I fiddled with the blinds cord but only made the tangle worse. I thought about the quartet I’d encountered in the Oregon Trail’s bar this evening: Army, Academy, and Agribusiness huddling together. Colonel Baggetto said he was lecturing on campus in the morning, but he might have arranged that simply as an excuse to come to Lawrence when he learned about Doris McKinnon’s dead body.

He’s worried about hippies, Baggetto had said. Nobody talked about hippies these days, but Roswell certainly didn’t want trespassers on Sea-2-Sea land.

The soil samples were the crux. Doris wanted evidence about what contaminants were in the soil. The bags she’d collected hadn’t been in her house when Peppy and I got there this evening. Either the killers had found the samples or she’d gotten rid of them before she died.

I was forgetting the metal container McKinnon had found. Doris had said she was going back for it the next day. I hadn’t seen any metal object in her home big enough to be the samovar or whatever they’d stumbled on—maybe that was what her killer had snatched.

It was maddening that I couldn’t talk to Sonia—she’d know who had driven onto the field in the middle of August’s video. She might even know about the soil samples.

I didn’t believe that the vandals who’d turned August’s home and the Six-Points Gym upside down were looking for dirt. The thumb drive was a real possibility. I needed to get it to a safe place. Cheviot, the private forensics lab I use, has the equipment and the expertise to bring the photos into better focus. They could analyze the drive itself for prints or DNA. They might even be able to bring up a license plate or a make and model number on the vehicle. They could perform a miracle and identify the samovar.

I copied the file to Dropbox and stored it in that mythic cloud. It sounds like a fluffy bit of white floating overhead, but of course it’s really a massive data farm, some big power grid that’s polluting some other person’s river.

In the morning I’d do a property search for the boundaries of Doris McKinnon’s land, check the boundaries of Sea-2-Sea’s experimental farm.

I climbed back into bed, moving Peppy so that I could lie in the place she’d made warm. The handful of little bones that Doris had found floated through the cloud of my own mind. Those bones, we all come to those dusty remains. Even Jake’s beautiful fingers, touching his bass strings, touching me, would one day be gray bones in a piece of soil.

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Trespassers W