Back from the Brink Read online

  “Still ten minutes out, Sheriff.” It was Lars’s voice. Strident. Her second-in-command was a steady, reliable presence. He’d heard the exchange over the radio. “What’s going on out there?”

  “We’re not alone,” she said. Ice melt be damned. She agreed with Ty: there was something else out there.

  Ty wouldn’t use the flashlight until it was an absolute need. He would not betray their position. Life and death were equal motivators. A stray thought streamed across her consciousness: MacAulay, not especially suited to this work and sick on top of that. She snipped the thread and let it flutter away. Worry did absolutely nothing to help a situation. A clear mind, sharp and buoyant, was the only way.

  “What and where?” Lars asked.

  “No confirmation on either.”

  And then it loomed aft, a dark, flat-bottomed barge. At the mercy of the current, it rocked forward and back. The vessel was empty and adrift.

  “Sheriff.” Ty’s voice was distant, scratched out by increasing static. He gave his coordinates, and Nicole glanced at the GPS on the console. As the crow flies, thirty yards west from where they had abandoned ship.

  “Would be good if you could grab us now.” His breath came thickly between his words.

  “On it, Ty. Can you see my lights?” The strobe and running lights were on, but she flipped a switch and added the red and blue bar that turned and flashed above the console.

  “Affirmative—” His voice stopped abruptly, and the radio snapped with static. Then, “Prob … here, Sheriff. Our … way out is …”

  “You’re breaking up,” she said. Radio and cell phone service, nestled as they were between mountain ranges, had its moments of interruption, no matter how many towers they planted. “What’s the problem with pickup?”

  “Ice is unstable,” Ty reported. His voice cut through her radio with sudden clarity. “Our way in is our only way out.”

  Which posed a problem. Nicole had to keep her distance from the BP skiff. Too close and it would drag her with it when the air escaped the hull and it plunged toward the bottom of the lake. She decided to approach the floe by port. To await a visual before edging closer. She hit her mike and hailed Ty.

  “In position.” Come now.

  Starboard side, she could still see the lights on the BP skiff, wavering under the surface of the lake.

  She waited, her hand on the throttle. Inside her glove, her palm and the skin between her fingers were slick with sweat. She watched the point where darkness rose from the ice. Her back was to shore, but from the corner of her eye she saw rays of red and blue cast over the lake from the units that had arrived and took comfort in that.

  Then two figures emerged from the gloom. Ty leading the way, rifle at his shoulder, and MacAulay bringing up the rear, the rescue bag in hand. They loped, not in the crouch they’d used when seeking shelter but boldly facing come what may. They kept a straight line, returning the way they had left, and Nicole pulled on the throttle, backing the skiff several feet so that she was closer to where they would end up. They lengthened their strides—less contact with the ice, less danger of breaking through. The floe rocked beneath their feet. The last ten yards they slipped and slid over the slick surface and Nicole realized it was awash with lake water.

  The floe was breaking up, and as she watched, the fractures chased their footsteps. Faster, faster! she silently urged them.

  They threw themselves against the gunwale, and Nicole left the throttle to pull them in. They had trouble getting to their feet and keeping their balance as she moved back to the console and went through the motions of pulling away from the floe, away from the downed BP skiff and the dangers beneath the water.

  “There are some life blankets in the forward compartment,” she called over her shoulder. “Get into them.”

  4

  “What is it, MacAulay?”

  Nicole kept her distance, rocking back on her heels, but her gaze never wavered. The ME was on his knees in a dense patch of forest beside a congealed pool of blood and … something else. Something pulpy. Something contained within a thin, saclike membrane. Something that was possibly human but so foreign it could have come from another planet. If she had to guess, without further information, she would say organ. The heart of a big animal?

  She lifted her gaze, looked beyond MacAulay’s crouching figure and through the trees. The lake washed up not twenty yards west from where she stood. So much activity condensed in a small area and within a limited amount of time.

  After reaching shore in the early-morning hours, she had sent MacAulay home for NyQuil and sleep. He hadn’t protested. Ty had changed his clothes, downed some hot coffee, and then gone back out on the water and cut the DOA out of the ice with the help of Arthur Sleeping Bear, her chief forensics officer. The victim was in deep freeze waiting for MacAulay. Nicole had hoped to give him until that evening, but the dogs had turned up this and been reduced to a frenzied barking. She’d had to call him in.

  “Animal, vegetable, mineral?”

  “Animal.” He poked at the mass with the end of a thermometer. It was malleable. He inserted the instrument, and Nicole heard the tissue give with a wet sucking sound. “Human, in fact.”

  “Human what?”

  He turned so that he was looking over his shoulder at her. “Placenta,” he said. “It looks like a woman gave birth here, and not too long ago.”

  “That’s a placenta?” It turned her stomach. She hadn’t seen hers. It had passed through her shortly after Jordan was birthed, and she hadn’t given it another thought. But it had given Jordan the gift of life, and because of that it was a beautiful thing.

