Dark Winter (43 page)

"Well, where's Nancy?"

"I don't know, I don't know. There was a noise, like something breaking, and Nancy yelled, someone inside, and then lots of banging around, and then it went quiet. I thought you'd all abandoned me. I thought you'd left the station and left me behind."

Lewis glanced around. BioMed was a mess. There was blood all over the examining table: Gina must have really been cut. More ominously, drawers hung half open, cabinet doors were swung wide, and medical supplies had cascaded onto the floor. Notebooks had spilled a glacier of paper. The place had been ransacked. Where the hell was Nancy?

The storage door in back was cracked open.

He went to the entrance and tried to push open the door, but something was blocking it. He shoved enough to get an arm through the opening and turned on the light to see what was in the way.

Legs.

Lewis felt a sick dread. He pushed harder and something heavy skidded aside, allowing him to squeeze through. He stumbled inside and looked down in grim confirmation at Nancy Hodge, her eyes rolled back and mouth open, a hypodermic needle jutting from the back of her neck. A set of X rays was resting on her body. He knelt and glanced at a manila folder. It read, "Abby Dixon."

The assailant was still confusing the trail.

He felt vainly for a pulse. Their doctor was dead. There were no obvious cuts and bruises, but not even junkies injected themselves in the nape of the neck. It was obvious that someone had crept up behind her and injected her. Killed her before she could talk about the X rays. Killed her before she could talk about Norse.

No escape. No radio. And now no doctor.

No proof.

He glanced around. X-ray records were upended and the storage cabinet against the rear wall had been shoved aside, exposing a metal panel screwed to the wall, scratched and dirty. Lewis slowly stood. They were doomed. Except… someone had been searching BioMed. And that searching meant maybe Nancy had hidden the two sets of X rays. What if Norse hadn't found them yet?

Another faint tremor of hope. The shifted storage cabinet appeared to hold nothing but medical supplies. The panel behind it required a screwdriver. So he moved out into the main sick bay and began his own search.

"What's going on? What's happening?" Skinner asked from his bed, his voice fearful. It wasn't just his pain. It was agonizing not to see.

"Nancy's dead, Clyde."

"Oh my God!" he moaned. "Not her, too!"

"It wasn't me who killed her. You have to believe that."

Skinner was silent.

"Did you see anything?"

"Is that a joke?"

Lewis grimaced. "Sorry."

"Dead how?" His tone was hopeless.

"An injection. Maybe murder. Was Norse here?"

"No voice. Just funny noises. Like what you're doing now."

"But who was it? Who was here before me, Clyde?"

"I don't know." There was a tremor in his voice. He was afraid.

"Think! I might need your help!"

"Please don't kill me, Lewis. I didn't see anything."

"Christ." He gave up on Skinner and turned to the drawers. The room didn't take that long to search. Nothing. "He took them," Lewis muttered.

"Took what?"

"Something Nancy had."

"Does it matter?"

He stood, despairing. How could he convince the others? "It matters because it means that I am well and truly screwed." He looked back at Nancy's body, frustrated and depressed.

"And that's the first intelligent observation you've made since you came here," a different voice said.

It was someone at the doorway. Lewis turned.

Norse!

The psychologist stepped inside and turned to address a group of men behind him. "We finally caught him in the act," he announced.

Pulaski, Geller, Calhoun, and Perlin followed, crowding one end of BioMed. A posse rousted from the videos in the library, bleary and belligerent. The open door let in a freezerlike chill, the spilled papers shifting in the draft. Abby's X rays slid off Nancy's still chest with a sigh. "It wasn't me," Lewis tried.

"It's never you, is it, Jed?" Norse replied softly.

Lewis picked up his ice ax in instinctive defense, trying to buy a moment's time, composing what he had to say. But before he could speak, Pulaski shot forward in sudden assault, the cook's flying tackle hurling Lewis backward against a set of wall shelves, the air whooshing out of him and the ice ax spinning into a corner. The shelves gave way, crashing down around his head. Dimly he realized Geller and Calhoun and Perlin were charging, too. "Wait!" he yelled.

