The stewardess leaned away from her.
“I’m sorry, but we landed five minutes ago. I’m not sure if you have a connecting flight or…”
Chase blinked, then realized that she was in an airplane and that it must have landed in Seattle. Part of her mind tried to tell her that this was a dream, but she knew better.
The other thing, the thing with her sister, that had been a dream.
Sort of.
“Sorry,” she grumbled. “Must have fallen asleep.”
The woman stood up straight and smiled.
“That’s alright. It was an early flight—I would have fallen asleep myself if I didn’t have to work.”
Chase nodded, and then undid her seatbelt. Now, without an ogre hanging on each of her shoulders, she could finally take a full breath, and did so in earnest.
“Thanks,” she grumbled. She stood, stretched her calves, then checked her watch. It was close to lunchtime, and she had an hour or so to kill before boarding the final leg of her journey to Anchorage.
Chase collected her bag from the overhead compartment.
“Will my checked baggage be automatically transferred, or do I need to pick it up?”
The stewardess, who was busy checking all of the overhead bins for forgotten carry-ons, said, “It should go directly to your final destination. But I’d check with the boarding agent at the next flight just to be sure.”
Chase thanked the woman again and disembarked.
Ten minutes later, she found herself sitting in the busy food court, cramming over-salted French fries into her mouth, and watching whatever passed as cheese these days melt from the heat of the microwaved hamburger patty and drip onto the greasy plastic.
She chased the fries with a sip from her Coke.
Not the way I imagined it…
For a split second, she debated calling up some of her old colleagues from her time as a Narcotics Officer here in Seattle, but quickly squashed this idea.
It wasn’t worth the memories, drudging up a past that would only serve to reopen old wounds.
She had spent a good three years as a Narc; the fourth, and what was to her final year, was blurred by an addiction that still scarred the inside of her arms to this day.
Definitely best to just sit and eat this burger alone, chase it with the syrupy soft drink, and prepare for Anchorage.
The problem with this, however, was that she had no idea what or who she was preparing for. For as long as she could remember, Chase wanted to be part of the FBI, but could never see a way to transition from law enforcement to the Bureau. That is until her brief stint as NYPD Sergeant of the 62nd precinct. In her first and only case—the so-called Download Killer, a disgruntled housewife who murdered young women, painted their lips with their blood, and then published stories about their deaths online—she had immediately brought in the FBI to lend a hand.
FBI Special Agent Jeremy Stitts had helped her solve that case, and in the process, Chase had gained insight into why her application kept being overlooked. Stitts had spent a good deal of time observing her leading up to Ryanne Elliot’s untimely death, and Chase couldn’t help but shake the feeling that the entire case had been a sort of job interview.
And she had passed… or so she had thought. Agent Stitts had given her a badge and a service pistol, but instead of whisking her off to Quantico for training, he told her to sit tight, to wait for the call.
Chase wasn’t good at sitting and waiting.
Too much time in her own head was never a good thing.
Too much time to remember.
It didn’t help that after the Download Killer, she had come home to an empty house. Her husband Brad had taken their seven-year-old son Felix and had gone on an extended vacation with the boy.
It wasn’t his fault, Chase knew. Brad had told her repeatedly that she put them second behind her job, and yet she had ignored him.
And then, poof, they were gone.
Even when she pleaded with Brad, even after she had resigned from the NYPD—granted she wasn’t so much eased out the door as pushed through by Internal Affairs—he said he needed time.
That they both did.
In the interim, she could see Felix whenever she wanted, but it wasn’t the same. Chase missed seeing his face every night, even if most of the time when she looked down on him he was already fast asleep in his bed.
It wasn’t the same; they weren’t a family anymore, and this saddened her deeply.
And it also reminded her of a past long before Seattle that she had worked hard to forget.
I’m doing it for you, Georgina… I’m doing all of this for you.
A month passed without a call from the Bureau, and Chase began to wonder.
