Winter Study (51 page)

“Adam!” Anna yelled. “Adam, wait!”

“Go back,” Adam called.

Anna
wriggled off the machine, rose and stumbled a few steps as her numbed
legs refused to carry her. Blood began to flow and she stomped her
feet, but she didn’t go any nearer to the men at the edge of the fall.

“Go
back,” Adam said again. Without the roar of the small engine, his words
were clear, ringing in her ears like the tolling of a bell.

“Lord
knows, I want to,” Anna called back. “But I can’t. You come with me,
Adam. Bob can make his own way home. We’ve got to talk. You need to
help me find Robin.”

“Robin’s better off where she is,” Adam said. “Bob made sure of that.”

In
his uniquely dreadful winter gear, goose down poking out and the duct
tape taking up more area than the nylon, Adam looked like

Robinson Crusoe: The Northern Saga.

He also looked crazy as a loon.

Anna
moved closer. Menechinn was a yard or two from Adam, saying nothing and
standing in a heap of clothes and flesh as if his bones had softened
and could barely keep him upright. Hoods and balaclava hid his face.

“Bob!”
Anna said sharply. He raised his head with the slow swaying of a bull
too old and too blind to know where danger is coming from.

“Bob,”
he echoed, and his pulled-back grin creased his face above the folds of
his neck scarf. With a hand the size of a club, he pawed off his hood,
baring his head to the elements. His face was the color of new brick.

“What’s wrong with him?” Anna asked.

“Tasting his own medicine,” Adam said. “Go back. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Ketamine?”

“His drug of choice,” Adam said.

“You are doing this for Cynthia?”

“Cynthia is dead,” Adam said. “This is just for me.”

“For
revenge?” Anna asked. “To even the scales? To get some of your own
back? Like you said, Adam, Cynthia is dead. She’s going to stay dead.
Give me one good reason to go through with this.”

“For
fun.” There was no expression on his face. It was as blank as if the
executioner’s hood was already drawn over his features.

“Okay,” Anna admitted. “That is as good a reason for doing it as any, I guess.”

“Doing what? What are we doing?” Bob asked, alarm creeping into the smear of happiness Lady K had put on his mouth.

“As
much a fan as I am of fun, it’s short-lived for the most part,” Anna
said. “With a first-degree murder rap, prison lasts forever.”

“Go back,” Adam said.

“Let me arrest him,” Anna said.

“And then what? Cynthia can’t testify. Robin can’t. Katherine can’t.”

Adam’s
words were heavy, falling in flat chunks through the snowy air. Anna
wanted to argue, tout the fierce and powerful justice of the law, but
he was right. Bob would get off. Robin’s blood would prove positive for
ketamine if Anna could get it to a lab in time and if its freezing
hadn’t changed the chemical properties, but who was to say Robin hadn’t
taken it herself? The pictures on Katherine’s cell phone were damning
only to Katherine. They could be traced to Bob, but who was to say it
wasn’t consensual? Rape was hard to prove at the most obvious of times.

Institutions
hated rape charges. This would be swept under the table by three
powerful bodies: Homeland Security, the National Park Service and
American University; well-meaning people wanting to keep the mud off
their organization, wanting to keep their positions.

“Arresting him would be fun,” Anna said finally, and a smile ghosted across his face.

“You drilled the ice,” she said to keep his attention.

“I drilled the ice,” Adam said.

“I nearly died.”

“I
know. Bob here always has to strut out front. I thought he’d be first
on the ice. It’s hard to grasp how complete a coward he is.” Adam’s
attention left Anna and focused like a laser on Bob Menechinn.

“Go,
Anna.” He took Bob’s arm. Menechinn tried to jerk away, but his
movements were slow and clumsy. The drug had made him forget where his
arms and legs were. He overbalanced and fell. He lay moving feebly,
making a fat snow angel.

Anna
took a deep breath and was immediately sorry as the cold burned her
lungs. “You’ll spend the next forty years of your life in a
penitentiary. You’ll get up when you’re told and go to bed and eat and
see the sun when you’re told,” she said. “You’ve lived your whole life
out of doors, Adam. Let me take Bob back.”

Adam’s
face didn’t change. “I’ve spent the last ten years in prison,” he said,
watching Bob paddle at the snow. “Get up,” he said to Menechinn.

Anna
needed him to connect with her sufficiently so he could hear past his
pain. “You said Katherine would never testify. You knew about
Katherine?”

“I’d seen the look before. On the face of my wife before she died. The wolves saved Katherine the trouble of killing herself.”

“Or you did.”

