On Thin Ice

by Debra Lee Brown

  Accusation.

  “Have them bring the stretcher. Tell Salvio to order a medevac out of Kachelik. It’s closer than Deadhorse. That chopper that dropped you here isn’t set up for it.”

  She nodded, took a second to get her bearings, then took off at a run, Adams’s unzipped jacket whipping her in the wind.

  Two minutes later the camp was in an uproar. Twenty minutes after that, in the camp’s tiny infirmary, the medic—a freckle-faced kid fresh from advanced life-support training—pronounced Paddy O’Connor dead.

  Lauren felt sick to her stomach.

  Salvio wrapped an arm around her and moved her toward the door. “Come on, I’ve got just the thing for you.”

  She tried to wave him off through a haze of tears, but he persisted, steering her back down the hallway toward his office. They passed Adams, gathered with the rest of the crew just inside the camp’s kitchen. His face was hard, his eyes black and unreadable. Surely he didn’t think it was her fault that Paddy’d been, that he—

  “Did he make it?” one of the crew asked.

  Salvio shook his head.

  Some of these guys had worked for Paddy O’Connor since the beginning. Lauren had known the toolpusher all her life. What on earth had happened?

  They turned into Salvio’s office and he directed her to the beat-up sofa. “Sit down.”

  “No, I—”

  He pushed her down onto the stained Naugahyde. She watched, in a daze, as he fished something out of his file cabinet.

  “Here. Drink it.” He handed her a small, silver flask.

  It didn’t surprise her at all that Jack Salvio ignored Tiger’s strict rules prohibiting alcohol in the field. She stared blankly at the flask. Why not? It couldn’t make her feel any worse, and it just might settle her nerves if not her stomach. He opened it for her, and she took a healthy swig. Whatever it was, it burned all the way down.

  “Good. Now get some rest. You look like hell.”

  She’d shed Adams’s jacket in the mudroom. Her clothes and her hair were caked with drilling mud, but that could wait.

  “No, I’ve got to call in.”

  “Phones are out. The weather.”

  That’s right. She’d forgotten. Crocker had mentioned it to her on her chopper flight in. “So there’ll be no medevac to transport Paddy’s body?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about the satellite uplink? I’ve got to call my boss and tell him what’s happened.”

  “Walters can wait. Along with the rest of the world. The uplink’s down, too.”

  “But—” The satellite link was never down. “How can that be?”

  “Dunno. All I know is it is.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Salvio shrugged. “Shut it all down, I guess. The whole operation.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I ain’t kiddin’ at all. The second we report what’s happened we’ll be crawling with Tiger execs, OSHA agents, borough cops—the whole frickin’ state’ll be out here. Might as well get a jump on the shutdown.”

  She looked at him incredulously. “But the exploration well… We’re nearly at target depth. The rock samples… If we don’t get them, if I don’t get them—”

  Tiger had spent a huge chunk of this year’s exploration budget on the Caribou Island project. Her boss, Bill Walters, was counting on her. The accuracy of their geologic maps, Tiger’s position in the next round of land leases, her promotion—everything depended on finishing the well.

  “Uh, excuse me…” The roughneck, Adams, stood just outside the half-open door. Lauren wondered how much of their conversation he’d heard. “I thought someone might want this.”

  With a shock she realized he was offering her Paddy’s hard hat. Her stomach tightened. A man was dead, and all she could think about was the damned job. Tears pooled hot at the corners of her eyes. By sheer will she beat them back.

  “You were out there.” She rose and stepped toward Adams’s outstretched hand. “Why?”

  “Who, me?” he said, far too casually.

  Salvio got to him first, and snatched the hard hat from his hand.

  “Yeah, you.” She narrowed her eyes at him, wondering what he was hiding. It was that chiseled expression of his that made her suspicious. He was just too cool about the whole incident.

  “Whaddya mean he was out there?” Salvio stepped between her and the roughneck. “When?”

