Days of Night

by Jonathan Stone

  Heller lets them describe the impromptu icing of Lazo-Wasum’s body—just to make sure their version matches Calloway’s.

  “And then?” Heller asks.

  Pritchard shrugs. “Then, we did our comm rounds.”

  “Comm. Communications?”

  “That’s right.”

  Heller thinks suddenly of the gravediggers in Hamlet. Just doing their jobs.

  “Tell me about your comm rounds.” Heller is pretty sure it isn’t relevant, but he might as well learn a little more about McMurdo. He notices how Pritchard and Dolan light up at the opportunity. Clearly no one ever asks. And this is a lot more of a comfort zone than talking about a frozen dead body. This is a chance to talk skills and success, not failure.

  “We need to regularly inspect the communications towers, for damage, for connections, for security.”

  The comm towers—two scaffolded structures, about four stories each—stand in unobstructed spots: one a few hundred yards from McMurdo, the other almost a mile further.

  “That’s our communications lifeline. How we connect to the world. See, telecom here is pretty limited, for a couple of reasons. You can’t have a satellite in geosynchronous orbit over Antarctica. Earth doesn’t rotate enough at its poles for that.” Dolan demonstrates roughly with his hands, circling an index finger over his fist. “And telecom providers won’t upgrade service for just five thousand people across a whole continent. Hell, less than five hundred people for almost half the year. Just not economically feasible. But hey, our towers work great. As long as they keep working. And we keep ’em working.”

  “All our communications. All our Internet and Wi-Fi and connection to the rest of the planet. Entrusted to a couple of IT dudes.”

  They laugh.

  But Pritchard adds, reflectively: “It’s weird, Detective Heller, these old towers for all our comm systems. Sophisticated but primitive, you know?”

  “Sophisticated but primitive,” says Heller. “You’re not the first one to tell me that about Antarctica.”

  And as they’re getting up to go, shaking hands, Heller asks them:

  “What’s that duct tape about? On Sandy’s zipper?”

  A shrug. “So’s he can get a better grip on the zipper in the cold, I guess. Not a bad idea.”

  Did he need a better grip than the next guy for some reason? Did it make him more identifiable to someone who wanted to identify him quickly? The questions expand. They always do in the beginning. It’s part of Heller’s love-hate relationship with police work.

  “Hey, where do I find Sorenson?” asks Heller. “She’s not on the clinic schedule today.”

  Pritchard and Dolan shoot each other a quick smile. Pritchard slides on his sunglasses, still smiling. “Oh, you’ll find her, don’t worry. She’s pretty hard to miss.”

  7.

  Next: the scientists in Lazo-Wasum’s lab. His fellow researchers.

  Heller makes his way to the botany laboratory. A sleek, gleaming steel-skinned building that stands out like an alien ship amid much older, grimier neighboring structures. Inside, the walls are brushed aluminum, the floor is a bright porcelain tile, and Heller immediately and intuitively understands that this is the point, the value, the real and central business of McMurdo Station: funded research, commercial applications, bottom-line potential.

  Sandy’s colleagues are still stunned, upset, six months later. They are glad to meet Heller—finally, the chance for some resolution—and unhappy to meet him, opening up the old wounds, the old questions, the old suspicions about one another. Heller knows this before he even enters the room with them.

  A new botany lab director, who was not here last winter, who is untainted, who didn’t know Lazo-Wasum, introduces Heller to the team—three men and two women—who worked with Sandy every day. Who knew him either passingly or very well. Who loved him. Who hated him. Who were indifferent. Heller would soon get a sense.

  He sits with them at a conference table in one corner of the lab. The botany director offers him coffee. Gathers the researchers around. “This is Detective Heller. He’s here formally investigating Sandy’s death. He’s got some questions for you. For all of you, and for each of you.” He nods to Heller.

  As Heller starts to explain, he gets the sense these are classic bench scientists. Quiet. Introverted. Weenies, they were called with easy derision at his working-class high school in Northern Vermont—and at every high school in America, he’s sure. This could just as easily be a lab on Route 128 in Boston or on the outskirts of Palo Alto or in the gentle hills of Northern Virginia, any of the research corridors—except for the endless snow and ice and brutal cold surrounding it.

