I smiled limpidly. “So I can find her dental records. So an independent pathologist can compare them with the X-rays of the teeth of the woman whose body disappeared from Dr. Roque’s lab last week.”

47
Playing with Germs

I was getting back on the elevator, exhausted and frustrated, when Sue-Anne Tommason tapped my shoulder. She shoved some tightly folded papers into my jacket pocket and flitted back to Kiel’s lab.

I waited until I was in my car to examine the pages. I’d been expecting a major secret—a hastily scribbled report of Dr. Kiel’s involvement in anthrax research or an overheard confession to Matt Chastain’s murder.

Instead I was looking at an offprint of a 1982 article in the Journal of Cell Morphology. “Phospholipase suppression in nuclear proteins during infection (Y. enterocolitica).” I sighed: this was one of the articles whose titles had stumped me when I first looked into Dr. Kiel’s history last week. The only words I understood were “suppression in” and “during infection.”

The work had been completed thanks to grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Army Research Council. It listed seven co-authors, starting with Kiel N. and including Spirova M. The only M in the list of authors.

I started to search for Spirovas on my tablet, but the sun had set while I was talking to Dr. Kiel. Floodlights were on in the parking lot and around the buildings, but away from the Forschung Center night was shrouding the West Campus. A mist was rising across the grass. I felt tiny and exposed on the hilltop, with dark prairie stretching out beyond me. A giant hound or, worse, a malevolent human could bound out of the mist while I was deep in databases.

I drove into town, to a strip mall near Free State Dogs. Students were laughing, holding hands, texting, as they went into the carry-out places. Their chatter felt reassuring. I parked under one of the streetlights and went back to my search engines.

LifeStory gave me a handful of Spirovs or Spirovas, no Magdas, and none who had been at the University of Kansas. I turned to newspaper databases, where I found her at once in the Douglas County Herald, lecturing in November 1981 to a meeting of the Lawrence Rotary Club.

Spirova had spoken about the grimness of life under Communism and how thankful she was to Dr. and Mrs. Kiel for opening their home to her. She was especially grateful for the chance to do research in Dr. Kiel’s lab. When she heard him address a 1979 symposium on infectious diseases and bioweapons in Bratislava, she’d been overwhelmed by the depth of his knowledge.