Days of Night

by Jonathan Stone

  Heller digs in. Hobbes is right. Not bad.

  “Manafort is self-taught, but he takes the limitations as a personal challenge, and he’s got a couple of full-time assistants he’s also trained.” He chews for a moment. “The basic communal pleasure of meals becomes more intense, almost overwhelming, during the winter-over. For some of us. Others lose interest in food and socializing entirely.” He shrugs.

  Heller looks around. They are momentarily out of earshot of anyone.

  “Manny, you’re on my suspect list, same as anyone, but I do need to ask you about something.”

  “Sure.”

  Heller smiles. “Manny Hobbes, we need to talk about sex.”

  Hobbes looks up, smiles, nods. “This’ll be a livelier dinner than I thought.” But then pauses. “Wait. Not my sex life!”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “That’s going to be a very short conversation, I’m afraid.” Hobbes smiles. “And not a very lively one, I assure you. Try not to fall asleep during it.” Then, smiling again: “Which basically is all I do in the bunk room.”

  “No, not your sex life. I mean McMurdo sex life. Sex life here, particularly during the winter.” Heller stabs a bite of chicken on his tray, shovels it in, swallows, continues. “There’s a different winter-over culture here. And I need you to tell me about it. And don’t sugarcoat it, and don’t bullshit me. This is not to disseminate to the world. This is only to inform a homicide investigation.”

  Manny sighs. Leans back, indicating with body language to Heller that he should perhaps do the same. That they’re going to be here awhile. Heller is pleased to get the sense that Manny already knows there is much to say. That he doesn’t resist at all.

  “You know how the rules are different here? No countries? No borders? You’re going to see how that applies to sex here too. Different rules. Undefined boundaries. It’s a few factors. The cold—people can’t get warm. The aloneness during the day, the aloneness of the landscape—people want to connect. Want companionship. Lots of young, healthy, physically fit people—that’s who gets this assignment. People who are unattached enough, independent enough, to be able to come here. They’re here for a few months, then back to their previous lives. This is a different time and place, a time-out from their other lives. And then the old classic problem—nothing else to do at night. And half the year, it becomes one long, long night with nothing to do. No bars, no restaurants, no movie theater, no place to gather. The old “caveman” problem. Got to entertain yourself. Lots of alcohol and drugs available, to pave the way. And these are scientists. Pushing the bounds of the known. They like to experiment.” A smile.

  But Heller is already thinking. Sex doesn’t come unattached. It comes with feelings, territoriality, unleashed passion, and unleashed fury, even genuine love, whatever that is. Ninety percent of homicides are between people who knew each other well. People emotionally involved. He has the sense that this wild, unspoken sex life is where things will lead him.

  “No kids, no pets allowed at McMurdo. That’s because we don’t want animals to bring new pathogens to the continent or kids to be subjected to any. But the result is no pet to snuggle with on a cold night. No child to hug. Or to model adult behavior for. So of course there’s sex. The only companionship. The only comfort. The only warmth.”

  Maybe it’s time for some kids and pets, thinks Heller.

  Maybe it’s time to normalize things a little.

  But Heller suddenly understands much more about winter-over. It’s not just mystery books and botany texts.

  “I’m pretty sure, Manny, that if I were to check all the caches on personal computers during the winter, I’d find plenty of porn, wouldn’t I? Round-the-clock porn, for any number of these guys.”

  “Women too, no?” says Manny.

  “Of course.”

  Manny shrugs. “I’m sure you’d find plenty of it. But so what?”

  “It’s what else I might find in the caches, Manny. Maybe sites that tilt from porno to outright violence. Or sites describing homemade poisons.”

  Hobbes looks stricken. Lowers his eyes, as if in shame. “It wouldn’t do you much good to check the computer caches, because we clean them as a matter of course once a year, when the new crew arrives with the warmer weather around October.”

  “That’s gonna make investigating this tougher.” Heller figures he can check current caches that haven’t yet been wiped. If someone’s got an obsession or fixation, it doesn’t disappear with the season. Of course, he can’t systematically check every cache for no reason. McMurdo operates by US laws. He needs cause.

  Hobbes looks at him. “Sorry about the caches. We did not anticipate this. This is unexplored territory.” He smiles thinly. “You’re at the frontier, Joe . . . of geography, climate . . . and homicide investigation.”

  9.

  Pritchard and Dolan.

  Besides the botany lab scientists and Calloway, they’re the only two people he’s already spoken to.

  Who never volunteered that they’d each slept with Sorenson.

  Either because they’d had no idea that she’d been seeing Lazo-Wasum. So it would be entirely irrelevant to mention. Oh, by the way, I once had a fling with a nurse here. The same nurse who came to receive Lazo-Wasum when we found him, because she is the only nurse.

  Or because they did know she was seeing Lazo-Wasum, and knew it had turned into something, where theirs had been one-night stands, and being jealous, annoyed, for whatever reason, they poisoned him. The radio guys, who would never be suspected—particularly since they were the do-gooders who found the body.

