Adam was asleep on the sofa, or appeared to be. Bob had long since retired to his room and Ridley and Jonah to theirs. Sleeping was usually something Anna was good at under stress, that and eating. Years hiking trails in the backcountry had taught her to sleep and eat every chance she got, the way animals did. When one’s body was the only vehicle available to keep one’s soul from drifting into the ozone, it behooved the driver to keep the tanks topped off.
Tonight was a glaring exception.
Muscle and bone sank gratefully into the hard embrace of the mattress. Fatigue washed over her mind, warm and soporific. Then the delicious sense of drifting into oblivion morphed into sinking under the ice in Intermediate Lake, and she fought desperately back to wakefulness. The nightmare version was more terrifying than almost drowning had been. In the lake, there had been little time for anything but staying alive. In dreams, there was all the time in imagination.
For reasons probably relating more to her sleeping habits than her near-death experience, she was naked in the water. The crippling cold wasn’t a factor. Below her lay not the limitless new world she’d glimpsed at the time but the terrors children suffer in nightmares: being helpless and abandoned to a force so utterly evil, one never musters the courage to look at it; a force that would not have the mercy to grant the relief of death. Again and again Anna dragged her bare breasts and belly up an icy edge, serrated like a knife, kicking legs weak to the point of near paralysis, to fend off the black, sucking certainty of what lay below.
It didn’t take too many repetitions of this nocturnal entertainment before she decided staying awake was a spiffy alternative.
She lay on her back in the dark and stared upward at a ceiling that she presumed was still there. In a lightless environment, the nothing above her eyes could have been two inches deep or gone on to infinity. The bedside lamp could restore the ceiling to its proper place; Jonah had left the generator running. He said it was in case of emergency, but it was for comfort, the knowledge that they could have light if they heard the stealthy footfalls of boogeymen creeping about. Or boogey-wolves.
Bogus wolves, Anna thought. Werewolves.
Not the species of legend that morphed from seersucker suits to snouts but man posing as a wolf, taking on the imagined properties of the wolf: stealth, strength, ruthlessness, viciousness, love of slaughter for its own sake. It didn’t take a trained psychiatrist to see the projection in that equation. Man gave the wolf all the dark bits of himself, then vilified the wolf.
Isle Royale’s wog might or might not exist. It was said DNA didn’t lie, but it had also been said pictures didn’t lie until computers put the lie to that. What lied was people and they lied all the time, and for every reason under the sun. People lied with words and pictures, and, if it were possible, they would lie with DNA. Katherine could have faked the results for a reason that died with her.
Anna couldn’t shake the certainty that why Katherine died was at the heart of the bizarre happenings, but the researcher had not been shot or stabbed or smothered. She’d been savaged by a pack of wolves. It would take more time and expertise than anyone on the island had at hand to fake that: tracks, scat, urine, wounds, fur and tooth marks.
Cause of death wasn’t in question and death by misadventure didn’t have a why. It had a cause: wrong place, wrong time, bad decisions, faulty machinery. Why needed motive and only humans had motives.
Anna turned her back on the crowding infinity of night above her and stared at the eternal nothing where Robin’s bed had been when she’d turned out the light.
The heart of the issue was, why Katherine died.
Katherine had died accidentally at the auspices of wolves.
There was no way Anna could work that equation that didn’t end up in the twilight zone.
Sensing herself headed in the same direction, she fumbled over the edges of the desk between the beds, found the light, switched it on and sat up, her sleeping bag tucked in her armpits. Reoriented in space, her mind back in her skull, she marshaled what she knew about Katherine.
Katherine met and fell in love with a wolf when she was three years old. Bob Menechinn was her graduate adviser. He had carried her up five flights of stairs when she was unconscious. Katherine had shown a desire to keep Robin away from Bob. She’d gone so far as to tell Anna to warn the pretty young biotech to stay away from him. Katherine was cowed by, in love with or frightened by her professor. She rarely stood up to Bob. The first time was in the camp between Windigo and Malone. The second was in the cabin at Malone Bay after Robin had gone to free the trapped wolf.
In the tent, wog or wolf snorting around outside, Bob had gone nuts, shouting and waving his headlamp. Katherine said: “Be quiet. You’ll scare him away.” Remembering the look on Robin’s face when Katherine hadn’t gibbered with terror – Katherine had been concerned about the monster – Anna smiled.
