That startled him. “He did?”
“All the signs point in that direction. I was just talking to Gertrude Perec, and she sort of confirmed it. At least she was aware that someone in Dr. Kiel’s lab was playing around with plague germs out around the missile silo back in ’83.”
“Plague? Here, in Douglas County?”
“Yes. Here, in Douglas County.”
He got slowly to his feet and perched on the stool next to mine. “And they covered it up, and now you’re poking the wasp’s nest and making someone really unhappy.”
“Yes. In fact, I just heard this morning that the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Dr. Roque found that Roque was infected with pneumonic plague. That’s what Roque’s good friend Dr. Hitchcock is battling up at the Cleveland Clinic. Actually, the pathologist said he was notifying the CDC, as is Dr. Herschel in Chicago. They should be issuing an alert to the local public-health authorities. Two confirmed cases and a suspected third is alarming.”
“Haven’t seen anything about that.” Everard touched an app on his phone. “Nothing’s come through yet. You sure about this?”
“About which?” I said impatiently. “I’m sure there’ve been two confirmed plague cases here in the last week, but I don’t know about the alert.”
Everard touched a speed-dial button on his phone. “Sharene? Deke here. You know anything about a public-health warning coming into Douglas from the CDC in Atlanta?”
I heard the tinny clatter of her voice, music while he sat on hold, more tinny clatter, filled with exclamation points.
He looked at me bleakly. “Apparently the sheriff and our public-health director said it was premature to panic the people of Douglas County. You say ‘bubonic plague’ and everyone starts screaming and heading for the exits.”
I felt a chill, a stiletto-shaped icicle, down the middle of my back. “Gisborne was the person who pulled Jenny Perec from the Wakarusa. He’s popped up like a magician’s rabbit every time I’ve been at the McKinnon farm or near the missile silo. What is his role in all this?”
Everard shook his head. “You and Ken don’t hit it off, that’s obvious, but that doesn’t mean you get to accuse him—”
“Yes, when someone puts me in jail, it usually stops me from having warm and fuzzy feelings. He has the power in this situation, as do you, and your lieutenant, and so on. And it’s your territory. All I have is a trail of events that show him trying to stop my investigation, along with his connection to many of the events I’m uncovering. He doesn’t want a public alert on the plague? Who’s he protecting?”
“Maybe he has more information than you do, Warshawski. You’ve done some smart fieldwork and made some lucky guesses, but that doesn’t mean you know everything.”
“No, you’re right,” I said quietly. “I understand this much: that I’m an outsider. Some days you feel you can trust me and some days you need to be loyal to your homies.”
“To my homies? You think the Lawrence Police Department is like some big-city street gang?” His eyes were bright and hard.
“I grew up in a big-city neighborhood, which is essentially a small town where everyone is inside one another’s business. We had plenty of feuds across our alleys and playgrounds, but you’d better believe we all banded together when someone from South Shore crossed our borders. I’m not accusing the LPD of corruption or lawlessness, just trying to understand why you stand up for Gisborne when you yourself have questioned his actions around the McKinnon murder.”
Everard pounded his fist into his palm with such force that Peppy jumped up and anxiously started licking me.
The sergeant gave a bark of harsh laughter. “I cling to my homeboys, and I frighten puppies. Sorry, dog.” He petted her head but turned and strode from the bar without saying good-bye to Simone and her friends, let alone me. Simone stared at me, questioning.
“Policy differences,” I said, more lightly than I felt.
My phone dinged with a message from Cady: what did the dna analysis tell you? are you going to the silo?
I stared at the screen. I didn’t want to lie to protect Gertrude Perec’s feelings. I didn’t want to break personal news to Cady myself. I finally wrote, you’re not related to the child whose bones doris mckinnon dug up. the risk of plague out there is high: stay away from it.
I started rolling up my newsprint notes when my phone rang. A second unknown caller with a Kansas area code. When I answered, it was a woman with a soft voice and a Kansas twang.
