Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  Sheriff Gisborne had to agree he had no real grounds for my arrest. He grudgingly admitted that I couldn’t have driven Doris McKinnon’s truck off the road.

  “Is there anything to suggest that Ms. Warshawski shot the dead woman?” Thelma Katz asked.

  “Warshawski showing up like that—” Gisborne began.

  “Forensic evidence, Sheriff. Anything to connect the bullet to Warshawski? Anything to show she could have driven the truck there or forced the victim to drive the truck there before shooting her?”

  “We haven’t fully processed the scene,” Gisborne grumbled.

  “Then get to work on that. Ms. Warshawski, what made you go down to the river in the first place? Assuming you weren’t checking to see if your murder victim was still there.”

  “I saw tire tracks and broken branches and wondered if someone was in trouble.”

  Thelma made a note on the pad of paper in front of her. “That was an admirable Good Samaritan act, but when you found the truck with a dead woman in it, why did you open the door instead of calling 911?”

  “I didn’t know she was dead, Your Honor. I hoped she might be alive and that I could help her.”

  “Thelma!” Gisborne interrupted. “This is a private investigator from Chicago. She’s familiar with crime scenes, she’s seen dead bodies. She’s been interfering with investigations ever since she came to town.”

  “Ken, this is a courtroom, not the Rock Chalk Pub. Let’s pretend you didn’t play high-school football with my father and follow normal protocol.”

  Gisborne turned red but subsided. Luella stepped forward to sort out what I should or shouldn’t have done; she said that far from interfering with investigations I had saved Sonia Kiel’s and Naomi Wissenhurst’s lives. Thelma got the DA to vacate the arrest. Somehow I ended up with a two-hundred-dollar fine—I think for stupidity, although that isn’t what they wrote on the form.

  When we finished, Luella stayed behind to chat with Thelma—it wasn’t a courtroom anymore, apparently, even if it wasn’t the Rock Chalk Pub. Gisborne didn’t try to join them—one of his deputies came into the room and muttered something that made the sheriff stride to the exit, with nothing but a malevolent glance for me.

  I brought my forms over to the cashier, wondering how big a bite Luella’s bill would take from my budget. Standing in line behind people paying traffic fines, court-ordered child support, penalties for littering, tampering with crime scenes, I felt too tired to go on. One never sleeps well in jail, no matter how splendid the accommodations, but I was tired down to my bones.

  I was tired of cleaning up the sad detritus of other people’s lives, tired of arguing with government agents, tired of trying to imagine why decent lawmen, as Sheriff Gisborne reportedly was, suddenly began acting as shills for the army or big corporations. Money had changed hands, or threats had changed ears—it was always the same story, and I was tired of reading it. No wonder Jake was fed up with me: I was fed up with myself.

  When I’d handed over my credit card and signed on all the appropriate lines, I collapsed onto the nearest bench. My hair felt filthy, and my good jacket needed cleaning. I could smell my own body, and it wasn’t enticing.

  One of the clerks tapped me on the shoulder. “You okay, miss?”

  I jerked awake and managed a ghastly smile. I was fine—in which case there was no loitering.

  I pushed myself upright and headed for the exit, where I stopped abruptly. Colonel Baggetto, AKA Pinsen, and the sheriff were having an intense conversation in the middle of the hall.

  The woman behind me, with two toddlers in tow, ran into me and shouted angrily.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting to see my ex here.”

  “You still need to watch where you’re going,” she said, but less belligerently: running into an ex is never pleasant.

  The deputies and clerks were eyeing the sheriff and his cohort overtly, but the trio had picked a strategic spot where they could see anyone who was trying to eavesdrop and they were far enough away that only a skilled lip-reader could make out their words. One of the many skills TV detectives have that I lack.

  I paused a moment, but I was no more successful than the clerks in deciphering the conversation. I walked over to the men and smiled sunnily, or at least tried to, despite my fatigue-fogged brain.

  “Warshawski!” The colonel tried to act nonchalant. “What are you doing here?”

