Frozen Solid: A Novel (22 page)

“Did anything change after you told him about Vishnu?” Hallie asked.

“He got friendlier, now that you mention it. That did strike me as odd at the time. Now I’m thinking he might have been trying to divert attention. A smoke screen.” She shook her head. “This is crazy. But telegraphing intentions is the last thing a killer would do.”

“So you do think he could have killed Emily? Because of Vishnu?” She felt something move down in her belly. Not a pain, exactly. More like pressure. She thought of Diana Montalban. “And might be involved in Fida’s disappearance.”

“I can’t believe we’re even talking this way.”

“I’ll take that for a yes.”

“A maybe.”

“Can you communicate with NSF?”

“Not until comms are back up.”

“Do you have a secure line?”

“You mean like CIA spook stuff? It’s hard enough getting hamburgers and gasoline at Pole.”

“Can’t go out because it’s Condition One. Can’t fly. No phone or email. Aren’t people talking about these deaths?”

“Of course. Graeter’s dog-and-pony show in the galley didn’t help. Might have made things worse. A good many people think he’s covering something up.”

“I got some very dirty looks in the hall earlier. They must really believe I brought a pathogen in.”

“Some definitely do. Not sure how many.”

Hallie’s gut spasmed suddenly, like a fist clenching, then released. She remembered Diana Montalban bleeding to death on the floor of the galley. Another spasm, this one bad enough to make her wince and grunt.

“What’s wrong?” Merritt asked.

She needed to keep going. “Just a cramp. So about Graeter …?”

“Nothing to do until comms are up.”

“Any idea when flights might start again?”

“The cutoff is sixty and ten. We’re about twenty degrees away from that now. I hate to even think this, but winterover might have come early this year.”

“And winterover lasts eight months, right?”

“Yes.”

She thought about eight months trapped in the most escape-proof prison on earth with Polies dropping dead, going crazy, boozing and drugging, maybe killing one another, and possibly with some deadly pathogen floating around the hermetically sealed station.

In for a penny … “Agnes, do you know anything about triage?”

A frown, then a split second of hesitation, both of which could have been evidence of a struggle to remember some long-forgotten fact. Or of something else. “It’s an emergency medical technique. Sorts out who gets treated when. Or not at all. Why do you ask?”

“I was just curious. Maynard Blaine mentioned something about triage when we were having coffee.” That, of course, was a lie, but detectives told lies to get at the truth, didn’t they? “He sounded pretty excited about it. Before I could ask him anything, he was paged and had to rush off.”

“Blaine told you that? When?”

“Yesterday. He just wandered over and sat down. You know how he is.” She gave a sly wink, and just then something serious happened in her lower regions.

“I have no idea what he was talking about.” Merritt looked confused, and very displeased.

“Could it be the name of a research project?”

“No. I would know if that were the case.”

The conversation had dead-ended. “It was really nice of you to come all the way down here, Aggie.”

“Got to watch out for my Beakers.” Merritt glanced at her watch,
stood. “Five o’clock. You should be out soon. I’ll probably see you at dinner.”

Merritt left. Hallie waited a minute to let her clear the corridor. She had given Lowry and Grenier her word, but this qualified as an emergency if anything ever did. She stood, gasped, and sprinted for the women’s room.

THE ONLY BENEFIT FROM A POLARRHEA ATTACK WAS THE AMPLE
time for contemplation it afforded while working itself out. She was still carrying around a secret that, she felt even more sure now, could get her killed. With Fida gone, she was back where she had started, unable to trust anybody, not one person.

Certainly not Blaine. He had lied to her about Emily, and that was the first strange thing about a visit that had kept getting stranger from that moment on. Why would he do that? Only one reason that Hallie could think of: he had some connection to Emily’s death. Stranger things had happened. She knew about John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy and all the charming psychopaths who seemed like perfect neighbors while they were torturing and butchering and eating their victims. But Maynard Blaine? He struck her more as a clumsy Lothario than a sadistic murderer.

