On Thin Ice

The woman was tough as nails. And a hell of a lot more attractive in the flesh than she appeared in that society news clipping he’d seen showing her dressed to the nines with Tiger’s money man, Crocker Holt. Seth had read all about the two of them in the dossier Bledsoe had provided.

Those big brown eyes of hers had given him the once-over, too. More than once. In an irritating way, she reminded him of Kitty, his ex. They both had that same finishing-school, expensive-women’s-college, “hey, look at me, I’m a big lady executive” sort of arrogance about them.

Behind the scenes, women like that got their kicks from messing with the heads of men they considered a couple of rungs below them on the evolutionary ladder. Construction workers, auto mechanics, even a roughneck now and then. Yeah, he knew the type. Boy, did he ever.

What Little Miss Society In Geologist’s Clothing didn’t know was that he wasn’t a roughneck. Well, not anymore he wasn’t. Fresh out of high school he’d pulled pipe from Barter Island to Barrow, scraping together enough money to pay his way through college.

He’d graduated with honors with a B.A. in criminology from the University of Alaska, surprising the hell out of his old man. Seth would never forget the day he called him in his New York office with the news. Not that an important oil man like Jeremy Adams had time to attend his kid’s commencement.

Remembering, Seth made a derisive sound in the back of his throat.

The FBI had recruited him right out of school. Some affirmative action thing, though he could have easily made the cut on his own. He ended up second in his class at the Academy. Even so, Bledsoe, his section chief in D.C., had never liked him. The feeling was mutual.

Three years later Bledsoe had him dismissed for reasons Seth didn’t like to remember. He’d blown their cover on a major counterfeiting sting the FBI and Secret Service had spent six months and a bundle of cash setting up. The way Seth saw it, it was either that or watch his partner take one in the back. He’d had no choice. Bledsoe thought otherwise.

In the end, his partner nearly bought it. Bledsoe somehow managed to blame that on him, too. After Seth got the ax, he went home to his native village of Kachelik, and had worked as a borough cop there ever since.

It was a great job, and he loved the village. He had friends there, and family. His wife left him when the Bureau canned him and, in hindsight, he considered himself damned lucky. They were from different worlds, and Seth never intended to make that mistake again.

The past few years had been pretty uneventful. No real challenges, no serious girlfriends. Everything was rocking along just fine until a few weeks ago when two suits showed up at the village in the dead of night in an unmarked FBI chopper.

Bledsoe wanted him back. Needed him, was more like it. The Feds wanted someone undercover on Caribou Island, and couldn’t find one among the ranks of bright and shiny new agents who’d fit in on an offshore oil rig in the Arctic. Seth was elected.

Altex’s grim financial situation made it easy for the FBI to get him out on the island. Posing as a native Alaskan affirmative action group, Bledsoe’s men had paid Paddy O’Connor a subsidy to hire Seth as a roughneck for the Caribou Island job. In a roundabout way, it was the second time he’d been hired by the Bureau because of his ethnicity.

It would be the last time.

He hadn’t wanted the job at first, but a tribal elder had counseled him to take it. Seth wasn’t sure why. He’d finally agreed, but it wasn’t because of the elder’s gentle prodding, or because Bledsoe offered him his old job back in D.C. if he fingered the perp. But this was no time to reminisce about his motives. He needed to focus on the facts.

He’d been on the job six days now, and so far everything about the operation seemed above board. He’d gotten the usual cold reception from the crew. If he hadn’t, he’d have been suspicious. Jack Salvio was a nasty piece of work, too, but nothing Seth couldn’t handle. Everything seemed normal, in fact, until fifteen short minutes ago when Lauren Parker Fotheringay landed on Caribou island.

Already he smelled blood.

Seth zipped his survival jacket all the way up, slammed his hard hat on his head and yanked the camp’s front door wide. A blast of arctic air hit him full in the face.

Some routine maintenance had delayed the start of his shift, but he’d check in on the drilling floor anyway, just to make sure he wasn’t needed. After that, he’d have plenty of time to pay a surprise visit to his number one suspect out there in her shiny new trailer.

That was probably Money Man’s doing. The protective fiancé. Every geologist’s trailer he’d ever seen on the North Slope had been beat-up and barely livable. This new one, which was bigger and nicer than half the houses in Kachelik, had been brought in special a couple of days ago for Her Majesty.

Seth dashed across the yard, took the slick outer stairs up to the drilling floor two at time, then skidded to a stop on the landing. Squinting back toward camp through the blowing snow, he saw Paddy O’Connor—that red hard hat of his was unmistakable—fighting the wind as he made his way toward Lauren Fotheringay’s trailer.

Damn! He’d hoped to overhear their conversation. Paddy was also on his list of suspects, but only as an accomplice. The Feds knew the thief was someone on the inside at Tiger, someone with a technical background who could interpret the data. But to pull it off, that person would need help in the field. And a drilling company toolpusher one short season away from bankruptcy was the most likely candidate.

Bledsoe had told Seth little else about the case. Just enough to get him started. He was supposed to finger the perps, then call in the cavalry. He wasn’t authorized to take action on his own. That figured. His job was to stay undercover and report back to the almighty Doyle Bledsoe.

He jerked the door open to the “doghouse,” the small break room just off the drilling floor, and ducked inside. The crew was standing around, drinking coffee. Big surprise. None of these yokels lifted a finger unless Paddy O’Connor was right there, making sure they were working.

