Heath felt like he was beginning to make progress. “And you had no idea he was involved with a diamond-smuggling ring?”
“None,” Tracie looked at him blankly and swallowed. “As far as I know, nobody had any idea anyone was smuggling anything through the Apostle Islands. Nobody even knew there was a sea cave hideout in Devil’s Island—not unless you believed the old fishermen’s tales about pirates, anyway. Six weeks ago, the case got blown wide open. Before that, I admit I was completely oblivious.”
“So you never suspected Trevor was involved in anything covert?”
“No.” Tracie looked annoyed. “Why would I?”
“You spent ten hours a day together, four days a week. He never did anything suspicious in all that time?”
“Look, Trevor and I had an arrangement. He stayed at his desk, I stayed at mine. When we drove around in the truck together or rode around in the boat, he drove and I navigated. He did the grunt work and I did the thinking, and we never talked about our personal lives. Ever. It’s an arrangement I’m hoping you and I can duplicate.”
“But you’re friends with his little brother.” Heath persisted.
“I met Tim after Trevor was already dead, when Tim came forward with information that helped us crack the case. We’ve barely known each other a month. And yes, I’m already better friends with Tim than I ever was with Trevor, but that only reinforces how very little I cared for Trevor.”
“So you didn’t like him?”
Tracie threw back her head and looked at the ceiling. Heath watched the muscles in her slender neck shift as she tightened her jaw in frustration. “Trevor and I had an arrangement,” she repeated.
“What kind of arrangement?”
Heath watched carefully as Tracie’s eyes darted to the door, as though seeking escape. Her face paled slightly and a vessel in her neck began to pulse visibly. She stood. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”
Though Heath rose from his chair, he didn’t take his eyes off Tracie’s face. He was learning more by watching her reaction to his question than he’d gathered from anything she’d told him in the last five days. She was scared. Of Trevor? He had to know.
“What was your arrangement with Trevor?” he asked quietly.
“I just told you.” The fire had gone out of her voice. Her chin quivered ever so slightly.
“So you never saw him outside of work?”
“Leave,” she pointed to the door. She wasn’t ordering him anymore. Her eyes were pleading.
Heath felt an unfamiliar urge to soothe her. “Tracie.” He spoke her name softly.
She flinched as he drew closer.
And suddenly, Heath realized he had to back off. “I’m sorry. I’m out of here.” He glanced back as he slipped through the door. Tracie’s face was still turned away, and her slight shoulders heaved as she gulped a breath.
For a fleeting instant, he wanted to grab her up into his arms, to protect her from harm as he had on Saturday. But something told him he was already too late.
Trevor had gotten to her first.
It took Tracie most of the rest of the morning to compose herself. Heath showed up at her desk shortly before noon. He handed her the keys. “Why don’t you drive? You know the way.”
She accepted them with quiet thanks and tried not to shiver when his hand touched hers. His comment on the phone the night before had reminded her of how rarely she experienced human contact. But she didn’t need to get it from him. She had friends. Tim was one of them.
Tim’s place was on the edge of town, rimmed by woods like so much of northern Wisconsin. Tracie spotted his bike leaning against the side of the porch. She knew he hadn’t driven since his license had been revoked following a drunk-driving charge the year before. She smiled. Tim was a good guy. A lot of drunks just kept on driving without a license.
Heath followed her up the peeling porch steps, and Tracie felt a sense of déjà vu as she recalled what had happened two days before when she and Heath had stood on a Price doorstep. She shook off her nervousness, rang the bell, and waited. No answer. She met Heath’s eyes, he shrugged, and she pressed the buzzer again. Still nothing.
“The bell might be out. Let me try knocking.” Heath reached past her and rapped on the doorframe.
“Here, try the inside door,” Tracie suggested, alert to the possibility of danger, and eager to get inside instead of standing out in the open on the porch. She held the storm door open.
Hardly had Heath’s knuckles touched the inner door than it swung inward. Heath quickly reacted and raised his arm. “Don’t look—” he started.
