Man Overboard

by J. A. Jance

  That was true insofar as it went. Julia Miller was indeed the person who had contacted them originally. The problem was, High Noon was really acting on its own behalf rather than on Julia Miller’s.

  The change in Garza’s voice when he spoke next was distinctly audible across two time zones and nearly 2,700 miles. “Ah yes,” he replied. “Señora Miller. What kind of concern?”

  “She has a few questions,” Ali answered. “She feels the words ‘death by misadventure’ don’t provide sufficient information. That’s why High Noon has agreed to look into the matter—in hopes of clarifying the situation. And that’s why I’m calling you today—to request that you forward us copies of any written reports regarding this case.”

  “Mr. McGeary is deceased,” Garza said coldly. “His cause of death is undetermined because evidence found at the scene left it unclear to investigators if he had perished accidentally or if he had taken his own life. His death may or may not have been due to natural causes. Perhaps he suffered a medical emergency of some kind and simply fell overboard. There’s also a possibility that he may have taken his own life. The circumstances surrounding his death don’t fit with homicide. Hence our considered use of the term ‘misadventure,’ which, in my mind, leaves the situation open to interpretation.”

  “But with the cause of death undetermined, I’m surprised you closed the case.”

  “Señora . . .”

  “Reynolds,” Ali supplied.

  “Señora Reynolds,” Garza objected. “Available evidence suggests that when Mr. McGeary entered his stateroom on the night of his death, he was highly intoxicated. The ship’s surveillance system had footage of that hallway from the time he disappeared into his room—alone, by the way—until hours later when the butler arrived to deliver his breakfast tray. No one else entered or left the room. When the butler found the stateroom abandoned, he immediately and quite properly initiated man overboard procedures. Between the time the butler entered the room and the time he made the emergency call, there was no time for anything else to occur, all of which leads us to conclude that, in this instance, the butler didn’t do it.”

  “But it doesn’t tell us what happened,” Ali objected.

  “No, it does not,” Garza agreed. “Mr. McGeary’s death is unfortunate, of course, but with no way to examine the body and with no smoking gun, there’s no way to discover how he died. Yes, the case is closed, and I make no apologies for that. Feel free to tell Señora Miller that she has my sincere condolences, but there is nothing more I can do.”

  “You could send us the reports,” Ali suggested.

  “No, I could not,” Garza replied. “The National Police do not make a habit of sharing the results of our inquiries—open or closed—with just anyone. Reports can be requested via court orders, of course, but I can’t see how High Noon Enterprises would be able to obtain one of those. Now, if that is all . . .”

  Ali couldn’t see how they’d be able to obtain a court order, either. Although she was supposed to be the diplomat here, she found herself bridling at the detective inspector’s dismissive attitude.

  “Mr. McGeary died on the third of June. You have no body. No cause of death. And yet, barely three months later, you have already closed the case?”

  “Your point is?”

  “I’m wondering if closing the case in such an expeditious fashion might have been more beneficial for the cruise line than having it drag on any longer.”

  “Are you implying that my investigation of the matter was either incompetent or corrupt?” Garza demanded.

  “All I’m suggesting is that your investigation may be incomplete,” Ali said. “I’m also letting you know that with or without your assistance, High Noon will be pursuing the matter.”

  “Very well, then, Señora Reynolds,” the detective said. “Have a nice day.”

  He hung up, and so did Ali. It wasn’t exactly a declaration of war, but it came close. If the reports weren’t available through regular channels, it might be necessary to access them through irregular ones. Ali put down the phone and went looking for Stu. She found him, bleary-eyed and gray with exhaustion, seated in front of his bank of computers and looking totally bereft.

  “How’s it going?” she asked, helping herself to a nearby desk chair and rolling it next to his.

  Stu shrugged. “I should have been a better friend to Roger while he was still alive.”

