Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  “Where did they go?” I put every ounce of pleading I possessed into my voice.

  Albritten shook her head. “I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”

  “Can’t? Or won’t?” I asked.

  “Over the line,” Clements repeated, but Albritten said, “She’s not asking out of spite, Bayard. She wants to help. Can’t, Detective. I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”

  I had to be content with that. I asked if August had said anything about the dirt they’d been digging up.

  “No.” Her lower jaw worked. “We didn’t have a conversation. August was frightened, and I was frightened for him and for my girl; neither of us was thinking clearly. But one of the women from Riverside Church, over across the bridge, Barbara Rutledge, I ran into her at the farmers’ market, oh, maybe a month ago. She told me I’d just missed Doris. And Doris was upset because someone was planting on her land. So I called her at the farm, and Doris said she rented out all the land now, that she couldn’t look after it herself, but she’d driven over there in her pickup, looking to make sure the fences and all were being kept up. She thought someone was planting on her land, where they shouldn’t have been.”

  “Would she have brought Emerald down from Chicago just for that?” I asked doubtfully. “Isn’t that something her lawyer could handle for her?”

  Albritten gave a ghost of a smile. “You don’t know us old Kansas women, city girl. We’d rather dig our own graves than pay the undertaker to do it for us.”

  28

  Disappearing Act

  I didn’t need Bayard Clements’s prodding to get to my feet: Albritten was clearly at the end of her strength. I waited in the front room while he escorted her to her bedroom. The pictures on the television had been rearranged, I noticed idly; the one of the women joyously celebrating St. Silas’s 150th anniversary had been removed. Curious.

  Clements reappeared. He said he’d walk to St. Silas with me, show me the church’s undercroft so I could see for myself it didn’t harbor any fugitives.

  We made the usual small talk while we walked to the church—how long had he been here, what did he know about the town. He’d grown up in Atlanta; his mother had worked for Bayard Rustin, which was how he’d gotten his name. Lawrence was an adjustment, small town, small African-American community, but he loved the spirit in the place and loved bringing the university students into the St. Silas family.

  “You weren’t here for the St. Silas hundred-fiftieth anniversary?” I asked.

  He stiffened. “What do you know about that?”

  “Just making conversation. I saw the photo in Ms. Albritten’s living room yesterday,” I said. “It wasn’t there today.”

  “I came here the following year,” he said. “Sister Albritten wanted the picture next to her bed. I moved it for her this morning.”

  “When you saw me coming up the walk?”

  He gave another social laugh. “Chicago manners are more unceremonious than I’m used to, Detective. I always thought coming to Kansas meant moving north, but manners here are much more southern.”

  I nodded, acknowledging the rebuke but still wondering about the picture. Our conversation had brought us to the church door, which meant an easy change of topic.

  “God’s house ought to be open to anyone needing a sanctuary,” Clements said, “but we can’t afford to employ anyone to look after the place, and it’s sad but true that people help themselves to what they see sitting around, even in a church.”

  The sanctuary had a musty smell, not unpleasant, but I could see the warping in the floorboards from the river damps. I asked him about floods, and he said they’d done the best they could with foundation protection. After the 1951 flood, the Corps of Engineers had put in dams along the river, which helped as well.

  “Lately Kansas has been more plagued by drought than flood, so we forget the menace the river can offer.”

  He led me into the cellars. I was worried about my precious Italian boots, but the floors were cemented over. Even so, water had pooled in the uneven surface and the walls felt clammy when I ran my hand over them. Clements turned on the lights—naked bulbs strung across low-hanging ceilings—and stood in a corner, arms folded, watching me with an ironic smile while I looked for any signs that someone had been here recently. Not so much as a La Perla bra strap or a USB port.

  It was also cold. Someone desperate—a runaway slave, a black youth scared of the cops—might tough it out, but I doubted that Emerald Ferring would want to. She might have come up the hard way, but that had been fifty years ago.

