“Robin’s better off where she is,” Adam said. “Bob made sure of that.”
In his uniquely dreadful winter gear, goose down poking out and the duct tape taking up more area than the nylon, Adam looked like Robinson Crusoe: The Northern Saga. He also looked crazy as a loon.
Anna moved closer. Menechinn was a yard or two from Adam, saying nothing and standing in a heap of clothes and flesh as if his bones had softened and could barely keep him upright. Hoods and balaclava hid his face.
“Bob!” Anna said sharply. He raised his head with the slow swaying of a bull too old and too blind to know where danger is coming from.
“Bob,” he echoed, and his pulled-back grin creased his face above the folds of his neck scarf. With a hand the size of a club, he pawed off his hood, baring his head to the elements. His face was the color of new brick.
“What’s wrong with him?” Anna asked.
“Tasting his own medicine,” Adam said. “Go back. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Ketamine?”
“His drug of choice,” Adam said.
“You are doing this for Cynthia?”
“Cynthia is dead,” Adam said. “This is just for me.”
“For revenge?” Anna asked. “To even the scales? To get some of your own back? Like you said, Adam, Cynthia is dead. She’s going to stay dead. Give me one good reason to go through with this.”
“For fun.” There was no expression on his face. It was as blank as if the executioner’s hood was already drawn over his features.
“Okay,” Anna admitted. “That is as good a reason for doing it as any, I guess.”
“Doing what? What are we doing?” Bob asked, alarm creeping into the smear of happiness Lady K had put on his mouth.
“As much a fan as I am of fun, it’s short-lived for the most part,” Anna said. “With a first-degree murder rap, prison lasts forever.”
“Go back,” Adam said.
“Let me arrest him,” Anna said.
“And then what? Cynthia can’t testify. Robin can’t. Katherine can’t.”
Adam’s words were heavy, falling in flat chunks through the snowy air. Anna wanted to argue, tout the fierce and powerful justice of the law, but he was right. Bob would get off. Robin’s blood would prove positive for ketamine if Anna could get it to a lab in time and if its freezing hadn’t changed the chemical properties, but who was to say Robin hadn’t taken it herself? The pictures on Katherine’s cell phone were damning only to Katherine. They could be traced to Bob, but who was to say it wasn’t consensual? Rape was hard to prove at the most obvious of times.
Institutions hated rape charges. This would be swept under the table by three powerful bodies: Homeland Security, the National Park Service and American University; well-meaning people wanting to keep the mud off their organization, wanting to keep their positions.
“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 there there. Adam means to kill you. You’re on the edge of a cliff; step back.”
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.