robbing the dead. And you noticed Carl Mendoza? He looks like he won the lottery. With Moss not undercutting him he might actually keep his grants.'
'That's cynical.'
'You lose money to the wrong people and you get cynical.'
'Moss said he made everyone else's research possible.'
'As long as they sucked up. Moss was also a Class-A prick.'
'What do you think happened to him?'
'That he saved his reputation by dying.'
It was after midnight. Then one, two o'clock. Everyone danced with everyone. Stocky Dana Andrews shook like a Maori, and Lena Jindrova turned an erect circle with a drink perched bizarrely on her head. Gabriella moved sinuously among the other men, her body a kind of social lubricant, erasing inhibition. Even Linda Brown, Pulaski's plain and overweight assistant in the kitchen, lost her stiffness and began to gyrate. The steaminess brought a kind of communion that relieved the anxiety over Mickey. For a blessed respite, the chill disappeared.
By the time Norse's head appeared at the foot of the stairs, then, they were drunk. He bounded upward and Nancy was right behind him, her eyes wide and dark, following with a hand on his belt. A ragged chorus of hoots and Bronx cheers erupted at their reappearance. 'The underpants police!'
The crowd parted slightly to embrace them and pull them in, like an amoeba swallowing prey. 'Who is it?' a drunken Pulaski shouted. 'Which of us is the thief?'
Norse grinned reassuringly. 'We found not a hint of scandal. You're all the most boring people in the world.'
Now the crowd booed, clamoring for salacious detail. Who had the most secrets to hide?
'Our lips are sealed,' Nancy said.
'Ply them with alcohol!' Pulaski cried.
A bottle of champagne erupted, fountaining over the two newcomers. Norse and Nancy ducked, but not quickly enough. White foam spewed over them, adding to the heady salt and sweetness of the room's cloying air. It ran down their clothes, making them sticky.
Norse staggered in the press of bodies and gasped, suddenly grabbing the neck of a bottle and taking a swig. He passed it to Nancy and grinned with relief at this enclosure by the crowd. His eyes swept them triumphantly and for just a moment Lewis thought he saw a wistful shadow in the psychologist's survey of the others, the same longing to belong that Lewis himself felt. Then commanding self-assurance replaced it, like a mask. Norse was the king of self-control.
Lewis could learn from him.
'What now?' Geller shouted.
'We've still got a mystery,' Norse said, handing back a few keys they had been lent for personal lockers. He drank again. 'We tried to put things back, but Carl, I accidentally broke one of your candles. Just clumsiness. I apologize.'
'You didn't puncture my sex doll, I hope.'
'No, but I had to inflate her to make sure she worked.'
'Do we trust?' Dana asked.
Norse grinned. 'Personal choice.'
'Does that mean we're innocent?'
'It means you can choose to believe in each other.'
'And how long do we keep partying, Doc?' Geller asked.
'Until I've drunk enough myself. Or until Harrison- '
As if on cue, though, the music abruptly cut. Everyone groaned. The lights came up and they were blinking, the communal mood shattered. It was Cameron, who'd come up quietly and slipped behind the bar. 'Time to pack it in,' the station manager said gruffly.
The group protested. 'Rod- '
'Shut up. We've got something.'
That silenced them. More footsteps, and Abby and Harrison Adams trooped up the stairs. They looked graver than Norse and Nancy and as they pushed into the hot room the crowd split apart from them, squeezing against the walls, as if this news threatened to be unwelcome. Everyone was suddenly uneasy again. It was deathly quiet.
'Did you find anything in the rooms?' Cameron asked Norse and Nancy from the bar.
'Nothing,' Norse replied.
'Well, Harrison found something,' the station manager said grimly. 'Doctor Adams?'
'There's an e-mail on Mickey's drive,' the astronomer said. 'We're going to trace it if we can. Meanwhile, it points to a place we haven't looked.'
'Which means I need a few men to volunteer now, pronto, and the rest of you in bed so I can have you tomorrow, half awake and not too hungover,' Cameron said.
'What's going on?' Mendoza asked.
'It's a place I hadn't thought to look, frankly. We're going to go there now.'
'Where?' Everyone was curious.
'Where even Mickey Moss had no business being.'
'Where?'
'The abandoned base.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Thin blue shadows bobbed ahead of the search party like anxious children, their silhouettes running ahead to get to the buried ruin. Lewis felt more hesitant. He was curious about the abandoned Navy base but he'd also been warned it was utterly dark and cheerlessly cold. The truth was, he was mildly claustrophobic. He didn't relish looking for a dead body down there.
The e-mailed message that Adams had found had been deleted from Moss's computer but Abby, who had some hacker skills, had been able to retrieve it from the encrusted history of his hard disk. If you want your meteorite back, meet me in the old base at midnight. Unsigned, of course, and dating from the evening before Mickey disappeared. She was trying to retrace its point of origin now.
Meanwhile, the elongated penumbra of their own bodies stopped at a womblike slit in the snow, its lips widened as if recently penetrated. Someone had passed this way not long before. The edges of the tiny entry glowed a cobalt blue that sank into the ink of a catacomb. It seemed the kind of hole that could close up behind you, not letting you out.
'It's the only place we haven't looked,' Cameron said in response to the unspoken reluctance of the others. Everyone was tired and hungover. The cold worsened their headaches.
'Why in hell would a thief lead Mickey here?' Pulaski wondered aloud.
'Cheese to a mouse,' suggested Geller, who'd pulled down his gaiter to bite on a candy bar. His beard began to grow ice crystals as he chewed.
'Which implies a trap,' the cook said.
'Or an exchange,' said Cameron.
Let's get on with it, then, Lewis thought. He was tired and uneasy and the half-mile walk from the dome had left him sweaty and cold. He wanted to crawl into bed. But volunteering to help this time seemed another way to get loose of the albatross of suspicion.
'This opening goes down to the old meteorology room at one end at the old base,' Cameron said. 'Stay tight and watch your step. The timbers are starting to buckle from the weight of the snow.' He was carrying rope, an ice ax, and a small field shovel.
'Why'd they build it down there, anyway?' Geller asked dubiously, looking at the hole.
'They didn't. The snow just piled up around it. Eventually it buries everything.'
'You don't even have to dig your own grave down here,' Pulaski said.
'And a hundred thousand years from now the ice will have flowed enough to spit everything back out into the
