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“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 decided 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.
He’d been too hasty, perhaps, in thinking her capable of murder. Selling proprietary corporate data was one thing. A nice, clean, white-collar crime. Lots of money involved, but no dirty work. And no one ended up dead. Lauren Fotheringay might be a criminal, but he sensed she wasn’t a murderer. Her anguish over Paddy O’Connor’s death was real.
Holding her close, feeling the soft weight of her breasts crushed against his chest, he thought about how long it had been since he’d really wanted a woman. Sure, he’d done his share of dating since he and his ex had split, but he hadn’t let himself get close to anyone again. Had never let his guard down.
As he stroked Lauren’s hair and soothed her with comforting words, he realized he was in danger of doing exactly that. His lips grazed her ear, her cheek. One more move and he’d be kissing her.
“Uh, sorry,” she said, and pushed against his chest.
He instantly backed off.
“I—I don’t know what came over me. I was just…” Her eyes darted away. She wouldn’t look at him. Her face flushed with embarrassment.
“Don’t worry about it.” He was embarrassed, too. As he turned to leave, she touched his arm.
“I stepped out of the trailer to grab some rock samples from the crate outside. That’s when I saw his hard hat.”
“Paddy’s?”
“Yes.” She gripped his arm tighter, her eyes locked on his. “I looked around but didn’t see him. That’s when I heard it.”
“Heard what?”
“I wasn’t sure. I thought it was shouting, but the wind was so deafening, I couldn’t tell.”
“So you…” He nodded, urging her to continue.
“I picked up his hard hat and walked toward the sound. Over by the reserve pit.”
“Without a jacket, in this weather.”
She shrugged. “I know. Stupid. But that’s what I did.”
“And then?”
“As I got close, I saw something in the mud. When I realized it was Paddy…” She looked away again, struggling to keep her composure.
“You tried to save him.”
She nodded. “But he was already dead.”
He wanted to believe her. The thought of her killing someone bothered him more than he wanted to admit. On impulse he grasped her hand and squeezed it. “You’ll be okay out here?”
“Yes. I just need some sleep.”
He was halfway out the door, zipping his jacket, when she stopped him one last time.
“Thanks,” she said, and shot him a tiny smile.
“Any time.”
He stood there in the biting wind after she closed the door, wondering why he’d acted like a schoolboy in there instead of a cop. She was damned attractive, that was why. And not as tough as he’d first made her out to be.
Maybe she wasn’t the one he was after. He’d like to believe that. Hell, ten minutes with her and he half believed it already.
A flash of white shot across his field of view. “What the—?” Arctic fox. Two of them, racing across the yard in the direction of the camp. Seth knew exactly where they were headed. To the Dumpster behind the kitchen.
He jogged after them, fighting the wind and trying to forget how good Lauren Fotheringay had felt in his arms. A few minutes later his suspicions were confirmed. One of the cooks had left the heavy, metal Dumpster lid open again.
A half-dozen arctic foxes huddled around a black plastic trash bag that had blown off the overflowing pile of garbage. One of them had a glazed doughnut in his mouth. No wonder the EPA was all over these drilling companies.
Seth let out a whoop and the foxes scattered. What a mess. He reached for the open bag, then froze. “Son of a—”
He forced his eyes wide against the wind and blowing snow, not wanting to believe what he saw. The overhead yard lights lent a harsh reality to the blood-covered tool stashed amidst the frozen remnants of that day’s breakfast.
Its shaft was thick and sheathed in blue rubber, the head square. The claw end was like a pickax, long and curved to a single sharp point. Seth had seen plenty of them growing up to know exactly what he was looking at.
A geologist’s rock hammer.
Chapter 4
Where had these rock samples come from, the moon?
Lauren pushed back from the microscope and focused her eyes out the trailer window. Not that it helped. She couldn’t see a thing except blowing snow. The wind velocity had increased overnight to dangerous speeds. She’d woken with a start that morning when an empty fifty-five-gallon drum had blown up against the side of her trailer with a powerful thunk.
She grabbed her calculator and ran through the sequence one more time. “This can’t be right.” For the third time she checked the smudged label marking one of the small plastic sample bags littering her workstation.
Someone had clearly made a mistake.
As drilling progressed and the well got deeper, rock samples mixed with mud and fluids were sucked up from the bottom of the hole. At the surface they were collected and bagged by one of the Altex roustabouts. It was a dirty, thankless task, usually assigned to the lowest man on the totem pole. She wondered who among the Altex crew had been elected.
The Caribou Island well wasn’t at its target depth yet, so at this point Lauren didn’t expect to see anything out of the ordinary, like traces of oil, in the samples. And least of all rocks so unusual she was certain some mistake had been made.
