Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  “The dead woman,” I said, my throat tight. “Did Dr. Roque say what he thought her race was?”

  “No, no. Dr. Roque was only starting the autopsy, and of course everything was going to take twice as long since he had to do all the tech support himself. Oh, why did I not say to hell with state regulations and go with him? I could have gotten him to a hospital as soon as he felt ill. By himself he would never leave the morgue if he felt unwell. His sense of duty was very keen. By the time he fainted, it was too late for medical help.”

  She started to weep again.

  I let her cry into the computer a bit longer but finally asked if she’d told the sheriff’s deputies anything about the dental X-rays.

  “No. They were so rude. They wanted to take apart his office, look at his mail. Rhoda was crying, I was trying not to cry: I would not tell them anything.”

  “Splendid,” I said. “Let’s not tell them yet. They’re being rather annoying, and I don’t feel like helping them. I know you’re tired, but I have one last question. Dr. Roque wrote a letter to McKinnon—at least I think he might have. All I have is the fragment of the envelope with his name on it.”

  I held up the torn scrap for her inspection. “Dr. Roque’s secretary didn’t know anything about it. Do you?”

  Malik frowned in puzzlement for a moment, then said, “Oh, she must have written one of the mold letters!”

  “Mold letters?” I echoed, bewildered.

  She laughed slightly. “I know it sounds crazy. He was in the news about five years ago because one of his autopsies showed a man had killed his mother using toxic black mold. It was in Luray, a tiny town in the middle of the state . . . well, never mind all those details. The lady’s death was called an accident, but a neighbor insisted the son had murdered his mother—he was in financial trouble, and he would inherit the farm when she died.

  “The local sheriff decided to ask the state to perform an autopsy. It was like an episode out of CSI or NCIS—Dr. Roque discovered that the dead woman’s lungs were filled with black mold. He sent KBI investigators to the home, and they discovered that the son had been coating her mattress with it. All the TV stations covered the story. Dr. Roque even was on 60 Minutes.

  “After that, people wrote him from all over the world. They wanted him to prove that this or that person had been poisoned. Sometimes they sent him horrible things, pieces of skin or jars with blood or sputum in them. Rhoda would return everything with a cover letter saying the doctor was a state employee who did not do private work. After a while the letters and things stopped coming.”

  “Doris McKinnon had collected soil samples, I think from land that had been declared contaminated by radiation. I don’t know what happened to the samples, but I wonder if she thought Dr. Roque’s mold experience would qualify him to test soil for radiation.”

  “Yes,” Malik agreed, “but I do not know why she wrote him at home, which she must have done, since Rhoda did not see the letter. Or she e-mailed him. I suppose she could have done that—I can look at his e-mail account.”

  “Do you have a key to Dr. Roque’s house?” I asked. “Could we go there, do you think, and see if we can find anything from McKinnon, maybe even her soil samples?”

  Malik had a key—when the doctor traveled, as he often had, she looked after his houseplants and his cat. She said she’d go over and search. “It will give me something to do, something concrete. Otherwise I will sit here playing what Dr. Roque always said was a loser’s game: ‘should have, would have, could have, did not.’”

  38

  Upscale Housing

  When we’d said our good-byes, I took a minute to look up the mold story and found the 60 Minutes clip. Dr. Roque did well on television—he’d been a Marcus Welby kind of doctor, square-built, with a soothing professional manner that works well with juries. He would have made a good internist, too—his kind, calm manner was wasted on the dead. Or maybe not. The dead deserve kindness as well as the living.

  I realized that someone was standing over me. When I looked up, I was startled to see the head librarian, Phyllis Barrier.

  “Are you still researching property lines?” Barrier asked.

  “Does the town ask you to monitor out-of-state users of your system?” I asked, puzzled by her attention.

  “I like to keep track of all our users. What can we provide that they can’t find on their own computers, I wonder?”

