Days of Night

by Jonathan Stone

  Intense connection. But intense isolation. A little laboratory of those polarities knocking up against one another.

  He heard someone singing a Billy Joel song he’d forgotten about. A hit, but one that people rarely remembered, “I Go to Extremes.” He heard the guy singing it over and over—a burly cafeteria worker behind the counter. Certainly aware of its ironic content. “I don’t know why I go to extremes . . .”

  He’d forgotten that song. What a good song. And now it is in his head.

  17.

  With the help of Trish Wong, he’s making better progress.

  He quickly realizes that many of the people here don’t really know what many of the other people do, how exactly they spend their days, what their specialty or work actually is. The scientific work is atomized, even from one science team to another. That’s sometimes by necessity, he learns—different teams are working for, and are funded by, competing pharmaceutical companies, so they don’t share their experiments or results. He’s a little surprised that Hobbes hasn’t ever mentioned that, but on second thought, he understands. It’s contrary to the collegial nature, the Antarctic spirit of sharing and camaraderie that Hobbes seems so invested in. It doesn’t fit Hobbes’s vision of Antarctica, so he conveniently chooses to forget about it. But Heller has been around long enough to know, and is hardly shocked to realize, that even science—noble, soaring science—is, in the end, about competition and the bottom line.

  Trish proves skilled and adept. She’s an excellent choice. She works up and prints out his postinterview notes for him, and they’re thorough and clear. She’s following up for him on the phone calls and paperwork for obtaining Internet-provider records. Heller shows up one morning and finds a series of colored folders, neatly labeled, where he can organize his increasingly unruly stack of investigative paperwork and data.

  “Am I living up to the stereotype of the prim, superorganized Asian girl?” she asks him with a smile.

  “Am I living up to the stereotype of the brusque, brooding, disorganized old white detective?” he responds.

  Her smile turns easily into a laugh.

  But in a moment, her face goes serious, and she hands him a folded note. “This was here this morning, slipped under the door.”

  He opens it.

  Just one line on it, but lettered carefully. No signature.

  Talk to Seth Breen.

  He looks up at Trish. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s from someone at McMurdo trying to be helpful. Someone who obviously doesn’t want to be involved.”

  “And someone who knows something?”

  She shrugs.

  “And who’s Seth Breen?”

  She smiles. Opens the folder already in her lap and reads to him:

  “Breen. Texan. Single. Biochemist. Multiple tours in Antarctica. On a grant funded by Rice University’s Department of Graduate Studies.”

  She closes the folder, looks up at him. “He’s working on something extremely technical that apparently could have applications not only for long space missions but for battlefield survival. His funding keeps getting renewed, so someone somewhere must see it as important work.”

  “You’ve been busy this morning,” Heller says, smiling, appreciative. He’s totally impressed. “Nice work, Detective Wong.”

  He sees Hobbes at breakfast. “What can you tell me about Seth Breen?” Heller decides not to tell him about the note slipped under his door. Not just yet.

  “Why do you ask? What have you heard?”

  Heller shrugs. Doesn’t answer.

  “Person of interest?” Hobbes asks, looking a little perplexed, however.

  “Everyone’s a person of interest,” says Heller, avoiding an answer.

  “Well, there is his odd hobby, I guess, but we all pass the time here somehow. There’s plenty odder.” Hobbes shrugs. “He’s a very reputable scientist, you know,” says Hobbes. “Some consider him a genius. And his hobby . . . well, that’s just the Texan in him.”

  Heller doesn’t reveal that he has no idea what Hobbes is talking about.

  Why let Hobbes think his lead investigator is clueless?

  “Come in,” says Seth Breen, welcoming him into his sleeping quarters, though Heller has the feeling he is not welcome here at all. Breen had suggested meeting in his lab. Heller had said he wanted to do it in his personal quarters.

  Heller takes a quick, unobtrusive, orienting look around and immediately sees and understands Hobbes’s oblique comments—and the note.

  There are wood carvings, whittlings—all over the living space. Intricate, careful.

  They immediately seize Heller’s attention.

  Because at first he can’t tell what they are.

  And then, in another beat, he can.

  One is a human heart. Intricate. The arteries and veins in bas-relief. Exactly life-size, Heller would guess.

  The next one is a liver. A human liver.

  There’s a kidney.

  A couple he doesn’t recognize. A pancreas? A thyroid?

  “I used to do portraits,” says Breen in his slow, deep Texas drawl. “But this is more useful and interesting, and a way to keep learning.”

  He gestures to Heller to take a seat—it’s a substantially beat-up, low-slung leather chair, so Heller figures it’s his “carving” seat. “I know, it’s not heads,” says Breen. “It looks a little disconcerting. But as I’m doing it, I’m learning so much about the organ. I’m reading about and pondering its interactions. It’s relaxing . . . so much more relaxing than doing a face. What can I tell you?”

  Heller understands the anonymous informant’s note. The instinctive alarm about this little hobby. The oddness of it. But there is no evidence of any knife, of any knife injury, to Sandy Lazo-Wasum—or to Rodney Marks before him, for that matter. No cuts. No marks. No signs of struggle. In fact, that is one of the more remarkable things about both victims.

