Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  “I was already out here in Maine, at Bowdoin. My brother, Larry, he’s two years older than me, he was at Reed in Oregon. Neither of us wanted to spend our vacations at home, and we were young—we didn’t care about anything except our own issues, so we didn’t know what Sonia was going through. I got a garbled story from my mother: she was sure Sonia was making things up to grab attention, and she was angry about some woman my dad had invited to his lab from Europe—Barcelona, maybe—but she didn’t talk about any of Dad’s students.”

  When I told him about this morning’s attack, he was shocked. “Will she survive? Should we come out?”

  I said I didn’t know, that I’d get back to him when I had more news.

  “Poor little bear,” he said. “Tell her I love her.”

  Larry, who was hiking outside Portland with his two children, knew even less about his sister’s adolescent history than Stuart, but his description of their mother was similar.

  “She was angry all the time after Sonia was born. Up to then she’d been normal some of the time. I mean, she sometimes had the interactions with Stu and me that I see my wife doing with our kids: Did you hurt yourself when you fell? What happened at school today? After Sonia was born, Mom checked out for good. She seemed to want us all to look after her, and she didn’t pay much attention to the baby. I remember her screaming at Dad all through the pregnancy: What about her life? She wasn’t dealing with any more kids. He could stay home from the lab a few nights a week to help out. I was eight, Stuart was six—you can imagine what that was like.”

  I grunted agreement. I’d met Shirley and Nate. I could picture it.

  “Made me nervous as hell about having any kids of my own, put it off until I was almost fifty. Poor little polar bear, though. Tell her I love her.”

  “Polar bear?” I echoed. “Your brother called her ‘little bear.’”

  “It was our nickname,” Larry said. “She had a white bear winter suit when she was three or four, and she loved wearing it. When we got home from school, she’d meet us at the door growling and beg for a raw seal. We’d cut up an apple and pretend it was a seal and let her hunt for it. Maybe it was the only time we were all happy together.”

  Like his brother, Larry asked me to tell him as soon as I knew Sonia’s condition. Like his brother, Larry knew nothing about Matt Chastain or the experiment, but he did remember Shirley screaming at Kiel about the European woman.

  “Bratislava, not Barcelona,” he said. “Dad went to some conference in Czechoslovakia about his bug, not sure when. He was always jetting around the world—summer institutes in Aspen, meetings with the army at Fort Detrick, conferences in Europe. He was a big noise in his field, and he loved being the center of attention.

  “Anyway, a couple of years after he went to that particular jamboree, this woman showed up. I was counting the hours until I could leave for college, and I was spending as little time at home as possible, so I don’t remember too much about it, just my mother’s histrionics—drunk, sobbing, yelling, throwing things—and Dad screaming back at her.”

  He was silent, revisiting a place he hadn’t liked to begin with.

  “Looking back, I think Dad and this woman had slept together at the conference and she thought it was love, but he’s tightly wound, and he didn’t know what to do with her when she showed up. What a fuckup all that was. I was practically weeping with the need to get away from it. I haven’t been back to Kansas since, but I’m sorry for the poor polar bear: Stu and I shouldn’t have left her to fend for herself all those years.”

  He couldn’t remember the woman’s name or if she’d had gold teeth. When he finished, I curled up on the seat next to Peppy, letting her warmth comfort me. I finally uncoiled myself and returned to the ICU.

  Tricia Polanco was still on the ward, but the ICU receptionist paged her for me. Polanco came out to tell me they’d been able to restart Sonia’s heart but had once more put her into a protective coma until her systems became stable.

  “That wasn’t either of her brothers who did this,” I said. “I spoke with both of them while you were in with Sonia.”

  I’d snapped a picture of AKA Pinsen with Baggetto, Kiel, and Bram when I saw them at the hotel bar last week. The lighting was poor, but you could make out the faces.

  “Was the guy one of these?”

  She squinted at my phone but shook her head. “Sonia’s brothers are both around fifty, I knew that, and the man who came here was about that age. He did look a little like this one, though—”

  She tapped Pinsen’s face with a fingernail. “Bland, I mean, nothing special, but it wasn’t this man. He made me think military—the muscles, the way he walked.”