Pulaski butted his face with his bald head, bloodying Lewis's nose, and one of the others struck him in the stomach. Lewis couldn't breathe. He feebly tried to rise but the cook gripped him in a wrestling hold, twisted his arm, and expertly flipped him onto his belly. Other strong hands caught his wrists and ankles and twisted electrical cords around them.

They'd trailed him to BioMed. Waited while he scampered across the snow. Crept up while he was discovering the body.

Geller grunted and stood up, stepping over Lewis into the storeroom beyond. "Nancy's dead!" he confirmed.

Lewis had been hit so hard he was seeing stars. It was difficult to think. "No," he wheezed. "I found- "

"Clyde, you all right?" Calhoun asked Skinner.

"What's going on? What's going on?"

"It's Doctor Bob," Norse said. "We caught Lewis preparing to kill you."

"Oh my God. Where's Abby?"

"We're looking for her, too. You seen her?"

Skinner said nothing. He was shaking with fear.

"She comes here, you notify us, okay?"

The blind man went rigid, as if waiting for a blow.

Norse crouched by Lewis's head, looking disgusted. "Who let you out?"

"X rays…"

"It was Dixon, wasn't it?"

"Ask Clyde…"

"Jed Lewis," he said solemnly, "by the emergency powers confirmed to me by the agreement of our peers in an emergency situation, I place you under arrest for the murder of Nancy Hodge."

He was choking, trying to get the words out. "Bastard…"

"And for the murders of Gabriella Reid, Rod Cameron, Harrison Adams, and Mickey Moss. Perhaps manslaughter for the flight of Buck Tyson. For the blinding of Clyde Skinner. For terrorism and emotional assault, for theft and false witness, for stalking and betrayal. You've jeopardized the very existence of Amundsen-Scott station."

Lewis's lower face was a mask of blood, his throat hacked, his ribs sore. "Lie!"

Norse stood. "You all saw it," he told the others. "We caught him in the act this time. He broke into BioMed after I'd ordered Nancy to lock it for her own safety. But we're not savages. We're going to have a trial."

"What can we do with him even if he's guilty?" It was Gage Perlin, looking at the trussed Lewis with frank fear. "He already busted out of the sauna. It's like he never stays put. He gets out, and something happens."

"It's my fault this occurred," Norse said. "I wouldn't listen to the rest of you. I wouldn't act when the rest of you wanted to. I wanted to go slow. But this time I am going to listen to you. This time we're going to end this nightmare once and for all."

"No," Lewis coughed. "He's not- "

Something in Norse snapped. He kicked Lewis, knocking the wind out of him again. It was as if he were furious with himself for having been blinded by the man's ruses. "Shut up, Lewis! Just shut up!"

He turned to the others. "We need to locate Abby- find out what her role was in all this."

Lewis closed his eyes and spit out some blood. He writhed helplessly on the floor, his cheek on cold linoleum, his vision a cluster of white polar boots. Abby, he thought, don't let them do this to you, too.

I think all of you believe in the rule of law," Norse began to the assembled winter-overs in the galley. "All of you believe in unity. All of you believe in fairness. And no one has tried harder than myself to keep a rein on our emotions, to counsel moderation, to avoid irrevocable actions. But in a truly extreme situation, extreme measures become inevitable, and an extreme situation is exactly what Jed Lewis has put us in."

Lewis sat in a chair with his hands and feet tied, Pulaski standing over him. The geologist was bruised, dried blood on his face, his hair in an unwashed tangle. His look at Norse was of sullen amazement, anger, and disbelief, but he once more felt overmastered. The fear and the hostility the others directed against him were as heavy and oppressive as the stickiness before a thunderstorm. He'd become the new Tyson.

"We don't have any communications," Norse went on. "We obviously don't have a proper jail. What we do have is a seductive, glib psychotic who has not only killed our only medical doctor but has been mocking us and toying with us from the beginning." The psychologist looked intently at the others. "We're ten thousand miles from home, stranded without help at the darkest, coldest place on earth. A quarter of us are already dead. A determined saboteur could doom us all. It's time for the group to come together, for the group to decide how we're going to get rid of a murderous infection."

"He's lying," Lewis spat, his voice thick and slurred after Pulaski's head butt. "He's not who he says he is! He's the one who's psychotic. Ask him who he really is."

