Man Overboard

by J. A. Jance

  “Yes,” Stuart observed quietly, “but he caught back up in a hell of a hurry.”

  “He did indeed,” Julia agreed. “It was like he could see connections that other people couldn’t. I figured Roger would have to get an associate’s degree and a couple more beyond that before anyone would consider giving him a job, but then he was befriended by one of his instructors, a guy by the name of Andrew Woods. When Roger confided about what had happened to him, Woods suggested that he give up on the idea of working toward degrees. He said that even with multiple degrees in hand, when it came to landing high-end jobs, Roger’s history of mental illness would make it impossible for him to pass necessary background checks. Woods thought Roger should apply for an entry-level coding job somewhere and use his skills to work his way up from inside rather than outside, and that’s exactly what he did. Woods was even kind enough to refer Roger to a friend of his who was in the process of starting a cyber security firm.”

  “Cyber Resources Unlimited?” Stuart asked.

  “Yup,” Julia said. “That’s the one. Once he hired on there, he never looked back, and he never went anywhere else, either.”

  “I knew that Roger’s father had committed suicide,” Stuart said, “and I knew it hit him pretty hard, but I had no idea about his being locked up for ten years. After he moved to California and especially after graduation, we completely lost touch. I thought it was because of the usual things—college, distance, whatever. Years later when we ran into each other at a conference and reconnected, he never mentioned a word about any of that.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Julia said. “He didn’t like to talk about it. I think he worried that if his bosses ever got wind of it, his career would stall out.” Julia fell quiet for a moment, looking first at Ali and then at Stu. “So?” she asked finally. “Are you going to help me with this or not?”

  For an answer, Stu began putting everything back into the box, including the computer and cell phones.

  “I’ll take a look at all this,” he said finally. “I can’t promise that it’ll tell you anything, though.”

  “Thank you,” Julia said. “And as I said earlier, I’m fully prepared to pay for your services.”

  “No,” Stuart told her. “That’s not necessary. Roger McGeary was a friend of mine. Looking into this is the least I can do.”

  On the phone with B., Ali had been lost in a momentary bit of wool-gathering. Her husband’s next comment brought her back to the present. “You still haven’t told me what you think we should do about all this.”

  Ali sighed. “That’s because I still don’t know. From what Julia said, she seems to be under the impression that someone from Roger’s work life might have been out to get him, but I think her real bottom line is to prove to her own satisfaction that Roger McGeary either did or did not commit suicide.”

  “What’s your take on the matter?” B. asked.

  “The Panamanian detectives who investigated the incident labeled it ‘death by misadventure.’ My personal opinion is that there’s a better than even chance that Roger McGeary, drunk as could be, fell off the ship, and drowned.”

  “So accidental rather than deliberate?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about Stu?” B. asked. “What does he think?”

  Ali thought about that for a moment before she answered. “Roger McGeary and Stu Ramey were good friends,” she answered at last. “You and I both know Stu doesn’t have many friends. Just from looking at him I can tell that he’s really broken up about all this. I think he’s going to want to know—need to know—what happened to Roger every bit as much as Julia Miller does, and I also think we should help him.”

  “Fair enough,” B. said. “Full speed ahead, then. Whatever you need to do, do it, but as far as I’m concerned, we’re launching this investigation on Stu’s behalf as an in-house matter. You can tell Julia Miller from both of us that she should keep her money and spend it on her damned horses.”

  One of the things Ali had always loved about B. Simpson was his generosity of spirit, and she knew he meant everything he’d just said—that when it came to solving the mystery of Roger McGeary’s death, she was free to use as many of High Noon’s very considerable resources as required.

  “Aye aye, sir,” Ali said with a grateful laugh. “I’m on it.”

  5

  When Odin and Frigg first started studying the inter-generational aspects of suicide, he was curious more than anything else, and he was shocked to discover that not everyone on the list was like him. His whole world was predicated on the idea that his father had committed suicide, and that had made all the difference. Unfortunately, there were far too many people out there who had lost parents to suicide who seemed to suffer no permanent ill effects at all. They went on to lead perfectly ordinary lives. They grew up; they went to school; they graduated; they found jobs; they got married; they had kids; they bought homes; they paid their bills. How boring. How dreadfully mundane!

  Surely there were others out there who were more like Owen himself—people who had grown up wondering about the hidden meanings contained in whatever suicide notes their dead parents may or may not have left behind.

  He was fifteen years old before he managed to hack into the police report concerning his father’s death. One of the pieces of evidence mentioned was the one-word message Harold had left scribbled on a paper napkin from some fast-food joint. SORRY. What the hell did that mean? Owen wondered. Sorry for what? Had Harold been having an affair? Was he caught up in some kind of illegal activity? Was he sorry about dying or sorry about living?

  By then Owen had already moved to the basement, leaving his upstairs rooms behind and taking over the quarters that had once belonged to Sarah and Dolores. He’d made life miserable enough for his last two tutors that they’d both quit without giving notice. Owen had absolutely no interest in book learning of any kind, and no intention of going on to college, either. When he had explained that he could learn more about computers on his own than he could anywhere else, Irene had allowed herself to be persuaded.