  Stu, a brilliant hacker and loyal employee, had been part of High Noon from the very beginning. He was far closer to B. than he was to Ali. Knowing about the carefully constructed wall he maintained between himself and the rest of the world, Ali was uncertain how she should approach him when he was clearly suffering from genuine grief.

  “You’ve worked on this all night?” Ali asked.

  Stu nodded. “I did, and so did Cami,” he said.

  “Give yourself a break, Stu,” Ali told him. “If you’ve spent the whole night on this, you’re being Roger’s friend right now.”

  “Any luck with Detective Inspector Garza?” he asked glumly.

  Ali shook her head. “No dice on the official case reports,” she answered. “I always believed that homicide cops are supposed to speak for the dead. Since Detective Garza is declining to do so, we’ll have to work around him. If there’s a backdoor way to lay hands on those documents, do so.”

  Stu gave her a wary look. She knew the man was in constant contact with a complex web of fellow hackers, a shady alliance that spanned the globe, and she had no doubt that one of them would be able to penetrate Garza’s officially unavailable files.

  “We’re looking for answers, Stu, not admissible evidence,” Ali told him. “Seeing the reports will allow us to know who was interviewed and what they were or weren’t asked. We’ll use that information to conduct our own interviews.”

  “You’re planning on doing interviews?” Stu asked, brightening slightly.

  “Absolutely. Since the cops won’t tell us what they know, we’ll need to start over and work the investigation on our own from the ground up. That includes tracking down Roger’s fellow passengers and any Whispering Star crew members who may have interacted with him prior to his death. Have you spoken to anyone from the cruise line?”

  Stu shook his head. “I was waiting to see what Detective Inspector Garza would say.”

  “Since that’s a bust, what do we know about Shining Star, other than the fact that their ships sail under a Panamanian flag?”

  Cami walked in just then and set a box of freshly made glazed doughnuts down on the table next to the laptop Stu was using.

  “I’ve been working the cruise line angle,” Cami answered as she opened the box and offered it to Stu. He reached into the box and took out one of the pastries. After a momentary pause, he collected a second one before Cami offered the box to Ali. “It turns out Shining Star’s US headquarters is just up the road from here in Las Vegas, Nevada,” Cami continued. “The reservation call center is located a few miles away in Henderson. I take it you didn’t get very far with Esteban Garza?” she added.

  Ali bit into her own doughnut before she answered. “You could say that,” she replied. “What about the cruise line? Do you think they’ll be more forthcoming?”

  “I doubt it,” Cami responded. “I tried talking to the legal department and passing it off as our doing a study of shipboard deaths. I didn’t get very far before the guy asked me straight out if my call had anything to do with Roger McGeary. As soon as I said yes, the conversation ended.”

  “They mentioned Roger by name?”

  “Yes.”

  “That means they’re worried about him for some reason,” Ali mused.

  “I agree,” Cami said. “I’ve done a careful media search on everything to do with Shining Star Cruises and its purported data breach. With the exception of a single blog posting in a professional cyber security journ
al, they’ve kept a tight lid on the whole situation. There was no public acknowledgment that Roger’s cruise was comped as a corporate thank-you. As for media coverage following Roger McGeary’s disappearance and presumed death? Not one of those referred back to his role in foiling the attack.”

  “Which means that as far as the cruise line is concerned,” Ali concluded, “mum’s the word. I’m guessing Detective Inspector Garza got that message loud and clear. That explains why he’s going to stonewall us and so are they. And since we’re unlikely to get any help on a corporate level, what do we know about the Whispering Star’s crew and Roger’s fellow passengers?”

  “I haven’t been able to lay hands on a crew member manifest. I know that they hire on with set contracts that may vary in duration from one crew member to another,” Cami answered. “In most cases they work for several months at a time and then take a month or so off.”

  “Does that mean that some of the folks who were working when Roger was there might still be on board?”

  “Some, if not all,” Cami said. “Why?”

  Ali did some quick calculating. “Where’s the Whispering Star right now?”

