Winter Study

by Nevada Barr

  “I can’t imagine anything worse than what you had to go through,” she said. She didn’t have to pretend to be sincere. If he had killed his wife, by the look of the young man in the picture it hadn’t been nearly as much fun as he’d hoped.

  “I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Adam said.

  “The coroner ruled it suicide,” Anna replied evenly. Adam was no longer breathing in her ear, his hair trailing over her shoulder, but he’d not stepped away either.

  “Why are you looking at that?” Adam sounded more worried than angry at the breach of his privacy, or such privacy as remained in the instant-information era.

  “Getting to know you,” Anna said. “Since we’re neighbors, let’s be friends.” She didn’t take her eyes from the monitor, but she wasn’t seeing. Every pore was opening to sense Adam: where he stood, how he stood, if he was dangerous.

  His breath puffed out on a dry cough. The closest thing to a laugh he was going to make.

  “You’re a piece of work, you know that?” he said and, rather than leaving, pulled up another straight-backed chair to sit next to her, scooting it up till his knees were less than a foot from hers. He put his long forearms down on his long thighs and leaned in till their faces were close enough, Anna could see the tiny red rivers of blood from broken vessels in his eyes. “Do you think I took Robin? Is that it?”

  His breath was hot, residual fire from the fury, and smelled sweet, as if he’d chewed a mint leaf. Anna couldn’t back away from him without tipping her chair over.

  “Adam,” she said wearily. “You’re crowding me. People crowd to intimidate. Could you either back off or do it in a more interesting way?”

  Another cough of laughter. Anna considered whether or not she should go on the comedy circuit in the Catskills.

  “Sorry,” he said, sat up straight and smiled. It was a good smile, full of healthy teeth, and it went all the way to his eyes crinkling the corners. Anna believed he was sorry, that he’d not meant to scare her. It didn’t mean he was a nice guy.

  “Did you make Robin disappear?” she asked.

  “Robin didn’t need to be here this winter. She should have stayed home or waited tables in St. Paul.” He rubbed his face. Both hands continued up until his fingers pushed his hair out in thick tresses. “We’ll start the search at first light?”

  The question took Anna off guard. “Yeah, I guess. Will we find her?” she asked pointedly.

  He smiled again. This time, it didn’t reach his eyes. “Who knows?” He rose and walked from the common room. A second later, Anna heard the door to his and Bob’s room opening and closing again.

  She couldn’t tell if she’d just had an up-close-and-personal conversation with a backwoods John Wayne Gacy or not.

  “Ted Bundy,” she corrected herself.

  In the minutes spent drinking the essence of Adam from the air as he stood over her half dressed and burning, she’d not tasted the sour warp of a psychopath. But, then, one didn’t. That was why they got away with it.

  Anna logged off. She wanted to rest, to sleep, but seemed to have lost the knack. She wanted to go outside, but she’d freeze to death in the dark. January’s paltry eight hours of daylight depressed her. It was just enough to remind a person they weren’t blind before it abandoned them for another winter’s night. Because she could think of nothing more productive to do, she went back into Katherine Huff’s room and stood staring at the simple dorm furniture. Two mediumsized duffel bags; all the personal gear any of them had been allowed to bring. There wasn’t a lot to dig through, but Anna did it. Dirty socks and underpants were her reward. Since she’d taken the laptop, the desk was empty but for the cell phone charger plugged into the same outlet the computer had been.

  Everything was so ordinary, so expected, at first she didn’t realize what she was looking at. Modern conveniences had become as air; only when they weren’t there were they noticed.

  Why would Katherine have a cell phone charger out and plugged in when there was no cell reception on the island? Anna unplugged the charger and carried it back to her room, locking the door behind her. Katherine’s cell phone was still in her day pack. She’d kept it, not as evidence but out of spite for Bob. Not particularly flattering but, as it happened, useful. Having plugged the charger into the wall, she connected the phone. A red light behind a dark blue plastic oval lit up. The oval had a star on it. Around the star, an elliptical circle was traced in silver.

