Troubled Waters (5 page)

“Look,” she pointed. “I was in the woods up there when
I heard shots fired. Abby Caldwell and Scott Frasier were the first people on the scene. They saw Trevor’s body in the water. I arrived seconds later, stood on that spot and looked right into this area of the lake. I saw Trevor’s body floating in the water facedown.”

“How can you be sure it was Trevor if he was floating facedown?”

“It
was
Trevor,” Tracie insisted. “He’s an unusually built guy. He was six-foot-five, really big with a distinctive body shape. Trust me, it was Trevor’s body I saw. Besides that, I took blood samples from the cliff side and inside the cave. The DNA evidence came back two weeks ago. The blood belonged to Trevor. The body looked like Trevor’s. You can’t tell me that wasn’t him.”

“I believe you,” Heath looked down into her eyes, and for the first time Tracie realized he had his arm around her again. Now she was glad for the support of his strong arm on her shoulder. “I believe that was Trevor who was shot, and whose body you saw. But his body was never recovered.”

A chill ran down her spine. Tracie fought back the fear she felt at Heath’s suggestion. “He had multiple bullet wounds. I saw them.” She had to make him understand. Trevor had to be dead. The man was evil. He’d tormented her. He’d killed one of his cohorts in cold blood. If he was alive…no, he had to be dead.

“I have a bullet wound,” Heath noted. “I’m not dead.”

At that reminder, Tracie pinched her eyes shut. To think that Heath could have died, just like Trevor.

“What was the nature of his wounds? Where were they located?”

“Upper torso.” She closed her eyes and pictured the image that she’d never been able to exorcise from her
memory. “Two wounds, maybe three. There was a lot of blood in the water.”

“How high on the torso?”

“Pretty high.”

“And Trevor was a big guy, right. Lots of extra bulk?”

Tracie understood what he was suggesting and pulled away from him, as though she could hide from the possibility of what his words implied. He held on to her fingertips and met her eyes.

“Is it possible the wounds could have missed major organs—that they could have been superficial muscle-tissue shots through the shoulder?”

“Yes.” Tracie admitted with a shaky breath. “But he was floating facedown.
Face
d
own
, do you get that? You don’t float facedown in Lake Superior for more than about two minutes and still live, bullet wounds or not.”

“Was he in the water that long?” Heath pressed. “Do you know for a fact he was floating facedown for more than two minutes?”

And then Tracie felt it. A cold terror like she’d never felt before. Her grandmother would have said someone had walked over her grave. And maybe there was something to that. She felt as though the lid had been closed on her casket, as though her fate had been sealed. If Trevor was alive, if he was out to kill her, she didn’t know how she could ever evade him. She wanted to vomit, but she slowly forced herself to look Heath in the eye. “No. I only had one look at him before we went back around the other end of the island to get the boat to retrieve his body. When we got back around to this side, he was gone.”

Heath rested a tentative hand on her back, his touch so welcome after all the time she’d spent feeling isolated by Trevor. She sniffled a few times, then gave in to the tears that poured down her cheeks. Trevor. Alive. Suddenly it
all made sense. He’d been the one shooting at them, he’d killed his own brother. He was after them, and Tracie knew Trevor well enough to know he wouldn’t stop until he’d killed her, too.

The job she’d started to dislike when Trevor had arrived now terrified her. What had begun as a challenging occupation now seemed impossible. How could she continue to do her job with Trevor on the loose? Her only hope was to somehow bring him to justice—but that task seemed insurmountable since they knew nothing of his whereabouts, their every lead had dried up and, if they got too close to him, he’d kill them.

They needed another lead to go on, and the sea caves were their most promising option. She tipped her head up and looked into Heath’s face. At his tender expression, she nearly started sobbing again out of gratitude that he was with her. But instead she blinked back her tears.

Heath cradled her face in one large hand and brushed away her tears with his thumb. “Ready to go on?”

“Yes.”