  Or the third possibility, the one that Heller’s instincts are calling out to him already, the one that he is almost certain, by long experience, will turn out to be the case: because they knew of the ongoing affair, and also knew the other had slept with Sorenson . . . and while they had nothing to do with the murder, they were sure that, because of their respective previous one-night stands with her and discovery of the body, an investigation not only would lead to them but might somehow—circumstantially or by inference or by mere convenience—actually convict them, and terrified of that prospect, they made the idiotic decision to say nothing.

  Pritchard and Dolan. Great.

  He’s barely been here, and it’s already getting screwed up.

  The first witnesses he talked to already haven’t told the whole story.

  Antarctica’s clean, white, blank slate is already muddy and rutted, like a dirty alley in McMurdo.

  His neat, clean list of 157 names already has asterisks, question marks, scribbles, and he’s barely started on it.

  He’ll have to check back with Pritchard and Dolan. In some less direct way.

  Maybe talk them into taking him on a radio-tower inspection.

  His investigation. Dammit. The engine is just pulling out of the station and already there are parts rumbling and rattling and threatening to fall off.

  And knowing himself, maybe most dangerous of all—Heller is already a little pissed off.

  There is a little more to these sexual liaisons, Heller realizes. A little more than the loneliness and cold that explains the night activity during the winter-over. Something more important behind the coupling. Because what kind of a person comes to Antarctica to begin with? As Hobbes said, someone who can go. Someone with no ties. It’s both kinds of pioneer spirit. Both kinds of pioneer personalities. Meaning, someone who wants to seize new opportunity, conquer new worlds and challenges. But also, it’s someone who wants to escape. To cut ties. Both kinds of settlers had headed to America, to Australia, west to California. Yes, to experience new, expanded possibility. But also to start over in some way. Erase the past by creating a new future. To put whatever they had screwed up behind them.

  He realizes it isn’t necessarily so black and white, of course. For most people, it’s a mixture of the two: fresh start and escape. Some of our best human impulses, and some of our most covert and shameful ones.
r />   He smiles a little sadly, staring up at the ceiling above his bunk. Because he knows it is a person like him. In the analysis of what kind of person comes to Antarctica, to the end of the earth, he is Exhibit A. Because while he was asked by the US Marshal’s Service on the basis of his skills, his résumé, his availability, he said yes because he wanted the fresh start. Nothing was holding him. He was leaving nothing important behind. Or nothing that couldn’t wait. Or that might be better if it waited—getting distance, actual and psychological and emotional.

  It’s people without ties who are willing to come to Antarctica. People without the strong and normal ties of family life, of marriage, of child rearing, of convention. And others for whom life is adventure, life is risk and possibility, who see life’s richness and shortness clearly.

  So Antarctica naturally draws some of the psychologically healthiest people on the planet, he realizes—and arguably some of the psychologically sickest.

  And here both types are thrown in together. Getting to know each other. Working with each other. Sleeping with each other.

  And when the two types commingle—when the sick entwine with the healthy, psychologically speaking—some “virus” may get created and pass between them. A dangerous virus. A lethal bug.

  People without ties. People willing to turn their backs on life. To pretend there’s nothing in the rearview mirror. He lies there thinking about his ex-wife, Ann. His daughter, Amy. Eighteen now. He should be in her life. And while it would seem, on the surface, that he is the one not looking in the rearview mirror—that he is the one who’s torn the mirror off completely—it is actually Ann who turns out to have a surprising aptitude for forgetting, for going forward, for ignoring the past. And yet she is the one who stayed, so she is the one who to the outside world looks steady, remaining in her job, raising her daughter, but psychologically is the one who cut her losses, more easily erased the past, and while he looks to be trying to escape it, he is only traveling to new places to continue to stew in it. He is the one in Antarctica, but he is the one stuck in the past, overly loyal, an unchanging fool. Tonight, he doesn’t want to go there. He needs to shut off this line of thinking in the dark. He turns over in his bunk, as if to face away from such thoughts.

  Would he be one of those who slept with Sorenson, or someone like her, if he was wintering over? Learning, with the power of desire, to be one of the cut off? One of the isolated? Willing to live in the present, to assume, or pretend, there are no consequences?

  And a bigger question comes to him—as if unbidden, from his unconscious—before he rolls into sleep.

  Can anyone really start fresh?

  Is there really such a thing as starting over?

  He realizes—smiles a little to notice, in these moments before sleep—that it is shifting in his mind from a psychological to a philosophical question.

  In the weeks ahead, he will remember lying here thinking this thought—and his head will pound at the irony of it, at the prescience of it, at the unpredictably deep and terrifying reverberations of that innocent philosophical question.

  Is there really such a thing as starting over?

  10.

  While he pursues the who, he simultaneously explores the how:

  Poisoning.

  He starts to look into the possibilities, and they multiply almost immediately. Go exponential on him every time he turns his thoughts toward them.

  The pinprick at the back of the neck. That Sorenson saw immediately, knowing the downy back of that neck so well.

  Poisoning isn’t just poisoning. It falls into subsets—of materials, technique, delivery system.

