I looked at him seriously. “You’re probably right, but what sent me out to McKinnon’s farm in the first place was because that’s where Emerald Ferring grew up. Sonia Kiel was out there the night McKinnon was digging her soil samples; in my fifteen seconds on the phone with her, as I told you at the time, she said she’d seen Ferring and August on her truelove’s grave. According to her mother, Sonia thinks Matt Chastain was her truelove. He disappeared after the old nuclear protest campsite burned down, and Sonia thinks Matt died there. So my idea of looking for a cemetery was wrong; it was McKinnon’s land.”

“And that has something to do with the price of tomatoes in Topeka?” Everard said.

“Matt was Dr. Kiel’s student, and Kiel says Matt was involved in an experiment that went bad. I wondered if that’s what contaminated the land? People at Riverside Church said the land couldn’t be used for development.”

“Could be, but what’s the point?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe because I only know three things about the land—Sea-2-Sea is cultivating it; it’s where the protest site used to be; it’s where Sonia thinks Matt disappeared or died—but those things make me connect what happened there in ’83 to what’s going on there now. Another thing is how hostile Gertrude Perec is to me. It made me wonder if Matt Chastain might be Cady Perec’s father—he was on the land back then, and Gertrude’s daughter was camping there. If she doesn’t want Cady to know …” My voice trailed away.

Everard said, “Cady’s always wanted to know who her father was, which is understandable, but it beats me why Gertrude would want to keep it hidden if she knew.”

“She worked for Dr. Kiel. Chastain was Kiel’s student. Sonia had a crush on Chastain and stalked him. Kiel threw Chastain out of the department for making a major blunder on an experiment. And now Kiel is drinking with the guy who’s running an experimental farm on the site of the commune. And this colonel is showing up, flashing his medals, along with a sidekick who he told me was a cadet in the university’s ROTC program. Only when I talked to them, they told me they didn’t have a record of anyone by that name.”

Everard’s phone pinged. He looked at the screen and looked up, his expression bleak. “Dr. Roque died twenty minutes ago. He wasn’t young, but . . . hell, he was a good, impartial pathologist. One of the few people in this damned state who had a job because he knew what the fuck he was doing, not because he buttered the right butt.”

I offered the awkward condolences you make to someone you don’t know well about someone you’ve never met.