Read Edge of Survival Online

Authors: Toni Anderson

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Suspense, #Contemporary

Edge of Survival (9 page)

A red admiral butterfly danced through the air and landed on a purple thistle nearby. She closed a suture and snipped it off with her surgical hemostats. Then she took the fish over to the recovery area and saw the first one beginning to swim around the enclosure, groggily bumping into rocks. She gave the second fish to Katie to revive, and netted the first fish and released it into the river. It wove its way clumsily to the shelter of the deeper pools on the other side of the river. Tooly came to stand beside her and they watched the expensive equipment swim away.

“How do you know it won’t die?” the old man asked. He’d taken a keen interest in their study.

“I don’t. Not until I track it swimming up and down the brook.” She gave the old man a smile and hoped she didn’t smell as bad as he did.

Actually, given the clove oil, she probably smelled worse. She needed a long bath and a big dose of Happy perfume.

“It’s the best option we have for studying migration.” She wanted to ask him about the fauna and flora in this region but it felt hypocritical for her to marvel at his expertise and then help destroy it. “You could fight this, you know,” she muttered under her breath. “You could protest to the Nunatsiavut government, persuade the mine company to use the next river valley over. I could help.”

Tooly stared at the water, a stoic expression of ancient wisdom on his face. Cam felt like an ignorant child.

“A long time ago, when my mother died, I fought with my brother over this land and I won. He was sent south to be educated by the government because they thought they knew best.” Tooly spat on the ground. “I was full of piss and vinegar. I thought one day he would return and we’d be brothers again. But he never came home.” He spread his arms wide to encompass the land, the sky, the river.

The gentle flow of water over rocks and heat of the sun penetrated Cam. Birds sang in the trees, the smell of pollen ripe on the breeze. Tommy and Katie moved in closer to listen. Vikki checked her watch.

“Now my brother has money, lives in a nice house, and his grandchildren go to school to learn the old ways.” Tooly shook his head, opaque eyes trying to conceal pain. “The old ways are dead except in books. So maybe all these years later, I realize it was my brother who won. More than fifty years ago I’d already lost this land, but I was too stubborn to know it.”

 

Daniel threw rocks in the harbor and watched the ripples fan out and then fade into the surface of the water. He’d taken the urine test, and the nurse had told him to wait about an hour for the results. If he failed, the inference was that he’d be on the next flight south and his stuff would follow ASAP.

His mouth felt like cotton wool and he didn’t know why he gave a damn. There were plenty of other flying jobs.

The Doc’s face flashed through his mind, and a wave of regret washed over him. That knowledge sat in the pit of his stomach like an IED because no matter how hard he’d tried to avoid emotional entanglement, somehow, that cute-as-a-button, pain-in-the-ass academic had gotten under his skin.

Maybe getting fired would be for the best. Tooly would keep her safe in the bush for the next few months. Daniel would submerge himself in some other remote community, where he could find a woman and a drink without worrying about the consequences. And now he was thinking about sex and alcohol again.

“Shit.” He threw another stone across the bay, gulls eyeing the splashes with avarice.

Ever since he’d told himself he couldn’t have a beer, he’d hungered after it. He couldn’t stop thinking about having one
last
drink. The same way he wanted sex. He threw another rock far out to sea. And rather than remembering any of the women he’d been with over the years, he kept picturing the cheeky smile on a fully clad fish biologist—who he would never go near—and that pissed him off.

So now he had another thing he desperately wanted to forget, and like everything else, the harder he tried to forget, the more it hammered his brain. He didn’t realize he was moving toward the bar until he was halfway there. A dog barked, a humongous husky chained outside a house that needed a new deck and a paint job. A woman with no front teeth tripped out the front door and down onto the gravel road. Daniel recognized her jaundiced, emaciated face. She was a local who was usually pie-eyed by lunch. Bile rose in his throat and he had to stop to spit it out behind the building. He wiped his mouth and tried to steady his breathing.

Great self-control, mate. Sterling character trait, following the drunk to the bar.

Perhaps it was time to admit he definitely had a problem. He started back toward the clinic. Plenty of ex-SAS boys turned to drink when they left the Regiment. Alcohol softened the blow of not knowing what to do with yourself, but all too often the alcohol gained control. Daniel did not want to turn into one of those sad, pathetic bastards who drowned themselves in Johnnie Walker and glory days. He’d rather plow into a cliff face or shoot himself in the head than end up a drooling, incoherent has-been.

