A Blizzard of Polar Bears, page 22
“Do you want me to sit with you while you do?”
She sniffed, wiping at her nose. “No, it’s going to be rough. You go on ahead with your evening. Afterward I think I’ll need to be alone for a while, try to process this.”
Alex stepped reluctantly toward the door. “Okay, if you’re sure. I was going to get some food. Want me to bring some back?”
Sasha gripped her stomach. “There’s no way I could eat. But thank you.”
“Of course. Call me if you need anything.”
“I will.”
Alex quietly shut the door behind herself as Sasha began to dial. She felt so sorry for the woman. So much of Alex’s own work was solo. She couldn’t imagine finding a kindred spirit to do it with. And to find that kindred spirit as Sasha had and then lose him? She bit her lip, Sasha’s tears infectious.
She climbed into her Jeep, her heart heavy.
At Moe’s, the corner table by the dartboard was all abuzz about Neil’s death. No one could believe it. Alex sat with them for a short time, and they lifted a glass to him. She decided not to mention his being paid to sabotage the study. He was gone. Let them think the best of him.
Wanting to be by herself then, she moved to the bar and ate in silence. She knew she should be exhausted, but her mind kept treading over what had happened on the ice.
Finally, feeling like she ate way too much, Alex walked over to the Centre. A couple researchers were milling around the lab, and Alex joined them. She looked forward to getting the samples back from the police so she could run tests.
For now, she ran further cortisol tests on the fur and claw samples of the bear she’d tagged on her first day out with Casey.
As polar bear fur grew during the summer, the stress hormone cortisol was integrated into the hair. Examining the cortisol level gave her insight into the bear’s condition and health at the time of the previous summer’s ice breakup. She found the stress levels somewhat high in the bear, indicating that it had been a long ice-free period during which he didn’t get a lot of nutrition.
Testing the fat sample, she found trace amounts of DDT, the dangerous pesticide that had been banned in the U.S. in 1972. It was still in use in other parts of the world, such as India, China, and North Korea, and it hung around for so long that its lingering residue caused problems even in areas where it had been outlawed.
She stretched, rubbing her neck. All of the adrenaline of the last few days had drained out of her body and she finally felt like she could sleep.
She climbed into her Jeep and drove back to her motel. Snow fell now, and the moon, obscured partially by clouds, illuminated the snowy terrain around her, making the scenery glow in an ethereal light. Fog filled the air, lending an aura of mystery. The drive did her good, as she gazed out over the silvery landscape. She pulled up at her motel and climbed out, still feeling stiff from the long walk across the ice.
When she reached the door, she froze. The lights were on. She was almost sure she’d left them off. She was habitual about never wasting energy. But she’d been so tired, it was possible she’d forgotten. She hesitated, thought of climbing back in her Jeep. But if someone was inside, they could be taking the hair sample she’d brought to the motel for safekeeping or stealing her laptop or backup drive with all her data.
Finally, she crept to the door and listened. She didn’t hear anything. When she’d waited a couple minutes, still hearing nothing within, she decided she must have simply forgotten to turn off the light. She inserted the key and swung the door wide.
Inside, the room lay in shambles. Her suitcase had been overturned on the bed, all the contents spilled out. Her toiletries lay scattered all over the floor, the contents of the refrigerator strewn around. The wastebasket had been dumped upside down. She’d stepped inside only a foot when the door slammed shut behind her. A man in a balaclava stood behind the door and he leapt forward, grabbing her arm. “Where is it?” he demanded.
A woman in a black ski mask emerged from the bathroom. She had Alex’s laptop tucked under her arm.
Alex swung around, wrenching free from the man’s grip, and squared off against them. The woman flung her laptop down on the bed and pulled out a wicked-looking knife.
“You find it in there?” asked the man. He had a gruff voice, and she immediately recognized it. She didn’t have to see him limp to know he was the leader of the snowmobilers who had attacked them.
“No,” answered the woman.
“Tell us where it is,” the leader said. He gestured for his comrade to approach her. “Or she’ll cut your face so bad you’ll never look the same again.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The woman narrowed in on her, her movements determined, the knife gripped tightly in her hand. Alex’s eyes went down to the chair in front of the desk. In another second, the woman would be past it. She had to act now. She grabbed the back of it and swung it hard, slamming it into the knife-wielder’s hand. Her weapon flew loose, arcing across the room and clattering against the wall above the bedside table. Alex continued swinging the chair, maintaining a tight grip on it, and advanced toward the leader like a lion tamer. She ran at him, slamming the chair into him and driving him back against the wall.
Then she flung the door open, throwing the chair at the woman. It glanced off her shoulder and she cursed. Alex slammed the door hard into the leader, who was pinned behind it.
Then she was outside, running for her car. She fished the keys out of her jacket pocket.
A puff of snow flew up just to the right of her feet at the same instant she heard a muffled poof. She spun, the keys out in her hand. The leader stood in the open doorway, a pistol with a silencer aimed at her head.
“I said,” he growled, “where is it?”
The woman joined him and they burst out of the motel room.
