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 app 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 guardian 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.
I gathered those up along with the books, which ran the gamut of conspiracy theories, from who killed JFK to reports of UFOs descending on Roswell. Clouds Without Witnesses: Secret Weapons Tests on Human Populations was a thick volume, but heavy even for a book. I opened it to find that Sonia had cut out the interior. A pint of vodka, almost empty, nestled inside. Sonia had written “You’re So Ignorant” on the endpaper with a broad-tipped red Magic Marker, accompanied by an R. Crumb–like caricature of a man in a U.S. Army uniform.
I flipped through the rest of the books, but they were all just that, books. I lay on the floor to look under the bed and pulled out her two suitcases. One was empty, but the other held a jumble of legal pads and notebooks, covered with a sprawling hand.
I put the books and articles inside and sprinted down the hall and stairs. I made it back to Free State just as the receptionist was starting to lock the outer door.