  Tell me about Lazo-Wasum, he’s about to ask. You were with him every day. Who was he? What was he like? Who did he hang with? Who did he like? Dislike? But he has the sense that they will be mute. Respectful of their old colleague, as they see it. Eager to cooperate, but not really sure how.

  “The first thing I’m wondering,” says Heller, “is how you do botany in Antarctica? Plants versus extreme cold and dark—in my mind, they don’t really go together, do they?”

  Well, this is why it’s important, Mr. Heller, this is why it makes a difference—and suddenly the little circle of botanists is looser, more animated, explaining about limited resources, about the fascinating reality and interesting effects of extreme cold, and the concept and practice of adaptive photosynthesis, and its possible applications and the adaptation of the findings to other, more populous places on the planet, and their eyes are lit up, and they are eager to correct his conventional misconceptions, to educate him, which is exactly what he intended.

  He chats with all of them together for a few minutes. Then interviews each of them separately for ten minutes or so.

  The scientist who was closest to Lazo-Wasum turns out to be a botanist named Theo Cohen. They worked next to each other in the lab. And as conventionally if abstractly good-looking as Lazo-Wasum seems to have been from his photos, Cohen is contrastingly not. Wide ears. No chin. All forehead. The kind of scientist who may have been drawn to the lab as a kid because he felt rejected or dismissed everywhere else.

  “Good scientist,” says Cohen. “Very capable. I have to admit I admired his basic bench skills. You don’t get that in a lot of highfalutin Stanford and MIT types, but Sandy had, I guess, a kind of modesty and steadiness and, I don’t know, decency that maybe comes from growing up in Europe.” Heller can hear that Theo Cohen was ready to not like his colleague but couldn’t help himself. “He had an interesting working theory on nonnative species transadaptation. I had my doubts, but I’ve been wrong before.”

  “So you two discussed your work.”

  “Absolutely. He was very curious about my hydroponics and forced-growing experiments.”

  “Ever discuss anything besides work with him? Girlfriends? His private life?”

  Cohen looks at him horrified. “That’s just not . . . just not what you do in the lab, Mr. Heller.”

  Or not what you do in the lab, thinks Heller.

  Heller hears, from Theo Cohen and the others, all the respectful mythmaking of a colleague suddenly gone. A kind of hushed, laudatory impulse. A classic response for those unaccustomed to dealing with sudden death. A response he has seen so often, recognizes so well.

  His thoughts wander, as he dutifully interviews them all, but wander to the same place. To how cut off, isolated, the five of them are—individually and collectively. Educated, privileged, coddled researchers, living on university or government grants, in an endless series of clean bright labs, long cut off from messier life. These botanical researchers, in their white lab coats and black-framed glasses—hothouse flowers themselves. As scientists, they have a rarefied existence to begin with—a life of the mind, of research papers, of conferences, and a shared language of arcane academic terminology—but these five, sealed into a lab at the end of the earth, are doubly insulated from the messiness of life. He can’t help noticing, smiling a litt
le, at such a contrast to his own life. Knowing the streets and alleys and dirt and filth. Inhabiting the messiness. They are not fully alive, a part of him thinks. Or, at least, not alive in the same way. And in that way they can’t really, fully process their colleague’s death.

  Couple that with other, more conventional signs and clues—alibis, personality tics and traits, nervousness, all of which he sees and interprets with the instant accuracy of long experience—and Heller realizes, knows in his gut, that Sandy Lazo-Wasum’s lab colleagues are, individually and collectively, not only innocent of any crime but useless to him.

  As he is putting on his parka to exit, he asks the group of them, offhandedly, “Hey, where can I find Nurse Sorenson?”

  He notices one of the two women get a little hard-edged, bristle a little.

  He sees Theo Cohen go a little dreamy. And another researcher narrows his eyes with what Heller detects as a little jealousy.

  Huh.