  “Recovering from a night in the Douglas County Jail. Paying my fine so I can return to society without a blemish on my character. The sheriff here can tell you all about it. How about you? They must miss you over at Fort Riley.”

  Gisborne and Pinsen were giving me those glassy looks that tell you you were a topic of their conversation, but Baggetto had easier social skills; he smiled genially and said, “It’s good for all relationships to have some space now and then.”

  “Any luck with your canister?” I asked.

  “You had plenty of time to remove it from the truck before we found you,” Gisborne said.

  “People tell me you’ve been a good sheriff here,” I said. “I can’t believe you didn’t inspect my car before my lawyer got there to demand a warrant. Which leads me to another question: How did you know I was at the riverbank?”

  Gisborne scanned the lobby, as if it would give him an answer. “Someone phoned to report suspicious activity.”

  “Someone saw suspicious activity around a half-submerged truck hidden under shrubs? It’s not visible from the road. You can do better than that, Sheriff.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” His jaw jutted out at an ominous angle. “That’s a working farm up above. Someone could have seen you.”

  “Someone could have, but that doesn’t mean they did.” I pulled my phone from my pocket. “Look at your smart devices to see what data you’ve got from the trackers you’ve put on me. They’ll tell you why you’re gathered at the river.”

  Gisborne and Pinsen both reached for their phones, but Baggetto shook his head. “She’s goading you, Marlon. Don’t let it get to you.”

  “No one’s told me you’ve been a good detective,” Gisborne said to me. His voice was thick, as if someone had stuffed mashed potatoes against his tonsils. “You think you’re funny, and you’re not, so I don’t see you making a living doing stand-up. In fact, I don’t see you doing anything that jumps out as special. Unless you did shoot Doris McKinnon and figured out a clever way to cover it up.”

  “I’m hoping I can learn from you,” I said earnestly. “Say, for instance, about Doris McKinnon. I thought her body disappeared from the morgue before Dr. Roque’s backup could perform the autopsy. How do you know there was a bullet in her head? She was pretty badly damaged when I found her. I couldn’t tell she’d been shot.”

  The three men stood as though a taxidermist had suddenly squirted them full of formaldehyde. Pinsen recovered fastest.

  “The woman in McKinnon’s truck, that’s what he meant,” Pinsen said quickly.

  “Everyone here has been wondering what you guys had on your minds that was so secret.” I gestured at the county employees, who’d been joined by a good half-dozen members of the public. “I’m betting you just realized it was Doris McKinnon in her truck, which raises a truly interesting question: Who was lying dead on her kitchen floor last week?”

  Gisborne jumped on that like a flea on Peppy. If I knew it was McKinnon in the truck, then my protestations of stumbling on the truck by accident were exactly what he’d said all along, a smoke screen to cover up the fact that I’d killed her.

  “I can take this to Thelma Katz and get her to reopen the inquiry,” he threatened.

  “My attorney is still talking to Ms. Katz.” I made myself sound eager to assist, not confrontational. “She could help you and Ms. Katz sort out whether you have grounds for a warrant.”

  Pinsen quacked that national security wasn’t something we should talk about, let alone joke about, in an open atrium. If it turned out t
hat Homeland wanted to question me, they wouldn’t need a warrant.

  “Is that who you work for?” I asked. “I thought it was the army college.”

  “Look, Ms. Warshawski.” Baggetto gave a sympathetic smile. “I can imagine how it must feel to you, our coming on so strong. But you know what’s at stake. If you know something else about the woman in the truck—if you spotted something out of the ordinary yesterday—”

  “A truck nose-down in a creek always seems unusual to me, but that’s probably because I’m so ignorant about life in the country. Maybe drunk or methed-up drivers go into the Wakarusa every day of the week and twice on Sundays. But if there was anything else weird, the sheriff’s people have had plenty of time to sort it out. You talk to Gisborne here, see what his deputies found at the scene and in my car. Hasta la próxima, Colonel, Sheriff, Mr. Homeland Army College.”

  I half expected one of them to stop me when I headed for the exit, but Gisborne only turned to his underlings, demanding once again to know what work wasn’t getting done.

