Today: Dr. Roque died of pneumonic plague. Had he contracted it from the woman whose body I’d found in Doris McKinnon’s kitchen when he started the autopsy? That didn’t make sense. He’d sickened and died within hours of starting the autopsy, which even for Y. pestis must be a speed record.

Assuming it was Magda Spirova whose body I’d stumbled on, where had she gone after the calamity of 1983? Why had she come back now?

I put my pen down and went to the bar to order another coffee.

1983: Someone, likely Magda Spirova, switched plague bacteria with its less toxic sister. Kiel tested it at the Kanwaka commune. The army called Dr. Kiel to Washington to explain what went wrong, and he explained himself so satisfactorily that the president and his defense secretary had themselves photographed with Kiel.

If pneumonic plague had killed people back in ’83 and was still killing people today, how had the organism survived all these years? Lotty had said it didn’t last long outside, not like anthrax, so there’d have to have been a way to save a sample in a lab. I pictured Spirova carrying a cage full of infected rats with her wherever she went, a medieval witch with her rodent familiars. It was a discomfiting image, woman scientist as witch. Not my favorite stereotype. Anyway, if Magda had been involved, she’d done something modern, technically savvy. Maybe she’d stuck a test tube full of Y. pestis in a freezer and thawed it out when she reappeared in Lawrence.

However it happened, that was the secret that no one wanted me to uncover. They’d used plague on human targets, they’d successfully covered it up for over a generation, they didn’t want it coming to light now. And who were “they”? Had to be the quartet I’d encountered in the hotel bar Thursday evening.

49
Baby Blues

I started to text Aanya again, to see if she knew anything about plague storage and preservation. Before I finished typing, a message came in from her, asking me to call:

i have much news for you, so in case it isn’t safe to talk on this phone, i’m going to skype you from the same place you skyped me last week. can you get there now?

I took that to mean she would be at a library in Kansas City and wanted me to go back to the Lawrence library. I finished my coffee, put Peppy in the car, and walked the four blocks to the library.

When the video screens came up, I could tell that Aanya hadn’t been sleeping. Her dark eyes had sunk into their sockets, and her narrow face looked even smaller, more pinched.

“Are you eating?” I asked.