Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “You say Leila’s baby is a he. Are you implying that they’ve already had this fetus tested, too?”

  “That’s what Melissa told me. It’s no surprise. Of course Harrison had Leila’s baby tested. He isn’t a person who leaves such things to chance. If there’d been anything wrong, I’m sure he would have disposed of that baby the same way he did mine, the son of a bitch!”

  I have one of those little ELPH cameras—the tiny ones with a built-in flash and autofocus. Jeremy and Kelly gave it to me last Christmas, probably so it would be easier to have a camera around when it’s time to take pictures of little Kayla, my granddaughter. When I turn the camera on and line it up to take a picture, it whirs and the picture moves into focus. And that’s what happened for me right then with Margaret Featherman. The focus shifted, and I saw her and her overweening anger against her ex-husband in an entirely different light.

  “That’s why you went back to school, isn’t it?” I said. “That’s why you got yourself a Ph.D. in genetics, and it’s why you’ve been at Genesis ever since, working on the patch.”

  She nodded. “I had to do something. From the beginning, Chloe adored her father, and she didn’t want to have anything to do with me. And the truth is, I was so angry right then—with Harrison, with Chloe, and with the unfairness of it all—that I probably wasn’t much of a mother. But the two of them absolutely closed me out—two against one. It’s always been that way. When I finally figured that out, I decided the hell with it. That’s when I went back to school. It was a way of making some small good emerge from my own terrible tragedy. I’ve spent almost every waking moment since trying to salvage something from my life and to find a way to keep the same thing from happening to someone else.”

  “Is it going to work?” I asked.

  “The patch? I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I believe it will, and looking at the way our shares are selling, it sounds as though the investors believe it will, too. It’s a patented process, and if it turns out to be successful, it could have applications in other possible birth-defect situations as well as Down syndrome. The problem is, Genesis has always been a small, closely held company. In order to do all the required testing, in order to get FDA approval, we needed a massive infusion of capital, which now we seem to have.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not thanks to me at all. It’s thanks to a little boy who never got to take his first step or feel the sun on his face or smell the rain in the desert or open a stocking on Christmas morning. I never saw him or held him or touched him. Harrison even refused to give the baby a name. To him our child was never a baby, just a fetus. There wasn’t a funeral or a casket or a marker in a cemetery with his name on it. I gave him a name, though. In my heart I’ve always called him Alton James, after my father.”

  It was only a matter of minutes since I had followed Margaret Featherman out the door of the Quixote Club and up the stairs into Dulcie Wadsworth’s apartment. If anyone had told me that within that time I’d end up feeling so sorry for the woman that I’d have a lump in my throat, I would have told them they were crazy. And I would have been wrong.

  There were tears—real tears—in Margaret’s eyes as she told me about her lost child. Her grief was still right there, concealed under the brittle surface of her anger—the armor she used to keep other people from getting too close. As long as she maintained the tough facade, no one saw a second layer beneath it, the all-consuming hurt. In fact, most of the time, I’ll bet even Margaret failed to remember it. It’s called self-delusion. I might not have recognized it either, if I weren’t something of an expert at it myself.

  We fell quiet for a moment. From the bar below we felt rather than heard the steady thrum of bass booming through the Quixote Club’s loudspeakers. Dulcie Wadsworth had soundproofed her apartment well enough that none of the music leaked into the living quarters, but there was no way to shut out the thumping vibration.

  “Maybe I’m wrong in thinking Naomi’s the one who wanted me dead or hired someone to kill me,” Margaret continued at last. “I can’t see any motivation. And the same thing is true for Harrison as well—no motivation. But I still need to know who did it. Will you help me?”

  “Tell me what went on when this so-called waiter burst into your room. Try to remember everything that happened, everything that was said.”

  Margaret looked at me appraisingly. “You know about him?”