  I was ravenous, and I badly wanted my dog. Also a shower, but I needed new clothes—I didn’t want to have to put back on the things I’d worn in prison and in court. Everything back at the B and B needed washing or cleaning after slogging around the rain and mud of Douglas County this past week.

  When I stopped for a coffee at the Hippo, Simone advised me on a place that would carry clothes women my age might wear—most of the shops in town catered to the college kids. After a detour for a cheese sandwich at the bakery where I’d had lunch yesterday, I went to a shop called On the Town, where I found a well-cut jacket, a new pair of jeans, and a few knit tops.

  37

  Twenty-Four-Karat Smile

  On my way to the B and B to shower, I dropped my travel-worn clothes at a dry cleaners. Going through the pockets to make sure I wasn’t also leaving keys or earrings, I found the torn corner of an envelope.

  Francis Roque, M.

  Forensic Pathol

  5026 Sunset

  Kansas Cit

  I stared at it. Dr. Roque was the pathologist who’d died—was it two days ago?—of flu. Why was an envelope with his name in my— And then I remembered: I’d removed it from Doris McKinnon’s hand yesterday afternoon. An oddity I definitely was not going to mention to the three musketeers.

  “When do you want these back, honey?”

  The “honey” was laced with impatience; it was the third time the woman at the counter had asked me that question. In the hope things might wind up quickly enough for me to leave Lawrence soon, I chose second-day service.

  Back in my car, I continued to look at the envelope fragment while I ate my sandwich. Dr. Roque had written to Doris McKinnon. Why? That was easy: because she’d written him. Maybe her last cow had died and she wanted an autopsy, but I was betting she had soil samples she wanted tested.

  I started to pull out my computer to look up Dr. Roque but remembered in time that nothing I did online was private right now, not until the Cheviot lab could confidently say they’d removed all the spyware from my devices. I drove over to the library to use their computers.

  Francis Roque, M.D., had been the chief medical examiner at the Kansas Bureau of Investigation in Topeka, but he also taught pathology at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Kansas City. He’d lived in Kansas City, close to the medical school, not in Topeka where the KBI offices were. A widower, he lived alone, his two grown children in Texas and Florida.

  He’d been twenty years younger than Doris McKinnon, so they hadn’t gone to school together, but she must have had some kind of personal connection to him: she was worried about what was happening on her land; she wouldn’t have just pulled a name out of a phone book.

  After thinking over my meager contacts in the area, I called Barbara Rutledge again, using one of my burner phones. Before I could ask about Roque, Rutledge thanked me for letting her know about Nell Albritten’s collapse: it was a help to building bridges in Lawrence for Barbara and other Riverdale members to bring her casseroles as they would if someone at Riverside took sick.

  Ms. Albritten had seemed in good spirits when Barbara visited. Albritten’s son and daughter-in-law were staying with her until she was fully recovered. Her pastor, Reverend Clements, came regularly to sit with her, as did other members of the St. Silas family, along with Reverend Weld, Riverside’s chief pastor.

  I felt guilty—I’d forgotten Albritten in the rush of other activities, like going to jail—but when Rutledge came to a halt, I asked her if she knew of any connection between Doris McKinnon and Dr. Roque.

  “Roque? Oh. The pathologist who died while he was doing Doris’s autopsy. I didn’t know Doris well, but I could make a few calls.”

  I started to ask her to keep my query to herself but realized it was hopeless—everyone talked to everyone here, and I was a high-profile stranger. Of course she wouldn’t keep it to herself. I gave Barbara the number of one of the burner phones and used another to call Dr. Roque’s office in Kansas City. He’d written McKinnon from his home address, not the KBI, so I was guessing his KC staff would be more likely than the state people to know why he’d written her.

  Although it was Saturday, Roque’s secretary was in the office. Her voice was thick with weeping.

  Dr. Roque had been a great man, a great doctor, charitable, witty but never cruel. She didn’t know how they would go on without him. She recognized McKinnon’s name—Dr. Roque had been about to start the autopsy when he was suddenly taken sick—but she didn’t remember handling any correspondence with McKinnon. When I said all I had was an envelope addressed to McKinnon with his home address on it, she couldn’t help me, but she was struck by the coincidence.

