Ever since the Cheviot lab removed the malware from my computer, I’d started seeing the Buick Enclave again. It wasn’t definitely on my tail, but it seemed to be where I was too much of the time. I wanted an anonymous car, and I thought I knew where to find one.
I also was worried about Peppy: if someone wanted to push me away from the investigation, all they’d have to do is take Peppy out of Free State Dogs and hold her hostage. But if I went into North Lawrence with her, the invisible poverty-stricken part of town, I could leave her with Nell Albritten and find a beater at one of the scrapyards.
I parked once again in the library lot. I packed my boots and change of clothes into my backpack, pulled my Faraday cage out of the trunk and tucked my devices inside, then walked with Peppy across the bridge, stopping frequently to see if anyone was following on foot. On the north side, I let her run along the river’s edge. No SUVs lingered in the parking area, and no one followed us when we continued on to Nell Albritten’s home.
Albritten greeted us with evident pleasure, stooping to pet Peppy.
I turned down an offer of iced tea. “Ma’am, I wonder if I could leave Peppy with you?” I explained my mission. One of the auto wreckers in the area would have a beater I could buy for a few hundred dollars; if my own errands turned dangerous I didn’t want my dog’s life at risk.
“She’d be company for you, too, now that your son and grandson have left.”
Albritten made a wry face. “Bayard called you, asking you to keep an eye on me, didn’t he? Your dog is welcome to stay here for a bit. She’s a sweet girl. She’ll be good company.”
“If anything happens to me, will you call this number in Chicago?” I handed her a note. “Dr. Lotty Herschel will organize someone to come down to collect Peppy, and she’ll also take care of . . . well, anything that needs taking care of.”
“You really are expecting trouble?” she asked.
“It’s all around me. I don’t know why it hasn’t hit me square in the face yet. My guess is the troublemakers haven’t found whatever they were looking for when they went through August’s home and place of work. They keep hoping I’ll find August and lead them to him.”
“Then it’s just as well you haven’t found him. If these villains catch up with you, I or young Bayard Clements will call this doctor of yours, and we’ll look after your dog.”
I gave her a quick embrace, feeling her shoulder bones through her cardigan. “I’d best be on my way if I’m going to get to the yards before they close.”
Albritten grunted again. “I’ll catch heck for this if word gets out, but I don’t share the local view about you. I have a car you can use.”
I didn’t bother asking what the local view was, since I had a pretty good idea.
Albritten reached for a walking stick that was leaning against the TV. “You can fetch me a coat from the closet over there. The navy one.”
She nodded toward her small entryway. I found a navy trench coat in the closet, with a blue silk scarf hanging around the collar, and helped her work her arms into it.
She led me slowly through to the kitchen, where a door opened into a garage. Everything in her home gleamed from polish and cleansers, and that included the garage, where plastic-covered bins stood on brightly painted shelves. In the middle sat a car, a dull-gray Prius. It didn’t have any plates.
Albritten gave a grim smile at my sharp intake of breath.
“Jordan had ten fits when he saw it here. I guess you know where it came from.”
“August Veriden’s Prius was green,” I said.
“Ed’s daddy was a good friend of my husband’s. They didn’t mind doing me a favor. Painted it, changed some number plate, took out the spy eye behind the dashboard.”
Whoever Ed was, he’d changed the VIN and disabled the car’s built-in GPS signal.
I knelt down to look Peppy in the eye. “You’re going to stay here, girl. You stay, you look after Ms. Albritten.”
Peppy stared from Albritten to me with grave eyes and moved next to the older woman. I buried my face in her ruff. When I got to my feet, I felt as though I had lost my last friend on earth.
“We’ll be fine, and you’ll be fine,” Albritten said. “Trust Jesus that far, young woman. The car keys are under the floor mat. Don’t know why I did that—old habit and the first place anyone would look. You think you can get this business cleared up? Soon?”
“I’d better. I’m spending a fortune down here that I don’t have, and I need to get back home.”
“Husband waiting for you?”
“Friends,” I said lightly, putting Jake to one side of my mind. “Friends and clients.”
When I’d pulled out of her driveway and made sure the garage was firmly locked behind me, I drove over to Lou and Ed, the pair whose scrapyard advertised itself as “Breathing New Life into Old Metal.” Albritten had phoned them after I left, and they had a set of Kansas plates ready for me. Two big men, taciturn, so alike that when they changed positions, I couldn’t tell which was which. They looked me over to see if they agreed with Albritten’s assessment that it was okay to trust me.
“You expecting cops to stop you?” Lou, or maybe Ed, asked, slapping the plates against his open palm.