It was still early. Alex wondered if anyone else was in the motel at this hour, or if they’d be out at dinner or coming back from sightseeing. “Somebody call the cops!” she shouted. She didn’t see anyone stir in their rooms.
“If she’s dead, she won’t be able to find it,” the woman said.
“Yeah, but we don’t know who she might have told.”
She couldn’t just stand there and get shot, but she didn’t have time to swing the car door open, climb in, start it, and then drive off before he could fire a clean shot at her. He was less than twenty feet away.
Instead she dove down and rolled behind the car. Cold snow pressed into her face. Keeping the car between her and the two attackers, she crawled around to the far side of it. The parking lot had six other cars in it, and she rolled to the next one while their line of sight was still obstructed by her own car. Then she rolled to the next. Now she ran at a crouch, covering the distance to the next two cars.
She recognized the last car in the lot. It was the one that had pursued Steve out of Moe’s parking lot the night she met him. It had to belong to the snowmobilers.
“Just tell us where it is!” the leader boomed.
Alex reached a small cluster of spruce trees at the edge of the parking lot and moved into them, snow shaking loose and cascading down the back of her coat. She shivered in the cold.
“Where’d she go?” the woman asked, sprinting down the line of cars.
Alex spotted another cluster of spruces across the street. She made a break for it, dashing across the open space.
“There!” the woman shouted. The leader took a shot and snow kicked up to Alex’s left. She wondered if he was purposefully missing like before, out on the ice. Trying to scare her into standing still, giving up. He clearly needed some information from her, though she couldn’t imagine what it was. But that wouldn’t keep him from shooting her in the legs to slow her down.
The hair sample had been sitting out on the motel desk in plain view, undisturbed. But again, they hadn’t been interested in taking samples.
She made it to the cluster of trees and squeezed between the branches. The street on this side was largely residential, and she raced between two houses, crossing through the backyard of the one on the left. But running in snow meant they could follow her tracks. She could hear them calling out to each other. They were trying to flank her. She had to get somewhere where she couldn’t leave a trail.
A fence loomed up before her and she took a running leap at it, gripping the top. She hefted herself up and over, dropping down on the far side. A startled German shepherd, chained to the homeowner’s porch, erupted in a fury of barking. She ran to the fence on the far side of the yard and vaulted over it, too.
She heard the gunning of an engine out on the street and wondered if they’d gone back to their car. She ran through more backyards. She heard the car stop and a door slam. She vaulted over a chain-link fence into someone else’s yard, setting off another dog, a small one this time, who stood in the person’s kitchen window and barked as furiously as its little Chihuahua body would allow.
She heard someone go over the fence one yard back and knew that at least one of them was following her on foot, probably calling back to the other one to cut her off at the next street.
She heard a car race by on the street ahead of her, and then screech to a halt. A car door slammed.
She jumped a railing into a new yard. This yard had no fence around the rest of the property, and she could see the headlights of a car glowing in the foggy, snow-filled night. A dog had been running around in this yard, creating a maze of tracks. She realized her own tracks could be obscured here, so she headed for a snow-covered tree and ducked down beneath its evergreen branches. She gasped, catching her breath, trying to quiet her breathing.
She heard someone scramble over the last fence she’d climbed. She inched back a little farther, covering her mouth to hide the frost as she exhaled.
Too late, she heard the crunching of boots on the snow directly behind her. A hand fell on her shoulder.
She whirled, coming face-to-face with Casey. He brought a gloved finger up to his lips and flicked out a collapsible combat baton. Just then the leader came scrambling over the fence into the yard, struggling with his injured leg. He stopped when he saw the maze of dog tracks confusing her trail. He took a few hesitant steps toward the tree, thought better of it, then turned back around, hunching over in the snow, trying to read the tracks. When he took a few more steps back toward the tree, Casey burst out with the baton, bringing it down hard on the man’s head. He crumpled, blood spattering on the snow, and went still, his breath frosting in the air. He was unconscious. Casey ripped the man’s face mask off and took a photo with his phone.
Alex crept out and joined him, staring down at the familiar face. A scar ran across the bridge of his nose, and with his long black hair and goatee, Alex recognized him as being one of the men who’d chased Steve out of the bar that night.
The rumble of a car’s engine sounded on the block next to them. Casey grabbed her hand and they ran to the next yard over. This property had a tall wooden fence. Alex leapt up and grabbed the top, climbing over. Casey landed next to her. The car drove slowly down the road, and they pressed into the fence, catching their breath. The vehicle motored onward. They crossed into another yard with a shed, the snow falling heavier now. The car’s headlights pierced the foggy gloom but started to move away in the wrong direction.
“Hey!” she suddenly heard the leader’s hoarse voice call in the distance. “Hey!” The car paused, and she heard a door slam. He’d recovered and rejoined his companion.
Alex pressed her back against the reassuring cold metal of the shed, Casey beside her. When the car’s engine faded away into the distance, she turned to him. In a spur-of-the-moment reaction, she hugged him fiercely. “Thank you.”
He held her, his familiar scent washing over her. He felt good in her arms. Reassuring. A part of her trusted him intrinsically, and yet another part of her didn’t know what to make of him. She could feel the warmth of his neck against her cheek. She pulled away.
