But how could he say no? The call had come out of the clear blue, literally—from the US Marshal’s office in Hawaii, which, to Heller’s understandable surprise, has jurisdiction over serious crimes at the American bases in Antarctica, through a recent agreement with the National Science Foundation, which operates the bases. The Marshal’s office informed him that they needed to subcontract an experienced homicide investigator to fly in, assess the situation, and begin to gather evidence, and he was their first choice, but there were other solid candidates too—so take it or leave it—and then they told him the pay, and with so little saved at this point and so many bills and looming alimony and Amy’s tuition, saying no wasn’t really an option.
Tuition. Alimony. And the unnerving headlines screaming from the newspaper in the seat next to his: renewed nuclear testing and territorial posturing from Russia, China, and North Korea in response to the chest thumping of a chaotic, unpredictable administration. It’s a world of escalating tensions, both personal and global, that Joe Heller is happy to temporarily escape. Antarctica seems like a good place to avoid all the fallout.
He thinks about the bills again and laughs at the irony. A job in Antarctica as a matter of survival.
3.
The little briefing room is warm, tight, a little claustrophobic. No windows. Not many windows generally in McMurdo Station, he’s noticed; windows just invite in weather and cold and trouble. Sealed off is a way of life. Is it also an attitude? Even among supposedly open-minded scientists? He’ll soon see.
Heller joins three men and a woman already gathered around a conference table. “Sorry it’s so stuffy in here,” Hobbes apologizes. “This building is pretty airtight, and we always shut the heat in from previous meetings. Less fuel use. That’s the ethic here.” A twinkle in his eye, his elfin smile. “On any other continent all our trapped BO would stink, but Antarctica is so dry. It’s not too bad, is it?” Hobbes tilts his head, sniffs the air. “I’m trusting you to tell us otherwise, Mr. Heller. We all lose our sense of smell over the Antarctic winters.”
A few chuckles.
Heller smiles back gamely. “No smell.”
Hobbes’s intent is clear, of course: to relax everyone a little, informalize the grim business to come, open the proceedings with a joke, lighten things—if only briefly.
Heller notices a phone in the middle of the table. For conference calls with the mainland, he assumes. But no one is on the phone now.
Hobbes gestures around the room: “Joe Heller, homicide investigator, meet Ron Stanford, chief of science, Colonel Wick Simmons, base administrator, Antoinette Bramlett, supply-chain command, and me you’ve met. I’m the station manager.” Head nods, and brief smiles of acknowledgment. Nothing as formal as a handshake.
Hobbes then introduces a fifth person at the meeting, by slapping a thick manila file onto the center of the table.
“Meet Sandor Lazo-Wasum. Sandy to his friends. Austrian. Thirty-eight. PhD in biology. Stanford, MIT. Five foot eleven. Two hundred ten pounds. A little overweight over the winter, like all of us.”
Lazo-Wasum’s photo ID is part of the file. Heller spins the photo toward himself, looks at it, mainly to be polite. Black bearded, wire-rimmed glasses, black eyes seeming to blink for the camera. Strong jaw. Generically good looking—like a stock photo of a scientist. But in that moment of the photo, he appears befuddled—a hint of personality that is not stock.
“Body preserved frozen until the cargo four-seven can get back in here, and is then sent for an autopsy,” Hobbes recounts. “Inadequate forensic facilities here at McMurdo. We hoped it would be suicide. Harsh as that sounds. We assumed it was suicide. We have our share, not surprisingly. Or natural causes. Heart. Lungs. Aneurysm. The biometric extremes here tend to bring out any latent physical problems. We screen for health problems, of course, pretty intensively, but we nevertheless have a higher-than-normal incidence of undiagnosed issues, given the environmental stresses.”
