by James Tabor
“They also found alcohol in her system.”
“Level just .038. That’s not even a DUI.” Barnard pushed the papers away from him. “Emily Durant using drugs? Unthinkable.”
“But there was ketamine in her system.”
“Know much about it?” Barnard asked.
“It’s an anesthetic. Not much beyond that.”
“Was an anesthetic. Today, a recreational drug. ‘Vitamin K.’ Some years back, it was used for monitored anesthesia surgery—twilight sedation. Colonoscopies, some plastic and dental work, minor ophthalmic procedures. That lasted until people started waking up.”
“While they were being operated on, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Bad.”
“Worse. Waking up during a colonoscopy is one thing. In the middle of a face-lift …”
“That happened?” Bowman asked.
“Yes. And wasn’t even the worst of it.”
“What could be worse than waking up while someone was carving you a new face?”
“Not being able to move or communicate about what you were feeling. Ketamine is a short-acting paralytic. So imagine being fully awake, paralyzed, in agony.”
“You said it was being used as a recreational drug, though.”
“Smaller dose levels produce euphoria and disinhibition.”
“But they found no evidence of foul play,” Bowman said.
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I don’t believe Emily Durant died from an accidental overdose.”
Bowman set his cup down. “Neither do I.”
Barnard’s head snapped up. “You don’t?”
“I suspected it before. Now I’m sure.”
“What do you think?”
“I think somebody killed her.”
25
“WHY DO YOU THINK THAT?” BARNARD BLURTED.
“The postmortem found multiple injection sites on the body. Drugs and paraphernalia were in the room.”
“Yes.”
“Injection sites included the femoral vein and artery and the median cubital and cephalic veins of both arms. Typical addict injection sites. But there were also micropunctures under each breast. Not typical.”
Barnard nodded, waited.
“Death from ketamine overdose seems beyond question.”
“And?”
“The microwounds weren’t injection sites.”
“What, then?”
“It was torture, made to look like something else. This is a homicide. And a bad one, at that.”
It took a moment for Barnard to grasp what he was hearing. Homicide was not a thing he had yet considered. And … torture? He became aware of a building rage, could feel his face flushing, his hands clamping into fists. He started to ask Bowman how he could know such a thing, but Bowman spoke first.
“Every wound site is close to a major nerve or nexus. Femoral, in the upper thigh. Solar plexus. Ulnar, on the inside of each elbow”
“You really think so?” Barnard was still struggling with the idea of torture.
“Yes. Whoever did it was good enough to avoid collateral trauma, which would have alerted a medical examiner.” He paused, looked at Barnard. “Sorry to tell you this, but I would bet that a more thorough postmortem would disclose damage to the optic nerves and possible others.”
“My God,” Barnard said. “Whoever did this has to be insane.”
A scientist, Barnard normally dealt with new information in a systematic, linear fashion: If that is so, then this must follow; and if this is so, then it is reasonable to believe … But a revelation like this defied such orderly dissection. The questions came tumbling out of his brain faster than he could articulate them. Why had this happened? Who had done it? How could they have done it without being discovered, in such a contained environment? What he finally said was “Criminal investigation is not my field. I’d better get on the horn to the FBI.”
“Maybe not quite yet,” Bowman said.
“Why not?”
“Let’s think this through first. Who, and why?”
“Jealous scientist,” Barnard said.
“Possible. Maybe she made a discovery that someone else wanted credit for.”
“Or a jilted lover,” Barnard suggested.
“More likely, I’d say. Hell hath no fury. And a place like that could magnify anger. If there are any cracks in a mind, a place like the Pole will make them worse.”
“Or it could have been a stark raving lunatic,” Barnard said.
“Yes. Somebody who was unstable before or became so after arriving. Now let’s look at why.”
“Another scientist might want to take false credit,” Barnard said.
“A jilted lover would want revenge.”
“And psychopaths just kill.”
“Killing is one thing. Torturing is another,” Bowman pointed out.
“Hard to see anyone but a psychopath torturing.”
“For every psychopath, there are hundreds of sanctioned torturers. All wanting one thing: information.”
“So they might have suspected Emily knew something she shouldn’t.” Barnard rubbed his face. “God. This is hard, Wil.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“Hallie is down there, and I sent her,” Barnard said.
“You had no idea. Have you reached her yet?”
“Tried email and sat phone both. Still no luck, so I did some inquiring. A NASA launch has preempted most of the station’s satellite time. And there was a solar event, as well.”
“I didn’t get through, either,” Bowman said.
“If you can’t, it has to be a complete blackout. I guess now we call the FBI.”
“We could try. But the Bureau is very buttoned up and brutally overtasked. The official report shows death from overdose. It would take a lot more than our suspicions for them to fly agents down there.”
“Even if you talked to them?”
Bowman chuckled. “I play for a different team. Crosstown rivals. Coming from me could hurt more than help. Stupid, but how much in government isn’t?”
“What the hell do we do then? If you’re right about this, a murderer is running loose around the station. Unless he already flew out,” Barnard said. He was feeling something close to panic, a sensation he had not experienced for a very long time.
