Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  I gave her another lemon swab. “Detective. Two weeks ago you went out to the silo, to the place where Matt is buried. Doris McKinnon was there. You ran to her when you saw her. What happened next? Did she take you home with her?”

  “Doris.” Sonia frowned. “You right. Doris, black people, digging Matt grave. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Black man grabbed arms, dragged me. Like soldiers drag Jenny.”

  “Drag Jenny?” I asked.

  “Dragged me to truck. Truck, fuck, suck, luck.” She giggled disconcertingly and passed into sleep again. This time she was breathing heavily and didn’t seem likely to waken soon.

  I released her hand and got up, wishing there were some way to unscramble Sonia’s confused neurons. Soldiers had dragged Jenny? Maybe during the 1983 protest they’d dragged Jenny away from the silo gates. August had dragged Sonia out of harm’s way, into Doris’s truck—that was my guess anyway. And taken her . . . back to town? To the farmhouse?

  “She will be stronger tomorrow.” Heinz had appeared next to the bed. “You can come back then to talk to her again.”

  I nodded, thanked her for letting me come in at all. Don’t whine about how little Sonia said. Be grateful she’s regained consciousness and can speak, I lectured myself as I followed the nurse out of the room.

  When we passed through the soundproofed ICU doors, we heard sharp shouts coming from the nurses’ station. Heinz hurried over, me on her heels.

  “You let a detective in to talk to her before her own father saw her? How dare you? How dare you!” The telltale vein was throbbing over Dr. Kiel’s right eye, and he was pounding on the countertop.

  A man of about seventy, in a white shirt and tie, was standing next to him. “Calm down, Nate. I can handle this.”

  “Dr. Kiel,” I said loudly. “I’m V.I. Warshawski. The detective. Who has been to see your daughter while you and Shirley sulked at home.”

  “And you, young lady, don’t get insolent with me.”

  Young lady? “Or what? You’ll cut off my allowance and shoot me full of lithium?”

  “Stop this now! This is a hospital, not a football stadium. If either of you starts up again, I will call security and have you both escorted from the building.” Heinz’s voice was full of authority; Kiel and I both shut up.

  “Dr. Kiel is raising a legitimate question,” the white shirt said. “Sonia Kiel is his daughter and my patient. Letting a detective question her without notifying us or allowing us to be present raises questions of malpractice.”

  “You must be Dr. Chesnitz,” I said. “I’ve been hearing about you. Ms. Kiel is forty-seven, and unless you have a legal mandate as guardian ad litem—”

  Heinz cut me off. “Dr. Kiel, you had specifically told Dr. Cordley not to involve you in questions about Sonia’s care when she talked to you on Wednesday. I have those orders in writing.”

  Kiel turned to me. “What did Sonia say to you?” His hands were shaking, but he was making an effort not to shout.

  “She says she saw Doris McKinnon on the land where Matt Chastain is buried. And she saw Emerald Ferring and August Veriden there as well. This is one of the fields around the missile silo, right?”

  “Sonia is delusional,” Chesnitz put in. “I would discount almost anything she said, especially now, if she’s been without her medication for a week or more.”

  “If I could undo one thing in my life, it would be to go back to the day I agreed to let him be a student in my lab,” Kiel said, the pulse still throbbing. “No. I retract that. I’d go back to the day I met Shirley Wachter and I’d turn around and walk away from her. The tinkling bells of the harlots of Zion! My grandfather warned me.”

  I hadn’t eaten today, and his wild speech was making me feel as though I were a rudderless ship in a heavy storm. Harlots of Zion, cartafalques. Dinner at the Kiel household must have been a rage-infused flying circus.

  “Dr. Kiel, could we sit down and talk, quietly? Sonia’s gone back to sleep. She won’t wake again for a while.”

  “Talk about what?” he demanded.

  “What Matt Chastain did that was so terrible. And why you won’t believe your daughter when she says she saw him die.”

  For a moment I thought he was about to explode again, but he suddenly became very still. I thought perhaps he was having a stroke. Nurse Heinz went to his side, holding his arm. Then I saw that AKA Marlon, the man from the Fort Leavenworth army college, had appeared in the ICU lobby.