Hobbes slaps down a second manila folder next to the first. “Autopsy and toxicology report.” He looks up. “As you’ve heard by now, Heller, a mess. Degradation of corpse in inadequate temperature during months of storage, due to a refrigeration-unit compromise that went undiscovered for weeks because its sensors were not adjustable to the outside ambient temperatures of Antarctic winter—like nothing is, after all. And when it was finally discovered, we did not have the necessary parts for repair, so our facilities team jury-rigged something, but the damage was done, probably.” He continues with a sigh. “Further degradation because of inadequate precautions during transit . . . temperature swings, cabin pressure shifts . . . key minutes lost in cross-border paperwork issues arising from his Austrian citizenship . . . more minutes lost in drop-off at the first forensic lab, which had the transfer time wrong and no one there for receiving. A second, independent forensics-lab exam was commissioned based on the shortcomings of the first, producing—need I even say it—contradictory findings.” Hobbes now picks up the second folder, waves it in the air for them, shakes his head, rolls his eyes in generalized frustration, before continuing. “Toxicology and autopsy results: traces of phenobarbital, cannabis, and alcohol.” He looks at Heller, explains. “Not surprising for a young guy wintering over here, just so you know.” Looking back down at the report. “And bacterial traces of several chemical compounds and toxic residues that may indicate poisoning. Accent on the ‘may.’” Hobbes slaps the folder closed. “Poisoning. A highly provisional finding. And that’s the best we’re going to get.”
“Which could easily have been accidental poisoning,” explains Simmons, the base administrator, interjecting eagerly. Tall, lean, jumpy, voluble. “Our scientists work with lots of toxic chemicals. Or maybe something in the air supply systems. Or the waste disposal systems. Who knows what could have happened.”
“Or not accidental at all,” says Ron Stanford, chief of science. Stocky and tanned, he wears his thick white mane long in the back, a scientist ready to host his show on public television. “We’re almost a hundred scientists. Botanists, chemists, chemical engineers, lots of advanced degrees. It could have been any of us.”
“You mean ‘any of us’ as victim or as perpetrator?” asks Bramlett, the supply-chain woman. Pale skinned, jet-black hair in a bun, oversize black-rimmed glasses. A prim career bureaucrat.
“Either,” Stanford says with a shrug.
“That’s the thing, Detective.” Hobbes smiles. “We don’t really know anything. All these smart people, and we don’t know anything. Blank slate. Just like Antarctica.”
“And the refrigeration issue and the transport issues and the clerical issues in receiving . . .” Simmons shakes his head. “One more case where the best of intentions—good scientific thinking and reasonable planning—get trumped by uncontrollable outside forces.”
“That’s Antarctica in a nutshell.” Hobbes smiles again. “Welcome to it, Mr. Heller.”
Over the next half hour, the conversation ranges broadly. A little impromptu, incidental, and practical education for Heller from hosts who want to be, or at least to appear, cooperative.
“There’s only five thousand people on the whole damn continent,” says Hobbes. “Most of us, nine hundred or so, here at McMurdo. And wintering over here last season, just one hundred fifty-seven, which is typical.” He brings out yet another manila folder. “Here’s the list. I knew you’d want it.”
“Your names are included?” It’s the first thing Heller has said in the briefing. He looks around the room. This will be thorough. No favoritism. I’m a cop.
“Of course. Our names are included. We were all here on the continent when Lazo-Wasum died. All four of us.” Hobbes leans back. “One hundred fifty-seven people. It’s finite. A twenty-first-century variation on the locked-room mystery, isn’t it?”
“Locked-room mystery?” asks Stanford.
“You’ve never heard that term, Stanford?” Hobbes shakes his head, smiles. “Labs and cages and white mice all your li
fe, Ronnie.” Hobbes explains patiently. “That’s when the murder takes place in a castle or at a dinner party or on an island, so the killer has to be someone in the room, and Inspector Holmes or Poirot or Maigret or whoever has to figure out the culprit. It’s a whole literary genre.”
“Doesn’t Trebor read those things?” asks Bramlett.
“Yes, loves them—has a whole shelf of them.”
A shrug from Stanford. “One of my researchers reads botany texts. Another reads the DSM.” Heller knew the reference. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association. Interesting pleasure reading. Heller will ask Stanford who’s reading that.