But Tracie had already seen inside. Tim lay in a pool of blood on the floor.
“Tim!” Tracie gasped as she shouldered past Heath to her fallen friend. Her hand flew to his neck and found a weak pulse. Hope rose within her. “He’s alive!” She could hear Heath behind her, giving instructions over his radio. “We need a medical team, quickly!”
“Tracie?” Tim’s eyelids fluttered.
“Yes, Tim, I’m right here.” She found the wound in his gut and tried to stem the flow of blood. “Help is on the way. Hang in there.”
“Can you hear them?”
Tracie listened for the sound of approaching sirens, though it was far too soon to expect them to arrive. The only sounds she could hear were Heath’s soft footfalls as he scoured the perimeter behind her. “Not yet, Tim, but they’re on their way.”
“They’re singing,” Tim gasped. “So beautiful.” His eyes bore a faraway look.
And suddenly Tracie realized Tim was no longer really with her. “Tim,” she choked on his name. “Tim, stay with me. Look at me!” she demanded.
Tim shifted his gaze to her face, and his pupils dilated as he focused on her.
“Who did this to you?” Tracie could feel the tears running down her cheeks. She realized Tim didn’t have much time. Likely the only way they’d ever bring his killer to justice was if he could name him before he died.
Tracie watched the light fade from his eyes.
“No, Tim. Look at me! Who did this?”
Tim blinked. “T—” he choked. “T-Tre—”
Tracie focused, pleading with her eyes.
“—verrrr.” The last syllable escaped his mouth in a sigh.
And he was gone.
Tracie picked up his hand and held it to her lips. “No.” She tried to squeeze back the tears. “No, please, no.”
She didn’t realize Heath stood behind her until she felt his hand on her back.
“Perimeter’s clear,” he said softly.
Tracie nodded. She didn’t look up at Heath, but neither did she push his hand away. It wasn’t until the paramedics came rushing in that she stood and turned to face him.
“We shouldn’t have left him alone. We should have put him in protective custody.”
“He didn’t want to go,” Heath reminded her. “Besides, we thought we had everybody.”
“It doesn’t matter!” Tracie hugged herself tightly. “We should have insisted. He could have gotten mad at us, but at least he’d still be alive.” She looked back over her shoulder in time to see the medics draping a sheet over Tim’s body. She pinched her eyes shut.
Heath’s hand fell gently on her arm. “We can’t go back in time. Don’t blame yourself.”
Much as Tracie would have liked to push him away, she found she couldn’t bring herself to shrug off the light touch of his hand. She took a moment to steady her breathing, then looked Heath directly in the eye. “We have to catch whoever did this.”
The corner of Heath’s strong jaw shifted in a determined expression. “I think it was the same person who shot at us on Saturday.”
“That makes sense,” Tracie acknowledged, “but we don’t have any evidence to link anyone to either crime.”
“Don’t we?” Heath moved closer to Tracie as investigators scurried around behind them, and his hand slid higher on her arm. “You asked Tim who did this. I heard his answer.”
“You did?” A shudder rippled through her. “But all he said was—” She stopped and pinched her eyes shut, too afraid to speak the word out loud.
Heath’s mouth moved close to her ear. “Trevor,” he whispered.
She pulled back and looked at him, her eyes wide. “But what does that mean? Trevor’s friends? Trevor’s associates, his rivals, his enemies? We don’t know what Tim was going to say.”
“He said Trevor.” Heath looked at her with an intensity that made her want to shrink away.
“Trevor’s dead,” she insisted in a whisper. Didn’t Heath understand? She’d seen Trevor’s dead body floating in Lake Superior. There was no way a dead man could commit murder.
“His body was never recovered,” Heath challenged her.
Tracie shook her head, still feeling shell shocked. “Trevor’s dead,” she repeated.
Heath nodded, took a step back, and bowed his head. When he looked back up at her, his eyes wore an unreadable look. “Right.” He said simply. “Right.”
Jonas sounded frustrated when Heath finally reached him by phone later that afternoon to report on what had happened.
