“As you know, Sonia recognized all the players. She started telling anyone who would listen that she’d seen Spirova out by the silo—she kept referring to it as her lover’s graveyard—but the thing that got everybody’s tail in a knot was her screaming that she’d watched the film—‘I saw her in the movies!’ she kept saying about Spirova. That didn’t mean anything to the staff at St. Raphael’s, but it meant a lot to me. And when Pinsen got wind of it, he wanted her silenced. From what she was saying, we knew she’d seen the film out at the farm, but we couldn’t find it when we searched there.”

I nodded. “The messy searches were done by Roswell’s army, the clean ones by you. Why did they pilfer the medical-supply closet at the gym where August Veriden worked? They deal on the side?”

Baggetto made an impatient gesture. “Does it matter? I think they wanted to make it look like ordinary vandalism, not that they were after something specific.”

My upper lip curled in distaste. “You searched Chicago and you searched Lawrence. You couldn’t find the film, so you had to kill Sonia?”

“That was Pinsen: he got the college kids to put roofies in her vodka. They thought it was a big joke.”

“I’ll bet. We keep reading about the cool sense of humor guys at bars have.”

It was convenient, putting all the bad deeds onto Marlon Pinsen. Just as Kiel and the army had done with Spirova in 1983. Pinsen would be court-martialed, Baggetto would go on to higher ranks, and we’d never know who really did what to whom.

“Of course, Spirova knew about the film. There was a night out in the Sea-2-Sea field—”

“Yes, I know about that. McKinnon was furious that the air force had sold her land to Roswell without giving her a chance to buy it. They’d told her it was contaminated with radiation, and she wanted proof one way or another.”

“Yes. Well, Spirova decided she would infect McKinnon with Y. pestis and then search the house for the film. She brought an aerosol sample up to the house and contaminated the soil inside the jars, but Roswell didn’t want contaminated soil going around the county—that would launch a full-scale investigation that might uncover his private patriot lab. He sent one of his private army after Spirova. She was shot in the kitchen, where you found her. The underling took the aerosol samples away with him but didn’t realize Spirova had already added it to the soil jars. I’m guessing that Veriden, McKinnon, and Ferring found Spirova’s body and fled, but that’s just a guess.”