Winter Study (49 page)

“Got
it,” Anna said to Katherine. She found needle-nose pliers in a drawer
beneath the counter and pulled the metal from the neck. It wasn’t a
needle; it was the dart used when an animal is shot with a tranquilizer
gun. Katherine had stood up to Bob after the necropsy for the same
reasons she’d found the courage to do it the other two times. He was
endangering her beloved wolves.

“Darted
it, then opened its throat and it bled out. The wounds made to look
like a huge bite pattern,” Anna said. “The wolf was murdered.” Lost in
thought, she turned the splinter of metal in the gray light. Bob had
said to Katherine: “We’ve used ketamine before.” Bob had found the
animal and he had stomped around it so much there was no hope of
finding any tracks. Then he’d claimed the body for “research.”

“You
thought Bob did it, didn’t you? Killed the wolf so the big game hunter
could have the head and pelt for his wall. You knew Bob used ketamine;
you knew because he’d used it on you.”

29

Having
cached the broken tip of the tranquilizer dart with the rest of her
Nancy Drew collection in the rusted toolbox under the floorboards, Anna
walked back toward the bunkhouse. Stillness was absolute. Air and cold
melded to form a quantifiable mass, a solid that could be moved through
without disturbing a single atom, a vacuum that held matter inside.
Anna’s steps grew shorter until finally she, too, was still: a rock, a
tree, a single mote of ice.

“That
doesn’t make sense,” she said. The words fell into the motionless
universe, leaving no ripple. “Katherine, if Bob killed the wolf, why
would he make the neck wound interesting? ‘Interesting’ doesn’t get the
study shut down. It goes against his interests. Bob never goes against
his interests.” Momentary sadness drifted across Anna’s mind; she
wished she hadn’t voiced her doubts out loud, intimated Katherine had
run to her death for nothing. Except that Bob had made her life
intolerable.

“Talking
to dead people,” she said to the gray that knitted branches together
above her head. “At least I’m not seeing dead people.” Still, she
didn’t move.

Whoever
had shot the wolf had made the bite marks so it would appear as if it
was killed by a giant beast. It was possible that the animal was
tranquilized by one person, then another person happened along in the
dark with a pointed object and thought, “Boy, wouldn’t it be funny if…”
But Anna doubted it.

Flying
back from Intermediate Lake the day she and Jonah saw Chippewa Harbor
pack kill the old bull, she had seen a wolfish shape in black, a neat
circling of nose to tail, as if a monstrous dog slept in the snow
beneath the boughs of an evergreen, just the shape viewed from the air.
She thought of the great deception in World War II when the British had
salted England with cutouts of Spitfires and barracks without walls so
that, seen from the air by German planes, they would look to be an army
amassing for an invasion at Calais, while the Allies moved ahead with
plans to land on the beaches of Normandy.

Huge
paw prints in all the right places, never perfectly clear and always
accompanied by moose prints, as if Bullwinkle had been adopted along
with Romulus and Remus. A hard object shaped like the hoof of a moose
and affixed to the bottom of snowshoes would work. Each step would
leave the mark of the hoof; no sign of the human above it. Giant paw
prints were easy enough, pawlike shapes on the end of ski poles. With
the wind and the drifting snow, even an experienced tracker wouldn’t be
able to tell they weren’t made by a genuine wolf.

Anna hadn’t been able to.

The
marauding animal that had terrorized their camp up by Lake Desor had
snuffled like a bear, pawed at the nylon walls like a dog and left no
paw prints. When Katherine hadn’t been scared, Robin had snorted —
almost a laugh. Because she had known the “wolf” wasn’t a wolf? It was
Robin who sent Anna and Bob to the side of Intermediate Lake, where
there were giant paw prints neatly laid in to lure the unwary trappers
to the center of the weird ring in the ice where Anna had fallen
through. Then Robin had apologized repeatedly. “I’m so sorry,” she’d
said. “It shouldn’t have happened.”

Anna’s
dream of the night before came back; her naked chest scraping over the
serrated-ice edge. She remembered, as she’d slid under the lake, how
the ice had been striated vertical marks of white against the gray of
older ice, and she remembered grabbing Adam’s day pack before he ran
for the supercub to leave Malone Bay with Jonah, how heavy it was.

“What’s in this?” she’d asked.

“Books,” Adam said.

Not
books. A drill and spare battery packs and bits. The ring in the ice
had been made by a drill, holes weakening the layer, water oozing up
through them creating the ridge.

The
trapline torn up by an animal so powerful, the metal of the foothold
trap was bent; Robin had reported seeing that. She’d gone to check the
line by herself and she hadn’t brought the trap back with her.

The wog was a hoax. The hoax had turned deadly. First Anna had gone through the ice, then Katherine had been killed.

As
always, that was where Anna came to a wall: Katherine had not been
killed by a human being; she’d been savaged by a pack of wolves.

“Damn,” Anna said and mentally set aside the researcher’s death.