  I nodded. Instead of asking how I knew, she shuddered slightly and shifted gears. “He came in right after Naomi left—seconds after. That’s why I thought at first that she had let him in. The guy looked like someone from Room Service. He was carrying a tray with a covered dinner plate. I thought someone had ordered a treat and sent it to me as a surprise. So even if Naomi hadn’t left the door ajar, I probably would have let the guy in myself because he looked legitimate. He put the tray down on the table, but then, when he removed the cover from the plate, that’s when I saw the gun on the plate—a gun and a roll of duct tape. He picked up the gun and aimed it at me.

  “I said, ‘What are you, crazy? Put that thing down before somebody gets hurt.’ Instead, he waved the gun at me and said, ‘Pick up the tape.’ That’s when I realized it wasn’t a man at all. It was a woman dressed as a man.”

  “Was she wearing one of the ship’s uniforms?”

  “It looked like it, but I can’t say for sure. For all I know, the damned thing could have come from a costume-supply shop.”

  “What happened next?”

  “She told me to pick up the duct tape and cover my mouth. I thought she was going to shoot me. I was scared out of my wits, but I did as I was told. And all the while I kept backing up—trying to get away, I guess. Trying to put some distance between me and the barrel of that gun. I’d had the door to my lanai open, and when I came to the sill, I stepped over it and just kept backing. By the time I finished covering my mouth, I was right up against the rail. I was so frightened by then—my hands were shaking so badly—that it was all I could do to put the last piece of tape on my face.

  “That’s when she told me to jump. I wanted to argue with her, but my mouth was taped shut, and I couldn’t say a word. She said, ‘Jump,’ again, and then she said the strangest thing. She said, ‘Now it’s between you and God.’ Then she punched me in the shoulder. The next thing I knew, I was over the rail and falling.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I was right. The FBI is protecting the wrong Dr. Featherman.”

  “The FBI? What are you talking about?” Margaret demanded.

  “Have you ever heard of an organization called Leave It To God?”

  “Never. They sound like a bunch of oddballs.”

  “They’re a long way beyond odd,” I told her. “They’re cold-blooded killers. They’ve presented the FBI with a list of targeted doctors—the ones who are most involved in developing cutting-edge life-saving procedures. Two of those doctors on Leave It To God’s list are dead so far—both victims ofas-yet-unsolved homicides. So are two of those doctors’ patients. The FBI looked at the list and assumed all the names on it belonged to physicians. When the name Featherman turned up, they decided Harrison Featherman fit the bill and had to be the target. I doubt they even considered the possibility that Ph.D.s would be on the list.”

  “Or women,” Margaret added. “The Attorney General may be a woman, but that doesn’t mean that the guys who work for her—the ones in charge of running the FBI—aren’t a bunch of male chauvinists.”

  When she said that, it sounded as if the old hard-edged Margaret Featherman was back—the tough nut I had met in the dining room the first night of the cruise. And right at that moment, hard-edged was probably a good thing. Margaret needed to be tough about then.

  “We have a few things going for us,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “You’re not dead, for one. You’ve actually seen the person who tried to k
ill you, and you can probably identify her. All we need is a little time and luck, and maybe we can find her.”

  “What do you mean, ‘we’? I want to hire you so I won’t have to do anything. You don’t expect me to give her a second crack at me, do you? She made a believer out of me. She meant to kill me, and she would have if I hadn’t gotten the duct tape off and wasn’t such a good swimmer. Even so, I never would have made it to land. The shore was too far away and the water was too cold. It’s nothing but pure luck that a fishing boat showed up when it did. They appeared out of nowhere. I started splashing water so they’d see me, and when they seemed to be within hearing distance, I yelled my head off. The guys on board plucked me out of the water, dried me off, warmed me up, and brought me here.”

  “See there?” I said lightly. “That’s Leave It To God’s whole idea. They left it up to God, and God saved you. Obviously you were meant to live.”

  “Somehow I don’t find that idea especially comforting.”