What about Graeter? Earlier, she would have put him close to the top of a suspect list. But then he had agreed to look through the personnel roster. Still, he might have known that no men at the station had names beginning with “Am.” She hadn’t been able to see the computer screen, so he might have lied about it, too. But she really
didn’t think so. She had seen flashes of humanity there. He was hiding from something, which Hallie thought was probably guilt over the sailors’ deaths. And though he despised the philandering ex, he might feel guilty for that as well—a husband who’d left his wife stranded and increasingly desperate.

What about Brank? A definite possibility. And so many other men that she did not even know. In the end, she found herself asking this question:
Who do you trust when you can’t trust anybody?
The answer came quickly:
Not who. What
. And the what was science. You could always trust the science.

She was about to finish up when the door swung open and two women entered. They settled into adjoining stalls.

“So what do you think?” one said. Her voice was so rough it could have been a man’s. Pole throat.

“I think it’s her.” That voice was more normal.

“Me, too.”

“Question is what to do about it.”

“That is the question. But you know what?” man voice asked.

“What?”

“There’s a lot of answers to that question in a place like this.”

“Y’all talkin’ ’bout that new Beaker?” Hallie roughened her own voice, exaggerated the southern accent. Probably not necessary, since she hadn’t spoken with these women before. Better safe than screwed, though.

“Who’s that? I didn’t know anyone else was here.”

“No worries—it’s me, Braden. Fuckin’ Polarrhea. Y’all think she’s carryin’ some kinda germ?”

“Facts is facts. She comes in, women start dying.” Man voice sounded angry and afraid.

“She’ll be flyin’ out Saturday though, right?”

“If planes fly. Tell you this: no fucking way I’m winterin’ over with a killer germbag. Not just me, neither. She’ll go out, one way or another.”

“Who’d you say that is over there?” the other woman asked.

But Hallie had already finished and slipped through the door.
She was still technically under house arrest, or whatever they called it here. She hoped that Graeter had not made any general announcement about her confinement. If he hadn’t, the only people who would know she wasn’t supposed to be wandering around were Graeter, Grenier, Lowry, and Merritt. She would risk running into them. What could they do, anyway, other than put her back in her room? It did not feel good to break her word, but she rationalized that another, much bigger emergency requiring her attention trumped that. Graeter might be in denial, but something very bad was happening in this sealed-off, isolated pressure cooker they called the station.

Back in her room she pulled on a heavy fleece sweater and a parka. She stuffed a wool cap, gloves, spare dive knife, and headlamp into various pockets. She went down to the lab to gather certain items and moved on, still getting used to walking in a bubble of light. She passed a woman who didn’t even look up, then a man who was texting. He gave her only a quick glance. She could not keep from looking back at them after they passed, and doing the same thing more often as she walked.

At the air-lock doors to the Underground, she made one last check, saw no other light pods coming behind, and pushed through, sure that she was alone and had made the trip unobserved.

IN THE UNDERGROUND’S MAIN CORRIDOR, SHE TRIED EDGING ALONG
flat against one ice wall, hoping she might avoid triggering the lights, but they came on anyway. Nothing she could do about it, so she moved as quickly as she could to get away from the entrance.

This would have to be done fast, and not only to avoid detection. She had not wanted to risk going all the way to the ECW room at the station’s other end. Stepping from fifty-four degrees in the station to sixty below in the Underground almost took her breath away, but now she knew enough not to gasp.

Dive knife in hand, she slipped down the main corridor, praying that she could remember the route Graeter had taken when he’d escorted her around down here. The first right turn was easy, then down a secondary corridor about twenty yards, not worrying about lights now, past one corridor on the left and into the second. A long way along that one, then down a narrower passage, then around the heavy black curtain.

Once in, she switched on her headlamp and unzipped a body bag. Harriet Lanahan still had on the clothes she’d died in. Blood had frozen into a thick, red carapace on her chest. Her face looked like
white wax. There was no frost on her—the humidity was too low for that. Hallie was thankful that someone had closed her eyes.

She had never feared dead bodies, even badly damaged ones. But these bodies were different. They evoked a childhood terror from some very deep place, unspeakable, nearly irresistible—a fear that these bodies might rise and take her back to their own realm. It was hard not to jump and run.