  Which obviously the note’s anonymous author didn’t know.

  “Grew up whittling and carving. My daddy taught me in West Texas. He was wonderful at it. It’s a family tradition.

  “Every season I take on a new organ. They’re very involved.” He picks one up, shows the intricacy of it. “Look at this thyroid, for instance. Like a red-veined butterfly, right? Or a glandular starfighter with Luke Skywalker at the controls. Almost delicate. It regulates heart rate, central and peripheral nervous systems, muscle strength, menstrual cycles, body weight, body temperature, cholesterol, respiration—our breathing, for Chrissake! But no one really knows how it does any of those. Nobody understands the damn thing at all. The red butterfly flies just out of our reach.” He puts down his carved model with more than a hint of frustration.

  Heller understands the frustration. He knows what this season’s carving is really about. The thyroid is the culprit—the mysterious culprit—of Polar T3 syndrome.

  Polar T3 syndrome. Compromised thyroid function from 24-7 sunshine for months on end, then 24-7 dark for months on end, combined with isolation, extremely cold temperatures, etcetera. Symptoms of the syndrome: forgetfulness, irritability, in some cases a fugue state. Commonly known as “Antarctic stare.” A condition observed for more than a century of polar exploration and habitation, from the pioneers to the present. Amundsen, Scott, and Richard Byrd all reported it. And there are plenty of extreme cases documented and even self-reported. Heller has by now read as deeply about it as possible on the Internet. A host of common additional symptoms: depression, severe headaches, sleep disturbances, derangement in thought patterns. And yet, despite the disconcerting severity of the symptoms, they subside almost immediately with the advent of sunshine and normalized daylight hours.

  “I’m guessing you chose the thyroid because of T3,” says Heller.

  “I suppose. Although my whittling a nice thyroid ain’t gonna tell us much about it,” Breen says. “So, Mr. Heller, what can I help you with?”

  Heller interviews him further, but he already k
nows. Seth Breen is not the guy.

  18.

  Trish reminds him of his daughter, Amy, of course. Close in age, though Trish is almost ten years older, thank God. But the same youthful outlook. It is a curative relationship with Trish, he’s already noticed. One where he gets to do it right—listening, supporting, affirming. Qualities he feels—he knows—he shortchanged Amy on.

  They look and sound completely different. Trish has black hair, that beautiful olive Asian skin (dark, flawless, no visible pores), and California all the way—that California liveliness and loud direct voice and love of the outdoors and natural happy lack of too much self-examination. Amy is blonde, white skin, freckles, fragile looking, translucent, willowy, soft, ultrafeminine somehow—a reflection and restatement of her mother’s classic Irish looks. But he notices how their physical difference only highlights their sameness. Their inquisitiveness, their hyperconnection to events around them, big and small, their sense of being so deeply and fully “in” the world, where he is not, has never been.

  Her California optimism. Her bright-eyed upbeatness. “My grandparents came from mainland China in the 1920s, started a laundry in Sacramento, raised six kids, and California’s tuition-free university system arose right about then.”

  “So let me guess. Within a generation the Wong clan are doctors, scientists, engineers, professors, am I right?”

  “More fulfillment of the stereotype, huh?”

  “But am I right?”

  She smiles. “Yes, mostly right.”

  This was the California—educated, sophisticated, accomplished, well-off—that Trish was raised in. And global travel is now part of that upbringing—to expand horizons both physical and intellectual—a thoroughly ingrained value, he could tell, that was part of her spirit and her family’s spirit, a family that had risked the journey to California to begin with. Antarctica was just a stop, one stop, on a lifetime tour of growth and expansion and deepening experience.

  It was in such contrast to his own formative experience. Crusty, depressing Northern Vermont. Hardship and cynicism part of the landscape, and no less part of the Heller ethos. Dairy farmers and tinkerers, laconic dad and uncles. A beer-and-whiskey culture. So for him, the fabled, oft-cited attraction of opposites was more than just that. More than just opposite American geographies. More than just her youth. It was her very outlook that could lift Heller up even here in the cold and ice and dark. Lift them both.

  During the course of the interviews, he is becoming more attuned to the highly charged sexual nature of wintering-over. He is starting to gather that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, that people are expecting it, looking forward to it, that it is almost cultural now. And he finds himself thinking of Trish—single, attractive, and seemingly attracted to him. This must be what older guys who date younger women face. But millions of older guys get past it somehow. Are very happy to get past it. There may be something almost biological, he thinks, in the prospect of coupling up for the winter. It may go back to the cave. It may be hardwired into the amygdala. Unconscious signals about hibernation. And he is somewhat relieved at Trish’s and Amy’s complete physical differentness from each other.

  Why all the interviews? That’s what Hobbes has asked, a little mystified and perturbed. And Heller has had to tell him. Because it has become apparent to Heller—unfortunately, depressingly, but more and more clearly—that Sandy Lazo-Wasum, despite how it first seemed, is increasingly likely to have been a completely random victim. That someone picked him not because of his relationships but because they were not involved in those relationships at all. Chose him because he was at such a distance.

