His lips twitched. “I thought my wife and I had made it clear that Sonia’s upheavals stopped entertaining us years ago. I assumed she owed money to a drug dealer who was tired of waiting for payment.”

“You’ve watched too many episodes of Breaking Bad. Drug dealers may shoot each other on the streets, but they don’t have the patience or the subtlety to break into an ICU in the manner that your daughter’s assailant used.”

Kiel was displaying a lot of nervous symptoms, from the twitching lips to the rocking on his feet, but he was so chronically angry and nervy that I couldn’t interpret the symptoms: fear, guilt, knowledge, or just an insecure, volatile man who couldn’t bear confrontation?

“I have a couple of visuals.” I opened my tablet. I’d uploaded the Fighting Germs picture while I’d been in the lobby, and next to it I’d put a copy of one of Sonia’s sketches.

“That’s Matt Chastain, right, drawn by your daughter. But which one of those women is Magda?”

Dr. Kiel became very still. Even the vein in his forehead stopped pulsing.

“Magda. Who mentioned that name? Have you been talking to my wife?” The words were as forceful as ever, but his voice lacked power.

“Your sons,” I said. “They were distressed at the news about their sister. They mentioned Magda when I asked about the experiment that went so badly thirty years back. What was that experiment?”

“Nothing you would understand.”

“You’re right that I can’t tell a peptide from a pep talk, but I bet if you told me the basics, like why you had to go to Washington to defend your grant to the Department of Defense, I could follow along.”

“You were talking to Shirley.” His voice was recovering. “She loves to create drama out of the ordinary. Sonia was grabbing all the attention, with her delusions about Chastain, so Shirley began telling people that I was doing secret work for the Pentagon and that I’d been called on the carpet.

“Wrong, wrong, wrong. It was an ordinary grant review, but Lawrence had been the focus of enormous media attention because that ludicrous film, The Day After, was made here. That brouhaha was compounded by the fracas at the missile silo. The president wanted to be briefed. I went to the White House, I spoke to the president and his secretary of defense. Shirley all but accused me of being a fascist for meeting with Reagan—that’s how unhinged she was. Sue-Anne!” he barked over his shoulder. “Go get that photo.”

Sue-Anne Tommason trotted obediently toward his office.

“What is Magda’s last name?” I asked.

“Why do you want to know?”