She shut down the microscope and grabbed her jacket, then paused to consider her options. She wasn’t that anxious to make another appearance in camp. Earlier that morning she’d been bombarded with crew members’ questions—the same question, actually, over and over.
Are we going to keep drilling?
Didn’t they understand? They were so close to finishing the well, it didn’t make sense to shut it all down now. Tiger had invested a small fortune to get the data from Caribou Island. Her boss Bill Walters, the VPs—Crocker included—and Tiger’s CEO would be counting on her. On all of them.
And she wasn’t about to let them down.
Last night after she’d left the camp, Salvio had changed his mind about continuing the drilling. But only temporarily, he’d warned her this morning. Fine. She’d take whatever she could get. Once communications were up, they could let the bigwigs at corporate decide what to do. Until then, she wasn’t changing her position.
She breezed out the door, then locked it with her key. No one was touching these rock samples until she figured out who had screwed up. The bags were clearly mismarked. It was impossible for that kind of rock to exist at the Caribou Island location. She should know. She’d interpreted all the subsurface maps of the site herself, just last year.
There would be hell to pay with her boss if she didn’t get this mess sorted out. And fast. No way was she shipping mismarked samples back to Tiger’s lab in town. But with Paddy gone and all communications down, she wasn’t sure who exactly from Altex to talk to about it.
Adams, maybe.
Warmth washed over her as she recalled the feel of his arms around her last night in the lab. Strong, solid, comforting. When was the last time Crocker had held her that way? Stroked her back, soothed her? It dawned on her that she didn’t even know Adams’s first name.
The camp’s forklift rumbled past, jerking her from her thoughts. Sheesh. Forty below, winds screaming across the tundra like a banshee, and she was lost in some fantasy about a roughneck. Great. Just what she needed. To act like an idiot out here on the job.
A man was dead. Tiger’s operation was weeks behind schedule, and the biggest promotion of her career hung in the balance. She needed to focus, to do what was expected of someone in her position. Not break down like a crybaby and fall into the arms of one of the crew, for God’s sake.
It had taken her years to win the respect of her male peers, of Tiger’s senior personnel, not to mention the rough-and-tumble drilling crews, most of whom still believed women didn’t belong in the field.
She wasn’t about to throw it all away because the going got tough. Her father would have told her to buck up, meet the challenge. That’s exactly what she intended to do. She’d see Salvio right away about those samples.
Hand over hand, Lauren pulled herself along the rope that had been set up as a guide between her trailer and the main camp. The weather was the worst she’d ever experienced, and showed no signs of breaking. Visibility was a joke. It took her nearly five minutes fighting the wind to make it to camp.
Salvio wasn’t in his office.
“Damn.” She plopped down into his beat-up desk chair and raked her fingers through her half-frozen hair. Fine. She’d talk to him later. Until then, she’d ask around among the crew.
The first shift was on break, and she heard laughter coming from the kitchen. The greasy aroma of hamburgers sizzling on the grill and her growling stomach reminded her she hadn’t eaten yet that day. Lunch sounded good. Maybe she’d grab a quick—
The thought vaporized as her eyes focused on the drilling stats blinking at her from one of the computer monitors on Salvio’s cluttered desk. She leaned closer and scanned the real-time drill depth readout.
“Fifteen two?” She blinked her eyes a couple of times to make sure she wasn’t reading it wrong. Fifteen thousand two hundred and six feet. That couldn’t be right. They were at nine thousand last night, nine two this morning. The top of the target zone for the Caribou Island well was nine thousand four hundred feet. Straight down. Easy as pie.
Altex had drilled dozens of oil exploration wells for Tiger, just like this one, over the past twenty-five years. Caribou Island should have been a routine operation, but Murphy’s Law seemed to be in full effect out here.
She hit the side of the monitor with the flat of her hand and watched the screen. The green numbers jumped, then blinked back at her. Fifteen two. “This is crazy.”
“Fotheringay!” Jack Salvio’s gravelly voice made her jump. He shot through the door, a nasty expression screwed into his face. “I’m having enough trouble with this frickin’ equipment as it is.”
“I was just—”
“Damned thing is always screwed up.” He leaned over her, typed some two-fingered gibberish into the keyboard and hit the Escape key. The monitor did a split-second reset, then flashed back to life.
Lauren focused in on the depth measurement. “Nine thousand three hundred feet.”
“There. It’s fixed.”
Frowning, she studied the blinking stats again. Everything seemed to be normal now. The drilling depth looked fine.
“Don’t touch it again, ya hear?”
