Cold Case Affair

The blast was massive, rocking the ground above, registering on sensitive seismic monitoring equipment as far away as the university in Anchorage.

The first external agency to be notified of an unexplained explosion in the bowels of Tolkin Mine was the Safe Harbor Fire Department. Seconds later Safe Harbor Hospital was on high alert for possible mass casualties, and frantic calls were going out for all available doctors to be on standby. These calls were picked up on home scanners, the news rippling like brushfire through the small, close-knit community. Family members hysterical with worry converged on the mine site.

Adam Rutledge, head of mine rescue and the shop steward for the local miners’ union, scrambled into his Draegers—mine rescue gear complete with breathing apparatus. He hurriedly contacted the members of his volunteer team.

When they reached the mine, acrid black smoke was billowing out from D-shaft and the extraction vents. At this point, no one aboveground knew what had happened eight hundred feet below. Snowflakes began to crystallize in the frigid air and a group of women shivered together against a biting wind, not knowing if their men were alive, injured or dead.

Among them was Mary O’Donnell, clutching the hand of her nine-year-old daughter, Muirinn.

Muirinn watched the rescuers tumble out of a bright yellow bus in their Draegers, led by their neighbor, Adam Rutledge—her friend Jett’s father.

But a police officer flanked by burly mine security men stopped Adam and his crew at the gate. One had a gun. Angry voices carried on snatches of wind as Adam clashed with the police. A German shepherd strained against his leash, barking and baring teeth at Adam. The cop then drew his gun. Adam raised both hands, backing off. Swearing.

Muirinn grew very scared.

She knew the whole town was at war over the big mine strike, neighbors pitted against neighbors, family members against each other. That’s why all the police and security men were here. Still, she didn’t understand why they wouldn’t let Mr. Rutledge and the mine rescue team in—her dad was down there.

Desperation squeezed the nine-year-old’s heart.

Snow swirled thicker. Temperatures dropped.

Slowly, miners began to emerge from the earth, blackened with soot, choking from emergency stench gas released by management into the tunnels to warn them out of the mine. Muirinn and her mother stood alone as other families were reunited all around them. A few women started to sob. Their men hadn’t come up yet, either.

Then Safe Harbor Police Chief Bill Moran came striding through the snow toward Muirinn and her mother, flakes settling thick on the wide brim of his hat.

When she saw the look in his eyes, Muirinn knew her daddy was never coming back.

By late afternoon, Chief Moran had examined the scene and learned of the two bags of explosives missing from the powder magazine. Positive he was now dealing with a mass homicide investigation, he’d contacted the FBI field office in Anchorage, and Tolkin Mine was locked down as they waited for the postblast team. But the spring snowstorm had other ideas. It barreled in and powered down with a vengeance, unleashing blizzardforce winds on Safe Harbor, cutting off access to the remote Alaskan coastal community. The FBI team was unable to land in Safe Harbor for a full forty-eight hours. The television crews came shortly after, filling the few hotels and restaurants in the tiny mining town. As the story of mass murder in the North broke, it rippled across television screens south of the 49th.

Three months later, Muirinn stood beside a hospital bed, tears streaming down her face. Sheer grief had stolen her mother’s life.

Muirinn was taken home to be raised by her grandfather, Gus O’Donnell, her last living relative.

Someone had planted a bomb that had killed Muirinn’s father, taken her mother, and changed her life forever.

And the police never found him.

The heinous secret remained buried deep in the abandoned black tunnels of Tolkin Mine. And a mass murderer still walked among the villagers of Safe Harbor.

Chapter 1 (#ulink_dc279c8f-f6f4-5c59-8bda-96de27c32ace)

Twenty years later

The wings banked as the pilot began a steep descent into an amphitheater of shimmering glacial peaks at the head of Safe Harbor Inlet, a small and isolated community that clung to a rugged coastline hundreds of miles west of Anchorage.

When Muirinn O’Donnell fled this place eleven years ago, those granite mountains had been a barrier to the rest of the world, a rock and ice prison she’d sought desperately to escape. Now they were simply beautiful.

Pontoons slapped water, and the tiny yellow plane squatted down into a churning white froth as the engines slowed to a growl. The pilot taxied toward a bobbing float plane dock.

She was back, the prodigal daughter returned—almost seven months’ pregnant, and feeling so incredibly alone.

Muirinn clasped the tiny whalebone compass on a small chain around her neck, drawing comfort from the way it warmed against her palm. Her grandfather, Gus O’Donnell, had left her the small compass, along with everything else he owned, including the house at Mermaid’s Cove and Safe Harbor Publishing, his newspaper business.

His death had come as a terrible shock.

Muirinn had been on assignment in the remote jungles of West Papua for the magazine Wild Spaces when Gus’s body had been found down a shaft at the abandoned Tolkin Mine, a full thirteen days after he’d first been reported missing. And no one had been able to reach her until two weeks ago.

She’d missed his cremation and the memorial service, and she was having trouble wrapping her head around the circumstances of his death.

Muirinn had called the medical examiner herself. He’d told her Gus had been treated for years for a heart condition, and that he’d suffered cardiac arrest while down the mine shaft, which had apparently caused him to tumble a short way from the ladder to the ground. Muirinn could not imagine why her eccentric old grandfather would have been alone in the shaft of an abandoned mine. Especially if he had heart trouble.

And she was unable to accept that the dank maw of Tolkin had swallowed the life of someone else she loved.

Gus had raised her solo from the age of nine, after the death of her parents, and while Muirinn had never come home to visit him, she’d loved her grandfather beyond words.

Just the knowledge that Gus was in this world had made her feel part of something larger, a family. In losing Gus, she’d somehow lost her roots.

All she had now was this little compass to guide her.

Muirinn peered out the small window as the floatplane approached the dock, thinking that nothing had changed, yet everything had. Then suddenly she saw him.

Jett Rutledge.

The one person she’d sought to avoid for the past eleven years. The reason she’d stayed away from her hometown.

He stood at the ferry dock on the opposite side of the harbor, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, his skin tanned summer dark, his body lean and strong. His thick blue-black hair glistened in the late-evening sun.

Muirinn’s stomach turned to water.

She leaned forward, hand pressing up against the window as the plane swung around and bumped against the dock. And like a hungry voyeur she watched as the man she’d never stopped loving crouched down to talk to a boy—a boy with the same shock of blue-black hair. The same olive-toned complexion.

His son.

Muirinn’s eyes brimmed with emotion.

He ruffled the child’s hair, put a baseball cap on the boy’s head and cocked the peak down over his eyes. Jett stood as his kid raced toward the ferry, little red backpack bobbing against his back.

The child hesitated at the base of the gangplank, drawn by some invisible tie to his father. He spun around suddenly, and even from this distance Muirinn could see the bright slash of a smile in the boy’s sun-browned face as he waved fiercely to his dad one last time before boarding the boat.

At the same time a woman approached Jett, the ocean wind toying with strands of her long blond hair. Her stride was confident, happy. She placed her hand on Jett’s arm, gave him a kiss, then followed the child up the passenger ramp.

That vignette—framed by the small float plane window—struck Muirinn hard.

Her eyes blurred with emotion and a lump formed in her throat. As the sound of the prop died down and the plane door was swung open, Muirinn heard the ferry horn and saw the boat pulling out into the choppy inlet.

Jett walked slowly to the edge of the dock, hands thrust deep in his jeans pockets as he watched the ferry drawing away in a steady white V of foam. He gave one last salute, hand held high in the air, a solitary yet powerful figure on the dock. A lighthouse, a rock to which his boy would return.

“You ready to deplane, ma’am?”