Man Overboard

by J. A. Jance

  In many ways, they resembled an old married couple, maintaining a certain measure of distance between them. Dinnertime conversation was limited to polite but idle small talk punctuated by occasional bouts of bickering. The complex set of trusts Harold established prior to his death had stood them both in good stead. When Irene died, the house and everything remaining in her portion would go to Owen, but he was in no rush to come into possession of his inheritance. His mother could be annoying as all hell at times, but she was handy to have around, primarily because she oversaw the household arrangements, leaving him free to attend to his own pursuits.

  “I’ll be away this weekend,” he said, when cocktails were over and they were seated across from one another at the long formal table in the dining room.

  “Really?” Irene asked. “Where are you going?”

  “Atlanta,” he said. “A friend of mine is getting married.”

  “Getting married?” Irene repeated, looking genuinely surprised. “I thought all your friends must be confirmed old bachelors by now, just like you. Who is it?”

  “His name’s Fred. You wouldn’t know him. We met over the Internet. He does the same kind of work I do. The wedding’s on Saturday afternoon. I fly out tomorrow.”

  “All right, then,” Irene said. “Be sure to leave a note for Pierre so he knows he’ll only be cooking for one. When will you get back?”

  “Sunday most likely,” he told her, “but don’t be surprised if I end up staying an extra day or two.”

  When dinner was over that night, Irene was more than slightly tipsy as she made her way to the newly installed elevator that gave her easy access to her upstairs suite of rooms. Worried about her unfortunate habit of smoking in bed, Owen had insisted on installing a state-of-the-art fire-suppression system throughout the house, including a series of commercial-grade fire doors. If his mother decided to turn herself into toast some night, he was determined that Irene wouldn’t take Frigg down in the process.

  He wanted his AI alive and growing and working inside his powerful network of linked computers, humming away in the basement and growing smarter by the minute. That’s how things were at the moment, and that’s how Owen Hansen wanted them to stay.

  14

  When Joel had popped the question at midnight on New Year’s Eve, Beth hadn’t needed to think it over. She said yes without a moment’s hesitation. They had hooked up the previous summer when Marissa had dragged Beth, kicking and screaming, to a Fourth of July party at Four Mile Beach in Santa Cruz.

  “Who all will be there?” Beth had asked.

  “You know,” Marissa had said. “The usual.”

  “The usual” meant second-generation members of Silicon Valley’s royalty—the sons and daughters of the tech pioneers from the seventies, eighties, and nineties. They were children of privilege who had been raised with far more money than good sense. Some of their fathers had risen to fame and fortune and gone on to be household names. Others, like Beth’s father, Richard Powell, rose only to crash to earth in spectacular fashion. Richard had created an X-ray photolithography process, something that would have made him a household name, too. Except it had been stolen away and patented by someone who had supposedly been Richard’s best friend.

  Richard had bet everything he owned on being able to bring the process to market, and when he lost control of it, he’d lost the farm. On the day his former partner’s company went public with what was then the largest IPO ever, Richard went out to his workshop and swilled down as many glasses of antifreeze-laced iced tea as it took to do the job. He’d left his wife, Molly, and his ten-year-old daughter, Beth, a fairly good-sized set of life insurance benefits, but that was about it.

  Beth had loved her father to distraction and laid the blame for his passing squarely on her own very narrow shoulders. Had she been a better daughter, her father wouldn’t have died. Molly, caught up in her own difficulties, didn’t immediately grasp how terribly Richard’s death had impacted her daughter. Two years later and after a whirlwind romance, Molly had married one of Richard’s fraternity brothers, Del Wordon. Del, a forty-something bachelor with no desire for children of his own, adored Molly and doted on Beth, legally adopting her on the occasion of her twelfth birthday.

  Unfortunately, the unconditional love of both her mother and stepfather wasn’t enough to keep Beth from embarking on a self-destructive path, but after almost two decades of trying, they had finally succeeded in getting her the help she needed. Dr. Amelia Cannon had been a godsend to all of them. It was during Beth’s weekly counseling sessions with the psychiatrist when Beth had finally begun to see the light. For years people had told her that her father’s death had nothing to do with her, but Dr. Cannon was the one who had made her believe it.

  Dr. Cannon was the first and only person who had understood and validated everything Beth had to say. Yes, the intervening years had been tough, but they had taught Beth valuable lessons that could prove to be a benefit to a whole new generation of children dealing with similar problems. With Dr. Cannon’s encouragement and with financial aid from Del and Molly, Beth had recently been accepted into the graduate school at Stanford, intent on pursuing a PhD in psychology with her first classes due to start the following September.

  And that was where she had been, late on that Fourth of July afternoon a little over a year earlier—hopeful and purposeful both—and feeling like, for the first time, she was finally pointed in the right direction. The party had turned out to be about what she expected—a bit on the wild side with plenty of food and drink to go around and plenty of substances—legal and otherwise—changing hands. Then, suddenly, she ran into Joel.