  “Not what you expected?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Women rarely have the opportunity to see the placenta. The baby is the star of the show, naturally, and once he’s born, we’re all about that.” He turned back to the pulpy mass and pulled the thermometer out. Fluid oozed around the puncture, and that did nothing to improve Nicole’s weakening stomach. “Seventy-two degrees,” he said. “A baby was born here, seven or eight hours ago.”

  Nicole checked her watch. It was 10:23. “The middle of the night,” she said. Possibly right around the time she and MacAulay and Ty Watts had boarded the skiff for a rendezvous with BP agents that had never happened. BP agents who were still missing and presumed dead. BP agents and officers from Nicole’s department were still out on the water, combing the shore, searching for evidence.

  MacAulay nodded. He sat back on his haunches, and she watched as his gaze roamed the area surrounding their scene—crime scene? Not yet.

  “The umbilical cord is underneath,” he said. “I already took a peek. It’s intact but tied off.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “If the baby was born in a hospital, the cord would have been cut an inch from the navel.” He shrugged. “Out here, without the right tools, good thing she knew something about emergency aid.”

  “Tying it off was an act of desperation?”

  “An act of necessity, for sure,” MacAulay returned. “No scissors, no knife when you’re on the run.”

  “You think that’s what happened here?”

  “That’s for you to figure out,” he said, “but if what Tandy reported is truth, then maybe this is a crime scene. Maybe we’ll find a woman and child nearby, but I hope not.”

  Nicole turned and let her gaze fall on Tandy Longhorn. She was short, thick, quiet in both words and manner. She waited at the top of a hill. When Tandy had walked into the station that morning, she had spoken her concerns—an old woman’s story of wild thrashing in the woods, of a young woman’s desperate run through the shallow waters of the lake and the whimper of a newborn baby—and then she had taken a seat. Nothing more. Not until Nicole had approached her, had asked questions about time and place and descriptions.

  There were none. It was dark, the moon and stars swaddled in cloud. Tandy claimed to have arrived at the young woman’s home, but too late. She had followe
d a broken trail, heard the splashing of water and the thick breath of a woman as she ran, the heavy footsteps of men, many of them, the weak cry of a baby just born.

  Nicole left MacAulay examining his find and climbed the rise, the thick grass beneath her feet still wet with dew.

  “Tandy?”

  “A placenta, yes?”

  “You knew?”

  Tandy nodded. “I am a midwife,” she said. “And a nurse.”

  “On the reservation?”

  The woman nodded. “That is nothing new to my eyes.”

  “The baby was born hours ago,” Nicole said. “In the middle of the night.”

  “Two thirty or three,” Tandy confirmed. Which fell within the time frame MacAulay had provided.

  “Why were you out here?” Nicole asked. “In the middle of the night? In the middle of nowhere?”

  There was no easy access to this part of the lake. It was a hike through trees, full now with spring, and over the soft mulch of an earth reviving.

  “I knew she was coming due,” Tandy said. “I came because she needed me.”

  “You came here?”

  “To her home first,” the old woman corrected, and it seemed to Nicole that a small amount of censure had entered her tone. She was annoyed, perhaps, that Nicole had asked her to repeat her story. “And I followed her footsteps here.”

  “You’re a tracker?”

  “I am a midwife,” she repeated. “And I am a woman of some intelligence.”

  “Her home—”

  “She was chased out of it.”

  “And you followed her here?”

  The woman held Nicole’s gaze but didn’t bother to respond.

  “Why didn’t you report this earlier?”

  “It was three-thirty by the time I arrived here and too dark to pick my way out of the woods without turning back the way I had come, which was too far. I waited for first light.”

  The town of Blue Mesa proper was a main street with a single traffic light and a cross street that divided modern conveniences from necessities, such as the police station and courthouse.

  “Did you deliver the baby?”

  She shook her head. “As I told you, that had already happened.”

  “And when you got here, the woman and child were gone?”

  “And the men.”

  “What did the men want?”

  “The baby,” she guessed. “Or the woman. But not both.”

  “Why not both?”

  “If both, why run?” Tandy posed. “We are miles from her home. If the men were to take the woman and toss the baby or take the baby and leave the woman behind, she would have to run and keep on running. But if there was some reassurance of keeping her baby, she would have faltered. Nine months pregnant, a three-mile run at this point, she would have stopped. She would have hoped for another way.”

  “And you don’t know her name?”

  “I know he called her Georgia and she called him Matthew. I know they wanted an at-home delivery. They were young. Maybe she was eighteen. Maybe not yet. They loved each other. That is what I know.”

  Nicole’s radio gave off a blast of static, and then Lars’s voice came through. She had sent him ahead to the home of the young woman Tandy was concerned about.

  Nicole turned away and took several steps toward MacAulay. “You have something, Lars?”

  “Affirmative,” he said. “DOA, circumstances unusual.”

  Meaning Nicole would not hear the details until she had a place of privacy. She scanned the woods, the lake, and turned back toward the old woman. Tandy stood her ground atop the hill, her long white hair thick and silky, the ends lifted by the wind. Beyond her, a quarter of a mile, Nicole’s Yukon was parked at the side of the road.