  34

  Hard Words

  “Marlon Pinsen!” I moved across the floor to him, hands outstretched, face wreathed in smiles. “Colonel Baggetto told me about your work, and of course your secret is safe with me.”

  Under the bright lights in the ICU atrium, I could see that he was older than I’d thought when I met him in the hotel two nights ago. He was young, but not college young.

  He stepped away from my hands, but I kept smiling. “Army Staff College. Is that why you were at the Lion’s Pride on Wednesday? I’ve been in Lawrence less than a week, but I know that men’s basketball is the beating heart of this town. Were they playing the Army Staff College and you’re such a fan you had to stay for the closing festivities?”

  “The Army Command and General Staff College isn’t that kind of school,” he said stiffly.

  “Of course not,” I agreed, still jovial. “It’s where you design all those important classes for people like Colonel Baggetto to keep them on their toes, with up-to-the-minute strategies on how to persuade ISIS to cough up their secrets. In your spare time, you protect America’s farms from invasive species.”

  He’d been screwing the corners of his mouth down in annoyance, but at my last sentence his expression shifted. I couldn’t quite decipher it. Alert? Worried?

  “What did the colonel tell you?”

  “Yes.” Kiel and Chesnitz had joined us. “Just what did Baggetto say?”

  “I don’t think I should discuss it in an open space like this,” I said, my tone provocative.

  Actually, no one was paying attention to us. There were perhaps a dozen family members waiting in the atrium, along with the staff members who stopped periodically to talk to them, sympathetic hands on frightened shoulders. Life in the ICU was a constant round of intense drama; families screaming in anguish near the nurses’ station probably happened so often that no one found our histrionics worth watching—except Nurse Heinz, frown lines deep between her eyes as she tried to assess whether Kiel or I was going to lose control again.

  “The spent fuel rods,” I whispered.

  “Oh.” Pinsen’s face relaxed. “Yes. They’ve disappeared. I’m sure Dante—the colonel—told you not to touch them if you found them.”

  “My college library sat on top of the first nuclear chain reaction,” I said. “We all knew better than to play with uranium rods.”

  “Good. Call the colonel at once if you come upon the canister. If you can’t reach him, phone me.” Pinsen pulled a card case from his jacket, extracted one, and gave it to me.

  It didn’t reveal anything—not a rank, not an address, just a cell-phone number and an e-mail address. Maybe he had other cards with his real name, his actual organizational loyalty—CIA, NSA, NFL? I stuck it in my hip pocket.

  “You were with Sonia Kiel just now,” Pinsen stated. “Did she have anything interesting to contribute?”

  “Depends on what you think is interesting. Her parents thought she was too fat as a teenager.”

  “And she’s still fat,” Kiel growled.

  “But losing weight while she’s laid up here,” I said encouragingly. “How much does she need to lose before you can listen to what she’s saying?”

  “You’ve met Sonia once, but you think you understand her mind,” Chesnitz said. “I’ve been treating her for thirty years and—”

  “And we all see how much good that’s done,” I snapped.

  “Did she talk about the missing material?” Pinsen cut off the start of a tirade from Chesnitz.

  I shook m
y head. “She’s only just regaining consciousness, and her speech is shaky. I doubt she remembers anything about the night outside the Lion’s Pride. We did touch on the 1983 protest.”

  Kiel clenched and unclenched his right fist. “Sonia’s forty-seven, but her head is stuck at age fourteen. I need to see her. And Dr. Chesnitz will have to check on her.”

  “I’ll discuss it with her medical team,” Heinz said. “Right now the priority is building up her physical strength. We will need Ms. Kiel’s consent for her to see Dr. Chesnitz. Unless, as Ms. Warshawski said, you or he is her legal guardian.”

  One of Heinz’s nurses came to whisper something to her. Heinz nodded. “I have to leave to take care of another patient, but no one can talk to Ms. Kiel at the moment: Dr. Cordley gave her an injection of propofol a few minutes ago, and she’ll be sleeping through most of the rest of the day.”

