“Who?”

“Dunno.” He swept his weapon’s light around the space, checking each square foot, before stepping into the room. Linda and Mark entered at his side.

It took ten tension-fraught minutes to confirm that everyone at the station was dead. There were thirteen bodies in total. All of them showed similar signs of a gruesome death. Most had been stabbed and lay in hardened lakes of blood. A couple showed blunt force trauma, as if someone had taken a baseball bat to them. One of them showed defensive breaks to the arms—he had clearly put up a fight. The bones were splintered. Another looked like he’d been shot with a large-bore gun, though Linda had been assured that there were no firearms at the base. In fact there were none on the entire continent.

“Someone’s missing,” Linda told them. “Wilson/George had a winter staff of fourteen.”

“It’s gotta be our killer,” Mark said.

“I’ll go check the vehicle shed,” Linc said. “How many snowcats should there be?”

“Two, and two snowmobiles.”

A few minutes later, Linda was searching through a desk drawer when Mark called out to her from another module. His voice made her jump. To say the research station and its grisly inhabitants gave her the creeps was putting it mildly. The hair on her arms had yet to stand down. She found him in one of the small crew’s rooms, his light trained on more bloody smears on the wall. It took her a second to realize the lines weren’t random. It was writing.

“What does that mean?”

Mark read it aloud, “ ‘Mime Goering for crow Nicole.’ ”

“Was someone saying they were killed by Hermann Göring?”

“I don’t think so,” Mark said absently.

“It doesn’t make any sense. No one stationed here was named Nicole. I checked their roster.”

Murph didn’t reply. His lips moved silently as he read the bizarre sentence again and again.

“What are you thinking?” Linda asked, as the seconds dragged out to a minute.

“Whose room was this?”

“I’m not sure.” They looked around and found a book with “Property of Andrew Gangle” written on the flyleaf.

“Who was he?”

“I think a tech. A grad student, if I recall.”

“He’s also our killer, and confessed before he carried out the murders. He was also very sick.”

“No kidding. Hello? Thirteen slashed-up bodies. He was sick, all right.”

“I mean ill. He had aphasia.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a speech disorder where the victim can’t process language properly. It’s usually caused by a stroke or brain injury, or it can progress as a result of a tumor, Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s.”

“And you’re able to figure this out how?”

“There was a game I used to play with some neuroscience grad students back at MIT. We’d make up sentences as if we had aphasia and challenge the others to decipher them.”