Murder Times Two

by Diana X Dunn

  She breathed deeply and then took a long slow look around the room, deliberately and obviously avoiding looking at the bed. She took her time, trying to take in everything that she could, checking and rechecking every surface that was visible. Just about the entire room had been cleared, presumably by the police. Several chairs and small tables had been removed along with the nightstand and her few personal items.

  Her photo cube from the bedside table that showed the photos of her made-up family was gone. So were the paper and pens from the desk that supplied by Max anyway. Odd bottles of perfume and hand cream that she knew she’d left lying around had all been taken. Some of those things had been out of place when she discovered the body, but there was no way now to double-check what Chrystal or the murderer had disturbed. She shook her head.

  “The police appear to have taken everything that was in here,” she said. “That is, I don’t remember the room being this empty when I found the body, so I assume the police have cleared it out.”

  Luke nodded. “Everything in this room, except for the major furniture pieces, was taken as potential evidence,” he told her. “Do you have any idea what Chrystal was doing in your cabin?”

  “No,” Suzy shook her head. “I’ve been thinking about that since you asked me yesterday, but I can’t begin to imagine what she wanted in here.”

  “Any guesses on how she got in?”

  Suzy could only shake her head again. “I’m not sure how good the security is on board,” she lied. She knew the security system inside and out and she knew that it was one of the most modern and sophisticated available. “I don’t know if it would have been easy for her to get in or not.”

  She paused for a moment, and then acted as if she had suddenly remembered something. “Max said that she’d let herself into his cabin as well, that same day,” she said, her tone deliberately suggesting that the memory had just come flooding back to her.

  “He did?”

  “Yeah, when we were having drinks that evening. He told me that after his meetings that afternoon he’d taken a shower, and when he came out Chrystal was in his bed naked.”

  Luke grabbed his M-ped and quickly scanned through a few pages of notes. “It must have slipped his mind,” Luke told her. “I’d better talk to him about it, though.”

  Suzy nodded. “Can I peek in the bathroom and the closet, just to see if anything looks strange in either of those places?”

  Luke nodded. Suzy assumed that he wasn’t in any hurry to confront a man as important as Maximilian Hart, even over a simple case of forgetfulness.

  Suzy took a quick look at in the closet and gasped. “Um, Luke,” she said quietly, “I think I know what Chrystal was doing in my room.”

  Luke joined her in the closet doorway. “What?”

  Suzy looked at him in surprise. “Look,” she suggested, pointing to the dresses that were still all hanging neatly on their hangers.

  Luke looked more closely and then frowned. He took a step forward and pulled the nearest dress off the rack. Up close, it was obvious that the dress had been neatly slit its entire length, leaving only a bit of fabric at the very top and bottom to hold it together and keep it on its hanger.

  He slipped gloves out of a pocket and put them on. Then he flipped carefully through the entire rack. Every single dress seemed to have the same damage. “The crime scene staff didn’t notice this,” he said almost to himself.

  “I suppose it isn’t all the obvious at first glance,” Suzy remarked. She knew the dresses well, so it was evident to her, but even Luke had had to look twice.

  “No, it really isn’t,” Luke agreed, “and they were focused in the bedroom, rather than in here.”

  Suzy thought carefully about her next comment. She didn’t want to appear to be telling Luke how to do his job, but she wasn’t sure that he was connecting the same dots that she was.

  “Do you think that she brought the knife with her then? To do this?”

  Luke blinked twice. “What makes you think that?” he countered.

  “I don’t know,” Suzy confessed. “I know she brought it with her or the murderer did, because it wasn’t mine. I suspect she was the one who cut up my clothes, because I can’t imagine anyone else doing it. I guess I just put two and two together. Maybe I got five by mistake, I don’t know.”

  “I suspect you added up correctly,” Luke admitted.

  “I’ll just look at the bathroom,” Suzy suggested.

