On Thin Ice

by Debra Lee Brown

  He was a fool to even want her. He’d learned enough about her to know she wasn’t the kind of hard-edged woman he’d first made her out to be. And she was nothing at all like his ex. Their high-society backgrounds were similar, sure, but Lauren hadn’t been raised that way from birth like Kitty had. It wasn’t in her blood.

  Listening to her talk about Alaska, hearing the nostalgia in her voice when she’d told him about the time she spent with her father in the Arctic growing up, made him think the kind of life she’d been living—the diamond ring, the Porsche, Holt’s money and her own career plans—maybe it wasn’t the life she really wanted.

  You’re delusional, Adams.

  What kind of woman wouldn’t want it?

  He shook his head and wished Danny, one of his officers from the borough police department, was here to knock some sense into him. He wondered, idly, how things were going back at the village. Probably fine, aside from the minor problems this kind of weather brought with it. A roof blown off an old building, a sled dog missing in the storm. Stuff like that. Not much happened in Kachelik. It was quiet.

  Small town and small time. There were no Porsches and only one jewelry store—and they didn’t even sell diamonds. For something like that you had to go to Anchorage. Better yet, San Francisco. Lauren had mentioned it, in fact.

  He knew from the case file that Crocker Holt kept a condo there—a million-dollar crib with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Seth thought about his two-bedroom house with the metal roof. He had a view, too—of the tundra.

  Was that why he was contemplating Bledsoe’s bargain? Because somewhere in the back of his mind he thought he’d be more interesting to a woman like Lauren if he was a federal agent working big cases in a big city, instead of the chief of police of a two-bit town?

  That was part of it. There was another reason, too, but he didn’t want to think about that now. He dropped the guide rope leading from the camp to Lauren’s trailer and raised a gloved hand to shield his eyes so he could see.

  “What the—?”

  The door to her trailer was wide open. Wind howled past him, blowing dry snow into the lab.

  “Lauren?” He started up the steps and stopped dead. What the hell had happened? The inside of the trailer was a wreck. Every cabinet door in the lab was open, equipment and supplies scattered across the white linoleum. “Lauren?”

  Panic rose in his throat. Sloughing a glove, he stepped cautiously inside, his hand slipping instinctively under his jacket to where his shoulder holster would be if he was wearing a weapon. Which, of course, he wasn’t.

  He swore.

  “Lauren, answer me!”

  The overhead lights were on in the lab and in the bedroom in the back. His gaze swept the room, all his training, his instinct sharpening every move. Moving slowly, he stepped over open boxes of all sizes and their contents littering the floor. Glass from a box of microscope slides crunched under his boot.

  All of the supplies in the overhead cabinets had been pulled down and were strewn across the steel counters underneath. Lauren’s microscope lay on its side in pieces. Her notebook, which was usually right next to it on her workstation, was missing altogether, along with her laptop computer.

  There was no evidence of a skirmish. No blood, no footprints, nothing. Thank God. No, this mess wasn’t the result of an altercation. Someone had searched the place, looking for something.

  The questions in Seth’s mind were who? and what?

  He had a pretty good idea of the “who”—either Salvio himself, or one of his cronies. Pinkie and Bulldog. Oh, yeah. This was right up their alley.

  Seth moved quickly toward the bedroom, but already sensed no one was there. The room was a wreck, the single mattress pulled off the box spring and ripped apart. Stuffing was everywhere. Lauren’s clothes lay scattered across the floor. The bathroom was the same, the contents of the medicine chest in a pile in the sink.

  “Oh, my God!”

  He spun a one-eighty at the sound of her voice.

  Lauren stood framed in the open doorway of the lab, wind whipping at her hair, her mouth gaping as her gaze swept the room, colliding with his in a shock.

  “What did you do?” She took a step toward him, then stopped, fear streaking across her face.

  “Lauren.” He put his hands up. “It wasn’t me. I swear it.” He snaked toward her, sidestepping the debris littering the floor, holding her shattered gaze.

