“Someone tried to murder your daughter yesterday. She’d begun recovering from her drug overdose and was coherent. Someone is afraid of what she’ll reveal about events at the McKinnon farm, either three weeks or three decades ago. It would be incredibly helpful if you stopped hiding behind Cheese— behind Chesnitz’s diagnosis and started listening to your daughter.”
“Mind your own goddamn business,” Shirley snapped. “We managed perfectly well in our own bucolic, hick-town way before you came muscling in from the big city to tell us what to do.”
I glared at her. “You call this managing well? Your husband and you fighting day and night? Your sons so out of touch you didn’t even let them know their sister was in the hospital? You’re an intelligent woman. Don’t you think you’d feel better—manage better—if you let the truth seep in around the edges?”
She struggled to her feet. “Don’t preach at me. You know nothing about my truth, or my family’s. You’re not the one whose daughter tried to immolate herself on a barge on the river, imagining she could commit suttee because her fictional lover had supposedly died in a fire.”
“You’re right, I don’t know those things,” I said more quietly, “but I don’t believe that Sonia made up Matt Chastain’s death. Maybe she jumbled a lot of details together—she was fourteen, she was lonely and, like you, sensitive and imaginative—but she saw something that terrified her.”
Shirley was appeased enough by the implied compliment to sit down again, but I couldn’t get her to budge on what Sonia had seen thirty years ago. I finally gave up on it.
“Just one last question and I’ll get out of your way. Who is Magda? Your sons told me—”
“Magda?” Red spots appeared on her face, fury sending blood to her head. “Has that bitch reappeared? I thought we were rid of her for good, little goddamn bitch of a sycophantic pseudoscientist.”
I backed away involuntarily, as though her vitriol could eat through my own skin. The stack of books wobbled and fell over.
“Get out of my house,” Shirley hissed, her face still blotched. “Get out of my house, and don’t ever dare come back into it.”
I stood on shaking legs. “Rid of her for good when? Last week or last century?”
She hurled her pen at me. Her aim was good. I got my hands up fast enough to protect my face, but my wrist took a stinging hit.
I retreated toward the kitchen but stopped long enough to say, “I called the hospital this morning. Sonia’s still in a protective coma. I talked to her brothers yesterday. They were both distressed and wished they’d known sooner that she was hospitalized.”
“If you dare bother my children again, I’ll get the police involved,” Shirley spat.
“Does that include Sonia?” I asked. “Have you been to the hospital yet?”
This time she threw a book, but I was out of range. I walked down the dusty hall and let myself out through the front door.
I wished I hadn’t deposited Peppy at Free State. I could have used a little puppy therapy about now. As a poor second, I drove to the end of the street and lowered my car seat so I could lie back, eyes closed.
Shirley’s anger was so extreme it singed. Who was the more damaging person in that marriage, Shirley or Nate? He was volatile and abusive, she was drunk and vitriolic. What a sea for a poor little polar bear to swim in. I found myself blinking back tears for Sonia.
I massaged my temples. Breathe into Shirley’s anger, let it wash away from you. I thought of my own parents, my father’s deep, protective love for my mother and the nights she and I had stayed up, sick with worry, while he worked the free-fire zones on Chicago’s West Side.
My mother died when I was sixteen, on a cold March day. My father and I had spent the night in her hospital room, my father inserting himself between the tubes and wires in her bed so that he could cradle her in his lap. I was at her side, holding her hand. For sixteen years we had been a little triangle of love, with me as the apex they both supported. I’d spent too much time on self-pity, the loss of my mother heavy in my heart, weighted further by my father’s death a decade later. I had never stopped to think how exceedingly lucky I’d been.
46
The Fighting Germs
I sat up again and looked up Kiel’s university address: eighth floor of the Forschung Center for Life Sciences. The Forschung Center was on what they called West Campus, a sprawling extension of the university where giant research buildings sat. I drove up and down hills and found a public-policy institute, engineering, chemistry and physics, and finally the Forschung, tucked into a side of the farthest hill. Unlike the part of the campus I’d visited last week, there weren’t any guard stations. Bonus for the weary detective: the Forschung had its own parking lot.
