43
Hazmat Site
The carillon had bonged midnight, and then one, before I finished sifting through the papers in the trunk. Bernie was heavily asleep, despite the lamps I had turned on. She’d been in a bright mood when I came in, which made me think she’d hatched a scheme with Cady, but I didn’t have the energy to catechize her on it. I also prudently didn’t ask to see her French essay.
Sonia’s fury and pain with her parents made those parts of her journals almost incoherent, but she wrote about the staff and other residents at St. Rafe’s with a compassion she apparently couldn’t speak aloud. She seemed to have built a relationship with two of the children in St. Rafe’s permanent housing units, although she colluded with their mother in hiding substance use: Mindy let me have Lima and Autumn this afternoon. Hopscotch, swings, ice cream . . . Mindy passed out, I took L & A, walked out in garden, we painted until Mindy woke up.
The suitcase included a number of drawings, most of them quick sketches, although Sonia had taken care with portraits of the little girls. She’d caught them in action, playing hopscotch, and had captured the intensity of children concentrating on a project. She’d drawn Randy Marx as part grasshopper, his wide lips exaggerated, while he counted grass seeds into piles.
I found a colored sketch of an adult Cady Perec looking at herself in a mirror, freckles prominent, copper hair done in ponytails that made her look like a child. Who are you? the mirror was asking her. A savage self-portrait of Sonia showed up in a corner of the mirror, leering down at Cady’s reflection. Another self-portrait: Sonia’s face in the body of a polar bear, swimming in a giant teacup whose liquid was labeled “Lithium.” Underneath it Sonia had printed “The Bi-Polar Bear.” My heart twisted with pain at her self-loathing.
Of most interest to me was a series of sketches of a man’s face. He had dark hair that grew almost to his collar and fell over his forehead in unkempt bangs. There were at least thirty versions of the face, some seemingly dating to Sonia’s adolescence, when the sketches were more immature.
I laid them out on the floor. When Peppy came over to inspect, I asked her opinion. “This is undoubtedly Matt Chastain, the clumsiest SOB who ever set foot in Nathan Kiel’s lab. Which are the two best, do you think? Shall we launch them into the ether?”
Peppy wagged her tail, knocking one of the newer sketches askew. I took that one, and one of Sonia’s juvenile efforts that held the clearest depiction of Chastain’s eyes and mouth. I photographed them. Even if my computer was vulnerable to Baggetto or Gisborne, I wanted to get those pictures in circulation. I posted them on Imgur, created a subreddit for Matt Chastain, put them on Facebook. “Matt Chastain, graduate student at the University of Kansas in the 1980s, missing since 1983. Do you know him? Do you know his family? Please contact V.I. Warshawski.” I added my e-mail address, my cell number, and my Facebook and Twitter pages. There didn’t seem much else to do tonight but go to bed.
I’d been in Lawrence less than a week, and I’d been hauled out of bed almost every night, but Sunday the natives seemed less restless and allowed me the sleep of the blessed. I didn’t wake until nine, when Peppy licked my face, demanding to be let out. Bernie was still asleep, but she stirred when I opened the door for Peppy.
“You got it, girl. We’re rested, we’re awake, aware, alive, we’re going to crack this case wide open today.”
Several people had posted on my Facebook page, suggesting Matt Chastains that they knew in different parts of the country. When I dug up their details, two of them seemed to be about the right age. I sent them e-mails, then did my full workout, which I hadn’t had time for in the last few mornings. Once I’d showered, Bernie was awake and fully ready to play detective.
I told her to take the dog for a run while I drove to the market for kefir and fruit. I also made phone calls, including to the hospital, where Sonia continued to breathe on her own in her medical coma.
When Bernie came back, she said she’d ride downtown with me, but she didn’t want to watch me answer e-mails at the Hippo; she’d explore the town on her own.
I looked at her narrowly but couldn’t imagine what mischief she could get up to in broad daylight without a car. I agreed to drop her at the Hippo and told her to stay in touch.
