On Thin Ice. Debra Lee Brown

air. On purpose. The lung freeze felt good this time. Hell, yes. She was back in the field.

      She had a job to do. Failure was not an option. Not for the woman who was about to become Tiger Petroleum’s next exploration manager. Not for Hatch Parker’s little Scout.

      Chapter 2

      Seth Adams wasn’t a betting man, but if he had to guess who the corporate thief was that the Feds had hired him to finger, he’d put all his stakes on Lauren Fotheringay.

      Last year, a small, foreign oil company that had never set foot in Alaska before snagged a land deal netting what turned out to be a fortune in oil drilling rights. No way was it just dumb luck. They’d had an inside track. Access to geological data the FBI knew, because of the position of the leases, could have only come from one source—Tiger Petroleum.

      The Bureau had already ruled out the possibility that the foreign company simply stole the data. Tiger’s security was renowned in the industry. No, the data had likely been sold to them—and selling proprietary corporate data without that corporation’s knowledge or consent was a crime. A big one.

      There was a criminal at work somewhere in the Tiger organization, and the Feds, along with Tiger’s CEO and some high-ranking Wall Street types, wanted that person caught. The Caribou Island operation was as good a place as any to start. Perhaps the thief would strike again. No one at Tiger knew, of course, that they were under surveillance, and the FBI wanted it kept that way.

      Oh, yeah, Seth thought, as he watched Lauren Fotheringay out the icy window of the break room, lugging her duffel and briefcase across the site in near whiteout conditions.

      The woman was tough as nails. And a hell of a lot more attractive in the flesh than she appeared in that society news clipping he’d seen showing her dressed to the nines with Tiger’s money man, Crocker Holt. Seth had read all about the two of them in the dossier Bledsoe had provided.

      Those big brown eyes of hers had given him the once-over, too. More than once. In an irritating way, she reminded him of Kitty, his ex. They both had that same finishing-school, expensive-women’s-college, “hey, look at me, I’m a big lady executive” sort of arrogance about them.

      Behind the scenes, women like that got their kicks from messing with the heads of men they considered a couple of rungs below them on the evolutionary ladder. Construction workers, auto mechanics, even a roughneck now and then. Yeah, he knew the type. Boy, did he ever.

      What Little Miss Society In Geologist’s Clothing didn’t know was that he wasn’t a roughneck. Well, not anymore he wasn’t. Fresh out of high school he’d pulled pipe from Barter Island to Barrow, scraping together enough money to pay his way through college.

      He’d graduated with honors with a B.A. in criminology from the University of Alaska, surprising the hell out of his old man. Seth would never forget the day he called him in his New York office with the news. Not that an important oil man like Jeremy Adams had time to attend his kid’s commencement.

      Remembering, Seth made a derisive sound in the back of his throat.

      The FBI had recruited him right out of school. Some affirmative action thing, though he could have easily made the cut on his own. He ended up second in his class at the Academy. Even so, Bledsoe, his section chief in D.C., had never liked him. The feeling was mutual.

      Three years later Bledsoe had him dismissed for reasons Seth didn’t like to remember. He’d blown their cover on a major counterfeiting sting the FBI and Secret Service had spent six months and a bundle of cash setting up. The way Seth saw it, it was either that or watch his partner take one in the back. He’d had no choice. Bledsoe thought otherwise.

      In the end, his partner nearly bought it. Bledsoe somehow managed to blame that on him, too. After Seth got the ax, he went home to his native village of Kachelik, and had worked as a borough cop there ever since.

      It was a great job, and he loved the village. He had friends there, and family. His wife left him when the Bureau canned him and, in hindsight, he considered himself damned lucky. They were from different worlds, and Seth never intended to make that mistake again.

      The past few years had been pretty uneventful. No real challenges, no serious girlfriends. Everything was rocking along just fine until a few weeks ago when two suits showed up at the village in the dead of night in an unmarked FBI chopper.

      Bledsoe wanted him back. Needed him, was more like it. The Feds wanted someone undercover on Caribou Island, and couldn’t find one among the ranks of bright and shiny new agents who’d fit in on an offshore oil rig in the Arctic. Seth was elected.

      Altex’s grim financial situation made it easy for the FBI to get him out on the island. Posing as a native Alaskan affirmative action group, Bledsoe’s men had paid Paddy O’Connor a subsidy to hire Seth as a roughneck for the Caribou Island job. In a roundabout way, it was the second time he’d been hired by the Bureau because of his ethnicity.

      It would be the last time.

      He hadn’t wanted the job at first, but a tribal elder had counseled him to take it. Seth wasn’t sure why. He’d finally agreed, but it wasn’t because of the elder’s gentle prodding, or because Bledsoe offered him his old job back in D.C. if he fingered the perp. But this was no time to reminisce about his motives. He needed to focus on the facts.

      He’d been on the job six days now, and so far everything about the operation seemed above board. He’d gotten the usual cold reception from the crew. If he hadn’t, he’d have been suspicious. Jack Salvio was a nasty piece of work, too, but nothing Seth couldn’t handle. Everything seemed normal, in fact, until fifteen short minutes ago when Lauren Parker Fotheringay landed on Caribou island.

      Already he smelled blood.

      Seth zipped his survival jacket all the way up, slammed his hard hat on his head and yanked the camp’s front door wide. A blast of arctic air hit him full in the face.

      Some routine maintenance had delayed the start of his shift, but he’d check in on the drilling floor anyway, just to make sure he wasn’t needed. After that, he’d have plenty of time to pay a surprise visit to his number one suspect out there in her shiny new trailer.

      That was probably Money Man’s doing. The protective fiancé. Every geologist’s trailer he’d ever seen on the North Slope had been beat-up and barely livable. This new one, which was bigger and nicer than half the houses in Kachelik, had been brought in special a couple of days ago for Her Majesty.

      Seth dashed across the yard, took the slick outer stairs up to the drilling floor two at time, then skidded to a stop on the landing. Squinting back toward camp through the blowing snow, he saw Paddy O’Connor—that red hard hat of his was unmistakable—fighting the wind as he made his way toward Lauren Fotheringay’s trailer.

      Damn! He’d hoped to overhear their conversation. Paddy was also on his list of suspects, but only as an accomplice. The Feds knew the thief was someone on the inside at Tiger, someone with a technical background who could interpret the data. But to pull it off, that person would need help in the field. And a drilling company toolpusher one short season away from bankruptcy was the most likely candidate.

      Bledsoe had told Seth little else about the case. Just enough to get him started. He was supposed to finger the perps, then call in the cavalry. He wasn’t authorized to take action on his own. That figured. His job was to stay undercover and report back to the almighty Doyle Bledsoe.

      He jerked the door open to the “doghouse,” the small break room just off the drilling floor, and ducked inside. The crew was standing around, drinking coffee. Big surprise. None of these yokels lifted a finger unless Paddy O’Connor was right there, making sure they were working.

      That was fine with him. He shot back down the stairs and started for Fotheringay’s trailer. Perhaps he’d get an earful of Paddy’s conversation with her, after all.

      “Yo, Adams!”

      He turned in the direction the shout had come from, but couldn’t