The sheriff looked at the deputies and clerks hovering in earshot. “Don’t you people have jobs to do? Or has Warshawski cleaned up all the crime in Douglas County, making your jobs unnecessary?”
The crowd melted, although Everard continued to lean against the counter. City employee—his promotions didn’t depend on the sheriff.
Gisborne started to leave as well but stopped in midstride to look back at me. “You asked what I found in the car. The incident report is gone, so how did you know I caught that call?”
I smiled seraphically. “It’s in the air, Sheriff. Everyone keeps telling me how everyone in the county knows each other’s bra size and so on. I’ve been here a week, and I’m already catching on.”
He eyed me measuringly, as if he were picturing us in the Old West with me in a noose on a makeshift gallows.
I stopped smiling, looked at him seriously. “I actually came here in the hopes I could read the autopsy report on Jenny Perec.”
“Gertrude Perec didn’t want her daughter cut open. Since it was clear that Jenny had drowned, we let her bury her daughter and get on with her life.”
“Thirty-three years ago, and you still remember. No wonder they keep reelecting you.”
35
Knee-Deep in Water
“You know, Warshawski, Lieutenant Lowdham was curious enough about your real mission that he called a couple of people in Chicago to ask about you.” Sergeant Everard walked out the side door with me.
Sharene’s face dropped as we moved out of earshot: everyone would have liked to know what the Chicago cops said about me.
“The consensus seems to be that you’re honest, you get results, you’re reckless. And you’re a pain in the ass.”
“If I die down here in Kansas, make sure they chisel that on my tombstone,” I said.
“It could happen.” Everard looked at me seriously. “I don’t know what is keeping you here, since no one has caught a whiff of Ferring or her cameraman. But something about the land around the silo is causing Gisborne to act more like the Sheriff of Nottingham than the guy we all love to reelect every four years. Besides which, the town is crawling with strangers who pop up in places you wouldn’t think they belonged.”
“That would be Colonel Baggetto and his odd-job man AKA Pinsen.”
“Not to mention you,” Everard said. “Why do you call him AKA?”
“There’s no mention of him in any database I have access to, and I have access to quite a few.” I told him about Pinsen’s arrival at the hospital. “He showed up so patly you’d almost think he was listening in on someone’s phone—mine, for instance.”
I looked directly at Everard, who flung up his hands, surrender position. “Not guilty. But don’t you think you’re a little paranoid? Why would he tap your phone? Maybe he was listening in on Dr. Kiel’s. Or maybe Kiel called Pinsen. If they’re involved in something together, Kiel would make sure Pinsen was in the loop.”
“Something that includes keeping tabs on Sonia? I don’t buy it. What is Kiel’s role in all this?”
Everard shrugged. “I don’t see any role for him at all, except for maybe his daughter stumbling into the middle of the picture.”
His lapel phone rang; I could hear a woman’s scratchy voice on the other end.
“They need me to do my real job, not bird-dog you.” He grinned. “The dispatcher’s actual words. Before I go hunting some housebreakers, you want to tell me how you knew that Gisborne caught the call when Jenny Perec drowned?”
I studied him thoughtfully: trustable or a skilled cop knowing how to run a con? “Cady Perec told me. How she knows, that you’d have to ask her yourself.”
“Fair enough.” He squeezed my arm, a friendly farewell, not a warning. “Warshawski, you find yourself falling down some rabbit hole, call Officer Friendly. I don’t want all the paperwork I’d have to fill out if you stopped a bullet in my jurisdiction.”
I walked over to the FedEx store in a lighter mood than I would have thought possible half an hour earlier. I copied Jenny Perec’s incident report onto a thumb drive and expressed it to the Cheviot lab. I printed the photos that showed the accident site itself, both the long shot, with the skid marks from Old K-10 down through the broken bushes, and the close-ups, then uploaded the pictures of Jenny’s dead face in an e-mail to Lotty.
I explained who she was, the absence of an autopsy report, and asked if Lotty could show the pictures to a pathologist. “I’d like some off-the-record speculation here. Water damage, radiation poisoning, weed killer?”