“Are you the lady who advertised about Matthew Chastain?”
I dropped the papers. “Yes. I’m V.I. Warshawski. Who is this?”
“Charmaine Long. I’m Matt’s sister.”
52
Good Country People
Charmaine had driven in from Belleville, Kansas, the town where she and Matt had grown up. It was a neighbor who had pointed out the Facebook post. “We haven’t heard anything in so long, I’d almost forgotten him. Where is he? How do you know him?”
“I don’t,” I said as gently as possible. “I was trying to find him because I think he was an important witness to something that happened in Lawrence thirty-five years ago.”
Charmaine and her friend were staying at a motel west of town. I offered to meet her there, but she wanted to come into “the city,” as she referred to downtown Lawrence.
I gave her directions to the Hippo. While I waited, I answered e-mails from Chicago, which was beginning to feel like a place I had known only vaguely, like a city where you spent a summer as a child but now can’t quite remember.
I recognized Charmaine as soon as she came into the Decadent Hippo, not because she resembled Sonia’s sketches of her brother, but because she looked around eagerly, as if Matt himself might appear at one of the tables.
She was an angular woman in her fifties, her salt-and-pepper hair cut in a straight line that didn’t quite reach her shoulders. Her face was freckled from long hours in the sun.
When I stood to greet her, the light died from her eyes: she had hoped against all hope that her brother would be with me. I offered her something to drink; her eyes widened at the array of bottles behind the bar.
“I’m not much for alcohol in the morning. Not often ever, really, just Christmas and birthdays.” Her tanned skin turned darker with embarrassment. “Does that make my small-town life obvious?”
I smiled. “I’m not much for alcohol in the morning either, but they make good coffee here. I’m having coffee. There’s tea, and soft drinks.”
When Charmaine ordered coffee, Simone, sensing either drama or Charmaine’s need for care, brought it to her at a small table in the corner.
We sat for an hour, her story coming out hesitantly at first, and then, as she became caught up in her memories, more fluidly.
The family hadn’t wanted Matt to go to school at KU, but he won a scholarship and he was passionate about science. As a little boy he’d saved the money he made raking hay and running errands to buy a microscope kit over at the hobby shop they used to have in town. Their parents had been upset, but he was determined.
And then, after he’d been in Lawrence awhile, he began questioning the Bible story of creation. When he started his graduate degree, their parents learned he’d begun accepting evolutionary theory.
Charmaine gave a strained smile. “Maybe that doesn’t seem shocking to you, but we were raised as Bible Christians. My parents couldn’t talk him out of it. Dad brought Pastor Mulveney to the house to pray over Matt the last time he was home. Matt was respectful, but he said that though he’d never turn his back on Jesus, God gave us brains to use and learn, and what he learned had made him believe the evidence that geology and the stars gave us about the age of the world.
“Matt tried to get Mother and Dad to come to Lawrence, to see the people he was working with, but they said Matt was wrong, he’d turned his back on Jesus, he was damned forever; if they visited him, it would seem like they agreed with him.”
She reac
hed down to pet Peppy, to give herself a little breathing room.
“I can’t tell you how hard a time that was,” she finally went on. “I was four years younger and I followed him around like a duckling when we were growing up. I missed him terribly. My parents tried to forbid me to write to him, but I was nineteen, I was working in the local hardware store and the owner let me get my mail there. I kept his letters.”
She’d brought one of the letters he’d written after that painful Christmas.
Dear Sis,
I’m not trying to run away from you or from Jesus. The deeper I can see in nature, the more wonderful God’s work looks. But He gave us brains and minds for a reason and I can’t ignore what reason teaches me. If I could, I would. I’m so lonely, Sis. My professor who got me my graduate fellowship left to teach at a university in Washington and I’m working in the lab of the department chair, who thinks I’m lower than the dirt on the floor . . .
Poor Matt: condemned by his parents, called an incompetent loser by his thesis adviser. No wonder when he’d found love in Jenny Perec’s arms he’d clung tightly to her.
