Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  “He actually was working with them,” Baggetto said through tight lips. “He is facing a court-martial, if that’s any consolation.”

  The chronology of this was bothering me. “Be quiet for a minute,” I said. “I need to think, and I can’t do it against your voice.”

  He stood silent, arms behind him, a parade-ground posture. I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

  “You say you only signed on after I came to Lawrence,” I said, finally looking at him again. “But I came to Lawrence because someone had tossed August Veriden’s workplace along with his apartment in Chicago. I assume they were looking for your precious movie. That happened about a week after August and Ms. Ferring arrived here.”

  Baggetto rubbed his own cheeks, dark with five o’clock shadow. “That was Roswell’s private army. They were way out of control: one of them killed Dr. Roque and another pretended to be Sonia Kiel’s brother so he could get into her hospital room and try to smother her. It was infuriating to see them acting like a vigilante force, but I couldn’t get them to stop without tipping my own hand and I needed to stay undercover until I located the film.”

  “You don’t sound very infuriated,” I said bitterly.

  “You want me to start pulling my hair out by the roots? Hear me out before you start preaching and condemning.” He scowled resentfully.

  “As you know, Sonia recognized all the players. She started telling anyone who would listen that she’d seen Spirova out by the silo—she kept referring to it as her lover’s graveyard—but the thing that got everybody’s tail in a knot was her screaming that she’d watched the film—‘I saw her in the movies!’ she kept saying about Spirova. That didn’t mean anything to the staff at St. Raphael’s, but it meant a lot to me. And when Pinsen got wind of it, he wanted her silenced. From what she was saying, we knew she’d seen the film out at the farm, but we couldn’t find it when we searched there.”

  I nodded. “The messy searches were done by Roswell’s army, the clean ones by you. Why did they pilfer the medical-supply closet at the gym where August Veriden worked? They deal on the side?”

  Baggetto made an impatient gesture. “Does it matter? I think they wanted to make it look like ordinary vandalism, not that they were after something specific.”

  My upper lip curled in distaste. “You searched Chicago and you searched Lawrence. You couldn’t find the film, so you had to kill Sonia?”

  “That was Pinsen: he got the college kids to put roofies in her vodka. They thought it was a big joke.”

  “I’ll bet. We keep reading about the cool sense of humor guys at bars have.”

  It was convenient, putting all the bad deeds onto Marlon Pinsen. Just as Kiel and the army had done with Spirova in 1983. Pinsen would be court-martialed, Baggetto would go on to higher ranks, and we’d never know who really did what to whom.

  “Of course, Spirova knew about the film. There was a night out in the Sea-2-Sea field—”

  “Yes, I know about that. McKinnon was furious that the air force had sold her land to Roswell without giving her a chance to buy it. They’d told her it was contaminated with radiation, and she wanted proof one way or another.”

  “Yes. Well, Spirova decided she would infect McKinnon with Y. pestis and then search the house for the film. She brought an aerosol sample up to the house and contaminated the soil inside the jars, but Roswell didn’t want contaminated soil going around the county—that would launch a full-scale investigation that might uncover his private patriot lab. He sent one of his private army after Spirova. She was shot in the kitchen, where you found her. The underling took the aerosol samples away with him but didn’t realize Spirova had already added it to the soil jars. I’m guessing that Veriden, McKinnon, and Ferring found Spirova’s body and fled, but that’s just a guess.”

  “I’m guessing Doris McKinnon came back to the house with August and Ferring. They saw Spirova’s body and panicked. Doris managed to pack up the soil containers and get them in the mail to Dr. Roque before your pals knew about it. And then someone followed McKinnon and shot her,” I said, leaning back against the pillows. “They reprised the murder of Jenny Perec: shot her, put her car into the Wakarusa at the same spot. Whose idea was that? Gisborne? He was the deputy who pulled Perec from the water.”

  “It wasn’t quite that bad.”

  Baggetto and I both turned in surprise: Sergeant Everard had slipped into the entrance, next to Baggetto’s adjutant, without our noticing.