  “Once the fishing crew pulled you out of the water, why didn’t they call the Coast Guard and let them know you were safe?”

  “I bribed them,” Margaret responded.

  “With what?”

  “With money—or the promise of it anyway. I gave them an IOU which I fully intend to honor as soon as I get back to Seattle. I told them I was sure my husband was the one who had tried to kill me—my husband and his girlfriend. It must have sounded plausible enough. I convinced them that if they took me back to the ship, the killers would simply try again.”

  “And they believed you?”

  “They must have. They brought me here, didn’t they? They told me that if I didn’t want to go to the cops, Dulcie Wadsworth was the only person they could think of who could help me. And she did. She gave me a place to stay. And when I told her about you, she said she’d figure out a way to bring you here. She did that, too.

  “I asked her how she was going to make it work since I didn’t think you’d ever been in Sitka before and that I doubted you’d know anything about it. She said, ‘Honey, I’m going to give the man a clue. If he isn’t smart enough to figure it out on his own, then he won’t be smart enough to help you, and we’ll need to find someone else.’ ”

  I was listening to her, but only half. With the other part of my brain, I was trying to come up with a plan. Leave It To God was a shadow organization. But if we could manage to bring down one of their operatives without alerting the entire organization that we were on to them, we might be able to penetrate their communications network and clean up the whole mess. As far as I could see, there was only one way to do that.

  “I want you to come back on board the ship,” I said.

  Margaret looked stricken. “You what?”

  “I want you back on the Starfire Breeze long enough to see if you can spot the killer and point her out to me.”

  Margaret was shaking her head before I even finished making my pitch. “Oh, no,” she said. “Not on your life. How do I point her out without her seeing me?”

  I thought about Antonio Belvaducci and his darkened room lined with security monitors, the ones showing what was going on in public areas all over the ship. The woman who had attacked Margaret Featherman had been careful to keep her face hidden from the lens of the nearest camera as she burst into Margaret’s room, but she wouldn’t be so careful as long as she thought her victim safely dead. With Margaret out of the way, her killer’s identity was safe.

  “The Starfire Breeze has a state-of-the-art security system,” I explained. “When you went over the side, one of the video cameras caught you falling, duct tape and all. That’s how we knew what had happened to you wasn’t suicide and it wasn’t an accident, either. Those videotapes are kept intact for the duration of the cruise. Whoever did this is either a passenger on the ship or a member of the crew. You’ll be able to find her because her face is bound to be there. All you have to do is keep looking, and you don’t have to do that looking in public, either. I’ll talk to Captain Giacometti. You should be able to watch those tapes in the privacy of the ship’s security room. There’s no way the killer can get to you there, unless she really is a member of the crew.”

  “She’s not,” Margaret Featherman declared. “I’m sure of that.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I didn’t decide to come on the cruise at all until just three weeks ago. I heard Harrison was going to be on board, and I decided I had to be, too. Just in case the IPO went through the roof, I wanted to be here so I could zing him about it. And I wanted my friends along as part of my cheering section. We were already booked for Reno, but I canceled those reservations and booked us all on the Starfire Breeze instead.”

  “You’re saying you and your friends were last-minute additions to the cruise?”

  “That’s right. It’s late in the season, and the cruise line had rooms that were going begging. They gave me a great price.”

  “In other words, if you’re the target, the killer has to be someone who signed up for the cruise after you did. That narrows the field some. Where’s a telephone?”

  “What do you want a phone for?”

  “To call the ship and talk to the captain.”

  Margaret shook her head. “I don’t know about that. It seems dangerous to me. What if the woman finds out I’m on board? What if she sees me and comes after me again?”

  “She won’t,” I said. “I’ll talk to the captain. If he can’t figure out a way to ensure your safety, we’ll forget about the whole thing.”

  “Maybe I could stay in your cabin,” Margaret suggested.

  It was a good enough idea but one that wouldn’t fly. “No,” I said. “That’ll never do.”

