"It's Lewis. I've come to help."
"Lewis?" His voice betrayed dread. "You set the bomb."
"No, I didn't, Clyde. Someone's setting me up."
The man lay quietly, looking afraid.
"What happened? BioMed was locked. Where's Nancy?"
"You've come to kill me, too, haven't you?"
"No! No, no. I'm trying to help. What the hell happened?"
"Where's Abby?"
"I don't know."
"Nancy told me to talk only to Abby."
"Well, where's Nancy?"
"I don't know, I don't know. There was a noise, like something breaking, and Nancy yelled, someone inside, and then lots of banging around, and then it went quiet. I thought you'd all abandoned me. I thought you'd left the station and left me behind."
Lewis glanced around. BioMed was a mess. There was blood all over the examining table: Gina must have really been cut. More ominously, drawers hung half open, cabinet doors were swung wide, and medical supplies had cascaded onto the floor. Notebooks had spilled a glacier of paper. The place had been ransacked. Where the hell was Nancy?
The storage door in back was cracked open.
He went to the entrance and tried to push open the door, but something was blocking it. He shoved enough to get an arm through the opening and turned on the light to see what was in the way.
Legs.
Lewis felt a sick dread. He pushed harder and something heavy skidded aside, allowing him to squeeze through. He stumbled inside and looked down in grim confirmation at Nancy Hodge, her eyes rolled back and mouth open, a hypodermic needle jutting from the back of her neck. A set of X rays was resting on her body. He knelt and glanced at a manila folder. It read, "Abby Dixon."
The assailant was still confusing the trail.
He felt vainly for a pulse. Their doctor was dead. There were no obvious cuts and bruises, but not even junkies injected themselves in the nape of the neck. It was obvious that someone had crept up behind her and injected her. Killed her before she could talk about the X rays. Killed her before she could talk about Norse.
No escape. No radio. And now no doctor.
No proof.
He glanced around. X-ray records were upended and the storage cabinet against the rear wall had been shoved aside, exposing a metal panel screwed to the wall, scratched and dirty. Lewis slowly stood. They were doomed. Except… someone had been searching BioMed. And that searching meant maybe Nancy had hidden the two sets of X rays. What if Norse hadn't found them yet?
Another faint tremor of hope. The shifted storage cabinet appeared to hold nothing but medical supplies. The panel behind it required a screwdriver. So he moved out into the main sick bay and began his own search.
"What's going on? What's happening?" Skinner asked from his bed, his voice fearful. It wasn't just his pain. It was agonizing not to see.
"Nancy's dead, Clyde."
"Oh my God!" he moaned. "Not her, too!"
"It wasn't me who killed her. You have to believe that."
Skinner was silent.
"Did you see anything?"
"Is that a joke?"
Lewis grimaced. "Sorry."
"Dead how?" His tone was hopeless.
"An injection. Maybe murder. Was Norse here?"
"No voice. Just funny noises. Like what you're doing now."
"But who was it? Who was here before me, Clyde?"
"I don't know." There was a tremor in his voice. He was afraid.
"Think! I might need your help!"
"Please don't kill me, Lewis. I didn't see anything."
"Christ." He gave up on Skinner and turned to the drawers. The room didn't take that long to search. Nothing. "He took them," Lewis muttered.
"Took what?"
"Something Nancy had."
"Does it matter?"
He stood, despairing. How could he convince the others? "It matters because it means that I am well and truly screwed." He looked back at Nancy's body, frustrated and depressed.
"And that's the first intelligent observation you've made since you came here," a different voice said.
It was someone at the doorway. Lewis turned.
Norse!
The psychologist stepped inside and turned to address a group of men behind him. "We finally caught him in the act," he announced.
Pulaski, Geller, Calhoun, and Perlin followed, crowding one end of BioMed. A posse rousted from the videos in the library, bleary and belligerent. The open door let in a freezerlike chill, the spilled papers shifting in the draft. Abby's X rays slid off Nancy's still chest with a sigh. "It wasn't me," Lewis tried.
"It's never you, is it, Jed?" Norse replied softly.
Lewis picked up his ice ax in instinctive defense, trying to buy a moment's time, composing what he had to say. But before he could speak, Pulaski shot forward in sudden assault, the cook's flying tackle hurling Lewis backward against a set of wall shelves, the air whooshing out of him and the ice ax spinning into a corner. The shelves gave way, crashing down around his head. Dimly he realized Geller and Calhoun and Perlin were charging, too. "Wait!" he yelled.
Pulaski butted his face with his bald head, bloodying Lewis's nose, and one of the others struck him in the stomach. Lewis couldn't breathe. He feebly tried to rise but the cook gripped him in a wrestling hold, twisted his arm, and expertly flipped him onto his belly. Other strong hands caught his wrists and ankles and twisted electrical cords around them.
They'd trailed him to BioMed. Waited while he scampered across the snow. Crept up while he was discovering the body.
Geller grunted and stood up, stepping over Lewis into the storeroom beyond. "Nancy's dead!" he confirmed.
Lewis had been hit so hard he was seeing stars. It was difficult to think. "No," he wheezed. "I found- "
"Clyde, you all right?" Calhoun asked Skinner.
"What's going on? What's going on?"
"It's Doctor Bob," Norse said. "We caught Lewis preparing to kill you."
"Oh my God. Where's Abby?"
"We're looking for her, too. You seen her?"
Skinner said nothing. He was shaking with fear.
"She comes here, you notify us, okay?"
The blind man went rigid, as if waiting for a blow.
Norse crouched by Lewis's head, looking disgusted. "Who let you out?"
"X rays…"
"It was Dixon, wasn't it?"
"Ask Clyde…"
"Jed Lewis," he said solemnly, "by the emergency powers confirmed to me by the agreement of our peers in an emergency situation, I place you under arrest for the murder of Nancy Hodge."
He was choking, trying to get the words out. "Bastard…"
"And for the murders of Gabriella Reid, Rod Cameron, Harrison Adams, and Mickey Moss. Perhaps manslaughter for the flight of Buck Tyson. For the blinding of Clyde Skinner. For terrorism and emotional assault, for theft and false witness, for stalking and betrayal. You've jeopardized the very existence of Amundsen-Scott station."
Lewis's lower face was a mask of blood, his throat hacked, his ribs sore. "Lie!"
Norse stood. "You all saw it," he told the others. "We caught him in the act this time. He broke into BioMed after I'd ordered Nancy to lock it for her own safety. But we're not savages. We're going to have a trial."
"What can we do with him even if he's guilty?" It was Gage Perlin, looking at the trussed Lewis with frank fear. "He already busted out of the sauna. It's like he never stays put. He gets out, and something happens."
"It's my fault this occurred," Norse said. "I wouldn't listen to the rest of you. I wouldn't act when the rest of you wanted to. I wanted to go slow. But this time I am going to listen to you. This time we're going to end this nightmare once and for all."
"No," Lewis coughed. "He's not- "
Something in Norse snapped. He kicked Lewis, knocking the wind out of him again. It was as if he were furious with himself for having been blinded by the man's ruses. "Shut up, Lewis! Just shut up!"
He turned to the others. "We need to locate Abby- find out what her role was in all this."