“Keep your radio on, and keep it on you,” Ridley said.
“Make sure your batteries are charged,” Jonah added. “Adam’s been having a heck of a time with his. A heck of a time.”
Then Anna was alone in the bunkhouse. Every pair of cross-country skis was in use. The snow was eighteen inches deep where it drifted and nearly a foot where it didn’t. Snowshoes hung on the wall, but with a foot to a foot and a half it was a toss-up whether they were more or less trouble than slogging through in boots. Had Anna meant to search, as she’d said, this might have bothered her.
What she meant to do was take the bunkhouse apart till she found out what the hell was going on. In the process, she dearly hoped to find out who took Robin. “Who” might tell her where the young woman had been stashed.
30
Anna found exactly nothing. Bob’s laptop was password protected, as was Ridley’s. Neither Jonah nor Adam had a PC. Drawers and duffel bags produced the expected long underwear and dirty socks. Sitting on the floor of Bob’s room, his duffel bag between her knees, Anna was swamped with helpless rage. Snatching up the emptied satchel, she flung it. It bounced off the side of the bunk and smacked her in the face, a stinging cut high on her left cheek where the luggage tag struck.
The bag was old and worn; the leather around the tag had grown stiff and cracked. Anna looked at the offending object: PROFESSOR MENECHINN, UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN. Bob was so lazy that in ten years he’d never bothered to change the address. “University of Saskatchewan,” Anna said aloud. The name struck a chord, and she sat in silence waiting for the rest of the music to surface.
“They’re both Canucks,” Jonah had said of Bob and Adam.
Not only were Adam and Bob Canadians, they had both lived in Saskatchewan and at the same time. Bob taught at the university where Adam’s wife, Cynthia, went to graduate school. It wasn’t a great leap to put Cynthia into one of Professor Menechinn’s graduate courses. It was an even shorter leap to imagine him assaulting her.
Then Cynthia committed suicide.
Adam never recovered from her death.
Adam told Ridley to recommend Bob for the Homeland Security review.
Adam had been excited at breakfast, happy.
“Holy shit!” Anna said. Adam was going to kill Bob. He was going to do it today.
Without skis, she’d never catch them. She took the snowmobile. Hammering up the Greenstone, icy wind lashing her cheeks and scraping her skin, Anna more than once considered turning around, letting Adam do mankind a favor. A world without the Bobs was a tempting idea. Rehabilitation didn’t work with guys like Menechinn. What he did wasn’t just a crime; it was a character flaw, a rottenness within.
Still, she didn’t leave Adam to his work. For one thing, she liked to think of herself as a half-decent human being. Not to mention if the two killed each other, she might never find out what happened to Robin.
The Greenstone climbed gently at first, then rose precipitously with switchbacks that threatened to push the snowmobile into the trees to a rocky escarpment thrusting above the tree line. The slope on the western side of the island was forested. On the east, the ridge fell away precipitously, a sheer sixty-foot drop, to a flat narrow boulder field skirting the edge of a meadow.
Forcing the snowmobile to its limit, she built up sufficient speed that when she reached the ridge the machine leapt a foot into the air, banged down in a spume of snow and rushed toward the drop. Squawking, she jerked to the left. The front of the snowmobile jackknifed. The machine rose up on one ski in alarmingly slow motion, toppled over and shuddered to a stop as the engine died.
Ahead of her, through the veil of falling snow, stood two shrouded figures. Skis and poles were jammed into the snow like battlefield grave markers. This was where Menechinn was to meet with the fatal accident that had been awaiting him since he’d been brought to the island.
“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
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.