  “I have MacAulay here,” she said. “Also unusual.”

  “I’ll secure and wait.”

  “Shouldn’t be too long.” They would bag and tag, and after MacAulay delivered their evidence to his lab, he would be en route to Lars. “An hour tops.”

  “DOA’s not going anywhere.”

  “I’m sending you a deputy.” And she’d call in a crew here. They would start at ground zero, at the evidence, and fan out. Somewhere out there were a woman and child. If they had survived. “Gender and age on your DOA?”

  “Male, approximately twenty-three years old.”

  She signed off and called in to dispatch, moving deputies and forensics around on the map. Then she turned and walked back to Tandy.

  “You remained here last night?”

  “Until first light,” she confirmed.

  “There was a disturbance on the lake last night about the same time you arrived here,” Nicole began.

  “Earlier,” Tandy said. “And miles from here.”

  “Yes.” Two plus miles. “But the young woman who gave birth, perhaps she ran by at the right time to see or hear something,” Nicole said. “And you too.”

  “I was concerned with the mother and child,” Tandy said. “And the men who had come for them.”

  The group of men Monte’s tipster had seen boarding a boat? Possible. The timing was right.

  “What did you see?”

  “They wore dark clothing. Still, I noticed one standing on the roof, outside a bedroom window. I saw others run from the front door and into the brush.” She spoke thoughtfully and paused to consider her next words. “They were good. One or two of them anyway. They read the signs of her passing easily enough and dove into the trees.”

  “And you followed them?”

  “I couldn’t leave her alone.” She shook her head, a shadow passing over her face as she perhaps revisited a brief moment of indecision as she’d stood above the sloping earth while a young woman, an expectant mother, ran for her life. “There’s only so much a woman like me can do. I followed, but that was all.” She turned toward the east and raised a hand to point out a dense copse of trees and brambles a quarter mile back and snuggled against the lip of the lake. “She lost them in there. It was like her feet caught wind. Even I had difficulty following after that.”

  “Where did the men go?”

  Tandy’s expression changed, her gaze floating out over the lake. “They saw the same as I did. Two boats tangled on the water. They were that close. The wind brought the sound of engines. I think that scattered them.”

  “What else did you see out on the lake?”

  “Trouble. A struggle of some kind. Sound travels over water, of course, but even then I heard only voices raised in anger. Male voices, but the words were not clear or I was not attentive to them. I had other concerns.”

  “Male voices only?”

  “Yes, of that I am sure.”

  “And then what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No gunshots?”

  “No. That is a distinctive sound, isn’t it, and one I would not forget.”

  “Eventually the boats separated,” Nicole said, leading the woman into her next observation.

  “Yes, but I didn’t see that. When I looked over again, the bigger boat was on its way toward shore. Slow and moving northeast, away from me. Even so, I noticed it wasn’t a straight line. More like swooping.” And Tandy lifted her arm and gave a waving motion that seemed to gather armfuls of air. “Back and forth and the passing each way big enough that I paused and considered it.”

  A pattern search, looking for someone or something in the water. “And what did you think?” Nicole asked.

  “Seemed a strange thought at the time, but not so much now,” Tandy began. “I thought maybe a person had gone overboard, that the boat was searching the water to attempt a rescue. After that I didn’t look again, not until you arrived. You or someone from your department. I saw the lights across the water, flashes of blue and red.”

  “Why didn’t you call nine-one-one?” Nicole asked. “When you realized the woman was in trouble?” When there had seemed to be trouble on the water?

  “I’d left my cell phone in the truck—I’d packe
d it into my medical bag so I wouldn’t forget it. Sometimes there are emergencies during birthing. Rare,” she conceded, “but more than I can handle with my limited resources for a home delivery.” She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was full of gloom. “And then I was too far into the woods and couldn’t give up on her. She is strong and one for courage,” Tandy explained. “And I wanted to help if I could.”

  “But you never caught up with the young lady or the men pursuing her?”

  Tandy shook her head, and a solemn regret fanned out from her eyes. She sought and held Nicole’s gaze. “The girl was gone, and in the early light I saw no sign of her or the baby.”

  Just the placenta, Nicole thought.

  “Do you think the men have her?”

  “I hope not,” she said. “With the commotion on the lake, I think they spooked and left. But then, where is Georgia and the baby?”

  Nicole left Tandy waiting on the hill and walked back to MacAulay. He had thrown together the basics of a ME bag, his now being on the bottom of Lake Maria. He pulled out a metal scoop. He already had an evidence bag open and waiting.

  “I’d like to get this whole,” he said, sensing her approach. “I don’t want to puncture the sac.” Again. “We’d have a real mess then and it’d be about impossible to collect it all.”

  “That scoop isn’t big enough.” Nicole stated the obvious.

  “It’s what I’ve got.” She heard his frustration and watched his frown deepen as he considered his situation. “Actually, I have a better idea.”