Norse ignored this. "No one was fooled more than I was. No one liked Jed Lewis better than I did. I was his first friend! I ran with him in the Three Hundred Degree Club! But we found him today with the body of Nancy Hodge and with that even I had to admit I'd been wrong about our fingie. Did we see him kill her? No. But we have to act on what we know, and what do we know?"

"We know he has a connection to every bad thing that has happened on this station," Molotov growled. "That all this started when Lewis came."

"I was looking for the X rays, dammit! Ask him about the X rays! That's the key to this whole thing!"

"We know it was Mr. Lewis who put a value on that meteorite," Norse went on, "and that shortly afterward the meteorite went missing. He apparently saw where Doctor Moss hid it. Was he the thief? I can't prove it. You'll remember that Cameron told Jed about the abandoned base and that he asked us about it. Then Mickey Moss died down there. Does that prove anything? No. Does it disprove anything?"

"He went last when we crawled to that pit where we found Mickey," Geller remembered. "The farthest from that hole. Like he knew it was there."

"He sent the e-mail!" Dana shouted.

"Listen to me," Lewis groaned. "Norse came to New Zealand at two different times. You're listening to an impostor."

They looked at him with disbelief. Their attention was on Norse and his recital. They'd stopped listening, because they wanted their nightmare to stop.

"Dana's right," the psychologist went on. "Remember what happened. Harrison Adams found someone had sent Moss an e-mail about the meteorite from Jed's computer in Clean Air. I thought a killer would be more careful than to use his own machine, but perhaps not. During a blizzard Lewis leaves his post despite orders from our station manager to stay there. Adams disappears at the same time. Who finds his body? Lewis. Who's holding a cut heat tape? Lewis. And here's where I made my mistake. I proposed a simple quarantine instead of confinement while we investigated the situation. I wrongly focused on Tyson. And so who asks to meet with Rod Cameron, who was continuing to investigate the two deaths? Lewis. And Rod ends up dead."

"I never even saw Cameron! I never went to the fuel arch!" Norse looked grimly at a group transfixed by this history. He was reciting what they knew. He was preaching to the choir. "It wasn't until later-too late, in fact- that I was exploring Rod's office after the explosion and found this letter." He held up a sheet of paper with Lewis's signature on it, the same one he'd showed Abby. "It promises that Rod can save his career if he lets Lewis have the meteorite. He thought Cameron might have it, and was still determined to get it any way he could."

"It's a forgery! He tricked me into signing that!"

Norse passed the letter around.

"We thought it was Tyson, but wasn't it with Lewis's arrival that our animosity towards Buck began to grow? Did Jed foster that? Frankly, it's difficult to remember. But Tyson fled because he feared he couldn't get a fair hearing, not with Jed Lewis in this group. And now he, too, is probably dead."

"I had nothing to do with- "

"So we welcome Lewis into our little fraternity. We party. Something goes wrong between him and Gabriella. And again, he is on hand for the discovery of her body. The cut-up magazine to make a note, the ashes in his room: We've been through this already."

"Think!" Lewis pleaded. "Why would I lead you to my victims?"

"You're not the first murderer to do so, Jed." Norse's observation was dispassionate, sad.

"Shut up and let Bob finish," Pulaski added. "Then it's your turn."

"So we lock him up," the psychologist resumed. "But before we can ask the authorities back home what action we should take, our communications center explodes from an apparent booby trap, blinding one of our key individuals. Lewis could have created the conditions for that explosion at any time after we curfewed our communications. Yet despite all this a young woman- someone Lewis has been seducing from the beginning and who has apparently been blinded herself by infatuation- springs him from his cell. Now she's disappeared, and perhaps with good reason. Within minutes, hours at most, our medic is dead as a result of Abby Dixon's romantic foolishness. And again, Jed Lewis is discovered with the body. Is Abby an accomplice? Or has he now killed Abby Dixon as well?"

"I told you he's a bloody psycho," Dana muttered.

"This is admittedly circumstantial," Norse went on, weaving the prosecution case. "Lewis has been careful to cover his tracks and to strike unobserved when his victims are alone, or at least when any witness is too blind to identify him, like poor Clyde. Yet sometimes victims can strike back from the grave. Nancy Hodge was drugged but before she died she pulled out the one piece of identification that pinpoints her assailant. There was a folder on her body."