I walked over to Free State Dogs to collect Peppy. She was happy to see me, but she kept turning back to twine herself around the staff member who’d groomed her yesterday.

I walked her to the car with a firm hand on the leash. “You’re all that stands between me and a meltdown, girl, so don’t go leaving me for some young woman with a bouncy ponytail. It’s bad enough having Jake swooning over foreign cellists without losing you, too.”

Back at the B and B, with pasta, cheese, and salad from the market, I talked it over with Peppy. Dr. Kiel hadn’t worked with anthrax, but whatever he’d studied, he’d been funded by the army as well as the National Institutes of Health—the NIH whose initials he’d flung at me.

Shirley said he’d been called on the carpet after the Matt Chastain experiment disaster. Kiel denied it. He’d shown me a photo of himself with Reagan and Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s defense secretary. It was meant to prove that he hadn’t done anything wrong, and I supposed it did—no president poses with someone who’s going to be a liability.

But why would a secretary of defense meet with a cell biologist, unless that biologist was doing something for the national defense? I brought my computer into bed and sat cross-legged in my underwear, trying to find out what work Kiel had done thirty years ago for the national defense. Not even my expensive databases could get Pentagon information.

I was frowning at the screen when Lotty called, her voice sharp. “Victoria! Thank goodness I’ve reached you. I’ve just been speaking with the clinical team looking after Dr. Hitchcock. He’s suffering from pneumonic plague.”

“Is that like bubonic plague?” I asked uncertainly.

“It’s the most lethal form of it,” Lotty said grimly. “Do you know him? Do you have any idea how he could have contracted it?”

I explained the chain of connections that had led me to his name but added that I’d never met him. “Is that what killed Dr. Roque? They were both handling some soil samples from a nearby farm.”

“I don’t know about Dr. Roque, but you don’t contract plague from handling dirt. With bubonic plague you are bitten by a flea that has been dining on an infected rat or prairie dog. For pneumonic an infected person can cough or sneeze on you. If it had been anthrax, yes, the spores can lie dormant in the soil, but not Y. pestis.”

“Why what?” I asked.

“Not ‘why,’ ‘what,’” Lotty said dryly. “Y for Yersinia. The organism’s formal name.”

I pulled out the offprint that Kiel’s student had given me. “Is it the same as Y. enterocolitica?” I had no idea how to pronounce it, so I spelled it for her.