She put on the surgical mask and gloves she had taken from the lab, removed from her pockets plastic bags and oronasal swabs. She inserted one swab deep into Lanahan’s right nostril, past the turbinates and up into the ethmoid sinuses, until she felt hard resistance. She rotated the swab shaft between shaking fingers, then carefully withdrew and bagged it. She repeated the process in Lanahan’s left nostril, then took samples from Montalban and Bacon. The nasal blood was frozen, but she was hoping that the bodies had not been here long enough for the cold to have killed all of the pathogens present. Looking down at the three dead women, she said, “I’m sorry I had to do that. But I think you would have wanted me to. Thank you all.”

She closed up the bags and left the morgue, felt her fear slipping away. By then she was shivering so hard she had to clamp her jaw shut. How ironic it would be, she thought, to survive the cryopeg only to freeze here.

On the way in, she had used the dive knife to scratch a small arrow at every corner where she’d needed to turn. In less than five minutes she was standing in front of the air-lock doors.

The lab where Emily and Fida had worked was on Level 1, Pod A, behind the air-lock door with the warning sign. It was kept locked, but Merritt had given her a key when they first met. Hallie had seen dozens of microbiology labs just like it, except most were bigger. Rows of white wall cabinets, two stainless steel sinks, a workbench with a ventilator hood. On a central bench rested an autoclave, a
centrifuge, microscopes, racks of test tubes, Bunsen burners, dessicators, incubator cabinets.

In the time it had taken her to reach the lab, her body heat had begun to soften the tiny red ice clusters on the swabs. She set out six petri dishes with red agar growth medium and used a sterile wire inoculating loop to transfer matter from the cotton-tipped sticks, swiping them back and forth in three separate sections on the surface of each dish. “Making a lawn,” it was called.

Since she wasn’t sure what she was trying to grow, she didn’t know the optimal incubation temperature. Many pathogenic bacteria liked eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit, so she set the lab incubator for that and waited for it to warm up.

Nothing would happen right away. Bacteria typically took from twenty-four to seventy-two hours to colonize growth media. Hopefully any pathogen in the blood samples would be a fast grower. She walked down to the far end of the lab to examine the Vishnu sample she had retrieved. It rested in a thirty-gallon tank full of cryopeg water that Guillotte had collected while she was diving. The tank itself resided in a chest freezer, the only way to keep the water as cold as it had been in the cryopeg. Nothing about the organism had changed, which she took as a good sign.

At the door, with her hand on the light switch, she paused, then decided to double-check the incubator temperature setting. As tired and brain-weak as she was, it would have been easy to get it wrong.

She peered through the glass window.

“Damn!”
She actually jumped back a step.

Stripes like bright yellow pencil lines had appeared on the red agar in all the dishes.

By the time she finished in the lab, it was okay for her to be seen walking around. Hallie came to the place where the corridors diverged. One led to Merritt’s office, the other to Graeter’s. Merritt or Graeter? She stopped, leaned against a wall, waited out a dizzy spell.
Merritt had been right: it was getting worse. On top of everything else, her throat was sore, and not just from the first day’s frostbite; the discomfort felt deeper and more painful, like the onset of a strep infection.

Where had she been going? It took her several seconds to remember. She looked both ways down the intersecting corridor. Left would take her toward Merritt’s office. Right to Graeter’s.

GRAETER WASN’T THERE
.

She went to the comms office and asked. “He’s out on the iceway,” the comms operator said. “Some landing lights are out.”

“I thought it was Condition One.”

“Yeah. But planes won’t land without those lights working right. Gotta be ready for them.”

“Did he take someone with him?”

“Nope.”

“When will he be back?”

“Couple hours, I expect.”

“As soon as he gets in, will you tell him to call me, please? It’s important.”

“Sure will, Doc.” All Draggers called all Beakers “Doc,” she had learned.

“Thanks.”

“Um, ma’am?” He looked at the comms office door, then back to her. His face was partially hidden by his long, lank brown hair and the requisite Pole beard. But underneath all the hair she saw that he was very young. He had large, fanlike ears, bulb cheeks with blemishes,
a receding chin, and a squashed-looking nose. And fear in his eyes. “Can I ask you something?”