However, there was also a guard in the lobby, who asked my business with Dr. Kiel. I couldn’t think of a clever cover story: I said I was there to discuss bioweapons, particularly anthrax.
Unlike the sheriff’s deputy, the guard wasn’t alarmed. I guess anthrax was all in a day’s work at the Forschung Center. He called up to the eighth floor. Time passed. People came and went through the locked doors, which needed a key card for access; I couldn’t get in unless I mugged someone in the parking lot to steal a card.
I checked my messages. Seventeen from Chicago clients, including one from Troy Hempel. Nothing from Lotty—her surgical day must be running long. Nothing from Jake. The only cheering message came from Mr. Contreras, happy he was leaving for home in two days: “It’s beautiful here, doll, but I want to be home. I miss you and the dogs and the little volcano on ice skates.”
I shifted uneasily, wondering what the volcano was doing. When I texted her, she assured me she was fine; Cady had invited her home to supper again. Cady’s granny was super nice. Bernie didn’t understand why I had a problem with her.
I wandered around the lobby, looking at portraits of bygone KU cell biologists. Noble P. Sherwood had a magnificent mustache and looked like Teddy Roosevelt. Cora Downs had done impressive work on tularemia when STEM women were as rare as unicorns. David Paretsky had done something unusual with peptides in a beast called rickettsia.
In a corner of the lobby, in the shadow of a display case, I came on a framed copy of the photo of “Dr. K’s Fighting Germs,” the picture of the lab team that had won a charity softball game I’d seen online in the Douglas County Herald. I was pretty sure one of the young men grinning in the background was the original of the face Sonia kept sketching.
I was heading over to the guard to ask him to check on Dr. Kiel when a young woman in a lab coat came out and looked at me doubtfully.
“Are you from Dr. Kiel’s lab?” I asked. “It’s V.I. Warshawski.”
She ignored my outstretched hand. “He said to tell you he doesn’t know anything about anthrax.”
She was nervous; I wondered if Kiel had been yelling at her.
“He’s bound to know more than I do.” I smiled. “All I know is what the Mayo Clinic website had to say, but he can tell me things like whether someone digging up dirt on a farm east of town could have contracted it from the ground.”
She hesitated. I said she could ask Dr. Kiel if it would be easier for me to discuss the situation with Colonel Baggetto. At that point she decided to take me inside—however nervous Kiel might make her, she didn’t want to be a Ping-Pong ball bouncing between him and me.
We rode an elevator to the eighth floor. She revealed her name as Sue-Anne Tommason, from near Garden City. Yes, they were sick and tired of only being known for In Cold Blood; there was plenty more to Garden City than somebody getting murdered sixty years ago. “It was horrible when the Capote movie came out. It reopened all these old wounds and made us look like a national freak show all over again. You’re from Chicago, right? And that’s got way more murders than Garden City.”
“Right you are, Ms. Tommason.” I followed her out of the elevator and down the hall. “And that seems to be what we’re mostly known for these days, that and Al C
apone.”
Tommason stopped outside a door that had Kiel’s name on it, took a breath, and led me inside. She left me at the entrance, with a whispered command to wait a minute, and went through a door at the far end of the room.
The lab was a large, well-lighted place, but rows of high black counters made it seem smaller. Unlike the Kiel home, the room was clean and sternly tidy, with the kind of equipment that makes you think of Walter Mitty going pocketa-pocketa—big drums with hinged arm holders that moved up and down in a steady rhythm, racks of test tubes, shelves of beakers of all shapes and sizes. It smelled of chemicals, a biting scent with a musty underlayer. The smell was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
I wandered around and came to a tightly sealed glass case, a bit like a miniature greenhouse, with ventilation tubes leading away from a pair of canisters. I leaned over for a closer look. They looked like the canister in the photo that Colonel Baggetto had shown me, which supposedly held fuel rods.
