“What’s troubling you today in Douglas County, Sheriff?” I kept my voice neutral.
“You, Warshawski. Douglas County was a pretty calm place until you arrived.”
“You mean until I arrived, no one would have found Ms. McKinnon’s dead body or tried to rescue Sonia Kiel and the young student, who were overdosing outside that bar?”
He shifted his gaze. “I mean none of that happened until you showed up.”
I laughed. “Come on, Sheriff. Horrible as Ms. McKinnon’s death was, it happened long before I came to town.”
“And now here you are, trespassing on private property.”
“This road?” I said. “This road is private property? It looked to me like it was posted as a county road, but you’re right: I’m a stranger.”
His upper lip curled in a snarl. “We got a call that someone was trespassing on Sea-2-Sea land, and I decided to look for myself, because I had this hunch, this intuition, the kind of thing a lady or a private eye might have, that I’d find you were the perp.”
“Good thing you’re a guy and a law-enforcement pro who doesn’t have to depend on his hunches, because they’d have misled you: I haven’t been on Sea-2-Sea land.”
He grinned in an ugly way. “Someone triggered an alarm at this location, and I don’t see anyone else around here, do you?”
“Sheriff, to the best of my knowledge, I have only been on Doris McKinnon’s land and on my own property. I did not cross that fence, the only one I’ve seen marked as Sea-2-Sea land.” I pointed toward the fence on the south side of the silo.
“Your property? What the hell are you talking about?”
I smiled blandly. “I’m a citizen and a taxpayer, and that enclosure is labeled property of the air force, which is part of the U.S. government. Which means I own a one-three-hundred-millionth share in it.”
“Like fuck you do. Like fuck you do.” He swung open the door to the squad car.
If he was going to arrest me or beat me up, I wished I’d had time to change out of my wet socks and mud-laden shoes. My feet were acutely uncomfortable. My options were limited: If I took off, he’d flag me down. If I stayed, I was a sitting duck. If I reached for my phone to call Luella Baumgart-Grams, the Kansas City lawyer, Gisborne would enjoy shooting me, with the righteous claim that he thought I was pulling a gun.
I kept my hands on the steering wheel, looking grimly ahead. Another cloud of dust was rolling toward us. Reinforcements. Great.
The car rolled to a stop behind Gisborne; the dust settled. It was a dark SUV, not a squad car. Squinting in my side mirror, I couldn’t see the emblem, couldn’t tell if it was a Buick or some other make, but when the door opened, I knew the driver: Colonel Baggetto, back in military dress. The ribbons and medals on his left breast would have sprained a weaker man’s traps.
When Gisborne turned to look at him, I took my hands from the steering wheel. My fingers were stiff—fear making me clench my muscles—and it was hard for me to open the car door.
“Colonel Baggetto—I thought you were addressing KU’s soldiers-in-training today.” I’m always grateful when my voice is steady at times like this, my mother’s vocal lessons paying off.
“We finished about an hour ago. I was on my way back to the fort when I heard there was some kind of fracas at the silo.” He smiled easily at the sheriff and me.
“It’s posted U.S. Air Force. I thought you were army,” I said.
“Nearest air base is a hundred and eighty miles away. Someone called someone who knew someone who knew I was in the area, asked me to check on it for them.”
“It’s under control,” the sheriff said. “You don’t need to stick around.”
“What happened?” Baggetto asked him. “Don’t tell me Warshawski vandalized the silo—it was decommissioned decades ago, and I’d think she’d have better things to do with her time than spray-paint old concrete.”
“Decommissioned but still dangerous.” Gisborne pointed at a sign on the locked gates with its familiar black fan blades on a yellow background, cautioning us against radioactive material. “Or do Chicago dicks have radioactive shields in their panties?”
I ignored the gratuitous vulgarity. Vulgarities. “I saw the sign but assumed it dated to when the missile was housed here.”
“It does,” Gisborne said, impatient, “but there’d been leakage in the missile cradle. That’s why the air force couldn’t sell it to a developer the way they have with a lot of other sites.”
I didn’t think Gisborne would be standing here if we were in danger, but I shifted my legs uneasily, as if fallout could fall upward, through the hundreds of feet between the cradle and the ground.
“In that case, why is Sea-2-Sea using adjacent land for their experimental farm?” I demanded. “Are they testing whether some kind of sorghum will grow fat and bushy if it’s got a lot of strontium 90 in it?”
Baggetto laughed, but Gisborne frowned. “How did you know they’re growing sorghum there?”
“Are they? I don’t know one crop from another: just a lucky guess from the list of ‘Most Common Plants Under Cultivation in Eastern Kansas.’ I read it in a book at the Lawrence Historical Society,” I added, seeing his scowl deepen.
“You say.”
“I can show you the book,” I said earnestly. “You know where the historical society is, right? That old bank building two blocks from your Law and Justice center—red stone, I think it is, or brick—”
“I know where the damned historical society is,” Gisborne said. “I’m the one who grew up in this town—county—not you.”
“Someone’s been using the missile site,” I said. “There’s fresh transmission fluid in the loading bay. If you’ve got vandals out here, or meth heads, they must have a key to the lock on the front gates, and they don’t seem scared of the gamma rays or whatever they are.” I should have paid more attention in Professor Wright’s Physics 101 class all those years ago.