She followed him dumbly as he pulled close to the island and anchored the boat. But when he pulled out the diving wetsuits, she took a deep breath and fought to stifle the fear of diving she’d worked so hard to overcome during her Coast Guard training. She thought she’d put it behind her, but now with everything else, she felt its lingering effects all the more acutely. It occurred to her that she could tell Heath about her fears, but after all the time she’d already wasted by crying on his shoulder, she knew she oughtn’t bother him. It wasn’t his fault her father had died making a dive in Lake Superior.

H
eath pulled on his gear inside the cramped dressing closet of the utility boat, then stepped out and waited for Tracie to finish suiting up. The same question kept circling in his mind: Was Tracie involved with the diamond smugglers? And the same answer rose like a shout in his throat: No!

But did he truly believe that, or did he keep returning to that answer because it was what he wanted to believe? Getting close to Tracie hadn’t been difficult, once he’d broken through the barricade she’d put up to keep her fellow Coast Guardsmen out. But it had also proven not to be without risks. He liked Tracie, and already felt himself losing his ability to objectively evaluate her as a suspect. But he knew better than to let his feelings get in the way of the investigation.

He stepped out of the closet and saw her, suited up and ready to go, and he grinned, unable to fight back the smile that rose to his lips. Tracie Crandall was a beautiful woman. No wonder he had trouble keeping his heart from getting involved. He had already begun to hope sincerely that she hadn’t been involved with the diamond smugglers. Either way, he needed to find out who was.

“Ready,” she said, a look of challenge in her eyes.

“Great.” He grabbed his hood. “Let’s get going.”

They helped each other secure their equipment, then slid into the ice-cold water. Despite their well-insulated wetsuits, Heath felt a discernable chill run straight up from his toes as he slipped into the lake. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the reduced visibility below the swirling waters. He paddled backward to resist the surf that would have smashed him against the rocks if he let it.

Beside him, he saw Tracie gracefully flex and flow, finding a rhythm with the water, moving with it. While the wounds on his back protested, he struggled to imitate her movements, and felt a flicker of jealously at the sinuous strength in her lithe body. His brute musculature was an advantage on land, but under the force of the crashing waves where surface area was a handicap, Tracie clearly had the advantage, her slender form undulating like a frond of sea grass in the waves.

With powerful LED lights strapped to their dive hoods, they entered the sea cave. Heath looked down and was surprised to see the steep sides of the narrow passage descending infinitely below him. The bottom was beyond the reach of his light, and he wasn’t ready to go looking for it. In keeping with cave diving practices, he and Tracie followed a guide line connected to the boat. That way they wouldn’t become separated from one another in the darkness, or lose their way due to the disorienting influence of the pitch-black cave.

They’d discussed their strategy prior to making the dive, and now, as planned, Heath followed Tracie into the cave. She’d been inside before, albeit above water, and therefore had the greatest knowledge of the layout of the space. As the light penetrating the water grew dim, Tracie paused and gestured to the walls around them. Heath looked up and saw the opening to the movable stone door that had
long disguised the interior cave, which for centuries had provided pirates and smugglers the perfect hideout right under the noses of the authorities, all but directly below the lighthouse that marked Wisconsin’s northernmost point. The secret sea cave had harbored many criminals over the years behind a stone facade that opened and closed much like a garage door.

The mechanism that opened the door, though intriguing, was unlikely to yield any clues to their case, so Heath secured their guide line to mark their place, and then he and Tracie swam on toward the darkness. As all light dissipated around them, Heath instinctively pulled closer to Tracie. They proceeded forward, unreeling their guide line as they went, until they came to the rough cave walls at the far end of the enclosure. Here Heath paused, inspecting the walls closely, hoping to find some clue as to what kind of vessels had been in and out of this space recently.

Tracie bobbed along silently beside him while he scrutinized the cave walls. The variation on the color of the brownstone lent a natural camouflage to the rock walls, making it that much more difficult for Heath to detect any artificial markings. The space stretched wider than a city block, so finding anything would be like discovering the proverbial needle in a haystack. They needed to go over everything methodically; flitting from one spot to another would likely cause them to miss something.

After several minutes of searching, Tracie tugged on his sleeve and pointed downward. He looked down, noting the infinite depth of the cave. She wanted to take a look.