  She shook her head and stepped back. “Lauren, no!” Not heeding his warning, she grabbed the door frame a fraction of a second before tumbling backward down the trailer stairs.

  A moment later he reached her.

  “D-don’t touch me!”

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her inside. She started to fight him, but he held her fast. “Listen to me, Lauren. Look at me!”

  She obeyed, her face white, her body trembling beneath his hands. Her astonishment was natural, explainable, but her fear wasn’t. She should have been angry, more than angry. She should have been pissed as hell to discover that someone had broken into her trailer and done this.

  But she wasn’t angry. She was scared to death. And that made Seth instantly suspicious. What had happened that he didn’t know about to make fear, and not anger, her first reaction?

  “It wasn’t me,” he said again, and looked steadily into her eyes. “I came out here to see you and found it like this.”

  He watched her take in air and work to calm herself.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “I was just…” Her gaze focused past him on the bedroom. When she saw the mess in there, her eyes widened. “Oh, no.”

  “What is it?”

  She jerked out of his grasp and stepped shakily over the boxes and scattered debris blocking her path to the bedroom.

  “Lauren—”

  “I’ll be right back.” She shot him a glance over her shoulder. “Stay here. Please!”

  What the hell was going on?

  He started to follow her, then stopped when he heard the bathroom door slam shut. She was in there for only a minute; it seemed like forever. Seth was just about to go after her, when he heard the toilet flush.

  “Are you okay?” he asked her again when she returned to where he was standing.

  “Yes.” She nodded, but not convincingly. Her face twisted in frustration. “No. I don’t know.”

  Her gaze darted around the room, her brown eyes like a frightened doe’s. The tough, cool facade she’d put on a few hours ago in Salvio’s office for Seth’s benefit was gone.

  “Come here,” he said, not waiting for her to respond. He simply put his arms around her and pulled her to him. She buried her head in his chest and tightened her arms around him like a frightened child.

  “Sweetheart,” he wanted to whisper into her hair, against the soft skin of her neck—but he didn’t. “Things have happened that you haven’t told me about. Am I right?”

  She nodded, her face pressed into the loft of his down survival jacket.

  “Look at me, Lauren.” He shed his other glove and tilted her chin up. “Has anyone threatened you, or hurt you? Salvio? Any of the others?”

  Her brown eyes glassed, and he swore.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m…fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No, I’m not. It’s just that—”

  He couldn’t help himself. He kissed her, and not gently. His head began to throb with the weight of a hundred unanswered questions—most of them about her, what she wanted, what she felt.

  The case—Salvio, Walters, Bledsoe and the hell Seth would catch if the section chief found out he’d fallen head over heels like an idiot for one of their suspects—all of it fled his mind as he let himself drown in the kiss.

  Lauren tried to break away, but he wouldn’t let her. “Seth, I…can’t do this. I don’t want to—” he kissed her again “—make things harder.” He could have made a joke, but he didn’t
. When he kissed her again, she finally gave up the fight and kissed him back.

  God, he wanted her. He wanted to pull her down on top of him right here on the linoleum. Unzip her jacket and—

  “Well, well, well.”

  Both of them startled at the sound of Salvio’s voice. Lauren unwrapped herself from Seth’s embrace and jumped back as if he was a pariah.

  Salvio stood in the open doorway and took in the scene. His gaze leveled on Lauren. “Don’t expect your boyfriend’s gonna like this.”

  Lauren flinched at the way Salvio drew out the word. “What are you talking about?”

  Seth started to speak, but she flashed her eyes at him in warning.

  “A woman like you. A lowlife like him.” Salvio nodded at him. “News like that travels fast.”

  Seth advanced on him, fully intending for his fist to connect with Salvio’s face.

  Lauren caught his arm. “Please leave. I can handle this myself.”

  “Place is a wreck, Fotheringay.” Salvio shook his head as he looked around. “Not much of a housekeeper, are ya?”

  Seth was ready to kill him. He forced himself to calm down and act like the cop he was supposed to be, instead of a man going medieval at the thought of someone threatening the woman he cared about. He sucked in a breath and reminded himself that as far as Lauren or Salvio were concerned, he was supposed to be a roughneck from Kachelik. That’s all.