  It was a satellite phone. Katherine did have cell service. If she had it, Bob had it. Bob had been anxious to retrieve this phone. He’d said he’d have to replace it out of his own pocket if it wasn’t found. At the time, Anna’d merely been impressed with his callousness. Now she wondered if he’d wanted the phone so no one would notice it was a satellite phone, know they had access to the outside world and one another.

  Why wouldn’t he want anyone to know that? Afraid they’d all make pests of themselves asking to borrow it? It wasn’t as if they didn’t know why he was on the island. Anna hit the CONTACTS button and scrolled down the list of names. None of them were familiar but Ridley’s, with his work number at Michigan Tech, the Park Service office in Houghton and Bob Menechinn.

  Without thinking why, she did it; Anna clicked on Menechinn and hit SEND. The warble of a loon called through the house. Quickly she pushed END. If Bob woke, if he looked, if he checked for missed calls, he would know the phone had been found. For several minutes, she sat still as stone and listened. There was no sound of doors or feet. Bob must have slept through the ringing.

  A loon. The call of a loon in January.

  The night Katherine had gone missing, Anna was awakened by the call of a loon. Since there wouldn’t be any loons on the island for months, she’d thought it a dream, like the dream she’d had of coyotes on her mother’s ranch. The coyotes frolicked in dreamscape, but the loon had been of this world. Bob had been called the night Katherine died. Katherine had died with the satellite phone in her hand.

  Anna found RECENT CALLS and opened it. The last call was to Bob Menechinn.

  Maybe he’d slept through that one too. There was no way Anna could tell if the call had gone through or how long it had been but, even if Bob had missed it, presumably Katherine would have left him a message. Her last words. Bob never mentioned a message.

  For a moment, Anna wondered if Bob had been the instigator of the mysterious “HELP ME” that had appeared on the window. The loon call of the cell phone had been after that by hours, but it was possible Katherine had phoned earlier, or he had phoned her.

  If he knew she was in trouble, why wouldn’t he have said so, led the rescue effort? When there was no physical danger to himself, Bob liked playing the white knight. If he didn’t know, why wouldn’t he have shared the message after the fact? Afraid they’d think he’d dropped the ball? Or was the message so vitriolic or damning, he didn’t want them to hear it?

  Reflexively, Anna looked over her shoulder, checking to see that the parka still covered the window. It did.

  Not being a devotee of the cell, Anna’d not given it enough thought. But cell phones took pictures. They text-messaged, and did far more things than anything smaller than the Pentagon should be able to do. A person’s cell phone was almost as rich an information trove as his or her computer. Anna hit MENU and began methodically deciphering icons, reading tiny print and punching buttons.

  Katherine had not taken any snapshots of the wolves. Being crippled, then eaten, was evidently sufficiently entertaining that there was no need to record it. Anna couldn’t tell if she had text-messaged anyone. She kept pushing arrows and buttons and hitting SELECT.

  “Ish.”

  The phone also received photographs. The pictures Katherine had taken were of the same ski vacation as the photographs on the laptop, just different shots and poses. The photographs that had been sent to her had been unopened till Anna’d pressed buttons and pried her way into where they waited like evil beings in a dead-e
nd alley.

  There were five of them, but Anna suspected there’d been more. Katherine probably looked at the first few sent, then deleted the rest unopened. She died before she could delete these.

  Katherine, nude, had been arranged on a bed. Her legs were splayed toward the camera. In the first photograph, there was a cucumber in her vagina and a carrot inserted in her rectum. The second picture changed only the objects used to rape her: a baseball bat and a green wine bottle. In the third, the photographer had gone to the effort of propping her head up and arranging her hands so she looked as if she had inserted the baseball bat herself.

  “Jesus!” Anna breathed and closed her eyes. She had to swallow the sickness in her throat before she could open them again. Then it was another half minute before she could bring herself to look back at the tiny screen.

  The fourth shot was a crooked close-up of her face with a man’s erect penis shoved in her mouth. Her head was back, eyes closed and jaw slack. In the last shot, the baseball bat had been replaced by a man’s fist pushed in up to the forearm. The man’s face was not shown.

  Katherine’s was, every time.