As if he wasn’t already…

He marched up the steps and into the clinic just as the nurse came through from one of the rooms in the back.

“Well?” he demanded. The overhead strip light blinked once like a reprimand. “Do you have the results?” He wanted this finished.

She adjusted both her cuffs before she answered. “You’re clean.”

“What?” He jerked back, eyebrows jumping. “Really?”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.” For the first time, her dark eyes twinkled in her serious round face.

Daniel grabbed her and, even though she yelped in surprise, he lifted her off the floor, whirling her in a circle. The other people in the waiting room giggled and pointed.

He put her back down and kissed one smooth plump cheek. “Thank you.”

She raised a hand to pat his face and he felt a punch in the gentle connection.

“Don’t fall, Mr. Fox.” Her mouth was downturned and her eyes were filled with sadness. “In this part of the world, we see too many people fall.”

Chapter Nine
Rise Above the Rest The Royal Air Force

Sweaty and tired, Cam stripped off her latex gloves and threw them in the garbage. “I’m going to walk upriver to check out the terrain,” she told Vikki.

The wobbly feeling was probably from leaning over all day. They’d finished tagging, and she wanted to check out one of the locations she’d picked for her remote monitoring stations. The helicopter had to make two trips to the ship anyway, so she wouldn’t get left behind. And, as overprotective as Daniel was, there was no way he’d leave her in the bush overnight.

“You want me to come with you?” Tooly asked.

Vikki looked stricken, clearly wanting to keep the old man close. Cam grabbed an apple and some water from her pack, stuffed the bear bangers into the pocket of her bug jacket.

“Nah. I’ll make sure I’m back for the second run to the ship.” She grabbed the handheld radio. “I’ll take this.” And just to reassure herself because she still felt a little dizzy, she pricked her thumb and did a quick glucose test.

“What is that?” Tommy asked, nodding to her funky pink meter. Tooly watched too. The kid had been treating her with a little more respect since he realized she’d been the one to find Sylvie’s body. She’d gained some kind of morbid teenage cachet. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket, young eyes intent.

“Blood sugar meter.” The reading was 94, which was fine. She was just tired after a long hard day. She shoved the device into her fanny pack and clipped it around her waist.

“Cool.”

She laughed. “Yeah. Glad you think so.”

She pushed through some berry bushes and followed a path beside the rocks at the edge of the waterfall. Negotiating the smooth flat stones at the top of the falls, she broke the seal on her water bottle and sucked back a huge gulp, enjoying the clean blast to her senses, washing away the insidious odors of clove oil and bug spray and fish slime.

She crunched on her apple. Chewed and washed down the sweetness with water. She sniffed the air and realized there was another smell in addition to her and the pollen. “Phew.” She wrinkled her nose at the musky odor. Maybe a skunk?

A set of tracks were baked into the mud below and she inched down the steep rock face toward them. She started to slip, ripping out cotton grass in an effort to slow her descent, and landed with a bone-jarring thud.
Ouch
. Balancing against the rock, she swept the water bottle across her brow, grateful for the coolness.

She crouched and studied the tracks. Having specialized in fish, she wasn’t much of a mammalogist. She could recognize a bear, or wolf—courtesy of the family retriever—and cat tracks. But she couldn’t distinguish between a black or polar bear, or tell the difference between a wolf and a coyote.

Pity she hadn’t brought Tooly with her, she’d bet he’d know what it was. It was the same type of track she’d photographed that day by the pond with Daniel. She hadn’t downloaded them yet because her memory card was huge and she hadn’t wanted Daniel’s naked body on her computer. The temptation to turn him into a screensaver was too great, and that would just feed his galactic ego.

She frowned and leaned closer. It looked a bit like a wolf track. Four visible claws, so definitely not a cat which had retractable claws—a relief considering that would be one big kitty. Kneeling on the hard-packed dirt, she let out a low whistle. It was almost the same size as her hand.

And there were
five
toes, she realized suddenly. The outer one hadn’t shown up in most of the prints, but there was one distinct track that had a smaller indentation from a fifth toe.

She frowned. What did a porcupine footprint look like? Or a badger? She straightened, rubbing her dusty palms on her thighs and decided to go get Tooly and ask him.

The tall granite boulder she’d slid down loomed over her, making her muscles ache just looking at it. It would be easier to wade back through the brook. She pushed through the bushes to the edge of the stream. There was an ear-splitting scream from down by the falls, followed by Vikki yelling, “Caaaaaaam!”

