“I don’t know, but can’t you for once leave something alone? At least until Lotty talks to the Cleveland Clinic?”

“Jewel, you suspect something, don’t you?” I demanded.

“Anthrax,” she finally blurted. “It could get into the lungs, make a doctor who wasn’t expecting it not look for it. Don’t go digging in contaminated soil!” She cut the connection.

Anthrax. Biohazard of choice for terrorists. Abortion clinics get threats of it pretty much every week, and of course the whole government mail apparatus was changed because of anthrax attacks following 9/11. I looked it up on the Mayo Clinic site, but it was hard to tell from the description of the symptoms if it could be mistaken for pneumonia. I fingered my lymph glands, checking for swelling.

“You are healthy as a hog, V.I. Warshawski,” I said sternly.

More important was any risk I might bring Bernie, as well as the danger Cady could face if she went digging in McKinnon’s land.

I texted Aanya Malik, Dr. Roque’s technician, to ask if there was any chance he’d died of anthrax. She phoned me back almost instantly.

“Vic, about the anthrax. It is possible that spores are in the soil that Dr. Roque and Dr. Hitchcock handled, but then why did not the woman who sent the samples to Dr. Roque also have anthrax?”

“I don’t know that she didn’t,” I said.

“You found her body. She was shot—that killed her. If she had been as sick as Dr. Roque, she could not have been driving that truck to begin with, believe me.” She paused, fumbling for words. “I know that looking at the dead cannot be easy, but did she have black discolorations on her face or hands, something like a hard smear of tar perhaps?”

I pulled out my phone and looked at the pictures I had snapped. It had been dusk, the light was bad, and McKinnon’s face was barely visible. It was mottled: she was old, and death had accentuated the liverish patches in her cheeks, but I didn’t think I could see any tarlike smears. I forwarded the photos to Aanya.

“I will ask the pathologist who will do the autopsy to be sure to check for traces,” Aanya promised. “Dr. Roque’s children have agreed to let us have an independent autopsy of the doctor, and Dr. Madej, who will do that, can also arrange to work on Doris McKinnon. Although the anthrax bacillus itself dies quickly after the host dies, there would be traces. And I will show him the photographs you took of Ms. McKinnon.”

I asked when the autopsy would be performed; she thought Dr. Madej would start work on it later this afternoon. “We trust Dr. Madej, Ruby—Dr. Roque’s secretary—and I do. Dr. Roque himself trained Dr. Madej. He won’t cut corners or make a cover-up.”

“A cover-up?”