It took me a long time to relax into sleep. I felt vulnerable in this rented room, with its flimsy set of locks. I finally drifted into feverish dreams: The earth had swallowed me. Jake sat on the ground overhead, playing his bass for a twenty-year-old cellist whose golden hair flowed below her waist.
I was able to sleep only long enough to take the edge off my weariness. When I woke a little after seven, I hotfooted it downtown to a FedEx store, where I sent the original thumb drive to Cheviot. I used a store computer, not my own, to type the cover letter explaining what I wanted them to do. I even paid cash for the shipment, instead of billing it through to my credit-card account.
I felt foolish being so cautious, but I had no idea what direction violence was coming from and had no secure place to store either my own electronics or any evidence I came upon. If I lost my computer, I didn’t want anyone to be able to trace my actions. Colonel Baggetto came to mind: a guy like him, with his training and access to government resources, could break into a computer like mine one-handed.
When I finished, my T-shirt was damp with sweat, clinging clammily to my skin. I zipped up my windbreaker and ran Peppy down to the river, where the morning wind off the water cut through my jacket to freeze my damp shirt. I ducked behind a scruffy bush and undressed, pulling off the shirt and shoving it into a pocket. Still cold, but not so bitter.
We ran back into the town, to the Decadent Hippo: when you’re alone and forlorn, little routines become sources of comfort. The bartender/barista cocked an eye at her bean grinder. I nodded, and she made me a cortado. They sold long-sleeved T-shirts, which showed a pink hippo lounging in a hot tub drinking a cappuccino. Twenty-five dollars bought me a coffee and something warm for my cold back.
I took my coffee to a stool in the window, where Peppy and I could see each other through the glass, and started answering e-mails. Freeman Carter, my lawyer in Chicago, had found a good criminal-defense lawyer about twenty-five miles away, in a suburb of Kansas City. He’d written Luella Baumgart-Grams about me; she’d be happy to help if the need arose. I sent her a follow-up message with a few details about the job that had brought me to Kansas and added her to my speed dial, because you never know. When I’d caught up on queries from Chicago clients, I tried to plan my day.
First stop: day care for Peppy. There were a number of day boarders in town, but the one that got the best reviews was Free State Dogs: Where Dogs Run in a Free State. They had space if I could get my vet to fax them her health record and if her temperament passed muster.
“And if your environment works for her,” I said sharply.
After I finished with my vet, I called Lawrence’s hospital for humans. Sonia was no worse, still breathing on her own but no better. The ward head told me briskly that one shouldn’t give up hope, as if I were her sister, which made me think I was the only person concerned enough about her health to call the hospital. How sad, especially since my chief concern wasn’t her well-being but whether she would ever recover any memory of whom she’d encountered in the bar or of the field where she’d spotted August filming her.
The hospital also told me that Nell Albritten had been discharged; her son, Jordan, had escorted her home. This afternoon, after I’d inspected Sea-2-Sea’s experimental farm, I could pay a neighborly visit to check up on her.
This meant identifying the property lines both for Doris McKinnon and for Sea-2-Sea. I was only two blocks from the Lawrence Public Library, so I went there first, before dropping off Peppy.
A reference librarian helped me find Doris McKinnon’s farm and stepped me through decades of records, with their changing property lines. I had always imagined farms as static, land handed down unchanging across the centuries. Instead pieces were always being bought and sold, not all of them contiguous.
Most of McKinnon’s land was a substantial chunk around the farmhouse where I’d found her body yesterday. In 1967 the U.S. government had seized three acres from her through the right of eminent domain for the Kanwaka Missile Silo. As I inspected the maps over the next several years, it looked as though special roads had been constructed, one from the west and one from the south, to connect the silo to existing county roads.
In 1967 Emerald Ferring was in Hollywood, just starting her career with Jarvis Nilsson. Her mother was probably still pipetting specimens for Dr. Kiel—I doubted that Emerald was making enough money at that point to support Lucinda. Doris McKinnon herself would have been in her thirties, fully capable of working her land on her own.
Over the next sixteen years, Doris bought and sold smallish parcels that lay in other parts of the county. Then, in September 1983, the United States took another fifteen acres from her, to the south and east of the silo. The southern edge now abutted one of the east-west county roads.
That was 1983—the year of the abortive effort to reenact Greenham Common, the year of Matt Chastain’s disappearance (his death?), Jenny Perec’s death, Cady Perec’s birth.
Correlation does not mean causation, I know that in my head, but in my gut, that famous residence of detective intuition, I couldn’t help wondering if all these things were tied together.
While I tried to find Sea-2-Sea’s experimental farm, the helpful librarian printed out the most current map for McKinnon’s holdings. I would start my search at the fields near the silo and hope I didn’t have to go riding all over Douglas County looking at her other land.
