Back from the Brink

by Emery Hayes

  She rose to her feet and turned back toward the department skiff. “There’s damage here,” she said, and took hold of a steel ring. She bent over the side of the boat and snapped several pictures from different angles.

  “Contact,” Ty said.

  “Another vessel,” Nicole agreed. “Heavier than the skiff but bearing closer to the water’s surface. What kind of boat is that?”

  The damage, what she could see of it, was a pair of scrapings. Deep gouges running parallel to and about nine inches below the gunwale.

  “Get a picture of that, MacAulay.” Nicole tossed him the camera.

  She stood and peered through the darkness and the distance and the leaping shadows created by strobe and current. Ty was good with boats. With engineering and tracing the contours left by collisions, both on land and on water.

  “Blamer Howard’s boat,” Ty said. “That’s an example. His isn’t the only party barge but the one I see most on the lake. Late spring through fall, Ski Heights rents them to anyone old enough to drive. Hitch included.”

  Nicole filed that piece of information in a mental folder. “You think it could be a run-in with a party boat?”

  “Did Monte say what kind of boat the UAs boarded?”

  “No.” And she hadn’t asked.

  “You ready for me?” MacAulay had moved to the gunwale, strobe still in hand, ME bag in the other.

  “Not yet. I need to get the pump going.” But she stood a moment longer and turned toward open water. She listened to the slap of the current against the boats and beyond that the absolute silence. “Something not right about that.”

  “About what?” Ty asked.

  “What do you hear?” Nicole asked.

  They all stood silently, feet braced against the current, listening.

  “Makes me edgy,” Ty said.

  “Me too.”

  “What does?” MacAulay asked.

  “Do you hear anything, Doc?” Ty asked.

  He thought about it, and though Nicole couldn’t see his face so deep in shadow, she knew his eyebrows were now drawn tightly over the bridge of his nose.

  “The water.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “And nothing else.”

  “We have a great population of snowy and horned owls. They carry on out here like a Guns N’ Roses concert. Usually. Fish jump at night. Crickets complain about the cold. Foxes chatter and wolves howl.”

  “Why are they quiet?”

  “Trespassers. Something’s riled them. Something bigger than themselves,” Ty said.

  “Survival quiets them.” She began searching the cubbies, opening the doors at the transom first as she searched for the pump. “Keep the strobe pointed toward open water, MacAulay. And turn in a slow half circle.” She was feeling penned in. Open to the same fate as the BP agents. “Sweep the surface of the lake and about five feet above.”

  They had no defense, hemmed in as they were. Evasive moves, yes, but in water thick with slush and the danger of trees felled by the winter cold and ice floes set adrift by the spring thaw, there wasn’t much they could do, if they needed to do anything at all.

  BP was still twenty minutes out, and that was just to make shore. Another twenty to navigate the waters. Her own team was slightly closer.

  “You think someone’s out there?”

  “It’s possible.” Probable. Monte and his agent were somewhere. Perhaps aboard the boat that had sideswiped theirs. And whether it was friend or foe, that was best-case scenario.

  “Call in,” she told Ty. “Full report and request a car in constant motion on the Lake Road.”

  Ty followed orders, and Nicole set up the pump.

  “Best thing to do is get our vic back to shore,” Ty said.

  If they could find him. Monte had stayed with the body. He’d told her that, and she hoped to find it in the ice, where the BP skiff was anchored at the floe. But that had to wait.

  “Agreed. But we need to work the scene first.”

  “It’s a bad idea to just sit here.”

  “Better if we had reinforcements,” she agreed. “But you know the deal with crime scenes. The longer we wait, the more we lose.”

  “One of us needs to move with the boat,” Ty said. “Maybe you leave me and MacAulay here and motor out. You wouldn’t have to go more than thirty or forty yards.”

  “It’d put me in a good position.” She’d be able to play offense or defense out there but was capable of very little here. “But you and Doc? Not so much.”

  An inescapable truth.

  “Why don’t you just let me in and let me get the job done?” MacAulay suggested.

  Nicole considered their positions, their strengths and weaknesses, the possibility of danger lurking beyond the reach of their lights. And the swift deterioration of evidence exposed to the elements and time.