Bernie had given Peppy a good run, so the dog was content to lie at my feet while I drank coffee and answered messages. I had begun recognizing the regulars in the Hippo: a woman who owned an art gallery on Massachusetts Street, a graduate student in English lit who always came in with a stack of books but played a video game while his coffee grew cold. Only a few greeted me, but most stopped to scratch Peppy’s ears.
My first e-mail of the day came from the Cheviot lab in suburban Chicago, to tell me they had cleared the mal- and spyware from my computer, phone, and tablet and added the most sophisticated encryption protocols possible, for a fee only slightly less than the national debt.
When I thought of the charges I was incurring every night I was away from home, my blood ran cold. I did the prudent thing and stopped thinking about them.
I wondered how much of Sonia’s journal was reliable. There’d been a fire—at least the Douglas County Herald had reported one—but the chronology with Matt Chastain and the bad experiment was impossible to sort out from Sonia’s writing. Her description of her symptoms sounded like a serious illness: she’d run a high fever, been attached to a ventilator. Could she have contracted polio? Is that what Matt Chastain, or the woman from Bratislava, or Kiel himself had spread around?
I shuddered. The Salk vaccine had been in place during my childhood, but there’d been a teen across the street from me, a girl who’d lived to dance. Polio left her walking only with an elaborately constructed set of braces.
I had a message from Cady, reinforcing the invitation to Bernie to visit her classroom and to ask what I’d decided to do about going to the Sea-2-Sea field at night. tomorrow should be clear. i know a place to roll under the fence without setting off the alarms. ten o’clock?
If I’d thought any trace of Emerald Ferring or August was in those fields, I would have cast prudence to the winds. But Baggetto and Pinsen had had plenty of time to scour them. The soil I’d taken on McKinnon’s side of the fence should have the same toxins as the dirt eight feet away.
I wrote Cady back to say I’d reconsidered; it would be foolhardy, even dangerous, to go. She didn’t reply. I hoped that meant she was sulking but wouldn’t go without me.
I sighed, dispirited, and turned back to my to-do list, started with a phone call to the geology professor’s office. A secretary answered.
I introduced myself as an investigator looking into circumstances around Dr. Roque’s death. “Since his last phone calls were from Professor Hitchcock, I’m hoping the professor would be willing to tell me what they were discussing.”
“Who are you really?” the secretary said.
“Really, I am V.I. Warshawski, a private investigator.” I repeated my message.
“I . . . I can’t talk to you.”
“What, did someone from the army tell you not to? Just put me through to Professor Hitchcock and you can safely say we never spoke.”
“It’s . . . that’s not possible, I’m sorry.” It sounded as though she was starting to cry.
“Ma’am, please tell me what the problem is.”
She hung up. I stared baffled at my phone.
“How’d you get hold of that name, Warshawski?”
I looked up, startled: Sergeant Everard had come in without my noticing.
“I’ll tell you if you’ll explain why there’s a lockdown on anyone letting me talk to him.”
Everard eyed me measuringly, looked around to see who was in earshot. “Outside.”
No one had seemed to be paying attention, but I suppose that’s how the local network got its feed: people texted or worked the crossword while their ears pointed toward the most interesting conversation in the room.
Peppy followed us. We moved away
from the smokers in the outdoor seats and leaned against an iron railing in front of the neighboring building.
“Dr. Hitchcock was hospitalized over the weekend, with acute pneumonia,” Everard said. “They medevacked him to Cleveland last night, to the Cleveland Clinic, which apparently can do a better job than anything we have in Kansas.”
“Pneumonia? Not flu?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Dr. Roque died of flu. He and Hitchcock were close friends, and . . . I don’t know. It seems weird, too much of a coincidence, both men being so sick. Does flu cause pneumonia?”
“I don’t know about that.” Everard was impatient. “All I know is the army shut down Hitchcock’s lab last night as a hazardous site that needs professional cleaning. His students, his staff, anyone who’s been near him—they’re all in quarantine.”
“His secretary just answered the phone,” I objected.
“I don’t know about that,” he repeated. “I’m giving you the scuttlebutt, and I only know that much because I have a cousin who works for the university’s public-safety department. Now it’s your turn. How do you know Hitchcock, or know enough to call him?”