Thanks to Jake’s e-mail, I hadn’t eaten breakfast. I found another diner, one where they baked their own bread in a stone oven you could see from the counter. While I ate, I made some rough calculations on the dimensions of the fifteen acres Doris McKinnon had been forced to cede and sketched those in on my county map, putting them relative to the missile silo a couple of different ways.
After homemade bean soup and four slices of bread with goat cheese, I wanted a nap. “No sleeping, Warshawski,” I said sternly. “Woman up. You are now ready for whatever dangers the Kansas prairies may unleash.”
The wind was blowing from the north, rain spitting in with it. It sliced through my wool jacket and knit top as if I were walking naked down the street. Maybe I wasn’t ready for the prairies to unleash their fury.
When I got to the library lot, I placed some sheets of newspaper on the concrete and knelt to look under my car, taking off my good jacket and putting on my windbreaker first. The trackers that Baggetto and Pinsen had access to were so tiny they’d be hard to find. I looked under the wheel housings and inched my fingers around the exhaust system but didn’t find anything except grease and mud.
Of course, that didn’t really prove anything—they could have inserted an industrial tracker behind my dashboard or stuck a tiny button out of reach. I supposed I could do a serious Wolinsky and wrap my whole car in foil, but what’s life without some risk?
In case they were relying on my devices to tell them my route, I put them all back in my Faraday pack. It would have to be protection enough.
I drove east once more, this time taking a side road, where it would be easier to spot a tail. Fifteenth Street went past the school where Cady Perec taught twelve-year-olds to be thoughtful citizens, then ran between two big cemeteries. Thank goodness I hadn’t wasted months hunting Sonia Kiel’s dead lover in an actual graveyard.
I crested a couple of hills, bumped across a set of train tracks, and was instantly in farmland again, my car bouncing along a pockmarked gravel road. I went by a place with boarded-up windows, possibly a meth house, something for Sheriff Gisborne to take care of once he’d finished looking after Sea-2-Sea’s problems.
When I reached Doris McKinnon’s farmhouse, I parked next to the barn, where Gisborne said they’d found the Prius’s and McKinnon’s pickup’s tire tracks. I put on my hiking boots and went inside.
A flex lamp hanging near the door held a powerful bulb; even inside the barn on a gray afternoon, I got a pretty good idea of the interior. I skirted the perimeter, not wanting to disturb the scene, if it was a crime scene, and not wanting to leave traces of my own presence.
Dust of all kinds—hay, dirt, seeds—billowed around as the wind gusted through the high open doors. I was sneezing heavily, so someone from NCIS, or Baggetto’s entourage, definitely could pick up my DNA if they cared to swab the building. The dust made it easy to see the oil drippings and tire marks left by the pickup and the Prius; they’d been parked close to the wide door that opened onto the yard.
Two cats snarled and slunk away when I moved the light into the interior. Besides the dust, the barn was packed with old equipment. A rusty tractor, stacks of things with jagged teeth, giant rake heads. Rustling in the corners came from whatever the cats were hunting—I hoped mice, but probably rats.
I didn’t see anything that looked like the canister in the photo Baggetto had shown me or the bags of dirt Doris had been digging up and tagging. Se
veral sets of recent footprints showed where Gisborne and his team had been looking, so if Doris had left anything important, the sheriff’s team would already have taken it.
I went into the house again, this time searching in a more concentrated fashion. The kitchen, which looked as though it might date to the pioneer era, had cupboards that stretched to the ceiling. I found a ladder, climbed up, discovered old glass dishes, a stash of gasoline rations from the Second World War, and what looked like a complete set of antique Delft, all thickly coated with dust.
Deep bins at the floor level might have been designed for flour when the house was built. Doris had stored boots and windbreakers in them, along with empty egg cartons. I spent an hour looking in drawers, even going to the basement, which had a dirt floor and a few snakes that were keeping warm on the hot-water heater. They stirred and lifted their heads, tongues flickering, when I turned on the lights. My guidebook to Kansas had assured me that benign snakes outnumber the venomous five to one; the book told me to look for elliptical pupils, but I didn’t want to get that close. If Doris let them live in her basement, they were surely benign, but it still took an effort to walk past them.