Did Katherine think it was her wolf lover come back for her after twenty-three years or more? In dog years, that would be one old lover. No, Katherine was not crazy; she didn’t strike Anna as even particularly fanciful. She knew wolves and she wasn’t afraid. Not then anyway. She’d told Bob to be quiet because she loved the wolf more than she did him.
Early on, Anna hadn’t given Bob and Katherine as Bob and Katherine more than a passing thought. Lovers, married lovers, ex-lovers, jaded lovers were ubiquitous in every profession. Unlike wolves, humans weren’t engineered to be monogamous. Considering it now, she didn’t think Katherine was in love with Bob. Anna had found it impossible to so much as like the man, despite the fact he saved her life, but women often loved wretched men. Men loved vile women. In the infamous words of Woody Allen: “The heart wants what it wants.”
During the Malone Bay adventure, Anna began to suspect that what she’d first taken for fear or jealousy on Katherine’s part was barely controlled fury, the acidic variety that the powerless suffer, the kind that eats away from the inside.
Katherine had hinted Bob was withholding her Ph.D. Was that sufficient motive to hate? Probably. People hated without much provocation.
The second time Katherine contradicted him was when he’d said the study must be shut down; she insisted the foreign DNA was sufficient reason to keep ISRO closed winters, keep the study intact.
Protecting wolves again? Protecting scientific study? Anna wondered if Katherine had a greater investment in the island’s wolf/moose research than she’d let on. Had she an interest that made it worth her while to fake the DNA results?
Katherine was all whispers and Bob all shouts, yet both of them were opaque, keeping their secrets.
The woodstove had been stoked later than usual and, though the door was closed, the bedroom was warm. Anna let her sleeping bag fall down around her waist. Pulling it back up to cover her nakedness, she realized that the window, curtainless and without blinds – a fact she’d never noticed before – was making her modest. No longer did she feel the safety of an uninhabited wilderness beyond the glass.
She switched off the bedside lamp and let the sleeping bag drop.
Drifting unanchored in the dark, she replayed Katherine. Bob introducing her the first night, Katherine ducking, hiding behind her hair. Bob asking her if they’d ever used ketamine, Katherine blushing and turning away. Katherine insisting on telling the others at Malone Bay that Bob was so strong, he carried her up five flights of stairs.
When she was unconscious. Anna turned the light back on.
Bob had carried Robin back from the V.C.
When she was unconscious.
Bob asked, “Have we ever used ketamine?” Robin lost one of the jab sticks loaded with ketamine and xylazine. Katherine fought with Bob after collecting the dead wolf’s blood. Anna’d had trouble with that. Because Katherine had treated them as such, Anna guessed the blood samples were important but couldn’t figure out why, given the work the researcher had done in the kitchen/lab before the wolf had thawed.
Anna had been assuming there were other samples from that wolf. There weren’t, she realized. Blood had not been collected earlier during the external exam; the wolf and his blood were frozen. There were no other blood samples but those in Katherine’s pocket. The dismembered wolf was blood dry and refrozen. Anna put the revelation that the samples were unique aside for later consideration and went back to Katherine.
Bob was with Robin in the V.C. before Anna arrived. Bob was with Katherine’s corpse in the carpenter’s shed, frisking – or fondling – the dead woman.
Anna wriggled free of her sleeping bag and, turning her back on the staring window, pulled on sweatpants and a turtleneck. She turned the light out again and, feeling her way from desk to door, opened it quietly, slipped through and into Katherine’s room. Making no sound, she closed that door and shoved something soft under it, a towel, she guessed, then turned on the light. The black staring of the uncovered window startled her. Night and wild had always been her friends. Now both made her jumpy.
Katherine’s laptop was on her desk, plugged into the wall to save its batteries. Once, when Anna wished to pry into the lives of dead or uncooperative individuals, she looked for paper: diaries, letters, notes; she listened to phone messages. Now she went straight for the laptop. Unless Katherine had a BlackBerry or an iPhone, the laptop would be where she housed her life when she wasn’t using it.
Having unplugged the laptop, she turned the light out again, dragged back the bathrobe she’d thought was a towel, returned to her own room and completed the operation one more time in reverse. Then she covered the window with Robin’s parka, shoving the sleeves into the grooves of the metal window frame to cover peepholes from the woods. There was probably no need for secrecy. There was probably no one out in the wee hours, peeking in frosty windows. But telling everyone everything hadn’t worked. Anna was switching back to telling no one nothing.
The laptop wasn’t password protected. The screen saver that came up was a photograph of Katherine and an older woman who looked so much like her, she couldn’t be anyone but her mother or an aunt. The two women were laughing, the camera obviously held in front of them in Katherine’s hand, as they yelled “Cheese!”
