She paused, closed her eyes, and some time passed before she opened them again. “I feel like I’m being watched. That sounds weird and paranoid, I know. But I can’t shake the feeling. It’s like that old thing where you’re walking by yourself on a dark sidewalk and think somebody’s following you, but when you look over your shoulder, there’s no one. I haven’t said anything about that, even to Fida. But I’m thinking maybe I should.
“One thing’s for sure. On Friday I am going to Thing Night. Alone. No Ambie. Wore out his welcome. I just want to drink a beer and dance a little. Have fun. If I can remember how.”
The video stopped. It was the last one.
Hallie stared at her laptop’s screen. What to do next? First thing, secure the card. She put it back where she had found it. If the thing had stayed there undiscovered this long, it was as good a place as any.
She could not get the afterimage of Emily’s ravaged face out of her mind. She wasn’t sure she ever would. It took her back to a time when they had both looked like that, after the climb on Denali.
The Cassin Ridge stuck out of Denali’s south face like the dorsal fin of a shark and was one of the world’s great big-mountain ascents. Before dawn they started up the route on the sixty-degree Japanese Couloir, about 1,000 vertical feet of ice, a long, shining blue mirror. Placing the tool picks and crampon points was like trying to drive nails into slabs of glass. Chunks of ice called “dinner plates” kept breaking off and shattering when they hit the ice lower down. It was some of the most delicate climbing Hallie had ever done. They would have moved to the couloir’s rock walls, but those were even worse, encased in a half-inch of clear, brittle ice called verglas.
With the chute finally climbed, they stopped on the Cassin Ledge, a rock shelf at 13,400 feet just big enough for two tents. They drank tea and slurped energy gel. The air was clear, a light wind blowing up the face. To the south they could see the Kahiltna Glacier curling around like a vast, white snake and, beyond that, the shining peaks of Mounts Hunter and Huntington, giants in their own right but dwarfed by Denali, the highest mountain in North America and the largest massif on earth.
They moved out, and an hour of moderate rock climbing brought them to a nightmarish obstacle called the Cowboy Traverse, a knife-edged ridge, very exposed, with both flanks dropping away at sixty-degree angles.
They were climbing unroped — simul-soloing — for speed. Hallie went first, straddling the ridge like a horse, crunching through crust over loose sugar snow. She knew that there had to be another hard, slick layer somewhere underneath. An avalanche could start when the weight of new snow — or a wrong step by some climber — sent the whole thing sliding like sand down a tilted mirror. But if you wanted the Cassin, this was how you went.
Seventy-five feet out, Hallie took that wrong step. A crack one hundred feet long opened across the slope, and a slab avalanche two feet thick let go. At first, it felt slow and gentle, unreal as a dream. Three seconds later it was like being spun in a giant dryer full of bricks.
The friction-melted snow froze as solid as concrete seconds after stopping. Upside down, she could move her tongue and one eyelid. She had created a small air space by cupping her hands in front of her face as the avalanche slowed. It was the first time in her life she had known absolutely that she was going to die.
She closed the working eye and said the Lord’s Prayer several times. Brought up images of her mother and father, brothers, and Barnard. Moved away from tears. Every trip had a verdict. She’d known that going in. No blame for a mountain.
She was hypoxic and semiconscious when something struck her boot sole a hard blow. Three shovel strokes later, she felt Emily shake the boot and yell at her to keep fucking breathing, goddamnit.
Later, off the ridge and looking back, she saw. Emily had traversed diagonally down and across 150 feet of intact but unstable slope to reach her. That whole section could have slid at any second. Should have, really.
“We both ought to be dead right now,” Hallie said, still shaking from cold and fear. “You know that.”
“What would you have done?” Emily handed her another cup of hot, sweet tea.
She thought about living another fifty or sixty years knowing she had done nothing. “The same.”
“See? No choice.” And then they both cried.
She wasn’t sure how long that reverie lasted, but now she had to think carefully about what she had seen. Who was Ambie? A pet name, obviously. But short for what? There weren’t a lot of men’s names that began with those letters. Ambrose, Ames, Amal, Amadeus … What she needed was a roster of station personnel.
Merritt, overseeing only the scientists, wasn’t likely to have that.
But Graeter, captain of the ship, was.
If she could find a man with that name, she might find Emily’s killer.
16
Hallie thought graeter might say hello. Instead, he pointed at his wrist.
“You’re late. Doctor. Leland.”
“Actually, I’m not.” Having taken his measure yesterday, Hallie had made a point of being precisely on time this morning. She held up her wristwatch as proof. “Twelve noon.”
Graeter held up both hands. He wore two watches, one on each wrist. “My time is Pole time,” he said. “I have you two minutes late. You might want to synchronize your watch with mine.”
“Pole time,” she said. “Sounds like a beer commercial.” She didn’t touch her watch. He was a never-good-enough man, but he would get no bowing or scraping from her. Might mean butting heads, but she would rather butt than bow any day.
“Sleep well?” Graeter asked.
“Is that a joke?”
“It’ll pass. Or maybe not. Some never adjust.”
“I know altitude. But my mouth feels like I gargled with acid. Do people get sick that quickly here?”
“You’re probably not sick. Yet. It’s frostbite. When you stepped out of the plane, you went from sixty above to about seventy below. Sucked in air. Involuntary, like what happens if you jump into freezing water. It heals in a few days. Usually.”
“Comforting.”
“Have you—”
“Did you find out anything more about the women who died?” she asked.
“I thought we covered this yesterday.”
“We didn’t cover the possibility that some pathogen might have killed them. If that’s the case, it could happen to others.”
“That wasn’t it,” he said, much too casually for her mood just then.
“How could you know that? Just about everybody I’ve talked to so far has been sick with one thing or another.”
“Doc called. He said Lanahan had some kind of operation on her throat. Montalban had surgery, too — a C-section.”
The same things Merritt had said.
Should I tell him?
Merritt could not have been the killer; the one piece of real information Hallie had — thanks to Emily’s video — was that the killer was a man. Graeter — more likely than Merritt, obviously. She would tell him nothing.
He glanced at the watch on his left wrist again. “Let’s go. I have a station to run here.”
He brushed past her and was out the door before she could protest.
A few minutes later, they were walking along the main corridor when Rockie Bacon approached. She wore bunny boots and black insulated Carhartt coveralls over a red plaid shirt. She held a smartphone in one palm and was texting as she walked, oblivious to Hallie and Graeter.
“Good afternoon, Bacon,” Graeter said.