“Sheriff might if I’m not clever enough to stay out of his way.”
“What are you going to say about the plates being expired?” Ed asked.
Good question. “I’m borrowing the car from my cousin’s husband’s sister, over in Fort Riley. I didn’t know the plates were expired, honest.”
“Good woman.” Ed swatted my shoulder. “Bat those baby blues, and they’ll let you off with a warning.”
“Not when they see my Illinois driver’s license, they won’t. And not if Sheriff Gisborne sees my name, so I’d best not do anything that makes them want to pull me over.”
When Ed bent to screw the plate onto the back holder, a plastic-covered container dropped out. I knelt to inspect it: a small box, about five inches square, wrapped in thick plastic, taped tightly shut. Under a film of dirt, the plastic looked new, the tape fresh.
“I need a sharp blade.” My voice came out hoarsely.
Lou felt in his coverall pockets and came out with a box cutter. I slit the tape, careful not to nick the box. Lou and Ed leaned over to watch, breathing heavily. The box was old, the surface rough from damp and age. I pulled it gently apart and found a second plastic bag inside, new plastic again, covering a small reel of film.
My hands were sweaty. I wiped my fingers on my jeans legs, but I was afraid to lift the reel. This is what August had found, what my troublemakers had been hunting for. Not the thumb drive, nor yet the baby’s hand. A movie.
Lou, or Ed, went over to a supply cabinet and came back with a pair of latex gloves. “Good lamp over on that worktable.” He jerked his head toward a high wooden counter where tools and engine pieces were laid out in careful stacks. He moved a fan and turned on a high-wattage work light.
With the gloves on, I carefully unspooled the reel, holding it so we could all see the tiny images, ghostly figures in the reverse coloring of a black-and-white negative. Before digital media, before VHS and Beta tapes, someone had shot film. This could be the sole copy of whatever it was.
I thought there were frames of a plane, of a woman with a baby in her arms—Jenny with Baby Cady Number One?—and maybe an aerial view of a campsite, but it wasn’t possible to piece together a story by looking at the frames. I needed a projector, I needed a duplicator, I needed to dump this onto video and get a million copies made.
“Found that old projector once, didn’t we?” Lou asked Ed. “We keep that or what?”
“Got it over to the house,” Ed said. “Thought it would come in handy one of these days. You expecting anyone this afternoon? It’s getting dark, may be time to close up the yard for the day.”
He turned to me. “Ms. Albritten didn’t give us your name, just that you were a detective from Chicago helping out, but we’ve got to call you something.”
“Vic. Your turn—how do I tell who’s Ed and who’s Lou?”
The men gave a rumbling laugh. “Ed has a mole on his left temple,” Lou said. “I have the gold front tooth. Vic, you seal that box up and let me put it in my tool kit. You follow us out to the house, take it nice and slow so the sheriff don’t pay you no mind.”
It was just on five o’clock, twilight in November, as I followed their old Chevy truck north. Traffic was heavy, homebound commuters, until we passed the exit to I-70. The truck turned left and started up a hill. We were immediately in the country, on a side road that decanted us at a small farm. Ed waved me around the truck and pointed to a barn, where there was space for the Prius.
As I walked back, motion sensors turned on lights in the yard and behind the windows of a log-framed house that stood in the yard. The cabin was modern, not a historic relic, properly mortised and mortared, with skylights and solar panels on the roof.
A collie trotted around the corner of the house. He stood at stiff-legged attention until Lou said, “Friend,” after which he sniffed me politely but unenthusiastically.
Ed whisked me inside while Lou went out to the barn to look for the projector. Ed said he wasn’t going to close the shutters; it would only draw attention if a neighbor drove by. We’d go to the basement to watch the film.
Ed took a sheet from a neatly stacked pile in the linen closet under the stairs. I followed him to the basement and helped him tack the sheet to the paneled wall of what he told me was their storm shelter. It was minimally furnished—an old armchair, a daybed against one wall, a cabinet stocked with emergency food and water, a small bathroom in one corner.
“We don’t sit down here much—we like being upstairs where we can watch the sky. After being in the yard all day or out poking through people’s junk, we want stars and fresh air.”
We paced nervously, not talking much, until Lou appeared with the projector. “Just needed a new cord. Got that laid on. Now, Vic, you got those slim fingers, not covered with cuts and burs like ours, you thread the film.”
My slim fingers were thick with nerves, but I followed Lou’s instructions on the threading order, and we had the projector rolling in a few minutes. The film started with the clacking noise of cellophane against spindles and the sparks of black and white that I remembered from childhood movies, and then we were facing a warning:
Property of the United States Air Force. Classified. Top Secret. If you are watching this movie without proper clearance or authorization, you could face fines of $25,000 and up to five years in prison.