  “Hey, Warshawski.” Everard came over to the bed and peered at me. “Want me to put those bruises out on Facebook? Proof to the world that you’re an investigator who runs the extra marathon for her clients?”

  “I don’t want to frighten off cowboys and soldiers,” I said. “What wasn’t quite that bad about Gisborne?”

  Everard sat on the edge of the bed. “He pulled Jenny Perec out of the Wakarusa. He didn’t put her in there. That was the air force.” He nodded at Baggetto.

  “I’m with the army,” Baggetto protested stiffly.

  “Doing the air force’s groundwork for them in eastern Kansas,” Everard said. “Did you know how Jenny Perec was killed by the plague and her body put into the Wakarusa to make it look as though she’d gone off the road in a frenzy?”

  Baggetto took a seat on the visitor’s chair with a challenging look at me, but I let it go.

  “I didn’t learn about it until the day at the courthouse when Gisborne got rattled by Warshawski here looking for the Perec file,” the colonel said. “The file had disappeared, but I don’t think it was Gisborne who pulled it. He started unraveling because he thought there was a traitor on the county staff.”

  “Yeah,” Everard said. “One of his deputies was moonlighting in Roswell’s CARE-NOW army. That was a blow. I kept telling Warshawski here that Gisborne wasn’t a bad guy. He wasn’t, but he got penned in pretty tight. He was giving Roswell and Sea-2-Sea extra security. Nothing wrong with that, but Roswell has a way of making it hard to leave once you’re part of his operation.”

  “It was Pinsen who dug out the original story,” Baggetto said. “He’s with Homeland, so he has access to every secret act ever committed by possums in the dead of night. He knew that young Jenny Perec had died of the plague. He told Roswell, and Roswell got his citizen army to shoot McKinnon and put her in the river. That really unnerved Gisborne.”

  “He’s stepping down,” Everard said. “No shame in that either. Guy is sixty-eight; he’s given a lot of service to this county.”

  “That’s all very noble,” I objected, “but I want to get back to the colonel. He says he was infiltrating CARE-NOW, but aside from letting Dr. Roque get killed and Dr. Hitchcock fight for his life with those contaminated soil samples, he stood by while Roswell’s terrorists put Cady and me in the silo to die. I know you’re not supposed to break cover, but how many bodies were you actually going to let stack up before you decided to break rank?”

  “I did my best,” Baggetto said through stiff lips. “I sent a signal to the First Infantry, and they marshaled a battalion. That was the unit that came to batter down the Level One missile-bay door.”

  “And now you’ll go to Washington and get a promotion and a nice new assignment. I’ll write my senator and beg him to make sure you don’t come back to the Midwest,” I said.

  “Pinsen and Roswell are in federal custody,” Everard said. “That should count for something. Dr. Kiel helped dismantle that horrifying lab in the missile silo. Sea-2-Sea is donating the fifteen acres around the silo to a nature preserve. But I’m with you. Not that my senators pay any attention to me, but maybe I’ll go on Change.org and get a petition going to send Baggetto to some outpost overseas where he can do the least harm. Nepal, maybe, or one of those places near Russia that end in ‘-stan.’”

  The colonel didn’t seem to think this was as funny as Everard and I did. He collected his adjutant and left, not even offering me a token salute.

  61

  The Siste
rs Grow Up

  I got better. Lotty flew back to Chicago. I showered, collected my street clothes from the cleaners, picked up my luggage from the B and B, where the owner had packed it in her garage. I went to one of the many spas on Massachusetts Street, where they trimmed my hair and cut and shaped my nails. I looked more like an ordinary person, less like a battlefield casualty.

  Lou and Ed let me spend my last few days in Lawrence on their farm, where the wind across the hills helped clean the misery of the last month out of my brain.

  One evening I went to see Cady Perec, who was back with Gertrude.

  “Vic, my whole world is upside down right now, but Gram is the woman who raised me and read me my bedtime stories. I feel like I’m living on a fake birth certificate, but I don’t want to be Magda and Dr. Kiel’s child. I feel like I belong to Jenny.”

  I smiled at her. “You have a right to the name she gave her daughter, Cady. A name to conjure with, to undertake bold deeds. I’m glad you don’t want to give it up.”