  Luke nodded, following her closely as she stepped into the cavernous space. She looked around slowly. Something seemed off, but she couldn’t quite figure out what it was. She took a deep breath and then closed her eyes. She counted backwards from ten, calming her nerves and focusing her attention. When she opened her eyes, she ran them over the space again.

  “Some of my toiletries have been moved,” she told Luke.

  “What do you mean?”

  “After I took my shower, before I got dressed for dinner, I left all the bottles in the shower in order and now they’ve been moved around.”

  “You have an order for the bottles in your shower?” Luke said, sounding surprised.

  Suzy laughed. “I suppose that sounds a bit, um, obsessive or something,” she admitted. “I often keep my eyes closed for long periods in the shower and I like to know that the bottles are in the same order all the time so I can reach for one and know what I’ve gotten without opening my eyes.” And so I can be sure that no one has tampered with anything, she added silently.

  Luke nodded slowly. “I guess I better get everything checked out by the lab,” he told her. He pulled out his M-ped again and tapped the screen a few times. “Again, the crime scene people were focused on the bedroom. I doubt they did much more than glance in here.”

  Suzy knew that if she had been in charge of the investigation every single item in every part of the suite would have been checked over and tested, but then Michael often accused her of being obsessive.

  “I’d be willing to bet that you’ll find something that shouldn’t be in there in at least one of those bottles,” Suzy told Luke.

  “Like what?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if there is something that causes hair loss in the shampoo, for instance,” Suzy told him. “Maybe even something as dramatic as acid in the body wash.”

  “But that would give anyone using it a nasty burn,” Luke frowned.

  “Exactly,” Suzy replied.

  “I’m starting to really dislike this Chrystal Sands.”

  “I was way ahead of you on that,” Suzy told him.

  Luke escorted her out of the room and back into the corridor as crop of crime scene technicians arrived. He asked her to wait for a moment while he went back in with them and gave them their instructions. When he rejoined Suzy, she smiled at him.

  “It’s lunchtime,” she told him.

  “Will Mr. Hart be at lunch?”

  “I’m not sure, but you have to eat,” she suggested. “If he isn’t there, he’ll probably still be in bed, and it isn’t like he’s going anywhere. You might as well wait and talk to him after lunch.”

  Luke nodded. As it happened, they were the only two in the dining room for lunch. Captain Grayson had gone ashore with a police escort to fill out the necessary paperwork for their docking privileges. Marta informed them that Max was having a business lunch with Henry and that she hadn’t seen either Genifer or Peter yet that day. Suzy and Luke tucked into a five-course feast that further threatened Suzy’s waistline.

  They chatted in a friendly fashion about every little nothing that either could think of that was inconsequential enough to be safe. Suzy found herself really liking the man as she got to know him better. As the meal wrapped up, he opened up to her about his past. She found out about his rough upbringing with an alcoholic mom in a slum outside of Los Angeles. That he had managed to escape his uncertain future to become a successful policeman was a huge accomplishment. She shuddered as he told her about his former partner who’d been sho
t in front of him and his subsequent decision to give up police work just before the job offer from SunInc had materialized.

  She was intrigued when he mentioned briefly that he was getting tired of working on SunInc and looking for new challenges. The SunInc Police Department was run by a commissioner who was a public relations expert, not a cop. Luke explained that he was getting tired of priorities being shifted for publicity reasons, rather than for good policing.

  Suzy made a mental note to talk to Michael about the man. He seemed as if he might be a good fit for the agency, assuming he was as clever as he appeared. As they talked, she volunteered very little about her own background, just a few casual remarks about her wealthy parents and their unrealistic expectations for herself and her siblings. She knew he’d run a full scan on her. No doubt he had checked out every single person on the ship, from the captain and crew through Maximilian Hart and every one of his guests. She suspected that he’d be examining her file more closely before the day was over.

