Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  “You are healthy as a hog, V.I. Warshawski,” I said sternly.

  More important was any risk I might bring Bernie, as well as the danger Cady could face if she went digging in McKinnon’s land.

  I texted Aanya Malik, Dr. Roque’s technician, to ask if there was any chance he’d died of anthrax. She phoned me back almost instantly.

  “Vic, about the anthrax. It is possible that spores are in the soil that Dr. Roque and Dr. Hitchcock handled, but then why did not the woman who sent the samples to Dr. Roque also have anthrax?”

  “I don’t know that she didn’t,” I said.

  “You found her body. She was shot—that killed her. If she had been as sick as Dr. Roque, she could not have been driving that truck to begin with, believe me.” She paused, fumbling for words. “I know that looking at the dead cannot be easy, but did she have black discolorations on her face or hands, something like a hard smear of tar perhaps?”

  I pulled out my phone and looked at the pictures I had snapped. It had been dusk, the light was bad, and McKinnon’s face was barely visible. It was mottled: she was old, and death had accentuated the liverish patches in her cheeks, but I didn’t think I could see any tarlike smears. I forwarded the photos to Aanya.

  “I will ask the pathologist who will do the autopsy to be sure to check for traces,” Aanya promised. “Dr. Roque’s children have agreed to let us have an independent autopsy of the doctor, and Dr. Madej, who will do that, can also arrange to work on Doris McKinnon. Although the anthrax bacillus itself dies quickly after the host dies, there would be traces. And I will show him the photographs you took of Ms. McKinnon.”

  I asked when the autopsy would be performed; she thought Dr. Madej would start work on it later this afternoon. “We trust Dr. Madej, Ruby—Dr. Roque’s secretary—and I do. Dr. Roque himself trained Dr. Madej. He won’t cut corners or make a cover-up.”

  “A cover-up?”

  Aanya laughed in embarrassment. “Everything that is going on with Dr. Roque’s death and Dr. Hitchcock’s illness is so unreal—I feel as though I’m in one of those spy movies. Anything could happen, and I want to make sure that it does not. But that is not why I called. It’s because of another strange event.

  “Ruby and I, we were starting to go through things in Dr. Roque’s lab, to see what open cases he had that needed to be sent to another pathologist. And I found the hand of an infant.”

  I pictured a baby’s hand in a jar and asked a startled question.

  “No, no, nothing that macabre—you have such a wrong idea of Dr. Roque! It is a tiny set of bones in a specimen case, dated and labeled. It came with the soil from Doris McKinnon.”

  The bits of bone Doris had dug up that night in the field. Not a badger or a raccoon but a human baby.

  “What . . . Did he . . . Was there a report?” I managed to stammer.

  “He estimated the bones to be about twenty-five to forty years old. He was able to get a DNA sample, but there was no match in any databases.”

  Another baby at the missile silo, with the age range framing the summer Cady was born. Another baby, one who’d been killed and left to lie there? Had Jennifer Perec produced a stillborn twin to Cady? Or Sonia, with her wild dreams about Matt and that journal entry describing hearing a baby crying—was it possible that Sonia had given birth but that she’d blotted out all memory of a pregnancy and delivery?

  “Vic, you are still listening to me?”

  “I’m here,” I said, “but so bewildered I don’t have anything to say. Could he tell the child’s sex?”

  “A girl, perhaps two or three months old.”

  “If I wanted you to try to match DNA from a living person, what would I need to send you? Would hair be enough?”

  “Only if it’s a living hair with the root attached. Saliva or blood would be better. What are you thinking?”

  “Right now my ideas are like a white sauce that won’t thicken, a mess of lumpy flour and milk. Get that bone case someplace safe, would you?”

  I hung up and squatted down next to Peppy. “I wonder if that’s the small object the marauders were looking for when they turned August’s apartment and the Six-Points Gym upside down. Colonel Baggetto said they were missing a canister, but what if it was a baby’s bones?”

  Peppy thumped her tail once. Agreement. That meant I should follow my impulse and try to get a DNA sample from both Sonia and Cady, to see if the dead infant was related to either of them, to Cady’s mother, or to Sonia as mother.

