In Cold Pursuit

by Sarah Andrews

  “We took two of them out to Black Island. Why?”

  “No, the day before.”

  Dave shook his head. “In that storm? Why would anyone do that? And you have to check the keys out from Science Support, don’t you?”

  The Boss shook his head. “Looks like someone hot-wired one of them. It’s not difficult to do. They used to teach us how to do it in case we lost a key out there. Anyway, the guys at Science Support are asking around.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “You do that, champ. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to run.”

  Thinking that he’d be whistling right now if he was any good at it, Dave continued down the hall, hung up his parka in the alcove, washed his hands at the hand-wash station, glanced at the monitors to see if anything interesting was going to be on TV that evening, then stepped into the line to get his dinner. After selecting chop suey, fried rice, egg rolls, and a big piece of chocolate cake, he scanned the dining room in the hope of spotting Valena. He didn’t see her, so he chose a table for four that had nobody else sitting at it, figuring that if she came through the line soon, she’d be more likely to sit with him if he was alone. Just to make sure that he didn’t look too hopeful, he chose a chair that put his back to the food lines.

  His plan quickly failed. “Hey, lover boy,” said Wilbur, lowering his tray onto the table across from him. “I hear you scored with that grantee with the nice ass.”

  Dave quelled an urge to push his plate into Wilbur’s face, managing to instead greet him with a serene smile.

  Joe dropped into the seat beside him. “You pork her for the Steve-o, y’hear?”

  Dave felt his breath go tight. “I miss Steve, too, boys,” he said, trying to steer them off the subject of Valena.

  “Cupcake thinks you did him,” said Joe.

  Dave was just raising a fork full of chop suey to his mouth. He set it down again carefully. “She … what!”

  “She says you knew right where to find him. You ought to hear her. Makes it sound real spooky.”

  “Or dark,” said Wilbur.

  “You guys are just messing with me.”

  “Nope. Scout’s honor. And she’s got Cal Hart talking about you, too.”

  Dave sat very still and contemplated his next move. He breathed deeply, staring at his chop suey. Deciding that finding another place to eat was in order, he gripped the edges of the tray and began to stand up.

  Cal Hart’s hand came to rest on his shoulder. “Where you going, dickhead?” he said, his voice loud enough to be heard at least three tables in any direction.

  Dave continued to stand up and turned toward him all in one move, shoving the tray in between them. “Joe and Wilbur here were just telling me you’ve been talking about me,” said Dave. “Anything you’d care to say straight to my face?”

  “Yeah. But not in here. Come on outside.”

  Dave’s mind sped up. There was something weird about Cal’s manner, like he was reading from a script, but he said, “Suits me.” Brushing past him, he continued to the dish room, scraped his meal into the bins, and dumped his plates and silverware into the wash line. He hated to waste the food, but was too proud to leave it sitting on a table for someone else to clean up for him. He knew he would not be returning to the galley this evening. He was done eating for tonight, entirely done.

  Outside in the cold air of the driveway, he shoved his hands firmly into his jeans pockets, stared at the man who had given his foolish friends something to flap their jaws about, and waited. Joe and Wilbur had followed them outside, and others were slowing their gaits as they passed, gathering to watch. I will keep my hands firmly in my pockets, he told himself. I will not get duped into a fight and get thrown off the ice.

  Cal said, “You’re a real stud, you know that, Dave?”

  Now on top of boiling mad Dave felt a wave of nausea. “If you’re passing lies about me, stop it now. This is too small a town for that kind of—” He couldn’t think of a word strong enough.

  Joe said, “Don’t let him get you mad, Dave. You know the rule: zero tolerance for physical fighting.”

  Edging closer, Cal said, “What I want to know is this: did you kill Steve?”

  “Did I what?” Rage rose in Dave’s chest and his ears began to ring, but he fought to keep his mind rational. Joe’s right, this asshole wants me to take a swing at him. Why?