Heath shook his head and pointed to his wrist, trying to communicate to her that they needed to be careful of how much time they spent underwater. Though the bottom of the cave might yield some sort of clue, he wasn’t ready yet to abandon his examination of the cave walls.

With a resigned look, Tracie returned her attention to examining the walls with him. Heath felt relieved. If he was honest with himself, he didn’t feel completely comfortable with Tracie diving very deep in the cave. Not only did gas consumption increase with depth, but the effects of nitrogen narcosis were known to be amplified by a dive within a cave as opposed to open-water diving. Since he didn’t know what kind of training Tracie had actually had, he didn’t dare let her go down too deep. She could easily panic, especially if she didn’t recognize the symptoms of dizziness, disorientation and exhaustion for what they were.

Heath kept close to Tracie while he searched the cave wall. They slowly made their way toward the left side of the cave, which extended under the platform the smugglers had used as a pier. Buttressed supports arched from the walls of the cave instead of straight up from the bottom. The unusual structure didn’t bode well for the depth of the cave. He’d have expected the supports to lie directly beneath the platform unless the distance to the bottom was simply too great.

Next to him, he noticed Tracie inspecting a greenish-gray streak on the rock wall. He swam closer and looked over her shoulder at the stripe. The smudge was clearly not part of the natural color variation of the wall. No, deep under the pier though they were, something had scraped against the rock hard enough to leave behind residual paint.

Heath pulled his sample collection kit from the pack at his belt. Carefully, he scraped at the hard rock. Removing a sample was tricky; getting it into the bag before it floated away, even trickier. He focused all his attention on the task.

It wasn’t until he’d safely zipped the sample away that he
realized Tracie was missing. A quick look around the cave revealed a distant light shimmering in the depths below. Throwing all caution away, he raced downward, his only thought for her safety.

He lost track of the distance as he sped down toward her. As he brought his light into close enough range to illuminate her, he saw that she was frantically pulling up at something on the floor of the cave. For a fleeting moment, Heath wondered if she’d found the drain to the bottom of the lake, and he feared that if she pulled it out, the water would all drain away, taking them with it.

Then he quickly realized the absurdity of his thought, and recognized it for what it was: a symptom of nitrogen narcosis. And if he was feeling it, Tracie was surely already under its influence. He had to get her to the surface—if he could find the surface. With crushing fear, he realized he’d left the guide line somewhere far above them. Already in the darkness he was having trouble distinguishing top from bottom.

Heath grabbed Tracie’s arm and tried to pull her away from whatever it was she was tugging at. She pushed at him, and the frenzied look in her eyes confirmed his suspicions. He had to get her to the surface in a hurry, before the intoxicating effects of her condition caused her to do something deadly. He’d been warned in his own training about disoriented divers pulling out their own air lines, or becoming so panicked they refused to leave the bottom until their air supply ran out.

Wrapping his arms around her torso, he tried to pull her away from the heavy object that held her down. She wouldn’t let go of her burden. He attempted to pry her fingers away, but when she began to fight him in earnest, he realized she wasn’t leaving without it.

No, the only way to get her to leave the floor of the sea cave would be to pull them both to the surface.

Fortunately, the weight of Tracie’s find made it clear which direction was down. Heath had only to resist the gravitational pull on their load to determine which way was up. The cumbersome object, about the size of a manhole cover, but thicker and tapered to a coned point, made their journey a slow one. Tracie struggled to wriggle away from him, kicking him several times.

The extra effort not only placed on additional burden on his air supply, but the extra carbon dioxide he exhaled threw off his oxygen exchange. Heath began to feel light-headed, and strained upward to see, but no matter where he looked, there was only darkness.

He pulled against the weight and fought against the disorienting effects brought on by the lack of oxygen he was experiencing. Much as he wanted to pull them upward, he had trouble remembering which way that was. Then Heath felt a heavy blow against the wound on his arm as Tracie fought against him, and the staggering pain that ripped through him shot clarity into his mind.