  “God damn!” Anna closed the phone and sat staring at it. “God damn!” she said again, shaking her head. Most of her adult life had been spent trying to put a stop to man’s inhumanity to everything he could get his hands on. The news showed burned babies, mothers running screaming from bullets, dogs eating fallen men, bombs shattering homes and vehicles. In real time, snuff films every night in every living room in America played out in the name of Current Events.

  Yet Anna could not get used to it. Paul had told her the day she got used to it was the day she lost her soul.

  She opened the phone and pushed ten numbers in rapid succession. A ring, and two, three. It was very late or very early. Sane people in real places slept at this time of the night. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”

  “Yes?”

  “Paul,” Anna cried. “Paul, it’s me,” and she began to cry.

  28

  Ketamine stayed in the blood a relatively long time, as far as testing was concerned. Robin’s blood would show traces of the drug for seven to fourteen days. One of those days was gone, and Anna didn’t know how many more they would be weathered in on the island.

  Skipping breakfast, she went, yet again, to the Visitors Center. The door was still unlocked. She wished there was a way to make sure it stayed that way while she was inside, but there wasn’t. Indoors, it was so cold she couldn’t see her breath. Frigid, superdry air would not fog.

  The vials of blood – Robin’s and the wolf’s – were in her coat pocket. Though the man blackmailing Katherine had been careful to keep his face out of the pictures, Anna didn’t doubt that it was Bob Menechinn. Katherine’s warnings, the comments about using ketamine, being carried upstairs unconscious – it made sense. Ketamine was not only a cat tranquilizer and a club drug; it was also becoming the date rape drug of choice. The aftereffects often included amnesia, disorientation and paranoia. Three symptoms that made it extremely difficult for victims to successfully prosecute their attackers.

  Bob – and Anna was sure it was Bob – had drugged Katherine, then photographed her in crude and mocking poses. These were the pictures that he’d threatened to put up on the Internet, the pictures that she didn’t want her mother to see, the pictures that had made her want to die.

  He intended to do the same thing to Robin. Robin wasn’t drunk; she was drugged. When Anna had come upon him in the carpenter’s shop, hunkered over the dead body of his graduate student, he had probably been looking for the cell phone. He also could have been indulging himself in a woman the way he preferred them: helpless and degraded.

  Anger was racking up Anna’s respiration rate. Inside her mittens, she clenched and unclenched her fists. Halfway through the main room of the Visitors Center she turned abruptly and walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Washington Harbor. The sun had not yet risen above the hills. When it did, there would be no blue sky to greet it. Clouds touched the tops of the trees on Beaver Island, black and mysterious across the wide expanse of ice. As she watched the scene – devoid of movement, devoid of sound, of shadows – and slowed her breath and heart rate, letting the blinding anger clear from her vision, she began to see colors. The ice, slate and pearl, hinted of blues and lavenders so delicate they were wisped with imagination. Ink spikes of the trees on the shore harbored dark-dark greens, greens so close to black they shimmered in and out of vision like the hide of a whale deep in the ocean. Far out, where the ice stopped past Beaver and the open water began, were the barest touches of pink, iridescent and ephemeral.

  In the night, the iris of the eye expanded to take in what available light it could to help clawless, blunt-toothed human beings live until morning. Perhaps in winter there was similar evolution, allowing the eyes to adjust to let in every scrap of color, so the fragile, neurotic creatures could stay sane to see another spring.

  As Anna let the anger go, she knew she was terrified. She was scared to the bone that Robin was cached somewhere, drugged insensible again and posed for pictures like those on the cell phone in Anna’s pocket. There were few places she could be hidden, unless death by hypothermia was part of the plan. Dead, a victim couldn’t accuse the rapist. Katherine wouldn’t be testifying anytime soon. Was that why Bob had said nothing when she’d called? Had she outlived her usefulness, and, when she got into trouble the night she ran off and called him for help, he just quietly turned over and went back to sleep?

  Gutless, Anna thought in disgust, but the theory worked with what she knew of Menechinn. So did the date rape scenario. Bob had the means and opportunity for drugging Robin and raping her. Robin’s jab stick, loaded with ketamine, had gone missing from Malone Bay cabin. He had the means to remove her bodily from the bunkhouse. He had carried Anna two miles and Katherine up five flights of stairs. Anna didn’t think he had the means to stash her anywhere on the island and still keep her alive. Therefore, he didn’t kidnap her. Or he didn’t mean for her to live.