  “You’ll stay,” she told Ty. “I’ve never cut a corpse out of the ice before.”

  “My specialty,” Ty agreed.

  He had worked rescue in Prince William Sound for two years prior to joining the sheriff’s department three years ago. Winter weather there was brutal, with ice floes and temperatures that rarely rose above freezing.

  She reached for MacAulay’s bag and set it aft, on the bench seat, then stood clear as Doc prepared to jump boat to boat. His long legs reduced the stretch to merely a hop, which he carried out with grace. It was impossible to tell if his fever had worsened, bundled up and exposed to the chafing wind as he was.

  “Quick,” she told him.

  “Without compromising the evidence,” he said.

  She looked into his eyes. Steady. That had bothered her in the beginning, but now she relied on it. Personally, professionally. MacAulay had an inner strength that ran deep and a stubborn patience that got things done right. Turned out, steady was what she was looking for.

  “Right,” she said. Her hand fell briefly to his arm. “I don’t know what’s out there. Definitely something. I don’t know if we’re in danger. If it’s immediate.”

  “But time is of the essence.”

  Nicole nodded, then stepped on the stair at starboard and up onto the gunwale.

  “Boarding,” she called to Ty. She leapt. The toe of her boot caught on the lip of the department skiff. She landed and stumbled into a crouch. Her joints and reflexes were beginning to respond to the cold, even swaddled in layers of winter gear. She looked toward Ty and he nodded.

  “Same here,” he said. “I’m starting to feel spongy.”

  There was a big difference between the cold on the water and that on land. One far more often led in a dance to your death.

  Nicole checked her watch. “Twenty-eight minutes.” Since leaving shore.

  “Right on time,” Ty agreed.

  “If he starts shivering”—she nodded toward MacAulay—“if you notice slurred speech, anything like that, hail me.”

  “I know what to look for.”

  She nodded. “Reinforcements are coming. If we can’t get the body now, later will do.”

  He locked the throttle, and Nicole handed him the strobe. After he had made the leap, she handed across the chainsaw.

  “And here,” she said, lifting her thermos from the console. She tossed it in a wide arc, which he easily picked out of the air. “Two to one.” And, on the ice, they would need the warm brew more than she did.

  “Always good odds,” Ty said.

  Behind him, she watched MacAulay as he leaned over aft, already at work.

  “Life first, if it comes to that.”

  “Always.”

  Nicole pulled back on the throttle and maneuvered away from the BP skiff. When she had a good ten yards between the boats, she made a loping turn using the strobe mounted at the bow for guidance. It wasn’t much. Visibility was cone shaped and eight yards deep. And so she motored slowly, peering over her shoulder at the bobbing BP skiff. Ty held the strobe over MacAulay as he chiseled away at the ice, collecting what could amount to evidence, and the thought came
to Nicole again, teasing her nerve endings, tickling that primitive part of her brain at the base of her skull, that they were exposed. Defenseless. Sitting ducks.

  3

  MacAulay pried loose a fragment of what looked like flannel. It had appeared to him as a shadow. A dimple in the ice, perhaps, but training had taught him it could be much more than that. He had used an Eskimo eight-inch stainless-steel bit to drill around it so he could pull the piece out still encased in its bed of ice. And it had reminded him of his rotations through both surgery and emergency medicine, the need for precision, for just enough and a little bit more.

  He held the piece under the light—bigger than an ice cube, smaller than the palm of his hand. He turned it over and made note of the pattern. Yes, flannel, and not a match in color or fabric to the shirt worn by their vic. The body was pressed close to the surface of the ice and wore a lined denim jacket and a shirt MacAulay recognized as linen, in a solid color that could be burgundy or brown.

  “Doc?” The deputy caught his attention, and MacAulay dropped the cube into a plastic evidence sleeve and sealed it.

  “I know, the sooner the better,” he said.

  “I don’t want to rush you.”

  MacAulay heard recrimination in the man’s voice.

  “No good ever comes of it,” MacAulay agreed. He was growing into the ME position, beginning to feel comfortable with his skill base. And the results were gratifying—putting away criminals before they could strike again. But that required patience, care, methodical procedure. “Do you think we’re in danger?”