  He looks for Anita Sorenson at the cafeteria at lunch. “She’s usually here about now.” “She was just here.” But he always just misses her. McMurdo does have a thousand residents in high season, but he still gets the distinct impression she is avoiding him. Which is absurd on her part, because she will have to talk to him at some point. There is no hiding. This is Antarctica.

  A more logical explanation of such behavior would be that she is trying to get something done—take care of something, talk to someone, arrange something—before they meet. What could she be trying to handle, or arrange or hide, before she meets him?

  In the vestibule of the base canteen a few days later, he happens to see the name tag on a parka of someone just coming in. “Ms. Sorenson?”

  The parka turns. Hooded tightly in the cold. Sunglasses.

  “You’ve been a little tough to find.”

  She slides her hood off. Pulls the sunglasses off her eyes.

  Suddenly he understands what Pritchard and Dolan’s smirks were about.

  And the woman researcher’s prickliness, and the male researcher’s dreaminess, and the other one’s jealousy.

  What nobody said, but everybody was thinking; what Heller had picked up a little bit from all of them.

  Sorenson is beautiful. Ridiculously, almost laughably beautiful. The conventional heart-stopping version, the textbook case. Scandinavian blonde. Flaxen hair. Swimming blue eyes. Beauty hidden and revealed in two quick, fluid motions of her hood pulled back and her parka unzipped, like a Bond-movie heroine. Beauty amplified by her slightly flushed skin coming out of the cold. Perfect smile, which she deploys now, seeing, Heller supposes, how he is a little startled.

  Almost a thousand people at McMurdo. Some percentage is going to be pretty desirable.

  Even more desirable than usual in the long, cutoff, isolated winter?

  Heller’s mental gears suddenly spin a little more quickly.

  One little gear has already been spinning for a while. Something that bothered him right away that he’s been waiting to ask her about: how quickly Sorenson got to the infirmary when Calloway called her at 6:00 a.m. In less time, apparently, than it took Pritchard and Dolan to drag Lazo-Wasum’s body there. How? Why?

  8.

  Suddenly, in a cognitive flash, Heller understands “winter-over.”

  Or, at least, one unspoken aspect of it.

  Obviously, the high-toned conversation about reading mystery series and botany texts and the DSM psychiatric manual distracted him.

  Obviously, the scientists’ pristine lab coats and earnest conversations have misled him.

  Or, at least, aren’t the whole winter-over story.

  “You’ve been avoiding me.”

  Sorenson doesn’t say anything. Looks away.

  “It’s going to be better for you if you talk to me. No matter what your role in Sandy’s death is.”

  She turns to him, anger and hurt sudden and pulsing in her eyes, but then tears begin to well in them and run down her cheeks.

  “My role?” she says quietly. Bitterly.

  Heller can tell by her response that she feels she has one. And he can guess by the emotion attached to it that it is not a role in killing Lazo-Wasum. That it is a more nuanced role. And that perhaps more than anything else—or anyone else—she misses him.

  So Heller takes a chance. Since Antarctica seems to operate by its own rules, maybe his approach here will too. Maybe he won’t do things by the book, since he doesn’t really have to, since there is no book.

  He looks around. No one’s within earshot. “I have to tell you, Ms. Sorenson, something bugged me right away. How did you get dressed so fast? How were you at the clinic so fast, ready to receive the body so fast when Dolan and Pritchard called about finding it? I’ve walked it. I’ve timed it. You must have been awake and dressed already. From being with Mr. Lazo-Wasum earlier?” In fact, just minutes earlier?

  He stares at her quietly. Waits. She says nothing back. Serving up her beauty cold, unadorned.

  “I think we’re talking about some specialized knowledge here, when it comes to that neck. A mark so small, Dr. Calloway pretty much admits he wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise.” He narrows his eyes, to watch, hawklike, for any reaction. “I think you saw that mark on his neck because you knew that neck,” says Heller.

  She looks up at Heller, expressionlessly, before the blue eyes moisten again. “I knew every inch of him,” she says quietly.

  They both know how much it tells him.

  How compressed and efficient. How demure yet explicit.

  An affair, thinks Heller. Ongoing. Not some quick fling, some sudden, impulsive coupling in the dark. I knew every inch of him.

