One of the articles had an illustration of a fermenter. It was a giant vat, the kind you see in beer breweries. If Kiel had been using something that big back in the eighties, where would he have put it? Out by the Kanwaka silo?

Too many things to put together. Short sleep and high anxiety didn’t make my brain work faster.

“Time to be up and about,” I told Peppy. “Run the riverfront, get some sheets of newsprint so we can write down our known knowns and our known unknowns.”

I checked my messages. A reminder from Lotty to take my pills. With food. I woke Bernie again.

“I’m going out. Your dad is arriving at Kansas City on the five-fifteen from San Jose. He’ll be here around seven. If you need me in the meantime, text, but you can call Lyft or Uber to get around.”

I wasn’t sure she’d heard me, but I stuck the doxycycline in my jeans pocket, pulled my computer, iPad, chargers together in my Faraday cage, and gathered various changes of clothes so I wouldn’t have to come back here if I got wet and muddy.

Peppy and I ran a five-mile loop down near the river. By the end, some of my anxiety had eased and I felt better able to think.

The FedEx store across from the Hippo sold me paper. Inside the coffee bar, I sponged off and changed into my jeans in their washroom, then sat down at the counter to work.

I divided my sheet of paper in two: 1983 and today.

1983: The air force is annoyed that the protesters are outside the Kanwaka missile. They want to drive them away. The army is funding Kiel’s research into Y. enterocolitica; why not spray some over the protesters, send them all vomiting into the local emergency room, and then burn the camp after they’ve left?

1983: When Doris went over to the field that August morning with food for Jenny and the baby, she’d seen the signs warning of hazardous waste. The signs had implied radioactive waste, but maybe that was a convenient cover.

1983: Unless Sonia’s memory had become more melodramatic over time, Matt Chastain had died in the fire that swept through the protesters’ camp. Cady Perec had looked for traces of Chastain in the cell-biology department files and come up empty. If a mother or sister had ever written Kiel wanting information about Chastain, those letters had been discarded.

Today: Doris McKinnon had found bones that she’d delivered to Dr. Roque. Baby bones, but maybe my invaders thought they were Matt Chastain’s remains. Is that what they’d been looking for—in my place, at August’s home and workplace? They were covering up his death?