  “I don’t like the feel of this, and neither does the sheriff,” Ty said.

  “She’s very good at her job.”

  “The best.”

  MacAulay again used the steel brush to cut through the surface of the ice, then a whisk broom to gather the shavings. He placed these in another bag, sealed it, and dropped both into the cooler. He’d done this with every square inch of ice in a twelve-foot circumference around and over the encased body while Nicole idled in the department skiff half a football field away and police and Border Patrol cruisers began to line up along the shore.

  He had been on the ice more than twenty minutes, less than twenty-five—Ty called out the time in five-minute intervals. The deputy stood on the boat, feet spread and knees bent. A few minutes ago, the current’s steady push had picked up tempo. It was a stronger, pulsing beat now, and MacAulay’s stomach, currently a good meter for measure, protested. If he’d had anything left in it, he would have hurled.

  His eyes swept over the sheet of ice, prying into the darkened edges. He had done what he could here. A surface sweep and collect. And now it was time to cut the man out. To attach the winch through steel hooks drilled into the ice and lift him aboard. Possibly three or four hundred pounds, including the ice coffin that embraced him. They had decided on a six-by-six-foot cut, as the man’s hands, legs, and feet were visible. Tied into a fetal position, hands behind his knees, he had surfaced in profile. MacAulay tried not to stare too frequently at the man’s face. It was stretched into horrors unspeakable, and unforgettable.

  Six by six was enough to guarantee a clean cut with no involvement of limbs.

  MacAulay pushed back on his heels and was about to rise when he heard a metallic shriek tangled in the sleeves of the wind. Close and deafening, like the engines of an airplane as it gathered torque for takeoff. The floe shifted, swelled as though a wave had risen beneath it. Behind him the boat rocked madly and the strobe light wavered in the deputy’s hands before it fell, shattering into sharp fragments over the encased body of the vic. MacAulay reached out and swept the pieces into a pile for collection—they needed to be gathered for exclusionary purposes.

  He looked up.

  The cruising lights on the BP skiff flickered. The deputy stood aft, feet braced, his head turned as he scanned the surrounding water.

  “Something wonky.” Ty spoke, his words followed by the crackling of the radio pinned to his shoulder.

  “What happened?” Nicole’s voice, distant and drowning under the pulse of the department’s skiff as it gathered speed.

  MacAulay turned, watched as she changed bearing, skirted ice, and met with the swifter current as she trundled toward them. He heard the rustling of the water, churned by the blades of the motor. And something else, something buried under sound and urgency, something he couldn’t grasp.

  “Ty? Report.” The wind buffered her radio and seemed to steal her breath.

  “The pump is failing,” the deputy said, speaking into his mike. “But there’s something more. Something heavy. Rocked the boat, the ice Doc is standing on.”

  “Not wash?” From a passing boat. If they’d heard the engine, seen lights on the water, possible.

  “The only time I’ve ever felt anything like this was rapid ice melt,” he said. “Big pieces breaking away from something as solid as a glacier.”

  Or the sudden collapse of ice patties once rooted to the lake bottom. It wasn’t always visible above the surface but arose from a natural disturbance, often with catastrophic results. It could change the level of the water, the geography of a shoreline. He’d read about it but had never experienced it.

  “Stand ready,” she said. “And get MacAulay back in the boat.”

  He didn’t need to be told twice. He stood and the ice creaked, fissures running beneath his feet. He stilled, breathless, yet wavered as the ice heaved on the current. He was four feet from the gunwale. He could scale that easily. He bent and picked up the cooler chest. The latch was secured, so he tossed it into the boat. He swept up his tools and dumped them into his bag, zipped it up, and tossed that also. Ty was crouched behind the console, the rifle he’d carried strapped across his back, tucked now into his shoulder and aimed into the darkness. Not trusting their circumstances to nature.

  The suction on the pump, a steady piston surge and purge, sputtered, coughed, and began gurgling. It was drowning under increased demand. The boat was sinking.

  Ice melt. The sudden shift had rocked him on his feet. The current had changed, become more forceful, and the BP skiff, already floundering, couldn’t hold up. It wobbled, stirring the water.