  Cami sat down in front of the nearest computer and did a quick search. “It leaves Southampton the day after tomorrow on a ten-day cruise from there to New York City. Why?”

  “Is there any space available on it?”

  “I guess. The notation on the sailing still says, ‘Request a quote.’ ”

  “Do that, then,” Ali said. “Request one. Since we’re not going to get any cooperation on a corporate level, we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way—on our own, with boots on the ground or, rather, boots on board. And it looks like you’re it, Cami. Do you happen to have a current passport?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Go on line and see if you can book space on that sailing. Once you’re on board, I want you to start asking questions. You’ll need to talk to anyone who remembers Roger McGeary. You can make up a connection of some kind. Maybe he was your brother’s roommate or best friend or something. Even though company suits aren’t going to want to talk about Roger, the regular working stiffs may be.”

  “I’m on it,” Cami said.

  Ali looked back at Stu. “Tell me about Roger’s computer. Did you get in?”

  Stu nodded. “Did,” he said.

  “Is there anything there that speaks to his state of mind? Was he depressed? Was there anything out of kilter in his life? A broken engagement, for example, or gambling debts or money problems of some kind?”

  “Nothing like that at all,” Stu said. “From what I saw, for the first time in Roger’s life, everything was pretty much in order, although for a period of time prior to all this he had been seeing a counselor regularly, a psychiatrist named Dr. Amelia Cannon. He had weekly sessions with her for the better part of two years, although he stopped seeing her several months before he died.”

  “Do we know why he was undergoing treatment?”

  “Probably about his mother,” Stu answered. “At least, that would be my guess. As Ms. Miller told us yesterday, the woman was a piece of work.”

  “And yet Roger kept the program from her funeral,” Ali observed. “A funeral he was unable to attend.”

  Stu nodded. “All Roger ever wanted was for his mother to like him. That’s what you always want the most—whatever it is that you can’t have.”

  Coming from Stuart Ramey, Ali regarded that as a very astute observation.

  12

  For a long time after Ali left the room, Stu simply sat in front of Roger’s laptop and stared uncomprehendingly at the screen. He was no longer combing through his dead friend’s life, looking for traces of what might have happened to him. In that moment Stu and Roger were kids again, back in his grandmother’s trailer in a run-down mobile home park just off South Central in Phoenix.

  Stu had no memory of his parents. They’d been killed by a drunk driver in a crash on I-10 when he was only three, leaving him to be raised by his paternal grandparents, Grace and Robert Ramey, Sr. His grandfather, a Korean War vet, was a double-amputee confined to a wheelchair, but he vehemently objected to the term “disabled.” Together he and Grace managed the mobile home park where they lived, exchanging work for rent. That was where they had raised their son, Robert, Jr., and where they would raise Junior’s son, Stuart, as well.

  In fact, Stu Ramey’s first memories were of tearing full speed down his grandfather’s wheelchair ramp in a Big Wheel, with his grandfather always encouraging him to go ever faster while his grandmother worried about broken necks and/or glasses, which Stu had to wear from age three on.

  Their shabby living room had always been comfy but crowded, primarily due to two items in particular—an immense old upright piano and an equally large Magnavox TV console. The TV set was seldom on, and when it was, the colored images were so faded as to be almost invisible. The piano, however, had been his grandmother’s pride and joy.

  Once a year, a blind man named Mr. Abel had come to the house to tune it. Whenever he arrived, driven there first by his wife and in later years by his son, Grace would greet him as an honored guest. She always served coffee and homemade chocolate chip cookies when the piano tuner showed up, and always insisted that the old man take some of the cookies home with him when he left.

  After Mr. Abel’s departure, Grace would settle down at the piano and play to her heart’s content, reveling in the familiar tunes from the dog-eared collection of sheet music she kept stored in the piano bench. One day, when Stuart was five, after ending her post-tuning concert with “Mr. Sandman,” Grace had gone to the kitchen to finish making dinner. While she stood at the stove mashing a pot of potatoes, the music had resumed with a somewhat halting version of the song she’d just been playing. She’d gone to the door of the kitchen and was astonished to see that Stuart had clambered up on the stool. Playing by ear, the child was plunking out a credible version of what he’d just heard.

