Polar Bear Dawn Read online

  Fuentes’s main credential: he got things done. He was the handler and driver for the two technicians from Clearwater, Kevin Buckner and Alicia Sylvester, two doe-eyed environmental activists that Fuentes hated the moment he met them.

  They had clashed immediately and hardly spoke to one another except to accomplish their mission. Kevin and Alicia had signed on to destabilize the oil sands. They had been given the technology to do it, and that was what they cared about. Fuentes had signed on for the money, only for the money. He hated the cold he was subjected to in northern Canada.

  When Fuentes’s cell phone rang, he had to take it out of his inner parka jacket. He had found out over the past two months that any cell phone left in an outer pocket would freeze. He hated Canada. He swore at it all the time. “Fucking frio, fucking cold Canada,” was his favorite expression.

  “Yes,” he answered, irritated that his hands were out of his gloves to take the call. “What is it?” His breath rose in clouds of steam in the extreme cold.

  Parsons was to the point. “Fuentes, there’s been a major cluster fuckup in Alaska. You have to eliminate and dispose of our two technicians.”

  Fuentes’s dark features broke into a smile for the first time in two months. “This would be my, greatest pleasure.” He smiled into the phone. “We are at the perfect place to get this done. I will call you back when my job is finished. Thank you, muchas gracias.”

  Fuentes looked over at Alicia and Kevin. They had wandered off to a tar pond. The last device had been installed, and they wanted to take one last look at the devastation of the landscape caused by the oil sands operations.

  Fuentes trudged through the deep snow and came up behind them. They were looking at some wolf tracks by the pond and commenting on how man was destroying the wildlife.

  Kevin was very tall and slim. At six foot seven, he towered over the five foot eight Fuentes, but size never mattered to Fuentes’s knife. He pulled out his large-blade hunting knife, and in one swift motion, he grabbed the back of Kevin’s parka hood, pulled him back towards him, and plunged the knife into Kevin’s throat.

  Kevin’s blood shot out in a hot stream into the frigid air. Steam rose from the snow where it dropped. Alicia screamed his name and knelt by his body.

  Fuentes stood over Alicia. He waited for her, to see her next actions. She rose up. She was very small, a petite young lady who was now in the shadow of her killer.

  Her eyes flashed defiance, and “asshole” was all she said before he cut her throat.

  He carefully pulled out his cell phone and called Parsons. “It is finished.”

  “Where are they?” asked Parsons.

  “A tailings pond, with lovely wolf tracks all around. I don’t think too many workers come here.”

  “Excellent, get back here to Fort Mac and we can finish our operations.”

  “Mucho fantastico. I cannot wait to leave your wonderful country.”

  “You are a lying little Spanish prick.”

  “You wound me when you call me a little prick. Please use the term ‘El Grande’ when you call me a prick,” Fuentes protested.

  Parsons finished his call with Fuentes and then placed a call to Cordele in Alaska.

  When Cordele answered, he simply said, “It’s cleaned up.”

  “Fine, good job.”

  Just off of downtown Fort McMurray, and about a two-hour drive from many of the oil sands mining operations, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Detective Bernadette Callahan was sitting in her Jeep. The engine was running, her two-way radio was on, and she was scanning her cell phone for recent YouTube videos.

  Bernadette was bored. She had been parked outside the house with yellow police tape since 9:00 a.m., and it was now past 11:00 a.m. She was waiting for the coroner and the crime scene investigator to show up, and both were late, as they had been detained by another crime scene on the other side of town.

  She was at the scene of a double homicide—a shotgun blast with some knife stabbing thrown in. A party gone wrong with some drug dealers, and no one had heard a thing through the loud music. When dawn’s first light came, the ravens started to circle the house.

  Ravens will always lead you to fresh meat, she thought. Bernadette had been raised on a Dene reservation in northern Alberta, the daughter of a Native mother and an Irish Catholic father who had wandered off. Bernadette had always walked a line between her native and Irish roots.

  Bernadette had joined the RCMP at the age of twenty-two, when politicians were clamoring to bring about an equalization of minorities and gender in the force. Bernadette had made it on both counts and had to work harder than anyone else to get respect.

