Page 42 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

Ten

What Kate wanted to do, though it was completely out of character, was dither around the cabin like a giddy teenage girl—the ones she’d watched on the television shows she’d studied when she’d first come out of her father’s compound, to try to understand what she’d missed of the world—spinning around and around on another Templeton trip.

Luckily, she was actually the grown adult Templeton had reminded her she was earlier. And an officer of the law, thank you. Which meant that after only the tiniest little bit of dithering—which in her case looked nothing at all like the girls on television and happily involved nothing more undignified than staring at the door he’d closed behind him—she ordered herself to stop. Immediately.

She did not moon at doors after inappropriate men. It was time to stop overthinking all things Templeton Cross and get down to the reason she was here, neck- deep in the gray areas she abhorred with a band of commandos.

“Veterans,” she corrected herself out loud, in almost as salty a tone as one of the Alaska Force members would have used. “Deeply committed veterans of our nation’s elite special forces, that’s all.”

Kate found a mini refrigerator masquerading as an end table on the far side of the couch, stocked with a selection of cold drinks. Better still, there was a coffeemaker in the small not-quite-a-kitchen area, with a hot plate to one side and a bag of ground Black Cup Fisherman Blend coffee beans. That was really all she needed as she settled onto the couch and dived straight back into her past.

It took her the first little while to move past her uneasiness at how much information Alaska Force had compiled on her past cases. Meaning, they had everything but her personal notes, and they shouldn’t have been able to access any of it, surely.

But once she let that go—because the point of Alaska Force, as far as she could tell, was their ability to do things they shouldn’t, and if she wasn’t prepared to handle that, she might as well go back to her impersonal apartment in Juneau while Christmas bore down on her like an angry grizzly—she sank into the task.

She started with the cases Oz had dismissed. As she went through them, she was pretty sure she’d figured out his methodology. The cases he thought were unlikely to relate to what had been going on here lately were the ones that mostly featured very small disorganized groups. A couple and their child, for example, off in a lean-to making noise one winter. Or lone-gunmen types, who tended more toward manifestos than military operations.

Kate read through the files, remembering the hours of investigative work she’d put into each case. The many witness statements, the careful compiling of evidence. She remembered long, cold stakeouts. The variousinterviews, ranging from tense to baffling to straight-up upsetting.

She wasn’t a woman who wanted to look back. She worked so hard to avoid it, save for a few weeks in the darkest stretch of every December. But it didn’t escape her notice that in looking through all these old cases, she might as well have hauled out the sort of happy, sparkly photo albums regular people kept on hand. These cases and the associated reports were the only memories that really mattered to Kate.

She read her own reports and remembered all the things she hadn’t put in them. The ways she’d learned how to be a better cop. The times she’d disappointed herself and had failed to make the necessary connections in time, or at all. There were triumphs, too. The children she’d saved from unfortunate circumstances. Unhealthy families she’d helped dismantle, and broken families she’d helped put back together.

Some people collected pictures of themselves on sandy beaches or documented every time they went off on a run or to drink something, or so Kate’s few forays onto social media had taught her. But Kate had always measured her life by what she did to make sure there were fewer bad people out there making other people’s lives miserable.

Her old cases were like thick, complicated balls of gnarled yarn to her, but stitched together, they all made something greater than themselves. They made a career. And more than that, they made Kate’s life more meaningful than the series of interchangeable furnished apartments she’d lived in or the relationships she’d never managed to hold on to or the thousands of ways she was never quite like all those regular people who’d grown up in normal families. No matter how hard she tried.

She’d made a serious dent in the list and was jotting down a few notes about her overall impressions next to Oz’s when there was a knock on her cabin door.

“Come in,” she called without thinking.

And immediately wished she hadn’t, because she wasn’t emotionally prepared for another round—

But it wasn’t Templeton. The door swung open, and Bethan came in, bringing a swirl of the cold with her.

“I thought you might be getting a little bit of cabin fever,” Bethan said when she’d closed the door behind her. “But you’re still working.”

Kate looked at her watch and saw that hours had passed. A lot of hours, in fact. It was edging toward seven o’clock at night. She stood and stretched, feeling the tension she’d been ignoring in her shoulders since the last time she’d gotten up and tended to her body’s needs. Which could have been hours ago now. “I think I lost track of time.”

Bethan looked open and friendly, which immediately put Kate on edge. Not only because she was always distrustfulof friendly overtures, thank you, but because Bethan wasn’t any old approachable neighbor in an apartment complex somewhere, randomly offering baked goods. She was one of the most accomplished women alive.

“I’m here to offer you some dinner options,” Bethan said.

“There are options?” Kate blinked. “It just occurred to me that I’m on the part of this island that doesn’t have any restaurants. Or bars.”

“Correct.” Bethan grinned, which might have been disarming if Kate hadn’t been so aware of how the other woman was holding herself. Still and ready. “It’s Jonas’s night to cook in the lodge. We all take turns making dinner for whoever’s on shift. I think you saw the mess hall on your tour when you were here before.”

“It looked like more of a dining room than a mess hall.”

“That’s because you haven’t eaten there yet with the men. Believe me, it’s a mess hall. You’re welcome to join in on the communal dinner and experience this yourself.”

“I don’t think I have enough information to make that determination,” Kate said. She pressed her fingers into the place where her neck ached. “Is Jonas a good cook? What does he cook? If I don’t like it, will I be forced to choke it down anyway?”

“He’s actually a decent cook.” Bethan sounded so resolutely even-keeled that Kate found herself frowning slightly, trying to figure out why a discussion of Jonas’s cooking skills required diplomacy. “Tonight’s offering is a stew. A beef stew, I believe.”

“Okay. I like beef stew. But you said there were options?”

“Your other option is you come with me.”

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