“I can just imagine.”
“So NSF went along with it. They should have called his bluff, but they didn’t.”
“So you had kind of gotten to know him while waiting in McMurdo.”
Lindemann nodded. “The Coffee House.”
“Wine.”
“New Zealand merlots. We had that in common.”
“And women.”
“Yeah, he liked women. So do I,” he said, sliding an evil look her way. “So what?”
“Okay.” She was making better time now, the slope of the glacier shallow enough that she could really begin to move.
“And I was making progress with him. Helping him understand things a little better.”
“That’s good. So then you were at the high camp, and Ted the blaster flew out with the Otter pilot, and the storm hit, and Morris got sick, and that was that.” Her breath burned in her lungs from the effort of speaking while she pushed so hard on the skis. “Have I got all that straight?”
“Yeah.”
“So how did the other Gamow bag find its way back to McMurdo?”
“That—” Dan shuffled along for a while, thinking. “I don’t know,” he muttered.
“All right then, here’s another question: did you notice anything unusual or unexpected after you got there? I mean, as regards Morris’s conversations with the others. Before he got sick.”
“What do you mean?”
Valena thought carefully about how to phrase her question. Whoever had visited Naomi’s camp to pass the word of Emmett’s arrest would not have known the particulars she knew, so if Dan offered them up, he knew them from having been there rather than from having been filled in after the fact, and she did not want to contaminate him as a witness. “Well, the feds assumed that Emmett was the one who caused the death because he was the one who was angry with the deceased. But perhaps someone else had a beef. So who else did he communicate with?”
“Oh, I see what you mean.” Dan thought a while. “It’s hard to remember after all this time. Mostly what I recall was how scared Emmett and everyone was when the guy got sick.”
At last, they were back up on top of the glacier and could see the tops of the Scott tents coming up over the curve. “Let’s put it another way, then. Who wasn’t scared?”
“Oh, that’s easy. That Wee Willy guy. But I figured he was just too damned stupid to get scared.” Dan stopped skiing. He stood still, thinking. “And come to think of it, there was another guy Morris didn’t like.” He gave her an appraising look. “Exactly what’s it worth to you to know?”
Valena pushed ahead. Over her shoulder, she called, “It’s worth your damned doctorate!”
“Dave,” called Dan. “He didn’t like Dave.”
41
ON MONDAY WHEN THE ASTAR THUDDED OUT OF THE sky onto Clark Glacier, Valena was ready and waiting next to the loaded core boxes. The downdraft from the rotors of the descending helicopter blasted her and everything within fifty yards with flying snow. She said her good-byes and thanks to Naomi, waved to the others, and climbed aboard. Her departure accomplished, she greeted the liftoff with the sharp focus of the single-minded. She had narrowed her search to two suspects, and it would soon be one.
The pilot on duty was not the talkative type, which was fine with Valena. Her brain was already in Crary Lab, where she would requisition a microscope just as quickly as she could. The gorgeous ridges and valleys rolled past beneath them as they flew south to pick up another passenger. There were stunning views of volcanic dikes, swarms laid naked along glacier-polished mountain tops. Like a settling leaf, the little craft spiraled down into the steep-sided valley that held the frozen length of Lake Bonney. They barreled out from the edge of the continent out across the ice, passing the big rig run by the ANDRILL project. When they landed at McMurdo, she refused a ride to her dorm, instead heading straight up the hill to the lab, saying that she would be back for her gear.
In Crary, she stopped only an instant at Emmett’s office to check for notes—there were none—then set down her duffel and parka and relocked the door before heading up the ramp in search of a binocular microscope, which she found in the storeroom near the head offices. She peered at the contents of the plastic bags. Instantly, she saw more than she had expected. Not only did the sample from her boots have lithic fragments and phenocrysts, it had tiny little penguin feathers, their short, thick barbules unmistakably belonging to flightless birds.
To identify the phenocrysts, she headed down the hallway and found a young woman from the Erebus team.