“It’s easy to walk onto the site,” I added, “but you’d need to open the gates to drive in.” I gestured at the place I’d climbed through.
Baggetto walked over to the front gates and shook them, as I had, and, as I had, inspected the lock. I went over to join him, looking again at the radiation warning sign. The yellows and blacks had faded to tans and grays. Someone had taken a potshot at it, missed a bull’s-eye by a couple of inches.
“When did they discover that the site was still contaminated?” I asked the sheriff.
“Why do you care?”
I could almost see the hairs on the back of his neck bristle. He didn’t like being challenged, but it felt like more than that.
“The sign is old,” I said, spelling it out. “If it happened recently, why didn’t they put up a bright new yellow sign that would catch people’s attention? You can see empty bottles and condoms and so on here—local people are using the land. If it’s dangerous, doesn’t the county have some duty to warn them?”
“I’m warning you,” Gisborne growled. “Locals are smart enough to stay off the site.”
“So it’s those dreaded outside agitators who’ve been littering the silo.” I nodded as if he’d made an important point. “It was good of you to drive all the way out here to alert me to the radiation.”
“I was already out here,” the sheriff said. “When the call came in from Sea-2-Sea, I said I’d take it myself because I was sure it’d be you, sticking your nose in other people’s business. And don’t give me crap about air force bases belonging to you.”
It would have been juvenile to whine that as a taxpayer it was hard to pay for things I never got to see or touch, like drones and warheads and so on.
“You were at the murder scene?” Baggetto asked Gisborne.
“Yep. We’re not as well supported as city forces, maybe. We don’t get to put sixteen bullets in a suspect, then take a hike, the way they can where this lady comes from, but we do slowly figure out how to walk and chew gum at the same time.”
The sheriff was trying to goad me, but Baggetto’s knowing the geography out here was what really had my attention. He was in the army, he lived a hundred miles away, but he knew about McKinnon’s murder and knew where her farm was relative to the silo.
“Did you?” the sheriff said.
“Did I what?” I’d missed his question.
“Go into the barn when you were out here yesterday.”
I shook my head, my stomach clenching: What had I missed? Emerald Ferring’s body?
“Someone was keeping a car in there. McKinnon had an old pickup and an older Subaru. Subaru’s there, but the pickup’s gone. My techs say the tire tracks indicate a Prius. What do you know about that, Warshawski?”
“Prius is a hybrid, right? That’s pretty much all I know about them, but a good mechanic could tell you how they work.” I kept forgetting I wasn’t going to bait the sheriff.
He jammed his hands in the pockets of his football jacket: he wasn’t going to slug me, at least not with Baggetto watching, but the impulse was strong. “You know anyone who drives one?”
“I don’t think so.” I knew August Veriden owned a Prius, but I didn’t actually know him, and I couldn’t think of anyone in my own circle who did.
“We checked with Illinois, and this kid you say you’re looking for, this August, he has one registered to his name.”
“You could be right,” I said politely. “I’ve never met him, so I know less about him than you seem to. Does Illinois believe those are his car’s tire tracks?”
“I know you think you’re the cleverest person to appear in Kansas since Dorothy and Toto came home, but we aren’t total idiots in law enforcement here. We’ve caught a lot of murderers who think they’re too smart for the law to get them.”
I hung my head, duly chastened. “Has your pathologist given you a cause of death for Ms. McKinnon yet?”
“Last I heard, you were not on any need-to-know list. Just because you discovered her the first time doesn’t give you—”
“The first time?” I interrupted. “Has there been a second time?”
“I meant in the first place. And basically you get to mind your own business, which has nothing to do with the cause of death.”
“What about the truck?” I asked. “Ms. McKinnon’s pickup?”
He was starting to shout me down when Baggetto repeated the question. “Do you have her truck?”
Gisborne hated having to answer while I was listening, but he snarled, “That’s missing as well. We’ve put out an APB. If it’s in the county, it’ll turn up.”
“What are we looking for?” Baggetto asked.
“A 2002 Dodge Ram. Came from the manufacturer in red, but neighbors tell me the paint was pretty much worn off by now. Of course, Warshawski here, she might just trip on it taking her dog for a walk down by the river.”
I didn’t like anything about this story. Gisborne knew I’d been walking Peppy along the river. Maybe it was a lucky guess—as he himself said, he wasn’t a lady or a PI who could rely on his hunches. But maybe he’d had a deputy in the Buick that was following me around yesterday.
Why would the Prius and the pickup both be missing? That didn’t make sense, unless Emerald and August had thought they could ditch the Prius and make a more anonymous escape from the county in McKinnon’s old truck. I refused to believe that Emerald or August could have attacked Doris McKinnon. I also didn’t like to think they’d stood idly by while someone else killed her. Maybe they’d been out, come back and seen her body, and realized that August would be the prime suspect.
Sonia Kiel had been on the land. Could she have had some kind of psychotic break and attacked McKinnon, thinking that the old woman had been responsible for her supposed lover’s death?
I shook my head, annoyed with myself: I’d lectured Sergeant Everard for profiling August, but here I was, profiling Sonia—last night I’d wondered if she’d killed Cady Perec’s mother, and now I wanted to frame her for Doris McKinnon’s death. It would be more to the point if I could find out who had fed her roofies at the Lion’s Pride the other night—someone had tried to silence her, and it could well be the person who’d actually killed McKinnon.