Back from the Brink Read online

  “Sorry,” she said. She didn’t try to skate free of the accusation, didn’t try to bury it under job duties, though she could have gotten away with it after two days completely disconnected. She owed MacAulay more than that.

  She lifted her hand and brushed her fingers over his forehead and into his hair. He felt hot, feverish.

  He caught her wrist, held it gently in the palm of his hand. “Forgiven,” he said.

  She sought his gaze and nodded. His eyes were warm, always welcoming. But she needed distance. Work should have been enough to make the separation easy. She was big on keeping the personal out of the professional, and MacAulay respected that.

  She took a step back. “I’ll help you to the boat.”

  “I’ll need a window seat,” he said.

  “No problem with that.”

  He turned and planted his feet on the ground. Nicole took hold of his arm as he stood.

  He was taller than her by a good six inches, and broad shouldered. She loved the fit of her head beneath his chin, the steady beat of his heart in her ear, the warmth of his skin against her cheek. But that was not for now. She tried to shake the memory loose and focus on the moment.

  “We need to work on getting you a backup.”

  “I have one. It’s Calabasas over in Polk County, but he’s in the Keys. Marlin fishing is good this time of year.”

  They started for the boat ramp.

  “My bag is in the back seat.”

  “Ty will get it.”

  Ty took the bulk of MacAulay’s weight as they helped him transition from land to water. The boat rocked beneath their feet, and Doc groaned and clutched the rails.

  “He gonna make it?” Ty asked.

  “He’s going to have to,” MacAulay answered for himself.

  “We’ll stand upwind,” Nicole advised, and jerked her chin toward the cruiser. “Get his bag. Back seat.”

  She settled MacAulay starboard, at midpoint so he’d receive less thumping from the bow once they started over the water. She handed him a life jacket and shrugged into one herself. When Ty boarded, she tossed him another, and then she stowed her gear and made her way to the front of the boat.

  “Ready,” she called over her shoulder. She spared MacAulay another glance. He was snug in his vest and clutching the rail, his ME bag on the floor between his feet.

  Ty took the wheel and began edging the craft away from the ramp. They had all lights running, but Nicole knew how treacherous the lake could be during the thaw. As they got under way, she stood in the bow of the boat, making sweeping motions with a handheld strobe to light a greater expanse of the lake in front of them. There were a lot of trees in the water, sheared by subzero temperatures and cutting winds over the winter, and slow and careful was the only way to proceed. They tried to keep to the path of the BP skiff, which had broken up the ice, but they weren’t a quarter mile in when they hit their first floe. It brought the skiff to a near stop, the motor whining. Ty turned starboard and motored around it. A third of a mile ahead she saw the BP skiff, the lights bobbing gently as the current moved beneath the vessel. It was quiet, the wind no thicker than a sigh. And with no natural light, the boat seemed adrift. They were not close enough to hail across the water. Nicole pulled off a glove and retrieved her cell from the deep pocket of her parka. She dialed Monte’s number and waited.

  “How are we going to get a body frozen into the lake back to my morgue?” MacAulay asked. His voice was softer than usual, and Nicole realized she didn’t like that. She liked MacAulay strong, even when they argued. She worried about dragging him out into this weather when his body was raging with flu. But there was nothing to be done about that.

  “Chainsaw, Doc,” Ty answered.

  Nicole turned in time to see MacAulay nod.

  “I thought so,” he said. “That conference in Toronto—” The department made it a practice to send MacAulay to two or three trainings a year. He was, by trade and by heart, a family physician and had stepped into the role of ME when the county became desperate for the services of one. He’d had a steep learning curve but had handled it well, sometimes exceeding expectations. “One case study was a body found bobbing in the Saint Charles River. It was cast in a solid block of ice. ‘The Human Ice Cube,’ it was called.”

  His words stuttered to a stop, and Nicole turned and found him leaning over the side of the boat, vomiting. She didn’t say anything. She hesitated, the strobe in her hands still, her knees bent to absorb the bounce of the hull against the water.