  “You can do whatever you like downstairs,” she told him, “as long as you turn up for dinner every night in a clean shirt and a properly tied tie. That’s not negotiable.”

  The term “every night” really meant every night Irene happened to be home, which wasn’t often. The nights she wasn’t, Owen scrounged through the fridge or ordered in. He had learned early on that Irene didn’t mind having a child all that much as long as it wasn’t necessary for her to waste a lot of time interacting with him. She had her life and her friends and was more than happy to leave the real work of raising her son to the hired help. Growing up, Owen watched his mother more than he knew her or liked her. He tolerated her foibles as an essential component in his life, and he learned to play her little games until he was almost better at them than she was.

  If Irene had mourned the death of her husband, it hadn’t been obvious—at least not to Owen. She was a bright, beautiful, and social creature. She loved dinner parties and plays and concerts. After Harold’s death, she quickly realized that being a well-to-do widow made for too many unwanted advances from any number of inappropriate suitors. Rather than stop going out, she set about amassing a collection of gay male friends that she kept on tap for social situations, using them as escorts to deflect whoever’s attention might require deflecting at the various concerts and galas she attended. She also welcomed her gay pals’ company for dinners at home, where they provided a much needed conversational alternative to Owen’s tiresome interest in all things computer.

  On the day Owen finally managed to unearth the details of his father’s suicide, he had gone upstairs intent on asking his mother some very pointed questions about his father’s death. Unfortunately, one of his mother’s current companions, a fellow named Jack Hughes, turned up for dinner.

  “So what have you been up to today?” Iren
e asked, beaming at her son. That was the customary opening gambit for their mealtime conversations. Irene would ask after Owen’s activities and he would give her a pro forma answer, with neither of them really paying attention. Owen had learned to reply to those empty queries innocuously enough that his mother could merely nod and proceed with whatever else she wanted to discuss. Tonight, though, Owen had hoped to have Irene to himself. When it turned out that wasn’t the case, he was more than a little annoyed.

  Spearing a pat of butter and slathering it onto a dinner roll in a way guaranteed to bug his mother, Owen went straight for the jugular.

  “I read the police report today,” he mentioned casually.

  “What police report?” Irene asked as a tiny frown furrowed her brow.

  “The one about my father,” Owen said. “After he committed suicide.”

  On those rare occasions when Irene did happen to mention Harold’s death in Owen’s presence, she did so by sticking to the least offensive kinds of terminology. She tended to mention nothing more definitive than the fact that Harold was “gone” or had “passed away.” Until that moment, the word “suicide” had never been part of any conversation that passed between mother and son regarding Harold Hansen. Once the word hit home, Owen was gratified to see how the shock of it instantly turned his mother’s face alarmingly pale. With steely determination, however, she pulled herself together far faster than he’d expected.

  “It’s neither the time nor the place to have a discussion of this kind,” she said, as if dismissing the whole issue as a small misstep in the general conversation.

  “Why not?” Owen asked insolently. “Why can’t we discuss it? Maybe Jack would like to know the answer to that question, too. My father went down to the beach and blew his brains out. Why?”

  “I don’t know why,” Irene hissed. “He just did it.”

  “What did he have to be sorry about?” Owen demanded, letting his mother know that he was also aware of the contents of the suicide note. “Was he sorry he was married to you? Sorry he had me for a son—so sorry he couldn’t stand to go on living? What, then?”

  Owen watched with interest as his mother carefully removed the cloth napkin from her lap, folded it, and set it down next to her plate. When she started to rise from her chair, Jack hurriedly stepped forward and pulled it out for her. Owen expected her to flee the room, but she did not. Instead she marched over to where he was sitting and slapped him so hard that Owen saw stars.

  “We will never speak of this again,” she declared furiously. “Never.” Then she went back to her chair, sat down, picked up her napkin, and resumed eating her dinner as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  It worked—they had never spoken of it again. They continued to live in the same household with Irene upstairs and Owen down. They continued to endure their evening meals together, night after night, year after year, all of them conducted in a kind of chilled civility. But looking back on that long-ago meal in the glowing aftermath of Roger McGeary’s death, Owen realized that his mother’s furious slap on the face had been the turning point in his life—the watershed moment that had set him on the path to becoming a serial killer.

  Back then he didn’t know who he was going to kill or how, but what Owen did know for sure—something he never doubted—was that whatever he did, he’d be smart enough to get away with it. And it would have something to do with people just like him—people whose parents had died by their own hand.

  6

  Ali waited until Cami left for her Krav Maga training session at the end of the day before venturing out of her office and into the back room where Stu held sway. She found her husband’s second-in-command seated where he always sat, in front of a bank of wall-mounted computer monitors and their various keyboards. This time, however, his attention was focused on a single laptop sitting directly in front of him, one with a distinctive red “X” painted on the back of the display. The “X” told Ali this was one of High Noon’s air-gapped computers, one that was never allowed access to either High Noon’s servers or the Internet. “These X’er computers function as cyber condoms,” Stu liked to say, “because you never know where someone else’s program has been.”