I finally gave up on it. I could spend weeks exploring the house and the grounds and still wonder if I was overlooking a hiding place in the outbuildings or in the fields themselves. Daylight would hold for only another hour, and I needed to look at the chunk of Doris’s old land that Sea-2-Sea was farming.
I drove over to the silo, scanning the skies for surveillance drones. Twice I spotted something circling, and twice, when I pulled out my binoculars, it was a hawk riding the air currents.
I wished I had a drone myself that could survey the field to see if any of Doris’s diggings remained. Instead I parked outside the silo gates and started walking through the field on Doris’s side of the fence. She seemed to have been a methodical thinker: if she wanted to test for radiation levels, she would have dug up some of her own soil for comparison.
Out in the open fields, nothing blocked the north wind. My ears began to throb, and my hands turned numb, even though I jammed them deep into my jeans pockets. Periodically a burst of rain would sweep through, hitting my jacket like buckshot, but fortunately it never lingered long. My teeth chattered from cold; it was hard to conjure the hot August day when Lucinda Ferring had discovered Cady tucked under a sleeping bag in her mother’s tent.
I paced McKinnon’s side of the fence, keeping about six feet away to avoid any Sea-2-Sea motion detectors. Close to the eastern boundary of my sketch of McKinnon’s land, I did find a hole. I squatted to study it. I had a plastic spoon and one of the plastic bags I keep on hand to clean up after Peppy. I dug up a few spoonfuls of dirt and tied a knot in the top of the bag. I counted off paces from the eastern end of the silo complex and made a note so I could find the spot again—I was hoping McKinnon had dug on the Sea-2-Sea side of the fence at the same longitude.
Next step involved taking my iPhone out of its Faraday cage to use an app that detects infrared rays. This meant revealing my location if anyone was tracking me. Maybe the bug in my room was the only surveillance they thought they needed. Maybe it wasn’t even there for me—perhaps a previous tenant had been doing surveillance on an errant spouse or a disloyal dog.
If Baggetto or Gisborne was tracking me, though, I had about fifteen minutes before they showed up. I sprinted over to the fence to scan it.
The app found Sea-2-Sea’s cameras easily: they were set in the tops of the fence posts and at the midpoint of each section of fencing, creating a cat’s-cradle kind of pattern. It should be possible to circumvent, with a little careful planning. I shut off the phone and stuffed it back in my day pack, jogged down to the road and into the Mustang. I made a fast U-turn and floored the car, churning up gravel and dust as I rocketed south to Old K-10.
The road was empty. The fierce wind had blown away most of the clouds; in my rearview mirror, I could see a dull orange sunset outlining the university’s buildings along the top of Mount Oread.
I was almost at the Wakarusa when I saw the flashing lights of a cop car in the mirror. It had exited from the main highway, I guessed, heading north at speed. I sucked in a breath, but the cop car—no, cars, there were three of them—continued past the Old K-10, turning toward the silo. That showed one thing, or three, I guess: my phone was being monitored, my Faraday cage was a success, and they hadn’t put a bug in my car.
My hands were damp, sliding on the steering wheel. I braked near the low bridge over the Wakarusa and turned onto a county road that skirted the river. I pulled over to the edge but kept off the verge—the Mustang wasn’t designed for mud. Maybe next time I totaled a car, I’d get an off-road vehicle, something sturdy, like a decommissioned tank.
I got out and peered down the ravine at the greeny-brown water. A few water birds were hunting in the middle; others were resting on the tiny gravel islands that dotted the river. “Knee-deep in mud,” Cady had told me Wakarusa meant in the local Indian language. Knee-deep, but still deep enough to drown her mother.
I took out the photos of the accident scene that I’d printed and tried to match them to today’s landscape. Of course the undergrowth had changed, and it was fall, not high summer, but I could guess the car’s path pretty accurately from the pictures.
