Days of Night

by Jonathan Stone

  And he still hasn’t quite gotten past the initial question about that pinprick at the back of the neck.

  What are the circumstances under which Lazo-Wasum’s neck could have been punctured so easily, so perfectly? Commingling with the fluid of the spinal column at such an optimal point?

  So far, his imagination is failing him there.

  He dutifully researches everything he can about poisoning.

  But part of him knows he isn’t going to learn anything new.

  Because tapping at the back of his brain—tapping there since he first read the file, since the long flight down—is a little drumbeat of knowledge and instinct and experience that tells him he already knows everything he needs to about the poisoning.

  Which is that a poison can be concocted pretty easily out of all kinds of common, readily available chemical materials. Anything under the sink will work, in all sorts of combinations. To say nothing of what’s in the labs. Which he’d bet the killer knew.

  He would also bet that the killer knew the limits of the infirmary here. That they weren’t really equipped to do an autopsy and certainly didn’t have the tools or knowledge to successfully isolate what the poison actually was.

  He’d further bet the killer knew that sending the body elsewhere for a full autopsy was going to be time consuming and impractical, that there wouldn’t be a decent weather window to ship the body out in winter, that the evidence would likely be compromised in transit, so any eventual, actual autopsy would prove in the end inconclusive—and knowing all this, the McMurdo authorities might not even bother with an autopsy at all.

  All leading to Heller’s biggest fear: that knowing all this—with all this working in his or her favor—a killer might just as easily, just as brazenly, just as heedlessly and comfortably do it again.

  He also realizes that some typical investigative tools aren’t going to apply.

  In a normal investigation, you can call on cell-phone records, but there are no cell phones, because there is no cell service. There had been spotty and intermittent satellite phone service for several years, but only the administrators and key personnel had the cumbersome handsets, because of the expense. Now that Internet service has become increasingly reliable, they’ve recently abandoned the satellite phones altogether. Some of the McMurdo residents manage to make phone calls over the Internet. Getting those records from Internet providers won’t be easy—it will be a first such request from Antarctica, he’s sure, and it will be coming from a US Marshal subcontractor and will require lots of patient explanation and perseverance—but Heller has begun that process and that paperwork.

  And of course, it’s all contingent on having specific records to request.

  Police work on the seventh continent doesn’t have much in common with the other six.

  11.

  Exactly 995 miles down the road from Mac Station (as Heller has already learned the locals call it) is the other American base, Amundsen-Scott Station. McMurdo is coastal; Amundsen-Scott is a thousand miles inland, within a hundred yards of the South Pole itself. In high summer, it’s accessible by C-130 transport and smaller cargo aircraft, in nearly daily cargo airlifts and exchanges between the two stations, and by Traverse Highway—a 995-mile road of densely packed snow marked by flags, for tractors and sleds, which nevertheless must watch for crevices the whole way there, because the snow and snowpack shifts. In winter, there is no air access—and land access is risky, not recommended except for emergencies, and for several months impossible.

  Amundsen-Scott makes McMurdo look positively civilized. It’s two hundred people in summer, fewer than fifty in winter, when it is completely isolated, and experiences one long six-month night each year—absolute night, with no hint or glimmer of sun on the horizon.

  Originally a geodesic dome, the base is now composed of ingenious curved structures on pillars that allow the snow to blow around and beneath the living quarters to prevent being completely covered after a storm. The pillars can adjust independently to the snow beneath them, which condenses gradually and unevenly and would otherwise cause the structure to tilt one way or the other.

  But people do winter over in Amundsen-Scott, and there are on record winter trips between the bases via tractor and motorized sled within weeks of Lazo-Wasum’s murder—extremely arduous, only occasional—but for that reason, Heller is including Amundsen-Scott in his investigation.

  Hobbes arranges a ride for both of them on the C-130 that goes the next morning.

  Ice. Snow. As far as the eye can see. The drone of the C-130 engines. A primitive workhorse, plying the sky.