“We have to go on the assumption that he’s still there. Or she.”
“So Hallie could be in danger,” Barnard said miserably. “Everybody could be in danger. We should at least reach out for the station manager.”
“He might be the one who killed Emily.”
Barnard started. “How likely is that?”
“We have no way to know.” Then Bowman was quiet for some time.
“What, Wil?” Barnard asked.
“I was thinking how long a ride it would be in the back seat of an F-35.”
“I didn’t know they had two-seaters.”
“Prototypes for the Israelis.”
“You could do that?”
“Yes. But it would take most of today for authorization, half the night for them to find a plane and pilot, eight hours for the trip, including travel time to an air base. They couldn’t land in New Zealand. So Australia, then civil aircraft to McMurdo …” Bowman shook his head. “Not fast enough.”
“What about contacting McMurdo?” Barnard asked.
“I did, before coming here. They can’t communicate with the Pole, either. And it’s too cold for planes to land there.”
“So they’re completely cut off.”
“Yes.” Bowman sat still, hands flat on the table, staring straight ahead, jaw clenched. Barnard recognized the look in his eyes, knew it had been in his own at one time. Trapped in a room with no doors and life at stake. Finally Bowman said, “How many scientists are down there?”
“Can’t be many, this late. Why?”
“We’ll keep trying Hallie. Meantime, let’s put the scientists under a microscope.”
“Why them?”
“More likely to know anatomy than a forklift driver.”
“We don’t have much time,” Barnard said.
“Won’t take much.”
Barnard walked him to the door. “Wil—if anything happens to Hallie because of me …” He stopped, had to look away.
“I understand,” Bowman said. “Believe me, I understand.”
26
HALLIE COULD TELL BY THE INCREASING PRESSURE IN HER EARDRUMS that she was sinking. With miles of freezing black water beneath. If she went too deep, or her descent rate exceeded her equipment’s ability to counteract it, she would just keep going, accelerating all the while.
She valved more gas into her dry suit and started to rise again. The new pinhole grew more quickly than had the first. By now the water was almost to her knee in one leg, over her foot in the other.
Twenty feet. Two minutes.
Losing buoyancy again, she valved still more argon gas into her suit and started finning as well to keep ascending. She could feel her hypothermia worsening—hard shivering now, her teeth beginning to chatter.
Ten feet. She could see the bright circle of the shaft’s top. Water over her knee in one leg, up to mid-calf in the other. The pain threatening to drive coherent thoughts from her mind. The only good thing was that the higher she went, the more buoyant she became.
Finally breaking the surface, she saw Merritt and Guillotte standing by the hole. They would have been monitoring her bubbles, once she was in the shaft.
“I ha-ha-had a dry-suit failure,” she stuttered. “Lower half flooded. Need help ge-ge-getting out.”
Guillotte yelled for more men. With two holding each arm and him pulling on the tops of her tanks, they hauled her out. She flopped onto her belly. Freezing water flowed through the suit, soaking her torso.
“He-he-help me doff. Can’t do myself. Too cold,” she said, through shivers and chattering teeth.
When they finally peeled the drysuit off, she had to get out of the wet dive underwear. Extra sets hung from one wall. She went to them, turned her back to the men, stripped naked, and pulled on dry ones. She donned all the rest of her ECW gear and drank a full thermos of hot chocolate given to her by one of the Draggers.
Once Hallie had just about stopped shivering, Merritt asked, “What happened down there?”
“Very strange,” she said. “Suit failure on both knees. I don’t ever remember—”
Merritt spun on Guillotte. “You let her dive in a suit with defects? She might have died. We could never replace her now!”
Guillotte’s cheeks reddened. “I inspected every piece of her gear. Including the suit. There were no visible defects.”
“But there were defects!” Merritt snapped.
“Aggie, wait,” Hallie said. “I don’t think Rémy missed anything. I inspected the suit, too. I was halfway through the dive before it started leaking.”
Merritt took a deep breath, stepped back. “Okay. Sorry if I flew off the handle. It’s just that with Emily gone, we can’t afford to lose you, Hallie. Can we, Rémy?”
“Of course we cannot.”
“I have to get back to the station. Rémy, you can transport Hallie after you’ve secured her gear.” Merritt turned and started for the door.
“Hey,” Hallie said.
“Yes?”
“I got the extremophile. There’s a biosample in the Envirotainer.”
“Oh,” Merritt said. “Right. Good work.”
And she left.
27
AFTER RIDING BACK TO THE STATION WITH GUILLOTTE, HALLIE went straight to her room and fell asleep. The ringing phone woke her an hour later.
“It’s Aggie. Have you seen Doc yet?”
“Not yet. The dive was—”
“Please do it as soon as possible. He’s waiting to hear from you.”
She hung up and lay there trying, without success, to sleep. The dry-suit failure had been frightening, but she’d handled worse diving emergencies. A good dive was one you walked away from, and she had walked, this time.
