“Arresting him would be fun,” Anna said finally, and a smile ghosted across his face.
“You drilled the ice,” she said to keep his attention.
“I drilled the ice,” Adam said.
“I nearly died.”
“I know. Bob here always has to strut out front. I thought he’d be first on the ice. It’s hard to grasp how complete a coward he is.” Adam’s attention left Anna and focused like a laser on Bob Menechinn.
“Go, Anna.” He took Bob’s arm. Menechinn tried to jerk away, but his movements were slow and clumsy. The drug had made him forget where his arms and legs were. He overbalanced and fell. He lay moving feebly, making a fat snow angel.
Anna took a deep breath and was immediately sorry as the cold burned her lungs. “You’ll spend the next forty years of your life in a penitentiary. You’ll get up when you’re told and go to bed and eat and see the sun when you’re told,” she said. “You’ve lived your whole life out of doors, Adam. Let me take Bob back.”
Adam’s face didn’t change. “I’ve spent the last ten years in prison,” he said, watching Bob paddle at the snow. “Get up,” he said to Menechinn.
Anna needed him to connect with her sufficiently so he could hear past his pain. “You said Katherine would never testify. You knew about Katherine?”
“I’d seen the look before. On the face of my wife before she died. The wolves saved Katherine the trouble of killing herself.”
“Or you did.”
“I had nothing to do with her death. Not one damn thing. I don’t kill women.”
“How about wolves?”
“The giant bite marks?” He smiled. “People will believe what they want to believe. I just helped it along.”
“So you darted the wolf and stabbed it to death,” Anna said coldly.
“An animal. The pound puts thousands to death every year. Fluffy and Bootsie and Socks. Don’t get onto me about an animal.”
Adam straddled Bob, took hold of his wrists and pulled him to a sitting position.
“You drugged me,” Bob said without bitterness, a sense of wonder in his voice.
“How do you like it?” Adam asked, standing over him, hands still clamped around the bigger man’s wrists.
“I don’t…” Bob rolled his head over and squinted to bring Anna into focus. “Ranger Danger,” he said and smiled. “You were going to kill me and now we’ll kill you.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” Anna said. “I don’t want to wait in line that long. Since you are going to kill me anyway, you might as well tell me: did you drug Robin?”
Bob leered. Snow was catching on his wiry hair and the fat of his cheeks where they pushed out beneath his eyes. “Adam said you were trying to frame me, Miss Ranger. Too bad you’re a fool.” His head rolled till Adam came into his line of vision. He had to let it flop back on his neck to look up at him. “Wearing a wire,” he said conspiratorially.
“How much did you give him?” Anna asked.
“Enough,” Adam said.
“You told him I was going to kill him or set him up?”
“Divide and conquer,” Adam said. “Upsy-daisy, Bob.” Using himself as a lever, he rocked back and pulled Bob to his feet. They were no more than two yards from the edge of the basalt shelf, yet the drop was practically invisible, the white of the snow melding seamlessly with the white of sky and ice. Anna knew it was there from her time on ISRO and the hike they’d made to Malone Bay. She doubted Bob had any idea he stood on a precipice. Adam turned Menechinn so he faced to the east over the cliff.
“Don’t,” Anna said. She didn’t move any closer. If a tussle started, it wasn’t going to be her who was nudged to her death.
“Bob, see there?” Adam pointed into the void where the white on white of weather created a blank canvas for the ketamine to paint on.
“Robin wants to meet you there.”
“Don’t,” Anna said again. “Bob, there is no
Adam spun around. The dead look was gone from his face replaced by the fury she’d felt the night she’d seen the photograph of him and his dead wife. “Get the fuck out of here,” he hissed, a whisper metastasized into a shout.
“Bob, do it, go. Anna will kill you. Run!” Adam shouted in Menechinn’s ear. Bob began to lumber forward toward imagined sex and safety.
In the eternal second of the mind, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, huge and shapeless in ill-fitting clothes, running into the arctic wilderness, played in Anna’s mind, overlaid by Peter Boyle’s singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz”; monsters pieced together from the dead and given life by the insane. Bob was a monster; that she didn’t doubt. She would never know what had made him or if there was true evil in the world and he had chosen his own monstrousness. Anna wouldn’t have chosen to save him. She wouldn’t have said she particularly wanted him saved. Her mind reacted to what he was with a cringing loathing she didn’t care to examine.
Her body reacted from years of training. She threw herself forward in a flying tackle aimed at the backs of Bob Menechinn’s knees. Big men had bad knees; the joints couldn’t cope with the bulk, and most of them had played football at one time or another. Knee injuries were a small ranger’s friend. Her right shoulder and side of her head smashed into him and the knees gave. Falling back and to the side, he crushed her right arm into the snow. Pain exploded in her elbow.
“It’s a cliff, it’s a fucking cliff, I was going off a cliff,” Bob began yelling. Mad with the sudden realization of physical danger, he scrabbled backward. His knee ground over Anna’s wrist and she cried out. A flailing hand struck her on the side of her head so hard her ear burned and roared.
“You’re welcome, God dammit,” she shouted as she tried to roll out of his thrashing way. On hands and knees, Bob scuttled through the deep snow, moaning and bellowing like a mad boar. He didn’t stop till he’d reached the trees. There he pulled himself upright, using the bole of a tree, and screamed: “He tried to kill me. He tried to kill me.” The litany didn’t stop there, but Anna tuned the rest of it out and got to her feet. Snow and down padding had saved her serious injury. Her wrist still rotated, and, other than the misery of ice down her collar and up her sleeves, the dive didn’t seem to have done any appreciable damage.
Adam was still standing near the cliff’s edge, his feet inches from where the rock fell away.
“Why did you do that?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know,” Anna said. For a minute, they stood, listening to the scissor cut of the wind in the trees and Bob’s lament. Snow came at them in spinning gusts, air currents made wild and playful where the earth dropped away to water.
“You know what he is?”
“Some of it. I think he drugged Robin. I think he did the same to Katherine, then raped her and took pictures to blackmail her into silence. I’m guessing he did something like that to your wife.”
“Cynthia,” Adam said.
“Cynthia,” Anna gave Adam’s memory the honor of a name.
“She was like Robin. Not raised like her or athletic like her, but with that innocence that doesn’t wear off at thirteen like it does for most of us.” Adam’s gaze moved from Anna’s face to where Bob clung to his tree, his moaning and cursing settled into a murmuring chant low enough they could sense the tenor but no longer had to hear the words.
“Cynthia had never been out of school – went straight from kindergarten through to her Ph.D. program. Her dad raised her by himself; only kid. Her mother died of appendicitis when she was barely walking.”
Anna didn’t know what to say and figured nothing was best. The talking was taking the action out of Adam for the moment.
His attention returned from the trees where Bob had run. “Cynthia thought men were nice,” he said. “She thought they took care of women and children, saved kittens from trees and helped old ladies carry groceries to the car.” A hint of warmth touched his voice and it no longer sounded of frozen harp strings.
“I hadn’t thought of that in a while,” he said to Anna and shook his head. “How could I have forgotten that?”