Anna clicked the START button and began methodically slogging through the files. Unlike paper files, computer files were snooper-friendly. There weren’t mountains of paper to hide the molehills of information. Katherine’s life was laid out and dissected as neatly as the wolf on the table in the carpenter’s shop had been.
Number-oriented, Katherine kept spreadsheets of her personal finances. She earned barely enough to live on but was subsidized by a monthly stipend. From her mother, Anna guessed by the notes Katherine had typed beside two of the entries. She paid her bills by computer. The usual cost of living was there: gas, water, electricity, food, insurance. Not surprisingly, Katherine spent about three times as much on books as she did on clothing and got her hair cut at a walk-in shop at the mall for ten dollars a visit.
She had been on the antidepressant Effexor for eighteen months. Half of America was on antidepressants, but Katherine had been given a hefty dose, 250 milligrams daily, plus.75 milligrams of Trazodone, an antidepressant and sleep aid. There were weekly payments to a Dr. Lewis. A psychologist, Anna assumed, from the regularity and frequency. Dr. Lewis’s name had appeared at about the time of the prescription payments for the antidepressants. The month prior to the advent of the mental health expenditures was an entry to another doctor with the note “D &C” alongside it. Other entries in the medical expenses were marked “co-pay.” This one wasn’t.
Maybe an abortion.
Then depression.
Under the file named “Black Ops,” Katherine had saved sixteen articles from newspapers and periodicals as ridiculous as The Star and as sublime as The Journal of the American Medical Association on the subjects of amnesia, traumatic amnesia, fugue states, repressed memory and multiple personalities.
The folder “Possibilities” contained short synopses of what Anna assumed were personal profiles from a matchmaking Web site. After each was written a number and a letter. Shorthand, possibly for the number of times they’d contacted and the letter grade Katherine had used to rate the contacts. There were considerably more F’s and D’s than A’s or B’s. The last entry had been two months before the “D &C” entered into the medical bills. One of the A’s or B’s might have been the father of the D &C. Or Katherine might have stopped dating – or shopping – at the time she became pregnant. What, if anything, this had to do with her death by wild animal attack a year and a half later Anna couldn’t fathom.
Under the file name “The Great Escape” were fragments of sentences, as if Katherine had been jotting down ideas or keeping a list.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS NEGATIVES ANYMORE.
IF MOTHER WAS DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE?
MURDER OR SUICIDE.
IF I WERE DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE?
MOTHER.
MURDER’S A DONE DEAL.
EVERYBODY’S ON THE NET.
WHO WOULD HIRE ME?
I WOULD DIE.
“Well, that’s just cryptic as hell,” Anna muttered. The list gave the impression Katherine was thinking of killing her mother or herself or her mother, then herself. The mother that gave her money every month. The mother she was hugging and laughing with on her screen saver.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS NEGATIVES ANYMORE.
The list that followed was nothing but negatives. “Everybody’s on the Net,” Anna read aloud. “Who would hire me? I would die.”
She minimized that screen and clicked on a file named “Pictures” from the main menu. Given the propensity to save everything when space is measured in gigabytes, Katherine hadn’t saved many photographs. Most were of animals, wild and domestic, that had been taken with more love than skill. There were a half dozen of Katherine taken with the woman on the screen saver, winter shots with mufflers and skis, both women smiling and laughing.
There’s no such thing as negatives anymore.
Because few people used film. Katherine had been talking about digital photography. Anna returned to the list saved in “The Great Escape” folder. Viewed from the perspective of photography, it made sense.
There’s no such things as negatives – in the classic stories of blackmail, victims had to buy back the negatives of incriminating photographs.
If Mother was dead, who would care? If Katherine was referencing compromising photographs this suggested, not that no one would miss Mother but that Mother was the person Katherine was most concerned about seeing the photographs.
What one didn’t want Mother to see was usually sexual in nature. Though born from Mother’s womb and because of her sexual congress with Father, girls – women – did not want Mom to see them in bed with some guy. Or some girl, Anna reminded herself.
MURDER OR SUICIDE.
Anna doubted the murder referred to Katherine’s mother. More likely it referred to the man who had impregnated her. Given the list of graded Internet “Matches,” it didn’t appear that Katherine had any steady boyfriend. She might not have had a flesh-and-blood beau at all. The men in “Possibilities” could have been fantasies, a virtual love life.
IF I WERE DEAD, WHO WOULD CARE? MOTHER.
