Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  “Cady doesn’t have one?” I asked when she’d again fallen silent.

  Her mouth twisted in a painful smile. “Dr. Clayhorn, she was the pediatrician, she said birthmarks sometimes disappear spontaneously, but not usually inside a week. Nathan, Dr. Kiel, was always so solicitous of Cady’s well-being. I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted Cady to be Jenny’s baby. The first year I worried that Matt might show up and claim her, even though Nathan promised that he’d left KU for good.”

  50

  Where Oh Where Can My Baby Be?

  “If Jenny wasn’t Cady’s mother, then who— Oh!” I felt a jolt, as if one of the Fates had stuck out a casual arm and whacked me between the shoulders. “Spirova had a baby at the same time as Jenny.”

  “She and Dr. Kiel argued about it; he wanted her to have an abortion, she wanted him to leave Shirley and marry her. She thought a baby would force him to choose her.” Perec’s head was bowed, her voice so soft I had to lean forward to make out the words.

  “I presume if you knew, the whole lab did,” I said. “Matt Chastain, too.”

  “I don’t think so. I was Dr. Kiel’s secretary. I saw and heard things no one else did, and I wasn’t the kind to be sharing what I heard with every stray dog that barked outside Dr. Kiel’s office.” She gave me a sour look—I was one of those stray dogs, but I’d had the effrontery to barge in uninvited.

  “Everyone guessed they’d had an affair when Nathan was in Bratislava. If Magda had asked me before making that dramatic escape out of Belgrade and so on, if she really did escape and wasn’t just planted on us by the Russians, I would have told her he wasn’t the kind of man who liked scandal. What he did on his trips never came home with him, at least not until she arrived.” She stood and said brusquely, “I’m cold. We’ll go into the house.”

  I was cold, too. I was glad to follow her inside to the kitchen, where she put on a kettle for tea and then disappeared up the stairs. The water came to a boil. I turned it off. I don’t like tea—she could fix her own when she returned.

  The kitchen overlooked the back garden, where birds were fighting over space at the two feeders Perec had set up. Birds covered the kitchen, too, painted on the stripes in the wallpaper around the breakfast nook, cut out of wood on the clock above the sink, even in the shape of the napkin and spoon holders.

  Perec was gone long enough that I wondered if she was on the phone with Kiel. However, she finally returned, her hair damp from the shower, fresh makeup covering any remaining ravages of her weeping.

  I seated myself in the breakfast alcove. “Did Magda come here for Kiel or because she was fleeing Communism—or both?”

  Perec made herself a mug of tea and sat across from me. “With her you could never be sure about anything. She claimed she came here for freedom, but I think she wanted to live in the West, she wanted the kind of life you can live here if you have money and status. The army was glad she was here, I can tell you that much.”

  “Because she brought her special knowledge of biological weapons with her?”

  Perec scowled. It annoyed her when I knew something she thought belonged to her as an insider. I wanted her annoyed—it would make her likely to tell me more.

  “The army was funding Dr. Kiel’s research,” I prodded. “When the big mistake happened—when the plague bacillus was switched with Y. enterocolitica—he had to go to Washington to explain what had gone wrong. That was because people at the missile silo died. Including Lucinda Ferring.”

  I’d practiced saying “enterocolitica” in the car driving over and was pleased I could bring it out so fluently.

  “She had the flu,” Perec said thickly. “They called Dr. Kiel—those people at the hospital couldn’t tell their right fingers from their right hand. They were always demanding his help. Anyway, he was the chief public-health officer for the county, even the state for a time. They called him in, and he cultured her blood, and he told them it was flu. It can kill someone, especially an older person, fast.”

  “Flu. No matter what he saw under the microscope.”

  She started to blaze up at me, but I interrupted. “Lucinda Ferring was his tech. She was in that lab. She was a black woman doing menial work, so she was invisible. I bet she knew everything you did and more besides, because you weren’t out on the shop floor with the students and Sonia, who worked as a lab dishwasher. If someone—was it Magda?—was bringing Y. pestis into the lab, even if Ms. Ferring didn’t know about it, she would have been exposed to it.”