  If Bob wanted her dead, Robin was dead. She wouldn’t have to be taken any distance at all. A couple yards from the bunkhouse would be sufficient. Dump her naked in the snow, cover the body with powder and branches. She would have been dead of cold before anyone noticed she’d been taken. Robin Adair had shyly crept into Anna’s heart and the thought of her murdered brought back the rage she’d been working so hard to lose.

  She shook it off.

  She needed to test the blood; she needed evidence before arresting Bob. “Proof,” Anna said. “Woman, then wolf.”

  Holding on to what shards of peace the winter scene had given her, she turned from the window and stumped quickly across the hardwood floor, dynamic movement thwarted by the fat rubber boots and thick down.

  In the back hall next to the DR’s office was law enforcement’s storage room: narrow, windowless and lined on both sides with adjustable metal shelves. Unlike many NPS storage rooms, it was neat and well organized. ISRO evidently had excellent seasonal rangers. On the top shelf were two briefcase-sized satchels, the standard field drug-testing kits used for years by police. They contained vials of various chemicals. Drugs were mixed with these liquids according to a key on the underside of the lid. The reaction gave the officer an idea of what she was dealing with. They were designed to find out what a drug was, not who was taking them, and were of no use to Anna.

  In the District Ranger’s office, where the light was best, she found what she needed, a gas chronometry-mass spectrum device, GC/ MS. Boxy and white, it looked vaguely like a blood pressure machine, the kind in grocery stores near the pharmacy. Before 9/11, there wasn’t a GC/MS in the entire Park Service. Now they were becoming almost commonplace, and they weren’t used to test criminals. Using hair, urine, saliva or blood, they drug-tested employees, particularly law enforcement.

  Ketamine, “Vitamin K,” the cat tranquilizer, wasn’t on a standard tox screen, but that would chang
e. Once used exclusively by veterinarians, it had made its way into the pantheon of club drugs because of its euphoric and hallucinogenic properties. Several years before, Anna had taken a trip with “Lady K” against her will and without her knowledge and enjoyed neither the high nor the apparitions.

  Ignorance stopped her in front of the GC/MS. She’d seen it operated exactly twice.

  “Fuck!” she whispered. Then with more vehemence: “Fucking fool!”

  None of it mattered: there was no electricity, no power. She couldn’t turn the machine on. A detail she’d overlooked in her mad dash down the hill.

  Modern conveniences were as air: expected.

  “Damn!”

  She turned and ran from the office, down the hall and up the hill through the snow. By the time she reached the carpenter’s shop, she was puffing and sweating. Without waiting to catch her breath, she began pawing through the plastic-wrapped packages of wolf parts on the table. “Okay, Katherine,” she muttered to the corpse at her feet. “Give me a hand here. What was it set you off? I can’t test the blood. Maybe you could with your fancy PCR, but I can’t, I made a royal fool of myself in the V.C. If a tree falling in the forest can be a fool. So what was it? What did I hand you? You squeaked like a rat. Skull? No. Paws? No. Bigger.

  “This.” Anna laid her hands on the square package that contained the excised flesh from the wolf’s throat, the meat Ridley had preserved because of the size of the bite pattern that killed the wolf.

  “Hey, it’s all coming back to me,” Anna told the dead woman. “Bob mouths off. Ridley cuts his hand. I pass this gob off to you. I’m examining the knife wound. You squeak. I turn. You look like shit. It’s this, isn’t it?”

  Without waiting for a reply, she set the package on the counter beneath the window and began prying the stiff plastic away where it had frozen to the tissue sample underneath. “Okay,” she said when she’d peeled the cube of wolf and set it on the counter where the light was strongest. Like any frozen meat, the excised neck flesh had become featureless, pale, the folds and hollows settled while the meat was warm, then frozen in a chunk. “If the dead speak to the dead, do your stuff,” Anna said to the corpse. “Otherwise, I don’t think this guy is going to tell me anything.”