at me with guilty or aggressive or guiltily aggressive faces. All I’d learn was that they didn’t want me in Douglas County.