She was nervous; I wondered if Kiel had been yelling at her.

“He’s bound to know more than I do.” I smiled. “All I know is what the Mayo Clinic website had to say, but he can tell me things like whether someone digging up dirt on a farm east of town could have contracted it from the ground.”

She hesitated. I said she could ask Dr. Kiel if it would be easier for me to discuss the situation with Colonel Baggetto. At that point she decided to take me inside—however nervous Kiel might make her, she didn’t want to be a Ping-Pong ball bouncing between him and me.

We rode an elevator to the eighth floor. She revealed her name as Sue-Anne Tommason, from near Garden City. Yes, they were sick and tired of only being known for In Cold Blood; there was plenty more to Garden City than somebody getting murdered sixty years ago. “It was horrible when the Capote movie came out. It reopened all these old wounds and made us look like a national freak show all over again. You’re from Chicago, right? And that’s got way more murders than Garden City.”

“Right you are, Ms. Tommason.” I followed her out of the elevator and down the hall. “And that seems to be what we’re mostly known for these days, that and Al Capone.”

Tommason stopped outside a door that had Kiel’s name on it, took a breath, and led me inside. She left me at the entrance, with a whispered command to wait a minute, and went through a door at the far end of the room.

The lab was a large, well-lighted place, but rows of high black counters made it seem smaller. Unlike the Kiel home, the room was clean and sternly tidy, with the kind of equipment that makes you think of Walter Mitty going pocketa-pocketa—big drums with hinged arm holders that moved up and down in a steady rhythm, racks of test tubes, shelves of beakers of all shapes and sizes. It smelled of chemicals, a biting scent with a musty underlayer. The smell was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

I wandered around and came to a tightly sealed glass case, a bit like a miniature greenhouse, with ventilation tubes leading away from a pair of canisters. I leaned over for a closer look. They looked like the canister in the photo that Colonel Baggetto had shown me, which supposedly held fuel rods.

“So you’ve switched from being an expert on my daughter’s mental illness to an interest in wool-sorter’s disease. Or maybe you think that’s the underlying cause of her problems. It’s an interesting hypothesis.”

Dr. Kiel had come up behind me, the noise of the ventilators masking his crepe-soled shoes. Sue-Anne was hovering behind him with two young men about her age, also in white lab coats.