  He dutifully circled back to Pritchard and Dolan, but it was as he suspected, as his instincts told him—they knew that Sorenson was involved with Lazo-Wasum, they knew they had each had a night with her, they felt guilty, anxious, withholding that from Heller, but they thought Heller would never understand, wouldn’t get the culture here. During the busy summer season at McMurdo, Pritchard and Dolan had their own casual girlfriends at the base, apparently. The pickings are slimmer during the winter, they explained, and Sorenson and others are casually accommodating. As for the night of the murder, they cheerfully and cooperatively provided each other’s alibis. Pritchard woke Dolan (as always, apparently, a running joke between them—they were suitemates), they got dressed together for the morning inspection, were first in line for coffee and donuts at the canteen, et cetera, et cetera. Heller had interviewed them separately, looking for inconsistencies, but all the details matched up. They were what they seemed.

  The problem is (and this he has not yet mentioned to Hobbes) it is looking more and more to Heller like this is the work—the MO, the style, the care and cautiousness and resulting lack of clues—of (he hates to even form the phrase in his mind) a serial killer.

  All the hallmarks: Seemingly random victim. Tracks covered perfectly. Not a crime of passion, or, if so, an eccentric weird passion that no one could understand or relate to except the killer him- or herself.

  A serial killer who, as it happens, has only just begun.

  A killer who, this being Antarctica, with its limits and frustrations, has managed to freeze or limit his (or her) temptation and proclivity and disease. But now, Heller is afraid, it has been awakened.

  He’s afraid the genie may have gotten out of the bottle.

  He’s afraid the taste may now be in the killer’s mouth.

  It’s something he started to realize fairly quickly, as the clues didn’t come. As the prospect of clues shut down tight.

  It’s something that long experience has told him. A knowledge that crept in at the base of his cerebellum, that tapped at his preconscious.

  He began to suspect it, to feel it in his bones, even on the flight down. He kept it to himself, though, figuring he had to do his due diligence. At least start the conventional investigative process.

  But the neatness of it, the immaculateness, the perfection of it that he was already sensing, pointed strongly to the possibility.

  Someone whose extreme care and caution is already projecting the decision, the temptation, to try it again.

  A serial killer. Just getting started.

  Serial killer . . . not a term he wants to use with Hobbes.

  Serial killer . . . not a term he likes to say even to himself.

  A serial killer. Typically, by the profile, a loner.

  Who has only killed one. So far.

  Something hard to explain right off to a roomful of administrators you’ve just met for the first time. So he kept his mouth shut.

  Amid all the prospective law-enforcement candidates, they hired Joe Heller. There were younger, more technologically savvy candidates, no doubt. Maybe more up to speed on the latest techniques. On the latest white papers. They couldn’t know if Heller’s long experience would make any difference. But this is what his experience gives them. This is what it buys. The creep at the back of the neck. The institutional knowledge. Unfortunately, he has seen this movie before.

  So he flew down to Antarctica, in fact, with a different understanding of his role.

  He figured he might serve as a deterrent.

  Whoever did it, Heller’s presence at McMurdo might be enough to prevent another crime. Might be frightening enough—deterrent enough—to be worried about getting caught for the first one.

  Even though Heller also knows in his bones that they aren’t going to find this murderer, if the murderer does manage to stop at one.

  But he also knows the reverse possibility—that his presence at McMurdo might provide incitement. Might provide a challenge. Often a compelling, irresistible element for a serial killer. The thrill of getting away with it, amplified exponentially by the joy of fooling law enforcement, tangoing with the police, stumping the authorities. Heller knows that his mere presence might provide excitement, a renewed determination to try it again.

  As he knows that his daily inability to solve the problem might only embolden the perpetr
ator to act again. That observing Heller’s impotence up close, firsthand, might be bringing daily joy to the perpetrator—and fresh inspiration, fresh creativity.

  There is a small piece of Heller that wants his presence to provide that challenge, to motivate, to tempt the killer again. Even at the risk of another victim.

  Heller is acutely aware of the double knife edge of his presence:

  A possible deterrent.

  Or the very opposite: A possible motivator.

  Heller’s presence might be just enough to keep the killer from striking again.

  Or just enough to make the killer strike again.

  There’s a “Catch” for you, Trish.

  Heller also knows the corollary.

  Knew it, suspected it, on the plane down, just as deeply in his bones.

  That whether he’s serving as a deterrent, who would keep the perpetrator from striking again, or whether he’s serving as a motivator, who would ultimately draw the perpetrator out, either way, he’s going to have to winter over.

  As a deterrent, to keep the perpetrator from striking again during the ideal “striking time”—when he or she understandably struck last—when no one is watching, when they can get away with it.

  Or to be here, when the perpetrator attempts to strike again.

  To attempt to stop it.

  Be smart enough. Alert enough. One step ahead.

  Either way, he is wintering over.

  He will be seeing and experiencing the weird, eerie, ineffable Antarctic winter for himself.