  “I’ll, uh, help you clean this mess up.”

  Lauren cast him a collected look. “That’s all right. I can do it myself.”

  “No, really. I’d like to.”

  “Please. Just go.” She stood there, rigid. Her jacket and gloves were still on, but her hard hat had fallen to the floor when he’d kissed her. The wind blowing in through the open door ruffled the fur of her hood against her cheek.

  “Sure?” he said.

  She nodded, her gaze riveted to Salvio. The company man turned to leave, and Seth followed him out. Lauren grabbed the door to close it behind them.

  Seth shot her a look that said later, but her eyes had gone cold again, just as they had earlier that day in Salvio’s office. He knew what had set it off this time. Salvio’s mention of her boyfriend. The very wealthy, highly respected Crocker Holt. The man she was going to marry.

  A woman like you. A lowlife like him.

  Lauren closed the door. Seth listened for the click of the lock, but couldn’t hear it over the wind.

  Jack Salvio leaned back in his desk chair and snorted. Driver’s license, VISA, a North Slope Borough library card and a couple of twenties. “That it?”

  “Nope.” Pinkie grinned. Christ, what an ugly sight. “I saved the best for last.” He gathered up the items on Salvio’s desk, stuffed them back into the wallet and pocketed it.

  Salvio eyed the roustabout with amusement as Pinkie closed the door to the office, walked to the window and pulled the drape. Salvio knew Pinkie’d done time. Petty theft, arson, assault with intent. Perfect for the kinds of capers they’d been pulling off for over a year now.

  “Check this out. You’re gonna croak when you see it.”

  Salvio nearly did. Pinkie’s eyes lit up like birthday candles.

  “Son of a bitch!” He snatched the weapon from Pinkie’s grasp and weighed it in his hand. “You found this in his stuff?”

  “Took some lookin’, but yeah. Found it duct-taped up under his bunk. It’s a Glock, ain’t it?”

  “Nine millimeter.” Salvio checked the ten-round clip. It was flush. “But what the hell’s he doing with it, and how’d he get it past security?”

  Every bag coming and going from Caribou Island was searched by Tiger rent-a-cops. No guns, no cameras, no booze… The list of contraband was as long as your arm.

  “Beats me.” Pinkie dropped onto the sofa and swung his feet onto the battered cushion.

  “Gimme that wallet again.”

  Pinkie tossed it to him. Salvio put the Glock down on his desk and jerked the driver’s license from its plastic protector.

  “Thirty-two years old, six-two, a couple a hundred pounds plus change.” Hair—black. Eyes—brown. An organ donor. Salvio laughed at that one. This son of a bitch was no Boy Scout. He stared hard at the Glock, his mind sifting through every encounter he’d had with this jerk over the past week.

  He’d been sniffing around Fotheringay from the beginning, and had a bad habit of showing up where he wasn’t supposed to be. Snooping around the office, questioning the crew, by the reserve pit with O’Connor’s body, in Fotheringay’s trailer at night. Oh, yeah. Jack Salvio’s mama didn’t raise no dummies. Old Nanook was banging her. Jeez, what he wouldn’t give to see Holt’s face when he found out.

  Salvio’s gaze zeroed in on the bad driver’s license photo of Seth Adams. “Roughneck, my ass.”

  Chapter 11

  S he was determined to do this herself.

  Lauren cruised casually past Salvio’s darkened office and checked her watch. 11:30 p.m. He’d be up on the rig now to supervise the shift change at midnight. She could hear men’s voices and occasional laughter drift down the hall from the kitchen.

  Seth was probably there now, eating before it was time for him to work. At least a dozen times since that afternoon, she’d alternately decided on and then dismissed the idea of confiding in him. Someone had ransacked her trailer looking for that sample. Thank God they hadn’t found it. It remained undiscovered in the box of tampons in her bathroom. Her woman’s intuition about where to hide it had been right.

  She ignored her intuition now. The little voice inside her head warning her that if she was right about her suspicions, what she was about to do was more than just stupid. It was dangerous.