  And he realizes—with sympathetic revulsion, with horror—that as she was looking at Lazo-Wasum’s body with the doctor, closely examining every inch of it inert in front of her, she had been examining it live, lovingly, affectionately, laughingly, just a few hours before.

  That’s what her avoidance was about. An extra wound, much wider and deeper and more evident than a pinprick at the base of the neck. Much bloodier.

  That’s what the fresh tears might be about as well. An extra bit of torture, of memory that will never go away.

  “How long had you been seeing him?” Heller asks quietly.

  “Just that winter.”

  “Did people generally know?”

  “That’s the thing,” she says. “I don’t think anyone knew. These winter liaisons. They come in two basic styles, Mr. Heller.” They are sitting now, off by themselves, at the end of the dark little vestibule hallway off the main canteen area. A space even long-time residents might not notice. Some boxes of unidentified supplies are stacked around them. “The first style is ‘everybody knows.’ You’re acknowledged as a couple. It’s as if to say to everyone else, don’t touch, don’t mess, hands off, we’re together. Like a temporary marriage that other people here witness and accept, even if it is temporary. The second kind of liaison, it’s a secret. Some of the energy and thrill of it, frankly, is that no one knows. It’s just between the two of you. So it lets you maintain your independence, your identity, your separate self in the eyes of your coworkers. Ours was the second kind. As far as I knew. As far as I could tell.”

  “Would you characterize this as casual? Or something more.”

  She smiles sadly. Her eyes well up again. “Something more.” Her emotions are close to the surface. They have been waiting, frozen, for someone to thaw them, give them permission to melt, to spread, to show themselves. No wonder she avoided him. She didn’t want this. She knew it about herself.

  An affair—but not one anyone else knows about, she doesn’t think.

  She could easily be wrong about that, of course. Or, she could know she is wrong about that and is choosing not to say who she thinks might have known. Choosing not to say for some reason Heller doesn’t know yet.

  And whoever may have known could have been motivated by jealousy, by hostility, by who knows what.

  “Ms. Sorenson
, who had you been seeing or been involved with here before your relationship with Sandy?”

  She shakes her head.

  Does it mean no one? Or does it mean I’m not going to say?

  “No one?”

  “No one of consequence.”

  “That’s for me to decide, Ms. Sorenson.”

  She shrugs. “Allan Seward. He’s in transport.”

  He writes it down.

  “Paulson. Ben Paulson.”

  He writes it down.

  “Covington. Sarah Covington.”

  He holds his pen still, hovering, before he writes it.

  She sees his pen pause. Smiles a little.

  He recognizes that he has stepped into a new reality. One that had not occurred to him.

  He realizes suddenly that he has to ask. Ask the obvious. So obvious he had dismissed it out of hand. Too obvious, too self-incriminating, too crazy for them to have so openly put themselves at the scene of their own crime. To have committed the crime, in tandem—a camaraderie of jealousy? Of retribution?—and then pretended to “discover” the body. So arrogantly, absurdly, bluntly stupid that he had rejected it immediately. But now, whether merely for due diligence, or because in the strange slanted light of this new reality there might be something he hadn’t seen, he has to ask. Not knowing, of course, if she’ll give an honest answer.

  “Pritchard? Dolan?”

  Sorenson looks at him evenly. “Not at the same time,” she says.

  Good Christ.

  “You’ve got to understand the culture here, Mr. Heller,” she says. “Or try to.”

  Like Pritchard said, You gotta adjust your thinking.

  He sees Hobbes in the canteen at dinnertime. He gets his tray, walks by him, and Hobbes, as Heller assumed, motions Heller to the empty chair across from him.

  “Settling in okay? So far so good?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’ll find the food surprisingly good, I think. Our head cook, Robert Manafort, is a genius with mass ingredients. Unless we all just lose our sense of taste after a while. Which is a mild version of what arctic explorers have experienced for centuries—that when you’re hungry enough, at the edges of starvation, even beef jerky tastes as good as sirloin steak.” Heller senses that Hobbes enjoys educating him about the continent. Hobbes has the teacher gene—for better or worse.