  And that’s how Stuart Ramey had learned to play the piano—by listening to and duplicating the music his grandmother played on the piano and listened to on the radio, leaving him with a repertoire that made him a child out of time. Talented though he was, Stu never learned to read music. Nor was there ever a possibility of his signing up for band since appearing in a concert would have been completely beyond him.

  Grace adored her grandson, but Stuart had issues she couldn’t help him overcome. He was not affectionate and couldn’t tolerate being held or hugged. He had loved the Big Wheel, but other toys didn’t interest him. Grace tried reading stories and books to him, but he preferred going off by himself—often to the back of his closet—where he would sit alone, rocking back and forth, for hours on end. He didn’t start talking until age four. After skipping the baby talk stage entirely, when he did speak—which was seldom, even at home—it was in complete sentences.

  Once Grace enrolled him in school, things got worse. At school he refused to speak at all. He simply sat in classrooms and stared off into space. He wouldn’t respond to questions or participate in any way. Achievement tests? Out of the question. At a time when Asperger syndrome was barely a blip on the public education radar, school officials, stymied on assessing Stuart’s intellectual abilities, decided he was stupid and dumped him in special ed, which was where his life changed when he met Roger McGeary.

  They were like two peas in a pod—two very smart but emotionally challenged kids who refused to participate in classroom give-and-take. Teachers, faced with two kids who refused to take part in class, necessarily focused on children who were more prone to acting out. Roger and Stu—sitting in silence, soaking up everything, and revealing nothing—didn’t garner much attention. Left to their own devices, they developed a fierce friendship. They communicated in a kind of Morse code, conversing in plain sight by using the ends of their pencils to tap out messages no one else in the classroom could
understand.

  Their family homes were geographically close but worlds apart economically. Desert Mobile Park, where Stu’s now widowed grandmother was still in charge, was located on Cody. Roger lived a few blocks south of that in a new and much more upscale neighborhood on the far side of West Roeser.

  By the beginning of seventh grade, Roger routinely came home with Stu after school and hung out there until nearly dark—reading comics, playing games, eating Grace out of house and home, and occasionally even doing homework. Since Stu’s grandmother couldn’t afford to buy video games, Roger would smuggle his Nintendo console and games out of the house and bring them to Stu’s. The fact that the boys were both pudgy and wore glasses was no deterrent to their ability to wage superhero warfare on video screens. Grateful that Stuart had a friend at last, Grace didn’t complain about Roger’s hanging around, although she did wonder about it.

  “Why don’t you ever go to Roger’s house to play?” Grace asked one day when she found that the leftovers she had planned to use for dinner had somehow disappeared during afternoon snack time.

  “His mother doesn’t like him,” Stu had answered.

  “His mother doesn’t like him?” Grace repeated. “That’s ridiculous. Mothers always love their children.”

  “His doesn’t,” Stu insisted stubbornly. “And she’s mean to him all the time.”

  “What about Roger’s father?”

  “He’s okay, I guess,” Stu said, “but he’s hardly ever there. Roger’s mother doesn’t like him, either.”

  Recognizing that the two social outcasts were good for each other, Grace Ramey simply fed them and let them be. During the summer, when Roger was going up to Payson to spend time with his Aunt Julia and asked if Stu could come along, too, Grace had been overjoyed. Sending him to summer camp was completely beyond her budget, so having him spend those two weeks at the ranch was a real blessing.

  Then came high school and a new version of hell. At that point some other well-meaning school administrator decided that special ed students needed to be “mainstreamed” and dumped the two outcasts into the regular high school population. Everybody still knew who was “special” and who wasn’t. Routine hazing that had previously been confined to after-school hours now went on each and every day, all day long.