  Clements was parked behind the church. When he realized I was on foot, he offered to drive me to my own car, but he seemed surprised that I’d parked at the library.

  “I was using the collection this morning,” I said. “It seemed easier to leave the car there.”

  I didn’t feel like explaining my worries about being tracked. I wondered if the fact that the sheriff or the colonel or whoever could track me through my phone meant they no longer needed to use their SUV. I put a reflexive hand on my throat, which suddenly felt tight.

  When Clements dropped me at the library, he brushed aside my thanks with a brusque comment. “I hope you won’t go doubling back to trouble Sister Albritten again.”

  I smiled perfunctorily. “Could she stay with her son for a few weeks? I don’t know what’s going on or who’s instigating it, but the violence at the McKinnon farm and at August’s home in Chicago—if those thugs think that she knows something—”

  “I know.” He cut me off. “That’s why I’ve organized people in the community to stay with her. I wanted her to go to her son Jordan’s, but she’s a stubborn woman. Old, besides, and the old need to be in their own places. Jordan will come back tomorrow. He has to get his business organized so that someone can take care of things while he’s away, and then he’ll stay with her, or his oldest boy will. It’s not perfect, but it will have to do.”

  I didn’t offer to help with guard duty; I didn’t know where my investigations might lead or when, but Albritten’s safety was yet another worry.

  Back in my own car, I took my electronics out of their foil casing. I had a raft of messages, some urgent, but my own first priority was to collect my dog.

  Peppy was delighted to see me, although the manager assured me that everyone had fallen in love with her; I could bring her back anytime. Peppy had played fetch longer than they thought possible for any dog, had worked well with the rest of the animals, and so on. I felt as though I were reading a kindergarten report: Your little Peppy is the ideal child, bright but caring about others. Not that I disagreed with a word of it.

  As we drove into town, I was thankful she’d had enough exercise that I didn’t need to walk her tonight. We went back to the Hippo. It was five-thirty, sun over the yardarm, whatever that was.

  The bartender/barista I usually saw in the mornings was on duty, so I brought Peppy inside with me.

  I put two twenties on the counter and asked for a double Oban, neat. My usual drink, Johnnie Walker Black, is half the price, but I wanted pampering. “Do you need proof that she’s my emotional-support dog, or can you take my word for it?”

  “I can tell by looking at the two of you,” the woman said, picking up one of the twenties and giving me back a five along with the second. “Keep your change. We all need emotional support around here.”

  I left the five on the counter and went to a corner table with my devices and my dog. Among the messages from my Chicago clients was one from Troy Hempel: he’d talked to his mother, and he’d get back to me when he could. I had seven texts from Bernie, telling me if I didn’t find August by tomorrow, she was flying down, no matter what I or her coach or her parents had to say.

  I replied to my most important clients, texted the Streeter brothers to ask them to do some legwork for me, and wrote an emphatic no way, josé to Bernie. people are killing each other and leaving the bodies for rats to eat. stay away.

  After that I loo
ked up Barbara Rutledge, who’d talked to Doris McKinnon at the farmers’ market a month ago. Although there are services that search for cell-phone numbers, they’re slow and costly, so I was glad that Rutledge turned out to be old-fashioned enough to have a landline. She answered on the third ring, too, so I didn’t have to waste time trading calls.

  I introduced myself and asked if I were right in thinking I’d met her the day before at Riverside Church.

  “Oh, yes. The detective who got everybody so agitated. Did you call on Nell Albritten?”

  “Yes. I’m sure you’ve heard she collapsed when I was with her.”

  Barbara was astonished. “I didn’t know— Has she seen a doctor? What did you do?”

  “I made sure she went to the ER,” I said. “She’s home again, depleted, the way one is after an episode like that, especially someone who’s in her nineties, but they say her heart is fine.”

  “Why did you think I already knew?”

  “Everyone in Douglas County keeps stressing to me how you all know one another,” I said. “That’s been proved true to me so many times that I’ve started to think my job here is to phone people and have them tell me what I’m doing.”