  Cal’s face now hovered inches from his own. “It just seemed so strange that you knew exactly where to find him. So call me paranoid, but I got to thinking that maybe you hit him, dumped him out there, then took Cupcake out there to make it look like you’d just sort of stumbled on him. And you were there at the high camp last year. Too much of a coincidence.”

  Dave shook his head slowly from side to side. “The Cake chose which route we’d follow. Ask her.” He turned and began to walk away.

  Cal came after him. “So you say. Well, this guy Jim Skehan’s got a real hard-on about finding out who killed Steve.”

  Dave turned back and faced him. “And why should this be a concern of mine?”

  “Because it looks like Skehan’s organizing a posse, and you’re right smack in his radar.” Cal stepped closer to him. “Skehan’s trying to figure out who really killed that reporter Emmett had up in his camp, and you’re on that list, too. I’m not the only one who got a little paranoid. You get it?”

  “So what?”

  “Valena Walker is ‘so what.’ Watch out for her, man.”

  Dave closed his eyes. The image of his companion of the afternoon sitting in the seat of the Challenger smiling, filled his mind. Beautiful Valena smiling. That smile fading as the conversation careened toward what was so clearly troubling her. He shook his head, but it didn’t free him. So he did the one thing he could do for himself: he kept his hands in his pockets and walked away.

  33

  IN HER DORM ROOM, VALENA PACKED AND THEN RE-packed her duffels for field deployment. As she moved through the task, she nibbled at her dinner, which she had brought from the galley on a take-out plate. She had laid the dish on the bunk below hers, chancing spilling chop suey on the comforter, but she was too wired to be concerned with such details. If food spilled off the plate she’d deal with it and take things from there. This seemed a metaphor for the way her entire life seemed to be playing out of late. Besides, on the comforters and Army blankets issued from Housing, a spill might go unnoticed. Like everything else in Antarctica—the so-called furniture in the room, the buildings, the Deltas, the whole town of McMurdo—they had a scavenged look to them. Skuaed, thought Valena, remembering the local term. Picked over by predatory gull-like birds.

  When she was done eating and confident that she had forgotten nothing she would need to survive in a remote Antarctic field camp—short of the equipment she would check out from the Field Center in the morning—she sat down with Emmett Vanderzee’s computer on her lap. She began to skim through the files she had noticed before, looking for anything that seemed connected to his arrest.

  She began with a transcript of the article Frink had published in the Financial News almost two years earlier. It purported to debunk a scientific paper Emmett had published in a scientific journal. She knew the paper backward and forward: it examined data from a wide range of paleoclimate records, including ice cores, lake cores, ocean cores, tree rings, and historical records, and showed that the modern-day climate was warmer than it had been at any time during the last two thousand years. It also showed that this increase had occurred during the last fifty years. The increase was so large and abrupt, in fact, that the graph of temperature increase versus time looked like a hockey stick laid on its side. For the first 1,950 of those two thousand years, the shaft of the hockey stick lay horizontally, with little or no increase. Then in the last fifty years—the puck end of the stick—the temperature had shot upward. AI Gore had emphasized this information by standing on a lift in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, rising with the line on his graph in a horrifyin
g swing toward the ceiling.

  Frink’s article attacked Emmett’s findings by stating that his data were scant, self-contradictory, and subject to misinterpretation, and concluded with a strong statement about Emmett’s motivation for having published his analysis: “Clearly, Mr. Vanderzee wishes to scare citizens back into the Stone Age. One wonders to what lengths he will go to obtain his next dole of grant money from public funds.”

  “Whoa!” said Valena out loud. She read on. The next file in the sequence was a compendium of letters to the editor of the Financial News that had been sent in response to the article. Emmett had written an eloquent rebuttal to the article, as had Jim Skehan and other scientists. Following each letter was a transcript of the way each had actually been published in that newspaper. As Skehan had told her, the letters had been severely edited, changing them into confused prattle.

  Rebuttals to the edits followed, Skehan’s particularly vitriolic. Responding e-mails from the editor stated only that they were “looking into the matter.” Next in the file were a flurry of e-mails from colleagues indicating that the edited letters to the editor had done their damage within the scientific community.