Robin
with her love of the island — what was it her boyfriend had said? The
last hope for the soul of civilization? Ridley with the most to lose:
vocation, avocation and summer cabin at one blow; Jonah, with his
loyalty to Ridley; Adam, for whatever reason, maybe just the hell of it
— were all of them in on it? Would one of them kill a wolf, a ranger
and a researcher to make the island sufficiently interesting that the
Park Service and the Michigan Tech would fight Homeland Security over
the issue of opening it in the winter months? Anyone in Winter Study
could have darted the wolf. The pack was on the ice for several days,
and everyone was proficient with the use of tranquilizer guns.

Robin
had been in the tent the night of the marauder, but Adam or Ridley or,
possibly, Jonah could have followed them. Without the heavy packs that
slowed the Malone Bay adventurers, it could have been done, round-trip,
home by midnight.

If they were willing to kill, why didn’t they just kill Bob and be done with it? That’s what Anna would have done.

With pleasure,

she thought, remembering the pictures on the cell phone.

Maybe
they had tried to kill Bob, but he had answered the call of nature, and
Anna toddled out onto the ice alone. If so, they — whoever

they

were — were awfully cavalier about collateral damage.

If
the point of the hoax was to make the study indispensable, killing Bob
wasn’t the wisest course. There was nothing so easily replaced as a
government flunky. Kill one and ten popped up in his place. And
accidental death by drowning wouldn’t make Homeland Security any more
likely to leave ISRO alone. Katherine had a personal reason to want Bob
dead, but Anna couldn’t see how she could have seduced Adam — or anyone
else — into drilling the ice in the short time she’d been with Winter
Study.

“Move,” Anna told herself and began trudging toward the bunkhouse again.

The men — all men; the women were vanishing at an alarming rate — were seated around the table in the kitchen.

Over
the years, Anna had arrested quite a few people, taken them in for
everything from annoying chipmunks to kidnapping and murder. She had
arrested men and women and, once, just to make a point, a child. There
were a few gaps in her repertoire. She’d never arrested an Asian and,
as far as she knew, she’d never arrested a Jew or a Quaker.

It
had been her intention to arrest Bob Menechinn, but, as she took in the
Breakfast Club, she couldn’t figure out how to go about it. There was
no place to incarcerate him. Should he decide he didn’t wish to be
arrested, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it without
backup and Adam, Jonah and Ridley could not be trusted. One, some or
all were perpetrating a fraud on the federal government — which she
wasn’t sure was a bad thing — and were willing to kill innocent women
and female park rangers to do it — which she was sure was a bad thing.

“Hey,” she said amiably as she banged the snow off her boots on the lintel. “Any coffee left?”

“Hey yourself,” Adam said. “On the counter. Good and hot.” No one else acknowledged her words or entrance.

Ridley
bent over the stove, stirring the inevitable oatmeal, his shoulders
rounded as a crone’s, his long fingers looking thinner than they had
twenty-four hours before, the knuckles outsized, as if arthritis had
taken him overnight. Jonah was droning on about disrobing “Mrs. Brown”
as he took the cozy off the sugar bowl and began spooning brown sugar
into an empty bowl. There was no ribaldry or playfulness in the Mrs.
Brown story this morning. The old pilot spoke in a monotone, an actor
who’s forgotten his character and lost his audience. Bob had taken his
preferred chair in the corner against the wall. The first time Anna had
seen him there, she’d thought of him as enthroned. Now “cornered” was a
better description.

Adam
was a stark contrast to his fellows. He burned again but with a new
fever. Not rage, Anna decided as she poured herself a cup of coffee.
Excitement. Adam couldn’t sit still; he positively bounced in his seat
the way a little boy will when an adventure is in the offing. A
wonderful adventure. Adam was having a problem keeping joy from busting
out all over.

“What
are you so happy about?” she asked as she took her place at the end of
the table, the de facto “Mom” spot. “Are we going to find Robin?”

Ridley turned from the stove. “Does he know where Robin is?” he demanded sharply. “Adam, do you know where she is?”

“I
just have a good feeling, is all,” Adam said. “We could do with a
little optimism around here for a change. I, for one, would rather
believe she’s alive somewhere than dead in a snowdrift.”

Anna cocked her head to one side, trying to hear through the tension that thrummed in the sinews of the room.

“Chipper,” she said. “Adam, you sound downright

chipper.

”

Ridley
stepped across the small space between the four-burner stove and the
Formica-topped table where the rest of them sat over empty bowls like
Goldilocks’s ursine victims. The thin, bony hands grabbed the front of
Adam’s shirt and Ridley hauled him half out of his chair and held him
suspended with wiry strength. “Do you know where Robin is?” he
whispered, a hissing of steam from overheated pipes.

Anna
lifted her coffee cup off the table to protect the precious liquid from
the inevitable scuffle to follow. She needn’t have bothered. Adam
didn’t rise to Ridley’s anger.