Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  “Okay, Chicago. You watch your back.”

  “Speaking of that—I left my dog over at Ms. Albritten’s—Pastor Clements wanted me to keep an eye on her and that was the best I could manage.”

  I wondered why Bayard Clements hadn’t approached the two men for guard duty, but as if reading my mind, Lou gave a snort of laughter. “That church parted company with us a long, long time ago. It was in the old pastor’s day, but we found over the years we got on fine without all that fire and judgment. Seemed like the Bible text most churches like best is ‘Judge fast before someone else judges you.’ But we’ll swing by Ms. Nell’s place, make sure she’s looking after your dog, or vice versa.”

  The two men led me up the stairs, checked the yard all around for visitors, escorted me to the barn for the Prius. “Be best if you didn’t turn your lights on until you’re back at the main road.”

  Ed said, “In the dark she’s going to go straight into a ditch. We’ll drive the truck down the hill. You can follow our taillights.”

  They led me as far as the train station, where they turned off to drive by the Albritten house. Having these unexpected allies, street-savvy guys with strong arms, made me feel easier than I had in days. I drove across the bridge and up past the university to Quivira Road, not exactly with a song in my heart and a smile on my lips but ready to face the wrath of the house of Kiel.

  It was seven by the time I got there. I’d had to stop at a grocery store for something to eat—they urge you to take doxycycline with food, and I could see why: swallowing a capsule with a gulp of water had left me with fiery pains along my esophagus and stomach.

  Kiel came to the door himself, a napkin in one hand and a fork in the other. “It’s the dinner hour, or do they eat at midnight where you come from?”

  “I can wait in the hall while you finish,” I offered politely. “I wanted to tell you that I now know why someone has been trying to kill your daughter, first with roofies in her Moscow Mule and then by trying to smother her in the ICU.”

  “She almost died of a drug and alcohol overdose,” he said. “She’s been an addict for decades. Like her mother.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Ever since she saw a soldier shoot your graduate student in the back. Matt was trying to get to Jenny Perec before her dead body was stuffed into her car. It’s not the kind of thing you forget very quickly, especially not when you’re fourteen and everyone around you says you’re crazy, so they can ensure no one listens to you when you tell the truth in public.”

  Kiel stood glassy-eyed, not speaking. Shirley shouted from the back of the house, wanting to know who was at the door. When Kiel didn’t answer, I called, “It’s V.I. Warshawski, Mrs. Kiel, with news about your daughter.”

  I turned back to Kiel. “What story did you tell Gertrude Perec? How did you keep her so loyal to you all these years? Her daughter was killed by the Y. pestis you helped spray around the protest camp. Her granddaughter was dead. You foisted off your own daughter on her—”

  “What are you talking about?” he interrupted, the telltale vein above his right eye acting up. “I never ‘foisted’ Sonia on anyone, more’s the pity.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Cady. You encouraged Gertrude to believe that Cady was Jenny’s baby, but Jenny’s baby died of the plague. Cady was Magda’s baby, but you helped create her. I can step you through the mechanics if you’ve forgotten how.”

  “So she wasn’t lying,” he whispered. “Doris McKinnon called Gertrude from the hospital, saying Lucinda had found Jenny’s baby abandoned in the tent. I thought . . . I— What difference does it make? Lucinda died. I could see she’d been exposed to pestis, not enterocolitica. I couldn’t think about a baby at a time like that, despite what Magda had said.”

  “Is that goddamn home-wrecking cunt still coming around?” Shirley Kiel had appeared in the hall behind her husband, her head bobbing forward, her eyes glittering with alcohol and fury.

  “Don’t talk like that!” Kiel roared. “It’s ugly, it’s cheap, and it makes you—”

  “Magda is dead,” I said.

  Shirley gave a crack of dreadful laughter. “Magda was in another country, and now the wench is dead.”

  “I guess it could seem like a joke, if you were truly perverse enough to laugh at murder. I don’t know if you’re a born sociopath or if you’ve spent so many years battling your husband that you no longer know what you’re saying or feeling. Maybe that’s the same as being a sociopath.”