  She fiddled with the edges of my phone, then finally said, “We found a fabric thread in her nose, so it definitely was someone trying to kill her.”

  Poor little polar bear indeed.

  41

  You’re So Ignorant

  By the time I finished with Tricia Polanco, I was longing for solitude—so much so that when I saw Sergeant Everard getting out of his car as I was leaving the hospital, I ducked back inside and left through a different exit. Just like Sonia’s assailant.

  Bernie’s presence in town made my nerve endings vibrate with the intensity of the Riverside Church organ. I didn’t think I could bear to spend an afternoon with her, but I couldn’t leave her on her own. However, when I called, she said Cady was showing her around and she’d meet me at suppertime.

  I didn’t bother to ask if they were going out to look at the Sea-2-Sea experimental farm—I didn’t want to know; I only wanted time alone. I changed into my running shoes, collected a picnic, and crossed the river on foot so that my long-suffering dog could have an energetic afternoon along the river bottom. The sun had come out, a pallid late-year sun, but it warmed the air and helped improve my mood.

  While Peppy explored, I found a wide rock where I could go through my case notes and plan my next steps. And eat. Lentil soup, still warm in its lined carton, bread and goat cheese. I was, if not happy, at least content.

  Before leaving the ICU, I’d asked Polanco if anyone had notified the Kiels about the attempt on their daughter. She said the nurses had agreed that that was the job of the ICU attending, Dr. Cordley, who’d been one of Kiel’s students. Not that we expect them to respond, she’d added.

  Nor did I, but I wanted to talk to them about the woman from Bratislava or Barcelona or wherever. Hers might be the body that had disappeared from the morgue after Dr. Roque collapsed on the autopsy-room floor—although it was funny that no one had mentioned her until now. Maybe not, though—I hadn’t been talking to anyone in Kiel’s lab. The separation between university and town could easily mean the populations didn’t know each other.

  What would get either Shirley or Nate Kiel to tell me Ms. Bratislava’s name and where they’d last seen her?

  I thought of Stuart and Larry Kiel telling me how furious their mother had been over Bratislava’s appearance thirty years ago. I wondered if Shirley had come upon the woman unexpectedly and murdered her in a fit of fury. It was hard to imagine keeping rage at a white-hot pitch for so many years, but a sudden encounter might have startled Shirley into acting. Although what would have brought both women out to the McKinnon farm at the same time?

  I decided to call Edward Hitchcock, the geologist who’d gone geode hunting with Dr. Roque: he’d tried phoning the pathologist several times right before his death. Maybe it was only to arrange another geode-hunting expedition, but perhaps Roque had consulted his old friend about Doris McKinnon’s soil samples.

  The phone rang unanswered, no voice mail or machine. I had only Hitchcock’s office number, not his cell, and I didn’t want to risk giving away his identity to whoever might be reading my files by going into my subscription databases.

  I reclined on the rock, my backpack as a pillow, and watched the swallows swooping and rising among the gulls. It was twenty degrees warmer here than in Chicago, my weather a
pp told me: not an inducement to move to Kansas, but enough to warm the rock and bring a few insects out.

  Dr. Roque’s death had been very convenient for whoever wanted Bratislava’s body. A sudden collapse from a virulent flu—could that have been engineered? Would Colonel Baggetto, for instance, have sneaked into the lab and stabbed Roque with a needleful of a mysterious drug or bug?

  I imagined them struggling, the needle dropping, Dr. Roque dying a hideous death while the colonel straightened his medals and gave a loud, sinister laugh. It was ludicrous: I could only see it as cartoon panels, Wonder Woman versus Cheetah, Superman against Lex Luthor. Anyway, Aanya Malik was listening to Dr. Roque’s dictation. If he’d had his mike on, then she would have overheard a struggle.

  On the other hand—had Roque been sick already when he drove to Topeka on Thursday morning? I used one of my remaining burner phones to call Malik.

