“Please don’t kill me,” he bawls. “I’ll give you anything you want. I swear. Anything. I’m sorry.”
My fingers aren’t warm, but I’ve worked enough blood through them to make them somewhat useful. I grab his arm and roll him onto his stomach, and when I do, the cord that binds his wrists together breaks. He is still bound by the belt that tethers his elbows, and he immediately starts to shake his arms to try and slip them free of the belt.
I stand up and take a second to catch my breath. The belt is tangled in the folds of his snowmobile suit, but he whips his arms frantically to get free. The toes of his boots are dangling over the mouth of the hole. He tries to bend his knees to get his feet away from the hole, but the ax handle that I shoved down his leg gives him very little wiggle room.
“Please, you’ve got to believe me. I’m sorry. I swear to God, I’m sorry. If I could take it back—”
“Tell me about Zoya,” I say. My next move will take all of my remaining strength, and I need a moment to summon what I have left.
“What?”
“You killed Zoya. Why?”
“I don’t know anything about—”
I put my foot on the back of Mikhail’s heels and lean down to grab the waist of his snow pants. In one last depleting effort, I heave his hips up while at the same time I stomp his feet through the opening in the ice. Frozen water splashes and overflows as he drops, up to his hips, in the water. He is bent at the waist, his chest flat against the ice, his gloved hands clawing to find purchase against the weight of the stones pulling him down.
“FUCK!” He yells at the top of his lungs. “OH MY GOD! STOP!”
“Tell me about Zoya,” I say again.
“You can’t do this! God! No!”
“Why’d you kill Zoya?” I grab his shoulders and begin to lift.
“Okay! Yes. I killed her. Pull me up! Please!”
“Why?”
“I’m slipping!”
“Tell me!”
“She wouldn’t listen. She wanted to find Ana. I told her no, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“How’d you kill her?”
“I can’t feel my legs.”
“I said, ‘How’d you kill Zoya?’”
“I . . . fuck! I drowned her, okay? Now get me out of here. I’m burning. It hurts!”
“Keep going. How’d you drown her?”
“I shoved her face into a toilet. I didn’t mean to kill her, I swear. I just wanted her to listen to me. It was an accident. Please!”
I stand over him, panting, my exhausted breaths shooting into the night sky. This man killed Jenni. He killed Zoya—drowned her in a toilet because she wanted to see her sister again. Only Zoya’s true killer would have known that she had been drowned.
“God—dammit! P—p—pull me up!” His words are punctuated by short gasps of air.
I grab the shoulders of Mikhail’s snowmobile suit and lift him off the ice—enough so that he can see my face.
“Thank you,” he whispers. “Thank—God.”
My chest burns as I pull against the weight of the rocks. That little bit of effort is almost more than I can take. I don’t have the strength to pull him out, not with a hundred pounds tied to his ankles. I give another tug but stop.
And it’s in that moment of pause that my universe shrinks to the size of a pinhead—my every thought orbits around one simple truth. It’s not the pain that stops me from saving this man, nor the weight of the rocks tugging Mikhail downward. I could save him if I wanted to. I could end this ordeal with both of us walking off the ice, him going north and me heading south. I have what I came for. I have his confession.
But Jenni’s words come back to me as I hold Mikhail’s life in my hands. Vengeance is not justice. She was right about that, but those ideas are not strangers to one another either. They’re born of the same mother, one sired by virtue, the other, the bastard son of vice. I used to think of them as standing back to back, facing opposite horizons, but I understand now that sometimes they can face the same path, the same end.
He looks at me, and in his eyes I see both hope and doubt. But deeper, behind it all, I see guile. I see the monster.
Vengeance is not justice. But on this frozen lake, under a sky ablaze with the Northern Lights, vice and virtue collude to deliver Mikhail Vetrov to the only grave he will ever know.
I’m holding him up by the lapel of his snowsuit, and he’s watching my eyes as I hesitate.
He knows.
I tip his chest up enough so that he slides deeper into the hole. He lets loose a scream and claws at the ice, his hands able to reach out to his sides just enough to catch the wall of the pit. With that little bit of leverage, he manages to press his shoulder blades against the back edge and stop his slide into the lake.
“NO!” His words sputter through muscles turned thick by the cold. “I told you . . . what you wanted . . . I confessed . . . you can’t . . . do this . . . you’re . . . a cop.”
I sit on the ice in front of Mikhail. “No,” I say. “I’m not a cop. I’m a man—a man whose wife and child you killed.”
Mikhail is breathing in hard spurts. I can hear a gurgle of spit churning in his exhales. He slips down a few more inches and jerks his head back to keep his chin above the water. His fingertips are barely holding on.
I look him in the eye and say, “In the end, it comes down to this: You’re an evil sonofabitch, and the world is a better place with you not in it.”
I climb onto my knees and move in so that I am only a foot away from his face. His eyelids are heavy, and I can tell that he is struggling to keep them open. He begins to grunt as the weight overtakes him.
“You may want to get right with . . . well, with whatever God you may believe in.”
He speaks and I can barely make out the words. “Go . . . to . . . hell.”
I shrug. “Maybe.”
His hands slip, and I hear the final gasp as he sucks in a breath before he is swallowed by the water. I watch the pale glow of his face disappear into the darkness. I wait until I see the bubbles of his last breath break the surface.
He is gone.
CHAPTER 42
I fall onto my back, lying in the same hole where Mikhail had spent most of the day. Above me the Northern Lights are in full flare, green and white, pulsing like a wildfire above my head. I’m mesmerized by the dance.
If I don’t move, my toes don’t hurt as badly, the crushing throb is replaced with numbness. I shiver in waves that break at the base of my neck. I breathe in shallow puffs because I am certain that a deep inhale would rip my lungs open. Cold from the ice at my back radiates up through me, and I feel as though I am becoming fossilized in ice. I look at the aurora, and all of my concerns take on a lilt of insignificance. It fills me with peace. The lights above my head are so beautiful, I can barely keep from crying.