On Thin Ice

Oh, yeah, Seth thought, as he watched Lauren Fotheringay out the icy window of the break room, lugging her duffel and briefcase across the site in near whiteout conditions.

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