Barret, page 14
He laughed. “Wouldn’t that be nice? It would be great to think this investigative work was that simple.”
“Naïve of me, wasn’t it?” she noted, with a headshake.
“No, not naïve,” he argued. “It’s just that, when you’ve got something that’s complex, with so many moving elements, plus potentially criminal or accidental, potentially one crime versus five or six or seven crimes,” he explained, “we have to get to conclusions carefully.”
“I get it.” She stood and stretched. “I’ll see you in the morning. I’ve got to go crash, so I can get up and start all over again. The good news is apparently that I’m to be replaced by new kitchen staff on the next load of incoming supplies.”
“Good,” Barret said. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy getting back outside again.”
“That depends. Is the weather taking another ugly spin? If that’s the case, maybe not.”
He shook his head. “Up here you never can tell, so don’t count on it. You could be better off in the kitchen.”
She laughed at that, then gave him a quick hug. “Thanks for an entertaining evening.”
He winced. “Hardly date material.”
“Are we looking to have a date?” she asked in amusement.
His grin flashed. “I wouldn’t mind.”
“Yeah, well, I’d just as soon not, … especially here,” she added. “There’s already enough talk, and that makes me uncomfortable.”
“Does it bother you?” he asked.
“Not that it’s just talk,” she explained, “but, with the lack of trust so bad that the base thinks I’m poisoning them, next they’ll be saying that I’m hooking up with you in order to get the benefit of the doubt.”
He shook his head. “I might as well tell you, if that’s what you were doing, it wouldn’t work anyway.”
She nodded, with a smile. “I know, and that’s another reason why I wouldn’t even bother trying.” And, with that, she laughed. “I’ll see you in the morning.” Then she headed to bed.
He was left sitting on his bed, wondering if she’d really been joking about what everybody was saying, if people really were looking at what was going on here at that level. It didn’t say a whole lot for people if they were. But then people were just that, … people. Some would go one way, and some would go another. Only when the tide started to turn did it become an issue, and that’s when gang mentalities could kick in, and he didn’t want any of that happening here.
Day 8 Early Morning
Avalon woke early the next morning and dragged her sorry butt out of bed and headed to the kitchen. First thing she did was pour herself a cup of coffee, knowing that Chef had no doubt done exactly the same thing.
When she checked the storeroom for him, she slumped onto the floor beside him, sipping her coffee.
Chef looked over at her, still tucked into his makeshift bed. “Aren’t we a sorry pair?” Chef asked.
She nodded. “That we are,” she declared. “On the other hand, we’re both still alive, so …”
He laughed. “You know what? I’ll take it. There are worse things to be grateful for.”
“I know, and, while we’re here, we’ll get it sorted out,” she stated. “At least I hope we can get to the bottom of all this.”
“But it sure would be nice if we did it in some sort of decent time frame.” Chef glanced over at her. “For now, they seem to be moving in a circle.”
She winced. “It’s not as if we have a whole lot else to do around this place.”
“No, and another ugly storm is coming our way.”
“And today is all about searching for Jerry,” she noted.
“It pretty well has to be. Nobody has any idea when he went missing, and that’s one of the biggest concerns.”
“It is for me,” she murmured. “How can anybody not know?”
“But you don’t know,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, great, thanks.” She sighed, giving him a raw smile. “I was trying to figure out how that could even be, but you know? Everybody’s busy. Everybody’s off doing their own thing. Plus the weather’s crappy, and everybody’s buckled in against it. Even when they’re outside or busy, they’re not looking around at everybody. I wonder if Jerry didn’t have a friend or any group that he could relate to—I guess it’s probably pretty normal for an investigator. Or normalish anyway.”
“His natural friend group would have been Ted,” Chef pointed out, “and Ted hasn’t seen him either.”
“Last I heard,” she added, “nobody can pinpoint when they last saw Jerry—other than the day before yesterday. And that means, if he’s not somewhere inside the base, then he’s likely …” She didn’t finish the sentence.
Chef stared morosely at his coffee cup. “And that would really suck,” he whispered.
“I know. But guess what? We’ll still have a bunch of hungry people in here after a bit. And, unless we get orders to the contrary, I’m still here with you. So we might as well get busy and do what we do.”
He gave her a bright smile. “It’s been really nice having you in the kitchen, you know? If you want to stay, I’d be more than happy to keep you.”
She laughed. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I very much want to get back out and do some training.”
“How about a combination?” he suggested.
“Can we do that?” she asked, frowning at him. “Because at least I’m warm in here, and I get food and coffee,” she said, with a smile.
“We can make all kinds of things happen,” Chef replied cheerfully. “You just tell me what you want, and I’ll see to it.”
“Just like that?” she murmured. “Abracadabra?”
“I don’t know about just like that,”—Chef laughed—“but most people are reasonable when it comes to this type of thing.”
“I don’t know about that,” she hedged. “Right about now I don’t think there is such a thing as people being reasonable. I think everybody is panicked and the opposite of reasonable.”
“Jerry was known for going for walks though, wasn’t he?” Chef asked, looking at her.
