“I’m guessing Doris McKinnon came back to the house with August and Ferring. They saw Spirova’s body and panicked. Doris managed to pack up the soil containers and get them in the mail to Dr. Roque before your pals knew about it. And then someone followed McKinnon and shot her,” I said, leaning back against the pillows. “They reprised the murder of Jenny Perec: shot her, put her car into the Wakarusa at the same spot. Whose idea was that? Gisborne? He was the deputy who pulled Perec from the water.”

“It wasn’t quite that bad.”

Baggetto and I both turned in surprise: Sergeant Everard had slipped into the entrance, next to Baggetto’s adjutant, without our noticing.

“Hey, Warshawski.” Everard came over to the bed and peered at me. “Want me to put those bruises out on Facebook? Proof to the world that you’re an investigator who runs the extra marathon for her clients?”

“I don’t want to frighten off cowboys and soldiers,” I said. “What wasn’t quite that bad about Gisborne?”

Everard sat on the edge of the bed. “He pulled Jenny Perec out of the Wakarusa. He didn’t put her in there. That was the air force.” He nodded at Baggetto.

“I’m with the army,” Baggetto protested stiffly.

“Doing the air force’s groundwork for them in eastern Kansas,” Everard said. “Did you know how Jenny Perec was killed by the plague and her body put into the Wakarusa to make it look as though she’d gone off the road in a frenzy?”

Baggetto took a seat on the visitor’s chair with a challenging look at me, but I let it go.

“I didn’t learn about it until the day at the courthouse when Gisborne got rattled by Warshawski here looking for the Perec file,” the colonel said. “The file had disappeared, but I don’t think it was Gisborne who pulled it. He started unraveling because he thought there was a traitor on the county staff.”

“Yeah,” Everard said. “One of his deputies was moonlighting in Roswell’s CARE-NOW army. That was a blow. I kept telling Warshawski here that Gisborne wasn’t a bad guy. He wasn’t, but he got penned in pretty tight. He was giving Roswell and Sea-2-Sea extra security. Nothing wrong with that, but Roswell has a way of making it hard to leave once you’re part of his operation.”

“It was Pinsen who dug out the original story,” Baggetto said. “He’s with Homeland, so he has access to every secret act ever committed by possums in the dead of night. He knew that young Jenny Perec had died of the plague. He told Roswell, and Roswell got his citizen army to shoot McKinnon and put her in the river. That really unnerved Gisborne.”