Hobbes explains to Heller, “You’ve got to tackle something over the winter. You’ve got to have some project. And as far as what it is, de gustibus non est disputandum. To each his own.”
Hobbes shifts in his chair, frowns for a moment, and starts to summarize, in a way, everything that Heller has been hearing. But it’s also clearly something that Hobbes has been waiting to say.
“It’s different here, Mr. Heller. You think differently. It stresses you in unpredictable ways. Someone otherwise normal may have gone off the deep end, and only temporarily. Maybe doesn’t even remember.” Hobbes leans back in his chair. “And you’ve got no resources here for your investigation. In that way, it’s primitive. But at the same time it’s highly advanced here. Lots of educated people, with access to lots of technology. You could be dealing with a clever criminal, because it’s one of us. A potentially tough case, Mr. Heller, right from the start.”
And then Simmons, the base administrator, jumps in, energetic, excitable, with what, Heller realizes, he has also been waiting to say to Heller. “And then, depending on what you find, we’ve got no mechanism in place for prosecution. If you’ve got perpetrators and victims who aren’t Americans, like Lazo-Wasum, the legal system breaks down. It’s just a collegial partnership of countries, and no nation’s legal system is binding.”
Heller knows the problem—and the precedent. They all do. A possible homicide in 2000. An Australian astrophysicist named Rodney Marks, thirty-two. Felt sick walking from the telescope observatory back to his barracks, went straight to the doctor, complained of headaches, expired a few hours later. Body kept frozen for six months, until it could be flown to Christchurch for an autopsy. Methanol poisoning. Marks was newly engaged to a maintenance technician here, had no financial troubles, was well liked, popular. Suicide was ruled out. But America and New Zealand had squabbled over jurisdictions and procedures, his room had been cleaned out, and thus any latent evidence destroyed; the forty-nine others who had wintered over with him at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station were never interviewed, then dispersed across the globe. Marks had Tourette’s, and doctors made a plausible case that his death was related to that. In the end, only a suspicious death. Inconclusive. Could the same killer have managed to keep a lid on it for fifteen years and then struck again? No—no one who wintered over at Amundsen-Scott or McMurdo had service of more than fifteen years. But the Antarctic authorities didn’t want an outcome like that again. An outcome of no outcome. Then again, in the intervening years, not much had changed, and “inconclusive” loomed again in the little conference room.
Of course, it would make sense if it was a suicide—Marks’s ingestion of methanol, and Lazo-Wasum’s death too. All that alcohol and marijuana in Lazo-Wasum’s system. It’s a lonely, difficult place over winter. Suicides are not common, but not unheard of. But they need to know if it was not a suicide—because justice has to be served. Or does it? What kind, what version of justice? That will be up to them, thinks Heller. Over his pay grade.
“It’s a legal minefield,” admits Hobbes. “What do we do with the perpetrator or perpetrators when and if we catch them? Depends on the nationalities of the perpetrator and the victim. But why should it, when nationality doesn’t mean anything here?”
“So why are we even looking into it, if we can’t necessarily take any action?” Simmons asks the room with rhetorical frustration.
“Because we need to protect our little society, such as it is,” says Stanford. “If it is a homicide, we can’t have another one. We can’t have some monster loose among us. We have to feel secure. Plus, this is a community of scientists. We search for and value the truth, just for itself. We want the facts, deserve the facts. Whatever happens or doesn’t happen as far as prosecution or punishment.”
Bramlett adds quietly—but with a little waver of emotion in her voice—“And . . . well . . . societies have to be just. Even ad hoc ones like this. We have a responsibility. To Sandor’s survivors. To his family in Austria. To all of us. It’s the mark of a civil society.”
“Truth is, we’re in two camps,” Hobbes admits to Heller, “as you’re beginning to gather. The utopians, who want to leave this alone as an isolated incident, let it go, keep our utopia intact. Maybe it was natural causes, maybe suicide, why not leave those as convenient possibilities. Versus the, I don’t know, justitopians? . . . authoritopians?”—he looks vaguely around the room, seeking tacit approval of his made-up word—“who feel we have to provide and follow some set of rules, in order to protect our society. It’s an ongoing internal debate.” A wry smile.
