Debra Brown - On Thin Ice

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.