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?
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.
“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