“He was still alive when you reached the house?” his supervisor clarified.
“Barely,” Heath conceded. “If we’d have gotten there a moment later, we wouldn’t know anything. As it was, I think it’s pretty clear he was blaming his brother for his death, but Tracie doesn’t necessarily see things that way.”
“Ah,” Jonas’s tone brightened. “The two of you are close now, hmm?”
Heath cringed. “She’s not the most open and trusting person, but I think she’s starting to let me in.” He thought about the brief time she’d allowed him to rest his hand on her arm. It wasn’t much—for most people, he wouldn’t think of it as anything. But with Tracie, it was progress.
“Starting to?” Frustration edged back into Jonas’s tone. “Look, we’ve got a gunman on the loose and we’ve just lost a witness. We don’t have time for you to ease your way into this. Tracie Crandall knows way more than she’s telling, and until we learn what she knows, we run the risk of losing more lives on this, maybe yours.” Jonas paused, and his voice dropped an octave to take on bone-chilling seriousness. “If you can’t handle this, Heath, tell me now, and I’ll put in someone who can.”
“I’m on it.”
Tracie took a long soak in the tub, but she couldn’t seem to wash away the chill she felt after watching Tim pass away in her arms. She dressed in her comfiest yoga pants and an oversized sweatshirt, and joined Gunnar in the kitchen, where her bare cupboards offered little to console her. Even Gunnar whined when she poured him the same old dry dog food.
“Sorry, buddy,” she whispered when he looked up at her with pleading eyes.
She jumped at the sound of the doorbell. “You expecting anyone?” she asked the dog.
Gunnar cocked his head to the side and barked once before trotting off toward the front door. Tracie followed him and flipped the switch for the porch light. The broad-shouldered silhouette at the door appeared to be holding a pizza box. Tracie let go of the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
She looked down at her dog. “I didn’t order pizza. You?”
Gunnar ignored her and poked his head through the doggie door.
Taking her cue from her dog, Tracie drew closer and peeked tentatively through the sheer curtains.
“It’s me. Heath,” her partner mouthed as he peered back at her through the gap in the shades.
Tracie jumped back and opened the door. “What are you doing here?” She grabbed Gunnar by the collar before he could attack.
Heath stepped into the house holding the pizza above his head. “Since you turned me down last night, I decided tonight I wouldn’t bother to ask.” He looked at her with challenge in his eyes.
Tracie hardly noticed his look. Instead she stared at her dog, who was nuzzling Heath’s free hand playfully while the Coast Guardsman attempted to pet him.
“Beautiful,” Heath nodded to Gunnar. “Part Great Dane?”
“Mostly German shepherd, I think.”
“But bigger,” Heath noted.
“Uh-huh.” Tracie looked quizzically at Gunnar. “He likes you,” she said softly.
“You sound surprised. Should I be insulted?”
“Oh. No.” Tracie shook her head and tried to focus her thoughts. “It’s just that—” She stopped. She needed to convince Heath to leave, but at the same time, the pizza smelled so delicious. Her stomach growled. “What?”
“Gunnar hated Trevor,” she admitted in a small voice.
“Gunnar—” Heath looked down at the dog with a bright smile “—you’re a smart dog.” He crouched a little lower, still holding the box high above his head.
Instead of leaping up and snatching away the pizza as she’d have expected, Gunnar planted his front paws on Heath’s knees and licked his chin.
Swallowing her surprise, Tracie took a deep breath and prepared to tell Heath to leave. But the savory aroma of the pizza tickled her nostrils, and her stomach gave another grumble. She looked at her dog. Gunnar thought Heath was okay. And the day had certainly been an exceptionally trying one. Perhaps she could relax her rule just a little, under the circumstances. But what good was a personal policy if she didn’t always stick to it?
Heath reached back through the open front door and grabbed a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew.
Tracie realized she’d been outmaneuvered. She tried one last protest. “Neither of us will get any sleep tonight if we drink that.”