  She repeated her thanks for my making the drive to Kansas City in the middle of the night, assured me she was fine, as was Dinah the cat—“I cannot believe I forgot her and left her to starve for all those days!”—and that the Kansas City cops hadn’t been in touch about the break-in. They probably hadn’t printed his house—overworked, underfunded police departments don’t process every crime scene.

  The oddity was that the break-in hadn’t made any of the news feeds. I would think anyone monitoring police frequencies would pick it up: Roque had that national reputation, even if it was five years old, and he was dead—two things that gave the break-in national interest. Either no one had seen the connection or the cops were playing this closer to their collective chest than I imagined. I didn’t say so to Aanya—I didn’t want her hyperventilating every time her phone rang.

  “Dr. Roque’s collapse at the start of an autopsy seems dramatic,” I said. “Could someone have engineered his illness? They wanted to get rid of that body before he examined it more closely.”

  “During the famous flu epidemic of 1919, people left their houses in the morning feeling fine and were dead by noon, so a swift-growing and powerful virus, it could have killed him quickly, on its own. For the body stealers, Dr. Roque’s collapse was perhaps merely a sign of fortune favoring their wishes, not them making it happen,” Aanya objected.

  “Fortune has certainly been favoring whoever is orchestrating this mayhem,” I agreed. “Where is Dr. Roque’s body? Can you get one of his colleagues to perform the autopsy?”

  “I do not know,” Aanya said doubtfully. “The budget crisis means not so many autopsies, and the state, they are saying he died of flu. The children, they are arriving tonight to conduct the funeral. I can ask them to authorize an examination by a private pathologist, but people are— I can’t think of the word in English. It troubles people to have their family members cut upon. It would trouble me, I know.”

  “I can understand that.” I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. “But it’s such a big coincidence, his collapse at the moment that someone wanted to steal the dead woman’s body.”

  “I will try,” Aanya said unhappily. “I understand what you are saying, but . . . well, I will try.”

  When she hung up, I called Peppy to me. The sun was starting to set, the air was getting cold, she’d had almost two hours of fun, which had left her coated in mud, with burs embedded in the feathers on her tail and haunches.

  “You look like a role model for every golden who ever pined for a life in the open,” I told her, trying to extract the worst of the burs. Since she kept squirming to bite at them herself, it was a frustrating business. Free State Dogs had advertised a grooming service. I called and was told that if I got her there in the next twenty minutes, they’d take care of her.

  “Okay, bellissima, we’re going to run like the wind and drive like Danica Patrick!”

  I dropped her off at Free State one minute over the limit, but the woman at the desk had seen Peppy on her two days at the place and said she’d fit her in.

  “We close at six on Sundays. If you’re not back by then, we’ll board her overnight and charge you for twenty-four hours.”

  I looked at the clock. One hour. Not enough time to go to the Kiels’ and persuade them to talk, but I was close to St. Raphael’s. While I drove, I texted Bernie on one of my burner phones. Cady had dropped her at the B and B; I would be glad to know she was working on an essay for her French-literature class.

  I was glad to know. I was glad to believe it even if it wasn’t true.

  Sunday evening the receptionist at St. Rafe’s was a bored youth playing a game on his phone. When I asked for Randy Marx, he pushed a button on the desk phone without taking his eyes from his screen.

  “Randy? Some lady here to see you. . . . I didn’t ask.” He sighed and said, without looking at me, “Your name?”

  “V.I. Warshawski.”

  “Like I can be expected to say that,” he grumbled. “She’s a foreigner,” he added to the desk phone. “Viyai something.”

  “Warshawski!” I shouted. “Chicago detective. Sonia Kiel.”

  That surprised the receptionist enough that he actually looked at me. “Damn, now I lost my ranking!”

  I supposed that referred to his game, not a contest for how long he could go without actually engaging with a visitor.

  Marx appeared a few minutes later. I hadn’t expected to find him on a Sunday evening. I’d been trying to imagine scenarios that would persuade his backup to let me into Sonia’s room.

  “I’m going out of town tomorrow,” he explained, ushering me into the Arrowfeather Room. “I wanted to get all the rescheduled therapy sessions and so on squared away with my administrative assistant.”

