His baleful glance fell on Peppy, who shrank closer to me. “Not you, girl. You keep giving emotional support.” He bent to scratch her ears. “Since you know so much, Warshawski, tell me where McKinnon’s dirt came from.”

“I don’t know, but I guess from her land, or what used to be her land. The churchwomen at St. Silas and Riverside tell me that back in September or October they saw Ms. McKinnon at the farmers’ market. She was upset because people were planting on her land. They told me she didn’t have the energy to farm anymore, that she’d been leasing the land to other farmers, and she hadn’t been out on the perimeter for a while. The air force had seized another fifteen acres from her back in 1983 or ’84. They let Sea-2-Sea buy it two or three years ago, I guess without her knowing. So Sea-2-Sea is planting on what used to be her land, which the air force had said was too contaminated with radiation to cultivate. In her place I would have been spitting mad and looked for confirmation.”

Everard punched his left fist into his open palm. “I am so fucking goddamn sick of being shut out from every piece of this damned investigation.”

I stared at him. “Sergeant—I’m not shutting you out. How can I? I don’t have any official status. I talk to people, and if I’m lucky, they talk back to me.”

His mouth set in a hard line. “Church ladies, army colonels, lab techs—hell, the nurses at the hospital called you before they called me yesterday when someone tried to suffocate Sonia Kiel!”

“It’s my full-time job,” I said lamely. “I’m not answering calls about home invasions or armed robberies on Iowa Street.”

Everard walked away from me, made a little circle while he communed with himself, came back, squatted to pet the dog.

“Francis Roque was one of the good guys. Now, given what’s happened to Dr. Hitchcock, it sounds as though Roque’s death was engin— But that doesn’t make sense. You don’t give someone pneumonia and hope they’ll die on you at just the right moment. I’m going to find out if there’s an autopsy. If there isn’t—I’ll see if I can make it happen.”

“And you’ll share the results with me because . . . ?”

“Because if I don’t, you’ll do whatever magic dance you do that gets church ladies and nameless techs to confide their deepest secrets.”

I squeezed his forearm. “If it’s any comfort, Sergeant, you’re one of the good guys, too.”

44
Swabbing the Decks, or Something