  Adams didn’t answer. He just stood there looking at her, those black eyes burning an impression right into her—a heady fusion of danger and sexuality that hit her like a punch. A second later she looked away.

  “Remember to tell that to the cops when they come,” Salvio said.

  “I—I will.” She didn’t trust Adams. There was something not right about him.

  Funny that none of the other geologists in her department had ever mentioned him before. Over the years Tiger had drilled dozens of exploration wells in the Arctic. It was a small, tightly knit community up here. You got to know the drilling crews pretty well. But no one had ever mentioned a half-native roughneck named Adams to her.

  “Get back to work, boy,” Salvio said.

  A healthy spark of rebellion ignited in Adams’s eyes. He stood there, unmoving, just long enough to piss Salvio off. A split second before she was certain the company man was going to deck him, Adams did an about-face and was gone.

  “I’d steer clear a that one, if I was you.” Salvio shot her one of his rare paternal looks, then dropped into his overstuffed desk chair. “He’s trouble.”

  She wondered for the dozenth time what Adams was doing out by the reserve pit when he was supposed to be on shift. And how Paddy O’Connor—a seasoned professional who’d worked every major oil field in the world, from West Texas to Saudi to the North Sea—had drowned in a reserve pit that was only five feet deep.

  She nodded at Salvio, promising herself she’d stick close to him and do as he advised. “Yes,” she said, and stepped into the hallway just as Adams turned the corner into the break room, flashing a cool look back at her. “Trouble is right.”

  They drilled a hundred more feet of hole before the shift was over at midnight. Geologist’s orders. A man was dead, and they were still drilling. Seth couldn’t believe Salvio had bowed to Lauren Fotheringay’s demand.

  In the claustrophobic bunk room he shared with three other guys, Seth stripped off his work clothes, grabbed a towel and headed for the showers down the hall.

  The hot water felt good on his sore muscles. He’d been in pretty good shape when he arrived on 13-E last week, but roughnecking twelve-hour shifts, day in, day out, was enough to make any man bone-tired.

  He threw on some jeans and a clean flannel shirt, then followed his nose to the kitchen. His stomach growled as his gaze zeroed in on New York strip steaks sizzling on the grill, stuffed baked potatoes and a half-dozen other side dishes ready and waiting for the crew to fill their plates.

  A few guys pushed past him in line as he stood there contemplating his next move. He needed to check out that reserve pit now. Wind and blowing snow had probably already destroyed any evidence of what had really happened to Paddy O’Connor.

  He swore under his breath as he palmed a couple of dinner rolls, then started back down the hall toward the mudroom, wolfing them down on the way. Salvio’s office was dark. He’d be sleeping this time of night. Good. Seth hoped he was having nightmares.

  There was a lot about Jack Salvio that Seth didn’t like, but he had to keep his own personal opinions out of the investigation. The company man was a suspect like everyone else, but Salvio had been with Tiger nearly thirty years, and nothing like this incident last year—where someone had sold a foreign oil company stolen data—had ever happened before. Besides, Salvio hated foreigners.

  No, it didn’t add up. Salvio was a pain in the ass and a bigoted jerk, but Seth didn’t think he had the smarts or the connections to put together a corporate piracy deal potentially worth hundreds
of millions of dollars.

  But Lauren Fotheringay did. Along with the technical knowledge required to know exactly which geologic data was valuable and which was useless. The question was, if Lauren was the thief, would she repeat last year’s caper, this time with data from Caribou Island?

  Suited up in full survival gear, Seth battled the wind as he trudged across the yard toward the reserve pit. Three quarters of the way there, he made out the outline of the geologist’s trailer. The bedroom was dark, but an eerie light shone from the bare lab windows. Perhaps he’d pay the esteemed Ms. Fotheringay an unexpected visit.

  First, he’d check out the reserve pit. Skirting around the trailer, he narrowed his eyes against the ice shards pummeling his half-exposed face. He was used to North Slope winters and the burning, biting wind. All the same, it was almost impossible to see anything.