  All the way there, the Traverse Highway is below him, like a map coordinate. The road to nowhere. A highway with only one entrance and one exit.

  They pass a yellow snow tractor below them, making the all-day journey.

  On the C-130, it’s a couple of hours. The unchanging drone of the four engines matches the unchanging landscape. There are no reference points. No way to judge whether you’re moving forward or simply sitting stationary in the air.

  The landing is quick, unceremonious, jarring, designed first for actual cargo, only secondarily for human cargo.

  As he descends the cargo ramp, the air temperature is noticeably colder than at McMurdo. And though he is correctly defended against it, with goggle shades, balaclava, thermal gloves and socks, this cold is a different thing. McMurdo is plenty cold—laughably or terrifyingly or stunningly cold, depending on your mood—but this is something outside human experience. It is eerie, otherworldly.

  It is Mars. He is stepping onto Mars. A human outpost. A fragile human colony—in a small cluster of buildings, each compact and unconventional—amid an unthinkable vastness.

  Unlike McMurdo, with its engines, activities, movement, bustle, Amundsen-Scott is still—and silent, once the C-130 engines recede. (The plane takes off immediately once unloaded; they don’t risk turning the engines off, in case they don’t turn back on, because it’s too cold to make engine repairs.)

  A silence unlike any he has heard. Because previous silence, he notices now, has presence, has sound to it. A silence that is usually a pause, a noticeable suspension of sound, sound waiting to rush back in again.

  But this silence is enormous, oceanic. A silence that feels like it belongs to the cosmos.

  Hobbes leads them into the structure. Its door is thick, its edges rounded, like a decompression lock from a science-fiction spaceship.

  A bearded Texan named Kevin Morton greets them on the other side of the door.

  In contrast to the haphazard, ramshackle spread of McMurdo, everything is packed together here. Kitchen, quarters, meeting area, laboratories, all kept neatly, immaculately. Thick glass windows to the outside. A space vessel.

  They sit with Morton in a window bay as Hobbes elaborates further on what he has alerted Morton to before they arrived. Lazo-Wasum. Homicide investigation. Wouldn’t involve Amundsen-Scott at all, except that there was overland travel between the stations on a few of the milder days of that winter, around the time of the murder.

  “I’m assuming all intrastation travel is logged somewhere, yes?”

  Morton nods cooperatively. “Every trip.”

  “So Heller here will need to check those logs.”

  “On computer. Can’t print them, we’re paperless here, but I can e-mail them to you,” Morton says to Heller. “There won’t be many. Just a handful of trips that time of year. Only something absolutely necessary. Repair work that can’t wait, that kind of thing. But even though there aren’t that many trips, there’s still gonna be an issue with accuracy.” Morton starts rubbing the side of his beard, as if trying to rub a solution into being. “The driver is always logged in—every vehicle trip has that in its manifest notes. But we don’t bother with a record of the passengers.”

  Heller raises his eyebrows, registering a little surprise.

  “I mean, Mac and Amundsen-Scott. Same team. This is no border crossing. There’s a lot of back a
nd forth in general, Mr. Heller, particularly in the busy summer. And the driver is like a ferry captain, I guess—in charge of passenger safety but not so concerned about who’s on what vehicle at what time. Truth is, we encourage everyone to think of it as one base, so the culture kinda goes against tracking who’s where and when.”

  “You’ll send the trip logs anyway?”

  “Don’t know what good it’ll do you, but absolutely, happy to.”

  The Traverse Highway is impassible during most of winter. Heller has already checked the Amundsen-Scott Station weather on the days before and after the murder. The weather had been typical for that time of winter—ungodly, seventy below, eighty-mile-an-hour gusts, zero visibility. If some crazy soul or souls tried and somehow made it over the Traverse Highway, it would have been the talk of McMurdo. If someone had tried it and failed, that would be the talk of McMurdo too. Meaning, Heller is already fairly certain there was no relevant trip close to the time of Lazo-Wasum’s murder. He was fairly certain of it before they boarded the C-130. But he didn’t know if he might learn something different, something entirely unexpected at Amundsen-Scott that has nothing to do with travel between the bases. He needs to be open to anything, to everything. He needs to be thorough. Lazo-Wasum deserves it.

