Troubled Waters (13 page)

Tracie peeked up at him again, the corners of her eyes curling into the slightest of smiles. “I chained him to his bed, too. Just like he chained Gunnar to the table.” Her expression sobered. “But then I didn’t know how I was going to get out of there. There were so many armed men, I didn’t know how I could possibly fight them alone.”

Heath smoothed her hair back from her face. “It doesn’t matter now. You’re out. It’s behind you.” He looked up from her face just in time to see a faint beam of light blinking
distantly off to their right through the thinning fog. He cut the boat’s throttle.

Tracie sat straight up. “What is it?”

“Lighthouse,” he said, pointing to the beacon as it slashed toward them through the night sky.

“I know where we are,” Tracie said, blinking as the beam cut past them again. “That’s the beam from Devil’s Island. It’s visible for fifteen miles in clear weather. We probably aren’t that far away if we can see it through this fog.”

Oddly enough, rather than hope, Heath felt a twinge of disappointment at the discovery. They were nearly home. Once their journey was over, he’d no longer have any excuse for spending time with Tracie. She’d said she couldn’t trust him again. He couldn’t blame her after his betrayal, though he wanted more than anything to continue his relationship with her. “Can you navigate back to Bayfield from here?”

She made a face. “Not in this fog. The islands are tricky enough when you can see them coming. Besides, the shallow waters and sheltered coves fill with ice earlier than the open lake. Who knows what we might run into?”

Heath pinched back a smile and unlocked the steering wheel. “What do you say we camp out at Devil’s Island until the fog lifts?”

“Great idea. Maybe we can get in out of the cold.” She slumped down into the seat beside him as he pointed the boat in the direction of the blinking beam.

“No problem,” Heath said, putting the idling boat back in gear. The idea of spending a little more time with Tracie appealed to him strongly, but something uneasy roiled in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t like Devil’s Island, especially not the sea cave. But Tracie had been frightened
enough lately, so he didn’t mention his fears to her as he steered the boat into the darkness.

Tracie didn’t want to say anything to Heath, but she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the thought of going back inside the cave at Devil’s Island. She’d had only negative experiences there, but more than that, she felt a distinct uneasiness at the idea, a deeper chill than the cold of the winter air that pressed against them. But she shook off her worries, telling herself her fear stemmed from too much stress and lack of sleep. Surely the worst was behind her.

As he lined up the boat to enter the pitch-black darkness of the sea cave, Heath turned on the boat’s bright headlights, which immediately illuminated the brownstone back wall of the outer cave.

“That’s odd,” Tracie reacted. “The hidden wall was open when we were out here on Tuesday. You didn’t close it when we left, did you?”

“No. You were with me the whole time. We left it wide open.” He idled the boat to a stop just inside the smaller outer cave. It bobbled slightly in the icy waves, nosing against the false back wall.

“I thought so, but I was so disoriented that day.” She shook her head. “So someone has been out here. But who would be crazy enough to come out to Devil’s Island in this weather?”

Heath looked at her solemnly. “Only someone who’s really desperate, I’d guess.” He stood and moved toward the side of the boat.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m going to open it. According to the report you insisted I read, the latch mechanism is over here somewhere, right?”

Tracie shuffled closer to him, careful to keep her blanket
securely wrapped around her, protecting her from the cold. “Are you sure we want to do that?”

“It’s less than thirty degrees out here,” Heath noted, gesturing to the crystalline shards of ice forming on the water all around them. “But I’m willing to guess it’s closer to forty or fifty degrees in there. That’s still cold, but it’s a lot warmer than out here.” As he spoke, he stepped closer to her and placed one hand on her arm.

She shook off his hand. Though his words made sense, her sense of foreboding grew. “Heath, please, we don’t know who closed the cave door, or why.”

“Well, who could it have been? Probably someone from the Coast Guard, don’t you think?”

“If they did, wouldn’t we have heard about it? Nobody had any reason to come out here.” The only ones who knew about the cave were the members of the Coast Guard who’d been involved with the search for Marilyn Adams, and the smugglers themselves. Due to the ongoing investigation, the fact of the cave’s existence hadn’t been released to the general public. She bit her lip thoughtfully.

