Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  Everard waved his mug at the bartender. “Simone, bring me another, would you, pretty please?”

  “Deke, you’re not crippled, last I saw. You come on up here yourself. You can see I got a line waiting, and I’m on my own.”

  The crowd was building, but it was modest compared to the one at the Lion’s Pride. Only a tiny TV in the far corner, so die-hard Jayhawk fans would be at the bigger sports screens.

  I shook my head when Everard offered me a refill. A double whisky after a long day was making me sleepy. Any more and I wouldn’t be able to drive or, more important, stay tuned to what Everard was saying.

  When he got back, I told him about Baggetto’s arriving at the missile silo. “He said he was in Lawrence to lecture to the ROTC unit up on the hill, but when I called, they didn’t have a record of his being there. On the other hand, he kept the sheriff from arresting me, or maybe shooting me while I tried to flee the scene.”

  Everard banged his stein on the counter, slopping some beer over the side. “See, that’s what I mean. Gisborne, he’s been sheriff here a million years, started as a deputy back in the eighties. He doesn’t usually fly off the handle like that.”

  “I wondered about drugs,” I said. “There’s a building on the missile site with black windows and a new lock.”

  “Whatever Gisborne may or may not be doing, he will not be covering for a drug ring,” Everard snapped. “Nor Dr. Kiel—he’s Dr. Public Health around here. No way would he support a meth lab.”

  “I know they’re not growing medical marijuana on that land,” I said, trying to lower the temperature. “It’s probably the one crop I could identify. But two different things could be happening out there—meth in the abandoned silo and something else on Doris McKinnon’s old land.”

  Everard nodded grudgingly.

  “Not to light another fuse under you, but I’m wondering about Baggetto, too.”

  “You’re safe, since I don’t know the guy. What’s he up to?”

  “I have no idea, but Baggetto knows an awful lot about what’s happening in the county for an army man with a big career behind and in front of him.”

  I put the maps I’d been using at Everard’s right hand, away from the beer puddle. “See this outline? That’s the fifteen acres the air force took from Doris McKinnon back in 1983, after the commune burned down. They said it was too contaminated to use, and a woman from the Emigrant Bank said that’s why the silo hasn’t been sold to a private developer, the way a lot of them have.”

  “Yeah?” Everard’s phone rang; he said he was off duty, turn the call over to Officer Peabody.

  “Why is Sea-2-Sea planting there? Unless I’ve got the map wrong.”

  Everard took the county map and the property conveyances from me and stared at them for a good ten minutes. I answered my own ever-growing queue of texts, checked for the nth time on whether Jake had been in touch.

  “No, you’ve got it right. Good question. I’ll see what the scuttlebutt is around the station.” He grimaced. “Things are tense right now between the city and the county, so I have to walk softly—and definitely not wave a big stick around.”

  I grunted acknowledgment and added, “Doris McKinnon did a secret nighttime digging project. I’m guessing it was on the land the air force seized. I’m guessing she wanted to check the radiation level in the soil—that’s the only explanation I can come up with. I don’t think the samples were still in the house when I was there last night—I didn’t know about her digging then, so I didn’t look for them, but a whole bunch of bags with tags showing latitude and longitude—”

  “How do you know this, Warshawski?” Everard cried. “Damn it, you’re sitting on evidence—”

  “An anonymous tip,” I said coldly. “You’re taking a risk talking to me, but I’m taking one as well, sharing my information with you.”

  Everard scowled at his beer but finally said, “Okay. Anonymous tip. And?”

  “And Sonia Kiel showed up, dancing in the field, saw Doris, screamed, ‘Fire, go away, you’re on sacred ground!’ That’s all I know. But a few nights later, someone slipped her enough roofies to damn near kill her. That connects Sonia to the McKinnon murder, at least in my book.”

  “I don’t know. That’s a pretty thin thread.”