  Shirley put a hand to her face, as if I’d slapped her. “That’s not true! That’s not fair.”

  “I’m way beyond what’s fair. Fair would have meant you paying serious attention to your daughter when she was fourteen and making herself sick with longing over Matt Chastain. You couldn’t have stopped his murder, nor that of Jenny Perec, but you could have protected your child from seeing those sights.”

  I felt a vein throbbing in my own forehead, my neck, too, and tried to steady myself. “What brought Magda back to Kansas this time, Dr. Kiel? Something to do with pestis, I assume, since Dr. Roque was infected with it and Dr. Hitchcock is fighting for his life.”

  He kept staring at me.

  “Magda must have called you,” I said. “Was she still bitter so many years later? After all, you sacrificed her to protect your research reputation.”

  “Yes, she called.” He spoke in a hoarse whisper. “So many years had passed I’d begun to think I could live out my days in peace, without hearing from her again.”

  “What did she want from you?” I demanded.

  “To taunt me, of course. She wanted me to know she could undo my career at any second with a phone call.”

  “What? To reveal your role in spreading pestis around the missile base?”

  He nodded fractionally.

  “Out of curiosity, not that it matters now, what actually happened? Why did you spray the camp?”

  “It was a way of testing diffusion,” Kiel said.

  As soon as he started explaining himself, his voice became stronger.

  He’d been working on Y. enterocolitica with army research grants. “Only for help in developing vaccines and other antidotes,” Kiel added sharply. “I was hopeful that we could use enterocolitica in a fashion similar to Jenner using cowpox for the original smallpox vaccines.”

  The Department of Defense had carried out tests of airborne organisms in other locations; they thought rural Douglas County would make a good test site. And yes, Kiel admitted, it was a way of getting the last of the protesters off the missile base.

  “I worked with the air force team to check the prevailing winds on the day we seeded the land. We mapped it all out, we knew which communities might be affected. After that, I started monitoring hospital admissions through the state’s public-health department. I expected to see a spike in GI symptoms. Then two people died of pneumonia; their families described the onset and the symptoms and I knew what I was looking at. I asked Magda. She blamed Matt and I was willing to believe her; he was constantly making mistakes in the lab. I alerted the air force. We got to the camp and they found Jenny, they shot Matt. They told me my career was over if I ever spoke about what had happened.”

  “Those pesky careers, they take a lot of care and feeding.” My throat was tight; I could barely squeeze out the words. “When did you realize that Sonia was there?”

  “How did you know she was there?” Kiel demanded.

  “The film the air force was making of your test; I’ve watched it. Sonia’s in it.”

  He didn’t react to news of the film; his mind was absorbed by the events themselves. “Sonia . . . she’d been embarrassing me for months with her infatuation for Matt. Gertrude told me Sonia had been lurking around Jenny’s tent off and on all summer, spying on Jenny and Matt. When we went out to prepare to burn the field, I found her—it was grotesque.”

  He made a gesture of disgust and turned his face away.

  “She was lying next to Matt?” I asked. “He was dead, and she
had his T-shirt on?”

  “It was revolting. The soldiers who’d come out to do the burn saved her. A day hasn’t gone by when I wished—” He cut himself off, realizing what he was about to say.

  “Comfort yourself. Sonia also wishes she’d died that day. Why do you think she drugs herself? She wishes she could unsee everything you caused her to see.”

  “It wasn’t my doing,” he said angrily. “It was Matt, in his stupidity, letting Magda change the specimens on him.”

  “Nate is never responsible for anything that goes wrong.” Shirley had been standing silent in the shadows behind her husband; her gibe startled me, but I stopped Kiel from snapping his own insult back at her.

  “Why was Magda’s baby in the tent? Why didn’t she get the plague? Or get incinerated?”

  He rubbed his forehead. “Magda knew I didn’t want another child. She knew I wasn’t going to leave my wife and marry her. Trade one harridan for another? I don’t think so. Maybe she put the infant in Jennifer’s tent to die, or maybe she thought it would be rescued. When Doris called from the hospital that day, I assumed it was Jenny’s baby, miraculously saved.”