“Even though I was writing him to tell him I still loved him, I didn’t hear from him after that last summer. It hurt me deeply—I thought he didn’t realize how much he meant to me. I started reading science books so I’d know how he was thinking, and I came to change my own mind about the creation story. I joined the Methodist church, which made our parents furious, and I wrote about it to Matt, but I never heard back from him.”
She swallowed some cold coffee; Simone, looking over, brought a fresh cup without saying anything. “When I got married the next year, my husband, Gardiner, he drove me over so I could talk to the people Matt had been studying with. They told me he’d gone off doing secret work for the government and they didn’t know how to reach him.”
Her mouth was set in that smile you make when you’re trying hard not to cry. “I’m five years older now than my mother was in 1983. Aging changes you, makes you realize how many things are more important than religion or ideology. Or made me realize—I don’t think my mother and father ever realized that. My husband and I lost the farm in 2007, and then I lost my husband to cancer in 2011. I can’t imagine turning away my own children because they believed something different than me, but my mother even burned all the pictures we had of him. I managed to save a few. That picture you put on Facebook, whoever painted that knew him pretty well—it looks just like him, like he did that last Christmas he was home.”
“Did you know he was in love? I think he and his girlfriend had a baby girl, although I’m not a hundred percent sure just yet.”
Charmaine’s eyes widened in her sorrowful face. “A baby? What happened to her? Where are they?”
“I don’t know, but the girlfriend died in a car crash about two months after the baby was born. And I think your brother and the baby died at the same time.”
Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. First Gertrude Perec, then Charmaine Chastain Long. I was having a wonderful effect today on the women around me.
She wept silently, but finally said, “If he’s dead, where was he buried? And the baby?”
I made a face. “I don’t know for sure that he did die, but Jenny—Matt’s girlfriend—was camping out as part of an anti-nuke protest east of Lawrence. A fire swept through their campsite and no remains were found. I’ve heard a rumor that I can’t prove that Matt was there and died at the campsite. It’s possible he survived, although the fact that neither you nor anyone else ever heard from him makes me doubt it. However, about a month ago, someone found part of a baby’s skeleton out where Jenny was camping with the baby. Would you be willing to let me have a DNA sample? It might show whether that baby was Matt and Jenny’s child.”
Charmaine was eager to be tested if it meant learning one concrete thing about her brother, even if it was the difficult news that all that remained of him was part of his dead child’s skeleton. I paid Simone, and drove with Charmaine to a drugstore for another sterile kit.
When we’d paid for the kit, she let me swab her mouth and spelled out her name and address for the label. “If it turns out that baby’s hand belongs to Matt’s child, I want it,” she said. “I’m the little girl’s aunt, she should come home to Belleville with me and be buried with her people.”
That seemed like a fitting request, although I wondered how Gertrude Perec would feel about it. Still, I promised I’d do my best to get the little hand to her.
When I dropped her at her car, she asked for directions to the missile silo. “If that’s where his life ended, I want to see the spot. I want to walk that land.”
“A couple of people out there have died from a rather serious illness recently,” I said. “I can tell you how to find the farm, but it would be best if you didn’t get out of your car. It’s not clear what’s going on, but there’s an old Minuteman Missile silo there, and there might be some contamination.”
When Charmaine had driven off, I texted Aanya to let her know I had another DNA sample to check against the baby. She offered to drive in to Lawrence to collect it—“You have been doing all the errand running so far; now it is my turn. Until I learn whether Dr. Madej has a place for me on his team, I am not having enough to do with my time except to sit and be unhappy.”
I didn’t want to tie myself down to a time and place to meet. I went back into the Hippo and asked Simone if I could leave a package behind the bar for a friend to collect. She agreed, on condition I tell her what had made Deke Everard leave the bar without saying good-bye.