“I don’t know.” She winced. “I hate to say it, but I always avoided him, and we’ll find out that’s what most people did. He was part of an investigation, and, short of answering his questions, most people probably responded the same way.”
“And, yeah, now that he’s gone missing, none of us know anything about it, which is another part of the problem,” Chef added, with a nod.
By the time they had breakfast served, she realized that some hadn’t shown up for breakfast. “Did a team go out early?” she asked, looking around. “Did I miss them?”
“Several went out at the crack of dawn,” Chef pointed out, “looking for tracks.”
“Just going out in this ugly weather is putting the team at risk.”
“And that’s the next problem,” Chef noted. “If Jerry went out on his own, even just to grab a few minutes to himself, he did it with the knowledge that it’s dangerous as hell out there. And now we’re putting more people at risk looking for him.”
“What about Joe? Did anybody check in with him?”
“I saw him at breakfast, but when you mean checking in? … Did you mean. asking him? If so, I’m sure somebody has, since they would have wanted to know if Jerry had taken off with a dog team.”
“But Jerry wouldn’t have,” Avalon stated. “I thought I heard somebody say he was terrified of the dogs.” At that, Chef stopped and frowned. She shrugged. “No, I don’t know who mentioned that or if it’s even true,” she added, with a half smile. “It seems as if everything’s just this big blur now.”
“Maybe, but it’s a blur that we need to come to terms with. So let’s get some work done because, either way, short of what seems to be a miracle at this point, there’ll be some very upset people today.”
With that in mind, they quickly tweaked the menu and got at the preparation work. When she turned around much later, Barret stood there, his hands on his hips, watching her.
Surprised, she stopped and asked him intently, “Problems?” She kept her voice low.
“No, I’m just really happy to see you.”
She walked over, gave him a quick hug, and said, “Thank you. That’s nice to know.” However, when she realized that his hug was a little more intense than expected, her shoulders sagged. “You found him?”
“We found him,” Barret replied. “And, yes, he’s dead.”
“Do we know what, why, how?”
“Sleeping in the snow, wrapped up in his jacket, potentially the same as Scott.”
“No, no, no. Everybody knows better than that, and they’ve all been talking about it constantly since Scott was found.”
“I know,” he replied. “Sydney is examining him right now.” He looked over at Chef, who was sitting there, suddenly looking very gray in the face as he stared at him. “You okay?”
“Sure, I’m okay,” he said. “We were joking earlier about being grateful to be alive. While, of course, it was something to be grateful for”—he shook his head too vehemently—“I wasn’t thinking of it in the sense that, … that it was reality. Jesus, I just don’t understand,” he muttered.
She walked over and sat down beside him and patted his hand. “I don’t either.” She looked back at Barret. “How close to the center was he?’
“He was just outside the generator room. He had a pack of cigarettes with him,” Barret described, “and one was still in his mouth.”
She blinked several times. “He just went outside for a smoke?” she wailed.
He nodded. “He had a pen in his hand but no notebook.”
At that, she stiffened and looked at him worriedly. “Are you thinking that somebody might have been there and removed it?”
“It’s hard to say.” Barret looked around. “He was kind of half hidden, and quite a few tracks were around, as everybody went looking for him. Both old tracks and new tracks. Unfortunately no way to find what were the original tracks. Nothing remains of the original scene.”
“Jesus,” she said, with a shake of her head.
“Not to mention the fact that anybody checking the generators would have utilized the same pathway.”
“He was out there?” Chef asked, looking at Barret in horror. “I go out there all the time.”
He nodded. “And not very far out either. It’s just, I guess, maybe he needed some space or needed something. I don’t know, but he wasn’t very far from safety. Yet that cold got him.”
“And that’s where the problem comes in,” she stated, staring up at him. “That cold out there …”
He nodded. “Yeah, it’s brutal. Jerry wasn’t part of the training missions, and, like Scott, it’s quite possible it was just a stupid mistake.”
She swallowed. “And yet don’t we think this is way too many stupid mistakes? Particularly if he had a notebook, and it’s missing? Especially as he had just investigated Scott’s death and his own mistake?”
“But we don’t know that he had a notebook. He just had a pen in his hand.”
“No way that you could write notes out there,” Chef declared, looking up at him. “No way.”
“I think you’re right,” Barret agreed. “I think, in this case, taking notes out there would be foolish, but he may have …” Then he stopped.
“He always had a pen in his hand,” Avalon pointed out, suddenly frowning at Barret. “Every time I’ve seen him, he’s had a pen in his hand.”
He looked at her and then turned toward Chef. “Is that your take on it too?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I can’t say I’m that observant. Or that my eyesight is that great for that matter,” he added, frowning. “Yet I’m sure the other guys could say something about that.”
“I’m sure they could but …” She took in the Chef’s small quarters. “I hate to ask, but where will you store him?”
“In the generator room,” he replied, “or at least out in the back with Scott.”
“Great.” She muttered under her breath, hating the idea of a makeshift morgue.
