Blood and Ice

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

December 16, 11:45 a.m.

JUST WHEN CHARLOTTE HAD STARTED to think this might not be such a bad gig, after all-terrible weather and camp fever, true, but no big medical crises to deal with-all hell had started breaking loose.

First, Danzig had been attacked and killed by his own husky and now- now Murphy was trying to tell her that the mutilated body lying before her on the floor of the botany lab was the dead Danzig's handiwork.

“That's not possible,” she said, for the hundredth time. “I pronounced Danzig dead myself. I stitched his throat closed with my own two hands, I hit him twice-no, three times-with the defib paddles, and I saw him flatline.” She knelt and put a hand to the side of Ackerley's cold neck. “And I saw him zipped into the body bag.”

“Well, somehow he got out,” Murphy insisted. “That's all I can tell you. Wilde and Lawson both swear to it.”

If she didn't know better, she'd have asked if they were drunk at the time, or flying high on something even more potent. But she knew Michael and she knew Lawson and she knew they would never make up anything so awful. And this was indeed about as awful as it could get. The throat and shoulders had been savagely torn, and the gushing blood had saturated his shirt and pants. Somehow his glasses, though spattered with gore, had managed to stay on throughout the attack. Whoever, or whatever, had done this, was something far worse than anything she had encountered even on the worst night in the Chicago