“You going to spread this through the county grapevine?” I asked sourly. “Dr. Hitchcock and Dr. Roque both contracted pneumonic plague, possibly from soil samples out near the old missile silo. The pathologist who did the autopsy thinks there should be a public-health warning, but the sheriff thinks it’s premature until they’re sure they know the source of the infection. The sergeant agrees with the sheriff, I agree with the pathologist.”
Simone took a step back. “This package, does it contain plague germs?”
“This package has zero to do with the plague. It has to do with trying to find the parents of a baby who died thirty-five years ago or so.”
“Connected to Cady,” Simone said.
“Not related to Cady at all, that much I know. Different baby, different daddy.”
I wrote Aanya’s name in black Magic Marker on a paper bag, stuck the box with the DNA sample in it, and borrowed some electrical tape from behind the bar to seal it shut.
Simone tucked the bag in a drawer filled with miscellany—lost glasses and phones, her own shoulder bag, a box of candles. “You ever going to tell me what this is all about?”
“If I ever know for sure what it’s all about, I will definitely tell you.”
53
Date Night at the Movies
Ever since the Cheviot lab removed the malware from my computer, I’d started seeing the Buick Enclave again. It wasn’t definitely on my tail, but it seemed to be where I was too much of the time. I wanted an anonymous car, and I thought I knew where to find one.
I also was worried about Peppy: if someone wanted to push me away from the investigation, all they’d have to do is take Peppy out of Free State Dogs and hold her hostage. But if I went into North Lawrence with her, the invisible poverty-stricken part of town, I could leave her with Nell Albritten and find a beater at one of the scrapyards.
I parked once again in the library lot. I packed my boots and change of clothes into my backpack, pulled my Faraday cage out of the trunk and tucked my devices inside, then walked with Peppy across the bridge, stopping frequently to see if anyone was following on foot. On the north side, I let her run along the river’s edge. No SUVs lingered in the parking area, and no one followed us when we continued on to Nell Albritten’s home.
Albritten greeted us with evident pleasure, stooping to pet Peppy.
I turned down an offer of iced tea. “Ma’am, I wonder if I could leave Pepp
y with you?” I explained my mission. One of the auto wreckers in the area would have a beater I could buy for a few hundred dollars; if my own errands turned dangerous I didn’t want my dog’s life at risk.
“She’d be company for you, too, now that your son and grandson have left.”
Albritten made a wry face. “Bayard called you, asking you to keep an eye on me, didn’t he? Your dog is welcome to stay here for a bit. She’s a sweet girl. She’ll be good company.”
“If anything happens to me, will you call this number in Chicago?” I handed her a note. “Dr. Lotty Herschel will organize someone to come down to collect Peppy, and she’ll also take care of . . . well, anything that needs taking care of.”
“You really are expecting trouble?” she asked.
“It’s all around me. I don’t know why it hasn’t hit me square in the face yet. My guess is the troublemakers haven’t found whatever they were looking for when they went through August’s home and place of work. They keep hoping I’ll find August and lead them to him.”
“Then it’s just as well you haven’t found him. If these villains catch up with you, I or young Bayard Clements will call this doctor of yours, and we’ll look after your dog.”
I gave her a quick embrace, feeling her shoulder bones through her cardigan. “I’d best be on my way if I’m going to get to the yards before they close.”
Albritten grunted again. “I’ll catch heck for this if word gets out, but I don’t share the local view about you. I have a car you can use.”
I didn’t bother asking what the local view was, since I had a pretty good idea.
Albritten reached for a walking stick that was leaning against the TV. “You can fetch me a coat from the closet over there. The navy one.”
She nodded toward her small entryway. I found a navy trench coat in the closet, with a blue silk scarf hanging around the collar, and helped her work her arms into it.
She led me slowly through to the kitchen, where a door opened into a garage. Everything in her home gleamed from polish and cleansers, and that included the garage, where plastic-covered bins stood on brightly painted shelves. In the middle sat a car, a dull-gray Prius. It didn’t have any plates.
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