  Dr. Chesnitz sputtered that propofol on top of Depakote constituted dangerous misjudgment.

  “Dr. Kiel, if you’ve changed your mind about involving yourself in your daughter’s care, can you discuss it with Dr. Cordley? And of course if you wish to sit with your daughter and talk to her, it might be beneficial to her. People understand what’s said to them under sedation. But you, Mr. . . . uh . . .”

  “He says his name is Pinsen,” I supplied helpfully.

  “Because it is Pinsen,” he said.

  “Mr. Pinsen,” Heinz said. “She can’t have any people with her right now who are strangers to her.”

  “This detective—” Pinsen began, in chorus with Chesnitz.

  “This detective has visited Sonia almost every day while she’s been unconscious. She also saved Sonia’s life.”

  The head nurse swept away, back behind the soundproofed doors into the unit. Both she and the rest of her team were wearing comfortable street clothes, but you could almost hear the snap that a heavily starched uniform would have made.

  I left, but the men remained near the nursing information counter. When my elevator arrived, I could see that Pinsen was talking urgently to Kiel, who continued to clench and unclench his hands. At least if he had a stroke here, he’d get instant help.

  Despite my bravado with Pinsen and Chesnitz, I was feeling dizzy from the Kiel family’s gyrations. There were a few cabs outside the hospital’s main entrance; I got one to take me to the Hippo.

  Simone was behind the bar again this morning. “Where’s your emotional support?” she asked, starting to grind beans for me.

  “She’s receiving, not giving, this morning, alas!”

  I glanced through the Douglas County Herald while I waited for my drink. The men’s basketball team dominated the front page. Women’s basketball got a couple of lines inside. The editorial page brayed happily about the recent election results but also issued a warning to the Lawrence Public Library.

  We’ve received numerous reports of lights showing in the library in the middle of the night. This town approved a bond issue to expand the library, but taxpayers did not give the board carte blanche to run up the electric bill.

  What a lucky town, to care enough about their library to expand it when all over America, communities were closing facilities and cutting acquisitions—including in Chicago.

  I drank the cortado in one swallow. Simone offered me a second, but I needed actual food now. At an upscale diner across the street, I ordered eggs, grits, and fruit. While I waited, I unloaded my computer from the cage and started checking mail.

  A message from Jake led the pack.

  I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch, but I’ve been angry that you would go to Kansas in response to pleas from Bernie Fouchard yet not fly to Switzerland in response to pleas from me. Perhaps you are similarly angry that I chose Switzerland over you. I can’t put you ahead of my music. I try to understand that you can’t put me ahead of your investigative work, but there will always be another crime to investigate; there won’t always be another chance to study and perform in the heart of the early-music movement. This was a one-time opportunity. This is a conversation that would be better face-to-face, but I don’t know when we will next be face-to-face. Are you still coming at Christmas? Or will crime win out? J.

  The message left me feeling as though I’d been kicked in the diaphragm. My food arrived, but I’d lost my appetite. I wrote back and sent the message without editing it.

  I read your message in a diner in Kansas. If I’d been in Basel, I’d have been sitting alone in a café while you rehearsed. I’m not Penelope. I have my own mission on the planet. It isn’t as beautiful or ennobling as music, but I also heal people’s lives. I’ll think about Switzerland and Christmas when I’m back in Chicago, feeling less fragile than I do here on my own. V.I.

  I tried reading reports from the Streeter brothers, queries from clients, but angry, hurt tears were blurring the screen. You want to sit in your room feeling sorry for yourself? my mother used to say. That’s all right, then, because no one else is feeling sorry for you.

  Buck up, Warshawski, get your head back in the game. I returned grimly to my mail, sorted out what I could handle myself remotely, what I needed to offload, all the time in the back of my mind wondering if Baggetto and Pinsen were shadowing my keystrokes. Wondering if Jake was playing Lieberson’s setting of Neruda to a stranger.

  I called Cheviot, my forensics lab, on one of my burners. I explained my concern and asked if they could do a sweep remotely from Chicago. It wouldn’t be cheap, and they needed all my passwords and access codes. I put those into a text to them on the burner and went back to work.