  Things got even worse from there. The next file was a scanned photocopy of a letter to Emmett Vanderzee from the United States senator who chaired the committee on science. The letter “requested” that he come to Washington to appear before the committee and explain his analysis of the data. The senator demanded a list of documents: not only Emmett’s published analysis but also his raw data, his colleagues’ data, a listing of his funding sources, and justification for all current and planned climate studies. Finally, it required that he open his books, showing how all project funds were being spent.

  The letter was a shotgun approach to fact finding, a witch hunt, an attempt to intimidate, so outrageous that Valena thought at first that it must be a joke letter sent by a colleague, and she reexamined the letterhead to make certain that it was authentic.

  Why would the US Senate presume to review scientific research? Was that within their purview or, more sensibly, within their expertise?

  She understood more fully now why Emmett had invited Frink to his camp. He had wanted to teach the man how science was done, and what it meant. He had wanted the journalist to understand that while scientific interpretations of data were open to debate, that debate belonged between people who understood not only how to analyze the data but also how those data had been gathered. He had wanted Frink to call off his dogs.

  But instead of Frink, he had gotten Sweeny. What was Sweeny’s piece in all of this? Why was a political reporter looking into science?

  Valena read on. After Sweeny’s death, the Financial News articles went for Emmett’s jugular not just as a scientist but as a man, painting him blacker and blacker through innuendo and almost direct statement that he had set Sweeny up to die. “Emmett Vanderzee, who is under investigation by the Senate Committee on Science, was not content to take criticisms,” began one article, and, “Having attempted to incite widespread panic with his flawed analysis of climate variations, Vanderzee greeted criticism by leading Morris Sweeny to his death,” read another. There were accusations that he “would do anything to protect his funding.”

  The date of the latest article was three days before Emmett had invited her to join him this year in Antarctica. Was that because Schwartz and Lindemann had just that minute jumped ship?

  Flicking the cursor back into the list of programs, she opened her professor’s stored e-mails and set the pointer to group them alphabetically by sender. She scrolled to F for Frink, but there was nothing there. She then scrolled to S for Sweeny and found a short list. The first few were no surprise, questions about what to expect in the camp and what to bring. They were all dated within just weeks of Sweeny’s arrival on the ice, suggesting that he had signed on late in the game. The last one caught her interest:

  Mr. Vanderzee

  Am in receipt of the image taken in your camp yesterday. Wanting to know name of second man from right. Is this Edgar Hallowell?

  Morris Sweeny

  She backed up one e-mail and found what she expected: Sweeny’s original request for a photograph of all personnel who were working with him that year. Why would he want that? And who was Edgar Hallowell, and why was Morris Sweeny interested in him? She closed her eyes, concentrating. The only name even close to that is Ted, which could be a nickname for Edgar. But why would a political reporter coming to Antarctica to learn about climate change be interested in a guy who blows things up?

  Pondering these questions, Valena turned on the word-processing program, opened a blank document, and began to write, making notes of the conversations she had had with the people who had been in Emmett’s camp:

  Emmett Vanderzee—arrested

  Bob Schwartz—stayed in tent, doesn’t want to talk about it, argued with deceased?

  Manuel Roig—saddened by events, was in cook tent, cook is alibi

  Sheila Tuttle—Roig her alibi

  Willy?—seems unmotivated and slow-witted, but crafty?

  Mischievous? Could he be stupid enough to get into trouble?

  Calvin Hart—says he helped EV, but did he? Where was he?

  Dave Fitzgerald—

  She could not bring herself to make an entry next to the last name, so instead she added Ted’s, just in case he had some previously undisclosed connection to the deceased.

  It was getting late. Valena turned off the computer and once again hid it inside her closet. She rolled her bath kit and pajamas into her towel, stuffed them under her arm, and headed down the hallway toward the showers, where she crammed herself into one of the tight, worn-out shower stalls with the plastic curtains too narrow to fill the gaps they were meant to cover.