  “We do all talk about one another all the time,” Barbara agreed. “Probably no different from a big city, but so many of us grew up together or have worked together for such a long time that maybe we’re in one another’s business more than you’d be in Chicago.”

  She hesitated. “Me not knowing about Nell Albritten is typical of what I was trying to say yesterday at church. There’s a divide in this town between black and white and between the people north of the river, North Lawrence, and the rest of the town. Only a handful of people at Riverside know Ms. Albritten, and unless they’re connected to the hospital, they won’t have heard a peep about her. If it had been Gertrude Perec or Joy Helmsley, we’d all have our casseroles baked by now.”

  “On the subject of casseroles, or at least food,” I said, “Ms. Albritten told me this afternoon that Doris McKinnon talked to you at the farmers’ market about a month ago. She was upset that someone was planting on her land?”

  “No-o-o.” Rutledge drew the word out, trying to remember. “She was upset, but she was talking about the land she’d had to sell to the air force. She said it looked as though they’d sold it to another farmer instead of giving her the chance to buy it back. ‘They’re growing something there, and I need to know why’—something like that.”

  “If she was digging up the ground in the middle of the night, trying to prove something, then it would be on that land?” That would be a wonderful break. I could ID the fifteen acres she’d had to cede and inspect them for signs of digging, instead of going all over the county.

  “She was digging in the middle of the night?” Rutledge was startled. “She was always . . . I don’t want to say eccentric—we’re too fast to slap that label on any woman who marches to her own beat—but she was always more out there than most other people. She let the anti-nuke kids camp on her land, back in ’83. That caused a lot of antagonism out in the county, hippies or Communists spoiling the landscape.”

  We’d hung up, and I was looking at the maps I’d used this morning, trying to work out where McKinnon’s old fifteen acres overlapped with the Sea-2-Sea experimental farm, when Sergeant Everard came in.

  He and the barista chatted for a minute—banter, it looked like—while she pulled a beer for him. He brought it over to my table.

  “Just got off duty.” He waved the beer stein. “So she’s an emotional-support animal, huh?” He leaned over to scratch Peppy’s ears. “I thought she was your analyst.”

  “She’s an exceptional multitasker.”

  “They told me you usually come here in the mornings for coffee.”

  “Best in Lawrence, at least for my taste,” I agreed.

  “That doesn’t look a lot like coffee,” he said, “but I took a chance that you’d come in at night. It’s how we LEOs catch perps: people like their routines.”

  “We perps do,” I agreed, “but maybe you saw my GPS come back on stream.”

  He raised his brows, surprised. “Not tracking you, Warshawski, just looking for you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You found me.”

  “A friend of mine at the state lab called me a little bit ago, about Doris McKinnon, or at least the woman whose body we assume belonged to Doris.”

  I waited some more.

  “Dr. Roque collapsed in the morgue this morning while he was starting the autopsy. He was there on his own: state can’t afford full-time tech support anymore, so it wasn’t until a guard saw him on a TV monitor that they called for help. He was airlifted to the med center in Kansas City, with some kind of acute flu.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said formally. “Does this mean the autopsy is on hold?”

  Everard grinned humorlessly. “We’re not quite a hick place down here, Warshawski, despite what the New York Times says. We do have more than one pathologist in the state. No, the problem is that McKinnon’s body is gone.”

  29

  Data Swapping

  “Gone?” I echoed stupidly.

  “Disappeared, vanished. I can’t think of any other synonyms.”

  I was too bewildered to say anything. Everard took my silence as criticism.

  “We’re not like Chicago, with thousands of homicides every year. We have security—guards, cameras, all the modern stuff—but we don’t need to run our path lab as if national security depended on it. At least we never thought we did.”

  I shook my head. “Not that. Anyway, the Cook County Morgue has been a disgrace recently, with bodies stacked every which way, oozing their secretions into one another. No, I’m trying to remember what the sheriff said this morning.”