“Anorthoclase,” said the vulcanologist as she squinted through the lens. “Yeah, that’s the main feldspar phenocryst you get around here.”
“Do you find it only in the basalts on Cape Royds?” asked Valena hopefully.
“Oh, heck no, it’s pandemic. And to be more specific, those aren’t basalts, they’re phonolites. It’s more alkaline than your basic basalt.”
“Oh. Okay. But I don’t see the anorthoclase phenocrysts here in Mac Town.”
“No, but half the flows on the island have it, though the size of the crystals may vary.”
Valena thanked her, stuffed the samples into her pockets for safekeeping, relocked the door to the office, and headed off to find Jim Skehan. He wasn’t in his office, so she went to the library and looked for e-mail messages. There was one from her friends at the Airlift Wing:
Valena
Edgar Hallowell served during Iraqi Freedom. Went AWOL en route court martial for theft of body armor. No current address.
Signed, Your friends
There was also one from Em Hansen:
Valena
I checked with a friend at the FBI lab, here forwarded. Try to stay warm. Stay out of trouble. Em
The forwarded e-mail from the FBI lab began:
Feldspars and broken antique glass—well how cool is that? Shackleton’s discards would be worth money even if they were Budweiser bottles. In 1907, quality control still wasn’t the big thing in manufacturing processes. There would be a lot of variability—measurable variability—in the composition of those bottles, even within a single bottle. Also, they didn’t have the respect we have today for heavy metals leaching from containers, and there would probably be some interesting trace elements in the bottles too. The light green and brown glass were probably colored by iron oxides (differing oxidation states), and the blue was usually cobalt oxides.
There was a long paragraph on analytical equipment she could use to identify the bottle glass, how large a sample she needed for each, but the lab tech had assured her that that the binocular microscope was as good as it was going to get here in McMurdo. She was going to have to find a lower-tech way of establishing a connection between boot grit and Cape Royds.
She read onward:
Volcanos are as distinctive as people. Each one spews out its own unique output, and each eruption is a little different. Chemically, even the start of an eruption is different than the end. If you had a decent sample and the right reference material, you could tell which volcano produced which ash, and that will tell you where someone/something has been.
Valena pondered this. So petrography as it is practiced at the FBI lab is a little more detailed than a volcanologist can manage here with a hand lens. That’s a relief!
She read on to the closing salutations:
As for the penguin guano, well, the defense community always said that the FBI Lab doesn’t do shit, and in this case they’d be right.
Valena threw back her head and laughed. But her mind was still racing. She had come up dry trying to figure out who had killed the journalist, but if she could nail the penguin egg theft to the man who had been seen riding south along the route from Cape Evans to Hut Point the morning Steve was killed, and if that person had also been at Emmett Vanderzee’s high camp when the journalist was killed, then she might be able to tear a hole in the whole picture, at minimum opening the way for doubt in the minds of the feds. And she thought she
knew exactly how to identify that way.
42
HUGH MULLER STOOD UP FROM HIS TABLE IN THE GALley and scanned the room for any sign of Valena. He unconsciously stood in almost full brace, his major’s leaves flashing on his fatigues.
“She’d be coming through the food lines, wouldn’t she?” said Marilyn.
“Sit down, Hugh,” said Waylon. “You don’t want to draw attention to this.”
Marilyn said, “It may be time to come out into the open with this, Waylon.”
“There’s Matt, I’ll ask him if he’s seen her,” said Hugh. He moved through the crowd to the table where the heavy equipment operator was sitting with a few other men. “Tractor Matt,” he said, making it sound like a social call. “You heard from our newest recruit lately?”
“You mean Tractor Valena?” said Matt. He wasn’t smiling. “I was just talking about her with Father Jim here. Jim, Hugh flew the mission last year to the high camp.”
Skehan stood up and shook Hugh’s hand. “We sent her into the field. She was expected back on a helo this morning, but she has not reported in. I left a note for her, but it’s gone now, and I don’t think it was her that took it down.”