Sea-2-Sea’s farms weren’t listed under their name, but Emigrant Bank and Savings was the trustee for 160 acres along McKinnon’s southern border, at the edge of the Kanwaka silo. Good bet that they were acting for Sea-2-Sea. The reference librarian printed out that map for me as well.
She was gathering them all into a folder when we were joined by a third woman, an African-American whose name badge identified her as phyllis barrier, head librarian.
“What are we working on here, Agnes?” Barrier asked the reference librarian.
Her tone was genial, but the look she gave me was searching—not unfriendly exactly, but the kind of expression my mother took on when she was sure I’d been doing something dangerous with my cousin.
“I’m V.I. Warshawski,” I said. “Ms. Chercavi has been helping me understand some property documents out near the Kanwaka silo.”
“May I?” Barrier held out her hand; the reference librarian perforce gave her the folder.
Barrier thumbed through the pages, then smiled at me. “We love to have people use our library, and we consider our patrons’ needs private, but I confess I’m curious. You’re visiting from Chicago, as I understand. Why are you interested in these property maps?”
The smile signaled that we weren’t in a hostile encounter, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
“If you know I’m from Chicago, then you know I’m the person who found Doris McKinnon’s body yesterday. Before she died, she was worried about activity on the land that abuts the silo, and I wanted to see where her property ended, whether the piece she was concerned about was actually hers. The Kanwaka silo sits on land that McKinnon used to own, but the rest of it now seems to belong either to Sea-2-Sea or to the air force.”
Barrier studied me again, flipped through the pages again, before handing them to me and telling me to enjoy my time in Lawrence. As I walked away, I wondered if I’d seen her before. Her face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Maybe she’d been at the hospital yesterday when I went there with Nell Albritten.
Lawrence was getting to be full of specters for me—first Marlon Pinsen and now the head librarian. I didn’t have any familiar faces around me—maybe my unconscious was creating phantom friends.
Before I drove Peppy to her day-care appointment, I circled the downtown but didn’t see any obvious signs of a tail. Yesterday’s Buick Enclave wasn’t parked nearby either. Another phantom?
Free State Dogs was the kind of place you could get only in a small town with a lot of open space—huge runs where the staff could sort dogs into compatible packs for play and rest. The staff seemed to know how to work with the animals, but I still felt a wrenching as I finally let Peppy trot off with one of their crew.
I guessed she’d be okay. I hoped she’d be okay. The third time I checked that they had my cell-phone number and would text me if anything went wrong, the manager patted me on the shoulder.
“Every parent feels like this the first time they leave their baby alone. She’s a sweetheart; we’ll take good care of her.”
Free State was on the main east-west artery that led from Lawrence out to the McKinnon farm and the Kanwaka silo. I unfolded my paper maps and checked the roads against the property lines on the documents the library had printed for me. Folded them up, cast a last longing look at Free State Dogs, and put the car into gear, singing, “Hey, said I, for the open road and the open camp beside it.”
Traffic was heavy on the highway, but as soon as I turned onto the county roads, I was alone. One good thing about the country, I guess, is that it’s easy to spot a tail. Unless you counted the circling hawks, I was on my own. I didn’t even see tractors in the fields I was passing, just the occasional herd of morose-looking cows.
At a crossroads near the McKinnon farm, I pulled over and took out my tablet, bringing up the stills that August had shot in the dark. I tried to compare them with the land around me. The ditches on either side of the road were filled with wild grass, brown now at winter’s approach. A heavy wind blew through the grasses, creating waves that looked like Lake Michigan in a storm. The wind buffeted the Mustang, increasing my sense of vulnerability. I turned on the radio just to hear the sound of a human voice.
“And God said, the unclean shall you cast from you. When Jesus told us he brought not peace, but a sword—”
I turned off the radio: I’d risk going mad on the prairies.
All the land around me resembled the photos: the ground plowed or harrowed or whatever they did after they’d harvested the crops, leaving behind little hillocks with tufts sticking up. I wasn’t looking for a needle in a haystack but a haystack in a land of hayfields. Impossible.
I’d start with the one place I could identify, the missile silo. I’d had vague Dr. Strangelove images in mind, so the actual site was a letdown: no giant Atlas rockets thrust their noses skyward, no heavily armed soldiers patrolled the perimeter. In fact, I almost missed the turnoff, it was so unobtrusively marked—just an old metal sign on a fence post, with the U.S. Air Force logo and faded letters announcing the Kanwaka Missile Silo.
The county road wasn’t paved, just had a coating of gravel on it that had been dinging my car as I bumped along, but the access road to the silo was covered in tarmac. Newly surfaced, by the look of it, although the installation itself seemed run-down—everyone was tired of nuclear weapons, even the land around the old missile. A twelve-foot-high cyclone fence enclosed the land, but sections had fallen over.