“He’s already frozen,” Barret explained. “Almost nothing that Sydney can even say about him, short of thawing him out and doing some sort of autopsy. However, she’s not equipped for that here, and, because his body’s frozen, any actual timelines, et cetera, will be distorted anyway. She will take some of his blood and send it in for analysis, but it may have degraded with the freezing. Then, by the time she gets the results back, well, … we have no way of knowing anything for sure right now.”
“She can check for some things here, can’t she?” Avalon asked.
“Sure, she can and she is. However, for the moment, … we’re considering it an accidental death.” Avalon shook her head at that. “No?” he asked curiously.
“No way,” she declared. “I don’t know how. I don’t know why. All I can tell you is that answer, that whole premise, just feels terribly wrong.”
“Wrong or not,” Barret replied gently, “it is an answer.” And, with that, he rubbed his eyes hard. “I’ll talk to you in a little bit.” And he quickly left.
*
Barret happened to agree with Avalon. As far as he was concerned, an accident was way too easy of an answer. Yet it was something that would make everybody else feel a little better. Not that giving an answer to make others feel better was the thing to do, but they had enough suspicion and outrage already. As he quickly tracked down Mountain, Barret found him talking to Magnus over a cup of coffee.
He sat down beside the two men. “I gather that we’re calling it an accident, but are we really thinking that?”
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s bullshit,” he snapped. At a glare from Mountain, Barret lowered his voice and looked around. “The first thing Avalon said to me is that there is absolutely no way this was accidental.”
“Sure, but we won’t just accept her instincts without any kind of proof,” Magnus pointed out.
Mountain nodded. “I’ve checked with Salmo, who works in the gear room. He didn’t see either Scott or Jerry in there, which is a death knell here in the Arctic.”
Magnus sighed, shaking his head. “I’m waiting for Sydney to get any information she can off the remains, but, at first glance at finding Jerry’s body, sitting there, leaning against the back wall, all tucked up, supposedly out of the wind, yet in the cold? It wouldn’t have taken very long at all.”
“I know, and that’s … just terrible,” Barret said. “The sad part is, why did he stay there? Why didn’t he just come back in again? Why was he out there in the first place?”
“I don’t know, and that will be one of the ever-expanding questions that we have to deal with here,” Magnus replied. “So, let’s just keep all the supposition and guessing to a minimum and wait until Sydney has gotten whatever answers are to be had.”
“Sadly Sydney doesn’t have any answers,” the doc said, as she stepped forward, looking tired and shaken. “I’ve taken some blood, but everything’s frozen. I don’t want to cut him apart too much, but I should test for some drugs at least,” she noted. “He was apparently smoking that cigarette. It looks as if it had been lit and had burned down to the nub in his fingers. It could have just burned all the way down. We did get that sudden chill out there, and twenty minutes without the proper clothing and protective gear? I mean, it’s quite possible this was another accident.”
“Yet another accident,” Mountain bit off.
She nodded. “And, yes, that’s way too many accidents for it to be accidental,” she murmured. “So, we’ll have to find some answers fast, before there are any more accidental deaths. After renewed safety training being held at this survival training base, if it really was an accident, it was a seriously stupid and senseless one. I don’t imagine anybody will believe that this is an accident, unless we can come up with some plausible reason as to why it happened at all.”
“In Scott’s case he had a tiff with somebody and stepped out, but why would Jerry go outside?”
“He did have a phone on him,” Sydney noted. “Maybe he couldn’t get reception.” At that, the other men looked at her. “I’ve seen other guys do it.”
“Do what?”
“Step outside to get better reception,” she replied. “Surely you’ve seen them. I had a talk with one of them when he came back in. I told him it was straight-up foolishness. What I can tell you is that there doesn’t appear to be any blood where the body was found. However, in the cold out there, if somebody knocked Jerry over the head, it wouldn’t have bled very much or very fast. It also could have been a slow internal brain bleed,” she whispered, as she sat down. She looked over at Magnus and reached out a hand, which he gently picked up. “I can’t say I had any idea that this was what I was signing up for when I joined in.”
“No, I’m sure you didn’t,” Magnus agreed in a soft tone, “but we appreciate having you.”
She shook her head. “We need new people in, and we need to move these two out. I want a full investigation and an autopsy done on each, but I highly suspect that, short of what we can see right now, we won’t find anything else.”
“Unless Jerry was knocked out just enough to keep him outside long enough to freeze to death,” Magnus suggested.
“That would be my guess,” she agreed, “but again I can’t really tell, not without a visible head wound. Not in his current state.”
“There are lots of ways to inflict a blow that wouldn’t cause any bleeding,” Magnus murmured.
“I know,” she replied, “and it doesn’t help that everybody here knows exactly how to do it.”
“The only reason to do something like that,” Barret stated, “is if there was a reason to take him out, and the only reason I can think of is if they thought that he was on to them.”
“Once again, we’re back in that chaos of not knowing what people were thinking about trying to shut down this place. Maybe they thought they could just knock him out, and it wouldn’t kill him.”