Beyond his e-mail exchanges with Hobbes, Heller doesn’t know any of the people in this room. But he does sense how well they know one another. Days together, weeks together, seasons together. He knows that there is likely to be, beneath the collegiality, some annoyance, some different points of view, some tensions, minor or substantial. The utopians versus the authoritopians. But there are probably more nuanced points of view than that.
Over the next weeks and months, Heller will come to understand these differing points of view, differing visions for Antarctica. But uniting them, he will see, is their common love of the continent they are on. For some of them, an allegiance far beyond any to their land of origin—an accident of birth, after all, because this is the land of their dreams, their ambitions, their souls, and their free choice.
Heller could understand the utopians. Hell, in just a few hours, he could sense it. For many of them, mankind’s last continent. Mankind’s last hope. Mankind’s fresh start.
But mankind being mankind, it has finally happened.
Amid the scientists, the political philosophy, the camaraderie, the spirit of international cooperation, the pursuit of scientific knowledge that crosses national boundaries so fluently, the common bond of discovery, the common bond of survival, the dreams of a better world, it has happened.
In this borderless collaborative community, a nation of no nations, a place of shared purpose and aspiration, it has happened.
Inevitably. Ruefully. Its own loud, silent comment on mankind.
A homicide.
A murder.
The utopians may still doubt it, but Heller is pretty sure of it already.
Heller is no scientist. He’s a cop. One who left the force several years ago, trying to put it behind him, creating a quieter life for himself, remaking his identity from cop into amateur astronomer. But someone in the US Marshal’s office unearthed his name and career from the digital record, double-checked it, Heller assumes, with phone calls to his former department, proposed him to Hobbes and his administrative team, and here he is. The continent’s first cop, presumably. The continent’s only. Manny Hobbes, as McMurdo’s station manager, is technically a Special Deputy US Marshal, approved for light law-enforcement duties—issuing tickets, disciplinary recommendations if an argument becomes physical—but it’s a largely ceremonial role, and he has little training—an annual paper test administered from afar by the US Marshal’s office in Hawaii—and no actual police experience.
Right now, Heller’s thought is far more concrete than any of the philosophical discussion across the table from him.
The faster he solves it, the faster he can get home, the faster the justitopians can get it off their plate, and the faster the utopians
can return to their dreams.
And an accompanying, inverse thought: as far as solving it fast, he already knows he’s deluding himself.
After the briefing ends, and the parties disperse with professional smiles and, now, handshakes, Colonel Simmons and Ms. Bramlett linger a little to offer some further insights. As if the presence of someone new, outside their circle, is a chance for a moment of broader perspective.
“America has traditionally dominated here,” Simmons tells Heller, “but that’s changing. The Russians and Chinese are making a bigger commitment. Argentines and Chileans committing to it too, with their maturing economies and their proximity. The treaties all come up in 2048, and there are abundant natural resources everyone will be competing for. It all looks like collegial science right now. But we’re talking about oil and gas and minerals, and the means of extraction have advanced enormously, so all these countries are salivating. Mark my words, our little utopia will become a war zone.” A shrug. “A little context for you, Mr. Heller.”
He thought he was escaping the world’s escalating tensions. Only to land in a place where they could bubble over.
“But that’s the future,” says Ms. Bramlett, touching Simmons’s sleeve as if to calm him down. “And the future is uncertain. Mr. Heller is here for a more practical problem.”
A minute later, it’s only Hobbes left in the briefing room with Heller.
“Hey, everything is tougher in Antarctica,” Hobbes says. “Food. Waste. Power. Transportation. Communication. Daily life. Why should police work be any different?” He shrugs. “That’s why there are no kids, no pets allowed here. It’s a place for grown-ups. And if you’re not one already, it grows you up quick.”
Yes, a homicide investigation is going to be tougher in Antarctica.
Though Heller will look back on this as the easy time.
Days of Night Page 2