Winter Study (48 page)

There
were five of them, but Anna suspected there’d been more. Katherine
probably looked at the first few sent, then deleted the rest unopened.
She died before she could delete these.

Katherine,
nude, had been arranged on a bed. Her legs were splayed toward the
camera. In the first photograph, there was a cucumber in her vagina and
a carrot inserted in her rectum. The second picture changed only the
objects used to rape her: a baseball bat and a green wine bottle. In
the third, the photographer had gone to the effort of propping her head
up and arranging her hands so she looked as if she had inserted the
baseball bat herself.

“Jesus!”
Anna breathed and closed her eyes. She had to swallow the sickness in
her throat before she could open them again. Then it was another half
minute before she could bring herself to look back at the tiny screen.

The
fourth shot was a crooked close-up of her face with a man’s erect penis
shoved in her mouth. Her head was back, eyes closed and jaw slack. In
the last shot, the baseball bat had been replaced by a man’s fist
pushed in up to the forearm. The man’s face was not shown.

Katherine’s was, every time.

“God
damn!” Anna closed the phone and sat staring at it. “God damn!” she
said again, shaking her head. Most of her adult life had been spent
trying to put a stop to man’s inhumanity to everything he could get his
hands on. The news showed burned babies, mothers running screaming from
bullets, dogs eating fallen men, bombs shattering homes and vehicles.
In real time, snuff films every night in every living room in America
played out in the name of Current Events.

Yet Anna could not get used to it. Paul had told her the day she got used to it was the day she lost her soul.

She
opened the phone and pushed ten numbers in rapid succession. A ring,
and two, three. It was very late or very early. Sane people in real
places slept at this time of the night. “Please,” she whispered.
“Please.”

“Yes?”

“Paul,” Anna cried. “Paul, it’s me,” and she began to cry.

28

Ketamine
stayed in the blood a relatively long time, as far as testing was
concerned. Robin’s blood would show traces of the drug for seven to
fourteen days. One of those days was gone, and Anna didn’t know how
many more they would be weathered in on the island.

Skipping
breakfast, she went, yet again, to the Visitors Center. The door was
still unlocked. She wished there was a way to make sure it stayed that
way while she was inside, but there wasn’t. Indoors, it was so cold she
couldn’t see her breath. Frigid, superdry air would not fog.

The
vials of blood — Robin’s and the wolf’s — were in her coat pocket.
Though the man blackmailing Katherine had been careful to keep his face
out of the pictures, Anna didn’t doubt that it was Bob Menechinn.
Katherine’s warnings, the comments about using ketamine, being carried
upstairs unconscious — it made sense. Ketamine was not only a cat
tranquilizer and a club drug; it was also becoming the date rape drug
of choice. The aftereffects often included amnesia, disorientation and
paranoia. Three symptoms that made it extremely difficult for victims
to successfully prosecute their attackers.

Bob
— and Anna was sure it was Bob — had drugged Katherine, then
photographed her in crude and mocking poses. These were the pictures
that he’d threatened to put up on the Internet, the pictures that she
didn’t want her mother to see, the pictures that had made her want to
die.

He
intended to do the same thing to Robin. Robin wasn’t drunk; she was
drugged. When Anna had come upon him in the carpenter’s shop, hunkered
over the dead body of his graduate student, he had probably been
looking for the cell phone. He also could have been indulging himself
in a woman the way he preferred them: helpless and degraded.

Anger
was racking up Anna’s respiration rate. Inside her mittens, she
clenched and unclenched her fists. Halfway through the main room of the
Visitors Center she turned abruptly and walked to the floor-to-ceiling
windows overlooking Washington Harbor. The sun had not yet risen above
the hills. When it did, there would be no blue sky to greet it. Clouds
touched the tops of the trees on Beaver Island, black and mysterious
across the wide expanse of ice. As she watched the scene — devoid of
movement, devoid of sound, of shadows — and slowed her breath and heart
rate, letting the blinding anger clear from her vision, she began to
see colors. The ice, slate and pearl, hinted of blues and lavenders so
delicate they were wisped with imagination. Ink spikes of the trees on
the shore harbored dark-dark greens, greens so close to black they
shimmered in and out of vision like the hide of a whale deep in the
ocean. Far out, where the ice stopped past Beaver and the open water
began, were the barest touches of pink, iridescent and ephemeral.

In
the night, the iris of the eye expanded to take in what available light
it could to help clawless, blunt-toothed human beings live until
morning. Perhaps in winter there was similar evolution, allowing the
eyes to adjust to let in every scrap of color, so the fragile, neurotic
creatures could stay sane to see another spring.

As
Anna let the anger go, she knew she was terrified. She was scared to
the bone that Robin was cached somewhere, drugged insensible again and
posed for pictures like those on the cell phone in Anna’s pocket. There
were few places she could be hidden, unless death by hypothermia was
part of the plan. Dead, a victim couldn’t accuse the rapist. Katherine
wouldn’t be testifying anytime soon. Was that why Bob had said nothing
when she’d called? Had she outlived her usefulness, and, when she got
into trouble the night she ran off and called him for help, he just
quietly turned over and went back to sleep?

