Nevada Barr - Winter Study

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.

Modern conveniences were as air: expected.

“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 dead speak to the dead, do your stuff,” Anna said to the corpse. “Otherwise, I don’t think this guy is going to tell me anything.”

Neither Katherine nor the bit of deceased wolf spoke.

What Anna was looking for wouldn’t be in the bite marks. Those had been probed and examined by Ridley and photographed by Robin. It was what they missed that gave Katherine the squeaky pallor. Bending close over the rock-hard neck muscle, Anna turned it slowly between her gloved hands, examining every inch of the flayed neck. On the back, near what would have been the wolf’s left side, halfway between ear and shoulder, was a tiny dot of silver metal, the broken-off end of a needle.

“Got it,” Anna said to Katherine. She found needle-nose pliers in a drawer beneath the counter and pulled the metal from the neck. It wasn’t a needle; it was the dart used when an animal is shot with a tranquilizer gun. Katherine had stood up to Bob after the necropsy for the same reasons she’d found the courage to do it the other two times. He was endangering her beloved wolves.

“Darted it, then opened its throat and it bled out. The wounds made to look like a huge bite pattern,” Anna said. “The wolf was murdered.” Lost in thought, she turned the splinter of metal in the gray light. Bob had said to Katherine: “We’ve used ketamine before.” Bob had found the animal and he had stomped around it so much there was no hope of finding any tracks. Then he’d claimed the body for “research.”

“You thought Bob did it, didn’t you? Killed the wolf so the big game hunter could have the head and pelt for his wall. You knew Bob used ketamine; you knew because he’d used it on you.”

Having cached the broken tip of the tranquilizer dart with the rest of her Nancy Drew collection in the rusted toolbox under the floorboards, Anna walked back toward the bunkhouse. Stillness was absolute. Air and cold melded to form a quantifiable mass, a solid that could be moved through without disturbing a single atom, a vacuum that held matter inside. Anna’s steps grew shorter until finally she, too, was still: a rock, a tree, a single mote of ice.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. The words fell into the motionless universe, leaving no ripple. “Katherine, if Bob killed the wolf, why would he make the neck wound interesting? ‘Interesting’ doesn’t get the study shut down. It goes against his interests. Bob never goes against his interests.” Momentary sadness drifted across Anna’s mind; she wished she hadn’t voiced her doubts out loud, intimated Katherine had run to her death for nothing. Except that Bob had made her life intolerable.

“Talking to dead people,” she said to the gray that knitted branches together above her head. “At least I’m not seeing dead people.” Still, she didn’t move.

Whoever had shot the wolf had made the bite marks so it would appear as if it was killed by a giant beast. It was possible that the animal was tranquilized by one person, then another person happened along in the dark with a pointed object and thought, “Boy, wouldn’t it be funny if…” But Anna doubted it.

Flying back from Intermediate Lake the day she and Jonah saw Chippewa Harbor pack kill the old bull, she had seen a wolfish shape in black, a neat circling of nose to tail, as if a monstrous dog slept in the snow beneath the boughs of an evergreen, just the shape viewed from the air. She thought of the great deception in World War II when the British had salted England with cutouts of Spitfires and barracks without walls so that, seen from the air by German planes, they would look to be an army amassing for an invasion at Calais, while the Allies moved ahead with plans to land on the beaches of Normandy.