  The monstrous nature of his acts, and of Magda’s, turned my legs weak. I had to clutch the doorjamb to keep from collapsing at his feet. Count ten, exhale, center yourself, there’s more to ask.

  “What brought Magda back to Kansas after all this time?”

  “My evil daemon. You can’t escape your fate. The Greeks knew that, but I never took it seriously until that army colonel showed up asking about her.”

  “Baggetto,” I said. “Matt Chastain’s sister came to me today. Do you know that his family cut him off because he was doing a biology degree and he’d come to accept evolutionary theory over biblical literalism? Do you know he’d been accepted into one of your colleagues’ labs but he had to work for you because his mentor left for Seattle? You thought he was clumsy, but he was a boy who’d been in love with science since childhood.

  “You take up so much space in the room that no one can breathe around you. You beat Matt down, you stood by while your older daughter collapsed, you let Magda Spirova sacrifice your infant daughter. You got yourself a pet psychiatrist who was willing to say Sonia was delusional and keep her endlessly medicated so you wouldn’t have to think about that horror story in the camp.

  “There’s only one useful thing you can do right now: Call your pals, Baggetto, Roswell, the guy calling himself Pinsen. Tell them that by this time tomorrow the whole world is going to have a chance to view that air force film. They can stop hunting for August Veriden and Emerald Ferring. They can leave Sonia alone.”

  55

  Men in Black

  My legs barely held me as I walked to August’s car. I wanted to see Baggetto, I wanted to tell him I knew his fuel-rod story was bogus, I wanted to find out what Spirova had been doing in Sea-2-Sea’s fields, but I had no strength left in me.

  I drove slowly to the B and B. Pierre should be there by now. I would pack Bernie into his car and then collapse into sleep.

  When I pulled into the parking space at the back, my suite was dark. I felt a pricking at the base of my neck. Ambush? I edged into the room, flipped on a light. No one was there, but Bernie’s backpack was on the foldout bed.

  I removed my smartphone from the Faraday pack, fingers thick with fear.

  papa’s plane made an emergency landing in denver. he won’t get here until ten, Bernie had texted. cady wants to go out to a farm near a missile silo, and i think that is where august and emerald are, so i am going with her.

  I called Bernie. “Are you with Cady? Are you already at the silo? Don’t go in there—it’s dangerous.”

  “You are only saying that because you have been too busy finding dead women to explore the only logical place where August could be.”

  “Bernie—it’s not the only logical place. There are places in Lawrence that are much more likely—”

  “Vic, I know you. I know you argue only to get your own way. I am with Cady. We can look after each other without a big sister on top of us.”

  She cut the connection. I called back but got voice mail. I tried Cady, but she didn’t answer either.

  Fury and fear washed through me. My body was so tired I could barely move, let alone think, but I needed to do both.

  I got up and staggered into the bathroom, stuck my head under the shower to bring on a semblance of consciousness, put on a dry, clean sweater and pulled on my boots. My night-vision binoculars were in my Mustang at the library lot. So was my gun. They’d have to stay there.

  I looked around for Peppy. It took me a minute to remember I’d left her at Nell Albritten’s. My trip to North Lawrence, the film screening with Ed and Lou—those seemed to have taken place back in the Jurassic. Jake, my angry lover; Lotty, Mr. Contreras, Sal—all my Chicago friends felt even more remote than that.

  I tried Cady and Bernie again before getting into the car but still just got their voice mail. My only hope of reaching them before Bram Roswell or the sheriff showed up lay in surprise. I tucked my phone back into its cage and took off. I circled the side streets until I was sure I was clean and then headed east, slowing at traffic lights but going through on the red.

  Once I was clear of town, I pushed the accelerator up to seventy, bouncing in the ruts, pebbles dinging the sides of the car. East Fifteenth Street to the open country, south to Doris McKinnon’s farmhouse, where I tucked the Prius inside her barn.