  Nevertheless, she was going to do it, and without Seth’s help. She’d leaned on him far too much already. She didn’t want them to get any more involved than they already were.

  Are we? Are we involved?

  She remembered the smoldering look in his eyes when he’d asked her that.

  Her hand paused on the door to Jack Salvio’s room, which was tucked into a blind alcove at the far end of the camp’s hundred-foot-long hallway, adjacent to the emergency exit she and Seth had used the day they’d broken into the sat-comm shack.

  The door was locked, as she’d expected it to be. But the camp belonged to Altex, not Tiger, and Lauren had lifted a set of master keys from the desk in the tiny office across from Salvio’s that had belonged to Paddy O’Connor.

  If Salvio was doing something illegal on Caribou Island—other than the typical high jinks that often went on in these oil field camps, like smuggling in booze or women—she was going to find out what it was and blow the whistle on him.

  She put her ear to the door and heard nothing except the low-level hum of the camp’s generators and the shrieking wind outside, which had been blowing for so long now the sound of it had become a part of the background.

  She tried four different keys before finding the right one. The knob turned easily under her hand. She was in. The room was dark, and she didn’t want to chance turning the overhead light on. Switching on her penlight, she scanned the small bedroom. It reeked of cigarettes and dirty clothes.

  A desk was wedged into a corner next to the unmade bed. It was as good a place as any to start. A minute’s search uncovered nothing out of the ordinary. Blank paper, pens, a couple of men’s adventure novels, and some letters from someone named Charisse in envelopes prominently displaying the logo of The Great Alaskan Bush Company—a popular strip club in town. Lauren sat down on the bed and started to read one. She stopped when she realized it had nothing to do with what she was looking for.

  What was she looking for?

  She wasn’t sure. Just something that proved there was more than a simple drilling operation going on out here.

  She searched through the clothes scattered on the bed. Paper crunched inside a pair of mud-spattered jeans that looked as if they hadn’t been washed in weeks. She smoothed the paper out on the mattre
ss and shone the penlight on the scrawled writing.

  It was a phone number. It seemed familiar to her. She knew it from somewhere, but where? Recently, Tiger had upgraded its phone system both in Anchorage and San Francisco. She hadn’t gotten a new number, but lots of people had, including her boss Bill Walters and some of the other Tiger execs. In her mind she ran through the common exchanges, then some of the extensions she knew by heart. No, she couldn’t place it. She pocketed the slip of paper, then arranged the clothes on the bed as she’d found them.

  The built-in wardrobe at the foot of the bed was next. She didn’t bother with the hanging garments, but went right to the cubbyholes on top. She held the penlight in her mouth as she sorted through folded piles of white underwear and socks. A flash of color caught her eye. She gasped. The penlight thudded onto the thinly carpeted floor and rolled under the bed.

  “Damn!”

  A moment later she dove for the light, jerking a whole pile of Salvio’s underwear from the cubbyhole in the process. She felt it whoosh by her on its way to the floor. Good going, Lauren. She found the penlight and sat up amidst a disarray of jockey shorts and wool socks.

  The glow-in-the-dark hands of her watch told her she’d been in the room only a couple of minutes, but already she heard men’s voices in the hallway outside. The second shift was suiting up to go to work.

  Now, if she could just gather up all this stuff and put it back where—

  The narrow beam from the penlight froze on the object that had caused her to lose it to begin with. She snatched the blue felt garment from under a pair of briefs on the floor.

  It was a liner. A felt hard-hat liner like the kind the crew used in winter. She used a down one, herself, but these were popular with the men because they could be washed.

  This one was dirty. It had mud on it and—

  “Oh, my God.”

  She held the penlight close and traced a finger along the brownish-black crust that glued the liner to itself, making it hard for her to smooth out the fabric.

  It was blood.

  The men’s voices in the hallway outside grew louder, along with footfalls. They should be moving away from the end of the hall, not toward it. Lauren froze. She switched off the penlight, pulled her knees up close and sat there in the dark holding her breath.