  That was all I said. There was no sense in telling Margaret Featherman that I was already taken and by Naomi Pepper herself. Finding that out would have made Margaret mad all over again, which would have been a shame. My admiration may have been grudgingly given, but I was just beginning to like her.

  23

  ONCE DULCIE WADSWORTH’S PHONE was in my hand, I rethought my initial intention. I spent my entire career at Seattle PD being accused of Lone Rangering it. And so, I decided to be a team player. I tried being a team player. Instead of calling Captain Giacometti first, I called the Starfire Breeze and asked for Kurt and Phyllis Nix’s stateroom. No answer. Rachel Dulles wasn’t in, and neither was Alex Freed. I didn’t leave a message. Then, because I really was trying to do the right thing, I even tried asking for Todd Bowman. No deal there, either. When I asked to speak to Captain Giacometti, I was told he was unavailable. Since I had started at the top of the chain of command, that left me no choice but to go down.

  “What about First Officer Vincente?” I asked.

  “If you can tell me what this is about . . .” the operator began.

  “I can tell you it’s urgent,” I said. “A matter of life and death.” Which was technically true. The fact that Margaret Featherman wasn’t dead had far more to do with pure luck than it did anything else. Or maybe, LITG was right, and God was the one who had put that fishing boat in the right place in Chatham Strait at just the right time.

  I waited on the phone for a very long time. “First Officer Vincente,” he said. “May I help you?”

  “I don’t know if you remember me. My name is Beaumont, J. P. Beaumont.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I remember you quite well. You are the FBI agent who is not an FBI agent, correct? The one who was allowed improper access to our security tapes.”

  This wasn’t going the way I wanted. “That’s correct,” I admitted.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Beaumont?”

  “I need to ask you a favor.”

  “I don’t think so, Mr. Beaumont. You are in no position to ask a favor of anyone; now, if you please—”

  “I’ve found Margaret Featherman,” I said.

  He stopped dead. “You what?”

  “Margaret Featherman, the woman who went overboard,” I said. �
�I’ve found her.”

  “Is she alive or dead?”

  “She’s very much alive.”

  “Thank God. That is wonderful! How did this happen? Who located her, the Coast Guard?”

  “No, Mr. Vincente. I found her. And I must swear you to secrecy. No one can be allowed to know she is still alive.”

  “But that is absurd, Mr. Beaumont. Out of the question. Surely we must tell her family, notify the FBI, let the Coast Guard know.”

  “You are aware, of course, that there are two entirely separate FBI investigations being conducted on board the Starfire Breeze at this time, correct?”

  Vincente paused. “Yes,” he agreed warily.

  “And that one of them deals with a plot to kill one of the doctors on board.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I am aware of such an investigation.”

  “What you don’t know and what the FBI doesn’t know is they’re protecting the wrong doctor. Leave It To God wasn’t after Harrison Featherman at all. They were after his former wife.”

  “But how do you know this?”

  “Because of what the killer said to Margaret Featherman before she was shoved overboard. The perpetrator is still on board your ship, and we’ve got to catch her before she gets away and before her compatriots know she’s been compromised.”

  “Mr. Beaumont, I don’t understand why you’re telling me all this. Surely, the FBI investigators are the ones—”

  “I’ve already tried calling them,” I said. “I don’t know where they are. All I know is, they’re not answering their phones, and time is of the essence. I want to bring Mrs. Featherman back on board. I want to smuggle her down into the security room and see if she can spot the woman who attacked her on any of Antonio Belvaducci’s tapes.”

  “The first thing is to notify the Coast Guard so they can call off the search.”

  “No!” I insisted. “That’s exactly what you mustn’t do—not until we get our ducks in a row.”

  “Our what?”

  Idiomatic English strikes again. “We have to have everything in place,” I said. “That’s all.” I could tell from the silence on the other end that I had his attention.