She wanted to hear from Wil so badly it was like a physical ache. To stay quiet this long, he must have been very angry. But, remembering the scene at the airport, she didn’t think he’d looked angry. More sad than anything. Why would what she said make him sad? And what on earth had he meant: There are things you don’t know about me. Really? After a year together?
That led her to wonder if there were things he didn’t know about her. Important things, not who she’d dated in high school or why she disliked French food. No, she decided, he did know the important things. She’d held nothing back. Nothing had warranted holding back. Which made his own comment all the more mysterious—and troubling.
The next morning was Wednesday, the start of her third day at the Pole. She had set the alarm on her phone for seven. The station PA system woke her at six-thirty.
“Attention the station. Attention the station. All hands meeting in the galley at zero seven hundred. Repeat, all hands meeting in the galley at zero seven hundred.”
“I called this meeting to talk about the recent fatalities,” Graeter said, standing up front, near the serving area. Hallie had arrived early, hoping to see Fida again, but he hadn’t appeared. Agnes Merritt sat with her, and Rémy Guillotte joined them just after Graeter started speaking.
“As I’m sure everyone knows, Dr. Harriet Lanahan passed away on Monday, Dr. Diana Montalban Tuesday. If anyone has questions or concerns, this is the time.”
“How about, like, what the hell happened?” a gruff male voice asked from somewhere back in the gloom.
“Doc?” Graeter said.
Morbell came forward, wearing a white lab coat and the dark glasses. He seemed to shrink under scrutiny.
“Well. Ah, yes, I can offer something in the way of explanation. Wound dehiscence. Harriet Lanahan had an esophagectomy last year. Diana Montalban had undergone a C-section delivery two years earlier. I believe that their surgical scars ruptured—”
“Wait a minute,” a woman from the audience interrupted. Short, red-haired, combative. “You’re talking about incision sites, right? That’s just skin and subcutaneous tissue. It wouldn’t cause bleeding like that.”
“As I was about to say,” Doc continued, “major veins and arteries were involved in both operations. Some must have ruptured.”
“Why now, and why two so close together?”
“Many kinds of stress can cause dehiscence. A condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is sometimes at fault. Pole is cruel. I don’t have to tell you that.” He shrugged, held up his hands.
“I was a surgical nurse once upon a time,” the red-haired woman said. “So I know about dehiscence. It almost always happens soon after surgery. This long after—very rare.”
Hallie could see Doc’s jaw clenching. Graeter stepped forward. He said, “All due respect to nurses, Doc is the physician here. Anyone else?”
For a moment no one spoke. Than another woman stood. She had very white skin, even for a Polie, and shining black hair, and deep purple circles under both eyes. “Yeah.” She pointed straight at Hallie. “What about her?” Every head in the room turned to stare.
“What about her?” Doc said.
“She comes in and people start dying.” She looked at Doc. “What about that?”
“I told you what I think caused the deaths. I don’t believe Dr. Leland had anything to do with them.”
“Would you be saying that if she was a Dragger?” the woman asked, and murmurs of agreement came from the crowd.
“Of course,” Doc said.
“I’m not so sure,” the woman retorted. “We don’t—”
Graeter stepped forward. “Doc answered your question. Are there any more reasonable ones?”
The woman colored, but she sat without saying anything else.
“Thanks for coming,” Graeter said. “Let’s get back to work.”
People started filing out through several e
xits. Hallie saw a number of stares directed her way. A few people whispered and pointed.
She left the cafeteria and headed for Doc’s office, moving along in her bubble of light. She kept looking over her shoulder, unable to shake the feeling that someone was following her, but every time she looked, there was only the darkness.
28
DOC WAS WAITING IN HIS OFFICE WITH A STETHOSCOPE HUNG around his neck. There was enough light, barely, for her to see his strange pink eyes.
“No glasses?” Hallie asked.
“Here I can adjust the light,” he said. “My condition is of the oculocutaneous variety. Too much light is not only painful, it makes everything I see look washed out and blurry. Like a badly overexposed photograph.”
As Hallie’s own eyes adjusted to the gloom, Doc took on a ghostly white glow. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Someone who can’t see must be a lousy doctor.”
“Actually, I was thinking how hard you must have worked, given your condition, to become a doctor. And how admirable that is.”
He blinked. “Oh.” Clearly it was not the response he was accustomed to. “So how have you been feeling?”
“Exhausted. Sore throat. Some rumbling in the gut. Other than that, okay.”
“Par for the course.” He checked her pulse, temperature, blood pressure. While he was working, she looked around with something like wonder. Even in the dim light she could see immaculate beige walls, gleaming stainless steel cabinets, a gurney with crisp white sheets. An exam area with a hospital bed and a privacy curtain. Counters with neatly arranged trays of instruments, swabs, wipes. Disposal containers for sharps and biohazards. The cream-colored floor was clean and waxed to a shine. The room smelled good, too, like alcohol and pine-scented disinfectant.
“My compliments,” she said. “This is the cleanest place I’ve seen here.”
“We make sure it gets special attention.” Agnes Merritt had been sitting on a stool near one corner of the shadowy room.
“I didn’t know you were here. Are you sick?” Hallie asked.