  “You’re trying to smear his name—”

  “Did he give you a course of tetracycline about that time?” I cut across her again.

  Her mouth opened in protest. Then came a horrified look, and she fell silent: memory had come back.

  “He didn’t bother with poor Matt or Ms. Ferring. Not even his own daughter, not until she fell onto Matt’s dying body in that field.” Sonia had written about it in her journal—she was burning, thinking she was in a fire. Burning, freezing, attached to a respirator. The 1 percent who survived pneumonic plague, but neither parent welcoming the miracle.

  “Kiel went to Washington to explain himself to the army. If he put the blame on his dead graduate student, it would reflect badly on him—why wasn’t he supervising his lab more closely? But the Czech bioweapons expert—what a lot of problems it would solve if she were responsible. What did he tell them? That he discovered she was a KGB agent, sent to steal U.S. germ secrets, that she actually conducted a trial diffusion for the KGB that killed a number of innocent people?”

  “It was her fault,” Perec said fiercely. “He had proof, he showed it to the army, and they came and took her away to Washington. They offered her some kind of deal if she would work for them secretly at Fort Detrick. They gave her a new identity, Nathan told me, to hide her from the KGB. He said she wouldn’t be bothering us again.”

  “And then she showed up here—when? a few weeks ago?—ready to blackmail Dr. Kiel, so she had to be disposed of, and how more artistically than with some of the pesky pestis that he’d kept locked away in a lab freezer all these years?”

  “That’s a lie!” Perec jumped to her feet, spilling her tea across the table.

  I grabbed a handful of napkins from the bird-shaped holder and blotted the tea before it could slop onto me. “Okay, what’s the truth?”

  “Neither of us knew she was back here, not until you found her body. It was a complete shock.”

  “But everyone said that was Doris McKinnon,” I objected.

  “The army sent Colonel Baggetto here—Magda had disappeared, and they thought she might have returned to Lawrence. When he heard about you finding the body, he had his suspicions.”

  “Did they lead him to stab Dr. Roque?” My mouth felt as though it were filled with ashes.

  “No one stabbed Dr. Roque. He died of the flu.”

  “Just like Lucinda Ferring.” I was holding my temper by a thread.

  Tea was pooling on her side of the table. She stared at it, as if it might turn into a magic well she could jump into.

  “Cady,” I said. “Lucinda Ferring found her in the field. She and McKinnon brought her to the hospital; she was dehydrated. And then someone called you.”

  “Nathan,” Perec said in a dull voice. “He told me Jenny’s baby had been rescued. They’d found Jenny earlier that day, drowned in the Wakarusa. The sheriff found her. Deputy Gisborne he was then. When Nathan told me Jenny’s baby had made it, I didn’t want to ask questions. I wanted something of my girl.”

  I didn’t want to feel sorry for her, but I couldn’t help it. She’d been squeezed in an intolerable vise—loyalty to Kiel, jealous fury toward Spirova, neither meaning anything under the crushing loss of her only child. Of course she wanted to believe that Cady was Jenny’s baby. I couldn’t say I wouldn’t have done the same thing.

  “Magda gave birth sometime that summer,” I said. “Where?”

  Perec hunched a shoulder, still staring at the tea. “She wen
t to Aspen, or said she went to Aspen. There’s a big conference there every summer, and she went off to present a paper. She left before she started really showing.

  “I thought she’d had the baby in secret and placed it with a friend. She was still hoping Nathan would change his mind and leave Shirley. But I guess she was keeping her baby somewhere in Lawrence. Maybe when she realized Nathan wasn’t going to marry her, she brought the baby out to the protest camp, hoping it would die from the plague test. She was crazy enough to do something that cruel.

  “What am I going to tell Cady? What can I tell her her name is, even? What will it do to her when she finds out Sonia is her sister?”

  Tears started falling again, not the sobs that had racked her earlier but those quiet, unconscious tears we don’t even know we’re shedding.