  “Roger’s info?” Ali asked.

  Stu nodded. “I downloaded everything from the two phones and the computer over to this, so I could look at it all in one place.”

  “And?”

  “I haven’t started.”

  “Why not? A password problem?”

  “A privacy problem,” Stu replied. “Roger was my friend. I know I promised Ms. Miller that I’d look into what happened, but it doesn’t seem right to go prowling through the man’s personal life without his express permission.”

  Impersonal hacking was one thing, evidently, Ali noted. Personal hacking was something else again.

  “Maybe it would be better for Cami to take a look,” Ali suggested.

  Stu shook his head. “I’ll do it,” he said. “I’m just having trouble getting started is all.”

  “Because you think Julia Miller is wrong, and Roger really did commit suicide?”

  Stu swallowed before he answered. “Yes,” he said faintly. “I guess that is what I think.”

  “It seems to me that Julia deserves to have the real answers, so let’s give them to her,” Ali said. “If that is what happened, maybe we can go so far as to figure out why. And if it turns out that isn’t what happened, let’s find out what did. You check to see if there’s anything in the computer that will point us in the right direction. In the meantime, I’ll have Cami sort out everything there is to be found on the incident itself. We’ll need to track down the cops from Panama who did the initial investigation. Next we should talk to people from the ship—the people who worked on board as well as any passengers who may have interacted with Roger during the cruise. We’re going to go after this in a full-court press.”

  “You keep saying ‘we,’ ” Stuart said.

  “I said ‘we’ because I meant it,” Ali told him. “High Noon Enterprises is on the case.”

  “But who’s the client?”

  “Stu Ramey, for one,” Ali answered. “If he chooses to pass along what we learn to Julia Miller, that’ll be up to him.”

  Stuart thought that through. Finally he nodded. “All right, then,” he said, turning his attention to the keyboard. “I think I can live with that.”

  7

  For someone who was essentially a hermit, it was only natural that Owen Hansen would gravitate to artificial intelligence. His AI creation, Frigg, became both his resource and his confidante. Once Frigg understood that there was more to the game than merely tracking down names and people, she willingly stepped up and became Odin’s fully committed accomplice.

  For Odin the next step in the process was finding a way to separate the damaged children of suicide victims from the undamaged ones. To accomplish that, Odin set Frigg the monumental task of sorting through all those names also appearing in the state of California’s massive archive of newly digitized court records.

  Frigg wasn’t the least bit daunted. She didn’t mind how much material was involved or how complex it was. She simply went to work. As it turned out, everything they needed was there. Arrest records? You bet. Drug and alcohol offenses? You got it. Divorce proceedings? Those, too. After an amazing amount of computerized analysis, Frigg was able to present Odin with a properly sorted and alphabetized list. Frigg’s next assignment was to cross-reference the two lists—the court records and the children of suicide—and locate the names that appeared in both. That sort resulted in a much smaller list—the sweet spot Odin liked to call his Target Group.

  It was easy to see that these folks were mostly damaged goods, the by-products of parental suicides who ended up with all the customary side issues—divorces, DUIs, bankruptcies, and substance abuse problems—that often occur as a result of having
survived a crappy childhood. Odin wasn’t the least bit surprised to discover that many of them were repeat offenders as far as encounters with the law were concerned.

  Close to the top of the alphabet, Odin focused in on one name in particular. Paul Abernathy was a troubled guy who boasted any number of moving violations. He had five DUIs—controlled substances rather than booze—to his credit along with driving with a suspended license, driving without insurance, and reckless driving (he’d done six months in county lockup for that one). He’d also done time in Club Fed for embezzlement. In other words, Abernathy was a crook and a druggie—just about what you’d expect from a loser whose father had offed himself when the kid was ten years old.

  Odin found Paul’s situation worthy of further consideration. The problem for Odin was that the last of the moving violations had occurred more than three years earlier. That left three possibilities—the guy was back in jail; he had straightened up and decided to fly right; or else he had left the state.

  With that in mind, Odin turned Frigg loose on the situation. The AI located the man living alone in a run-down two-story apartment building at the corner of Kester and Erwin in Van Nuys and walking back and forth to work as a janitor at a nearby grade school. A major portion of his minimal wages went to pay court-ordered restitution to the victims of his embezzlement scheme, an amount that, with interest, had ballooned to a student debt–worthy total that his regular but meager payments barely dented.

  Once Abernathy was located, it wasn’t difficult for Odin to put him under surveillance and keep an eye on him. Odin soon discovered that Paul Abernathy was a man of regular habits. He set off on his walk to work at two-thirty in the afternoon, arriving on campus just as school was dismissed for the day. Once there, he swept floors, mopped hallways, dusted desks, and cleaned bathrooms from three o’clock until eleven p.m., when he headed home. Occasionally he’d stop off for a Subway sandwich or McDonald’s along the way. But always, without fail, he ended the evening in a lowbrow bar on Victory—a sticky-floored saloon appropriately named the Dive Bar—where he settled in and drank until last call.