Hard Line - Pamela Clare Page 0,58
do you suggest?”
“We can tell everyone that Jones and Segal are flying home with the package, while I’m staying to find the killer. We make it look real—flight schedule, all of it. This bastard wants the package. The moment it’s in the air, he’s lost his chance. He knows that. I’m betting he’ll do whatever he can to get his hands on it before our fictional plane lands. With any luck, he’ll get sloppy.”
Tower considered it. “It’s a risky plan.”
“It is.”
Desperate men were dangerous.
Samantha watched the readouts as the telescope finished observing four sky fields at declination minus forty-five degrees and then moved to the next four. She’d had time to look at yesterday’s observations, the data from all thousand detectors coming together to create an image that was unmistakably an elliptical double-ringed galaxy. The work was a welcome distraction from the chaos that was life on station. This is what she was here to do, not obsess about murderers and hacked satellites and former KGB agents.
Still, her mind kept drifting to Patty’s murder.
On the walk over, she’d told Thor about Vasily and the switchblade, and he hadn’t been happy with her.
“I wish you’d let me know,” he’d said, a grumpy frown on his face. “Vasily is not someone you want to hang with.”
“For the record, I wasn’t ‘hanging with’ him. He came up on me out of the blue.”
Then Thor had warned her not to be alone with Kazem or Bai. He hadn’t given her an explanation, but it didn’t take a doctorate to understand that Cobra must have narrowed their list of suspects and that both men were still on it.
It was hard for her to imagine either of them as a murderer. Both were scientists dedicated to their work. No, Kazem hadn’t taken Patty’s rejection as well as he might have, but he hadn’t done anything violent. And yet someone here—someone everyone considered a friend and colleague—had killed her.
Samantha willed herself to focus, checking each amplifier channel’s output before heading into the back to make more coffee. She reached for the canister and remembered it was empty. She’d used the last of the coffee grounds this morning.
She walked to the hallway and unlocked the door that separated the SPT control room from the BICEP half of the building. She made her way to the shared storeroom for another bag of coffee, Kazem’s and Greg’s voices drifting up from their control center.
“Try rebooting it now.”
“I hope this works.”
“Yes!”
She returned to her side of the building and brewed a fresh pot of coffee, carrying the steaming mug back to her desk, her thoughts drifting again.
None of this made sense to her. How could the killer possibly think he could get away with it? They were all here for the duration of austral winter in a closed environment. Under normal circumstances, no one came, and no one left. That meant the pool of suspects was small and static.
But what if the bastard hadn’t planned it—or at least hadn’t thought it through? Methanol poisoning was slow and easy to expose. All she’d needed was the bottle of wine and a lighter. Surely, the killer had understood that the autopsy would reveal…
Chills skittered down her spine.
Under normal circumstances, Patty’s body would still be here. She’d be frozen solid somewhere in the service arches below the station, waiting for a flight home in austral spring. There would have been no autopsy until November, and by that time, no one here would have remembered what had happened that night. An investigation would be almost impossible.
Maybe the killer believed he could get away with it. No one on station had imagined that the Pentagon would risk sending a team of operators to retrieve components for the satellite. Or that Patty’s body would go home on their plane. Or that those operators would take on a murder investigation.
The killer hadn’t planned for any of that.
He hadn’t planned for Cobra.
“Shit.” She needed to tell Thor.
She picked up her radio but hesitated. He was probably busy. It’s not like she had new evidence for him. This was nothing more than a few connected dots. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would unmask the killer.
“Samantha?”
She gasped, dropped the radio, and turned to find Kazem standing behind her in his snow pants and a long-sleeved shirt. She must have forgotten to lock the door to the walkway when she’d returned with the coffee.
Shit.
She would have picked up the radio, but dropping it had broken the plastic casing, and the