  “Her name is Cady,” I said quietly. “She’s the person you raised, not the person Magda gave birth to. She’s lucky that she came to you. You think highly of Nathan Kiel, but you must know how he and Shirley treated the three children who grew up with them.”

  She didn’t speak, but some of the rigid lines went out of her cheeks.

  I watched the second hand make a couple of circuits around the birds in the clock before I spoke again. “What made Colonel Baggetto think Spirova had come back here? Had she been in touch with Dr. Kiel?”

  At that she looked up at me, the fierceness back in her face. “He talks to me. Who else can he trust? He saw her. He went out to that research place near Eudora, and he recognized her at once, even thirty-five years later.”

  “What was she doing there?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know. But Bram Roswell is as crazy as Magda, so whatever she was doing, it wasn’t designed to bring peace and light to the world, you can count on that.”

  The meeting I’d stumbled on in the hotel bar last week, where Kiel was sitting uncomfortably with the colonel, Roswell, and the young man from the army staff college, that must have been to discuss Magda. How had she died? How had she landed in Doris McKinnon’s kitchen?

  And what part of it had August Veriden and Emerald Ferring witnessed? I didn’t want to risk their safety by trying to find them in the library. If they were hiding in the stacks, under F for Fugitive or W for Witness, it would be child’s play for Baggetto and Gisborne to follow me to them.

  I stood, my knees stiff. Every joint stiff, actually. “You owe it to Cady to tell her the truth.”

  “You don’t get to tell me what I owe to whom.”

  “You’re right. I’m just the outside agitator turning Lawrence upside down. In some part of your mind, though, you’ve always known the truth—it’s why you’ve resisted Cady’s efforts to find out about her father. Do you know that she went through all the files in the departmental office, looking for Matt Chastain’s records? What happened when his family wrote, wanting to know where he was?”

  “Dr. Kiel told them he was doing important work for the government but that we couldn’t disclose the location. Then he wrote that we hadn’t had word from him for over a year and that the CIA feared he had died.”

  “A comfort to his mother, no doubt. Just as knowing how Jenny died was a comfort to you.”

  Her face was splotched with red. “Don’t you sit in judgment on me. You have no right. You may think you’re clever and that you know a lot, but you know nothing. You never had a child, you never lost a lover, you’re like a cool breeze floating over the ground, not touching it.”

  51

  Known Unknowns

  I had just enough energy to find a park and sit on the cold ground with my dog. “Cool Breeze” Warshawski. Maybe I’d add it to my business cards. It would give me a certain swagger, like Cool Hand Luke.

  “What a mess,” I said to Peppy. “Poor Cady. This is going to hit her like a piano falling from the sky. The whole thing is a mess, from the death of Matt and Lucinda and Baby Cady Number One to now, with Doris McKinnon’s and Dr. Roque’s murders, and the attack on Sonia. Why do you think Magda Spirova came back to Lawrence?”

  Maybe if I had something to eat and wrote it all down, it would make enough sense that I could figure out what to do next. I walked with Peppy to the bakery for soup and bread. They wouldn’t let an emotional-support animal join me inside, so we trudged back to the Hippo. Anyway, the coffee was better there, and I could get a small whisky alongside it in case Peppy’s support flagged.

  As I sat at our usual spot, the high counter in the corner, my phone rang. Unknown local number, which turned out to belong to Bayard Clements, the pastor at St. Silas.

  “Ms. Albritten!” I said. “Is she all right?”

  “Sister Albritten is the Pillsbury Doughboy with the Energizer Bunny inside,” Clements assured me. “I want to keep her that way.”

  My stomach muscles tensed as I waited for the next sentence: Keep away from her. Instead he wanted my help.

  “Jordan, her son, you know, and his boy, they had to go home. School’s in session, Jordan’s wife is sick herself. No one from St. Silas can be with Sister Albritten around the clock, and I worry about her right now, especially tonight when she’ll be on her own for the first time. I have to go to Atlanta this evening for a funeral, or I’d stay with her myself, but I won’t be back until Friday.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said slowly, trying to imagine how my day might play out. “If I could get one of the women from Riverside?”