Suicide was ruled out because of the devastating effect it would have on her mother. Katherine was thinking clearly enough to realize whatever the digital photographs contained, they would not damage her mother as much as the death of her daughter would.
MURDER’S A DONE DEAL.
The powerful emotion evoked by the concept of murder, with the other choice being self-annihilation, gave Anna the gut feeling that this line referred to the D &C, the death of an unborn child. Abortion was the word Anna would use. If Katherine used the word murder and still went through with the D &C to end her pregnancy, she had to have had a powerful motivation. The obvious one was that the child was terribly disabled or was a product of rape.
EVERYBODY’S ON THE NET.
WHO WOULD HIRE ME?
I WOULD DIE.
The rapist had sexually explicit photographs or videos of Katherine that he was threatening to put on the Web if she didn’t…
What? Anna wondered. Katherine had no money. A graduate assistant, it was unlikely she had any power.
If she reported the assault? If she pressed charges? If she didn’t continue to allow herself to be raped?
“Jeez, other people’s lives,” Anna whispered and shook her head, feeling suddenly sad.
Though prying eyes – should any be braving the night – had been shut outside, she closed the laptop partway and leaned her back against the wall.
The inferences she’d made from the list didn’t seem connectable to Katherine’s death. Blackmailers didn’t normally kill their victims; it was the other way around. There was also the annoying but inescapable fact that Katherine had not been coshed on the head and tossed into a Dumpster. She’d been brought down by Middle pack or Chippewa Harbor pack. There was no way to be certain since the only one on the island who could have run DNA from scat was dead.
It was an accidental death. Anna announced this in her brain. The feeling that the death was key to the sickness of the island did not abate. Anna stretched her legs in front of her, flexing her feet in their thick wool socks, cracking her ankle bones. Till this moment, she’d not thought of Isle Royale as sick, but the word fit. Wolves, moose, researchers, all were suffering an illness not unlike the disease that must have swept through Salem before the witches were burned. Hatred and insanity were virulent and highly contagious. The infected lynched their fellows, gang-raped women, burned down buildings, saw the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese sandwiches and were beamed up to alien spaceships to have their innards probed.
The virus needed certain conditions in which to grow; its victims had to be willing to believe; they had to want, on some level, maybe even unbeknownst to themselves, to do what the virus would tell them to do. And they had to be greedy: for profit, for importance, for revenge, for entertainment, for adventure. Only the greedy could be effectively conned. One never read of Zen masters being taken in by scams. They didn’t crave anything, and, therefore, con artists couldn’t set the hook.
Ridley wanted to keep the park closed winters so the wolf/moose study could continue.
Bob wanted to open Isle Royale to the public in winter because he’d been paid to find a way to do that, if not in cash, then in future work. Travel writers and professional “experts” had to find what the client paid them to find. Honesty might be the best policy, but it didn’t pay as well or get one invited back.
Katherine had seemed to want to keep the island open but was more concerned that Bob accept her thesis and pass it on to her graduate committee. At least until they’d come to a parting of the ways after the necropsy and Katherine had run off.
Robin wanted to keep ISRO closed in winter and the study up and running. She’d also seemed to want to be scared, the way teenagers love to terrify themselves with tales of the homicidal escapee from the insane asylum, Jason, Hannibal the Cannibal and countless assorted purveyors of horror.
Anna didn’t know what Adam wanted. His vanishing acts seemed to indicate he wanted to be by himself, his words that he wanted to be of help to the team, his actions that he disliked Bob one day and wanted to be his best friend the next. Had a crush on Robin one day and was indifferent to her the next. Maybe Adam didn’t know what he wanted either. Maybe he hadn’t known since his wife died.
The wolves, the ice, the windigo, the weather, the very blood and bone of the island seemed to want them dead or confused or insane or gone. Wolves came so close, it was as if they wished to be near humans, wished to be seen. Wolves killed Katherine. Ice three inches thick, thick enough to ride horses across, broke in a mouth-shaped hole at the weight of one small woman. Snow blocked vision and wind tore at nerves and cold ate away at hearts.
If the wolves, wog led or otherwise, wanted the island to themselves winters, they’d probably get what they wanted: the unusual behavior patterns, the alien DNA and the oversized track sightings were sufficiently unique and exciting that the National Park Service and Michigan Tech would fight to keep ISRO closed to the public from October to June and the study ongoing.
Ridley would get what he wanted for the same reasons.
Bob would not, but it wouldn’t be through his annoying his employers with excessive truthfulness, so, in a way, he would. Anna doubted he cared about the study, the island, the wolves or anything but himself.