  “Is it typically one driver?” Heller asks Kevin Morton.

  “Yes. Nick Logan. He’s the guy who usually makes those runs.”

  “Is he here? Can I talk to him?”

  Morton disappears farther into the structure for a few minutes, then reappears with Logan. Long hair, sunglasses, big smile, a kind of ski-instructor type.

  When Logan slides off his sunglasses to shake hands, Heller the cop notices right away. Instantly learns a little more about Antarctic culture.

  “So, Nick, are you just coming off a highway drive?” Heller asks him.

  Logan shakes his head. “No, sir.”

  Heller turns to Morton. “Hey, could I interview Nick for a few minutes, just to see what he might remember from any trips around that time last winter?”

  “Sure, go ahead,” says Morton.

  When they’re out of earshot of everyone else, Heller says quietly to Logan, “I thought maybe your eyes were red from driving. But now I know your eyes are red like that ’cause you’re high as a kite. If you don’t want me saying anything to your boss, Morton, about it, I just need you to answer some questions honestly.”

  Logan nods quietly, obediently, his big smile gone.

  “That pot you’re so enjoying, Nick, I figure you sometimes shuttle ounces of it between Amundsen-Scott and McMurdo, am I right?”

  Logan nods, startled at how quickly Heller has picked this up.

  “What about anything else? Remember our deal, Nick.”

  Logan looks back nervously at his boss, Morton, then back to Heller. “Some mushrooms. A few tabs of acid. You know, for winter, when people have downtime. I only get paid in ’shrooms and joints. You gotta understand. It’s just a little favor for folks at both bases.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like lab chemicals?”

  Logan looks at him, confused. “That’s stealing,” he says, clearly unnerved by the idea. “I’m not about to steal official shit from the scientists.”

  Rodney Marks, the astrophysicist who might have been poisoned years before, was stationed here at Amundsen-Scott. He saw the base doctor several times in the days before he died, but the doctor could find nothing wrong. The doctor certainly wasn’t looking for an exotic poison. They found traces of methanol in his system during the autopsy, so they guessed at methanol poisoning but admitted the methanol might have been there simply by postmortem contamination. They could have missed the actual poison entirely. An exotic poison that might have made its way, in the intervening years, from Amundsen-Scott to McMurdo, across the Traverse Highway or aboard a C-130.

  It didn’t seem like Nick Logan was shuttling poison between the stations—not intentionally, anyway. Could it be someone else?

  Another possibility. In an ever-expanding array of them.

  Incomplete transportation records. Unavailable Internet phone-call records. Infinitely possible poisons. All in a mocking dance together in Joe Heller’s head.

  12.

  Dinner the next night.

  “Manny, can I join you?”

  Another of their impromptu meetings in the cafeteria.

  “Manny, one hundred fifty-seven names. And twenty-five of them, as you know, people who were here last winter but moved on at the end of the season, to new jobs, new places, and need to be tracked down and interviewed, wherever on earth they are today. Plus, I’m expecting to have Internet phone records to go through. I’m going to need some help.”

  “Like . . . an assistant.”

  “Yes. And soon. I’m starting to worry about getting through all these names and all the logistics before the winter-over.” When the weather turns. When I can’t fly out.

  Hobbes nods sagely. And then does something extremely unscientific and surprising to Heller.

  Hobbes looks around the cafeteria for close to a minute.

  Then calls out: “Hey, Trish.”

  A slender woman of Asian extraction looks over.

  Hobbes gestures her over. Gestures to a chair to join them.

  “Trish Wong, this is Joe Heller.”