  As he’d suspected, the crime scene had been completely obliterated by the weather. No footprints, no outward signs of a struggle, nothing. “Damn.” He should have stayed out here and surveyed the scene instead of helping to get Paddy’s body inside.

  Ten minutes after the toolpusher was pronounced dead, Salvio had rousted them all back to work, and had supervised the first part of the drilling shift himself. There’d been no way for Seth to slip out and investigate. Now, ten hours later, there was nothing left to see.

  He kicked at the dry snow covering the spot where Lauren had been kneeling. The only evidence that she or Paddy had been there at all was a slick coating of muddy ice where she’d struggled with his body.

  He glanced in the direction of the trailer, his mind made up. An open crate of rock samples, probably left outside by mistake, provided just the excuse Seth needed to intrude. He grabbed an armful of the frozen plastic bags, jerked the door open to the lab and stepped inside. “Anybody home?”

  Lauren jumped at his voice, nearly upending the lab stool on which she was perched. She’d been looking at samples under a microscope with a black light that bathed the room in a ghostly bluish glow. Soft music strained in the background—a raw Celtic ballad. It surprised him a little. Given what he’d read about her, he would have pegged her for classical or jazz.

  “Don’t you guys ever knock?” She swiveled toward him, then froze in place when she recognized him. “Oh, it’s you.”

  “Yeah. I was just—”

  “Put them on the counter.” She hopped off the stool, strode past him and flipped on the overhead fluorescent lights. “Over there.”

  He set the samples down next to the scope, then turned to face her.

  “What do you want?”

  She’d been crying, and she hadn’t slept. He could tell from the dark circles under her red-rimmed eyes. Brown eyes. Pretty, he thought, for the second time that day.

  “I saw the samples outside and thought I’d give you a hand.”

  “Right. You saw them. All the way from camp, in this weather.” She crossed her arms over her chest, and arched a neatly plucked brow at him.

  She was smart as whip. Smart enough, he reminded himself, to commit murder and hide the evidence.

  “No,” he said. “I was out here already.”

  “For the second time today. Why?”

  She was right to challenge him. Typically the crew didn’t lurk around the geologist’s trailer. It was off-limits to them unless they were acting under specific orders. Especially if the well they were drilling was important.

  Data—especially rock samples with traces of oil—was the whole reason they were out here. Good geologists protected their data, and right now Lauren Fotheringay was glaring at him with all the mistrust of a grizzly protecting her threatened cubs.

  He needed to figure out how to reach her, how to get close to her, and fast. If he didn’t, he’d never discover if she was the one the Feds were after. Or if she’d had a hand in Paddy O’Connor’s murder. The medic had called it a drowning accident. Not a chance. No one drowned in a reserve pit.

  Seth decided to gamble and go for the truth. Part of it, at least. He had to get Lauren to trust him. If the truth failed, he’d try seduction. That always worked with women like her—cool corporate princesses out of their element, thrilled by a chance to drag the bottom for some rough company.

  “Okay,” he said, flashing his eyes at her. “So the rock samples were just an excuse. I really wanted to talk to you.”

  The gamble paid off, though he wasn’t sure if it was truth or the promise of seduction that roused her interest. All he knew was that her frosty stance softened, along with the hard look in her eyes. She nodded at the desk chair in the corner. “So talk.”

  He sloughed off his jacket, set his hard hat on the counter, but ignored her offer to sit. She watched him like a hawk. Every move. He recognized the music now. The Chieftains. He liked this particular cut, in fact. “Nice music,” he said, and risked a smile.

  Those warm brown eyes of hers instantly frosted over again. She snapped the CD player off and resumed her icy pose of a moment ago. “Paddy didn’t fall in that pit. And he didn’t drown. He was murdered.”

  Her plain statement of the facts caught him completely off guard. For a split second he read something in her eyes, in the way she unconsciously bit her lip, that unnerved him. A feminine sort of fragility he wasn’t prepared for. A moment later it vanished, and her features hardened.

