“You’re welcome.” Thor stepped out into the hallway again, checked to make sure her door was locked. He lowered his voice so as not to be overheard. “Patty didn’t die of natural causes. She was poisoned. Methanol. Her death was ruled a homicide.”
“Holy shit.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“The US marshal stationed at McMurdo wants to deputize us and have us spearhead an investigation here, to be her eyes and ears.”
Jones stared at him. “Tower will never go for that. We’re not Sherlock Holmes.”
“How much does she believe we can do in just a few days?” Segal asked.
“I don’t know, but Hardin wants our help, too. I’ll check in with Tower tomorrow first thing and bring him up to date. In the meantime, nothing about our mission has changed. We keep the package and Dr. Park safe.”
* * *
Samantha staredup at her ceiling, waiting for the Xanax to kick in and grateful for the men who stood on the other side of her door. Like everyone else, she hadn’t wanted the Cobra guys to come. She had worried that their presence would be disruptive to life on station. Now, she was glad they were here.
She couldn’t imagine how this felt to Thor and his men. They’d come down here to do one job, and were now being asked to do another. Even so, Thor had stayed cool through all of it—getting the news, helping Samantha when she’d almost passed out, setting her up with a security camera, getting Kristi to check on her.
They only take men who can keep their heads in a crisis.
Well, Samantha believed that.
But Thor wasn’t some detached, ice-cold automaton. When she’d kissed him, his reaction had been immediate and red-hot. It had been the best, sexiest kiss of her life. He barely knew her, and still, he’d been so kind to her, helping her pack Patty’s things, putting up the fairy lights, making her a priority when he surely had more important things to do.
I know you’re hurting.
She wouldn’t have expected compassion like that from a military man. Then again, what did she know about military men? Apparently, nothing.
Oh, Patty, who did this to you?
Samantha ran through the staff, one by one, but that was too much like counting sheep, her thoughts unraveling as the Xanax finally kicked in.
* * *
Thor didn’t sleep well,his dreams shifting restlessly from Patty’s murder to kissing Samantha. He woke at five with a hard-on and dragged his ass out of bed for a conference with Javier Corbray, Tower, and Elizabeth Shields, Cobra’s top intel analyst. He’d already spoken with Tower last night, bringing him up to date before going to bed.
Shields’ strawberry-blond hair somehow looked immaculate even though it was midnight in Denver. “Did you get any sleep?”
Thor could function pretty well on four or five hours. “Enough.”
Tower looked as clean-shaven and pressed as ever. “That’s why we have coffee. Corbray, are you there?”
Javier Corbray, a former Navy SEAL, was the company’s other owner.
His face appeared on the screen. “I spoke with the DUSM at McMurdo—Reyna. Normally, we wouldn’t take on something like this. We supply security. We don’t do investigations. But she’s right when she says there is no one else. Apparently, Hardin offered to take it on, but she’s not confident in his abilities as a site manager to handle something like this, especially not when he has friendships with people on station.”
That made sense. “So, now we’re deputy US Marshals?”
Corbray nodded. “You’ll be staying until the situation is resolved.”
Thor had thought long and hard about how to get started on an investigation last night. “We don’t have access to DNA tests or fingerprinting or any other forensic tools. There’s no surveillance, so we’ve got no video evidence. We’ll be asking people questions and relying on them to tell the truth. I seriously doubt that the person who poisoned Dr. Holcomb is going to confess.”
Shields took over. “It’s more complicated than you know. I’ve been on the phone with the medical examiner who did Dr. Holcomb’s autopsy. I wanted to get the file for you because those details could be important. According to the medical examiner, the time it would take someone to die of acute methanol poisoning falls into a range that overlaps with the time of the satellite hack.”
Thor stared at the image of Shields on his screen. “Then it’s likely that whoever hacked the satellite is here and that this person is also the killer.”
Shields stifled a yawn. “We know the hack came from south of the Antarctic Circle, and we know that Dr. Holcomb died the next morning from a poison that had to have been in her system for a while. It could be a coincidence, but I don’t think so.”