“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.