  MacAulay straightened and caught her gaze.

  “If there was another way,” she began.

  “But there isn’t,” he said.

  She turned back to her cell. The call had gone to voice mail and she disconnected. No sense leaving a message when she would make physical contact in five minutes.

  The water was thick slush and slapped against the hull. The weight of it dragged against the boat. They slowed as the port side bumped against solid ice. The clouds parted, revealing a half-moon and a handful of scattered stars. She was grateful for the sudden clarity. Even in April, the lake was just as often covered with dense fog. The sky misted and sometimes hailed.

  Per protocol, Ty gave the skiff’s horn a two-one blast to announce their approach. Nicole lifted the strobe and let the high-intensity beam fall on the BP skiff. It was shouldered against solid ice on its port side. They were still thirty yards out but close enough to hear the engine idling. Close enough that they should have seen Monte and his partner standing in the bow or stern. She adjusted the strobe in her hands, chasing the shadows from the fore of the skiff, and found nothing.

  2

  Ty realized the grim truth the same time she did.

  “Shit.” He pushed the throttle into reverse and brought the skiff around so that they stopped a good twenty yards from the BP vessel. Then he shifted into neutral and let the current pull them slowly closer. “Ghost boat.”

  He murmured the words but she heard them, carried on the breeze. Doc heard them too. The boat shifted under their feet as he stood and moved port side.

  “Where are they?” he asked.

  She ignored the question and caught Ty’s gaze. He shook his head—they were all at a loss.

  “Bring her up close,” she said. “Keep five or ten yards between vessels.” She was going to look but not touch. She didn’t know if they had a crime scene on their hands or if the disappearance of the agents was accidental. “Ty, radio dispatch. Have them put a call in to BP. Tell them we’ve made contact with the vessel but no souls aboard.”

  She inched forward on the bow, port side, and braced her feet. She used the strobe, shifting it slowly over every inch of the skiff visible from the starboard side of the vessel, which was a lot. A small pocket of shadow on the port side, behind the Sailfish console, was too small to conceal an adult male. Monte was gone. And his partner too. Monte hadn’t mentioned another agent on board, but she knew they seldom scouted alone. So, for the time being, they were looking for two missing agents in the middle of Lake Maria.

  Nothing seemed disturbed on the skiff. There was no sign of blood. She recognized heavy boot prints on the gunwale, but they could have been made by the agents when boarding. The prints were starboard side, closer to Nicole and away from the ice floe. It was possible someone had boarded the boat out here in the middle of the lake. Perhaps Monte had been taken by surprise when an approaching vessel turned out not to be from the sheriff’s department. But it was more likely that an accident had occurred. Perhaps a man had fallen overboard and in an attempt to execute a rescue, he had been pulled in as well. In waters this cold—thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit when she checked yesterday—the body would quickly become numb and slow to follow commands from the brain.

  She heard Ty connect with dispatch. He read the registration number off the boat’s bow and reported its current state—adrift, no souls. She felt MacAulay ease his weight aft, where he picked up a Maglite and began a search of the ice. Th
e floe was fractured and butted up against another of similar shape and breadth. Their lights reached no further. The second floe could measure a football field or stop abruptly after only a hundred feet. Was the ice solid enough for a man to transverse? Probably. She had seen it done. But it was a risk not worth taking, especially when the ice ended too many meters short of land. She knew for a fact that the entire shoreline of Lake Maria was fluid.

  Monte would have known better than to chance it. Always best to stay with the vessel. The man was seasoned, reasonable. Had intellect and instinct.

  Ambush? Or accident?

  She lifted the strobe and searched the BP skiff for its ring buoy. It was in place, attached to the transom. No attempt to rescue had been made. No man overboard.

  She became aware of the reassuring weight of her side arm, holstered at her hip, beneath her parka. And the Colt Commando strung over her shoulder. She knew Ty was armed. And that sometimes the deputy carried a Sig P365 in an ankle holster.

