Chase did his best to ignore her, but as he typed, the faint scent of jasmine drifted over him. His pulse began to pound and his lower body stirred to life. “I could use a little breathing room,” he said gruffly, leaning back in his chair.
“Oh. Sorry.” Harper took a couple of steps back—as if that would do any good.
Chase blew out a breath, resigned to the constant state of arousal she left him in, which, no matter how he tried to ignore her, didn’t seem to lessen.
He pointed to the map. “See this protrusion of land at the end of the peninsula off the coast of Venezuela?”
“I see it.”
“That beach is Piedras Negras, the closest place Michael could have sailed.”
She leaned down to look at the computer, and fine blond hair feathered across his cheek. Chase inwardly groaned. When she backed away, he blew out a breath and started typing, checking the distance between Piedras Negras and Oranjestad.
“Thirty-nine kilometers,” he said. “That’s about twenty-four miles. He could have made an easy day sail there.” He looked back at the map. “Curaçao is farther, about a hundred seventeen kilometers. Roughly just under eighty miles. Cruising at eight or so knots, it’s a long day sail. They would probably opt to stay overnight. Bonaire is another little Dutch island about forty miles farther away.”
He turned in the chair to look at Harper and saw her shoulders slump. “How will we figure it out?” she asked.
“If we have to, we’ll go there and start looking for answers. With any luck, I’ll get a call from Tabby. I should have heard from her by now.”
As if saying her name had somehow made his cell ring, his iPhone signaled. He pulled it out of his jeans pocket and checked the caller ID.
He pressed the phone against his ear. “Talk to me, Tab.” In his mind’s eye, he could see her, very short black hair, razor cut on the sides and moussed on top, a little silver hoop in one of her sleek black eyebrows. A row of tiny hoops curled around the side of her left ear. She had several tattoos and a tongue stud.
At twenty-seven, Tabitha Love was unlike any woman he had ever met. She hadn’t gone to college, barely graduated high school and was basically a genius.
“I tracked down your guy’s last location.”
“Hold on. Let me put you on speaker.” He set the phone on the table, looked over to see the relief in Harper’s face that he was treating her as part of the investigation.
“GPS on his sat phone pinged him four days ago at the Zee Winden Marina in Curaçao,” Tabby said. “That’s in a bay on the south end of the island. I’ll give you the coordinates.”
“Great.”So not Piedras Negras.
“There’re some nice beaches in the area,” Tabby said. “A few casinos. Good diving off the island.”
He remembered Michael had loved anything to do with the sea. One spring break they had gone diving in Florida.
“That’s great, Tab. We thought he might have been headed to Piedras Negras, closest landfall to the marina where he was moored. Looks like he went for a longer sail.”
“The Iridium Extreme is a really great sat phone. It has an SOS button, but it wasn’t used. It also allows you to send an SMS text message with your exact location to anyone, viewable on an online map from anywhere on the planet. Apparently, that didn’t happen, either. Unfortunately, the phone hasn’t moved from the last location, and it’s no longer sending signals.”
“You think the battery could just be dead?” Harper asked hopefully.
“Tabitha Love, meet Harper Winston,” Chase injected into the conversation.
“It’s possible, Harper. Or something could have happened to it. The phone got busted, fell into the water, something like that.”
“At least we know where he was,” Chase said. “Anything else, Tab?”
“I’ll keep digging, see if I can pick up something else that might help us. I’ll let you know if I stumble across anything useful.”
“Thanks.”
“Good luck.” Tabby ended the call.
“We have to go there,” Harper said. “We need to find out what happened to him.”
“Tomorrow. I’ll call Dutch tonight and have him arrange transportation. We might need someone local to take us around after we get there.”