That was fine with him. He shot back down the stairs and started for Fotheringay’s trailer. Perhaps he’d get an earful of Paddy’s conversation with her, after all.

“Yo, Adams!”

He turned in the direction the shout had come from, but couldn’t see more than ten feet ahead of him. If the storm got much worse, they’d have to set up a rope between the rig and the camp, so no one would get disoriented walking back and forth.

A couple of roustabouts—Paddy O’Connor’s men—fought the wind as they made their way to Seth’s side.

“What’s up, guys?”

“How ’bout giving us a hand?” One of them pointed back toward camp, where Seth knew a pallet of equipment sat waiting to be carried inside. “Forklift’s down for the count.”

Seth glanced in the direction of the geologist’s trailer, but couldn’t see it anymore through the storm. He bit off a silent curse. He wanted to get out there and see what was going on between Paddy and Lauren, but he also didn’t want to arouse any suspicion, or give any of the crew any more reason to hate him than they already did.

Some of these good old boys didn’t take kindly to natives taking up good roughnecking jobs they considered theirs by right. In winter the Arctic was a deadly environment. There was an unwritten rule out here that everyone pitched in and helped each other.

“Sure,” he said, casting an annoyed glance in the direction of the equipment. It would probably only take a minute.

Twenty minutes later, when the pallet was empty and the roustabouts were on their way inside, Seth crept around the side of Lauren Fotheringay’s custom-built trailer and peeked in the only uncurtained window.

There was nobody there.

At least not in the lab portion of the trailer. He scanned the clean white linoleum and sparkling steel countertops. A crate full of plastic bags filled with muddy rock samples sat by the door. Lauren’s briefcase lay open on the desk next to a top-of-the-line laptop computer.

There was only one other room in the trailer. A small bedroom and bath in the back. He didn’t think Paddy would be in there with her. But maybe so. He seemed to know her pretty well. What had he called her back in the mudroom?

Scout. Kind of an odd nickname for a society cupcake who wore the biggest diamond engagement ring Seth had ever seen up close, and who drove a seventy-five thousand dollar Porsche. Yet another little gift from her fiancé. Seth had done some last-minute homework on both of them using the Internet.

Skirting around the back of the trailer, he took care to avoid slipping into the murky-looking reserve pit. Due to the warm temperature of the mud and drilling fluids circulating in and out of it, it was the only thing liquid for miles. Everything else in the Arctic was frozen solid this time of year.

The wind was blowing so hard now, swirling dry snow up around him like an icy white shroud, he could barely see his hand in front of his face. The bright, overhead yard lights reflected off all that white, making visibility almost worse.

Then he heard it. A woman’s scream.

Seth froze in place, peering straight across the reserve pit from where the sound had come, ice and wind slicing at his eyes. It had to be Lauren. She was the only woman on the island.

It took him a full minute to traverse the narrow strip of ice sandwiched between the back of the trailer and the open pit. Where the yard opened up again, he took off at a run, then stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her.

She was kneeling at the edge of the reserve pit. In shirtsleeves! No jacket. No hard hat. Was she nuts? Her auburn hair whipped at her face. Up to her forearms in mud, she was trying to pull something out of the pit—or push it in—he couldn’t tell which.

As their gazes collided, he read panic in her eyes. “You!” she shouted at him over the roar of the wind. He took another step toward her, then caught a glimpse of something that made his heart seize up in his chest.

A red hard hat, lying next to her on the ice.

Only then did he notice what she was desperately clutching. Paddy O’Connor’s limp, mud-covered body.

Seth narrowed his eyes, but not from the sleet blasting his face. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Chapter 3

For the first time in her life Lauren was knee-knocking, bone-shaking terrified.

Adams bore down on her like a predator. Once, years ago, she’d watched as a polar bear slaughtered a lone seal who’d drifted away from its herd. It all came back to her now as she felt a dazed sort of panic, the kind she’d seen reflected in the seal’s eyes the second before the bear took it down.

Three strides, then two. Adams was almost on her, but she couldn’t will herself to let go of Paddy’s jumpsuit and run. She locked gazes with the roughneck, her teeth chattering from the cold. Adams reached out and—

To her astonishment, he grabbed the collar of Paddy’s jumpsuit and in one smooth motion pulled him out of the pit onto the ice.

“Move away from him.”

“Wh-what?”

“You heard me, move!”

She slid to the side, her arms dripping mud that would be frozen in— Oh, God, it was already frozen.

Adams shot her an icy look as he checked Paddy’s body for a pulse. Lauren knew he wouldn’t find one. That was the first thing she’d done when she’d discovered him facedown, floating in the reserve pit.

“Get the medic.”

The world spun around her. Bright yard lights reflected off blowing snow. Bone-chilling wind sliced her skin like a razor. She sat back on the ice as visions of Paddy O’Connor and her father—collecting rock samples, inspecting a worn drill bit, sharing a beer after a job well done—screamed through her mind in an avalanche of pain and tenderness.

She was barely aware of Adams starting CPR.

“I said get the medic! Now!”

His command snapped her out of her daze. “Y-yes. Of course.” She scrambled to her feet.

“Wait. Here.” He stopped the chest compressions long enough to shrug off his survival jacket and toss it to her. Then he watched her as she struggled into it, teeth chattering, her gaze pinned on his. For the barest moment she read something in his eyes, something she wasn’t prepared for.

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.