  She recognized him at once, even though the last time they’d seen each other or spoken had been the night of Beth’s junior/senior prom. He’d taken her to Armando’s for a pre-prom dinner, where she’d eaten everything in sight and then spent the next half hour closeted in the restroom while she barfed it all up. When they finally made it to the dance, she’d been too sick to go inside.

  “Hey, look who’s here,” Joel said, smiling and raising a soda can in her direction. “Long time no see. Care to join us?”

  Beth leveled a scathing look at Marissa. Obviously she had known Joel would be here and had suckered Beth into coming along. Marissa answered with a grin and a noncommittal shrug and immediately walked off with someone else.

  “What’s your poison?” he asked, opening a nearby cooler.

  “Do you have any Diet Coke?” she asked.

  He pulled a can of it out of a cooler, offered it to her, and then gestured to the vacant camp stool next to him. “Take a load off,” he said. “I won’t bite.”

  When she sat down on the stool, it sank so far into the sand that it almost spilled her over backward. By the time Joel helped right her, they were both laughing.

  “See there?” he said. “Obviously we’re meant for each other. You’re already head over heels.”

  And the truth was, they were meant for each other. The party went on around them. They roasted hot dogs over a portable butane stove and ate with mustard and ketchup dribbling down their respective chins. They roasted marshmallows over open flames as well and ate them, burned to a crisp, straight off the stick. And they talked. God, how they talked—while the sun went down and while the fireworks were blasting into the sky. They were still talking when Marissa said it was late and she needed to leave, and she didn’t seem the least bit surprised when Beth said she’d like to hang around a little longer because Joel had offered to take her home.

  Other than Dr. Cannon, Beth had never spoken to or listened to any other individual the way she did with Joel, not even her best friend, Marissa, who knew some of the truth about Beth but not nearly all of it.

  From the beginning she and Joel talked about real stuff without either of them seeming to pull any punches. Joel had gone to college, graduated second in his class from law
school, gotten hired by a local law firm, married, had two kids, and made partner. So far so good. Then it had blown up in his face. He’d found out that his wife, Corrine, was cheating on him—not just once but multiple times—with one of the senior partners from his firm. The subsequent divorce had not only ended his marriage, but also derailed what had once been a promising legal career.

  “I couldn’t believe it when the court gave Corrine full custody of the boys,” Joel said. “Could not believe it. How could the legal system I worked for and believed in do something that screwed up? When the firm offered me a buyout, I took it. Then I got drunk and stayed that way for the next three years. But now I’m starting over. I’ve got a new job. Between child support and back child support, I barely make enough to pay my rent. Corrine remarried—not to the original guy she was screwing around with. She married someone else, but she’s still holding me up for child support.”

  He paused, reached into the pocket of his shorts, and pulled out a coin that he handed over to Beth.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “It’s my one-year sobriety chip,” he said. “As of today, I’ve been off the sauce for exactly one year. I went to a meeting and got the chip before I came to the picnic.” He paused and grinned at her. “Between getting the chip and meeting up with you again, I don’t know which is the better deal.”

  Later, after they’d helped reload all the camping gear, they sat in the parking lot of the campground and talked some more. Now it was Beth’s turn to tell her story. She had never spoken to anyone other than Marissa and Dr. Cannon about her father’s suicide. She told Joel about all of it—about her battle with anorexia, including that ill-fated prom date, and about the cutting, too. As the sun came peeking up over the horizon behind them, she pulled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt and showed him the scars.

  “I’m sorry,” was all he said, running his index finger gently across the webs of raised lines in her flesh. “I’m so very sorry.”

  He didn’t ask her to marry him until almost six months later, but from that moment on, Beth Wordon knew for sure that if he ever did get around to asking, she was bound to say yes.

  15

  As the plane rumbled down the long taxiway, Cami Lee settled into her business class seat on British Airways, closed her eyes, and felt like pinching herself to make sure this was real—that she wasn’t just making the whole thing up.

  Camille Lee had grown up in the Bay Area. Much to her parents’ dismay, she had wanted to be a detective for as long as she could remember. Now in a very real way, she was one. Not as a cop and not as a licensed private eye, either, but an investigator nonetheless. And this was her first solo assignment—an international solo assignment. Her perpetually feuding parents, both of them hard-core academics, would have been appalled, but too bad. Cami was living the life she wanted as opposed to the life they had wanted for her.

  There had been a single available business class seat on today’s British flight out of Phoenix, and she and Ali had been able to grab it. That meant Cami was on her way to the UK, and due to arrive a full day before the cruise was scheduled to depart. The overnight flight would put her at Heathrow early tomorrow afternoon. Ali had arranged for a driver to meet Cami at the airport and take her to a hotel in Southampton where she would spend the night before boarding the Whispering Star on Friday. Once they had nailed down the cabin on the ship as well as the flight, Cami headed home to pack. She had then caught the shuttle to Phoenix in time to catch the 7:30 p.m. flight.