“Doris McKinnon sent Dr. Roque some soil samples that she wanted tested.”
“And you know this because . . . ?”
“Because I talked to Dr. Roque’s chief tech, whom you are not to bother or harass. She told me about Dr. Roque and the black mold—remember that?”
“Oh, yes. It turned him into a local hero. I think Dr. Kiel’s nose was out of joint because Roque got so much publicity from it. Kiel’s usually the go-to guy around here for odd deaths.” Everard flashed a brief grin. “Black mold. Then what?”
“The tech thinks maybe Doris sent Dr. Roque dirt samples to be tested because of the mold story.”
When I stopped, Everard said coldly, “And then what?”
“And then I need your word of honor as a whatever you most honor that you will not feed the tech to the KC cops, Colonel Baggetto, Marlon Pinsen, Gisborne, or your own revered lieutenant.”
“Not if you’re concealing evidence of a crime,” the sergeant growled.
“I’m not concealing any crimes. They’re all right out in the open where anyone who cares can see them.”
Everard rocked back and forth on his toes. It takes serious strength in the soleus muscle to do that in thick-soled shoes.
At length he said, “How can a stranger to these parts team up with an unknown lab tech in less than a week? I’ll give you this: I’ll let the tech go, but if you’re covering up a crime, I’ll feed you to the sheriff, the colonel, and all those other people. I’ll even add salt so you go down more tasty.”
My hands were freezing. I jammed them into my jeans pockets. “Someone broke into Roque’s home, in between his leaving for Topeka on Thursday morning and Saturday night, which is when the tech discovered it. She went over to rescue his cat—she always fed it when he was out of town. She had a key. She’d forgotten the cat in her grief and misery. She called me.”
“And?” Everard eyed me measuringly, testing my story in his mind. All true, just not necessarily in that sequence, but it made me feel and therefore sound solid as a rock.
“I gather that the damage was impressive enough that she couldn’t tell if anything was missing, except his home computer. But the last three incoming calls on his home phone were from Hitchcock. When I learned that, it made me think Roque consulted with Hitchcock—they shared a passion for collecting rocks, geodes, the tech said. I was hoping Hitchcock could tell me what Roque said, maybe even that he had Doris McKinnon’s dirt. If the lab has been declared a hazmat site, it’s a cinch that Roque sent the dirt to Hitchcock. Something’s in it that Colonel Baggetto or AKA Pinsen knows is toxic. Let me stress that I have no idea if it is or isn’t.”
Everard spoke into his lapel phone. A voice squawked something back, and he pulled out his cell phone. After a minute I could see messages scrolling on his screen.
“KC confirms the break-in, says they got an anonymous tip. You know anything about that, Warshawski?”
“No, Sergeant.” Liars are voluble; I kept my smart add-ons to myself.
“Kansas City sure as sin doesn’t need any help from the Lawrence cops, who are overworked anyway, so I’ll leave that dog lay.”
His baleful glance fell on Peppy, who shrank closer to me. “Not you, girl. You keep giving emotional support.” He bent to scratch her ears. “Since you know so much, Warshawski, tell me where McKinnon’s dirt came from.”
“I don’t know, but I guess from her land, or what used to be her land. The churchwomen at St. Silas and Riverside tell me that back in September or October they saw Ms. McKinnon at the farmers’ market. She was upset because people were planting on her land. They told me she didn’t have the energy to farm anymore, that she’d been leasing the land to other farmers, and she hadn’t been out on the perimeter for a while. The air force had seized another fifteen acres from her back in 1983 or ’84. They let Sea-2-Sea buy it two or three years ago, I guess without her knowing. So Sea-2-Sea is planting on what used to be her land, which the air force had said was too contaminated with radiation to cultivate. In her place I would have been spitting mad and looked for confirmation.”
Everard punched his left fist into his open palm. “I am so fucking goddamn sick of being shut out from every piece of this damned investigation.”
I stared at him. “Sergeant—I’m not shutting you out. How can I? I don’t have any official status. I talk to people, and if I’m lucky, they talk back to me.”