  “Hi, Mr. Heller.” She is fresh faced, smooth skinned, in her midtwenties at most. Her momentary Asian aura—of austere reserve, preternatural inner calm—melts away immediately. In less than a minute, Heller understands her as the Southern California girl she is, through and through. San Diego? Long Beach? Palos Verdes Peninsula? Heller would be willing to bet big.

  “Trish does administration and is involved with our hydroponic growing project. We grow our own melons and asparagus.”

  “Very few. Very slowly,” Trish says with an apologetic smile.

  “Trish wintered over here last year for the first time. She loved it, didn’t you?”

  She smiles. “Didn’t mind at all.”

  “She’s bright. She’s the best of Antarctica. And one other wonderful thing about her. She’s your new assistant.”

  They both look startled—at each other, and at Hobbes.

  “Assistant?” asks Trish—that smooth, soft brow wrinkling a little. “On what?”

  “He’ll tell you,” says Hobbes, pointing to Heller.

  “But . . . ,” Heller says, and looks at Hobbes, hoping his expression reads But she’s on the list.

  Hobbes looks back at him with a sardonic smile. Come on, Heller. Trish Wong did not commit a homicide. Your list is officially one person shorter. And you’ve got the help you need.

  She turns to Heller.

  “So what is this about?” she says cheerfully. “What do you do here at McMurdo? I haven’t seen you before.” Chipper. Upbeat. Ready to pitch in.

  Oh boy, thinks Heller.

  “Sandy Lazo-Wasum’s death . . . ,” he says. Working up to it.

  “It was terrible,” says Trish.

  “Well, it’s now a . . . it’s now a homicide investigation.”

  He watches her expression crumble. Her cheerfulness collapses in front of him.

  But as he talks, he sees her take it in. He sees her resolve. A sense of importance and mission and purpose crosses her face. A sense of right and wrong.

  He can tell already, without much talk between them, that Hobbes has chosen well.

  Heller had a need, and Hobbes has improvised on the spot. Was flexible and lightning fast with a solution. Heller is impressed. He takes it as a lesson in Antarctic life, of which Hobbes is a veteran. Be flexible. Improvise. Jury-rig it if you have to.

  In Antarctica, he suddenly has a partner. Young, Asian, female, cheerful, extremely well educated—his polar opposite, so to speak, in many ways.

  It has been decades since he’s had a partner, of course.

  It will either pull him out of his shell, he thinks, or fold h
im deeper into it. He will know very soon.

  13.

  Decades since he’s had a partner.

  Decades since Paul.

  Brilliant Paul. Idiotic Paul. Wonderful Paul. Infuriating Paul.

  Paul who made him. Paul who ruined him.

  Paul who made him joyful, giddy. Paul who enraged him, humiliated him.

  For Heller, the jury was still out on Paul D’Agostino.

  The actual jury wasn’t still out. The actual jury had returned a verdict of guilty on a series of serious drug charges against Paul. Dealing, distribution, smuggling, theft of evidence, on a grand scale.

  His partner for years. Doing it all for years successfully behind Heller’s back, without Heller even suspecting. And then when Heller found out, he carefully, stealthily gathered the evidence, being sure the evidence was irrefutable, before turning Paul in.

  The case of course getting all the unavoidable notoriety of partner against partner.

  Not just partners. Partners who had the most stellar arrest record in the department. Department all-stars. Making the case all the more notorious.

  He surprised, alienated, and polarized the rest of the department, everyone around him—other detectives, administrative captains, assistant DAs, everyone—by turning his partner in.

  And the outcome everyone expected, of course, upon Paul’s conviction, when the twenty-year sentence was pronounced, was that Heller, under the pressure of the aggressive silence, the unspoken freeze-out around him, the generalized distaste for him, the glare of publicity, would simply resign.

  But he surprised them again. He stayed on. No one would partner with him, and he didn’t want to try to replace Paul anyway, so he worked alone. Stayed on, worked cases on his own, and pretty effectively, for years more.

  The most universally despised cop in the department.

  His divorce from Ann had been part of the fallout. It’s hard to live with a man who is universally despised. Whose circle of friends simply falls away.