“You’d be, too.” He paced the strip of carpet in front of the officer’s desk, stopping every so often to glance at his watch.
“Four o’clock in the morning,” Danny said. “You just checked it.”
Seth ignored him and moved to the window. The street outside the station house was dark and quiet. All of Kachelik was asleep. He’d be, too, if he was smart.
But he wasn’t smart.
He was a man in love with a woman who didn’t know what she wanted. And that made him crazy. Maybe she did know, and was just too afraid to act on it. The thing was, he had no idea if she was afraid to dash his hopes or make him the happiest man on earth.
Seth swore silently under his breath.
He knew what he wanted. He hadn’t known before tonight, not entirely. But now he was sure.
“I said, I checked out that crew manifest you brought back.”
Seth hadn’t been listening. “Uh, yeah. Find anything?”
“You were right about one of them. Charles P. White, aka Pinkie. His sheet’s as long as your arm. Did time in…geez, three different states.”
That didn’t surprise him.
“Assault, assault with intent, petty theft, grand theft, arson, rape—” Seth ground his teeth “—another rape, and the list goes on.”
Arson. Seth mentally added the Caribou Island warehouse fire to the list of Pinkie’s crimes.
Rape. If Bledsoe’s men so much as blinked while Lauren was under their protection, Seth swore to God he’d—
The radio crackled to life behind Danny’s desk, and both of them jumped.
“I got it,” Danny said, and flipped a switch on the box.
It was Al Cheriut who ran a charter service over at the airport. The same guy Lauren had tried to hire to take her out to the island yesterday afternoon.
“Yeah, Al,” Seth said into the mike, pushing Danny out of the way. “What is it?”
The pilot’s voice was groggy with sleep. “Just thought you oughta know… ’Bout fifteen minutes ago, some guy rolled my kid outta bed over at the airstrip at Takluk.” It was another village, about as far south of Caribou Island as Kachelik was east.
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Some chopper pilot. Needed fuel. Said he’d just dropped some big wheeler-dealer Tiger exec off on Caribou Island. Seein’ as how that lady yesterday wanted me to fly her out there, I just thought you’d wanna—”
“Who was the guy?”
“The pilot?”
“No, the Tiger guy?”
“Dunno. My kid said the pilot was on his way back from the island. He’d already dropped the guy off.”
Seth swore.
In the back of his mind, he’d never really thought Bledsoe’s ploy would work, that the brains of the operation would take the bait. Lauren was out there alone, and while he knew, hoped, Bledsoe’s men could handle Salvio and his cronies, he didn’t know what to expect from this so-called mastermind.
If it was Holt, surely he wouldn’t hurt her. The guy was supposed to marry her, for God’s sake!
And if it turned out to be Walters? Walters had every reason to want Lauren dead, and not just because of what she might know about the covert operation on Caribou Island. Walters was about to be passed over for promotion—a promotion Lauren would get in his place.
Seth had the sick, gnawing feeling he’d done the wrong thing—trusting Bledsoe, letting Lauren go—but for the right reason. For her. Because that damned rock sample meant more to her than anything else in her life.
“Son of a bitch!”
Danny grabbed the mike from Seth’s hand a split second before he ripped it from the box. “Uh, thanks, Al. We’ll catch you later, okay?”
Seth didn’t wait around to hear any more.
Danny caught up with him in the back room where they kept the department’s gun safe. “What are you doing?”
“What I should have done in the first place.” He spun the cylinder of the combination lock—right, left, right—and the safe’s heavy door clicked open.
“Which is?” Danny caught the shotgun Seth tossed him from the rack inside the safe, then started to shake his head. “You’re not doing what I think you’re doing?”
“The hell I’m not.” He nodded toward the Kevlar vests hanging on the wall behind them. “Put one of those on.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you.” He donned one of the vests, a shoulder holster, then slapped a Beretta into it. He reached into the safe for another of the department shotguns, annoyed as hell that only SWAT or Feds were issued assault rifles.