“That’s not good,” said Hugh.
“No, in fact, that’s bad.”
Hugh said, “I left a note for her yesterday. I don’t suppose it was there when you last checked.”
Skehan shook his head. “I put my note up early this morning, well before she was due, and there were no notes waiting for her.”
Hugh leaned closer to the scientist. “I’m going to take a chance here. We military generally keep to ourselves here on the ice, but this is a special case. When that man was killed up in the high camp, it was because our drop bundle was tampered with, and that makes it personal. So I think it’s time we told each other everything we know, and put our heads together on this.”
“Amen, brother.”
Hugh said, “Valena asked us to look into the military record of a man named Edgar Hallowell. There was an Edgar Hallowell who served in Iraq at the beginning of the war. He was suspected of a number of petty thefts, but when he got to stealing body armor, the investigation went onto the fast track. They brought him back to the States for court-martial, but he went AWOL. We were able to obtain a photograph of him. Well, I was the pilot who flew Vanderzee’s event into the high camp last year, and guess what?”
Skehan’s eyes narrowed. “Cal Hart.”
“Got it in one.”
Skehan’s face grew dark with anger. “We do our very best science, and an opportunist threatens to take us down.”
Matt said, “That problem goes all the way to the White House.”
Skehan stood up. “I’m on my way to Bellamy’s office.”
43
VALENA STOPPED FIRST AT THE POST OFFICE, WHICH WAS housed in one end of a large, white building just down the hill from the Boss’s office in Building 17. At the end of the room, she found a window where stamps were sold and packages weighed. She presented herself to the clerk.
“Hi,” she said. “Is it true that I can mail things from here just like I was shipping something locally at home?”
“Yes,” said the woman. “This is an Army post office, which means that you pay as if you were shipping from our port of entry into the United States. Well, actually, things have to go through customs in New Zealand, which means that you can’t send anything that would be hazardous to New Zealand wildlife. They have very strict rules about that.”
“I see. So you X-ray the packages.”
The woman shook her head. “No. We weigh them and sell you the postage. You fill out the customs form, just like at home in the States.”
“And what if the contents are particularly fragile? Or…temperature sensitive?”
The woman smiled. “We supply all the bubble wrap you can stand. If you need to send something especially fragile, you can get heavy cartons over in BFC or Crary Lab. Everything gets recycled around here, and the scientists get special equipment shipped to them all the time, so it’s easy to skua a really good box over there. And they have wonderful stickers you can put on the boxes that say ‘Do Not Freeze’ or ‘Keep Frozen,’ depending on what you need.” She smiled. “They have little penguins on them.”
Little penguins, thought Valena. How ironic. “How does something with a sticker like that get home?”
“The scientists can have boxes shipped home on the cargo vessel that comes in at the end of the season, or they can ship things through here. This is much faster, and costs very little. I once sent my skis all the way home for six dollars.”
“Fantastic. And how long do packages sit here before they go out?”
“Oh, usually only a day or two. We can usually get them on the next flight. This time of year, it’s the southbound flights that are overfilled.”
“So if someone brought you a package say, last Tuesday, when would it have gone out?”
The clerk looked at her askance. “You mean during that big storm.”
“Yes, that was the day.”
“Well, we had a flight go out that evening, but it took off in a hurry, too fast for us to get the mail on board. You’ll recall that was the day Steve Myer died.” Her face tightened and she gazed down at her fingertips for a moment. “But there have been two flights out since.”
“Do you remember any particular boxes? Perhaps one marked ‘Do Not Freeze’?”
The woman laughed. “Half of them say that.”
“Are you able to guarantee that they won’t be frozen?”
“We do pretty well,” she said, but her eyes were beginning to ask, Why all the questions?
“Do you recall a man bringing you a ‘Do Not Freeze’ box last Tuesday about this time of day?” She indicated a tall man with her hand. “Good-looking guy with blond hair, or a big, scary guy with darker hair?”