  After lunch Luke headed off to find Max for an overdue chat and Suzy returned to her cabin. She was bored and restless, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. After changing into one of the new bikinis that had been delivered, she headed up to the deck. One of the wait staff was able to scrounge up an old M-ped that had been left behind by a previous guest. All of their data and applications had been wiped, of course, but at least it provided her with a window to the outside world.

  She quickly searched the WorldNet to see what the news had to say about the murder. It was disappointing but not surprising to find absolutely no coverage. Max had good enough connections to suppress just about any type of publicity. With nothing else to do, she amused herself by searching for each of her traveling companions on the device.

  This trip to The Mirage had happened fairly short notice, as soon as the agency received word that Peter was joining the ship. She hadn’t had time to do a full search on the rest of the passengers. Since she had been on board, she’d avoided spending too much time on her M-ped, wanting to look every bit the lazy spoiled woman her character was meant to be. Now she was regretting that she hadn’t done more research.

  Chrystal Sands had a huge presence on WorldNet, advertising her services as an actress and model. Suzy flipped through page after page of glossy photos of the woman, struck anew by her beauty. Suzy studied one close-up photo for a long time, noting the tiny marks that indicated that the photo had been retouched after it was taken. Those touch-ups presumably concealed the more obvious marks of the surgeries and procedures that Chrystal had had over the years. Suzy ran a hand over her own face. Even an up-close inspection of her makeup-less face would not reveal any similar defects. Her agency paid for the best treatments available. It was obvious that Chrystal had had at least some of her work done much more cheaply.

  A read-through of Chrystal’s biography told her exactly nothing. The wording was deliberately vague, talking about a difficult childhood where she’d been bullied for her looks and years of struggle before she’d achieved success. If Suzy had had proper computer access, she could have discovered a lot more, but this bland public face told her more than Chrystal had intended it to do. It was obvious to Suzy, with her vast experience in creating identities, that Chrystal was an invented persona. The name itself was a huge giveaway. Suzy didn’t believe that anyone was actually named Chrystal Sands.

  It wasn’t possible to tell, from the WorldNet profile, whether Chrystal had created the persona but maintained another real identity elsewhere or if she had changed herself into Chrystal at some point and shed her past. Suzy was frustrated by the information that she couldn’t access. It was a very new experience being cut off from her agency’s sources.

  Max Hart’s public profile was much more straightforward, but then Suzy knew that already. Part of her job in maintaining Suzy’s identity was keeping track of the man. Max had hundreds of pages filled with photos of himself at various events, especially charitable ones. Suzy grinned as she watched Max looking older and then younger and then older again in a continuing cycle over the past ten years or so. From the photos, she could date each of his refreshing surgeries, if she wanted to. She glanced through the official list of businesses that he owned, checking to see if he owned anything on SunInc. It didn’t appear that he did, but he had so many holding companies and investment firms that it was hard to be sure. Without her personal M-ped, she couldn’t find out anything more.

  Henry Martin didn’t officially exist on WorldNet. Suzy spent a few minutes looking into the company that he owned but found nothing of interest. Peter Palmer was a different story. He had several pages of boring information about his company. He had, apparently, built it up from next to nothing into a massive enterprise that was going to change the world. Suzy read through a few pages of reviews from people who had worked with his company in the past. After the third page she stopped, recognizing the same three or four authors writing over and over again. If the man was going to have his own public relations department write his reviews, he should hire more talented writers who could effectively change their writing style.

  Randy Lloyd was only a blip on the WorldNet, appearing here and there as a companion to first one rich man and then another. For the last few years there were only a very small number of mentions of him, always in the company of Max Hart. Suzy searched for Genifer Hart and read through the sad story of her parents’ tragic racing accident and her subsequent adoption by her late mother’s younger brother. Beyond that there was just a series of photos of the woman falling out of various nightclubs in different expensive outfits, flashing her perfectly toned body at every camera and onlooker. With her, too, Suzy could track the dates of the various surgical enhancements the woman had undergone.

