The junior officer in the doorway was surprised into a coughing fit. Baggetto turned to frown at him: there went Junior’s next promotion.

“Be that as it may, when you stumbled on Spirova’s dead body, I knew that whatever you knew, whoever you were really looking for, you were close to the same quest I was on. I badly needed to keep tabs on you but, even more, on Bram Roswell at Sea-2-Sea. The morning Sheriff Gisborne and I found you at the silo, I let Gisborne know I sympathized with the CARE-NOW baboons. He introduced me to Roswell. We roped Kiel in. I could see what Roswell was doing, but it was damned hard to keep track of you.”

I looked at my fingernails. They’d broken off in jagged pieces while I’d worked on the ventilator screws. They were black underneath, dried blood. A manicure wouldn’t do much to prettify them.

“So your story is that you were infiltrating CARE-NOW? And AKA Pinsen—what was he doing?”

“He actually was working with them,” Baggetto said through tight lips. “He is facing a court-martial, if that’s any consolation.”

The chronology of this was bothering me. “Be quiet for a minute,” I said. “I need to think, and I can’t do it against your voice.”

He stood silent, arms behind him, a parade-ground posture. I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at him.

“You say you only signed on after I came to Lawrence,” I said, finally looking at him again. “But I came to Lawrence because someone had tossed August Veriden’s workplace along with his apartment in Chicago. I assume they were looking for your precious movie. That happened about a week after August and Ms. Ferring arrived here.”

Baggetto rubbed his own cheeks, dark with five o’clock shadow. “That was Roswell’s private army. They were way out of control: one of them killed Dr. Roque and another pretended to be Sonia Kiel’s brother so he could get into her hospital room and try to smother her. It was infuriating to see them acting like a vigilante force, but I couldn’t get them to stop without tipping my own hand and I needed to stay undercover until I located the film.”

“You don’t sound very infuriated,” I said bitterly.

“You want me to start pulling my hair out by the roots? Hear me out before you start preaching and condemning.” He scowled resentfully.