“Oh, for God’s sake. Cady. You encouraged Gertrude to believe that Cady was Jenny’s baby, but Jenny’s baby died of the plague. Cady was Magda’s baby, but you helped create her. I can step you through the mechanics if you’ve forgotten how.”

“So she wasn’t lying,” he whispered. “Doris McKinnon called Gertrude from the hospital, saying Lucinda had found Jenny’s baby abandoned in the tent. I thought . . . I— What difference does it make? Lucinda died. I could see she’d been exposed to pestis, not enterocolitica. I couldn’t think about a baby at a time like that, despite what Magda had said.”

“Is that goddamn home-wrecking cunt still coming around?” Shirley Kiel had appeared in the hall behind her husband, her head bobbing forward, her eyes glittering with alcohol and fury.

“Don’t talk like that!” Kiel roared. “It’s ugly, it’s cheap, and it makes you—”

“Magda is dead,” I said.

Shirley gave a crack of dreadful laughter. “Magda was in another country, and now the wench is dead.”

“I guess it could seem like a joke, if you were truly perverse enough to laugh at murder. I don’t know if you’re a born sociopath or if you’ve spent so many years battling your husband that you no longer know what you’re saying or feeling. Maybe that’s the same as being a sociopath.”

Shirley put a hand to her face, as if I’d slapped her. “That’s not true! That’s not fair.”

“I’m way beyond what’s fair. Fair would have meant you paying serious attention to your daughter when she was fourteen and making herself sick with longing over Matt Chastain. You couldn’t have stopped his murder, nor that of Jenny Perec, but you could have protected your child from seeing those sights.”

I felt a vein throbbing in my own forehead, my neck, too, and tried to steady myself. “What brought Magda back to Kansas this time, Dr. Kiel? Something to do with pestis, I assume, since Dr. Roque was infected with it and Dr. Hitchcock is fighting for his life.”

He kept staring at me.

“Magda must have called you,” I said. “Was she still bitter so many years later? After all, you sacrificed her to protect your research reputation.”

“Yes, she called.” He spoke in a hoarse whisper. “So many years had passed I’d begun to think I could live out my days in peace, without hearing from her again.”

“What did she want from you?” I demanded.

“To taunt me, of course. She wanted me to know she could undo my career at any second with a phone call.”

“What? To reveal your role in spreading pestis around the missile base?”

He nodded fractionally.

“Out of curiosity, not that it matters now, what actually happened? Why did you spray the camp?”

“It was a way of testing diffusion,” Kiel said.