“So you’ve switched from being an expert on my daughter’s mental illness to an interest in wool-sorter’s disease. Or maybe you think that’s the underlying cause of her problems. It’s an interesting hypothesis.”
Dr. Kiel had come up behind me, the noise of the ventilators masking his crepe-soled shoes. Sue-Anne was hovering behind him with two young men about her age, also in white lab coats.
Kiel was bouncing slightly on his toes, a boxer already throwing the first punches. I supposed wool-sorter’s disease was a nickname for anthrax; it would be a mistake to start the conversation by asking him.
“Those canisters—Colonel Baggetto told me the other night he was looking for one. Did it go missing from here?”
“What are you now? An investigator for the NIH? I don’t need to account for my equipment to you or anyone else.”
His voice was harsh, but he’d stopped bouncing. That made me think he knew about the canisters.
“You knew Dr. Roque,” I said.
“Oh, yes. PH Roque.”
“PH?” I asked.
“Publicity Hound,” he snarled. “Oh, I know, nil nisi bonum and all that. Don’t mouth pieties at me.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” I said. “You know he died of a virulent strain of flu. And I presume you know that Dr. Edward Hitchcock, from the geology department, is in the Cleveland Clinic with a similar infection?”
I paused, but he didn’t speak. The vein over his right eye started pulsing: danger sign. Sue-Anne and the two young men looked at one another. One of the guys shook his head slightly, a warning not to speak.
“Both of them were handling soil samples from Doris McKinnon’s farm. That made me think of anthrax.”
“Did it, now? Let’s see: First you thought you were a mental-health expert, next you were with the NIH, inspecting my equipment. Now you think you’re with the CDC, an expert on infectious diseases?”
CDC. The Centers for Disease Control. I didn’t know what NIH stood for, and it didn’t matter. Kiel thought broad insults would goad me into losing my temper, which meant I needed to be relaxed and smiling.
“I spoke with a doctor this morning who suggested anthrax.” Okay, Jewel Kim was a nurse, but Kiel seemed to be the kind of person who would sneer at nurses.
“Your Chicago doctors are surprisingly ignorant,” Kiel jeered. “Or was it one of the cretins at the local hospital? Anthrax does not mimic flu. If that’s all you wanted to know, you could have phoned me.”
“I wondered who would want your daughter dead,” I said. “You surely know that someone tried to smother her yesterday morning.”
“You think her life has great value to society?”
I pulled a stool out from underneath the counter and sat. “I won’t mouth pieties to you, such as everyone’s death diminishes me. I do wonder whether you’ve spent so many years in fury that no other emotions can arise in you, but I’m only an investigator of human frauds and felonies, not of their hearts’ deepest secrets.
“However, someone did try to murder Ms. Kiel yesterday morning. Even if you don’t think her life has value, aren’t you a tiny bit curious about who wants your daughter dead?”
His lips twitched. “I thought my wife and I had made it clear that Sonia’s upheavals stopped entertaining us years ago. I assumed she owed money to a drug dealer who was tired of waiting for payment.”
“You’ve watched too many episodes of Breaking Bad. Drug dealers may shoot each other on the streets, but they don’t have the patience or the subtlety to break into an ICU in the manner that your daughter’s assailant used.”
Kiel was displaying a lot of nervous symptoms, from the twitching lips to the rocking on his feet, but he was so chronically angry and nervy that I couldn’t interpret the symptoms: fear, guilt, knowledge, or just an insecure, volatile man who couldn’t bear confrontation?
“I have a couple of visuals.” I opened my tablet. I’d uploaded the Fighting Germs picture while I’d been in the lobby, and next to it I’d put a copy of one of Sonia’s sketches.
“That’s Matt Chastain, right, drawn by your daughter. But which one of those women is Magda?”
Dr. Kiel became very still. Even the vein in his forehead stopped pulsing.
“Magda. Who mentioned that name? Have you been talking to my wife?” The words were as forceful as ever, but his voice lacked power.