“You’re out of your mind,” Danny said, continuing to shake his head in amazement. “Bledsoe told you to stay put. You’re off the case.”
“I may be off the FBI’s case, but I’m a North Slope Borough cop, goddamnit, and I’ve got my own case.”
“Yeah, a redhead about five-two.”
“Five-three,” he said, and started for the back door.
When he found her, after he made sure she was safe, he was going to get some answers. For starters, did she love him or didn’t she? A simple question, requiring a simple answer. Was she going to marry that—he let fly a choice expletive for Crocker Holt—or was she going to marry him?
“Just how do you think you’re going to get there? All the way to Caribou Island?”
Seth shot him a look.
“That wreck? Oh, no. It’s barely flyable. I put the maintenance order in weeks ago. It’s still tied up in approvals.”
“Screw the approvals. It’ll get me there.” He pushed open the back door and headed for his Jeep.
“And I suppose you want me to fly you?”
“That’s right. Unless you want to give me a quick lesson and send me off on a wing and a prayer.”
Danny climbed into the passenger seat of the Jeep a second before Seth threw it into gear and barreled out of the parking lot. They argued all the way to the airport.
“So tell me again, why I’m doing this?” Danny skidded across the ice after Seth, toward the rusting, thirty-year-old chopper the department had snagged only because Danny had saved it from the scrap heap.
Seth tossed him a wry look. “To nail the bad guys, save the girl.”
Danny’s face effected a look somewhere between thoughtful calculation and surprise. “Okay. Sounds good.”
Twenty minutes later they were in the air.
Bill Walters?
Lauren’s jaw dropped.
Her boss stood in the doorway of Salvio’s office, blocking her only means of escape.
Where were those federal agents? They were supposed to have kept her in sight every second. Lauren fought the panic twisting her stomach into knots.
It had taken them much longer to reach the island than they’d expected. It turned out their undercover dog musher had only been on a sled once in his life, and he hadn’t been driving. In the end Lauren had had to mush the dogs herself, the embarrassed agent jogging along beside her.
“I heard about what happened,” Bill said, moving into the room.
Lauren took a step back.
“God, Lauren, are you okay?” He reached out to touch her shoulder, and she flinched.
“Y-you’re supposed to be at home, in bed.”
“Me?”
She swallowed hard, backing toward the small window overlooking the brightly lit yard. Somewhere in the background she was conscious of the roar of heavy equipment as a skeleton crew worked round the clock to disassemble the rig and shut down the Caribou Island operation.
“The…I…thought you were home, is all.” This was crazy. Bledsoe had just confirmed her boss’s whereabouts not an hour ago.
Walters grinned, but his eyes weren’t smiling. “I ought to be home. My brother’s visiting from Ohio. We’re twins. He’s at the house now.”
“Oh, God.” Lauren felt her knees go weak. Bledsoe’s agents had mistaken her boss’s brother for Walters himself. “When did you get here?”
“I left
as soon as I got the news you’d been found and were on your way here. Didn’t bother with the corporate jet or even a charter. Hitched a ride with a buddy who flies a mail route up this way.”
He was smart. Exactly as Bledsoe had predicted. She bumped up against the window and sucked a shallow breath.
“You don’t look good, Lauren. Have you seen a doctor?”
She shook her head, which was spinning like a top, over-heating with conflicting information.
“Salvio told me about the accident in the warehouse.”
“Accident?” Her voice cracked as she said the word.
“Amazing you made it out alive. Too bad about that roughneck. I heard he didn’t make it.”
She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t even move.
On the sled trip in, she’d prepared herself for the inevitability that Crocker was the one. She’d figured out that he’d probably been playing her from the beginning.
Crocker was the one who’d asked her mother to introduce them two years ago, who’d infiltrated himself into the Fotheringays’ social circle and into Lauren’s life. When they’d started dating he’d been in banking, but soon after he’d asked her to introduce him around to Tiger’s top brass. That’s how he’d landed the job of VP of finance.