  “I owe you a lot,” Cady said. “My life in the silo—I can’t ever repay that. Giving me the truth about my birth after all this time. It adds up to a huge debt.”

  I nodded at her. “It’s the cliché of our era, to pay it forward, but that’s what you do when you feel overwhelmed by gratitude. I don’t want anything from you except to know you’re doing your best in a world that’s hard on poets and small creatures.”

  Gertrude couldn’t quite forgive me for upsetting the narrative she’d imposed on Cady’s life, but at least she offered me a glass of wine and a bowl of nuts; at least she let me talk to her granddaughter in the living room instead of on the cold porch. And she let me bring Peppy in with me.

  The next day I went to see Sonia. She was in a nursing home, recovering her energy so she could join her brother Stuart in Maine. Three weeks without alcohol or those badly named recreational drugs had taken some of the coarseness out of her skin. She didn’t have any memory of the events at the Lion’s Pride, but she did remember watching the air force reel through Doris McKinnon’s front-room window.

  “I was there, you know, back in 1983. I saw it all. I saw them shoot Matt, I saw Magda steal the film from the air force truck while everyone was arguing. She put it in the basket that Doris and Lucinda had left in Jenny’s tent. I guess she thought she’d come back for it, but Lucinda took it up to the house.

  “Later, after I recovered from the plague, Nate couldn’t bear that I knew what had happened, so he was happy for me to be crazy. I became what everyone wanted, the crazy woman. I’ve promised Stuart I won’t drink or do drugs while I’m living with him and Kevin up in Bangor, but that’s the best I can do right now. Stay sober, keep away from Shirley and Nate. One day, one minute at a time, like all those slogans at St. Rafe’s kept telling me.”

  “I borrowed your journals,” I said, “and they were stolen out of my room. I’m sorry. The army has them—Bram Roswell’s private goons had broken in and taken them, and Colonel Baggetto recovered them. They seem to be evidence now in a federal case against Marlon Pinsen and Bram Roswell. You may never be able to get them back. Those beautiful pictures you painted of Lima and Autumn are gone, too. The only thing they didn’t take was this.”

  I handed her the drawing of the bi-polar bear.

  Sonia studied it for a long minute, then handed it back. “If you like it, go ahead and keep it. Who knows, maybe it will be valuable someday.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry I violated your privacy, though.”

  She gave a lopsided smile. “You’re only one in a long line. I’m getting a length of blue ribbon and making a cordon sanitaire to wear whenever I have to see a doctor or . . . or any violator. I get to have privacy, I get to get rid of CheeseNuts. You can keep the journals if they ever come back.”

  62

  There’s No Place Like Home

  I left Lawrence the day before Thanksgiving. Nell Albritten and Emerald Ferring tried to persuade me to stay for the big fete at St. Silas, but I needed to be home. Sergeant Everard took me out for a farewell supper the night before I left. One thing led to another, as they sometimes do.

  “You could open an agency down here, you know,” Everard said as I got dressed early Wednesday morning. “There’s obviously an abundance of crime in Lawrence that none of us know about.”

  “You’d start imagining I was killing people to create work for myself,” I said. “You’d start arresting me every time a dead body showed up in the county.”

  He laughed and helped me put Peppy into the car, along with my luggage and an enormous picnic basket prepared by the St. Silas women.

  “You could be right about that, Warshawski. You could be right. Still, you go buy yourself a pair of red high heels, just in case.”

  I fished in my suitcase for my Magli pumps. “Got them, but they’re taking me back to Chicago.”

  Much as I longed to be home, I backtracked to the middle of the state, west and north of Fort Riley to the little town of Belleville. I’d persuaded Aanya Malik to let me have the tiny hand Doris McKinnon had sent to Dr. Roque, along with her soil samples. Charmaine Long cradled the miniature case it was in against her cheek.

  “Matt’s little baby,” she murmured. “My little niece. Thank you, thank you for bringing her home to me.”

  We talked through the afternoon, while I recounted once more the long hard story I’d pieced together. Charmaine, too, wanted me to stay for Thanksgiving, stay until Friday when she would have a private funeral for Matt and Jenny and baby Cady.

