I sat up, no longer sleepy, and turned on my bedside lamp. Colonel Baggetto had gone out of his way to lie to me last night. He could have let me walk away with nothing but a smile—last night I hadn’t cared who he had drinks with or what had brought him to Lawrence.

I logged on to my subscription search engines, but they couldn’t tell me much about Baggetto. He’d been born in Providence, Rhode Island, attended a science-and-math academy, and gone from there to West Point. He’d graduated nineteenth in his class, done three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of army intelligence.

After the third tour, he’d undergone advanced training at the Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth—only forty miles from Lawrence—and completed a master’s in computer engineering at Columbia in New York. He’d been sent to Fort Riley three months ago, right after his promotion to colonel. That was it. Nothing personal, other than that he’d never married anyone of any sex.

I’m bone ignorant about the military, but it looked like Baggetto was being groomed for great things. Which meant he wouldn’t be in Lawrence, or talking to me, if it was trivial. Or if it might hurt his career.

Which meant it was somehow tied to Sea-2-Sea, because he’d been at the hotel with Bram somebody along with the bogus cadet. I couldn’t remember Bram’s last name—I kept thinking Stoker, naturally—but the Net found it for me. Bram Roswell, head of R&D. M.B.A. from Wharton, undergraduate degree in agribusiness from Kansas State University, which happened to be near Fort Riley. I wondered if that was significant, if Roswell returned to his alma mater to root for football games and then got together with army intelligence officers at night to plan . . . what?

A search of news stories reported Roswell’s appearance at various charity functions in Lawrence, Kansas City, and Dallas. Another story revealed that Roswell was active in Patriots CARE-NOW—Concerned Americans for Rearmament Now. He was shown with a former undersecretary of defense for nuclear arms getting a medal at their annual dinner.

Was whatever brought Baggetto and Roswell together somehow connected to Doris McKinnon and the digging she’d been doing? Had McKinnon’s decision to dig brought Emerald Ferring to Kansas so hastily? Ferring had relied on Troy Hempel since he was seven and began cutting her lawn for her, but she turned to August Veriden, a stranger, because she couldn’t wait five extra days for Troy Hempel to come home.