Their courtship, his proposal, even moving their wedding date up nearly a year…she’d concluded that all of it had been part of Crocker’s plan to position himself inside Tiger Petroleum for the purpose of selling millions of dollars of proprietary data to black market buyers.
The question was why?
She even recalled some unmarked rock samples Crocker had asked her to analyze last year. He’d said it was a favor for a friend. She’d done it, and the samples had, in fact, contained oil. She suspected those samples had ended up in a foreign oil company’s pocket, just as the FBI suspected, and that Crocker’s own pockets were lined with green.
As she stared in undisguised amazement at Bill Walters, Lauren realized her faulty conclusions had been the result of nothing more than an overactive imagination, fueled by Seth’s insistence that Crocker was the one. They’d both done her fiancé a terrible injustice and, in her case, that injustice ran deeper than simply believing for the span of a few hours that he was a criminal.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” she breathed, shaking her head, her gaze moving slowly over Walters’s cool features.
“What do you mean?” He screwed up his face and cocked his head. “And about that roughneck…why’d he take you off the island?”
“Seth?” Her mouth was dry. She was still in her survival jacket, and Salvio’s office was warm.
She’d seen Jack only briefly, about an hour ago when she’d first arrived. His reception was so warm, so over-wrought with concern for her safety, it was almost eerie. She’d felt as if she’d entered a bad episode of The Twilight Zone. He’d acted as if nothing had happened out of the ordinary before the warehouse had exploded.
He’d called it an accident, too. I guess there would never be any proof that it wasn’t, since the burned-out remnants of the building were already plowed off to the side of the site.
Pinkie and Bulldog had actually smiled at her when the undercover agent—her musher, breathless from his jog along the ice road—had dropped her off and careened into the night, the sled dogs barely in check.
Nothing was as she’d expected.
And where the hell were those James Bond, dressed-all-in-white agents when you needed them? The ones with the guns. The ones that Bledsoe promised would protect her.
“Yeah,” Walters said, ripping her from her thoughts. “That’s his name. Seth Adams. Why’d he take you away in that Rolligon?”
“Why?” Her hands began to sweat as Walters inched closer, reaching into the pocket of his down vest. “He, I…don’t know. He had some crazy idea that something was wrong here.”
She held her breath as Walters drew something out of his pocket. It was a…handkerchief? She’d expected a gun. In fact, she had her own shaking hand buried deep in her jacket pocket, wrapped tightly around Seth’s Glock.
“Maybe something is wrong here,” Walters said cryptically as he calmly dabbed the sweat off her brow.
Lauren nearly fainted.
“There nothing frickin’ wrong, got it?” Salvio blustered into the room and clapped a paw on Walters’s shoulder. “Come on, Bill. I got a pool cue in the rec room with your name on it.”
Lauren felt as if she was in a dream state. “Jack, I…want to go out to my lab now.”
He hadn’t let her near the trailer since she’d arrived. He’d made the excuse that Bulldog was cleaning it up for her, clearing away the mess that had been made when some “misguided person” had trashed it. Salvio hadn’t said who had done it, or why, only that the crew member had been sent back to town.
He’d been spinning lies like that one since she’d arrived. The scariest part was that he knew she knew it, but it was almost as if he didn’t care, as if she didn’t matter.
As if she were already dead.
“Go ahead,” Salvio said, steering Walters into the hallway. “Trailer’s all ready for you.”
The moment she realized the two of them were going to let her go—and if not let her go, at least let her get out of Salvio’s office alive—she nearly whimpered in relief.
She was out the front door of the camp in seconds, pulling in icy gulps of air as she jogged across the yard toward her trailer. The place was in an uproar, crewmen and equipment everywhere.
Where were those agents? She hadn’t seen a sign of them since the musher had dropped her off. Maybe that was normal. Maybe they were just that good, hiding in the shadows where they could see her, but she couldn’t see them.