  He was torn. It was a physical sensation, straight down the middle. Go down with the boat or plunge into the icy waters of the lake when the floe completed its fracture? The odds seemed better where he stood.

  “Abandon ship,” MacAulay called to the deputy. “It’s going down.”

  Even as he said the words, the gunwale tilted and rose, away from MacAulay and toward a sure capsizing. Aboard, he heard the deputy scrambling. Ty tossed a Maglite and then the skiff’s rescue bag. Both hit the ice with a solid thump. The flashlight skittered several feet. The bag settled. The ice held. Then the deputy leapt, rifle in hand.

  MacAulay felt every cell in his body brace for disaster.

  “Get down, Doc,” Ty called. The deputy scooped up the Maglite and shoved it into a pocket. He was fluid motion. The leap, the crouching crawl over the ice, the pocketing of the flashlight. “Grab the rescue bag. We need to get to thicker ice.”

  Yes, that made sense. Move toward center. But in the dark, every step was one of faith.

  MacAulay fumbled with the handle of the bag. It was fear; he felt it in the shallow basin of every breath. It was the elements, exposure to freezing temperatures for going on an hour now, making his movements slow and clumsy. It was the flu racking his body.

  It was a terrible night for murder.

  “This way.” The deputy’s voice was a harsh whisper. Sound carried over water. Even the scraping of their feet on the ice. “And in the name of salvation, get down. Crawl or scuttle. Slide on your ass if you have to.”

  MacAulay chose the crouch. He pulled the rescue bag along beside him, thumping on the ice, his long legs folded like paper clips and just about as useful. He kept close to the deputy by following the sound of his feet and the sharp puffs of his breath. Away from the skiff’s lights, his eyes began to
differentiate between the darkness of the sky and the inky blackness of the water and take in the startling lightness of the ice compared to the two. He thought about that and about the senses and how they grew acute in times of need. A very primitive reaction and suitable to the circumstances—MacAulay felt like the hunted.

  “You think someone’s out there,” he said. It made sense.

  The silence. The changing current. Possibly the wash that had overwhelmed the pump.

  “We know it. But we have other things to worry about,” Ty said. “Ice has a feel to it, Doc.”

  The deputy had stopped, and MacAulay almost barreled into him. “What do you mean?”

  “It was solid back there. Not a whole lot of give. It wavered a little when I jumped ship, but nothing more.”

  “Yeah, I felt that.”

  “It’s turning spongy now,” Ty said. “Our feet are sinking a little more into the ice. Means it’s beginning to turn to slush. Nothing major yet, but a few more yards and it could turn into Swiss cheese.”

  “So we don’t move forward,” MacAulay said.

  “Or in any other direction. Ice doesn’t always melt around the edges first. It doesn’t decompensate at the same speed throughout.”

  “So now you’re making me nervous.”

  “Nervous? Nah,” Ty said. “Not yet. Just means the only way out is the way we came in.”

  “And if they come?” They meaning predators. Whoever was out there and closing in. Whoever had taken the BP crew and left a sinking ship.

  The deputy tapped the butt of his rifle on the ice. “Then we stand and deliver.”

  * * *

  Nicole hit her radio mike. “Update on backup, dispatch?”

  Static. She looked toward shore, where bar lights rolled. Two distinctive patterns. Her officers had arrived along with the BP teams Green had promised. Close but stopped. Which meant Gunnar’s boat was not yet in the water.

  “Several units, ours and BP, already on-site. Gunnar’s boat en route. Trying to get an ETA on that.”

  They were on their own.

  She listened to the shrill whine of the engine as she leaned on the throttle. The Commando hung from its shoulder strap, bumping against her side. The wind cut over the bow and plowed into her. It was like falling face first into a snowdrift. At thirty yards out, the BP skiff tilted aft. It was a slow wallowing as the gunwale lifted and the cruising lights wavered, flickered, and then pulled it together to flare brightly. She watched Ty. Weapon drawn, he tossed the rescue bag to the ice, leapt. MacAulay stood tall, squared against a backdrop of night. The skiff turned a graceful somersault, slow but smooth. The running lights shimmered under the water. Nicole could see it even from that far out. And then the hull was bottoms up, a cradle upended, and the men she had left adrift faded into the darkness.