“You missed the excitement.” Nick coughed, glanced at her and back to the ambulance pulling away.
“Had a little of my own to contend with.” She brushed at the snow clinging to her short dark hair. “Found our senator slipping through the streets on foot. When I stopped to ask him why he was on foot instead of in his car, he took off.”
“And being the suspicious agent you are, you pursued.” Nick laughed, the image of Kat, at least six inches shorter, if not more, than Gordon Thomas, chasing him across the snow on foot. “Did you catch him?”
“I always get my man, St. Claire.”
“Where’s he now?”
“In the back of an Alaska State Trooper’s car on his way to the Fairbanks Jail.”
“What did he charge him with?”
“Murder.” Kat crossed her arms over her chest and stared at the scene around her. “I think I scared him a little. He spilled his guts on a number of issues.”
“Just to you?”
“No, he was more than willing to share with the trooper, by the time I was through with him.” She nodded toward the gingerbread cottage, scorched with smoke. “It really makes me mad when someone messes with a fellow Alaskan.”
“Remind me not to make you mad.” Nick’s lips twisted to hide a smile. “I might be confessing to sins I haven’t committed.”
“Yeah. And don’t forget Mary Christmas is a fellow Alaskan.” Kat’s brows rose in a challenging gesture.
Nick rocked back on his heels and let a long gap fill with the noise of firemen reeling in their hoses, the fire effectively quenched.
Crime scene investigators entered the house with cameras and rubber gloves.
Nick and Kat waited out of the way until firemen brought up not one but two stretchers, clean white sheets draped over the faces of the victims.
Kat’s cell phone rang.
While Kat hung back to answer, Nick moved forward.
Trey Baskin pulled back the sheet and checked the identity of the first one. Even from the distance and beneath the layer of soot, Jasmine Claus’s diminutive body could be easily identified.
With his special investigator badge that SOS had designed for just such occasions back before they’d quit as a government agency, Nick was able to slip by the police personnel to join Trey.
“Hey, Nick. Glad you made it out of there. A few more minutes and you’d have been a goner.” Trey nodded at the man lying on the stretcher, with a gunshot wound to the chest. “I haven’t a clue who this guy is.”
“Call in the FBI. This man went by the code name Cobra.”
“Cobra, huh?” Trey’s eyes widened. “Cobra? The hit man for hire? Damn, I’ve read about him. What the hell’s he doing in Alaska?”
Nick’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I suspect the price was right.”
“Holy crap. And he was after Santa? Isn’t that taking hatred of the holiday a bit far?”
A state trooper called to Trey, leaving Nick standing in the snow. Medics loaded the two stretchers into the back of another ambulance, both bound for the state medical examiner’s office.
As she closed the distance between them, Kat slid her cell phone into her pocket. “That was Royce, he wants to know when you’re headed back to Texas.”
Nick stared up into the sky. The clouds cleared, exposing a million stars like jewels adorning the heavens. “I was thinking of staying here for a while.”
“A long while or for an extended weekend?”
“I’d like to play it by ear, but if things work out, I might ask for a transfer.”
“Oh? I’m sure we could find room for another agent in the Alaska office of the SOS. Considering there are only two in it now.”
