What, I didn’t know, but I didn’t know the answer to any of the problems I was facing. Finding a way to look after Ms. Albritten would be a cinch compared to sorting out Cady’s and Sonia’s histories, finding August Veriden and Emerald Ferring, and unraveling what Dr. Kiel was up to with the colonel. Maybe I’d tuck Albritten into the Mustang with Peppy and let her ride shotgun as I drove madly around Douglas County, looking for dead women.

One problem at a time. I unrolled the newsprint where I’d divided events between “Current Day” and 1983. Under “Current Day,” I wrote, “Colonel Baggetto came to Lawrence at the request of the army, not because of some bogus spent fuel rods but because Spirova’s presence in Lawrence worried them.”

In 1983 Spirova had been furious with Kiel. In her mind he’d lured her to Kansas and then abandoned her. Had she switched those organisms in 1983 at the behest of the KGB or out of rage with Kiel? In either event he’d survived and thrived, while she’d been bound over to the U.S. Army. The army probably kept her on a tight leash when they first had her, but as the Cold War ended, I was guessing they cut her loose and didn’t bother to keep track of her.

Even if revenge had been boiling in her mind for thirty years, why had Spirova waited this long to come back? She couldn’t have counted on Kiel to stay alive until she got around to punishing him. No, Spirova must have come back to Kansas for reasons that had nothing to do with Kiel but everything to do with bioweapons.

Gertrude Perec had said Magda was working with Bram Roswell out at Sea-2-Sea. Doing what? Perhaps she was taking her bioweapons expertise into how to destroy plants. Maybe that was what they were doing on their off-limits experimental farm—growing plants in order to give them lethal diseases.

I drew a picture of a corn plant with an ugly worm boring into it. If Sea-2-Sea really was engaged in that kind of work, then the army probably knew all about them. In which case, instead of tracking Spirova to Kansas, Baggetto had brought her here as a consultant for Bram Roswell.

I started looking at Sea-2-Sea, not the rhetoric on their website (“Safeguarding America’s Food Supply from Sea to Shining Sea”) but deeper background. I skimmed reports to congressional committees, looked at work by investigative journalists who covered America’s vast food chain, dipped into scholarly databases.

Sea-2-Sea didn’t seem different from any other food giant: hideous work conditions in the fields to place on our tables those bright sparkling wines. Laboratories where plant and animal genetics were studied. Vast landholdings that drove small farmers out of business. Sea-2-Sea wasn’t any better than their competition, but they didn’t look worse.