  “I don’t belong there,” I said, finally extricating myself. “I need to go back to the place I do belong.”

  Peppy and I drove through the night, stopping in a motel outside Des Moines so I could sleep for a few hours. We crossed the Little Calumet as dawn was breaking on Thursday morning. The crowded streets of my childhood lay below me on the Skyway; the tower formerly known as Sears was silhouetted along Lake Michigan to the north. When we reached the South Side beaches, I pulled off the road to let Peppy swim. The water was cold, colder than the Kaw, but I stripped and jumped in with her. I needed the clear, cold waters of Lake Michigan to cleanse myself.

  I toweled off under the shelter of a big rock and put on my good trousers, my rose cashmere sweater, my Magli heels.

  When we reached our building on Racine, Mr. Contreras was waiting out front, tanned from his weeks in the Caribbean, smiling so widely his ears might have fallen off.

  “You made it home safe, doll. You made it home safe. The doc kept me posted, or I would’ve been down there myself to patch you up. You come on in. People have been cooking, people are desperate to see you.”

  Lotty emerged from the hallway, Max Loewenthal beside her. Sal Barthele towered over them, August’s cousin Angela next to her, with Troy Hempel and his mother nearby. Bernie came out from behind Mr. Contreras. She was starting toward me when Mitch gave a tremendous bark and broke through the throng. He jumped on me, knocking me to the ground. I lay there, laughing, and kicked my heels together.

  Thanks

  In some ways this novel, which takes V.I. out of her comfort zone in Chicago and sends her to Kansas, is my own origin story. The story line was suggested by an event in my father’s scientific life. He was a cell biologist at the University of Kansas from 1951 until his death in 2000; an experience he had at a rickettsia conference in Bratislava in 1964 underlies this novel.

  The book is set in and around the town of Lawrence, Kansas, where I grew up. I have taken a number of liberties with the town, both its topography and its institutions. I’ve restructured the Lawrence Memorial Hospital to meet V.I.’s needs. I’ve filled in part of the ravine along the south side of the Kaw River to make room for Riverside Church. I’ve tampered with the layout of the Judicial and Law Enforcement Center and the workings of the county sheriff and the city police. I’ve inserted a missile silo into the Douglas County landscape, somewhere between the Pendleton farm and my own childhood home. I apologize for a
ny land I may have misappropriated.

  In Chicago, I have added an Area Six to the police department structure so that my fictional cops can operate without reference to any real police operations.

  For the history of race in Lawrence, I’ve relied partly on my own memories and partly on This Is America? The Sixties in Lawrence, Kansas by Rusty L. Monhollon and Bill Tuttle’s “Separate but Not Equal,” in Embattled Lawrence, edited by Dennis Domer and Barbara Watkins. Langston Hughes grew up in Lawrence on the old east side, but for the purposes of this novel I’ve concentrated African-American life on the north side of the river.

  As always, many people helped make this work possible. Professors Bill and Wendy Picking head the list, for taking time from significant professional obligations to advise me on biological matters. Dr. Raymond Zilinskas, who is an authority on biological weapons, was most helpful in the earliest days of my work on this novel.

  Angela Wilson, formerly a district attorney in Douglas County, explained court procedures in Kansas for the moments when V.I. Warshawski inevitably ran afoul of the law. Jonathan Paretsky not only made that connection but drove me around the town and county to check locations.

  Retired Lawrence police officer John Lewis has been most kind with his advice. As usual, I have taken liberties, some conscious, some inadvertent, with the advice I’ve received. Marzena Madej kept us all going in Chicago while I worked on this book: many thanks are due to her.

  Finally, I’m grateful for the active support and insight of my editor, Dan Mallory, who has helped renew my confidence in my writing voice and in V.I. herself.

  The chapter titles are dedicated to my husband and to the memory of Don Sandstrom, who cherished them.

  I hope everyone will forgive my mistakes—this is a work of fiction and shouldn’t be relied on for any political, personal, social, or economic data. Any mistakes are my misconstructions of what I read or heard; please don’t blame the messengers.