  She had worked her way from one detachment to the next, always staying below the radar but proving skilled enough at solving crimes to become indispensable. It also helped that she took no crap from the male RCMP officers. Her last tangle with a senior officer had left him with bruised balls. She had proven hers were bigger, and she was shipped off to the detective squad—probably because they wanted to get rid of her, but she didn’t care.

  Bernadette was thirty-five, with medium-length reddish brown hair, light brown skin, and green eyes. She was of average height with a muscular frame that showed off her dedication to the gym. She needed to be able to defend herself, against bad guys, but mostly, she needed to keep her weight down. She loved doughnuts and junk food.

  She balanced a double cream, double sugar large Tim Horton’s coffee on her knee. A maple-glazed doughnut was standing by. She would hate herself for this later, but this was now.

  As Bernadette scrolled down the YouTube site, she came across the video of the polar bear making a meal of a man. The description below stated: “Polar bear in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, eating an oil worker.” Thousands of hits cheered on the polar bear.

  Bernadette shifted in her seat, took a swig of her coffee, and sighed. What is the world coming to? she thought. She had no idea how much this particular incident would involve her in the very near future.

  5

  Troy Had Spent The Last two hours securing the crime scene around the dead bodies. The security team and camp authorities realized that at minus forty-five degrees with a wind chill, and an active polar bear, securing the dead body in place outside the camp would be impossible. They placed the body of Marc Lafontaine on a stretcher and found a place for him in the medical room.

  Troy was glad they decided to move the body, as he imagined the warm body freezing to the ground and someone with a blow torch having to extract him later. The thought of the arms and legs frozen into their wild contortions was not appealing either. Troy had had to remove frozen bodies in the Arctic on several occasions after accidents—never a memorable time.

  He walked back to the security guard office located at the main entrance of the camp. Braddock was in his office, going over reports. The chief had been in meetings with the Arctic Oil Company, the base manager (the one who ran the show), the operations manager, and the safety manager and had placed the camp on lockdown: no one could leave, no one who wasn’t already a resident of the camp could come in.

  A security guard had been placed at the front door, and oil workers milled around the main entrance, the ones who were supposed to fly home that day. Their shift of two weeks on with twelve-hour days and no breaks was over—they wanted to go home, murder or no murder.

  “So how bad is it?” Troy asked as he slumped down in one of the two chairs in front of Braddock’s desk.

  Braddock lifted his head, finally noticing Troy. “Well, I don’t remember having my ass chewed out this bad since I was a young beat cop in Detroit.” He smiled at Troy as he spoke. Not too much fazed Braddock. He was mid-fifties and had retired from the Detroit police force when the economy had cut the police budget. Guys like him, too young and too broke to retire, had gone looking for work. Braddock had found Arctic Oil Company in Alaska: great pay, long hours, and lots of paperwork.

  Troy shifted in his chair and sipped the coffee he’d broug
ht in. “What’s the story with the Arctic Oil brass? They think Marc killed his sister then ran headfirst out the exit door to get eaten by a bear?”

  Braddock laughed and ran his hand through his hair. “Actually you’re not far wrong. They want to call this a murder-suicide and are damned if they’ll let it be known we have an unknown killer in the camp.”

  “Yep, the shit doesn’t change, it just gets deeper,” Troy said. “So, what do the closed circuit television tapes show?”

  “Well, we had another fuckup.” Braddock dropped his hands to his desk. “We’ve got blank tape for about one hour last night.”

  “Not possible,” Troy said. “Our CCTV has double backups. The only way that could’ve happened is if someone flipped a switch right here in the control room.”

  “Yeah, I know that. Cummings and Stewart were on last night. Both deny any knowledge of the CCTV not working, and Cummings was at the console most of the evening. He said he didn’t see anything.”

