Troy let out a slow whistle. “That would be a pretty major conspiracy theory.”
“Maybe,” she said, “and I get that it’s probably not fair to everybody here, but Chucky and Winslow are both oddballs. They’ve been working the rigs for fifty years, I swear to God. Probably only forty, I guess. But, listening to them, it’s been at least seventy.”
Axel cracked a grin at that. “And we all know guys like that too,” he said, “but what benefit does anybody get out of blowing up the rig?”
She took a deep breath. “The company was bringing in a new management control team. They would get rid of a lot of people here who were troublemakers.”
“What kind of troublemakers?”
She winced.
“Come on. Fess up. Let’s hear it all,” Troy said impatiently.
She glared at him. “You forget,” she said, “that I’m an outsider. I’m not one of the crew and a part of things.”
“And you’re female,” he said.
She gave a clipped nod. “Exactly. Three other women were on board, but they’re all gone now.”
“Why did they leave?”
Her glare upped in wattage. “Sexual harassment and—well—rape.” Her words landed into a heavy silence in the small room.
Chapter 3
Berkley took a deep breath. “One of them was my friend,” she said. “And I know for a fact that she was assaulted in the shower.”
“Is she okay?”
“No! Of course she’s not okay!” She glared at Troy. “Will she eventually come out of this okay? Yes. At least I hope so. Was she physically damaged? No. And she wasn’t murdered afterward. Although I fear she wishes she had been. Getting her off the rig seemed like the least I could do.”
“Did she go to management?”
Berkley nodded. “Yes, she did. And that’s part of the reason behind this change of this whole male-only culture.”
“So, a lot of the old guys would get the sack?”
“Well, let’s just say, they would all get investigated. All three women claimed rape. All three women have been shipped off, and all the men say it was the women’s fault. All the men say it’s not an atmosphere where women are welcome. The men say it had nothing to do with them, that this should have been a male-only culture, not a mixed culture.”
“A lot of oil rigs have great success with coed cultures.”
“Maybe so,” she said. “This one is full of old rednecks who grump a lot about it and say it has nothing to do with them and that the entire crew was being treated as guilty.”
“But wait, couldn’t the women ID the men?”
“I’m not sure about the others, but my girlfriend said she was blindfolded, but she does know it wasn’t just one guy.”
Troy sucked in his breath at that. “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he said gently. “That’s difficult for everybody.”
“It’s particularly difficult being the only female left behind,” she said boldly. “Not only is there a large group of the men who resent me for being female—because it reminds them of the change of management coming in and the investigation happening—but also another large group of men were protective, but all those protective men are gone,” she said.
“Are you in danger now?” Axel’s tone was harsh and raspy. Even as Troy watched, his partner’s big hands clenched into fists.
She smiled up at him. “Well, now that you’re here, I expect you to pound them all into the ground as needed,” she said with a laugh.
“Just point him out to me,” he said. His words were a promise.
“So far I’ve been fine,” she said, with a shake of her head. “I’ve never had any trouble any of the times I’ve been here. And the fact that eight men are on board with me, well, it makes the odds not that great in my favor, but it’d be a lot easier to pinpoint who was causing the trouble now than to have a full crew on this rig.”
“So, back to the other two women, you don’t know if they could identify their attackers?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. One left almost immediately, and a lot of secrecy surrounded her exit. I presume she went straight to the top of the line and said she needed to get off. Her accusations came afterward, so I think she just ran first.”
“So, of course, no rape kits or anything like that for the medical team were here to process either, right?”
“No,” she said. “The doctor said he didn’t have any. It wasn’t something that he’s expected to stock.”
“But he could have done something in the meantime,” Axel said. “Just because he didn’t have an actual rape kit doesn’t mean he couldn’t take semen samples and photographs.”
“I took photographs,” she said quietly. “And, with my girlfriend’s help, we did swab for semen.”
“Good,” he said, “and did they get to a lab?”
“I pulled some strings, and they’ve gone to a private lab, yes.”
“Does anybody know you did that?”
“I hope not,” she said cheerfully, “because I’m pretty sure I’m in more danger if they do.”
“Yes,” he said, “I can see that. Well, this is not exactly what we expected to hear.”
“Of course not,” she said, “nobody does. You come here, and it’s all about a rig blowing up and potential sabotage.”
“Maybe,” Axel said. “But, at the same time, it’s not necessarily what’s going on.”
“Would somebody blow up a rig in order to stop an investigation into the rapes?” Berkley asked.
“Well, it got them out of being part of the investigation, so quite potentially, yes,” Axel said.
“So hang on,” Berkley said. “These guys rape three women, know that they’ll get in trouble over it all, so they blow up a drilling rig, and manage to get off when all the crew is taken away? Now they just aren’t available to come back for work and don’t answer their phones when the investigators call them?”
“Quite possibly, yes,” Axel said.
“But didn’t four men die while this rig got blown up? Or went missing?” Troy asked.
“If so, those rape charges just escalated to murder,” Berkley stated.
“And the only reason for that to happen is if somebody really didn’t want to get caught, as in somebody with a powerful position or somebody who already has a rap sheet and knew he would have the book thrown at him, like a third-strike thing or something?” Troy frowned.
“All of which is possible,” Axel said. “And unfortunately so are half a dozen other options we have yet to think about.”
“Really sucks,” she said. “But, first off, we have to take out those cameras.”
“What will that do?” Troy asked curiously.
“You can search the place,” she said.
“I can search it anyway,” he said. “I just hack into the system and get to the security cameras to choose which ones we need on, which to turn off.”