“Who else knows this cave is out here?” Heath asked. “The smugglers? Trevor should be in custody by now.”

Tracie shook her head. “Trevor told me he was going to introduce me to my father’s killer tonight, but he never got around to doing so. Unless your FBI guys got him, too, then my father’s killer is still at large.” Her words were cut off by a ratcheting boom as the secret door began to rise. Tracie blinked at Heath. “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t do it,” Heath began.

Tracie’s eyes widened as the open expanse of cave was revealed by the rising wall. The boat’s headlights pierced the darkness, reflecting back off the brownstone interior. Combined with the glow of the overhead lights inside
the cave, it was enough for Tracie to see clearly the dark, hulking form that lurked in the water.

A submarine floated inside the cave, its rounded hull a dark greenish-brown, its conning tower rising above them, with a jagged mast that scratched the ceiling of the cave. The cave door settled open with a decided groan, followed by near silence and the gentle lapping of the waves.

“Then who—” she started to ask quietly.

“I did.” A voice echoed up from the long pier that ran half the length of the cave.

They both turned, and Heath’s body sagged as he let out a relieved-sounding breath. “Goodman! You captured the
Requiem?
”

“Of course.” The voice echoed through the emptiness as a man stepped toward them. “You didn’t think I’d let you take all the credit for breaking up the smuggling ring, did you?”

Heath hurried to the side of the boat, tugging Tracie after him. “It’s okay. It’s my boss from the FBI,” he explained. Tracie quickly slipped her aching feet into the diamond-covered high heels before disembarking.

“So.” The man spoke again as they hurried across the cold walkway toward him. “I didn’t see you in my office this morning as planned,” he said, staring Heath down. But then his scowl was replaced with a toothy grin and he chuckled. “Seems I’m not the only one who likes to do things his own way. Now, would you like to see inside? She’s a beauty.”

Tracie hesitated. Her father had died on that submarine. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go anywhere near it.

Heath’s boss must have sensed her hesitation. “It’s a lot warmer inside the sub than out here,” he noted with a wink.

Though he made an excellent point, Tracie’s heart still
beat hard as she approached the submarine. Heath supported her as she stepped unsteadily onto the hull in her stiletto heels, and then down into the hatch. When she stepped off the ladder at the bottom, she turned and found herself in the brightly-lit control room. She blinked a few times against the suddenness of the light and shuffled out of the way as Heath stepped down beside her.

She was surprised to see three other large men besides the man who’d greeted them. He came down last, pulling the hatch closed tight behind him.

“Ready for the nickel tour?” The man nodded to them and led them through a brief passage to a cramped room with curtained bunks on one side. “Here we have the crew’s quarters,” he announced, nodding to one of the men who’d entered the narrow room behind them, who then closed the door.

The creeping feeling along the back of Tracie’s neck became too much for her to ignore. It wasn’t claustrophobia, although the coffin-like bunks along the wall didn’t offer the room much in the way of breathing space. No, something wasn’t right. Heath was the only man on the sub whom she knew, and even he had recently betrayed her.

As the shifting bodies in the tight space sent her shuffling closer than she’d have liked to Heath’s boss from the FBI, she pasted on a smile and said, “I’m sorry. I don’t believe we’ve been introduced. I’m Tracie Crandall.”

“Pleased to meet you, Tracie.” He extended his hand. “My name is Jonas Goodman.”

“Jonas Goodman,” she repeated, the name registering as too familiar to be merely a coincidence, as the man’s other hand snapped forward and he clicked a cuff around her wrist. “You mean Jonas Vaughn, a.k.a. Jonas Blaine,” Tracie corrected him. She tried to pull her arm away, but the cuff was already closed tightly around her slender
wrist, and just as fast, Jonas jerked her arm toward a pipe that ran the length of the ceiling, clamping the other side of the handcuffs tight to the pipe.

“That’s right,” Jonas said, clearly unaffected by hearing his aliases revealed. Before she could recover from her shock, he pulled her other wrist up and cuffed it to the pipe as well.

Tracie glanced to Heath, half expecting to find he was in on Jonas Goodman-Vaughn-Blaine’s plot. Instead, she saw Heath’s bloodied head lolling from side to side as the two big guys who’d come in behind her cuffed his unconscious body to another pipe.

