But Charlotte simply shook her head.
“Shouldn’t I at least try?” Michael said, pressing down with the heel of his hands, as he had seen done in CPR classes. “Should I give him artificial respiration?”
“He’s gone, honey.”
“Just tell me what I should do!”
“Nothing you can do,” she said, looking up at the clock. “If you want to know, he was gone from the second that damned dog got at him.”
Without looking behind her, she reached for and found a clipboard on the counter. She lifted the pen on its chain and recorded the time of death.
Danzig’s eyes were still open, and Michael closed them.
Charlotte flicked off the machines, then picked Danzig’s walrus-tooth necklace up off the floor, where she’d hastily thrown it.
“That was his good-luck charm,” Michael said.
“Not good enough,” she said, handing it to Michael.
They sat in silence, the corpse lying between them, until Murphy O’Connor put his head in the door.
“Bad news about the chopper,” he said, then, taking in what had happened, mumbled, “Oh, sweet Mother of God.”
Charlotte removed the transfusion line. “No rush,” she said. “They can come anytime.”
Murphy ran his hand back over his salt-and-pepper hair, and stared at the floor. “The storm,” he said. “It’s gonna get a lot worse before dawn. They said they’d have to wait for it to blow over.”
Outside, Michael could hear a raging wind pummeling the walls of the infirmary like a hail of angry fists. He hadn’t even noticed it till now.
“Christ almighty,” Murphy muttered. He started to turn away, then said to Charlotte, “I’m sure you did everything possible. You’re a good medical officer.”
Charlotte looked unaffected by the praise.
“I’ll send Franklin in, to help with the body.” Then he looked at Michael. “Why don’t you come down to my office? We need to talk.”
Murphy walked away, and Michael wasn’t sure what to do. He did not want to leave Charlotte alone—not with the body—at least not until Franklin, or somebody, got there.
“It’s okay,” she said, as if intuiting his problem. “You work the ER in Chi-town, you get used to dead people. Go.”
Michael got up and slipped the walrus-tooth necklace into his pocket. Then he went to the sink, where he scrubbed his hands clean.
Franklin came in and, as Michael went out to the hall, Charlotte called after him, “And thanks, by the way. You make a good nurse.”
In Murphy’s office, he found Darryl warming his hands around a cardboard cup of coffee—it was clear that Murphy had just told him about Danzig’s death—and the chief himself was sitting back, looking utterly depleted, in his desk chair. Michael leaned up against a dented file cabinet and for a minute or so no one said a word. They didn’t have to.
“Any ideas?” the chief finally said, and another silence fell.
“If you’re referring to Danzig and the dog,” Darryl finally ventured, “no. But if you’re referring to the missing bodies, then there’s one thing that I think is pretty clear.”
“What’s that?”
“Somebody’s gone off his rocker. Maybe it’s a case of the Big Eye.”
“I’ve been doing a check,” Murphy replied, “and so far everybody’s accounted for—even Spook. Nobody’s in a daze—at least any more than usual—and nobody’s gone off the reservation.”
Darryl pondered this, then said, “Okay. Then whoever it is, they hid the bodies somewhere—it’s cold enough out there that they’ll just freeze solid again—then they hightailed it back to the base.”
“And the dogs?”
Darryl had to think about that, but Michael knew that the dogs, unless they were restrained somehow, would have come back on their own.
“Can they survive in a storm like this?” Darryl asked, and Murphy snorted.
“For them, it’s a day at the beach. They’ll hunker down and sleep right through it. The bitch of it is, any tracks they left are already gone.”
But Michael had a hunch where they might have gone. “Stromviken,” he said. “That was their routine exercise run.”
“Could be,” Murphy said, mulling it over, “but if somebody drove them there—even if there was time, which looks pretty damn unlikely—how’d he get back to base without them? Nobody, not even I, could have walked back here alone, much less in this weather. Ain’t nobody going nowhere in this soup.”
“What if he was using a snowmobile?” Michael said. “Could he have towed it along behind the sled?”
Murphy assumed a quizzical expression. “I guess,” he said. “But then he’s got the dogs towing the snowmobile, plus the bodies in the ice block—”