  I looked at him seriously. “You’re probably right, but what sent me out to McKinnon’s farm in the first place was because that’s where Emerald Ferring grew up. Sonia Kiel was out there the night McKinnon was digging her soil samples; in my fifteen seconds on the phone with her, as I told you at the time, she said she’d seen Ferring and August on her truelove’s grave. According to her mother, Sonia thinks Matt Chastain was her truelove. He disappeared after the old nuclear protest campsite burned down, and Sonia thinks Matt died there. So my idea of looking for a cemetery was wrong; it was McKinnon’s land.”

  “And that has something to do with the price of tomatoes in Topeka?” Everard said.

  “Matt was Dr. Kiel’s student, and Kiel says Matt was involved in an experiment that went bad. I wondered if that’s what contaminated the land? People at Riverside Church said the land couldn’t be used for development.”

  “Could be, but what’s the point?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe because I only know three things about the land—Sea-2-Sea is cultivating it; it’s where the protest site used to be; it’s where Sonia thinks Matt disappeared or died—but those things make me connect what happened there in ’83 to what’s going on there now. Another thing is how hostile Gertrude Perec is to me. It made me wonder if Matt Chastain might be Cady Perec’s father—he was on the land back then, and Gertrude’s daughter was camping there. If she doesn’t want Cady to know . . .” My voice trailed away.

  Everard said, “Cady’s always wanted to know who her father was, which is understandable, but it beats me why Gertrude would want to keep it hidden if she knew.”

  “She worked for Dr. Kiel. Chastain was Kiel’s student. Sonia had a crush on Chastain and stalked him. Kiel threw Chastain out of the department for making a major blunder on an experiment. And now Kiel is drinking with the guy who’s running an experimental farm on the site of the commune. And this colonel is showing up, flashing his medals, along with a sidekick who he told me was a cadet in the university’s ROTC program. Only when I talked to them, they told me they didn’t have a record of anyone by that name.”

  Everard’s phone pinged. He looked at the screen and looked up, his expression bleak. “Dr. Roque died twenty minutes ago. He wasn’t young, but . . . hell, he was a good, impartial pathologist. One of the few people in this damned state who had a job because he knew what the fuck he was doing, not because he buttered the right butt.”

  I offered the awkward condolences you make to someone you don’t know well about someone you’ve never met.

  His eyes were bright. “Catch you later, Warshawski. Catch you later.”

  30

  Visiting Brass

  Peppy jumped into the passenger seat. As I started to slide in next to her, someone got out of a car across the street and crossed to me. I stood back up, leaning against the doorframe.

  “Colonel Baggetto. Don’t they need you at the fort?”

  “No one is indispensable, especially on a military base where colonels grow like tumbleweeds and captains do the heavy lifting.”

  “I didn’t think tumbleweeds took much lifting,” I said. “If you’re looking for me, I’m going back to my room and resting. Alone. If you want the sheriff, I can’t help you—the local LEO I was just talking to is with the police.”

  “I was hoping I could buy you dinner,” Baggetto said.

  “So you tracked my car down? Wouldn’t it have been easier to phone?”

  Under the streetlamps his teeth gleamed white. “I know your car but not your phone number.”

  “And you with your degrees in computer engineering and experience with army intelligence. NCIS makes it seem as though all anyone in military intel
ligence has to do is press a computer button to see every phone call I’ve made in the last ten years.”

  “I probably could,” he said, still smiling, “but that wouldn’t be ethical. Can I persuade you to talk to me inside someplace warm, instead of the middle of Eighth Street?”

  In the end, because I wanted to talk to him and I wanted to be inside with Peppy, not in a restaurant with her in a car, I told him he could meet me at the B and B. I didn’t feel like feeding him, but he told me he’d pick up a pizza on the way there, along with a bottle of wine.

  In the B and B’s laundry room, I changed out of my good clothes into jeans and a sweatshirt, fed Peppy, and settled in the easy chair, leaving the straight-backed chair at the small desk for Baggetto. I turned down the wine.

  “I haven’t put scopolamine in it,” he said testily.

  “‘Drinking wine on top of scotch / Will a detective’s thinking botch,’” I said. “They taught us that jingle when I was at the detective academy.”