  “And of course the CCTV wasn’t recording, even if he didn’t see anything. Interesting . . Troy looked out of Braddock’s office window. Cummings was at the console again, making busy. Troy had never liked Jason Cummings, a twenty-something-year-old from Southern California. His dad, an ex-cop, had pulled some strings in Anchorage to get him into Arctic Oil. Somehow the young man had managed to cling to his job, in spite of his many screw-ups. Everyone knew he had some pull with the Anchorage head office—no one liked that.

  Troy stood, stretched, and finished the last of his coffee. “Look, you know I don’t think much of Cummings. I think we get him in a room and sweat him a little, see if he pops. Meanwhile, I’ll get the personnel files of our deceased for the police when they get here.”

  “Oh yeah, I need you to pick up a Detective Mueller and a CSI Franklin on this morning’s flight. You’ll be their escort while they’re here,” Braddock said.

  Troy stopped in his tracks. “Detective Mueller? Really? Man, we go way back.”

  “You two have some history?”

  “Yeah.” Troy smiled. “He busted my ass big time when I was a punk on the streets of Anchorage.”

  “Well, he’s all yours.”

  “Thanks, Chief.” Troy threw a fake salute and walked out of Braddock’s office, staring at Cummings as he left. He thought Cummings cringed as he walked by, but he couldn’t be sure.

  The personnel offices were in the administration area at the center of the camp. As Troy walked by the base camp manager’s office, he could hear a heated discussion going on as to the reports the base manager would make. The media would be calling—the camp would need to have a statement. Houston would be calling—the dreaded head- office boys—the camp would need to have answers.

  Troy carried on down the hall to personnel and found Della Charles. Della knew about everything and everybody in the camp. They said if a mouse farted in a hay stack in Oklahoma, Della would know about it in her hometown of Baton Rouge.

  He knocked on her door and walked in. “Hey, Della, what’s up sweetheart? You’re looking fine as ever.”

  “Oh Troy, you talk such shit,” Della purred. Her voice a pure southern drawl, the word shit sounded like it had a least 5 i’s in it. She wouldn’t take any such talk from anyone but Troy. She always held out hope that he would drop by her room one night. He never had, but she hadn’t given up hope.

  “I betcha want files on the latest deceased—poor things.” She reached over to the copies she had on her desk. Della was a big girl. She was a former Louisiana beauty queen, formerly petite, but that was behind her now. So was her girth. She had allowed herself to grow: no pageants, no runways, so she now allowed herself the luxury of food. Her new size could not hide her beauty—green eyes, fair, flawless skin and cascading blonde hair. She was any man’s dream in a size twenty- four.

  “Sure do, Della. You’re always way ahead of me.” Troy took a seat in front of her desk and leaned forward.

  Della handed him the files with a flicker of lust in her eyes that he found hard to avoid. He took the files, opened them, and began scanning the pages. “Not much here,” he finally said, looking up at Della.

  “Well, that’s all I got from Arctic Oil Contract Central. They negotiate the contracts and send in the contractors once they’re cleared,” Della said, pained that she’d been unable to help Troy.

  Troy noted that the two deceased siblings were Canadians who had traveled to and from Arctic Oil Camp together, and they always flew home to Vancouver, Canada, on their shift change. The files always included flight information.

  “Della,” Troy said, looking softly into her eyes, “I need to get copies of the files of all the personnel who flew in here at the same time as the deceased. Could you get me that?” He threw in one of his best smiles with the eyes.

  “Oh, Troy, only because it’s you, honey.” Della went back to her computer. Her silver wrist bangles clattered on the keyboard. “This search may take a while. How about I drop it by your sleeping quarters later . . .?” She dropped the last words like a sugar lump, sweet and large.

  Troy smiled. “Sorry darling, I’ll be with Anchorage PD and crime scene people all day. My office will be fine.” He winked at her and headed out the door. He couldn’t help feeling that her eyes were attached to his ass like a laser. Probably because they were.

  Troy headed back to the security office. The time was 0915 hours, and the Shared Services flight, carrying the detective and crime scene investigator, was to arrive at 1025 hours. He needed to get moving. The wind would be blowing snow on the roads, making the trip to the airport slow.

  Troy walked past the oil workers hanging out in the cafeteria—they had nowhere to go. Instead, they drank coffee and speculated about the deaths. Troy knew that somewhere in the camp was a killer—probably looking back at him.