  I texted Cady, asking if I could interrupt her workday for five minutes. “Something odd came up connected to Doris McKinnon’s land. Would you undergo a DNA test?”

  Cady was so excited that her text jumped off the screen, filled with absurd autocorrections. She broke for lunch at eleven forty-five; she could meet me at the Prairie Shores Café on Eleventh and New Hampshire.

  That gave me time to drive to one of the big chain drugstores on Highway 10 and buy a few sterile sample kits and gloves. When I got back to midtown, Cady was hopping on the sidewalk in front of the café.

  “What did you find? I can’t go inside—everyone in there knows me. If they hear me talking to you about evidence at the silo, someone for sure will tell Gram. Did you find bones? My father’s? The pearl ring my mother wore? It wasn’t on her when they found her body, unless one of the deputies stole it.”

  I felt stricken. “Cady, I haven’t found anything that definite. Some bones turned up that are old enough to have belonged to someone at the missile protest, but the person wasn’t old enough to have been your mother or father. I can’t justify asking for your DNA, but it could help to see if you are related to the dead child.”

  As I spoke, my words sounded lame to me, and Cady’s excitement died down. Even so, she let me swab the inside of her cheek and watched me seal it up and label it. We went inside for lunch, but she was nervous and picked at her food. As she’d said, everyone in the café knew her—teachers, people from the courthouse across the park, friends of her grandmother. She couldn’t focus on what anyone said to her. After stirring a bowl of chili for some minutes, so vigorously it slopped over onto her lap, she announced she had to get back to class.

  I followed her outside, but she cut off my awkward apology.

  “There’s something else,” I said. “Two men who handled Doris McKinnon’s soil samples became gravely ill—one died, the other is fighting for his life. Sea-2-Sea is farming that land. There haven’t been reports of other illnesses in the area, but the company could be suppressing that information. We need to know if Dr. Roque and Dr. Hitchcock caught the same bug and if they got it from McKinnon’s soil.”

  “It’s not very likely, is it? None of the farmhands from Sea-2-Sea are turning up sick.”

  “Nonetheless—”

  “Nonetheless, you are trying to control what decisions I make, and, frankly, Vic, however well-meaning you are, that’s not your call.”

  Bernie joined us at that moment. “There you are. Again you are not answering your phone. I went to the Hippo, but they could tell me nothing. I have been trying to do your work. I am sure the Protestants are hiding something.”

  It turned out she’d gone over to Riverside Church. Pastor Weld and Pastor Carmody had both read her the riot act when they found her hunting through the basement; according to her, if I’d been there, I could have entertained them while she, Bernie, searched for August—“Since only I care what has become of him. Are you doing any investigating today or only reading diaries created by femmes folles?”

  “I’m going to visit one of these women right now. She’s near death, so your hypervibrant presence might do her good.”

  “Maybe I can go over to Cady’s school,” Bernie said. “It is possible I myself will become a teacher.”

  “God help the children,” I said, but I was relieved when Cady reinforced the idea: she could use a teacher’s aide; budget cuts up and down the line in the state meant classrooms were bulging and support staff shrinking
.

  “As long as Bernie doesn’t think she can start questioning my judgment,” Cady added, with a pointed look at me.

  I drove over to the hospital, my own spirits sagging. Sandy Heinz was on duty, fortunately, and told the security guard on the floor that it was all right for me to visit Sonia.

  There were two large bouquets in the room, one from each brother. “We’re pulling for you, little bear, get well soon,” Stuart had written. “Go get those demon seals, little bear,” Larry’s card said.

  I sat with her for a time. She was breathing on her own but still not conscious, and she seemed to have shrunk since my Saturday visit. I told her I’d read her journals and seen her sketches of Matt Chastain. “I put them out on Instagram and Facebook. I’ll let you know if I hear anything. Your brothers love you, little polar bear.”

  Finally, with a nervous glance around to make sure the security guard’s attention was elsewhere, I took out a sample bottle and swabbed her cheek.

