I reclined on the rock, my backpack as a pillow, and watched the swallows swooping and rising among the gulls. It was twenty degrees warmer here than in Chicago, my weather app told me: not an inducement to move to Kansas, but enough to warm the rock and bring a few insects out.

Dr. Roque’s death had been very convenient for whoever wanted Bratislava’s body. A sudden collapse from a virulent flu—could that have been engineered? Would Colonel Baggetto, for instance, have sneaked into the lab and stabbed Roque with a needleful of a mysterious drug or bug?

I imagined them struggling, the needle dropping, Dr. Roque dying a hideous death while the colonel straightened his medals and gave a loud, sinister laugh. It was ludicrous: I could only see it as cartoon panels, Wonder Woman versus Cheetah, Superman against Lex Luthor. Anyway, Aanya Malik was listening to Dr. Roque’s dictation. If he’d had his mike on, then she would have overheard a struggle.

On the other hand—had Roque been sick already when he drove to Topeka on Thursday morning? I used one of my remaining burner phones to call Malik.

She repeated her thanks for my making the drive to Kansas City in the middle of the night, assured me she was fine, as was Dinah the cat—“I cannot believe I forgot her and left her to starve for all those days!”—and that the Kansas City cops hadn’t been in touch about the break-in. They probably hadn’t printed his house—overworked, underfunded police departments don’t process every crime scene.

The oddity was that the break-in hadn’t made any of the news feeds. I would think anyone monitoring police frequencies would pick it up: Roque had that national reputation, even if it was five years old, and he was dead—two things that gave the break-in national interest. Either no one had seen the connection or the cops were playing this closer to their collective chest than I imagined. I didn’t say so to Aanya—I didn’t want her hyperventilating every time her phone rang.

“Dr. Roque’s collapse at the start of an autopsy seems dramatic,” I said. “Could someone have engineered his illness? They wanted to get rid of that body before he examined it more closely.”

“During the famous flu epidemic of 1919, people left their houses in the morning feeling fine and were dead by noon, so a swift-growing and powerful virus, it could have killed him quickly, on its own. For the body stealers, Dr. Roque’s collapse was perhaps merely a sign of fortune favoring their wishes, not them making it happen,” Aanya objected.

“Fortune has certainly been favoring whoever is orchestrating this mayhem,” I agreed. “Where is Dr. Roque’s body? Can you get one of his colleagues to perform the autopsy?”