Cady Perec had said how vulnerable it made kids feel when they saw it every day on their way to school. In my childhood we’d grown up with a vague fear of nuclear war, but a fully loaded Minuteman right by your school bus—that was the stuff of permanent nightmare.
I pulled over onto the verge and started to walk the perimeter. Although the fence had collapsed in places that would make it easy to enter the site, the front gates still stood padlocked.
The odd thing about the layout, at least to my urban mind, was the way the property was cut up. The missile had sat in a triangle, with the apex pointing at Doris McKinnon’s house. A barbed-wire fence ran along the same parallel as the triangle’s base, smack in the middle of a field. If I had worked out the maps properly, the land beyond the fence belonged to the fifteen acres the air force had seized from McKinnon back in 1983. The conveyancing reports didn’t show it as being redeeded to Sea-2-Sea.
When I walked along McKinnon’s side of the barbed wire, I saw medallions every twenty feet or so, labeling the land beyond as private property, no trespassing. The medallions were stamped with the Sea-2-Sea logo—wheat sheaves crossing a stylized map of the United States.
I wondered if McKinnon had marked her own land on the opposite side. When I bent over to look, my skin tingled and I jumped back: the fence was electrified. Curiouser and curiouser.
I returned to the silo and slipped inside through a place where the fence had come unmoored from its post, taking care not to touch the metal, in case Sea-2-Sea’s electrical circuits ran through the Kanwaka fence as well.
The resurfacing of the tarmac continued beyond the padlocked gates. The road, big enough for a double-wide, ended in the concrete wings of a loading bay. A narrower track branched out from there and led to an enormous concrete circle.
Broken antennas—what used to be radar, I supposed—stood in the corners of the triangle. An assortment of smaller manhole covers and what looked like fuel or water tanks were spread in a circle around the missile bay itself. The tanks were filled with dirt and weeds that had blown in since the missile was taken away.
I watched a snake glide past. Were the fields of Kansas home to poisonous snakes? Maybe this was the kind we were supposed to love because they ate rodents, but my toes curled and tingled inside my running shoes. The snake slid onto the oblong lid to some part of the complex, where two other snakes were already resting—perhaps the cover was made of a material that amplified the sun’s weak late-autumn heat.
I tried singing, to boost my spirits, but the wind swallowed my voice. It ripped through my windbreaker and the thin Hippo shirt underneath. I jogged around the perimeter, trying to warm up, snapping pictures of the different empty tanks, of the snakes, of the loading bay. I didn’t see any place that looked as though Doris and her team had been digging here.
On the far side of the enclosure I found what looked like a ranch house, wooden, with a concrete step up to the door. The windows had been painted black. At first I thought meth makers had taken over the place, but then I saw a small plaque next to the door: when the kanwaka silo was active, this was the launch control support building, where crew members off duty could sleep. windows were painted black so the owl shift could sleep during the day.
The door had a new padlock, I noticed, a sophisticated one. Maybe meth makers really had moved in. In which case the SUV that had chased Sonia and Doris’s team across the fields belonged to a drug enterprise with major resources. Good people to stay away from. I sniffed the air and thought I picked up a tangy chemical smell, but not the sulfurous stench that comes with a big drug operation.
Before leaving the enclosure, I went to look at the high doors to the loading bay. Drops of oil on the tarmac showed that a truck or car had parked here fairly recently, but the doors themselves didn’t look as though they’d been opened in some time. They were too heavy to manage without special winches, and I didn’t see any shiny places in the hinges or massive handles that would show that someone had been operating them recently.
No one had gone in through that door for some time. So someone was parking here, using this out-of-the-way spot for . . . what? The only thing I could think of continued to be drugs.
I slid back through the opening in the silo fence and started into the fields, looking either for some sign of tire tracks or Doris McKinnon’s digging or even, vain idea, some remnant of the thirty-three-year-old hippie camp.
It was hopeless. The rain of the past week had turned the fields into mud baths. Maybe one of those Indian or Bedouin trackers beloved of crime writers could sense where Doris had been digging, but I couldn’t.
Mud was encasing my running shoes, making them so heavy that I felt as though I were walking through congealed molasses. My socks were soaked through, turning my toes into frozen lumps. I trudged back to my car, stopping again outside the perimeter gates. This is where Emerald Ferring had been photographed in 1983: “Aunt Doris, I owe you much.”
I was just getting into my car when I saw a dust cloud rolling toward me, the telltale strobes of the law flashing through it. I shut the door quickly, locked it, turned on the engine, and got ready to move. A squad car pulled up alongside me.
Sheriff Gisborne rolled down his window and signaled me to open mine. “I might have guessed that if there was trouble in Douglas County today, you’d be behind it.”