  “My computer is out of commission.” I smiled and got to my feet. “I’m grateful to the library for letting a stranger use one here.”

  She didn’t smile back, but she didn’t try to question me further, just watched me as I walked to the stairs. Perhaps Marlon Pinsen had sent her a National Security Letter, demanding to know what websites I visited. Librarians are not allowed to discuss the receipt of a National Security Letter with anyone, not even their counsel, let alone a Chicago private eye. The longer I stayed in Lawrence, the more beleaguered I felt.

  I sat on a bench in the park across from the library to call Troy Hempel’s mother—I hoped she could help determine whether the body that had disappeared from the morgue might have been Ferring’s.

  “The pathologist who died as he started the autopsy sent her dental X-rays to his technician. The dead woman had two gold teeth. Do you know, did Ms. Ferring—”

  “No. Ms. Emerald had beautiful teeth. Perfect white teeth. What makes you think she’d go around looking like a pimp?”

  “I don’t,” I said wearily. “I just need to make sure we didn’t overlook the possibility that we’d misidentified the dead woman.”

  Ms. Hempel said sharply that my lack of progress in finding Emerald was making her son and all the neighbors—not to mention Ms. Hempel herself—doubt whether I could really do the job.

  “We’re meeting tonight to decide whether to keep you on the job.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Get in touch when you’ve made up your minds.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she bristled.

  “That I’m not going to try to argue with you if you decide to cut me loose. I’m more frustrated than you are, because I’m down here slogging around, finding whiffs of disturbing secrets without turning up any new traces of August Veriden or Ms. Ferring. I want to come home, but I can’t, or won’t, until I get things sorted out in Lawrence.”

  It was private on the park bench, but it was also cold. I drove back to the B and B to shower and then went to Free State Dogs to collect Peppy.

  She’d been a model border, they’d be happy to continue to look after her, but I was feeling anxious and bereft. Peppy was gratifyingly happy to see me as well, twining herself around my legs and making little grunting sounds in the back of her throat. Who needs a bass player when you have a golden retriever? “So there, Jake Thibaut,” I muttered, shepherding Peppy into the Mustang.

  We had a leisurely evening together, a welcome change. I baked a piece of cod in the toaster oven in the B and B’s common room, made a salad, was curled up in the bedroom with a glass of pinot grigio watching Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis fleeing the Chicago mob in drag when one of my burner phones rang.

  “Ms. Warshawski . . . I know it is late—I am sorry, but . . .”

  “Aanya.” I recognized her voice despite her agitation and muted the television. “What’s up?”

  A moment too late, I remembered the transmitter under the desk. Damn and double damn. Maybe the TV masked my saying her name. I took the phone out onto the patio.

  “I’m at Dr. Roque’s, only . . . it is terrible. Someone has broken in, the house, his beautiful orchids, his papers . . . Who would do this?”

  “What were they looking for?” I asked. “Something big or something small?” Small was what intruders had hunted at August’s home and gym. Big, that might mean they were looking for Doris’s soil samples, or Colonel Baggetto’s fuel rods.

  “How can I know that? I only know that the door was locked when I got here. I switched off the burglar alarm, I tu
rned on the lights, and I saw a disaster. And why does it matter, big, small? His computer is gone, that is the only thing I could notice.”

  “Have you called the police?”

  “I called you first, but I will call them, yes, only I do not want to stay here waiting for them. What if these criminals are hiding in the house? What if they attack me?”

  She was in her car, the doors locked. I told her to stay there, and I would meet her as fast as I could. As fast as I could make my tired body move through time and space. I didn’t want to risk leading the sheriff, the colonel, or anyone else to Roque’s house before I had a chance to look at it, which meant no downloading maps or using my phone app. I made Aanya step me through the directions, one exit at a time, read them back to her, and told her to call me if someone approached the house but otherwise to sit tight.