  She had arrived at Sky Harbor three hours before her scheduled departure and well over the two-hour suggested minimum for international flights. What she hadn’t counted on was the fact that TSA took a very dim view of people purchasing last-minute one-way tickets to the UK. At the check-in counter, her passport was examined in minute detail. Her checked luggage was pulled aside and gone through item by item before being thoroughly swabbed for explosives. Ditto for items in her carry-on luggage. She’d had to turn on and boot up all three of her electronic devices—her phone, laptop, and iPad—to prove they were operational. As for Cami herself? She went through the regular machine screening and was then pulled aside for a pat down and a separate interview as well. When she entered the interview room, she was dismayed to find that the luggage she had previously checked was there waiting for her.

  For the first time Cami began to wonder if her name had somehow mistakenly turned up on the No Fly List. Maybe she wasn’t going anywhere at all.

  Sergeant Croy, the pudgy and balding uniformed man seated behind the interview desk, someone who easily outweighed Cami three times over, stared first at her boarding pass and then at another document that she eventually recognized as a printed copy of the ticket purchase.

  “You bought this today?” he demanded. “Why so late?”

  Cami shrugged. “Because I didn’t know I was going until just this morning. My cruise leaves the day after tomorrow, and this flight gets me there a day early.”

  “You’re going on a cruise and you just now found out about it? Most people plan their cruises years in advance.”

  She didn’t want to mention anything at all about the Roger McGeary situation. Things were already complicated enough.

  “It was purchased through a Web site, a company called Late Breaking Cruises,” Cami explained. “They gave us a smoking deal.”

  “I’ll just bet,” Croy muttered irritably. “It says here the ticket was purchased by an outfit named High Noon Enterprises. Who are they?”

  “My employers,” she answered. “Up in Cottonwood.”

  “And they’re sending you on a cruise?”

  Cami thought about Roger McGeary being given his reward cruise by Shining Star Cruises. That hadn’t worked out very well—at least not for him. “It’s a bonus,” she said. “Like an award for work well done.”

  “Right,” he said. “So why only a one-way ticket? People who buy one-way tickets tend to be problematic.”

  Cami was doing her best to rein in her temper, but it was starting to get the best of her. “Because I’m returning to the US by ship,” she replied.

  “So tell me about this last-minute cruise. What kind of cruise is it? From where to where?”

  “From Southampton to New York City on board the Whispering Star.”

  “Where all does it stop?”

  Cami was stumped. The whole idea of this venture was to place her on the ship so she could ask questions about Roger McGeary. She knew the cruise’s embarkation and disembarkation points. As far as the stops in between went? She had no idea.

  “I’d like to see your cruise documents, if you please,” Croy said, holding out a beefy fist.

  The only documentation Cami had for the cruise itself was a single confirmation-of-travel e-mail from Late Breaking Cruises. She had the document on her iPad, but she hadn’t bothered printing it. She handed Croy the device with the requested confirmation open on the screen.

  He read through it and frowned. “I’m going to need some verification of this. Is there any way to get in touch with these people other than e-mail?”

  Cami took the iPad back, located Last Minute’s contact information, and read off the toll-free number. Once Croy dialed it in, it seemed to take forever to get through the call-center queue. He sat on hold, cleaning his fingernails and looking as though he hadn’t a care in the world, while Cami stewed in her own juices—glancing nervously at her watch as her scheduled 7:30 departure time drew nearer and nearer. She wasn’t a terrorist, but she was certainly being treated like one, and she was on fire with resentment. Being given the third degree by a fifty-something bullying bureaucrat wasn’t doing much to make the world a safer place.

  Finally Croy got through to a live person at Last Minute. After several long-winded exchanges he was finally satisfied. “All right, then,” he said, slamming down the receiver and giving Cami a final glare. “You�
�re free to go.”

  “What about my luggage?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

  With little hope that her checked luggage would make it, Cami took her carry-on and raced from the interview room, reaching the gate bare moments before the ground agent closed the jetway door. She was the last passenger to board. As she settled into her seat, alerts from a series of arriving e-mails dinged in her phone. She glanced at them long enough to see that they were all encrypted files from Stuart. She had time enough to open her computer and download the files, but no time to read them, at least not then. Instead she sent Stu a text message:

  On the plane. Almost didn’t make it because of TSA. The guy was a complete jackass. Got your files. Will read later. Have to turn off the computer now.

  It seemed to take forever for the plane to gain enough altitude, but when the bell rang announcing that computers could now be used on board, Cami pulled hers out, turned it on, called up the first file, and turned on the decryption program. Then, with a glass of champagne at hand, she opened the file, which happened to be labeled: Sólo para uso autorizado. Beneath that were the words: Policía Nacional de Panamá.

  Cami had no idea how Stuart had laid hands on Detective Inspector Esteban Garza’s official reports, and it was probably just as well she didn’t. There was a good possibility that by simply reading the words both she and Stu were breaking several international treaties, but read she did.

  It turned out that transcripts of all of Detective Inspector Garza’s interviews were there. The files indicated that most of the interviews conducted on board the ship had been videoed, and the ones done by phone with Roger’s fellow employees at Cyber Resources in California had utilized Skype. Cami suspected that most of the interviews had been conducted in English initially before the contents had been transcribed into Spanish, typed, and placed in the file.