  “You were out there,” she said.

  “So were you.”

  “You think I killed him?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  Her mouth dropped open. “You’re joking, right?”

  “Am I?” Now he was getting somewhere. He’d push her right to edge and see exactly what she was made of.

  “You’re insane. Get out.” She turned away and gripped the edge of the counter. He could tell by the way she wavered on her feet that she was exhausted.

  Sheer instinct drove him closer. Perhaps she was more of a mystery than he’d first suspected. He’d thought he had her figured out, but he wasn’t always good at reading people on first impressions.

  “What did you and Paddy talk about?”

  “Nothing. I left the camp to come out here and—” She spun toward him and shot him exactly the kind of condescending look his ex-wife had been famous for. “What business is it of yours?”

  “I’m a witness. I saw Paddy come out here to your trailer, myself.”

  “He did no such thing. After I left the camp I didn’t see him again until…” She looked away, her cheeks flushed.

  “I saw you with his body. You were—”

  “Trying to save him.”

  “That’s not what it looked like.”

  She pursed her lips and glared at him, deadly silent, her small hands fisted at her sides. He could tell from the fire in her eye that she was mentally counting to ten. He used the time to consider the facts.

  Paddy O’Connor had been in damned good shape for a man pushing up against the far side of sixty. Someone as petite as Lauren could never have muscled him into that reserve pit against his will.

  Seth hadn’t had the chance to check Paddy’s body for marks. He’d been too busy trying to revive him. Now it would be nearly impossible to confirm his suspicions. Wrapped in plastic sheeting, the body was sequestered away in the big freezer in the camp’s kitchen, which was open around the clock.

  Lauren could have hit him with something, right here in the privacy of her trailer. Could have knocked him out cold, dragged him to the pit, shielded by the weather, then drowned him.

  He glanced around the trailer at the neat stacks of papers, rock samples and supplies. Everything in order, neat as a pin. No blood. No signs of struggle, or obvious weapons in sight. Not even any mud on the floor, except for his own footprints. Lauren Fotheringay was either innocent, or very very good. Seth suspected the latter.

  “I think you’d better leave.” She turned her back on him and shut down the microscope she’d been using when he’d arrived.

  He wasn’t giving up that easily. He de
cided to try a different approach. “You knew Paddy pretty well, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did. He was…” She paused, and for a moment he thought she might not continue. “He was my father’s best friend.” She swept some glass slides into a drawer and slammed it shut, her back rigid.

  Four feet away he could feel her anger, and something more. A carefully shielded vulnerability evidenced by the way her hand shook as she again gripped the counter for support.

  Seth knew all about her father. Everyone here did. But he hadn’t known Paddy O’Connor had been Hatch Parker’s friend. The dossier Bledsoe had given him hadn’t included that fact.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and on impulse stepped toward her.

  “That’s okay. I’m just…”

  He looked down at her from behind as her knuckles turned white clutching the counter. Her shoulders shook almost imperceptibly, then her ragged breathing seemed to stop altogether. With a shock he realized she was crying.

  “Hey, don’t.” Without thinking, he gripped her shoulders to steady her. By accident he grazed his lips across her hair, catching a whiff of herbal shampoo as he leaned down to whisper in her ear. “It’s okay.”

  A fierce sort of compassion welled inside him. That wasn’t good. He was a federal agent, for Christ’s sake. Well, an ex-federal agent. Still, he was a cop, and he had a job to do. He was supposed to be questioning a suspect, not comforting a weeping woman.

  She turned in his arms. As her feet twisted between his, she faltered and reached for him. He caught her up, and her arms snaked around his neck. A second later her face was buried in his chest. She worked to get a grip on herself, but gave up the fight as he gently massaged the tight muscles of her back.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered, again, and stroked her soft auburn hair. “It’s good to cry. Get it all out.”

  What the hell was he doing? He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that she was warm and soft, and she needed him. Her father had been killed on this very rig, and now another man she’d been close to was dead, too.