  I was longing for home, but I sure didn’t miss Chicago traffic: it was forty-five miles from the B and B to Roque’s house, but fifty minutes after hanging up I was pulling in behind Aanya’s hybrid. She was parked near a kind of tiny creek or maybe a drainage ditch that snaked through the neighborhood.

  Even under the dim streetlights, it was clear that Roque had lived in a wealthy area—well-kept grounds, large houses set back from the road, most with those little signs announcing their alarm systems. When Peppy and I got out of the Mustang, Aanya opened the door and came toward us on shaky legs.

  “Thank goodness you’re here. And you brought a dog.” She knelt to embrace Peppy, who obligingly sat and licked her nose. “I’m sorry to be a coward, but—”

  “You’re not a coward. You did what you were strong enough to do, which was a lot. I want to see the house for myself anyway, and we need to call the cops as fast as possible.”

  A couple of dogs out for late-night walks barked at Peppy. Their owners lifted a hand in greeting but didn’t try to talk.

  Aanya told me no one had come by to question why she’d been parked out front for an hour. “But the Plaza—it’s a place with restaurants and shops just over there, so probably neighbors pay little attention to strangers as long as people are quiet.”

  She pointed at lights across a tiny creek—shops, restaurants, which I’d only vaguely noticed when I was driving in. As long as Roque’s intruders hadn’t been noisy, the neighbors would have ignored them.

  Aanya didn’t want to go back inside, but I told her I needed her to show me where Dr. Roque had kept his computer and let me see how extensive the disturbance had been.

  Extensive. That would be the word for the damage. It looked like the same hands that had torn apart August’s apartment. I’d asked about big or small, to try to gauge what they were looking for, but that had been an irrelevant question. Or maybe they’d been looking for both big and small.

  I followed Aanya into the room Dr. Roque had used as his home office. It had been a lovely place, I imagined, before wild hands tore it apart. An étagère had held crystals, but these had been dumped, some shattered.

  “Oh, he traveled the world looking for these. I can hardly bear it,” Aanya mourned. “He had a friend in the geology department at the University of Kansas, Professor Hitchcock, who also liked geodes. They used to go to Utah together. They even went to Mongolia once, and to Australia.”

  She was on the floor, trying to put pieces of one back together.

  “You said his computer was gone. What else?”

  “I do not know, I cannot tell. I was never in his private rooms, of course, but you can see there’s an expensive television still sitting, and his stereo.” She put her hands over her eyes, not wanting to look. “And the geodes, they knocked them to the floor but did not take them.”

  There are housebreakers who read the obituaries and stake out houses of the recently dead, but I didn’t imagine we were dealing with that kind of robber: the fact they’d left salable items behind wasn’t a surprise.

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “We can’t do any good here. I’m going to call the cops from my car. You take off. You don’t need to tell them you were here—your fingerprints would be here in any event, since you were the person who tended to things when he traveled.”

  I made one last survey of the room and realized I’d overlooked his phone—so usual an object, even these days with people going exclusively to cell phones, that I hadn’t registered it. Covering my fingers with a tissue, I fiddled with the menu button until I got the registry of the last calls he’d made or received. Three were from the same number in Lawrence.

  Aanya was peering over my shoulder. “That’s from the university.” She opened her own phone. “Yes, that is Dr. Hitchcock. He called me two days ago, when he heard about Dr. Roque.”

  Peppy startled us both with a sudden, sharp bark. Aanya clutched my arm, sucked in a harsh breath. A second later a black-and-white ball of fur streaked across the room and jumped onto the toppled étagère.

  Aanya laughed weakly. “Dinah! How could I be forgetting her? If you take your dog out of the room, I will coax her to me and bring her home.”

  39

  Surprise, Surprise!

  I’d driven over to the Plaza shopping center to call the Kansas City police—late on Saturday night, the bars and streets were crowded, so they wouldn’t bother too much with tracking me down. The burner phone was becoming a liability, though—Aanya and Cady had both called it, and I’d used it with too many of my Chicago clients. I put it under my front tire and ran over it on my way out of town. I had two more, but I’d pick up another couple on Monday.