Gutless,

Anna
thought in disgust, but the theory worked with what she knew of
Menechinn. So did the date rape scenario. Bob had the means and
opportunity for drugging Robin and raping her. Robin’s jab stick,
loaded with ketamine, had gone missing from Malone Bay cabin. He had
the means to remove her bodily from the bunkhouse. He had carried Anna
two miles and Katherine up five flights of stairs. Anna didn’t think he
had the means to stash her anywhere on the island and still keep her
alive. Therefore, he didn’t kidnap her. Or he didn’t mean for her to
live.

If
Bob wanted her dead, Robin was dead. She wouldn’t have to be taken any
distance at all. A couple yards from the bunkhouse would be sufficient.
Dump her naked in the snow, cover the body with powder and branches.
She would have been dead of cold before anyone noticed she’d been
taken. Robin Adair had shyly crept into Anna’s heart and the thought of
her murdered brought back the rage she’d been working so hard to lose.

She shook it off.

She needed to test the blood; she needed evidence before arresting Bob. “Proof,” Anna said. “Woman, then wolf.”

Holding
on to what shards of peace the winter scene had given her, she turned
from the window and stumped quickly across the hardwood floor, dynamic
movement thwarted by the fat rubber boots and thick down.

In
the back hall next to the DR’s office was law enforcement’s storage
room: narrow, windowless and lined on both sides with adjustable metal
shelves. Unlike many NPS storage rooms, it was neat and well organized.
ISRO evidently had excellent seasonal rangers. On the top shelf were
two briefcase-sized satchels, the standard field drug-testing kits used
for years by police. They contained vials of various chemicals. Drugs
were mixed with these liquids according to a key on the underside of
the lid. The reaction gave the officer an idea of what she was dealing
with. They were designed to find out what a drug was, not who was
taking them, and were of no use to Anna.

In
the District Ranger’s office, where the light was best, she found what
she needed, a gas chronometry–mass spectrum device, GC/ MS. Boxy and
white, it looked vaguely like a blood pressure machine, the kind in
grocery stores near the pharmacy. Before 9/11, there wasn’t a GC/MS in
the entire Park Service. Now they were becoming almost commonplace, and
they weren’t used to test criminals. Using hair, urine, saliva or
blood, they drug-tested employees, particularly law enforcement.

Ketamine,
“Vitamin K,” the cat tranquilizer, wasn’t on a standard tox screen, but
that would change. Once used exclusively by veterinarians, it had made
its way into the pantheon of club drugs because of its euphoric and
hallucinogenic properties. Several years before, Anna had taken a trip
with “Lady K” against her will and without her knowledge and enjoyed
neither the high nor the apparitions.

Ignorance stopped her in front of the GC/MS. She’d seen it operated exactly twice.

“Fuck!” she whispered. Then with more vehemence: “Fucking fool!”

None
of it mattered: there was no electricity, no power. She couldn’t turn
the machine on. A detail she’d overlooked in her mad dash down the hill.

Modern conveniences were as air: expected.

“Damn!”

She
turned and ran from the office, down the hall and up the hill through
the snow. By the time she reached the carpenter’s shop, she was puffing
and sweating. Without waiting to catch her breath, she began pawing
through the plastic-wrapped packages of wolf parts on the table. “Okay,
Katherine,” she muttered to the corpse at her feet. “Give me a hand
here. What was it set you off? I can’t test the blood. Maybe you could
with your fancy PCR, but I can’t, I made a royal fool of myself in the
V.C. If a tree falling in the forest can be a fool. So what was it?
What did I hand you? You squeaked like a rat. Skull? No. Paws? No.
Bigger.

“This.”
Anna laid her hands on the square package that contained the excised
flesh from the wolf’s throat, the meat Ridley had preserved because of
the size of the bite pattern that killed the wolf.

“Hey,
it’s all coming back to me,” Anna told the dead woman. “Bob mouths off.
Ridley cuts his hand. I pass this gob off to you. I’m examining the
knife wound. You squeak. I turn. You look like shit. It’s this, isn’t
it?”

Without
waiting for a reply, she set the package on the counter beneath the
window and began prying the stiff plastic away where it had frozen to
the tissue sample underneath. “Okay,” she said when she’d peeled the
cube of wolf and set it on the counter where the light was strongest.
Like any frozen meat, the excised neck flesh had become featureless,
pale, the folds and hollows settled while the meat was warm, then
frozen in a chunk. “If the dead speak to the dead, do your stuff,” Anna
said to the corpse. “Otherwise, I don’t think this guy is going to tell
me anything.”

Neither Katherine nor the bit of deceased wolf spoke.

What
Anna was looking for wouldn’t be in the bite marks. Those had been
probed and examined by Ridley and photographed by Robin. It was what
they missed that gave Katherine the squeaky pallor. Bending close over
the rock-hard neck muscle, Anna turned it slowly between her gloved
hands, examining every inch of the flayed neck. On the back, near what
would have been the wolf’s left side, halfway between ear and shoulder,
was a tiny dot of silver metal, the broken-off end of a needle.