Turning the bottle so she could clearly see the label, Heath corrected her. “It’s caffeine-free.” He gave her another one of his bothersome grins that told her he knew he’d won. “Where can I put this?”
With a sigh, Tracie led the way to her kitchen.
THREE
Heath wished he knew how to set Tracie at ease. She ushered him through the house like a museum tour guide who hadn’t learned her lines yet.
“This is my living room. Sorry about the mess.”
“You weren’t expecting me,” Heath assured her, taking in a room that wasn’t so much messy as cluttered, with built-in oak cabinetry halfway installed along the outside wall, piles of books awaiting the finished shelves and a solid-looking window bench stained but not varnished between the ceiling-high bookshelves. “Besides, it looks like the mess belongs to your handyman, not to you.”
Tracie looked up at him and blushed. “I’m the handyman.”
Glancing back over the cabinetry, Heath took in the solid craftsmanship. “I’m impressed. It looks like you know what you’re doing.”
“I don’t, really.” Tracie tucked a few tools discretely on a shelf.
Heath noticed the brand name of the drill just before she set it aside. Gerlach Tools—his family’s business. Fighting back the urge to look closer and see what line the drill came from, he continued on as Tracie led him through the room to her kitchen. No, it wouldn’t do at all to give away that much of his identity. If she knew who he really was, she might ask how he got into the military, and he didn’t feel at all confident that he could maintain his cover story if she began to ask him personal questions. Too much of his real-life history didn’t match up with his cover story. The last thing he needed was to blow his cover.
Heath learned all manner of interesting tidbits from Tracie about life in the Coast Guard. He found out what to do when the copier jammed up, whom to call when a toilet backed up and how best to lie low when Jake got fired up. But he couldn’t seem to steer their conversation toward anything personal, not without Tracie heading him off, going silent or even leaving the room to check the porch light or investigate imaginary noises in the basement.
He ran into a little more success when he brought the conversation around to the topic of the diamond smugglers. It seemed she was as intrigued as anyone about how they’d run their operation under everyone’s noses for so long.
“None of the
men we’ve captured will tell us anything—where the diamonds are coming from, or how they’ve been transporting them. The boats we captured contained a small number of stones—a few handfuls. Nothing like the reports we’ve heard from gemologists. They claim these fake rocks have taken over a major niche in the market. People have been paying top dollar for them for years, thinking they were getting real diamonds of superior color and clarity.” She tossed a pizza crust to Gunnar before helping herself to another piece.
Heath smiled, glad to see her enjoying the food he’d brought. Tracie looked like she’d skipped too many meals. He tried to keep his tone casual, to keep her talking about the smugglers without getting suspicious of his curiosity and clamming up. But as he’d suspected, the woman who’d worked so hard to keep him at a distance had a flood of thoughts and theories pent up inside her. As she began to trust him, her dam began to crack.
“What I don’t understand,” she continued after she’d washed down a bite of pizza with a swig of soda, “is why no one figured out something was wrong a long time ago. I mean, we no sooner discover these smugglers than multiple gemologists come forward and announce these fakes have been out there for over a decade. Granted, the diamonds were excellent imitations—chemically and optically identical to real diamonds. But how could synthetics sneak by so long on the national market? And why can’t the Feds figure out where they got them from? You don’t just buy diamonds out of thin air. Somebody had to sell them. Can’t they follow the trail?”
“I believe the FBI is on the case now,” Heath said, trying to distance himself from the very organization he worked for. “I should hope we’d have answers soon.”
Tracie let out a snort. “Not soon enough for Tim,” she said, winging a pizza crust through the air and watching Gunnar leap artfully to catch it. Her scowl faded and she grinned at the dog, but when she glanced over at Heath, she immediately blushed. “I probably shouldn’t give him people food, but when he gives me his sad-eyed begging look, I can’t very well turn him away. He’s my very best friend in the world. I don’t know what I’d do without him.” She clamped her mouth shut after that profession, which was the closest thing to personal information he’d learned all evening. She sat silently fiddling with her napkin while Heath finished the last piece of pizza.
Troubled Waters Page 3