Robin was undoubtedly getting to be as scared as ever she’d dreamed.
Katherine would never get her dissertation published.
That left Adam, a widower or a murderer or both, a man who moved out of sync with the moods of the others.
ANNA CREPT INTO THE COMMON ROOM. The old computer, plugged into the wall for the use of seasonals, shined a single green, beady eye. The wood in the stove had been banked and a line of embers showed between two logs, casting enough light she could make her way without bumping into the furniture. Adam’s outline darkened the couch, where he snored softly.
Stopping, Anna looked down at his recumbent form for a minute or more. Adam played possum; she’d figured that out. There was no way of telling if he played possum now. It didn’t much matter, and, if he was playing possum, she had the satisfaction of knowing the visitation of a bedraggled middle-aged specter in the still of the night had to be giving him the willies.
She moved the chair in front of the computer at an angle so she could watch both the screen and Adam and clicked on the blue E. The island’s Internet server popped up. They lived in a bunkhouse warmed by a woodstove, electrified by an old gasoline-powered generator, water brought up from the lake and an outhouse, and they were on the Internet. As she clicked on Google, it occurred to her that the odd thing was she didn’t find it odd. As a kid, she didn’t have television. It was all done with towers then, and she’d lived in a tiny town in a mountain valley where the reception was lousy. Now she took instant global communication from a remote island for granted.
She typed in “Katherine Huff.”
Katherine had published in seven scientific journals, articles on DNA research in mammals, and sixteen magazines and periodicals, on the subject of wilderness education. On the latter, Bob Menechinn’s name was listed first, with her as his graduate assistant.
The articles on DNA were painfully technical, written for other scientists and virtually incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Anna slumped against the back of the chair, feet thrust far under the table, chin nearly on her chest. She wasn’t sure what it was she had leapt out of bed to seek in cyberspace. The mystery of who Katherine Huff was, why she’d been savaged by wolves, wasn’t in journals. There wasn’t anything else, no newspaper articles reporting murder or mayhem connected to her, no MySpace revelations or vanity Web site with pictures of her dog and a diary of her summer vacation in Europe.
According to Hollywood, savvy Internet users could find out everything right down to the subject’s bra size and favorite food. Maybe in real life they could, too, but Anna wasn’t on that level. Google and Wikipedia maxed out her cyberspace cunning.
Adam snorted from a snore into deeper sleep, his breathing more a vibration against Anna’s mind than her eardrums. The light from the banked embers painted the angular planes of his face dull orange, his fancy mustache black as an ink drawing against it. The warm glow erased years from his face, the shadowed room the gray from his hair, and he looked no more than twenty. Supposedly he was an old hand at Winter Study, a friend of Ridley’s, a Park Service renegade who traveled with ease between researchers and NPS staff. So Jonah had intimated. Anna had seen little of it. Adam had let Ridley and the rest of them down as often as not. When they needed him, he was nowhere to be found, and the batteries in his radio died and came back so often they could have had regular roles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
He shirked his work, then skied out in the dark when the body recovery went sour. Behind Bob’s back, Adam praised, excused and mocked him. To Bob’s face, Adam was obsequious and scornful by turns, the way a kid will be when forced to curry favor with a person he or she loathes.
Why would Adam need to curry favor with Bob Menechinn?
Anna typed “Adam Johansen” into the box on Google’s home page. Seventeen hits. The front page of an old Lassen County Times had a photograph of him standing with three other men. They were dressed in fire-retardant Nomex and leaning on shovels. They’d been with the wildland firefighters credited with saving the tiny town of Janesville, California, from being burned. The rest were from local papers in Saskatoon. These were archival and covered the suicide of Cynthia Jean Johansen.
The first reported only the barest of facts. Cynthia Johansen, nee Batiste, a twenty-two-year-old senior at the University of Saskatchewan, had been in the bathroom of the apartment she shared with her husband of eleven months, Adam Johansen. The bath was separate from the sink area and she had closed the door. Her husband, a thirty-one-year-old freelance carpenter, had been cleaning the trap under one of the sinks. When he realized she had stopped speaking, he tried to get her to open the door. By the time he broke it down, Cynthia had bled to death from three deep cuts made by a man’s straight razor, two to the left wrist and one to the right.
According to the school newspaper, Cynthia’s best friend, Lena Gibbs, said Cynthia had miscarried two months prior to the incident and had gone into a severe depression. Gibbs said Cynthia had never talked about killing herself, but she had talked about being a bad person and suffered crippling guilt over the loss of the baby.