  I turned down the offer of thin, overboiled coffee. “Did you know there was an attempt on Sonia Kiel’s life today? Someone posing as a brother tried to suffocate her.”

  His pale face didn’t register emotion easily, but his reaction seemed more one of fatigue than alarm or astonishment. “Are you sure about that? I was told she went into arrest, but that didn’t surprise me. Her heart’s taken a lot of abuse.”

  “Her drug use didn’t lead her to hold a pillow over her own face until she stopped breathing.”

  At that he did flinch. “Are you sure?”

  He pulled out his cell phone and started to text, but I took the phone from him.

  “I am sure. If someone says otherwise, they’re either protecting Sonia’s assailant or keeping the news secret in hopes that the perp will think he got away with it. In which case it was wrong of me to tell you, but that’s water over the Kaw River dam now. I came here because I want to see Sonia’s writing.”

  I powered off the phone and handed it back to him.

  “I can’t do that. Resident records are confidential. Even if you had a warrant, we’re covered by HIPAA. Our therapists are licensed—”

  “I don’t want to see what you’ve written about her,” I interrupted sharply. “I want to see what she wrote about herself.”

  When he looked puzzled, puzzled and mulish both, I added, “You told me on Thursday that Sonia was always journaling about Matt Chastain and the protest out at the old missile silo. I want to see her journals, or computer files, or whatever she wrote on. She can’t give me permission. They’ve put her back into a protective coma.”

  “I . . .” Marx fiddled with his phone, turned it back on, saw me eyeing him, and put it in his pocket. “I’ll have to consult our lawyers. I’ll be gone all this week. We can talk a week from Tuesday.”

  I resisted the urge to lift him by his T-shirt and shake him. “Mr. Marx, by a week from Tuesday, Sonia may be dead. Even if she recovers from today’s assault, it’s hard to guard someone in a hospital—there are too many ways in and out of the building, and no one is enthusiastic about protecting her.

  “I know you’ve tried to work with her. I know she’s a pain, but right now she’s a living, breathing pain. If you won’t let me see Sonia’s papers tonight, my lawyer will be in court tomorrow to get me appointed Sonia’s g
uardian ad interim. And if something happens to her between now and my getting that authority, I will sue you and St. Rafe’s for causing harm to her by your failure to act tonight.”

  I know you catch more flies with honey, but I didn’t want any more damned flies piling up around me. I wanted Sonia’s writings.

  Marx looked at me with as much loathing as his colorless face could summon and tapped a speed-dial number on his phone. “Hank—Marx here.” He sketched the scenario I’d proposed, apparently was told I could make it happen, and turned to me to say sulkily that Chet would escort me up to Sonia’s room and oversee anything I took away with me.

  “I didn’t think having Sonia here could get any worse, but you’ve certainly proved me wrong.”

  I bared my teeth. “Sonia never had an advocate before. You have a good trip, and comfort yourself with the hope that before you get back, I’ll have sorted out this situation to the point that I can head for my own home.”

  Chet was the young man with the handheld device. He led me to Sonia’s room on the second floor, expressing his ill humor at being asked to work by going as slowly as possible.

  “Sorry to tear you away from your game,” I said. “Why don’t you give me the key so you can get back to your battle station?”

  “Against regulations,” he said huffily, but he picked up his pace. When he’d opened the door to Sonia’s room, he left me alone to explore.

  I was keeping an eye on the clock: I could spend only fifteen minutes here if I wanted to get back to Peppy by six. Fortunately, it was a small space, with a bed, an open closet that included shelves and drawers, and a table big enough to write at. Bathrooms were shared among the residents, but the room held a sink. No coffeemakers or hot plates; kitchens were also shared.

  Sonia had lived here for three years, but she hadn’t accumulated much. Her clothes were dumped willy-nilly in the closet. Most were shapeless, sweats and polyester probably pulled from a donation box. She had a few good pieces, a red sweater with navy piping and a well-known label in the neck. The drawers and shelves held an assortment of underwear, toiletries, and a dozen or so books. She also had printouts of articles on weapons disasters of all kinds—biological, chemical, nuclear.