  The biggest file in my in-box came from Cady Perec, with the sheriff’s report on her mother’s death. The incident report was terse:

  Responded to a call from John and Jim Pendleton, who’d gone down to the Wakarusa to fish. Boys had found the half-submerged Toyota, had seen the body inside, tried unsuccessfully to open the doors.

  The boys had run the better part of a mile up the road to a filling station, where the manager let them use the phone. Responding deputies Kenneth Gisborne and Lucas Gerstenberg had called for a tow truck with a winch. Once the car was out of the water, they’d been able to pull the victim from the driver’s seat. They’d recognized Jennifer, or at least Gerstenberg had—he’d gone to school with her.

  I scrolled through the file looking for an autopsy report but couldn’t find one. I turned to the photos, which had transmitted with surprising clarity.

  The county photographer had been thorough. I looked at the skid marks, where the Toyota had gone off the road, the trail of broken bushes and crushed weeds the car created as it careered down the bank to the Wakarusa.

  There were a dozen shots of the Toyota nose-down in the river. Jennifer Perec’s hair floated over the steering wheel, looking like river grasses, until the deputies opened the door and lifted her out and laid her on the verge.

  Her face was swollen, with what looked like bruises around the ears and cheeks. Blows from the steering wheel? Distension from her time in the water? Or perhaps my comforting suggestion to Cady last night had been accurate and her mother had been hit with some kind of chemical or radioactive gas.

  I pushed my uneaten food aside and paid the bill. The Law and Justice Center was only a couple of blocks away. I walked there and put in a request at the county information counter to look at an old file; yes, I had the file number. I copied it out of my computer and handed in the form.

  While I sat waiting, Deke Everard strolled past. “Warshawski! I hear you caused quite the dustup at the hospital this morning.”

  I lifted my jeans legs to stare at my ankles. “I don’t see a tracking device.”

  Everard grinned. “I like to show the computer jockeys that old-fashioned gossip is quicker and more reliable than sifting through a quintillion text messages. What are you doing here?”

  “Someone will tell you before you get to your office,” I assured him.

  The clerk at the information desk called my name. Everard walked over with me an
d leaned an elbow on the countertop.

  “What’s she after, Sharene?”

  “An old file that’s disappeared, Deke. I’m sorry, miss. We’ll put in a message to the clerical staff to hunt around for it in case it got misfiled, but for now it’s just plain missing.”

  Everard picked up my request form. “Jenny Perec’s incident report? Why do you want that, Warshawski? You keep telling me and everyone else that the only reason you came down here was to find Emerald Ferring.”

  “You don’t need to remind me that I’m failing miserably,” I said. “So I’m grasping at straws. Ms. Ferring’s life intersects with the Perec family in a lot of places. Did you know it was Ferring’s mother who found Cady Perec, saved her life?”

  “Before my time. Do you think looking at Jenny Perec’s death certificate will tell you where to find Emerald Ferring?”

  “Stranger things have happened. What I really wanted to see was the autopsy report. And I wouldn’t mind knowing what Sheriff Gisborne found in the car when he pulled it out.”

  “Mud, that’s what.” Gisborne had appeared in the room: someone must have told him I was here, looking for the file. “Mud and stink. No one goes through a car that’s been in the water, Warshawski.”

  “Not even to find any valuables? Or a hint as to who Cady Perec’s father was?”

  We were starting to draw a crowd. The foreign detective who attracted death like a blowfly was confronting the sheriff.

  “You’re looking for Cady’s father now, Warshawski? Don’t you have enough to do in Chicago?”

  “You told me not to leave Douglas County. I’m making hay while the sun shines.”

  The homely farm metaphor didn’t endear me to him. “Leave the Perec family alone. If Gertrude Perec wanted to find Cady’s father, she’d have started that search while the trail was still hot.”

  “Right, Sheriff. We all know that Gertrude doesn’t want to know. Maybe doesn’t want Cady to find out would be a better way of putting it. If Cady were three, her grandmother could make a case for being her spokesperson, but Cady’s thirty-three, so she gets to choose for herself.”