  The direct route to the silo was across fields, but I wasn’t about to attempt that at night, even with a full moon.

  My boots crunched on the gravel. Around me, creatures slithered, twittered, rustled through dead leaves. Rats, badgers, owls—I wished I could be sure that was all I was hearing. Every swaying bush or dead cornstalk turned into a soldier training a nightscope on me, or Spirova’s friends with aerosol cans of plague.

  When I’m this frightened, I usually sing, but I didn’t want to advertise myself. Breathe, Victoria. My mother’s voice sounded in my head. Relax, carissima, and breathe. Naturalmente sembri un topo strozzato. Of course you sound like a strangled mouse—you are not letting your body have any oxygen!

  Right, Gabriella. Deep breaths, down to my belly. Those breaths were one of your many gifts to me.

  I’d reached the road to the silo. I stood still, squinting at the fields. A solitary spotlight on top of the silo’s front gates showed a small car parked nearby. I went over to it and risked switching on my flashlight. No one was inside, but Reporters Cover American History: Teacher’s Guide was on the passenger seat.

  I squatted on McKinnon’s side of the fence, trying to see any signs of motion in the field beyond or any darker shapes against the dark earth.

  “Cady!” I called softly. “Bernie! It’s V.I.”

  I called again but got no response. I walked back to the silo and shone my flash again through the padlocked front gates. Nothing was parked outside the heavy silo entrance. I slid through the same gap in the fence I’d used last week. Crossed the silo grounds at a cautious trot. Came to the place where the compound abutted Sea-2-Sea’s land.

  “Cady! Bernie!” I called again. “It’s V.I. Warshawski. I can’t see you. If you’re in the field, tell me the way past the alarms.”

  No answer. I turned around, uneasy, listening for . . . I didn’t know what. Had the two women gone to Sea-2-Sea’s headquarters on foot, without Cady’s car? If they’d been seized . . . I needed to go to Sea-2-Sea myself.

  I skirted the back of the silo buildings, heading toward the county road on the west side of the complex, but stopped abruptly: lights were seeping through the black paint on the windows of the old launch-control support building. It came from the section where the launch crews had worked and slept.

  I hadn’t tried to get past the locked door to the support building when I was here before. I’d noticed that the lock was new and put it down to either meth makers keeping out the sheriff, or the sheriff and the air force trying
to keep out meth makers. I swore silently: I should have been more diligent in my exploring.

  I moved as silently as my boots would allow, up to the windows and through a crack in the paint. I could see a chair arm, the corner of a table, a man’s hand chopping up and down as he made a serious point, but not the whole picture. I walked over to the entrance. The padlock had been removed; the door opened easily, silently, hinges and doorframe well oiled and planed.

  As soon as I was inside, I heard their voices coming from the end of the hall. They were arguing. Baggetto was speaking, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  I walked down the hall, through the open door to the team meeting.

  “I don’t care what Kiel wants—”

  Bram Roswell stopped in midsentence. Baggetto and AKA Pinsen were with him; all three stared at me as if I were an octopus who’d landed on a Ferris wheel.

  “We wondered where you were, Ms. Warshawski,” the colonel said. “You come and go, and sometimes you’re very public about it and sometimes not so much so.”

  “It’s always flattering to be missed,” I said. “I wondered how sophisticated your surveillance might be. How did the peanut butter affect your remote mike?”

  “Peanut butter!” the colonel said. “Was that the sound like sawing wood?”

  I grinned, a savage rictus. “That was my dog licking it off. I hope she shorted the circuits. This seems like an uncomfortable place to meet, when you have the Oregon Trail Hotel close by. Or are you trying to restart the Minuteman program? The best place to do that would certainly be where a missile silo already exists.”

  “What we’re trying to do is none of your business,” Roswell said.

  “That depends, of course, on what it is,” I replied. “If this is a weekly poker game and you’re hiding your winnings from your spouses or Uncle Sam, you’re right—nothing to do with me. On the other hand, if you’re releasing Y. pestis into the air and soil, it’s the business of everyone in this county. In the whole country, really.”