Be patient, she chided herself. They’ll call.
But when one month bled into two, she hadn’t been able to resist the urge: Chase picked up the phone and dialed Agent Stitts.
The man told her the same thing that she had told herself: just sit tight and wait.
On the third month, just as she was considering appealing to her ex-partner and good friend Damien Drake to join his PI firm, if for nothing else than to pass the time, she finally got the call.
And, like the flight she just experienced, it wasn’t what she had expected.
There was no private jet as she had seen countless times on Criminal Minds, no glass conference rooms filled with high-tech equipment and a team of slightly autistic yet brilliant specialists.
So far, it was just her, a douchebag TSA agent, an unhappy gate attendant, and two obese seat partners.
Oh, and the burger.
This burger.
Chase took a bite, and then dabbed at the grease that dribbled onto her chin.
She was nearly done with her meal when an announcement informed her that Delta flight 0199 to Anchorage was starting to board. After a short debate about whether or not she should finish her quarter pounder, and deciding against it, Chase took out her phone and scrolled to her recent calls.
All but one of the ten outgoing calls were to the same number. She dialed it now and waited until the answering machine picked up on the third ring.
“Hey buddy, I hope you’re having a great day at school. I’m just calling to let you know that I probably won’t be seeing you this weekend.” Chase closed her eyes and tilted her chin to the ceiling. She fought back the hitch that tried to claw its way into her throat. “I know I promised to take you to the indoor water park, but I can’t this weekend. Mommy’s going away for work… to Alaska! It’s supposed to be super cold there, but I’ll make sure to keep warm. I’ll be sure to pick you up something nice, and I promise to take you to the water park when I get back. I love you, Felix. And I love you too, Brad. Talk soon. Chase.”
Despite her best efforts, Chase was crying softly as she boarded the final flight of this leg of her journey.
CHAPTER 4
“What do you mean my luggage isn’t here?” Chase demanded, feeling the effects of the long travel day already. That, mixed with the early wakeup time and the poor quality of what little sleep she had, was taking its toll on her, and she fought hard to keep her cool.
The man behind the counter, a creature with fish eyes and thin lips that stretched nearly all the way across his face, appeared to pick up on these cues and leaned away from the counter. She got the impression that the glass partition that separated them wasn’t just for show.
“Ma’am, for some reason your luggage was held behind.”
Chase felt her blood pressure rise.
“But my—” she leaned in close, “—my service revolver was in there!”
The man’s eyes narrowed, and Chase produced her FBI badge that Agent Stitts had sent her.
Fish eyes blinked, seemed to extend toward the FBI seal, then retracted.
“Agent Adams, I’m not sure what to tell you, but your stuff isn’t here. Pistol included. I’ll make a note on your file stating that you are a government employee and hopefully…”
Chase drowned this banter out. She knew how it ended.
And yet, what little she heard touched a nerve.
Government employee? What am I? Some sort of aide to a local congressman?
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.
“Is it there?” she said, cutting the man off mid-sentence.
“Excuse me?”
Chase opened her eyes.
“My stuff. Can you confirm that it’s in Seattle? So far, you’ve only told me that it isn’t here, in Anchorage. Did it leave New York?”
The man turned to his computer and pecked at the keyboard with two index fingers.
What seemed like hours later, he looked up.
“Nope,” he said simply.
Chase scowled.
“No, what? No, it’s not there or…?”
The man’s thin lids slid over protruding eyeballs.
“No, I can’t tell you. All I know is that your luggage was not put on the flight to Anchorage. Now, I’m sure your stuff will make it here tomorrow, or the next day.” He spun a piece of paper around and slid it under the partition. “Now, if you’d be so kind as to put down the address of the place you’ll be staying, I’ll make sure they get it to you as soon as possible.”
Chase’s frown deepened as she looked over the sheet of paper, which asked for more personal information than an eHarmony profile.