Twenty-two.
Anna slid farther down in the chair, the picture of a lowrider sans muscle car. Anna’s older sister, Molly, had been born when their mother was twenty-three. This was not abnormal. The body wanted to reproduce at a young age, when the chances of conceiving and the mother living through the birth to care for her offspring were greatest. From Anna’s vantage point, twenty-two seemed impossibly young to be dealing with college, marriage, pregnancy and miscarriage, yet women managed it without killing themselves – or anybody else. Often, younger women dealt with miscarriages better than their older sisters. Youth was resilient in body and mind. The future still held the possibility of many live births.
Anna wondered if Cynthia Jean’s guilt was brought on or exacerbated by other factors. Drugs, maybe, or intentionally rash actions designed to end an unwanted pregnancy. An abusive husband had brought on more than one miscarriage. Because Adam’s wife’s death was ruled suicide didn’t mean he didn’t kill her; it only meant that if he did, he’d gotten away with it.
The next article, written the following day and on page two of the paper instead of page six, reported that Adam had been removing the sink trap because his wife said she’d lost her engagement ring down the drain. He told police that while he worked, Cynthia had talked with him through the door about how much she loved him and how glad she was he had given her a home and that the eleven months they’d been married were the happiest of her life.
The phone rang and he went to answer it. He said his wife asked him to stay and talk to her, but he said he’d be right back. The call was from one of Cynthia’s teachers, and he brought the cordless phone into the sink area from the kitchen.
Cynthia wouldn’t respond when he spoke, and the door to the bath was locked. He told the police and, later, the newspaper reporter that he thought his wife was mad at him for answering the phone when she’d asked him not to so he ignored her and went back to working on the sink, occasionally making remarks. He said he got angry, then worried, and that was when he broke through the door and found her.
Anna saw her husband, Paul, in her mind, felt him in her heart and couldn’t imagine the kind of pain Adam must have suffered. That is, if he was telling the truth.
The only story she’d heard that was more tragic was the accidental death of a three-year-old who’d sneaked out and crawled behind his mother’s Camaro to surprise her when she left for the grocery store.
Paul Davidson was a Christian, an Episcopal priest, he believed in a loving God. Paul was also Sheriff of a poor county in Mississippi. He saw suffering of the worst kinds, cruelty and ignorance, predator and prey on the human scale, and it was far more vicious than anything between wolves and moose. Anna’s husband didn’t believe in the magical thinking of God granting wishes, but he did believe in the importance of prayer. He didn’t believe in pearly gates or Saint Peter or crossing the river Jordan. He didn’t believe in any other hell than the ones found on Earth. He didn’t believe in angels or ghosts or miraculous answers to prayers. Yet he believed he would be at one with his God when he died.
He believed Anna would, too, but she couldn’t quite get there with him. She couldn’t get her mind around a God who was purported to know – and care – about the ins and outs of human suffering. If there was such a watcher of the falling sparrows he – it was always he – was a bloodthirsty son of a bitch. Or he was a helpless son of a bitch.
Spending all eternity with either incarnation didn’t appeal to her.
The next article she clicked on brought her upright in her seat. The headline read: “No Ring Found in Trap.” Beneath it was a quarter-page color photograph of a young Adam Johansen on the front steps of a brick fourplex, carrying a bloody, naked woman. The woman’s arms hung at her sides. Her hands were completely red, and blood trailed down the leg of Adam’s khaki shorts and painted the side of his calf and the top of his running shoe. Cynthia’s head was back in the classic Fay Wray swoon, but the woman in the photograph was either dead or soon to be dead. Long hair, brown or dark blond, streamed to Adam’s ankles, the ends pointed and dark with water and blood. Anna could see the white paint on the doorframe behind Adam streaked from where the hair had been drawn across it when he carried Cynthia outside.
“It’s a still from a videotape.”
The voice was no more than six inches from her ear. Years of not responding to the machinations of people whose day she was ruining for one reason or another, Anna didn’t leap out of her skin, shrieking.
“Did I wake you up?” she asked.
Adam leaned down, looking at the photograph on the screen. He was shirtless. Heat radiated from his skin. Threads of long hair trailed across Anna’s neck like the tickle of spiderwebs walked through in the dark. Muscles at the corner of his jaw worked as he clenched and unclenched his teeth.
Fear on men smelled sour. Adam smelled of molten iron and metal ice-cube trays, red coals and rocks brittle with cold.
Adam reeked with a distillation of rage.