Fear sliced through her as she ran through the shallows. Visions of blood and Sylvie’s slashed neck flashed through her mind. Heart pounding, she raced, careening to a halt to climb out of the water onto the rocks at the top of the waterfall. Vikki, Tommy and Katie were just in front of her. She couldn’t see Tooly anywhere.

“What is it?” Cam yelled.

“Big effing bear.” Vikki glanced over. “Gimme the radio.”

Cam passed it across and peered over Tommy’s shoulder. A huge bear with massive haunches and dense black fur stuck a paw on top of one of her coolers and sniffed at the contents.

“Hey! That’s my equipment!” She retrieved the bear banger from her pocket. It was like a cap gun that shot out a flare and she loaded it up fast. “Where’s Tooly?” The breath rasped through Cam’s throat. She cocked the gun.

“He told us to get up here.” Vikki jabbed her finger straight down to a spot Cam couldn’t see. “He’s down there.”

About ten feet away from the behemoth bear.

Vikki relayed a message for help on the VHF FM radio.

Tommy glanced toward the pool at their backs. “We could jump in—”

“Bears can swim, idiot,” Vikki broke away from her radio call to veto that idea.

“And we’d drown wearing our waders,” Cam pointed out with a little more tact. They all simultaneously slid the braces off their shoulders.

Cam nudged forward, peering over the edge, relieved to see Tooly climbing the rocks toward them. She remembered all the furs strung outside his shack. The guy was probably used to dealing with predators, but she didn’t want anyone hurt on her watch, and he didn’t have any weapon on him beside the knife on his belt. The bear turned, a cute face and pale snout juxtaposed against lethal-looking two-inch incisors. He sniffed the air, stared at the old man and then jogged toward him.

“Fire the banger, Cam!” Vikki screamed, startling everyone, the bear included, who backed up a couple of steps, swinging his head from side to side. Cam met Tooly’s gaze peering over the top of the rock and the old man nodded.

Cam raised the revolver into the air and closed her eyes as she pulled the trigger. The percussion bounced off solid rock, and Tooly lurched up onto the boulder where they were all standing. Vikki stumbled back, knocking into her. Cam’s center of balance shifted, and she instinctively windmilled her arms in a desperate attempt to keep her footing. Tommy bumped her as he turned around to see what was going on. Just a whisper of contact, a brush of air, and her body drifted another centimeter from safety as she grasped vacant space. Her heart thundered. Time slowed. And she fell backward into the pool at the base of the falls.

The splash was enormous, but to her relief, she bobbed to the surface and floated. The bear circled back to poke at her coolers. Dammit, her receiver was in there!

“Shoo! Shoo bear!” It was hard to swim wearing the restrictive waders, but she managed a couple of strokes that made her muscles feel as if she’d been shot with an elephant tranquilizer. Despite the water temperature, sweat beaded her upper lip. She flailed her arms, kicking toward the closest rocks at the side of the falls, but the smooth walls gave her no purchase, and the spray made her boots begin to fill.

Crap. She clawed at the rock, her fingernails breaking as they found nothing to cling to. The roar of the falls blasted her ears. She spat out a mouthful of water in panic. She was going under!

Vikki screamed, trying to reach down to grab her.
Oh God.
She gasped, gagged, then stole another fast breath, blood banging through her ears. Her throat felt raw from holding back a scream. She tried to kick but the sheer weight of water dragged her down. Liquid crept over her nose and she lunged to take a final breath before she was pulled under.

***

“I know I said I’d be home tonight—” Griff clamped down on the rest of the sentence as his wife cut him off. He fused both hands around the handset, trying to temper the unhappiness and frustration that rushed through him. “Marcia, I’m sorry. This is just taking longer than I expected—”

He sat in Sergeant-in-Charge Percy Roblin’s office, which the guy had loaned him for the duration of the investigation. He was behind the man’s supersized desk, seated in his plush black leather chair. Johnny Leland glanced up from another desk they’d dragged in, where he was entering witness statements and cross-referencing databases, searching for potential links with other crimes.

Griff was hyperaware of Constable McCoy standing behind him, looking out the open window and pretending not to eavesdrop on a private conversation. He lowered his voice, trying to appease a woman who had long ago stopped being appeasable. “It’s probably going to be another couple of days. Ask Dr. Cahill to reschedule—”

He pulled the phone away from his ears as the volume on the other end of the line exploded and then went abruptly silent. He put the phone back in its cradle and wrapped both hands over his naked skull.
Christ.