  It was past midnight when I got back to the B and B, but any hopes I had of falling into bed were destroyed when I reached the walk at the back of the house where my suite was. Peppy gave a sharp, excited bark and raced forward; a small figure emerged from the shadows to embrace her.

  “Vic! Where have you been? I have been calling and calling and calling, and getting only your voice mail.”

  “Bernadine Fouchard, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “But I have come to help, of course. I took the bus, twelve hours—horrible, ma foi, crying babies, men imagining I want a career as a whore—but here I am. You are doing nothing to find August. You are only looking for old women who are dying in rivers.”

  “Tomorrow you will get on the bus to go back to Chicago, horrible or not. It’s hard enough to conduct an investigation in a strange city with a hostile sheriff and a host of other obstacles, but you, my little tornado, will make things a thousand times worse.”

  Bernie’s mouth set in a mulish line. “You are not my mother. You cannot make me do anything.”

  “Right you are. However, I’m sure Arlette agrees with me.”

  I opened the door to my room and took my phone out of its cage. Seven messages from Bernie popped up on the screen: she’d been here half an hour, or at least she’d been phoning me for half an hour.

  It was almost two in the morning in Quebec, and it took Arlette a moment or two to understand what I was saying, but as soon as she did, she was furious. I handed the phone to Bernie

  Her conversation with her mother was in French, which I don’t understand; I could tell that Bernie was annoyed, waving her free arm angrily but able to speak only in fragments because her mother kept cutting her off. Finally Bernie handed the phone back to me.

  Arlette said, “I will be buying an airplane ticket for her. The nearest airport is Kansas City? Bien. I will text you the details in the morning. This child is more trouble than a busful of hockey players. What Pierre will say . . . He is in California this week—the Canadiens are playing the Sharks. Maybe he will stop in Kansas City on his way home and put her in a . . . I don’t know the English word. Une camisole de force.”

  “Whatever it is, I hope he can,” I said. “She can sleep on the foldout bed in my room tonight, and we’ll deal with things in the morning.”

  Bernie was completely unchastened. “Since Mama is so strict, I will of course go back to Chicago, but until then I will make sure that you are doing every
thing possible to find August. By the way, I watched all those videos you gave Angela and me, the ones you found in August’s apartment. There’s one where he interviewed Emerald about her career. There’s nothing on it about why she wanted to come here, just old stuff about Hollywood and being an African-American actor in the seventies and eighties. I brought a copy for you.”

  She fished a data stick from her backpack.

  “This isn’t a justification for your trip,” I said. “You could have e-mailed it to me.”

  “It’s not that interesting anyway. It doesn’t say, ‘We will go to Lawrence and hide beneath the football stadium.’”

  I snatched it from her, angry but wanting to see it for myself. It didn’t, in fact, reveal anything useful. Ferring had one of those classically trained actor’s voices, recognizable from the video in the field but richer on this clip. She was acting for August, telling a dramatic tale of her childhood in Kansas. At the end she held out her hands in a pleading gesture, saying, “I know it’s an imposition, but if you could drive me down, I’d like to go soon.”

  No wonder August had packed up and taken off with her. The tone, the emphasis, made her sound like Violetta or Mimi collapsing from consumption—just one last dance before the end.

  “Where’s Angela?” I asked Bernie when Ferring’s interview had drawn to a close.

  “She was afraid of the demerits for missing practice.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “We don’t practice on Sunday. With my help we can find August before they miss me. You know Uncle Sal would say I should be here.”

  That being Mr. Contreras. At least he was in St. Croix, one small blessing.

  I smiled grimly. “Instead you’re going back to Chicago tomorrow. I will drive you to the airport, even if it means handcuffing you to the floorboards. But for now I’ve had a long, stressful day. It’s my bedtime. You get the chair.”