  I texted Aanya, saying I was going to drive the samples over to Kansas City to hand to her personally. She gave me directions to the lab, on the outskirts of the city.

  On my way out of town, I dropped Peppy off at Free State Dogs and drove east, passing the Kanwaka Missile Silo. On an impulse I turned south to look at Sea-2-Sea’s local offices. Since there were two rings of security fences, an outer one of eight-foot-high cyclone fencing with an inner ring of more attractive ironwork, it was hard to make out the details, but the complex seemed to comprise a series of Quonset huts, with a central drab brick office building in front of them. Whatever they did there must be mighty secret.

  I hadn’t seen either the sheriff or the colonel since we’d parted at the court on Saturday morning, but a Douglas County sheriff’s squad car was parked across from the barricaded front gate. When I stopped to look at the compound, a deputy got out and started toward me. He seemed to be photographing my license plate, which is always annoying.

  “Can I help you, miss?” His tone wasn’t inviting.

  “I don’t think so.” I flashed a smile. “I’m wondering if I can help you, since you wanted my license-plate number.”

  “Routine precaution,” he said, but he shifted uneasily, embarrassed at having been caught in the act. “I want to see—”

  “Yes,” I said sympathetically, stopping him before he could demand my license and insurance card. “I understand that Mr. Roswell is worried about hippies. I’m wondering if these mythical hippies should worry about anthrax.”

  “Anthrax?” He forgot about my license.

  “I’ve been told Sea-2-Sea may be producing it here. Since it’s a Category A bioweapon, I would expect a bigger protection detail than just one squad car. But I expect they’re giving you antibiotics and a vaccine just in case.”

  I made a U-turn, spitting up gravel on his car, and left him in the road, staring after me.

  45

  Here for the Duration

  I drove on toward Kansas City, across the Wakarusa, past the place where I’d found Doris McKinnon in her truck on Friday, then followed Aanya’s directions to the medical center. She met me at the entrance, so that I didn’t need to go through security, and said if my swabs were good, she should have some results within the next day or two. I had wanted to see the bones she and Roque’s secretary had uncovered, but she told me that the place where she’d secured them would take a good half hour or forty-five minutes to reach.

  “Just as well that they’re off-site,” I said. “I don’t know if that’s what the vermin who invaded Dr. Roque’s house were looking for, but better not to leave them where those creeps can get at them.”

  As I drove back to Lawrence, my thoughts churned uselessly. What did the army or Sea-2-Sea or Dr. Kiel, whoever was behind Douglas County’s mayhem, need to find so desperately? I couldn’t believe it had anything to do with drug manufacture. The U.S. Army wouldn’t send a high-ranking colonel to a meth plant, and much as Nathan Kiel rubbed me the wrong way, I didn’t see him as a drug lord.

  I kept coming back to bioweapons. Roswell, the senior Sea-2-Sea executive, belonged to some group that supported rearmament. When I’d read about it, I’d thought of nukes, but the group could be interested in bioweapons as well. Dr. Kiel would know a lot about anthrax. Whether he knew anything about how to turn it into a weapon, he would still be someone the army or a private contractor would consult if they wanted to culture bioweapons in Lawrence.

  If Roswell was producing weapons at the Sea-2-Sea compound, why would they also be growing crops nearby? As a cover for their weapons program? On the other hand, agricultural waste is spewed everywhere without a second thought; Sea-2-Sea might think nothing of selling sorghum grown in contaminated soil.

  What about the spent fuel rods that Baggetto said he was looking for? Was that a cover, too? Baggetto had bugged my room. It could be to see whether I talked to anyone about fuel rods, but the story of the rods might be another cover story. Cover for bioweapons?

  Bernie was still with Cady at the school. I drove to the B and B, where I returned to the databases with Dr. Kiel’s research history. I couldn’t find any articles that showed him involved with anthrax research. He’d started life working on something called C. burnetii in 1958 and had switched to Y. enterocolitica in the late 1970s. These germs had nothing to do with anthrax: the first was called a rickettsia; it gave you Rocky Mountain spotted fever. The second caused a nonfatal intestinal ailment.