  “You didn’t go—”

  “To a detective academy,” I said when he stopped in midsentence. “I don’t mind you looking me up—I tried to do the same to you, but your history is, of course, harder to penetrate. What you really did in Afghanistan, for instance. That’s all deeply buried behind DoD fire-breathing dragons.”

  “Every teenage hacker can break into the Pentagon computers, so I don’t think there’s anything too secret there.”

  “If only I were a teenager. Maybe then I could find out what you’re really doing in Lawrence. You weren’t lecturing to the ROTC kids this morning, and there’s no Marlon Pinsen enrolled at the university. Or on Facebook. I know he’s a real person because I shook his hand and he called me ‘ma’am’ in that endearing way you army guys have, but I don’t think ‘Marlon Pinsen’ is the name his mama calls him.”

  “Hmm.” Baggetto poured wine into one of the coffee mugs on the desk and sniffed it. “It smells good. Sure you don’t want some? No? I don’t know what his mother calls him, but you’re right, I wasn’t lecturing on the hill. I don’t know why I lied to you.”

  “Embarrassment over speaking the truth is sometimes the reason. Or hiding criminal activity—I find that often in my work.”

  My feet, my hips, my tibias—every bone from pelvis to toe ached. I pulled my knees up so I could sit cross-legged and began massaging the balls of my feet. Baggetto looked and then made a determined effort to look away, busying himself with cutting the pizza. Peppy, who’d been lying flat next to me, got up to stare longingly at him. I called her to me.

  “We don’t beg, remember? Especially not from strangers who might feed us scopolamine.”

  Baggetto laughed, put a slice on a napkin, and handed it to me across the dog. “Embarrassment or criminal—those the only two choices? How about hunting in the dark and not knowing what I might trip over?”

  “Is AKA Marlon hunting with you?” I asked.

  Baggetto took a long time to reply, eating, wiping his fingers, pouring another mug of wine. “He’s at the General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, forty miles up the road, one of their young computer hotshots. He was assigned to work with me.”

  “On?”

  “The silo. What were you doing there this morning?”

  “I could lie or stonewall, since that’s the name of tonight’s game, but I was there out of simple curiosity. The investigation that brought me to Lawrence is exactly what I told you when I met you at Fort Riley a week ago. Emerald Ferring lived with Doris McKinnon when she was growing up and as a university student. She and August Veriden visited Ms. McKinnon, presumably spent at least one night with her—I’m sure your buddy Gisborne has told you that much. I was curious about her land. The air force commandeered eighteen acres from her.

  “Various people have told me that the land is contaminated, too radioactive to farm, so I was especially curious about her property lines and whether Sea-2-Sea was farming on land that was contaminated. Your turn.”

  “You aren’t eating. Are you a vegan?”

  The slice of pizza was oozing cheese and red sauce through the flimsy napkin. I unfolded my legs and found a plate to put it on, wiped up the tabletop. “I know it’s heresy for a Chicagoan, but I don’t like deep dish. My mother was from Umbria. Thin crust, minimalist toppings. It’s still your turn to explain why you showed up there right after the sheriff arrived. Give me a more entertaining story than a friend of a commanding officer’s second cousin knew you were in the area.”

  “That part is true,” Baggetto said. “Before Sea-2-Sea bought the land from the air force, they had it tested. Their crew didn’t turn up any traces of radioactivity. That should have been the end of the story, but you know how it is—people talk. Bram Roswell got worried: if people started thinking that Sea-2-Sea was selling radioactive crops, the company could go toes-up.

  “Roswell called the air force, who did a more thorough inspection, going through the silo inch by inch. They found a cylinder with spent fuel rods in it. Do not ask me what that was doing at an abandoned missile base. It didn’t belong there to begin with: nukes aren’t like reactors—they’re not actively generating power, they don’t require fuel rods. Dumping the rods there looked like malicious vandalism by someone who had access to a nuclear facility, either weapons manufacture or a power plant. Before we could analyze them to see where the rods came from, the cylinder disappeared. We’re terrified, frankly.”