“You got clearance, Vic? Ed and I sure don’t.”
The three of us burst into nervous guffaws.
The film ran for just under thirty minutes. It started with a close-up of the missile with its warhead in the Kanwaka site, then panned the faces of the brave men who sat there in shifts, ready to answer their country’s call if they needed to press a button to obliterate human life. This seemed to have been spliced in from a PR film; it looked more professionally shot than what came next, and it was the only segment that didn’t have a date stamp.
Monday, August 15, 1983, 0800 Hours
The ragtag protesters’ camp. The numbers, never large, had dwindled; the tents were shabby, and you could tell that the ground was baked hard by the prairie sun. Jenny Perec was there with her baby, along with a dozen other people, most of them young, many wearing tie-dyed shirts or dresses with the peace symbol painted on the front.
The camera had contained a mike, but the focus had been on sight, not sound, so we got only murmured snatches of conversation. Ed, Lou, and I all jumped when a loudspeaker suddenly blared at the campers.
“Now hear this, now hear this: at six hundred hours tomorrow morning, a test of highly toxic materials will commence in this region. Vacate the premises by twenty hundred hours tonight. After tonight the air force cannot guarantee your safety.”
The film showed chaos among the protesters. Some seemed to be confronting guards at the silo gates, others were huddled in a group by one of their tents. The film showed most of them packing their belongings into their cars or VW campers and driving away. I didn’t see Jenny among them.
Tuesday, August 16, 1983, 0600 Hours
The filming began with the plane I’d noticed under the shop light. It wasn’t possible to tell whether the plane was near the silo, but four men in protective gear were loading tanks under the wings, emptying stainless tubes that looked like Colonel Baggetto’s missing fuel-rod container. Several men in uniform, wearing gas masks, were overseeing the operation. With them stood a trio of civilians.
I told Lou to stop the film so we could look at the civilians. Matt Chastain, Magda Spirova, Nathan Kiel. In 1983 Kiel had been a vigorous forty-eight or -nine with thick black hair like Sonia’s, and sinewy arms and legs. Spirova and Chastain seemed impossibly young.
“Lady looks sly,” Ed said. “Up to no good.”
I looked more closely at Spirova’s face. Ed was right; she was swallowing a smirk. Kiel was fussing with the equipment, but in the frozen frame he was facing the camera, saying something to one of the military men. I identified the three figures I knew to Lou and Ed, and Lou started the projector again.
We were above the protesters’ encampment now, flying low, the plane trailing clouds of something—Y. pestis?—over the tents.
Thursday, August 18, 1983, 1600 Hours
A jeep carrying men wearing protective gear drove into the camp. From the jerky quality of the picture, I guessed someone was filming in a following jeep or truck. I felt motion sick as the camera tilted and swung around. The crew in their protective gear were looking into the tents, giving thumbs-up to the trailing camera team, until they came to the tent closest to the silo. For a count of almost two minutes, the camera showed only the open flap to the tent.
Finally a man emerged, carrying a woman in his arms. She was either unconscious or dead, and I was guessing dead.
A man spoke into his walkie-talkie, but we couldn’t hear what he said. For another minute or so, the camera swung between the walkie-talkie and the body on the ground, and then the cameraman stopped filming.
The next segment was so macabre I asked Lou to run it three times before I could finally believe it. A trio of cars arrived, traveling fast judging by the dust clouds. First came Kiel, fishtailing as he pulled up. Behind him a second car decanted Spirova. A beat-up Toyota squealed to a halt in front of Kiel. Matt Chastain jumped out and ran over to Jenny. Her body had been laid on the ground. Chastain flung himself onto it.
It took three air force men to pull him away and to hold him while he struggled. Kiel knelt and looked at Jenny and then looked up. His younger self displayed a wider canvas of emotions than angry spite. He was alarmed, but puzzled as well. Spirova’s smirk appeared again, but only Lou, Ed, and I were watching her.
The air force men put Jenny into the Toyota and drove it away. Matt broke free and tried to run after the car but stumbled and fell. We saw blood spread across his left shoulder: he’d been shot in the back. Two soldiers picked Matt up and laid him in a cart attached to one of the jeeps, shoving aside camera paraphernalia and other equipment to make room for his body. The movie ended there, but on the third viewing I saw fourteen-year-old Sonia’s face peering from behind one of the tents. They laid him on the cartafalque, Sonia had said in the hospital last week. The cart, Matt’s cartafalque.