Bernie had given Peppy a good run, so the dog was content to lie at my feet while I drank coffee and answered messages. I had begun recognizing the regulars in the Hippo: a woman who owned an art gallery on Massachusetts Street, a graduate student in English lit who always came in with a stack of books but played a video game while his coffee grew cold. Only a few greeted me, but most stopped to scratch Peppy’s ears.

My first e-mail of the day came from the Cheviot lab in suburban Chicago, to tell me they had cleared the mal- and spyware from my computer, phone, and tablet and added the most sophisticated encryption protocols possible, for a fee only slightly less than the national debt.

When I thought of the charges I was incurring every night I was away from home, my blood ran cold. I did the prudent thing and stopped thinking about them.

I wondered how much of Sonia’s journal was reliable. There’d been a fire—at least the Douglas County Herald had reported one—but the chronology with Matt Chastain and the bad experiment was impossible to sort out from Sonia’s writing. Her description of her symptoms sounded like a serious illness: she’d run a high fever, been attached to a ventilator. Could she have contracted polio? Is that what Matt Chastain, or the woman from Bratislava, or Kiel himself had spread around?

I shuddered. The Salk vaccine had been in place during my childhood, but there’d been a teen across the street from me, a girl who’d lived to dance. Polio left her walking only with an elaborately constructed set of braces.

I had a message from Cady, reinforcing the invitation to Bernie to visit her classroom and to ask what I’d decided to do about going to the Sea-2-Sea field at night. tomorrow should be clear. i know a place to roll under the fence without setting off the alarms. ten o’clock?

If I’d thought any trace of Emerald Ferring or August was in those fields, I would have cast prudence to the winds. But Baggetto and Pinsen had had plenty of time to scour them. The soil I’d taken on McKinnon’s side of the fence should have the same toxins as the dirt eight feet away.

I wrote Cady back to say I’d reconsidered; it would be foolhardy, even dangerous, to go. She didn’t reply. I hoped that meant she was sulking but wouldn’t go without me.

I sighed, dispirited, and turned back to my to-do list, started with a phone call to the geology professor’s office. A secretary answered.

I introduced myself as an investigator looking into circumstances around Dr. Roque’s death. “Since his last phone calls were from Professor Hitchcock, I’m hoping the professor would be willing to tell me what they were discussing.”