She had crossed the room and was reaching into her suitcase for a pair of panties when the door suddenly opened. Marcus walked in and took two steps. The door closed behind him. He froze.
Lonnie stood at the end of the room, her full, naked figure exposed to his eyes. She did nothing to cover herself. She stood still and let him stare. Marcus’s face flushed red, and he turned away, but not after his eyes had taken in her entire form.
He stammered an apology and stepped into the bathroom to allow her to dress. Lonnie was even more impressed with this man she loved, as old-fashioned as he was.
Marcus.
Lonnie blinked away the thought as she turned from the mirror and climbed into the tub, sliding the cloth curtain across the opening. She stood under the steaming showerhead as hot beads of water coursed down her bare body, washing away the sweat and tension of the long, hard day.
Emotions edged up within her and an uncontrollable flood of tears ran down her cheeks, mingling with jets of water from the shower. Lonnie knew she would have to confront Marcus, but this was not how she wanted it to happen.
“Oh, God. How am I going to do this?”
Water splashed onto the bottom of the tub and ran in uneven rivulets down the drain.
After fifteen minutes, Lonnie got out of the shower, dried off with a large terry cloth towel, and wrapped it around herself. Her body throbbed with physical exhaustion and she struggled to make it across the room to the bed. Once there, she collapsed onto the thick, down-filled comforter. Her long straight black hair splayed out like ebony rays of the sun, forming a silken halo about her head. She took a deep breath, and before she finished exhaling, slipped into a dreamless sleep.
The phone on the nightstand rang so loud, it made her heart skip a beat. She lurched from the bed and instinctively grabbed the wireless handset, pressed the talk button, and mumbled into the receiver. “Wyatt.”
“Wyatt, this is Commander Stark.”
She glanced over at the clock next to the phone cradle. It was two-thirty in the afternoon. She had been asleep for more than eight hours, but it only felt like a few minutes.
“Yes, sir.” Lonnie felt embarrassed when she realized she was naked. Even though there was no one around to see her, she pulled the terry cloth towel snug around her bare body.
“I know your shift isn’t scheduled to start for a couple hours yet, but I need you to get here earlier. Come directly to my office when you arrive. I read your report and that of the FPD shooting last night.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied, still groggily trying to rub the sleep out of her eyes. “I can be there in forty-five minutes.”
“Make it thirty.”
“Yes, sir.” The other end of the line clicked off. She put the handset into the charging cradle and hurried to the bathroom to get ready.
Within twenty minutes, Lonnie walked into her garage, fully uniformed. Her hair was in a tight bun, over which she put the blue, wide-brimmed smoky hat. She got into her patrol car, pressed the button on the garage door remote control, and started the engine. As soon as the door rose high enough, Lonnie backed the long, white Crown Victoria out into the last bright rays of the late afternoon. In moments, the sun would drop below the horizon. She made her way across town in the fading light to the Fairbanks Northstar Borough Public Safety Building.
At 15:05, she walked into Commander Stark’s office. The trooper commander sat behind his desk, perusing the files from the previous night’s events.
“Close the door, Wyatt,” the commander said without looking up. “Take a seat.”
Wyatt did as she was instructed, sitting erect in a chair directly across from him. She looked at the file open on his desk and waited for him to speak.
“This thing is big, even bigger than we thought. In your report, you mentioned footprints that led to a square area of discoloration on the side of a transformer at the substation, where it looked like a sign had been removed. I called down to Anchorage, Palmer, and Valdez, and asked the commanders of those areas to have patrols to check the main substations there as well. They found almost identical marks on their outermost stations as you found in the Salt Jacket station.”
“That’s curious.” She crunched her eyebrows together in contemplation.
“Curious?” Stark snapped back. “Damn right it is. Each local power utility also reported vehicles stolen, maintenance crew trucks, around the same time yesterday morning. All of them have been found again, but only ours had a witness who saw the perpetrators. FPD scoured both of the vehicles they found last night, as well as the house. While the stolen truck was exceptionally clean, they managed to get several good sets of prints from the perp’s house and personal vehicle.”
Commander Stark handed Trooper Wyatt two sheets of paper, computer printouts with pictures and personal information on two men.
“Adem Jankovic is from Kosovo in former Yugoslavia. He had initially come into the US on a special student visa after his family was massacred by Serbian troops in the civil war. He disappeared two years ago when he was linked to an Al Qaeda cell in San Francisco. He has been known to go by the aliases of Harry Foil from England, Frederik Styr from Germany, and Adem O’Shay from Ireland.”
“This guy doesn’t look like the Al Qaeda stereotype,” Lonnie said as she studied the picture.
Jankovic was blond-haired and blue-eyed, with distinctly Germanic features. He was handsome and wore a pleasant smile in the photograph. His features would blend in almost any crowd across Europe or North America. In his eyes, though, she saw coldness, cruelty from somewhere within. In another generation, he could have been the subject of a Nazi propaganda poster.
As she looked at the image, she recalled a recent History Channel show about the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Her attention had been drawn to it because she knew that Marcus had been to that part of the world many times. In the show, they mentioned that the Kosovar Muslims had sided with the Nazi invaders in order to defeat the Serbian-controlled government. Adem, Lonnie surmised, may very likely be the progeny of a German soldier’s liaison with his Kosovar grandmother.
She switched to the other picture. It was of a very stern-looking man with dark features who looked like a mix of Eastern European and Turkish. Framed by a matte of thick, black hair and a heavy uni-brow, hateful eyes stared into the camera above lips that curled in a snarl.
“This guy is freaky,” Stark said. “Nikola Nousiri, an Albanian national verified to be part of the Islamic Brotherhood of the Sword, an assassin according to CIA and FBI reports. He is supposed to be dead. The son of a bitch was killed in gun battle with Homeland Security last summer in Seattle. His body was burned to a crisp and half decapitated but they claim to have positively identified him.”
Commander Stark rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “I’m getting too old for this crap, Wyatt. I don’t like it when dead men leave fingerprints on a crime scene after they’ve been in the ground for the last six months.”
She looked up from the pictures. “So, do we have any leads as to where the two men went last night after killing Beed?”
“No leads.” Stark shook his head. “I want you to take these two pictures out to Salt Jacket and check with the men who claim they saw them. Verify that the faces in the pictures are the men they saw yesterday.”
“Yes, sir,” Lonnie replied. “Um, Balsen said Johnson was going to be out running his trap line for a couple of days. He may not be available.”
“If you can’t find him, the other two should be good enough until he gets back. I want all the info we can get on these two.”