  “That’s so strange, him writing to her and then getting her body to work on. That’s just bizarre, but he didn’t say word one to me. Talk to his lab tech—if it was some weird question, he might have mentioned it to Aanya when they were in the lab together.”

  Like the secretary, Aanya Malik was grief-stricken. “I owe everything to Dr. Roque. He helped me get my green card, my education, everything. When my sister ran away from a forced marriage, he helped me bring her to Kansas City so she would not be shot by my uncles. I know we will go on, but I don’t know how.” Malik spoke idiomatic English, overlaid with a South Asian accent that was sometimes hard to understand.

  I murmured those phrases we always use, even though they seem empty in the face of great loss. After a few minutes, Malik tried to pull herself together.

  “You said you were a detective. I know the police have come from Lawrence and gone through Dr. Roque’s files. Even someone from the army has come. Is that why you are calling? If you think he did anything wrong, I will tell you personally that—”

  “No, no. I’m not with the police, I’m private.” I repeated my story, which seemed to be getting as long as the Odyssey. I tried to keep it concise but included my conflicts with the sheriff and my fears about the colonel in the hopes that would make her feel she could trust me.

  When she decided to risk talking to me, we had to do it through Skype, so she could see my face; she needed to be sure I was who I said I was, not someone in a government office with a soothing voice tricking her into talking about Dr. Roque.

  I set up a temporary Skype account on the library server and let Malik see me against the background of the library’s computer room. “Someone, either the sheriff or the army, has planted malware on my own computer, so I have to use public ones.”

  Malik herself was in her home, sitting on a couch in what I judged was her living room. She was young, perhaps thirty, hair cut short around a narrow face, dark eyes rimmed red from weeping.

  “Of course I remember Doris McKinnon. That was the woman Dr. Roque was starting to work on when he collapsed. He dictated his preliminary notes, which came to me: the budget cuts in the state have left him—had left him,” she corrected herself mournfully, “short-staffed at the KBI lab, so I often typed his autop
sy notes for him.”

  “Were you there when the body disappeared?”

  “Not with him: I am not—was not—allowed in the Topeka lab because I do not work for the state: my salary is paid by the doctor’s research grants. However, his dictation came to me through a conferencing app, so I know exactly what he said.

  “He was puzzled indeed by what he was seeing. He did not believe that the body could belong to Ms. McKinnon, because she was old, perhaps ninety. The woman he was examining was also old, but she was closer to his own age, around seventy. He also was puzzled by her teeth, so he sent me the X-rays—he took those before he started the actual autopsy, that and he took scrapings from the fingernails.”

  Malik fiddled with her computer and sent me a copy of the jaw X-rays. “He had to take those himself because there was no lab tech available in Topeka that day. The state budget cuts mean the techs can only work twenty hours a week. The dead woman’s teeth were bad—she had not seen a dentist probably for many years. Another thing also was strange: some of the dental work Dr. Roque thought had been done in Eastern Europe or possibly Greece. When he sent me the X-rays, he asked if I could do some deeper research on them.”

  I looked at the X-rays, but they told me nothing, except that there were teeth involved. “What did you find?”

  “I did not look,” she said. “I heard Dr. Roque gasping for air, I heard his body fall. I was sixty-five miles away and terrified; I called the guard at the state lab and finally he looked at his monitor and saw the doctor on the floor. If only he had been more alert—! But in any event, Dr. Roque was hospitalized, the dead woman’s body disappeared, I did not know if there was any point. However, I see she had two old gold teeth with a great deal of decay underneath.” Malik pointed at two of the teeth, an upper molar and a bottom front tooth.

  “These weren’t American crowns, which are usually porcelain with gold inlays. They were gold that you see flashing when the person smiles. Dr. Roque said that was typically Eastern European.”

  My stomach twisted: I’ve seen gold teeth in Chicago—some South Side dentists used to make them. And someone closer to Roque’s age than to McKinnon’s—that description fit Emerald Ferring.