  “Disappeared from where?” I asked. “Surely the air force’s technical experts didn’t leave the cylinder lying where they found it.”

  Baggetto rubbed his neck, buying time: debating how much truth to reveal or what lie to tell.

  “They found it on the base. They thought they could leave it inside the silo, which is essentially impregnable without a crane and three different keys. You know. You tried the door when you were there this morning.”

  “Without your special knowledge of the number of keys it would take to open,” I said. “But back to the rods—they’re spent, so why are they dangerous?”

  “Oh, that.” He made an impatient gesture—even though he knew nothing about nukes, that was apparently a primitive level of knowledge that even kindergartners possess. “Spent rods are still radioactive. They don’t generate enough power to build a big bomb or run a plant, but you could do a lot of damage with them. Just look at Fukushima.”

  “So you’re here to find out who walked off with the rods?” I asked.

  “My goal is twofold: to find the cylinder and to keep it quiet so we don’t start a public panic,” he warned.

  “Okay, I won’t put it on Facebook. I’ll just get a Geiger counter for my next trip to McKinnon’s farm.”

  “It’s not a joke.” His frown was formidable: forceful officer with a lot of military power to back him up.

  “I don’t think it is, Colonel, but I’d love to know if it’s true. What does Dr. Kiel have to do with it, for instance? I thought he was a cell biologist, not a physicist.”

  “Love to know if it’s true? I’m talking to you in confidence about matters of national security.”

  I studied my fingers. All this outdoor work was wreaking havoc with my nails. I’d noticed a half-dozen beauty spas downtown—maybe I should take a couple of hours off for a manicure in the morning.

  “Are you listening to me?” His tone was somewhere between angry and petulant.

  “Colonel, I’m a stranger in a strange land. I’m alone, except for my dog. You have a sheriff, a major scientist, an intelligence officer from some fancy army college, and the whole First Infantry if you need them. I’m listening to you, but that doesn’t mean you’re telling the truth. Back to Dr. Kiel, the non-physicist.”

  He eyed me narrowly but decided not to push back. “We talked to Kiel because he had a lot of involvement at the site during a big protest back in ’83.”

  “Yes, I know about that. Not his involvement, but the protest. His daughter was there.”

  “We hoped he could
give us a list of names of people to talk to who might have carried a grudge against the military all this time. He’s a fierce guy, reminds me of one of my own colonels when I was at the Point, didn’t have any use for sloppy thinkers or people who were late to anything. Parade, class, handing in assignments, even mess.”

  I turned it over in my mind. It could be true, but how could I possibly find out?

  “I’m telling you this because you’re talking to a lot of people, and some of them are people I wouldn’t think of talking to, like that African-American lady you met yesterday, the one who went to the hospital.”

  I smiled sourly. “You have been doing a thorough job on me. When I get my Geiger counter, I’ll be able to tell you if the rods are in her home.”

  He ignored the levity—and the sourness. “We can’t help thinking the McKinnon woman’s murder is tied to the rods. She was upset that the air force sold the land to Sea-2-Sea instead of back to her. She talked to her lawyer about it, but it was legal. Maybe not moral, but legal. And then Emerald Ferring, who took an active part in that ’83 protest, she showed up, along with the youth. McKinnon wouldn’t be strong enough to heft that cylinder, but the kid—young man—could have done it.”

  I leaned back in my chair, eyes shut, putting the narrative in order in my mind. “Someone ransacked August Veriden’s home and place of work up in Chicago, but they seemed to be looking for something small. How big was this cylinder?”

  Baggetto pulled out his phone and showed me a photograph. “The cylinder looks like this. If you see it, please don’t open it or try to move it. Just call me.”

  I shook my head. “It looks kind of like the coffeepot they had on the counter at Riverside Church when I was there yesterday afternoon.”

  “Why do you turn everything I say into a joke?” Baggetto demanded, his parade-ground voice back. Private Warshawski, a hundred push-ups in the sun.