  Out of interest Suzy scanned for Marta Rose and John Grayson as well. She knew quite a bit about them already because they had both been with Max for many years. Marta was mentioned once on Genifer’s profile, credited with saving the devastated orphan from her endless despair. She was also mentioned once in Max’s profile as the only person he felt he could ever fully trust. Suzy could well believe that, knowing the sort of money-hungry vultures that Max usually attracted. Captain Grayson did not appear anywhere, except for a single mention dating from when Max bought The Mirage and hired him to act as captain.

  Finally she tapped in Luke’s name and waited to see what she might find. A handful of news articles appeared, related to the death of his partner. Suzy read through them quickly. Everything in them was pretty much exactly as Luke had described it. The only detail that he’d left out was that his partner on the police force had also been his partner off-duty. The young woman who died, Carly Stein, had been twenty-two and a fairly new recruit to the homicide division.

  One article had an extended interview with Carly’s mother. The woman talked about how happy her daughter had been with her promotion and in her new relationship with her handsome partner. According to the article, Luke and Carly had just set a date for a legal partnership ceremony and were already making arrangements for starting a baby at a nearby ex-utero clinic.

  Suzy shut off the device and sat back in her deckchair. She frowned and then got up and headed into the kitchen. She poured herself a large drink from the kitchen refrigerator, gulping half of it in a single swallow. Feeling angry with herself for feeling so emotionally involved in a story that had nothing to do with her, she finished the drink and then headed reluctantly back to her cabin for a tablet to counteract its effects. She was working and she needed to keep herself at her best, even if she felt like getting drunk and being alone.

  The rest of the afternoon passed slowly as Suzy sunned herself on the deck, drinking and watching the comings and goings on SunInc. The neutralizing agent ensured that she didn't feel the effects of the drink she kept continually refilled beside her. Eventually it was time to get ready for dinner and she felt cooler and more in control after a long shower. She dressed carefully, choosing a long strapless gow
n in a sea green color that brought out her eyes. Her sparkly silver shoes were too high to be comfortable, but Suzy Barr always put style over comfort.

  Luke and Max were already in the dining room when Suzy arrived. She greeted them both coolly and fixed herself a random drink. Max was working his way through something purple and Suzy was surprised to see that Luke was holding a glass full of something that looked equally intoxicating.

  The trio chatted about nothing as the other guests slowly gathered. Henry looked annoyed with the world when he arrived and his mood didn't seem to improve as he steadily downed two successive glasses of some fruity punch. Peter and Genifer arrived together, suddenly looking far friendlier than they had even a day earlier. Randy was nearly late, but he seemed to be in an expansive mood, hugging Suzy when he arrived and then greeting the others extravagantly. Captain Grayson arrived just before Marta announced dinner.

  Genifer slid into her seat on Max's left, winking at Peter as he took the seat on her other side. Randy quickly claimed the seat on Max's right, patting the chair next to him and calling out to Suzy. "Come sit with me, darling," he coaxed.

  Suzy shot Luke an apologetic look before joining Randy. Luke immediate followed, quickly taking the seat on the opposite side of Suzy. Randy raised an eyebrow at that and then winked at Suzy.

  "Looks like you've gotten yourself an admirer," he whispered loudly to Suzy.

  Suzy considered a dozen possible replies and then decided to ignore the remark. Marta served the first course as Henry and Captain Grayson dropped into the remaining chairs. For a few moments everyone focused on eating and drinking, but the silence felt more companionable tonight than it had the previous two evenings.

  Conversation seemed to flow easily as the evening continued. Randy regaled them all with stories about the tacky clothes and odd behavior that he had seen on SunInc as he watched from his safety of his cabin. Luke listened to the descriptions, adding his own horror stories on occasion. The remarks kept the conversation light and meaningless until dessert. As everyone dug into their lemon mousse, Max stood up.