Problem was, she had no idea where she was going to be staying. In fact, she really had no idea what the hell she was doing here at all.
Alaska, the voice on the phone had said. And that was pretty much it.
Aside from bringing her badge and gun, the latter of which had promptly gone missing.
Along with all of her clothes and a jacket appropriate for the weather.
Chase shook her head and filled out as much of the form as she could, making sure to write out her cell number twice, before handing it back.
The man looked it at, then at her. Everything he did seemed to be governed by how many times his giant eyeballs were covered with those translucent membranes. It was as if he needed to ask his eyes permission to breathe.
“Your address?” he said at last.
“Don’t know where I’ll be staying yet. But my number’s there. Just call me when you get it.”
More staring.
Chase sucked her teeth, fighting the urge to curse.
“Just call me; I need my pistol.”
The man frowned, and when he turned to file her paper in a stack of two dozen others, Chase fled the booth before she said or did something that would ultimately end in the man “losing” her luggage form.
Her face was warm, her stomach full from the meal to the point of bursting, and she felt dizzy.
What a way to make a first impression.
She pressed by a middle-aged couple who were searching for their suitcase on the carousel, oddly dressed in Hawaiian shirts, and then she made her way toward the main lobby.
A peek at the wall of windows across the terminal drew an instinctive shiver: it was snowing outside, and Chase, always uncomfortable on airplanes, hadn’t even worn a jacket. The only thing she had brought in her carry-on was a small makeup case, her toothbrush, deodorant, a t-shirt, several pairs of underwear, and her hair straightener.
The rest had been packed neatly into the suitcase that had subsequently been left behind.
Chase shook her head and hurried away from the crowds. Truth be told, she hadn’t a clue where she was going, but fueled by the frustration that this day had offered, she moved with purpose.
And a need for a drink.
Instead of alcohol, however, she settled for a small coffee cart from which she grabbed a Styrofoam cup full of caustic looking fluid. She was in the process of putting on the lid, which, obviously, felt just a fraction of an inch too small, when a hand gently brushed her shoulder.
She jumped, and then slid her hips backwards to avoid the scalding liquid that cascaded to the floor.
Chase lost it.
“Jesus Shit!” she said, spinning around. “Why the fuck would—”
A man in a dark navy suit with a narrow face and the beginnings of a blond goatee stood before her, shock and fear on his young face.
Chase glanced upward at the hat he was sporting—also navy, just a little lighter than the color of his suit—then at his hands.
Gripped in white fingers was a wipe board roughly the size of a sheet of paper. Written on it was a single word: ADAMS.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am. I just—”
Chase’s eyes narrowed.
“Why do you have my name on your board?” she snapped.
The man looked down at his hands, then turned it around so that the word was the right way up. He did this in a manner that made Chase think that he had forgotten what he had written on it.
“A-A-A-Adams…” he mumbled to himself. “I thought that m-m-maybe—”
“Who are you?”
The man broke into a grin, and he held a hand out to her.
Chase didn’t shake it.
“I asked who you were.”
The man’s smile faded.
“F-F-F-Floyd. F-Floyd M-M-Montgomery. Are you Chase A-A-Adams? I s-s-seen a picture on the n-n-news a while back, s-s-something—”
Chase cut him off before he could finish recounting a story she knew all too well.
“Yes, I’m Chase Adams. What do you want?”
The man looked down again.
“I must have m-m-missed you getting off the p-plane. The gates changed at the last m-m-minute, and I hurried, I really d-d-did, but it’s hard to—”
“What do you want?” Chase repeated, trying to save him the pain of forcing the words out with his stutter.
She saw his Adam’s apple bob and he lowered his eyes before answering.
“I’m here to p-pick you up. Agent M-M-Martinez sent me to come g-g-g-get you.”
CHAPTER 5
Girdwood, Municipality of Anchorage, Alaska.
Chase had never heard of the place before today, but quickly learned that it was a small town about forty miles from Anchorage with a population of roughly the same as an average housing complex in NYC: two thousand people.
