Sarah Andrews - In Cold Pursuit

“Well, they tried to make it look like they were just going for a stroll, but they put him in Hut 10, right where they put the last fellow they incarcerated.”

“Incarcerated?”

“It’s like a little house. You can rent it for parties. They put the young man who attacked another with a hammer in there. Put him on suicide watch, in case he was going to try to hurt himself, but he was actually quite cooperative, I hear.”

“Emmett Vanderzee? Suicide?”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m talking about the man who hit the other one with the hammer. Three years ago.”

“They have a marshal here? Where’s his office?” I should go talk to him , Valena decided.

“Yes, they do. Chad Hill, the NSF man in charge.”

“I thought George Bellamy was in charge.”

“He’s on the Science side. Chad is Operations. Somebody had to be the local law, so he went up to Hawaii a few years back and was deputized, or whatever you call it.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Everyone wants to know if he has a pistol!”

“A pistol?” Valena squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. None of this was making any sense.

“There are no weapons here in Antarctica. That’s part of the Antarctic Treaty, I think. Anyway, there’s no need for them. Who in their right minds would fight a war here? They’d freeze their behinds off! And there’s no hunting allowed here, either; that’s absolutely part of the treaty, or is it the environmental protocol?”

Valena heard Brenda’s words but was stuck back at the beginning of the conversation, trying to imagine her highly intellectual, ironic, tall, skinny professor being marched into a makeshift jail. The idea of Emmett Vanderzee being held under armed guard was nothing short of ludicrous. Valena shook her head, trying to clear it. What was going on here?

Brenda spirited a huge bag of corn chips off the table behind her and offered the open end of it to Valena. “Take some,” she said. “It’s why it’s here.”

“No thank you,” she said. Five minutes earlier, she had been so hungry that her stomach seemed to have grown teeth, but now it felt like she had eaten clay. Her professor was in jail and she was nowhere. Fourteen years of effort had gone up in smoke.

Brenda’s soft brown eyes glowed with concern. She said, “Well, breakfast’s being served in the galley if you need it. I don’t go over until brunch on Sundays, usually, which starts at eleven. You do know that it’s Sunday, don’t you? So many get mixed up when they cross the international date line. I’m just over here writing my e-mails because the computers are faster here than the ones in Building 155, and I don’t have to wait in line. But you were asking where your office is. Biology is on this level. Glaciology and geology are down on the second phase. Down the ramp and to your right.”

Valena began to back out of the room. Somehow having someone care about her made her feel even more lonely and exposed. “I’ll just take a look downstairs.”

“Okay. When are you scheduled for Happy Camp?”

“You mean survival school?”

“Yes, Snowcraft 1. Are you in the Monday-Tuesday class?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, have a good rest today. You can’t go much of anywhere else until you go to Happy Camp. Maybe there’s a movie at the Coffee House. We had a showing of March of the Penguins last week, and it’s always a good laugh when they show Madagascar. I just love those psychotic penguins: ‘Cute and cuddly, boys!’”

Before Brenda could say anything more, Valena gave her a vague wave and moved quickly along the hall and down the ramp.

VALENA FOUND A DOOR MARKED WITH A PLAQUE listing Emmett’s name and event number. She inserted her key. The door opened to evidence of Emmett’s somewhat chaotic office housekeeping. His equipment was stacked everywhere. Big shipping cases and duffels, file boxes filled with air photos and satellite imagery, mountaineering equipment. She unzipped one of the larger black duffels. It contained an enormously thick sleeping bag and layers of closed-cell foam matting.

They didn’t take away his equipment , she noted. That’s a good sign. As she stared at the jumble, it occurred to her that Brenda had not spoken to her as someone who was about to be sent home. That meant that her fate was not generally known or perhaps even clearly decided. And that meant that there were possibilities. She now looked at the heap of equipment with a keener eye.

His cloth attaché was stowed underneath his desk, as if he had left it there just a moment before. With a certain sense of invasion, she opened it, but she found only a few unused tablets of lined paper, some pens and mechanical pencils, and his electronic camera. She noted that its memory chip had been removed and that his laptop computer was missing, too. The marshal took his digital media as evidence , she decided.

Then she realized, I’m thinking like a detective.

For the first time since that horrible moment the evening before when George Bellamy told her what had become of her professor—and her plans—Valena felt her heart lift. She let her mind follow the concept of detection down a narrow, turning passageway of thought. The world seemed to spin and shift, now taking in one point of view, now considering things from yet another.

Why would they arrest him now? If that journalist’s death wasn’t an accident, and Emmett killed him — which is absurd! — they would have arrested him a year ago, when it happened.

Then she turned these thoughts around another way. What evidence exists that suggests that the reporter died through anything but mischance? What new evidence has come to light that justifies a change in their conclusions?

She ran what she knew of the story of the death in Emmett’s camp through her mind. This amounted to precious little. When it happened, she had been in her first semester at UNR, the University of Nevada at Reno, where she had enrolled for her master’s degree. She had worked the summer before at the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, processing cores Emmett had collected, to prove her interest—and her capacity to function in the negative thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit cold of its vaults—and had enrolled immediately in Vanderzee’s glaciology class, the only class he taught at UNR, so that she could show him how smart and dedicated and hard-working she was. Her plan was to get him to take her on as a research assistant out at the Desert Research Institute, where he kept his laboratory, become indispensable, and persuade him to take her with him to Antarctica.

“Hello.”

Valena turned to see who had spoken.

It was a woman, leaning in the doorway with arms folded. Blond. Thirties or forties. Fit. Easy smile. Intelligent eyes. “New here?” she inquired.

“Yes. I’m Valena Walker. Glaciologist. Just arrived yesterday.” It felt good to identify herself not as a hapless graduate student who was about to be sent home, but as a professional.

“Kathy Juneau,” the woman said. She pointed up toward the upper level of the lab. “Biologist.”

Valena tipped her head a bit to one side. “I thought there was almost no biology to study down here. Are you a marine biologist, then?”

“No, freshwater. I’m here to collect a cubic yard so I can extract a carbon sample, then archive it for scientists worldwide to study.”

“Carbon?”

“We’re studying the carbon cycle as it occurs in lake water. This is about the only place on earth we can do that, because everywhere else carbon is washed in from surrounding vegetation and other organisms that live outside the lake.”

“Oh. Right. I had heard that there were lakes under the ice.”