  She hit her shoulder radio and requested backup from dispatch. Lars, her second-in-command, and two additional deputies. There was one big problem with that—the department had only one skiff. “Lodi, tell Lars to borrow Gunnar’s boat.” Gunnar was a local fisherman, one of the earliest each year to navigate Lake Maria following the winter freeze. His vessel was prepared to deal with the elements.

  After receiving an affirmative, she signed off. Silence descended. She listened for any anomaly in their surroundings. A splash of water too loud or forceful to belong to the natural current of the lake. Or a creak of ice indicating a shift in weight. The distant drone of a motor.

  Nothing.

  The wind skittered over the ice and added chop to the water. Nicole loosened her knees so that she rode the stronger current beneath her. She counted her breaths as she waited for the wind to calm.

  “MacAulay, hand me the bullhorn,” she called, and stepped back from the rail as the boat shifted with his weight. “It’s in the compartment under the transom.”

  Her cell phone rang, and she reached into her pocket for it. She checked the display—BP North.

  “Cobain.” She heard the sharpness in her tone, the result of mounting tension.

  “It’s Green.” Division commander. Nicole knew him to say hello. “You’ve made contact with Monte?”

  “Negative,” she said. “We are one-point-zero-seven kilometers east off the southern shore of Lake Maria. We have your BP skiff here. No souls.”

  “No souls?”

  “How many agents are we looking for?”

  “Two. Kyle Monte and Melody Baker. Both experienced.”

  Both missing.

  “There’s been no apparent attempt at rescue.” The skiffs were similar in design and cargo. She explained that the life buoy was still intact and that there was one life jacket strapped to the console. One was gone.

  “And no bodies?”

  “Not on board,” Nicole confirmed. “Not on adjacent ice floes. We haven’t searched the water.”

  “What the hell?”

  She knew only the pieces Monte had given her—a tip, a group of refugees braving the elements in the hopes of making it to the Canadian border and asylum. What didn’t she know?

  “Start at the top,” she told Green. “Tell me everything I need to know.”

  He took a moment—to gather his thoughts or to pick through them, choosing what to share and what to keep to himself? That whole marking of territory for which Nicole had no patience.

  “We’re sitting ducks out here, Green,” Nicole emphasized. “Start talking.”

  “We’ve had some activity on the lake recently. Politics are making this all dicey. Desperation is at an all-time high. UDAs putting in sooner, risking more.”

  To have more.

  “The drownings last week?” she asked. BP had claimed jurisdiction, had recovered the bodies after a failed rescue attempt.

  “Identity was confirmed yesterday. They were Syrian refugees trying to walk across,” he disclosed. “The woman fell through, clutching her baby.” He paused as that sank in. “We also learned that more attempts were planned. We think there’s somewhat of an underground railroad leading up this way. Monte’s been out on the lake every night this week.”

  That explained the presence of the boat but not its missing crew.

  “Has he had any trouble out here?”

  “Nothing reported. Not since the drowning last week. His last check-in tonight was at one hundred hours. All good. Then the body. We’d been looking for it for a few weeks now, but that’s like a needle in a haystack. That tip came in to us by phone, a woman’s voice, accented, and we assumed a UDA passing over the ice discovered him. No coordinates given, one of those ‘about a half mile from the southern edge of Lake Maria’ descriptions. Monte called in the find. I talked to him myself. That was at two twenty.”

  Nicole sifted through the facts and came up empty. There were no clues, no fingers pointing to what had happened.

  “I have backup moving in,” she said.

  “And I have two teams on the way. My ETA is twenty-five minutes.”

  She ended the call. “We need to get over there.” She nodded toward the BP skiff and the ice beyond. “We need to see the other side. Clear it.” And then they needed to do a surface search of the water. And if that wasn’t enough, they would have to use fishhooks on long poles to get under the ice. Sometimes bodies were pushed upward by the life vests and jammed under the floes.

  “You looking for a volunteer?” Ty asked.