His mouth set in a hard line. “Church ladies, army colonels, lab techs—hell, the nurses at the hospital called you before they called me yesterday when someone tried to suffocate Sonia Kiel!”
“It’s my full-time job,” I said lamely. “I’m not answering calls about home invasions or armed robberies on Iowa Street.”
Everard walked away from me, made a little circle while he communed with himself, came back, squatted to pet the dog.
“Francis Roque was one of the good guys. Now, given what’s happened to Dr. Hitchcock, it sounds as though Roque’s death was engin— But that doesn’t make sense. You don’t give someone pneumonia and hope they’ll die on you at just the right moment. I’m going to find out if there’s an autopsy. If there isn’t—I’ll see if I can make it happen.”
“And you’ll share the results with me because . . . ?”
“Because if I don’t, you’ll do whatever magic dance you do that gets church ladies and nameless techs to confide their deepest secrets.”
I squeezed his forearm. “If it’s any comfort, Sergeant, you’re one of the good guys, too.”
44
Swabbing the Decks, or Something
After Everard left, I went back into the Hippo, but I couldn’t focus on any of the mail or messages needing my attention. Hitchcock and Roque, both with serious lung illnesses. Both exposed to dirt from Sea-2-Sea’s experimental farm. I’d been walking that land; I wondered if I had some bug multiplying in me that would suddenly make me start to gasp and choke. I took a deep breath and heard myself wheezing.
I called Lotty, who was in surgery. I called her clinic and spoke to Jewel Kim, her advanced-practice nurse.
“Oh, yes, those photographs you sent Lotty,” Jewel said. “She got them late on Saturday, you know. She sent them on to me, but I only saw them this morning. Her cover note said she couldn’t tell anything from the pictures. She doubts that anyone could make a diagnosis of anything except drowning, but she asked me to pass them on to the Beth Israel pathology team. I’ve done that, but, Vic, you can’t be impatient about it—they have a lot of work of their own, and they probably won’t get back to me before Wednesday at the earliest.”
I thanked her but explained I was calling about a different problem and told her about Hitchcock’s illnesses. “I’m wondering if it’s the same strain of flu that killed his good friend Dr. Roque.”
“
I can’t possibly guess at a diagnosis over the phone for two men I’ve never laid eyes on,” Jewel said, exasperated. “I know Lotty would tell you the same.”
“When you put it like that—”
“It is like that,” Jewel said.
“Here’s the problem: A local farmer—also now dead—sent soil samples to Dr. Roque, wanting to know if they were contaminated. I’m pretty sure Dr. Roque sent them to Dr. Hitchcock. So . . . what was in the soil that made both men sick? I wondered if the soil was contaminated by someone playing around with the 1919 flu—I keep hearing about a 1983 experiment that went awry and wondering if that has something to do with the murders and the illnesses and so on.”
“I see,” Jewel said slowly. “When you put it like that . . .”
She put me on hold but came back after five minutes to say that she’d texted the surgical secretary at Beth Israel. “If Lotty has a break in the afternoon, I’ve asked her to call the Cleveland Clinic and find out what they say about Dr. Hitchcock.”
“I collected dirt from what I think is the place they got their samples. Could I be at risk of whatever is ailing him?”
“Vic, please, don’t do such stupid things!” Jewel cried. “Lotty worries about you day and night. Don’t do something that will break her heart, I’m begging you.”
“But . . . could these men have contracted flu from farm dirt?”
“I don’t know, but can’t you for once leave something alone? At least until Lotty talks to the Cleveland Clinic?”
“Jewel, you suspect something, don’t you?” I demanded.
“Anthrax,” she finally blurted. “It could get into the lungs, make a doctor who wasn’t expecting it not look for it. Don’t go digging in contaminated soil!” She cut the connection.
Anthrax. Biohazard of choice for terrorists. Abortion clinics get threats of it pretty much every week, and of course the whole government mail apparatus was changed because of anthrax attacks following 9/11. I looked it up on the Mayo Clinic site, but it was hard to tell from the description of the symptoms if it could be mistaken for pneumonia. I fingered my lymph glands, checking for swelling.
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