He tightened his hold on Tracie and the conical chunk of metal she’d found, and propelled them upward, kicking hard with his legs. He couldn’t recall where they were headed, and all but forgot what they were fighting until his head broke through the surface of the water. Tearing back his face mask, he gulped the pure, frigid air of the sea cave. Then he pulled back Tracie’s mask, the beams of their lights gyrating against the ceiling until he got one twisted around so he could see Tracie’s face.

Tracie’s pupils contracted against the light and he watched as the frantic expression faded from her face. Together they swam below the dock to the lip of the pier, and lifted the massive steel cone through a foot or so of
empty air. It grated metal against metal as they sat it on the painted steel grate of the dock.

Then Heath hoisted himself upward, and reached down to pull Tracie’s slight frame up from the water. She struggled onto the platform beside him and slumped down, panting heavily. Heath’s mind spun as he recalled the terror he’d felt in the dark depths, and he realized he’d nearly lost it under there. He felt a foreign sense gratitude welling up as he considered how close they had come to dying in the sea cave.

As Tracie’s clarity of mind returned through a fog of confusion, she trembled from the cold and the terror of what she’d just experienced.

“Are you okay?” she asked finally, when she’d caught her breath enough to clear her thoughts.

“I think so. My arm is killing me, though. I think you might have opened up my injury.”

“Your arm?” she gasped, realizing with horror that she’d fought against him underwater, though the details were blurry. She remembered how afraid she’d been that he’d bleed to death when he’d been shot. If the wound bled too profusely out here, she’d have to administer first aid and get him to help in a hurry.

“You bumped it with that—” he pointed to the massive hunk of metal she’d pulled up from the bottom
“—thing.”

“Evidence,” she informed him, then winced at the thought of how her discovery might have re-injured the wound on his arm. “Let’s get back to the boat so I can take a look at your arm.”

Carrying their flippers and the unknown object they’d pulled from the bottom, Heath and Tracie clumsily walked along the length of the platform to the exit of the cave.
When the ledge outside the cave ended, they had no choice but to go back in the water to swim to where they’d anchored the boat. After lugging the evidence on board, Heath got the engine and heat going, and then peeled off the top of his wetsuit so Tracie could look at his arm.

As she’d have guessed, the angry wound was weeping red. She pulled out first aid equipment and settled in to try to make up for the damage she’d caused. While she worked, the heater began to spew out warm air, and she soon felt her chattering teeth still enough to permit conversation.

“I’m sorry about what happened back there,” she apologized as she pressed gauze to the antiseptic she’d daubed on his arm. “I don’t know what came over me. I’m not usually like that. I wouldn’t ever intentionally strike you.”

“That’s all right. It wasn’t you.”

She looked at him quizzically.

“Nitrogen narcosis,” he offered.

Tracie thought she’d heard the term somewhere, but couldn’t place it. “What’s that?”

Closing his eyes, Heath sighed, his expression patient. “The levels of nitrogen in our air supplies weren’t intended for that deep of a dive. As the depth increases, so does their concentration. They become like a narcotic. Underwater intoxication.” He turned to face her and opened his eyes. “You lose your mental control, become someone else.” His face held a distant look. “It’s often fatal.”

The gravity of their near-miss settled on her with a crushing weight. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

“It’s worse when you’re diving in a cave than in open water. If I’d had any idea the cave would be that deep, I would have warned you.”

“You had no way of knowing. I was shocked, and I’d been inside the cave before but not underwater. It just
seemed to go down forever.” Tracie finished taping the fresh bandage on his arm and closed her eyes, remembering. She’d certainly been out of it. Her thoughts had been so confused. While initially her dive had been driven by curiosity about what lay below, she’d quickly seen the flash of her light against the hunk of metal, and she’d sped down to retrieve it. Her memory muddled after that point, and she wasn’t even sure what she’d been thinking when Heath reached her. She shivered.

“You should change out of that wetsuit. You’ll be warmer,” Heath offered.

“Good idea.” Tracie hurried into the changing closet, then stepped out and took the wheel while Heath changed. The weather was unseasonably clear, and they were able to make good time through the maze of islands that separated them from the Coast Guard station in Bayfield.