Lewis closed his eyes and spit out some blood. He writhed helplessly on the floor, his cheek on cold linoleum, his vision a cluster of white polar boots. Abby, he thought, don't let them do this to you, too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I think all of you believe in the rule of law," Norse began to the assembled winter-overs in the galley. "All of you believe in unity. All of you believe in fairness. And no one has tried harder than myself to keep a rein on our emotions, to counsel moderation, to avoid irrevocable actions. But in a truly extreme situation, extreme measures become inevitable, and an extreme situation is exactly what Jed Lewis has put us in."
Lewis sat in a chair with his hands and feet tied, Pulaski standing over him. The geologist was bruised, dried blood on his face, his hair in an unwashed tangle. His look at Norse was of sullen amazement, anger, and disbelief, but he once more felt overmastered. The fear and the hostility the others directed against him were as heavy and oppressive as the stickiness before a thunderstorm. He'd become the new Tyson.
"We don't have any communications," Norse went on. "We obviously don't have a proper jail. What we do have is a seductive, glib psychotic who has not only killed our only medical doctor but has been mocking us and toying with us from the beginning." The psychologist looked intently at the others. "We're ten thousand miles from home, stranded without help at the darkest, coldest place on earth. A quarter of us are already dead. A determined saboteur could doom us all. It's time for the group to come together, for the group to decide how we're going to get rid of a murderous infection."
"He's lying," Lewis spat, his voice thick and slurred after Pulaski's head butt. "He's not who he says he is! He's the one who's psychotic. Ask him who he really is."
Norse ignored this. "No one was fooled more than I was. No one liked Jed Lewis better than I did. I was his first friend! I ran with him in the Three Hundred Degree Club! But we found him today with the body of Nancy Hodge and with that even I had to admit I'd been wrong about our fingie. Did we see him kill her? No. But we have to act on what we know, and what do we know?"
"We know he has a connection to every bad thing that has happened on this station," Molotov growled. "That all this started when Lewis came."
"I was looking for the X rays, dammit! Ask him about the X rays! That's the key to this whole thing!"
"We know it was Mr. Lewis who put a value on that meteorite," Norse went on, "and that shortly afterward the meteorite went missing. He apparently saw where Doctor Moss hid it. Was he the thief? I can't prove it. You'll remember that Cameron told Jed about the abandoned base and that he asked us about it. Then Mickey Moss died down there. Does that prove anything? No. Does it disprove anything?"
"He went last when we crawled to that pit where we found Mickey," Geller remembered. "The farthest from that hole. Like he knew it was there."
"He sent the e-mail!" Dana shouted.
"Listen to me," Lewis groaned. "Norse came to New Zealand at two different times. You're listening to an impostor."
They looked at him with disbelief. Their attention was on Norse and his recital. They'd stopped listening, because they wanted their nightmare to stop.
"Dana's right," the psychologist went on. "Remember what happened. Harrison Adams found someone had sent Moss an e-mail about the meteorite from Jed's computer in Clean Air. I thought a killer would be more careful than to use his own machine, but perhaps not. During a blizzard Lewis leaves his post despite orders from our station manager to stay there. Adams disappears at the same time. Who finds his body? Lewis. Who's holding a cut heat tape? Lewis. And here's where I made my mistake. I proposed a simple quarantine instead of confinement while we investigated the situation. I wrongly focused on Tyson. And so who asks to meet with Rod Cameron, who was continuing to investigate the two deaths? Lewis. And Rod ends up dead."
"I never even saw Cameron! I never went to the fuel arch!" Norse looked grimly at a group transfixed by this history. He was reciting what they knew. He was preaching to the choir. "It wasn't until later-too late, in fact- that I was exploring Rod's office after the explosion and found this letter." He held up a sheet of paper with Lewis's signature on it, the same one he'd showed Abby. "It promises that Rod can save his career if he lets Lewis have the meteorite. He thought Cameron might have it, and was still determined to get it any way he could."
"It's a forgery! He tricked me into signing that!"
Norse passed the letter around.
"We thought it was Tyson, but wasn't it with Lewis's arrival that our animosity towards Buck began to grow? Did Jed foster that? Frankly, it's difficult to remember. But Tyson fled because he feared he couldn't get a fair hearing, not with Jed Lewis in this group. And now he, too, is probably dead."
"I had nothing to do with- "
"So we welcome Lewis into our little fraternity. We party. Something goes wrong between him and Gabriella. And again, he is on hand for the discovery of her body. The cut-up magazine to make a note, the ashes in his room: We've been through this already."
"Think!" Lewis pleaded. "Why would I lead you to my victims?"
"You're not the first murderer to do so, Jed." Norse's observation was dispassionate, sad.
"Shut up and let Bob finish," Pulaski added. "Then it's your turn."
"So we lock him up," the psychologist resumed. "But before we can ask the authorities back home what action we should take, our communications center explodes from an apparent booby trap, blinding one of our key individuals. Lewis could have created the conditions for that explosion at any time after we curfewed our communications. Yet despite all this a young woman- someone Lewis has been seducing from the beginning and who has apparently been blinded herself by infatuation- springs him from his cell. Now she's disappeared, and perhaps with good reason. Within minutes, hours at most, our medic is dead as a result of Abby Dixon's romantic foolishness. And again, Jed Lewis is discovered with the body. Is Abby an accomplice? Or has he now killed Abby Dixon as well?"
"I told you he's a bloody psycho," Dana muttered.
"This is admittedly circumstantial," Norse went on, weaving the prosecution case. "Lewis has been careful to cover his tracks and to strike unobserved when his victims are alone, or at least when any witness is too blind to identify him, like poor Clyde. Yet sometimes victims can strike back from the grave. Nancy Hodge was drugged but before she died she pulled out the one piece of identification that pinpoints her assailant. There was a folder on her body."
"Yes, Abby's," Lewis said impatiently. "Does that make her the killer?"
"Nancy was smart and the murderer was in too much of a hurry to look at her folder," Norse went on. "It was a grave mistake. Because when we looked at the X rays…" He glanced at the cook.
"They were Jed's," Pulaski concluded quietly.
The group began to buzz like a disturbed hive. What had Lewis been mumbling about X rays? Lewis felt dizzy. The cook pulled out the film of his teeth and it began to be passed around the room like damning proof. Everything had gone horribly wrong.
"I'm sure you can appreciate how embarrassing this is for me," Norse said sadly. "I came down here thinking I was a pretty good shrink. I thought I was a decent judge of character. I bet that Jed Lewis could be trusted. I told Rod he could be trusted. I stuck up for him when the rest of you were suspicious. But I was wrong, dead wrong, and I mean dead in the most literal way. I don't expect you to forgive me. I certainly won't forgive myself. All I ask is that we act, and act now."
"Act how?" Gina Brindisi said in a small voice.
Norse took a breath. "Jed Lewis appears to have directly or indirectly killed six people. Maybe seven, if he's butchered Abby. It's not for me to say if we know that beyond a reasonable doubt. It's for you. But for our own survival and peace of mind, we can't wait out the winter. We can't wait for distant rescue. The final say has to be a group decision, but…"