  Cordele received troubling information from his contact at Arctic Oil Camp. The Anchorage police were on their way to the camp, and his contact needed to be extracted as soon as possible. The situation up there was messy. His man had bribed a security guard to cut the CCTV feed while he committed the murders. The guard needed to be taken care of. More mess, Cordele thought.

  The worst part was that his man at Arctic Oil camp thought he was being shadowed. He sensed it, and if he did, he was probably right. His man was an ex-spook himself, deep cover from military intelligence.

  Cordele wondered who else would be up there. Had McAllen or those crazy bastards from Ironstone Investments hired someone to watch over the mission? He sent the information in a secure text to his boss in Seattle.

  The weather in Anchorage was brutally cold at minus twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, but he needed to get out. He looked out his Hotel window. Ice fog billowed from the cars exhaust in the street below. The hotel window was latticed with fingers of ice. He would go for a walk downtown, find a restaurant with some good food and wine, and wait for his boss’s reply.

  6

  If Randall Francis felt remorse over the killings of the four technicians from Clearwater Technologies, he didn’t show it to his boss. His boss, Duncan Stewart, was sitting across from him in their New York office just off Wall Street.

  Their company was called Ironstone Investments, and it was a front for stock manipulations that twelve stock traders at multiple computers in a glass wall behind them worked at daily, as they went about their business of fraud in the markets. New Yorkers always thought they should be wary of crime in the streets. The crimes in these offices were much greater and did more harm than pickpockets and muggers.

  Both Randall and Duncan were listening intently to the caller on speaker as he filled them in on the deaths in Alaska and Fort McMurray.

  Duncan threw several menacing looks at Randall throughout the briefing. Duncan was a little man in his late thirties, balding, with a thick red beard and a big voice. He thought of himself as a reincarnation of a pirate and enjoyed the pillaging of markets as they manipulated oil and other commodities by either blackmail or brib
ery. A riot at a gold mine or an oil tanker running aground in a shipping lane while his traders made millions made him believe he was a maker of his own destiny.

  The latest venture, to control oil prices with sabotage in the Alaska and Fort McMurray oil sands, was looking bad. Randall had brought him this “absolute fucking genius idea,” and it was looking more and more to be of the fucked-up variety.

  Randall only squirmed slightly as he felt Duncan’s gaze. Randall was slightly smaller than Duncan, mid-thirties, and had a flat, featureless face that would make him a ghost in a crowd. His voice was one octave below falsetto, and it rose above that when he spoke too fast. He dressed well in expensive dark suits to make up for his pasty complexion.

  The speaker on the phone, a male, assured voice, was giving them the final rundown on the venture. The devices that would affect the flow of oil were in place, and their people, the ones the speaker had hired, were now in control. The technicians from Clearwater, who had been hired against the voice’s advice, were now dead.

  “There is one more item we need to discuss,” the voice on the speaker said.

  “What is that?” Duncan asked. He hated the voice. His face turned beet red, as it often did when he got angry, and he threw another nasty look at Randall. Randall had brought in this voice, the black ops guy, whoever he was, to run this venture, and now it was coming to haunt him.

  “Professor McAllen will have to be eliminated in the next twenty- four hours, as we just eliminated his people, and we are sure there will be recriminations for you. We suggest it be done at once.”

  Duncan switched the speaker phone to mute and stared across the desk at Randall. “And there you have it you fucking idiot. We’ve got to kill someone else to get this done. In the five years I’ve run this operation, I’ve never had to kill anyone to make my profits . . . and now this.”

  Randall looked across the table. His hands were dripping with sweat; he dared not brush his brow, as he was sure a cascade of sweat would flow. He needed to show calm in the face of Duncan’s wrath, or he would be lost. “Look, for big profits, there are sometimes some great sacrifices, and unfortunately, these four were expendable. And as our contractor just said, the couple in Alaska were about to go to Arctic Oil for more money. So, fair turnaround, don’t you think?” Randall managed a weak smile with his last remark, hoping to ease the tension.