As I drove back to Lawrence, my thoughts churned uselessly. What did the army or Sea-2-Sea or Dr. Kiel, whoever was behind Douglas County’s mayhem, need to find so desperately? I couldn’t believe it had anything to do with drug manufacture. The U.S. Army wouldn’t send a high-ranking colonel to a meth plant, and much as Nathan Kiel rubbed me the wrong way, I didn’t see him as a drug lord.

I kept coming back to bioweapons. Roswell, the senior Sea-2-Sea executive, belonged to some group that supported rearmament. When I’d read about it, I’d thought of nukes, but the group could be interested in bioweapons as well. Dr. Kiel would know a lot about anthrax. Whether he knew anything about how to turn it into a weapon, he would still be someone the army or a private contractor would consult if they wanted to culture bioweapons in Lawrence.

If Roswell was producing weapons at the Sea-2-Sea compound, why would they also be growing crops nearby? As a cover for their weapons program? On the other hand, agricultural waste is spewed everywhere without a second thought; Sea-2-Sea might think nothing of selling sorghum grown in contaminated soil.

What about the spent fuel rods that Baggetto said he was looking for? Was that a cover, too? Baggetto had bugged my room. It could be to see whether I talked to anyone about fuel rods, but the story of the rods might be another cover story. Cover for bioweapons?

Bernie was still with Cady at the school. I drove to the B and B, where I returned to the databases with Dr. Kiel’s research history. I couldn’t find any articles that showed him involved with anthrax research. He’d started life working on something called C. burnetii in 1958 and had switched to Y. enterocolitica in the late 1970s. These germs had nothing to do with anthrax: the first was called a rickettsia; it gave you Rocky Mountain spotted fever. The second caused a nonfatal intestinal ailment.

By now it was three in the afternoon. How drunk would Shirley Kiel be? How choleric her husband?

The VW wasn’t in the drive when I got to the Kiel house, and no one answered the front door. It was hard to imagine that both parents were at the hospital worrying over their daughter, but of course they might be at the grocery store or taking in an afternoon movie. My mouth twisted as I tried to picture the Kiels in some banal and harmonious activity.

I pushed my way through the heavy bushes along the side of the house to the back, where the sunporch overlooked an untended garden. A light was on; when I stood on a rusting garden chair, I saw Shirley, crossword book in hand, head back, eyes closed. Movement in her chest: she wasn’t dead. Snoozing or passed out.