“They need me to do my real job, not bird-dog you.” He grinned. “The dispatcher’s actual words. Before I go hunting some housebreakers, you want to tell me how you knew that Gisborne caught the call when Jenny Perec drowned?”

I studied him thoughtfully: trustable or a skilled cop knowing how to run a con? “Cady Perec told me. How she knows, that you’d have to ask her yourself.”

“Fair enough.” He squeezed my arm, a friendly farewell, not a warning. “Warshawski, you find yourself falling down some rabbit hole, call Officer Friendly. I don’t want all the paperwork I’d have to fill out if you stopped a bullet in my jurisdiction.”

I walked over to the FedEx store in a lighter mood than I would have thought possible half an hour earlier. I copied Jenny Perec’s incident report onto a thumb drive and expressed it to the Cheviot lab. I printed the photos that showed the accident site itself, both the long shot, with the skid marks from Old K-10 down through the broken bushes, and the close-ups, then uploaded the pictures of Jenny’s dead face in an e-mail to Lotty.

I explained who she was, the absence of an autopsy report, and asked if Lotty could show the pictures to a pathologist. “I’d like some off-the-record speculation here. Water damage, radiation poisoning, weed killer?”

Thanks to Jake’s e-mail, I hadn’t eaten breakfast. I found another diner, one where they baked their own bread in a stone oven you could see from the counter. While I ate, I made some rough calculations on the dimensions of the fifteen acres Doris McKinnon had been forced to cede and sketched those in on my county map, putting them relative to the missile silo a couple of different ways.

After homemade bean soup and four slices of bread with goat cheese, I wanted a nap. “No sleeping, Warshawski,” I said sternly. “Woman up. You are now ready for whatever dangers the Kansas prairies may unleash.”

The wind was blowing from the north, rain spitting in with it. It sliced through my wool jacket and knit top as if I were walking naked down the street. Maybe I wasn’t ready for the prairies to unleash their fury.

When I got to the library lot, I placed some sheets of newspaper on the concrete and knelt to look under my car, taking off my good jacket and putting on my windbreaker first. The trackers that Baggetto and Pinsen had access to were so tiny they’d be hard to find. I looked under the wheel housings and inched my fingers around the exhaust system but didn’t find anything except grease and mud.