They certainly hadn’t been able to see her when Bill Walters had her cornered in Salvio’s office. She realized that Bledsoe didn’t even know Walters was here!
The trailer door was ajar, and soft light bled from the back bedroom into the lab, reflecting off the newly mopped linoleum. Perhaps Bulldog really had cleaned the place.
Everything seemed in order when she stepped inside and closed the door behind her. She considered locking it, then decided against it, in case her FBI white knights needed to get to her fast.
She hadn’t considered the idea that the trailer might be booby-trapped, as the warehouse had been. She simply figured that if there was any danger, the FBI agents wouldn’t have let her come in here alone.
She ran a hand along the steel countertop as she moved slowly toward the bedroom. It seemed a million years ago when she and Seth had nearly made love here.
She allowed herself to remember—his face, those penetrating eyes, the way he felt inside her, the words he’d whispered to her just days ago.
I love you.
She stepped into the narrow bedroom and gasped.
Crocker was sprawled casually across her bed. He looked up at her, ice-blue eyes glittering in the soft light, and smiled. In his pale, manicured hand he cradled the plastic bag housing the only remaining rock sample from Caribou Island’s secret well.
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Seth yelled to Danny over the deafening staccato of the borough chopper’s over-taxed engine.
“Pedal’s to the metal. Five minutes. Almost there.”
It was a clear, cold night. In the distance, the lights on Caribou Island gave off a phosphorescent glow. Seth narrowed his eyes, scanning the ice for signs of Bledsoe’s team. About a mile from the island he saw the black, unmarked FBI choppers at rest on the ice. A dogsled sat nearby. The mixed-breed team went crazy as the borough chopper passed overhead.
Lauren was already on the island, Bledsoe’s team in place.
Seth held his breath as Danny slowed the bird into a wide turn over the site. The rig was already partially disassembled, the yard and staging areas cluttered with outgoing pallets of equipment. The burned-out warehouse and a handful of federal agents sporting arctic camouflage lurking in the shadows, scattered across the si
te, were the only signs that Caribou Island wasn’t just another exploration well.
“I count five,” Danny yelled, as he completed the turn.
“Six,” Seth said, and swore. The sum total of Bledsoe’s team, the team that was supposed to keep Lauren in sight every goddamned second.
“Why are they all outside? Wouldn’t she be inside?”
Seth checked his weapons and reached for the rattling door handle. “Land this thing, Danny! Now!”
“So this is it.” Crocker said, weighing the sample bag in his hand. “Hard to believe something so small could be worth so much money. Hiding it in that box of tampons was nothing short of brilliant, Lauren. Too bad I know how you think.”
“It was you. It was you all the time.” Lauren was frozen in place, her gaze riveted to Crocker’s cool blue eyes.
“Of course it was me. Who else could do something this big, this…magnificent?” He waved a hand in the air.
“I…I thought Bill…”
“Walters? That buffoon?” He made a disparaging sound in the back of his throat as he swung his legs to the floor and rose in that elegant way that was his alone.
“So, Bill’s not involved?”
“Oh, he had his uses,” Crocker said, skirting the bed. “But, no, Walters doesn’t have a clue about what we’ve managed to pull off out here. He did do a fine job of making sure we had the most up-to-date technologies, I’ll give him that.”
She remembered that Bill had, indeed, lobbied for those things months ago. The computerized drilling system, state-of-the-art communications, the works. “But why would he do that?”
“I told him I’d support him in his big play for the job of his dreams.”
“Exploration VP? You would have done that?”
Crocker laughed. “Of course not. That job’s going to you. And think of what a great team we’ll make once you get it.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m very serious, sweetheart.” He kept advancing, backing her into the darkened lab.
“But, Crocker, why? What possible motive could have driven you to this?”
“Money.”
Her incredulity blossomed into sheer amazement. “But you’re rich, even wealthier than my stepfather.”
On Thin Ice Page 21