  I stared at the scarred counter through the whisky, which gave everything beneath it an amber glow. I’d asked Gisborne if they had a cause of death yet, and he’d slapped me down: I didn’t have a right to ask even if I discovered the body “the first time.” Yes, that was it, and then he made a good recovery, claimed he’d meant “in the first place.”

  When I repeated this to Everard, he frowned in a worried way. “You don’t think Gisborne knew already, do you? He and I don’t always see eye to eye, but I’ve known him practically my whole life.”

  “I grew up with people who are doing five to ten for fraud and arson, just to name a few counts.”

  “Gisborne is honest. I’d know if he wasn’t,” Everard shot back.

  “Just harassing you,” I said. “You know him, I don’t. It struck me as odd. If you’re so sure he’s honest, why did you come looking for me to tell me about McKinnon’s disappearance?”

  Everard’s mouth twisted in mockery. “People talk about you at the station, you know. They say they’re bored with vandalism and drunk drivers, with the occasional armed robbery for spice, that if we want real crime, we should keep you around. ‘Warshawski’s like a crime divining rod—does she make ’em or find ’em?’ Drugged women, murder victims, people faint when you show up. I wondered . . .”

  “If I’d given Dr. Roque a bad disease and walked off with your body?” I said helpfully when his voice trailed off.

  He grinned again, a real smile, relieved that I’d taken the kidding in good part. “That’s what the scuttlebutt is. I have confidence in the Lawrence force, certainly in my lieutenant and most of the people in his command. The KBI—Kansas Bureau—has done some impressive work, solved murders that needed a lot of finesse. So I’m not going to say that we need your expertise. We don’t, even though they’re understaffed these days, given the state’s financial crisis. But. Something’s going on that’s making me . . . I don’t know what the word is. If I were your friend on the floor here, the hair on my neck would be standing up.”

  He rubbed the back of Peppy’s head with his boot toe.

  “What in particular?” I asked.

  “The body disappearing, of course. What you said about
Gisborne—I don’t know what bug is crawling up his ass, but he’s acting weird. I mean, county, city, we have our own crimes, our own investigations, but we know we’re in it together, and we don’t usually play turf wars with each other. When the word came in from the morgue, though, the sheriff went to Lieutenant Lowdham and told him this was a county matter and Lawrence should stay out of it.”

  “And the lieutenant?” I prompted when Everard fell silent again.

  “Lieutenant said if any crimes committed in Lawrence tied into McKinnon’s death, we’d have to take the lead, but for now we’d lay low.”

  “Sonia Kiel,” I said. “Drugged and left to die outside the Lion’s Pride.”

  “You’re tying this to the McKinnon death? What, a drone hovered over your head and a little alien said, ‘Warshawski, Sonia Kiel saw Doris McKinnon die’?”

  “I knew it was a mistake to release another Star Wars flick,” I said. “Maybe Sonia did see the murder. She saw something. Listen to the whole story—it’s weird enough without needing to throw in aliens. Do you know a Colonel Baggetto?”

  When he shook his head, I told him about running into Baggetto at the hotel last night with Bram from Sea-2-Sea and Dr. Kiel. “Gisborne is doing special favors for Sea-2-Sea. Is that normal for him?”

  “What do you mean, normal?” Everard kept veering between hostile and conciliatory; the needle swung to the red again.

  “I’m not judging.” I kept my voice patient; I couldn’t alienate the one local LEO who’d shown me some goodwill. “Can any company or citizen ask the sheriff to respond when an alarm goes off on their property?”

  Everard shrugged. “If Sea-2-Sea had it set up to ring in the sheriff’s office, sure. Why not?”

  “I leaned over the fence, which is electrified. I guess that brought Gisborne running. Sea-2-Sea is awfully protective of a few cereal plants.”

  “City girl.” The needle swung into the blue again. “Those plants could be a special hybrid potentially worth millions of dollars. Sea-2-Sea doesn’t want anyone touching them—not a crime.”