She whipped her head back toward Goodman, who’d retreated along with his men to the doorway behind them. “You killed my father!” she shouted after him as the other thugs headed down the passageway.

“I did,” Jonas smiled, “and if you don’t give me the answers I want, I’m going to kill you, too.” He looked back over his shoulder in the direction the other men had retreated, then chuckled. “I’ll be right back.” He didn’t even bother to shut the door behind him.

Heath fought back against the heavy darkness that shrouded his eyes. Through a throbbing headache he heard his father’s words to him the last time he’d been home.

“I just don’t understand what you think you’ve got to prove. Your mother and I love you. We want you to come home. That FBI work you do is dangerous. We don’t want to lose you.
We don’t want to lose you
.”

The last sentence taunted him, ricocheting around in his mind like the glancing shot of a bullet. Regret surged through him, because for the first time he could begin to envision a life for himself running the family business. If
he had Jesus in his heart and Tracie at his side, he wouldn’t be alone anymore, not even at Gerlach Tools.

Too bad the realization had come too late.

Heath fought back the nausea that rose in his throat as he pulled his head up from his concussed stupor and looked across the tiny crew’s quarters to where Tracie stood. Both her hands were cuffed to the pipe on the ceiling, her Coast Guard blanket lay crumpled on the floor, and his tuxedo jacket dwarfed her slim figure as she shivered in her diamond-shrouded dress. He’d promised to protect her, but he’d unknowingly delivered her into the hands of her father’s killers. She had every reason to hate him.

“Tracie, I’m sorry,” he began in a whisper.

She ignored his apology. “Where are they going? What are they doing?”

Heath hadn’t realized the men had left them alone, but he now felt the subtle, silent vibrations that meant the submarine was getting underway. “He’s probably telling the other guys where to take us.”

“And then what? He’s just going to leave us for dead somewhere?”

Her assessment sounded so final, he didn’t want to think about it, or give her any room to think about it. Ignoring her question, he clarified, “So J. Vaughn was Jonas Vaughn.”

“Yes.” Tracie shot a fiery look back at him. “Jonas Vaughn became Jonas Blaine, a.k.a. Jonas Goodman.”

“And who was the other J?”

“Jeff Morse, a.k.a. Jeff Kuhlman. He died in Canada eight years ago. Ironically, he was the only one of the four men who I was ever able to personally contact.”

“Shortly before he died?” The bump on Heath’s head made it harder for him to follow what had happened.

“Yes. I didn’t know until you found the names of the
men who were lost with the
Requiem
that his real name was Kuhlman. I didn’t know anything about him. I searched for years for the men who were in the sub when my father died. I finally found Jeff, but before I was able to meet with him, he died when his truck went off the road in a blizzard.”

“Makes sense.” Heath paused, wondering if Jeff Kuhlman’s accident had really been accidental. These guys seemed to knock off anyone who threatened them. “I’m sorry. I never imagined, not in a million years…” He let his words fade away as the muffled sound of footsteps drew closer. “Jonas,” Heath said in an icy voice as the man he’d trusted entered the tiny room.

“It’s time,” he announced, approaching Tracie with a key in his hand. “You have a decision to make, but before I tell you what your choices are, you need to understand what a lucky girl you are. Trevor Price likes you. He’s rich. He’s powerful. He’s handsome. And he wants you at his side.”

Jonas trailed the key along Tracie’s jawbone, outlining the curve of her delicate features. “So here’s the deal—Tracie Crandall is going to die tonight, and it’s up to you to decide whether that death is real or only a cover. If you choose to go to Trevor, we’ll give you a new name, a new identity, and you can enjoy the best things money can buy. Or we can simply kill you now.”

While Heath watched, furious at his own helplessness, Tracie’s eyes met his. Her voice was as cold as the ice on the lake. “Kill me now.”

With a chuckle, Jonas noted, “Funny, that’s the same choice your father made, right before I ripped off his oxygen supply. You see, he’d seen too much. And you’ve seen too much.” Jonas looked from Heath to Tracie. “You two have made a lot of trouble for me today. I was headed
to the party when Martina reported in and told me she’d picked up Trevor where you left him, handcuffed to the bed.”