The silence was uncomfortable but Griff had stopped worrying about whether or not people knew he had marital problems. These days it felt less like marriage and more like war.

Peshavaria walked in carrying what Griff assumed was the autopsy report. “No drugs or alcohol found in the vic’s system, but there was evidence of long-term substance abuse. And from her medical records, she had a history of STDs but was currently free of infection.”

So much for trying to trace her customers through that angle.

“No latent prints on the body. Cause of death, exsanguination. Knife sliced the common carotid. The vic probably had sex not long before she was killed, some semen was recovered. Medical examiner said sex didn’t look forced but if someone held that knife to her throat…” Peshavaria shrugged an eloquent shoulder as his voice tailed off.

“Sylvie wouldn’t need a knife to her throat.” Roblin spoke from the doorway. He’d been surprisingly accommodating given they’d taken over his detachment. “That girl would climb aboard a dead man if it got her a drink or a fix.”

Images of Sylvie Watson were splashed across his desk, and the horror of that gaping neck wound hurt Griff more than his wife’s discontent. Sylvie Watson had been brutalized, her little boy had lost his mother, and her parents were swamped by grief. He’d made a promise to them, but he wasn’t getting anywhere.

“What have you got, McCoy?” He turned away from the images of death and stared at the bank of wildflowers behind the detachment building. It looked pretty, but the buzz of insects against the screen reminded him why he preferred the city.

She bit her lip and stepped forward to access Roblin’s PC. Her crooked incisor and absence of makeup made her look like a high-school student rather than a fellow officer. But she was hardworking and intelligent, which counted for far more in Griff’s book.

“I got passed around Whitehall for about an hour before I found someone in the British Ministry of Defense who was authorized to send me information on Daniel Fox.” She clicked on a file, and the hair on the back of his neck snapped to attention like the Maple Leaf flag in a force 10 gale.

Johnny Leland climbed to his feet and walked around to look at the screen and whistled. Everything was blacked out except name, rank and number, and a couple of gallantry awards including the Military Cross. Griff widened his eyes.

Daniel Fox was
Returned to Unit
shortly before he left the army two years ago.

“Is this guy a spy or what?”

“Reasons of national security was the spiel I was given.”

“I’d say the British authorities aren’t being very cooperative.” Griff leaned back in the chair and pursed his lips. “What would make a career soldier like Fox quit while he was at his peak? Medical reasons? That doesn’t make sense because he’s a helicopter pilot and you need a thorough physical to get your license.” Unless it was a psychological problem he’d been smart enough to hide.

Daniel Fox was a trained killer. The question was whether or not Fox had killed Sylvie Watson.

Constable McCoy brought up an internet browser and typed in Daniel’s name along with SAS. She clicked the search button and Griff sat forward, narrowing his eyes at the screen.
Whoa
.

A front-page newspaper article came up with a picture of a heavily armed man carrying a kid over his shoulder and pointing a lethal-looking machinegun straight at the camera.
Murderer
was emblazoned in huge block letters.

“That
our
Daniel Fox, do you think?” Dried dust and blood caked the guy’s face.

They all leaned closer to the screen. Constable McCoy’s nose almost touched the monitor. “Yep.”

Griff exchanged a raised brow with Johnny. “You sound positive. How can you be so sure?”

McCoy gave a disbelieving huff of a laugh. “Are you kidding? Those eyes are imprinted on every woman in town.”

Johnny grinned. “You have a personal interest in this guy, McCoy?”

“No.” Fierce scarlet rushed up her neck and spread until her whole face glowed. “But I’m not blind, sir.”

Griff suppressed a smile. Finally, evidence she was as human as the rest of them.

The article lambasted Fox’s SAS team for the indiscriminate murder of civilians.

“I remember something about that now.” Johnny scrolled through the story. “They saved a hostage who turned around and said he wished they hadn’t bothered because of the number of hostile casualties inflicted.”

Griff winced. “That had to hurt.”

“Yeah, going into a terrorist hotspot to save some guy who turns out to be as grateful as dog shit.” Johnny stretched out his back and vertebrae clicked in quick succession. “And then he shot this cameraman because he thought the guy was carrying a grenade launcher. The cameraman was the reporter’s husband, and after the SAS rescued her, she annihilated the poor bastards in the press.”

“So Daniel Fox could be our man?” McCoy looked excited.

Griff shrugged one shoulder and pressed his lips together. “Could be, but it doesn’t feel right.”

“Why not?” McCoy watched him closely, eager to learn. It made him feel tired.

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