Baggetto’s eyes widened. “Jesus, I don’t think so, but—” He touched a number on his phone. “Pluto? . . . Yeah, Baggetto. Have you picked up a civilian male, African-American, twenty-five, in the last two weeks? . . . Seen a BOLO? . . . Know anything?”

“We’re not holding him,” Baggetto reported after a pause for Pluto to consult his computer or perhaps a crystal ball. “And our MPs haven’t heard anything about him.”

Arrieta, who’d finished with the library, turned to me. “One of the spouses who volunteers there took Ms. Ferring and her escort to supper at the canteen when they’d finished for the day. He said Ms. Ferring told him they were spending the night at a motel in Manhattan and then driving on to Lawrence. She told him she’d grown up and gone to the university there.

“Lawrence is about eighty-five miles to the east,” she added helpfully. “Just an hour or two on I-70, but I can recommend some motels in Manhattan for you if you’d like—the Flint Hills are beautiful this time of year. Your dog would love them.”

My brows went up: I’d left Peppy in the car both times I’d been in her office.

Arrieta and Baggetto laughed. “The base telegraph is way better than any Internet system ever devised,” Arrieta said. “Even before you came in here, I knew that a civilian with a golden was in the fort.”

File for future reference: in a small town, you cannot be invisible. I thanked the officers, gave them my card, and promised Arrieta I’d let her know when I found Emerald and August.

I stopped for lunch at a diner on the outskirts of the fort, gave the dog one last run in the hills, and then headed out. The traffic was thicker than we’d seen yesterday—we were going toward the big cities of the eastern part of the state, Topeka, Lawrence, Eudora.

We passed a sign for a Wizard of Oz museum, everyone’s idea of what Kansas is about: tornadoes and no place like home. Even after we left the Flint Hills, the countryside remained hillier than I’d expected. I guess I thought Kansas would be a long, flat land, like the country I’d driven through yesterday.

“Were they telling me the truth?” I asked Peppy. She had her head out the window, checking the strange smellscape, and didn’t appear interested in the question.

“It seemed odd that the colonel didn’t want to know why there was a BOLO on August,” I told her. “I would: I’d worry that I’d let an ax murderer into my fort. That makes me wonder if they actually did arrest August but didn’t want to tell me. In that case, though, what did they do with Ms. Ferring?”