The woman gave her a crimped smile. “Now, you know that’s none of my business to answer a question like that.”
“But if it had to do with the murder of Steve Myer?”
The postmistress gave Valena a long, evaluative look before saying, “Then I’d have to answer that only one person came in at lunchtime that day, and that yes, he was tall and blond and good-looking. And he had a large box to ship, and as I recall it was marked ‘Fragile’ and ‘Do Not Freeze.’
Valena thanked her and let herself out the door. She cut around the back of the post office building and through an equipment storage yard to reach her next target, which was Chad Hill’s office. If she was going to be successful, she needed the authority that was vested in the marshal of McMurdo Station.
Chad Hill had gone to lunch. The woman who managed his office said that he would be back in half an hour.
“May I leave him a note?” Valena inquired.
“Sure.” She began looking around for notepaper. She fished a discarded notice out of the paper recycling and handed it across her desk.
Valena lifted her pen and wrote:
Mr. Hill:
I have in my possession trace evidence that I believe will connect theft of protected wildlife and antiquities from Cape Royds to the murder of Steve Myers. The fact that this theft was accomplished during last Tuesday’s storm connects it to Steve’s murder, but also to the murder of Morris Sweeny. The connection is that whoever drove a snow machine out to Cape Royds in that storm would also have been able to use GPS and a snow machine to find the missing drop bundle at Emmett Vanderzee’s camp and bury it in one of the fuel drum excavations. GPS was present at Emmett’s camp and was used by his assistant, Calvin Hart.
I have questioned every person who was in Emmett’s camp last year, and only Cal’s testimony varies from the others in important details. Raytheon studies the backgrounds of potential employees and would be harder to fool than my professor, who is too busy researching what is true to notice when someone is lying to him. It is my belief therefore that Calvin Hart is an alias, and that his true name is Edgar Hallowell.
<
br /> When Edgar Hallowell was a soldier in Iraq, he stole plates out of fellow soldier Jacob Sweeny’s body armor. Jacob died in an ambush because he lacked these plates. His brother Morris became obsessed with finding Hallowell, who disappeared after being dishonorably discharged. Morris came to Antarctica in search of him after spotting him on Emmett’s Web site.
The postmistress states that someone answering to Hart’s description mailed a package from McMurdo’s post office last Tuesday. Please take steps necessary to track and seize this package. I believe it contains live penguin eggs and antique bottles from Shackleton’s Nimrod hut, which will prove his guilt in that matter at least.
I request also that you use your authority to search clothing in Hart/Hallowell’s possession for trace evidence. In particular seize his FDX boots and check materials lodged in the treads for anorthoclase crystals, penguin guano, and feathers, and possible shards of antique bottle glass. Meanwhile, I will be at Emmett’s office in Crary Lab with corroborative trace evidence.
Sincerely, Valena Walker
Valena folded the note, stapled it, taped the edges, and handed it to the woman. “Please see that Mr. Hill gets this the moment he returns. It’s urgent.”
The woman looked at her as if she had just sprouted a new head. “Okay.”
“It has to do with Steve Myer.”
“Oh! Okay!”
“Thanks.” She smiled and relaxed a little, knowing that her job was almost finished. Chad Hill would return from lunch within the half hour, and she would be waiting in Emmett’s office with Jim Skehan.
She let herself out through the air lock, automatically popping her sunglasses out of her sunglass pocket on her upper right sleeve and putting them on. Outside, as the outer door swung shut behind her, she strolled down the steps and tipped her face up into the great Antarctic sunshine. She closed her eyes and for a moment took off her sunglasses, confident at last to enjoy the sting of the cold and the blast of the sun. I’ll get a quick shower, she decided, and slather on some more sunscreen, then take a slow stroll through this glorious twenty-four-hour sunlight on my way to Crary Lab, where I’ll—
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