  One subset it falls into that people don’t generally consider: Is it slow or fast? Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

  Slow has the advantage of the perpetrator being able to create distance between the deed and him- or herself. You can be in another place, another city, on another continent before it takes effect. The victim might mistake it for sickness, because certain poisons can simply feel like a bad flu or the creep of disease, and a young Antarctic employee might not even bother the doctor with such common symptoms. Or their worsening might be so gradual, so subtle, that the victim hardly notices, until it is suddenly, mortally, too late.

  Slow has the advantage of many subtle and undetectable delivery methods. Air, food, water, even a powder or residue against the skin. Alcohol, recreational drugs, even one’s daily toiletries—cologne, antiperspirant, toothpaste. Even the skin moisturizer for the face or hands to defend against the Antarctic cold. All potential delivery systems. Each a creepy way to invade the personal, to violate the presumed inviolate. Slow has the advantage of looking for something that works in unique conjunction with the cold. Maybe a lethal chemical reaction that the extreme cold disguises especially well.

  Or fast. Fast poisoning being almost a contradiction in terms. Fast can have the advantage of greater certainty. No chance of recovery, of reversal, of accidental antidote. No time to introduce an antidote.

  But fast is inherently riskier because the perpetrator cannot get distance of time and place. The only “distance” will be in the exoticism and stealth of the materials. Fast requires, in general, a greater degree of facility with poisons, to disguise the poison adequately, so that it’s not just a chemical version of, say, an evidence-laden gunshot wound. Though it is, Heller realizes, a silent version of a gunshot wound. And it can be a guaranteed version of a gunshot wound, reducing the chance of surviving it, as you might a gunshot wound. And there aren’t firearms allowed or available at McMurdo, by order of the National Science Foundation, and because there’s no rational need for them—a place of science, no polar bears or other natural predators, no military presence because none of the other countries’ research stations allow them either, by international agreement—so the fast poisoning to some degree replaces out of necessity the gunshot wound, and it requires less force, produces less mess, no muss, no fuss, and is more lethal, depending on the poison. It doesn’t require you to overpower the victim. It takes the physicality out of it. The perpetrator can be small. Which means the perpetrator can be anyone.

  With fast poisoning, the big disadvantage is you have to be there. Which perhaps means you have to witness it. Which also perhaps means you want to witness it. That you have chosen fast poisoning, you take on its risks, because you really want to be there.

  Heller shudders.

  Either someone had to take the risk. Suddenly. Because something had suddenly changed, something had suddenly been discovered, a sudden, desperate, anxious reaction—the clock was suddenly ticking.

  Or someone wanted to take the risk. Or doesn’t care about the risk. The poison is merely a convenient, unconventional stand-in for a knife or gun. A sudden, furious, vengeful response—in chemical form.

  The prick at the back of the neck definitely says fast. Risky and fast.

  And the winter-over nightlife—the sexual mores and escapades, the drinking and drugs—definitely points to something passionate, impulsive, vengeful.

  Or points to an environment of passionate, impulsive, vengeful people, which would be a perfect cover, a perfect diversion, a perfect misdirection for something—and someone—more cunning.

  Poisoning seems exotic, at first. But thinking of all the available chemical ingredients from ongoing experiments, of the collegial atmosphere of science and research, of the lack of conventional weaponry, of the quiet, collaborative, close-knit community, he realizes that it is, on the contrary, the least exotic and most reasonable way to murder someone on Antarctica, and the odds of getting away with it are very high. If you have it in for someone, and you’re on Antarctica, there are no guns, and knife wounds leave lots of blood and clues, so poisoning is the way to go.

  The prick mark at the back of the neck?

  The handiwork of a needle, presumably.

  But finding that needle? There is already a useful, knowing expression about that, the haystack in this case being the pi
le of medical waste, or even general waste, that the needle has undoubtedly been tossed into, and all that waste, medical and general, already transported out aboard one of the previous year’s flights, with every other ounce of Antarctic trash, in the cargo section of a 747.

  Unless whoever was clever enough to administer this poison was careful and smart enough not to want to risk tossing the needle in with other waste, where someone investigating might naturally begin looking for it, because every ounce of trash is transported out, doesn’t stay put, can possibly be seen and intercepted, so the killer didn’t take that risk but put it somewhere else, and that needle and plunger of evidence are still here. Just beneath the frozen surface somewhere? A square couple of inches of evidence amid five million square miles of identical landscape? Not recoverable.

  Or in the bottom drawer of a bedside table, the perpetrator still trying to figure out what to do with it? Recoverable, maybe.

  Heller, sitting at the little desk in his little room, continues his Internet research into poisoning.

  Cross-references it with cold. What does well in the cold? What’s untraceable in the cold? When it comes to poisons, is there a cold-weather superstar? Heller searches.

  His career has served up countless gunshots, stabbings, beatings, even lethal martial-arts holds—even the proverbial fireplace poker and tire iron—but if there was a poisoning, he can’t remember it. Which makes him an odd choice for this case, he thinks.

  He has everything to learn.

  But this research need not be lonely, isolated. Quite the opposite.

  He has dozens of experts to call on, to explain the science, to propose how they would do it.

  And maybe one or two of them will prove a little too knowledgeable or finally notice some compound missing from the lab, or something.