“Your sons,” I said. “They were distressed at the news about their sister. They mentioned Magda when I asked about the experiment that went so badly thirty years back. What was that experiment?”
“Nothing you would understand.”
“You’re right that I can’t tell a peptide from a pep talk, but I bet if you told me the basics, like why you had to go to Washington to defend your grant to the Department of Defense, I could follow along.”
“You were talking to Shirley.” His voice was recovering. “She loves to create drama out of the ordinary. Sonia was grabbing all the attention, with her delusions about Chastain, so Shirley began telling people that I was doing secret work for the Pentagon and that I’d been called on the carpet.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong. It was an ordinary grant review, but Lawrence had been the focus of enormous media attention because that ludicrous film, The Day After, was made here. That brouhaha was compounded by the fracas at the missile silo. The president wanted to be briefed. I went to the White House, I spoke to the president and his secretary of defense. Shirley all but accused me of being a fascist for meeting with Reagan—that’s how unhinged she was. Sue-Anne!” he barked over his shoulder. “Go get that photo.”
Sue-Anne Tommason trotted obediently toward his office.
“What is Magda’s last name?” I asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
I smiled limpidly. “So I can find her dental records. So an independent pathologist can compare them with the X-rays of the teeth of the woman whose body disappeared from Dr. Roque’s lab last week.”
47
Playing with Germs
I was getting back on the elevator, exhausted and frustrated, when Sue-Anne Tommason tapped my shoulder. She shoved some tightly folded papers into my jacket pocket and flitted back to Kiel’s lab.
I waited until I was in my car to examine the pages. I’d been expecting a major secret—a hastily scribbled report of Dr. Kiel’s involvement in anthrax research or an overheard confession to Matt Chastain’s murder.
Instead I was looking at an offprint of a 1982 article in the Journal of Cell Morphology. “Phospholipase suppression in nuclear proteins during infection (Y. enterocolitica).” I sighed: this was one of the articles whose titles had stumped me when I first looked into Dr. Kiel’s history last week. The only words I understood were “suppression in” and “during infection.”
The work had been completed thanks to grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Army Research Council. It listed seven co-authors, starting with Kiel N. and including Spirova M. The only M in the list of authors.
I
started to search for Spirovas on my tablet, but the sun had set while I was talking to Dr. Kiel. Floodlights were on in the parking lot and around the buildings, but away from the Forschung Center night was shrouding the West Campus. A mist was rising across the grass. I felt tiny and exposed on the hilltop, with dark prairie stretching out beyond me. A giant hound or, worse, a malevolent human could bound out of the mist while I was deep in databases.
I drove into town, to a strip mall near Free State Dogs. Students were laughing, holding hands, texting, as they went into the carry-out places. Their chatter felt reassuring. I parked under one of the streetlights and went back to my search engines.
LifeStory gave me a handful of Spirovs or Spirovas, no Magdas, and none who had been at the University of Kansas. I turned to newspaper databases, where I found her at once in the Douglas County Herald, lecturing in November 1981 to a meeting of the Lawrence Rotary Club.
Spirova had spoken about the grimness of life under Communism and how thankful she was to Dr. and Mrs. Kiel for opening their home to her. She was especially grateful for the chance to do research in Dr. Kiel’s lab. When she heard him address a 1979 symposium on infectious diseases and bioweapons in Bratislava, she’d been overwhelmed by the depth of his knowledge.
Dr. Spirova, although only thirty-two, is something of an expert on infectious diseases herself: she worked in the Soviet bioweapons installation in Těchonin, in eastern Czechoslovakia, before making her escape during a conference in Belgrade in 1981. It was a journey worthy of John le Carré: she fled with the clothes on her back to Vienna, flew to Montreal and made her way across the border into the United States on foot.
“Is true, I am coming to this country not quite legally,” Dr. Spirova said in her charmingly accented English. “I am needing political asylum. If returning to home country, to Czechoslovakia, I am in prison as traitor. Dr. Kiel obtained for me temporary residency permit; I can be part of his research family as well as his wonderful American home.”
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