“I came by your motel to apologize,” he said. “Saw them chasing you.”
“I’m glad you were here.”
They stood in silence, their bodies close together. She felt a little dizzy at his proximity. “We . . . we have to figure out what they’re after.”
His blue eyes stared down into hers. “To sabotage your study?”
“It’s more than that. It doesn’t add up. Why did the person steal my research from the lab, but the snowmobilers left it untouched out on the ice? And just now in my motel room, they asked again where ‘it’ was, but a hair sample was clearly visible on the motel desk, and they already had my laptop with the data on it. They were looking for something else.”
He didn’t answer, just looked down at her, concern creasing his brow. Their faces were only inches apart, his lips slightly parted.
“That man you hit just now,” she went on. “He was with the man you killed on the ice. They were all in Moe’s the other night, the ones who chased that nervous little guy, Steve, out of the restaurant.”
“Do you know what they wanted from him?”
“No. But he was scared. Really scared. I wonder if they got to him.”
They stood together in the silent neighborhood, snow cascading around them. It collected in Casey’s tousled black hair, flakes melting as they landed on his handsome face. Suddenly the mystery of their attackers felt more distant than the mystery of Casey himself.
“Who are you?” she asked him. “Really?”
“I’m Casey MacCrae. I’ve never lied to you, Alex.”
“Where do you know me from? Have we met?”
“No. Not until I came here.”
“Then how?”
He went silent, staring down at her intently. She felt encapsulated with him there, in the shadowed darkness of the shed, the hush of the snowfall.
“In New Mexico. I was out in the mountains one night. I came across you out there. I learned that night that you’d found spotted owls on that land, and the sale to the golf course developers had fallen through. I’d been dreading that development. It . . . meant a lot to me that the land got protected, that it went to a land trust instead.”
“You had a connection with that piece of land?”
He squeezed her hand. “Yes. After that, I followed your work.” He looked down, biting his lip. “Forgive me. I was curious where else you’d worked. Got interested in your career. I confess I . . . borrowed your GPS unit.”
“Borrowed it? Where did you find it?”
“I came across your pack. You’d set it down. I know I shouldn’t have taken it . . . but I wanted to know where else you’d worked, places you might have aided with protections. Then I saw you were coming back, and I guess I sort of panicked. I took your GPS unit with me.”
“Why not just talk to me? Why then mail it back to my dad?”
“I felt bad about taking it. Wanted you to have it back. I looked up your Garmin registration and mailed it to that address. I guess that was your dad’s. I visited a lot of the places you’d worked to protect. I’d . . . been struggling since I got back from Darfur. Needed to get my head straight. It helped to be out in these amazing areas where wildlife was protected. Seeing the work you’d done was inspiring. It reminded me that not all people are evil. Some of them are working for good. I sent you postcards from those places to let you know how important I thought your work was, how beautiful those places were that you’d helped to protect.” He met her gaze. “I really didn’t mean the cards to be creepy. I guess I . . . just didn’t know what to say. You didn’t know me, after all. Somehow I thought it would be even weirder if I signed the cards.”
“And Boston?” she asked.
“I was in New York when I heard you’d been instrumental in getting those wetlands protected. I wanted to come up and have a look for myself, see what you’d accomplished. I read about it online, and the more I dug into the history of that piece of land, the more worried I got.”
“What do you mean?”
“I read about the luxury condos that were supposed to go up, and how the owner of the construction company lost his business after the deal fell through. His wife left him. He had all these hateful, ranting posts on environmentalist websites. He’d written angry letters to the Boston Globe about how the economy was going to be ruined if conservationists and other ‘bleeding hearts’ kept choosing animals instead of people’s livelihoods. I began to worry he might do something drastic. I hacked into his email and learned that he’d bought a gun on the dark web. So I armed myself and went to the ceremony. I was worried he’d . . . well, do exactly what he did. And I was ready. I thought if I could get body cam footage of him if he brought a gun, I could call the police. But then everything just went insane.”
She took a long deep breath, her brow so furrowed it began to hurt. She studied his worried face, his compassionate eyes. “You saved my life out there. And the lives of countless others.”
“I couldn’t let him hurt you.”
“And Montana?”
“I’d done some digging around, wanted to know what kind of people you’d be dealing with when you got out there. Some of them were dangerous. I wanted to keep an eye on you.”
“On the DVD you mailed me, you’d written that I had your back, and that now you had mine. How did I ever have your back? I didn’t know you before now.”
“I told you I’ve never lied to you . . .” He hesitated.
“Yes?”
“But I don’t think I want to tell you that part. I’m not sure you’d . . . be okay with it.”
“I want you to tell me, Casey.”
“I’d like to. But maybe tonight isn’t the right time. Maybe when we know each other better.”
She felt the tiniest flutter of fear inside her. “And will we? Know each other better?”
“I’d like to.”
Alex could sense something disturbed in him, something deep down. Maybe something broken. Or something deeply sad or lost. But she didn’t feel danger from him, though she knew he was capable of killing. But now she knew that she was capable of killing, too, if it was in defense of herself or someone she cared about.
