So she strong-armed past the pain, gave him a level look, and said, “I asked you first. Anyway what?”
His eyes slid over her face. His jaw tightened. “Okay, partner, here it is: my plane didn’t just crash. It was shot out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile. Given our altitude and location when we were hit, someone here on Attu or in the waters right around it had to have done it. It’s possible that one of this group who’s coming after us now was already on the island at that point, but I don’t think so, because storm or no storm, if they had been on the island, it wouldn’t have taken them until the next morning to show up. I think they got called in after my plane was shot down. As far as I know, your people were the only ones on the island at the time, and if that’s the case, then one of you had to have fired that missile.”
It took a moment for what he was saying to click into place.
“You think Keith shot your plane down?”
“I don’t know. If you and he are the only ones left—and we don’t know that; without eyeballing the bodies there’s no way to be sure—then I’d say he’s at the top of the suspect list.”
Staring at him, Gina mentally reviewed all she knew about Keith. He was a scientist, and a physician, and—
“He was the last person added to the team,” she said slowly. “That was about a week before we left. I thought at the time that he was going to have to scramble to get everything he needed together in order to do the project he meant to do here.”
“Tell me about him. Everything you know.”
Gina did. It wasn’t a lot.
“So you’d never met him before he joined your group on Attu?” Cal asked, and Gina shook her head no. “Did any of the others know him?”
Gina thought back. “I’m pretty sure Arvid didn’t.” The thought of Arvid made her wince, but she determinedly kept her focus on where it needed to be: the present, in which she was remembering everything she could about Keith. “I don’t know about anyone else. He didn’t seem to have any particular friends among the group.” She frowned at Cal. “It’s difficult to get permission to conduct research on Attu, you know. We all had to go through this unbelievable application and screening process. If there was anything wrong with Keith’s credentials—with any of our credentials—the screening process almost certainly would have caught it.”
Cal sat back in his chair. “Ah, but what you’ve got to ask yourself is, who conducted the screening process?”
“We had to go through a ton of government agencies . . .” Her words faltered at the look on his face. “Are you saying our government is involved?”
“I’m not saying anything at all. I’m still trying to work out who’s involved.”
She refused to let him off the hook that easily. “Ivanov and the men who shot Arvid were speaking Russian. How could they be from our government?”
“The international situation tends to get complicated sometimes.” His tone told her that as far as he was concerned the conversation was over, even before he cast a meaningful look at the stew remaining in her can. She had only eaten about half. It was good, and it was still warm, but she couldn’t take another bite. He said, “You should eat the rest of that.”
Shaking her head, she shoved the can across the table toward him. “I can’t. You eat it. You’re way bigger than me, and you need more food. And while you’re eating it you can tell me—”
She broke off as his fingers encircled her wrist, trapping her with her arm stretched out across the table.
“What?” She looked at him in bewilderment, only to find that he was staring down at her arm.
Following his gaze, she saw to her dismay that the lamplight had caught the fine tracery of scars that covered her forearm like a spiderweb and turned them silver.
They were why the extra set of clothes in her backpack had included a white turtleneck instead of a tee and why she almost never wore short-sleeved or sleeveless shirts anymore.
With the help of skin grafts, the scars had shrunk and faded until they were no longer disfiguring, until they were no more than pale, hair-thin lines crisscrossing her right arm, but they were there: a permanent reminder.
Like she needed one. Like she would ever, could ever, forget.
“Those are burns,” Cal said, and ran a gentle forefinger over her scars. Her eyes flew to his. She would have been sucking in air except that what felt like the weight of the whole world had just dropped on her chest, making it impossible for her to breathe at all. “How’d you get them, honey?”
Chapter Twenty-Three