  “I’ll go. We have any plastic booties on this boat?”

  “I’ll get you some,” MacAulay offered. He stood close to the console, the bullhorn in hand. Nicole reached for it, and he relinquished it but not without a little hesitation. When she looked into his face, she saw his concern. It gave him a pondering expression, but he stopped short of expressing his feelings, and she appreciated that.

  Nicole turned back to the BP skiff. It rocked gently. Beyond, the sheets of ice swayed with the current. And beyond that, a sprinkling of white lights broke the darkness. Too low and too close to be stars. Homes nestled along the shore, less than a half mile as the crow flies.

  She raised the bullhorn and announced, “This is the Toole County Sheriff’s Department.” Her words echoed over the lake, hit the mountains beyond, and came back to her. “Is anyone in need of help?” She waited, but the quiet wasn’t broken. She repeated her words, finishing with, “We’re here to help you,” hoping that any refugees who heard her appeal would trust it.

  Wishful thinking. They would risk it all, this close to freedom. To safety.

  Nicole rummaged through an equipment bin and pulled out the X-370. It was a relic but had never failed them. Not even in the dead of winter, not in negative degrees or in wind chill that ripped through a person like knives. She brought the camera with her to port and stepped up on the gunwale, bracing herself against the railing. She began to take photos, of everything she could see in the BP skiff and of the shadows that concealed who knew what, if anything, from several different angles, stretching over the transom to get closer. She would have to board to get the pockets hidden in shadow. To film the floe and the surrounding water, and to do it in three hundred sixty degrees.

  She stepped down and pushed the strap of the camera over her shoulder.

  “Bring it close,” she told Ty. “Five feet if you can.”

  Soon the BP vessel would run out of fuel and sputter to a stop. She didn’t know how long Monte and Baker had been afloat, idling, or how many miles they had trolled the edges of the lake, searching, before that. But she knew the gas tank held eighteen gallons and possibly four hours of forward pull.

  “They dropped anchor,” Nicole called over to Ty. Its rope trailed from the bow of the BP skiff. They had stayed with the body. And they’d do that only if there was no reason to pursue life. They had lost sight of the refugees, if they’d ever had it.

  “So the body’s here, somewhere, but
what else?” Ty returned.

  Nicole slipped on the booties and traded the strobe for a flashlight. A yard or so of slushy water separated the boats, and Ty was pulling back on the throttle to maintain the distance.

  “Going,” she called over her shoulder, and timed the jump to work with the current, toeing off as soon as the skiff rose on the swell.

  “Shit.”

  “What?” from both Ty and MacAulay.

  “It’s taking water,” she said. Not quite ankle-deep, which was fine in terms of gear—her boots reached midcalf—but when she landed, the spray had hit her face and rolled down her neck under the gaiter tube. “Not a lot. Two inches maybe.”

  The spray had frozen on her face, and she peeled it off in thin layers resembling Scotch tape. She rubbed the skin with her gloved hands, creating heat through friction. Frostbite prevention 101.

  “You see the damage?”

  “Looking.”

  The beam from the flashlight chased the shadows from the boat. There were no boot prints because the entire hull was covered in lake. She moved around the console, prying the darkness from the cubbies under the gunwale with the Maglite.

  “No bodies,” she reported. “No bullet holes.” She pulled on the weapons locker. The padlock was engaged and rocked against the steel sheeting. She knocked against the door. There was no hollow timbre. Intact. Monte and his partner hadn’t felt the need to arm up.

  She moved deeper into the bow and followed the seam under the gunwale looking for damage, first along port side, which was solid against the ice floe and rubbing with every lift and dip of the current, then turning at the bow and running down starboard. She didn’t get two feet before she found it. A stretch of molding puckered and straining against the steel pins. Water flowed from three spouts formed in the tubing. It was more than a trickle, but just barely. She ran her hand along the outer fiberglass and felt the buckle that surrounded the leak. She knew these things worsened quickly.

  Had they hit something? Or had someone hit them?