  By now it was three in the afternoon. How drunk would Shirley Kiel be? How choleric her husband?

  The VW wasn’t in the drive when I got to the Kiel house, and no one answered the front door. It was hard to imagine that both parents were at the hospital worrying over their daughter, but of course they might be at the grocery store or taking in an afternoon movie. My mouth twisted as I tried to picture the Kiels in some banal and harmonious activity.

  I pushed my way through the heavy bushes along the side of the house to the back, where the sunporch overlooked an untended garden. A light was on; when I stood on a rusting garden chair, I saw Shirley, crossword book in hand, head back, eyes closed. Movement in her chest: she wasn’t dead. Snoozing or passed out.

  The chair began wobbling underneath me. I jumped clear as it fell over.

  “Who are you?” A neighbor had appeared at the fence next to the Kiel house, a woman around seventy, holding a basket of plant bulbs.

  “I’m someone who badly needs to speak to Shirley and Nathan about their daughter. Shirley’s home, but she’s not answering the door.”

  “Oh. Poor Sonia. Are you a social worker?”

  “Private investigator.”

  She suppressed a smile. “Ah, the famous woman from Chicago who is uncovering all the sins and crimes of Douglas County. Shirley was complaining about you when I saw her at the farmers’ market on Saturday. Gertrude Perec also chimed in, but Barbara Rutledge had an opposing view. You’ve provided us with a lot of entertainment. Nathan is probably in his lab, but if you want to wake Shirley, the back door is unlocked.”

  The town jester, that was me, racing back and forth between silo and river while the locals lined up to evaluate my performance. “You know all these people, and I don’t. Do you know why Ms. Perec is so angry when Cady tries to ask about her father? I wondered if he was an old graduate student of Dr. Kiel’s, but that made Ms. Perec really blow up at me.”

  The woman shook her head. “That’s puzzled me all these years, too. It’s somehow tied up in her great loyalty to Dr. Kiel. However, I don’t know Gertrude well—we used to volunteer together at the League of Women Voters—but Cady’s birth has always been a sore spot. Maybe while you’re here, you can sort that out, too.”

  I made a face but thanked her for her advice on the back door, which opened with only a slight groan from the warped wood. The door led through a small mudroom to the kitchen. The Mixmaster was still on the floor, where it had been joined by a large pot.

  “Mrs. Kiel!” I shouted, careful n
ot to touch the counters. “Shirley!”

  I waited a count of ten, then skirted the appliances and went to the sunporch door. Shirley was straightening her skirt and patting her hair into place.

  “Who— Oh, it’s you.” She wasn’t happy, but her rancor was only at half strength.

  “Yep. I’m here for the duration.”

  “Of what?” she snapped.

  “Of Sonia and the attempt on her life. Of the story about Nathan and Matt Chastain. Matt, about his experiment gone bad—” I broke off. “Anthrax. Is that what Matt did that was so terrible?”

  “Anthrax?” Shirley was bewildered for an instant, then gave a bark of contemptuous laughter. “If you think Nathan had anything to do with anthrax, you’re going to be here an even longer duration. He’s never worked with it. And neither did Matt Chastain.”

  The wicker chair I’d moved on Thursday was still where I’d placed it, but a set of books and crossword puzzles stood on it. I added those to a teetering stack on the side table and sat down.

  “Then what sin did Matt commit that turned him into a ‘subhuman specimen’ in your husband’s eyes?”

  “My darling daughter’s language. You’ve been talking to her? I thought she was in a coma.”

  “She is. That’s something she said earlier.” I started to ask if Shirley had been to the hospital yet but bit the words off: I wanted information, not a fight. “Regardless of the language, what did Matt do?”

  “I don’t know. He cultured the wrong specimen, or switched specimens in mid-experiment. Nate was beside himself. The army got involved because they’d funded the research. Nate had to go to Washington and explain himself. He must have done a good job—they renewed the grant, and Nate kept his job.”

  “Sonia saw something at the missile site back in 1983, whether—”

  “She thinks she saw something. If you’re believing the things she babbles—”