In fact, during the just over half an hour drive sitting in the backseat of the midnight black Lincoln Town Car—Floyd had insisted that Chase sit in the back, even though she felt uncomfortable with being driven around—Chase learned more than she would watching an hour of Cosmos.
The first thing that she learned was that Floyd liked to talk.
A lot.
Part of this, Floyd explained, was that his speech therapist had told him that getting over the psychological block of speaking would help improve his stutter.
Chase wasn’t so sure.
Floyd Montgomery was twenty-four years old and was the nephew of Girdwood’s Chief of Police. He had worked for his uncle and the local PD doing odd jobs since he was just a kid, had a sister who had moved to Montreal when she was seven with her dad, neither of whom Floyd ever saw, and he had a keen interest in trains.
A real keen interest.
Chase listened as the man spoke, mostly out of politeness rather than interest, and when Floyd finally paused to take a breath, she finally broke in.
“So, Floyd, any idea where, exactly, we’re going?” she asked, watching as the subdued metropolis of Anchorage, which was centered around the airport, began to thin into a white expanse.
Floyd’s eyes flicked up to the rearview, before quickly returning to the road.
“Yes; Girdwood, small t-t-town about forty minutes f-from Anchorage. Well, t-t-technically we’re going to Crow C-C-Creek Road. Say, this is the first time that I’ve d-d-driven an FBI agent around. I was pretty excited when Unc—” that’s what he called the Police Chief, Unc, as if he were eight and not three times that age, “—said that I’d be chaperoning not one, but, t-t-two FBI Agents. I mean, that’s p-p-pretty exciting, don’t you think?”
Again, hi
s pale eyes flicked up.
The question seemed rhetorical to Chase, but concerned that his eyes remained locked on hers and not the road for so long, she eventually offered an answer.
“Well, I bet you’re pretty disappointed, huh?” she said with a wry smile. Despite his ramblings, after everyone that she had encountered today, Floyd was a breath of fresh air.
He turned his eyes back to the road.
“W-w-well, I don’t know about t-t-that. You’re very p-p-pretty.”
For some reason, Floyd’s innocence struck a chord with her and Chase started to blush. Turning her gaze to the dark, tinted windows, she stared at her own reflection.
Seeing the dark circles under her eyes, her hair that she had been forced to pull back in a short ponytail after falling asleep between the two giants on the plane, she thought briefly that Floyd was messing with her.
But something told her that this simple man wasn’t capable of being dishonest.
“Thank you,” she said, watching as the landscape further degenerated into a sea of white.
The next five minutes passed in silence, but then they drove over a set of train tracks, and this set Floyd off on a tangent on his favorite subject.
“In 1909, Alaska Central Railroad—th-th-that’s the company name—built the f-f-first railroad in Alaska. It was f-f-fifty-one miles long, and took food and people to T-T-T-urnagain Arm.”
Chase nodded. This seemed to fuel Floyd’s excitement, and when he spoke again, his stutter became more pronounced.
“F-f-from there, the d-d-dogs would take the p-p-people and f-food where it needs to g-g-go.”
Chase’s ears perked.
“Dogs?”
Floyd nodded.
“D-d-dogsleds. I had a dog once,” Floyd continued, “His name was S-S-Steven. He w-w-was a co-co-cocker-spaniel. But he died.”
Another pause, this one extending as long as a full minute.
“We’re almost here,” Floyd announced, pulling Chase out of her head.
They had moved from a main highway artery to a feeder capillary, and the metropolis that was Anchorage had become a distant memory. They passed a sign announcing that they were entering Girdwood, then continued through the lazy resort town, before exiting on the other side. In the distance, she could make out snow-covered pines, as well as a narrowing of the road. Floyd turned onto an even smaller road, which Chase assumed, but couldn’t tell for certain given the snow, was unpaved.
Frozen Stiff Page 2
