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 turned 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.”