“I had nothing to do with her death. Not one damn thing. I don’t kill women.”

“How about wolves?”

“The giant bite marks?” He smiled. “People will believe what they want to believe. I just helped it along.”

“So you darted the wolf and stabbed it to death,” Anna said coldly.

“An animal. The pound puts thousands to death every year. Fluffy and Bootsie and Socks. Don’t get onto me about an animal.”

Adam straddled Bob, took hold of his wrists and pulled him to a sitting position.

“You drugged me,” Bob said without bitterness, a sense of wonder in his voice.

“How do you like it?” Adam asked, standing over him, hands still clamped around the bigger man’s wrists.

“I
don’t…” Bob rolled his head over and squinted to bring Anna into focus.
“Ranger Danger,” he said and smiled. “You were going to kill me and now
we’ll kill you.”

“I’m
not going to kill you,” Anna said. “I don’t want to wait in line that
long. Since you are going to kill me anyway, you might as well tell me:
did you drug Robin?”

Bob
leered. Snow was catching on his wiry hair and the fat of his cheeks
where they pushed out beneath his eyes. “Adam said you were trying to
frame me, Miss Ranger. Too bad you’re a fool.” His head rolled till
Adam came into his line of vision. He had to let it flop back on his
neck to look up at him. “Wearing a wire,” he said conspiratorially.

“How much did you give him?” Anna asked.

“Enough,” Adam said.

“You told him I was going to kill him or set him up?”

“Divide
and conquer,” Adam said. “Upsy-daisy, Bob.” Using himself as a lever,
he rocked back and pulled Bob to his feet. They were no more than two
yards from the edge of the basalt shelf, yet the drop was practically
invisible, the white of the snow melding seamlessly with the white of
sky and ice. Anna knew it was there from her time on ISRO and the hike
they’d made to Malone Bay. She doubted Bob had any idea he stood on a
precipice. Adam turned Menechinn so he faced to the east over the cliff.

“Don’t,” Anna said. She didn’t move any closer. If a tussle started, it wasn’t going to be her who was nudged to her death.

“Bob,
see there?” Adam pointed into the void where the white on white of
weather created a blank canvas for the ketamine to paint on.

“Robin wants to meet you there.”

“Don’t,” Anna said again. “Bob, there is no

there

there. Adam means to kill you. You’re on the edge of a cliff; step back.”

Adam
spun around. The dead look was gone from his face replaced by the fury
she’d felt the night she’d seen the photograph of him and his dead
wife. “Get the fuck out of here,” he hissed, a whisper metastasized
into a shout.

“Bob,
do it, go. Anna will kill you. Run!” Adam shouted in Menechinn’s ear.
Bob began to lumber forward toward imagined sex and safety.

In
the eternal second of the mind, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, huge and
shapeless in ill-fitting clothes, running into the arctic wilderness,
played in Anna’s mind, overlaid by Peter Boyle’s singing “Puttin’ on
the Ritz”; monsters pieced together from the dead and given life by the
insane. Bob was a monster; that she didn’t doubt. She would never know
what had made him or if there was true evil in the world and he had
chosen his own monstrousness. Anna wouldn’t have chosen to save him.
She wouldn’t have said she particularly wanted him saved. Her mind
reacted to what he was with a cringing loathing she didn’t care to
examine.

Her
body reacted from years of training. She threw herself forward in a
flying tackle aimed at the backs of Bob Menechinn’s knees. Big men had
bad knees; the joints couldn’t cope with the bulk, and most of them had
played football at one time or another. Knee injuries were a small
ranger’s friend. Her right shoulder and side of her head smashed into
him and the knees gave. Falling back and to the side, he crushed her
right arm into the snow. Pain exploded in her elbow.

“It’s
a cliff, it’s a fucking cliff, I was going off a cliff,” Bob began
yelling. Mad with the sudden realization of physical danger, he
scrabbled backward. His knee ground over Anna’s wrist and she cried
out. A flailing hand struck her on the side of her head so hard her ear
burned and roared.

“You’re
welcome, God dammit,” she shouted as she tried to roll out of his
thrashing way. On hands and knees, Bob scuttled through the deep snow,
moaning and bellowing like a mad boar. He didn’t stop till he’d reached
the trees. There he pulled himself upright, using the bole of a tree,
and screamed: “He tried to kill me. He tried to kill me.” The litany
didn’t stop there, but Anna tuned the rest of it out and got to her
feet. Snow and down padding had saved her serious injury. Her wrist
still rotated, and, other than the misery of ice down her collar and up
her sleeves, the dive didn’t seem to have done any appreciable damage.