The Internet produced a hundred or more images of him, dark-haired as a young man, white-haired now, with a square, serious face. Only a few showed him laughing, one a group photo taken in 1980, over this caption:

KU Germ Expert Dr. Nathan Kiel with his lab team celebrating their first-place victory in the KU Charity Softball Series.

He would have been about fifty at the time, but he looked younger. I enlarged the image. The team all wore T-shirts with a caricature of a Jayhawk and the slogan dr. k’s fighting germs. There were four women on the squad, but unfortunately the Douglas County Herald hadn’t included anyone else’s name.

Kiel’s two sons, Stuart and Larry, were around fifty. Larry the linguist worked for a think tank in Oregon. Stuart the math whiz was teaching high-school math in a private school near Bangor, Maine. Larry was married to a woman, with two children of his own. Stuart was married to a man and didn’t have any children. Did it say something about Kiel that his two sons had moved as far from Kansas as possible, or was that just where their work had taken them?

I couldn’t find any biographical information about Sonia, except her date of birth: she had recently turned forty-seven. Nothing on going out east somewhere to make a career in the arts. Nothing about a truelove, real or imaginary.

Kiel’s wife, Shirley, was two years younger than the scientist. She had worked only later in life, when she was in her fifties, for one of the downtown banks, and had retired three years ago. Roughly the same age as Gertrude Perec, although there was no mention of Perec in the Kiel dossier, as friend, lover, or relative.

I tapped my front teeth with my pen and finally texted Cady: does your granny know dr. kiel? i found his daughter last night close to death outside the lion’s pride.

Before heading out, I called the local hospital to check on Sonia. She was in the ICU. When the operator put me through to the charge nurse, I identified myself as a detective.

The nurse said Sonia was still unresponsive but was starting to breathe on her own for longer periods.

“Did you find drugs in her pockets when she came in? I’m wondering what she took—heroin, Rohypnol, or something I’m not imagining.”

The charge nurse put me on hold and after a minute a physician came on the line. “Detective, did you say? What’s your name?”

I spelled it, hoping the doctor didn’t have a Lawrence PD directory in front of her. “And you are Dr. . . . ?”

“Cordley. We’re doing a tox screen, Detective, but do you have a reason to suspect roofies or heroin?”