  “As a last resort,” he said sharply. “They live to gossip, and that’s the fastest way for word to get out that Sister Albritten is home alone and vulnerable.”

  “Copy that, Pastor. I’ll work out something.”

  What, I didn’t know, but I didn’t know the answer to any of the problems I was facing. Finding a way to look after Ms. Albritten would be a cinch compared to sorting out Cady’s and Sonia’s histories, finding August Veriden and Emerald Ferring, and unraveling what Dr. Kiel was up to with the colonel. Maybe I’d tuck Albritten into the Mustang with Peppy and let her ride shotgun as I drove madly around Douglas County, looking for dead women.

  One problem at a time. I unrolled the newsprint where I’d divided events between “Current Day” and 1983. Under “Current Day,” I wrote, “Colonel Baggetto came to Lawrence at the request of the army, not because of some bogus spent fuel rods but because Spirova’s presence in Lawrence worried them.”

  In 1983 Spirova had been furious with Kiel. In her mind he’d lured her to Kansas and then abandoned her. Had she switched those organisms in 1983 at the behest of the KGB or out of rage with Kiel? In either event he’d survived and thrived, while she’d been bound over to the U.S. Army. The army probably kept her on a tight leash when they first had her, but as the Cold War ended, I was guessing they cut her loose and didn’t bother to keep track of her.

  Even if revenge had been boiling in her mind for thirty years, why had Spirova waited this long to come back? She couldn’t have counted on Kiel to stay alive until she got around to punishing him. No, Spirova must have come back to Kansas for reasons that had nothing to do with Kiel but everything to do with bioweapons.

  Gertrude Perec had said Magda was working with Bram Roswell out at Sea-2-Sea. Doing what? Perhaps she was taking her bioweapons expertise into how to destroy plants. Maybe that was what they were doing on their off-limits experimental farm—growing plants in order to give them lethal diseases.

  I drew a picture of a corn plant with an ugly worm boring into it. If Sea-2-Sea really was engaged in that kind of work, then the army probably knew all about them. In which case, instead of tracking Spirova to Kansas, Baggetto had brought her here as a consultant for Bram Roswell.

  I started looking at Sea-2-Sea, not the rhetoric on their website (“Safeguarding America’s Food Supply from Sea to Shining Sea”) but deeper background. I skimmed reports to congressional committees, looked at work by investigative journalists who covered America’s vast food chain, dipped into scholarly databases.

  Sea-2-Sea didn’t seem different from any othe
r food giant: hideous work conditions in the fields to place on our tables those bright sparkling wines. Laboratories where plant and animal genetics were studied. Vast landholdings that drove small farmers out of business. Sea-2-Sea wasn’t any better than their competition, but they didn’t look worse.

  When I’d first checked into Roswell, I’d noted that he was involved in some chest-thumping group. I went through my case notes. Patriots CARE-NOW: Concerned Americans for Re-Armament Now. Their website had the kind of rhetoric that made the hair on my neck itch: Obama was a terrorist Muslim who was selling out America to her enemies. America needed to become strong again, we needed to be feared, we needed to be vigilant against our enemies, we needed to be ready with first-strike capability.

  Sergeant Everard came in and poured himself a coffee from the thermos at the counter. When he saw me, he called, “You found any more dead people, Warshawski?”

  “I can’t remember my body count the last time I saw you,” I said.

  He came over and knelt to scratch Peppy. “Sonia’s still alive.”

  “That’s good to know. I took some of her journals from her room at St. Rafe’s on Sunday. Someone broke into my room at the B and B and stole them while I was out yesterday.”

  “That a fact? You file a report?”

  “You think there’s any point?”

  “There’s always a point, Warshawski. It lets the perps know that someone is paying attention. Even if they get away with it this time, at least the police have something on file if it happens again.”

  “The next time a Chicago detective comes here and starts poking into old business?”

  He grinned. “Could happen, you never know. What was in the journals?”

  “Old business,” I said. “What happened at the Kanwaka silo, Matt Chastain dying of the plague—stuff like that.”