  The water became hot very quickly. Abstractedly, she thought of Peter the energy efficiency engineer. Had he fitted the system with a recirculating hot water system so that people wouldn’t have to run the water long to get it hot? It’s all resources, she thought. Antarctica is all about the resources. So if that’s so, what resource came into play at Emmett’s high camp?

  She was at last beginning to relax a little, enjoying the sensation of hot water coursing over her body, when she heard a familiar voice call her name. It was Cupcake. Oh, good, I can ask her Ted’s full name, she thought, as she turned off the water and pulled the shower curtain across her body. “Hey, what’s—”

  “Just looking for you, darling.” Cupcake wobbled a little, the effect of several stiff drinks. “You know, I’m good. Real good.”

  “Aw, come on, Dorothy! I’m in the shower!” Valena pulled the scanty curtain closed as far as it would go and turned the water back on.

  “I can see that, not that you’re showing me much.”

  Valena’s blood began to boil, an old habit of getting mad so she wouldn’t have to know that she was scared. “Get out of here! I mean now!”

  Cupcake began to back away. “Don’t get so touchy. Wha’ happened at the rest of that meeting? ‘At’s why I’m here. I jus’ wanna know what’s up …”

  “I said go away!”

  Another woman came into the bathroom. “Hey there, Cakes, wassup?”

  “Oh, I’m just having a little chat with my friend here, tryin’ ta calm her down. She’s sort of upset.”

  Valena stuck her head out again. “Upset? You want to see upset? Just push it an inch farther!”

  The third woman grabbed Cupcake by the arm. “Come on, Dorothy, you know better than to screw with a grantee.”

  Cupcake yanked her arm loose. “Screw with her? Hell, I came in here to warn her about her new boyfriend!”

  The woman grabbed Cupcake by both arms now and hauled her out the door. “You’re drunk! Come on, Dorothy!”

  As the door swung shut, Valena heard Cupcake yell, “He looks real sweet, but it’s just a candy coating! You don’t want to know what’s hiding inside!”

  Valena huddled against the back wall of the shower. Adre
naline coursed through her naked body. She began to tremble, shivering with cold even under the hot water, and she wondered if she was going to throw up. She tried to think, to get herself under control. It’s just been a hard few days, she told herself firmly. Get a grip. Yeah, there’s bad shit happening around here, people getting killed, but I’ve got that under control now. I’m leaving for Cape Royds in the morning, and I’ll be safe where I’m going. Okay, maybe it’s not smart to go to that field camp where Lindemann is, but what’s he going to do to me? Screw up his doctoral position? Not hardly.

  The water began to warm her skin, but deep inside she still felt cold. She turned off the water and pulled her towel inside. Tried to rub herself dry. Her skin felt like it was crawling around on her body.

  Cautiously, she stepped out of the shower, dressed, and headed down the hallway, glancing both ways to make sure Cupcake wasn’t waiting for her there.

  Back in her room, she climbed into her bunk, pulled the blankets and comforter up to her chin, and closed her eyes. Slowly, by inches, she admitted to herself that she was scared, not angry, and that what had scared her most was the chance that Cupcake might be right about Dave Fitzgerald.

  34

  VALENA ONCE AGAIN AWOKE EARLY. SHE DRESSED quickly and, leaving her gear in the room, slipped out the door and across the way toward the building where the Airlift Wing had its offices. There she left a note with Master Sergeant John Lansing, with instructions to give it to Larry. It read:

  One of the men at Emmett’s camp may have been using an alias. Sweeny may have been looking for someone named Edgar Hallowell.

  Thanks, Valena

  She wrote her e-mail address across the bottom of the page.

  This task dispatched, she jogged back across to Building 155 and headed down the hallway in search of a hearty breakfast. Glancing neither left at the flight manifests, nor right at the monitors mounted near the galley door, she grabbed a tray and headed into the food lines, steering a course directly toward the omelet man. “Good morning,” she said, awarding him her best smile.