Also from new tire tracks through the broken bushes and marsh grasses on the steep hillside. I climbed down the ravine face, following the tracks, my feet dragging, fearing what I’d find at the end of the trail.
It wasn’t the Prius but a Dodge Ram pickup. The cab and body were rusted: you could see only a few patches of the red it had been painted when it left the factory.
Like Jenny Perec’s Toyota, it was pointing nose-down in the water, but the pickup sat too high to go all the way in. Water rose about half a foot above the running board. I could see the figure in the driver’s seat, head against the steering wheel.
My legs felt like wooden stalks, too hard to bend enough to walk me over to the truck. I did not want this to be Emerald Ferring, perhaps with August in the seat next to her.
The autumn sunset provided only a thin afterglow of light, which barely reached the bottom of the ravine. My wooden legs needed to come to life before it grew completely dark. I stumbled back up the hillside to my car for my high-powered flashlight and used it to inspect the ground around the truck. My footprints, easy to see in the mud. Others that had almost disappeared in the soft ground.
I held my flash in my mouth and photographed the ground, hoping something might emerge, then pulled on my gloves and climbed onto the running board. The growing darkness made the windows reflect blackly back at me. Water oozed in over the tops of my boots. Rank, old.
I tugged on the door, which gave slightly—it wasn’t locked, but pressure from the river water made it hard to open. Bad behavior at a crime scene: I was rubbing off prints, I was letting water into the cab.
I shone my flash around the interior. The dead person was alone at the steering wheel. It was neither Ferring nor August Veriden; the wispy gray-white curls had belonged to a white woman, an old one. The cool air had probably slowed decomposition, but her face was still bloated, the skin darkening as it decayed.
I tried to inspect the body without touching it. There was an ugly hole on the right side of the back of the neck. There wasn’t much blood around it, but blood had seeped down through layers of clothes and pooled in the gearbox.
I took more pictures. I wondered if I could slip a hand into the victim’s coat or pants pockets to look for an ID, but she was leaning against the steering wheel and I’d have to move her, effectively destroying all evidence around her death.
Her right hand was holding the steering wheel, but the left had fallen to the seat. When I shone my flash on it, I saw a scrap of paper in the cup made by her palm. She’d been clutching it when she died. As her muscles relaxed, the scrap had dropped free.
Bad detective, I admonished myself, removing evidence, but I took off my righ
t glove and stuck two fingers in like tweezers to retrieve it. Held it carefully while I stepped away from the truck, away from the water, tucked it into a zip pocket of my windbreaker, and returned to the truck long enough to shut the door.
I was climbing back up the ravine side, my wet socks squelching inside my boots, when I saw the flashing lights. Idiot! In the stress and excitement of finding McKinnon’s truck, I’d used my iPhone to take pictures. Damn and triple damn. I had a fleeting urge to shinny up the pillars and stop a car on the road above. Instead I used the time to text Luella Baumgart-Grams, the defense attorney my Chicago lawyer had found for me.
36
Casual Day in Court
I’ve spent time in holding cells in Chicago. Compared to them, the Douglas County Jail was the Ritz. No bedbugs, no people suffering psychotic breaks at two in the morning, no stench from years of sweat and other bodily fluids thinly masked by bleach.
Luella Baumgart-Grams had driven to Lawrence from Overland Park, but she’d arrived after the end of business hours in the Douglas County courts. However, she promised to spend the night in Lawrence and escort me to the Law and Justice Center in the morning. More important, Luella took care of my biggest worry: looking after Peppy. Luella had Free State Dogs board the dog overnight, which meant I didn’t go nuts with worry in my clean cell.
The lawyer also brought me fresh clothes and brushes for teeth and hair so that I could make a reasonable impression in public. Saturday-morning bond court held a mixed bag of bail applications—drunk drivers, public nuisances, bar fighters who’d fired weapons. And one arrest for murder. Since my case was the most complicated, Judge Thelma Katz saved me for last. She and my lawyer knew each other from the state women’s bar association; that speeded things up, that and the fact that the DA didn’t want to deny my bail request.
Fallout Page 24