Bluewater Stalker: The Sixth Novel in the Caribbean Mystery and Adventure Series (Bluewater Thrillers Book 6)

by Charles Dougherty

  In a rare moment of objectivity, he acknowledged that he was no writer; he spent more time reading and complaining about writer's block than he did forcing himself to sit at the keyboard and pound out words. He knew that writer's block was a myth, an excuse to avoid what was often drudgery, but the lack of product was no myth. One of the ways he had heard of overcoming writer's block was keeping a journal; another was sometimes referred to as free writing, simply forcing oneself to write whatever came to mind for a set period of time. He had been working at this ever since he had arrived, and was beginning to recognize that it was yet another form of organized procrastination.

  In two and a half weeks, he had produced a sizable document, entitled 'The One -- Free Writing,' which contained thousands of words of gibberish and fragmented thoughts. As he read back over his previous writing, he was surprised at how much of it centered on his growing obsession with Jane Fitzgerald. He wasn't accustomed to a woman occupying his thoughts to such an extent. Women were not important to him; they were easy to come by and compliant. He didn't recall a woman ever ending a relationship with him before; that had always been his prerogative. It had infuriated him for years that Bill Fitzgerald produced an endless series of articles filled with creative insights, seemingly without effort, while he struggled to make the words come. These were recurring themes in his vituperative 'free writing.' He considered how he might turn all that negative emotion into fodder for his killer character, but every time he started to write, he lost focus.

  "Shit!" he exclaimed as he realized someone was knocking on his door. He glanced at his watch; he'd been staring at the blinking cursor for almost an hour. The pounding grew more insistent. He wondered how long the person had been knocking, and then it struck him that it was too late for it to be one of the hotel staff. He got up, leaving his laptop on, and walked to the door. "Who is it?" he asked, his irritation plain.

  "Doctor Cardile?" he heard through the door.

  "What!"

  "I thought it was you on the ferry."

  "Who are you? What do you want?"

  "You won't remember my name, I'm sure. I'm a former student of yours; I took one of your creative writing classes years ago, and it was an experience that set me on my career path. When I saw you, I realized how much I owe you for making me what I am. At first, I didn't want to bother you, but then I discovered we were staying in the same place, and I hoped I could buy you a drink or dinner and tell you what an important influence you've been in my life. How about it? Just a little of your time — it would mean a lot to me."

  Cardile thought for a second or two. This was a new experience for him. In all his years of teaching, no former student had ever come back to offer thanks, and his ego needed a boost, a positive stroke. He flipped the deadbolt back and swung the door open. "Sure," he said. "Just give me a …"

  He had just a glimpse of the man before he felt himself enveloped in a lightning bolt; he noticed the stubble on his assailant's head as his limbs twitched, his muscles contracting past the point of pain as he crashed to the floor. He had a vague sense of the man kicking him out of the way, and he heard the door close.

  "Any of the killers in your book use a Taser?" the man asked. "Just as well you'll never finish. That book's pure garbage."

  Chapter 28

  After an early morning departure from Portsmouth, Vengeance was southbound off Scott's Head, entering the Martinique Channel. Bill had the helm, and Jane sat beside him, her head on his shoulder. Dani and Liz were sitting in the cockpit enjoying the ride. They had been under way for about five hours when the satellite phone beside Dani rang. Looking at the display, she said, "The lawyer." She pressed the connect button.

  "Good morning, Mr. Lawson. It's Dani Berger, and I have you on the speaker. Both of the Fitzgeralds are here, as well as Liz Chirac, my partner in the charter business."

  "Good morning, everybody. Are you sailing to Ste. Anne?"

  "Yes, we are," said Bill. "Any news for us?"

  "Yes, quite a bit, in fact. Your call was timely. Let me say first that the police in St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada are all wanting to talk with you again. I've taken the position that you're unavailable at the moment, but that I'm in touch with you."

  "They must have really been interested, then."

  "Yes, well … not for the reason you think. Be patient with me. I have a lot to tell you. Are you where we can talk for a little while? Not about to put into port or anything?"

  "No, we're just leaving the south end of Dominica. We're about four hours from the north end of Martinique," Dani said.

  "All right. That's good. I called our friend the Chief Inspector, and he had been preparing to call me. The maid at the Mango Tree Resort in Bequia found David Cardile's body in his room this morning at about 9 o'clock."

  "He's dead?" Bill asked, alarm ringing in his voice.

  "It appears to be suicide. Of course, the coroner hasn't made a determination yet, but he was in the bathtub with his wrists slit. A razor blade was on the side of the tub." He paused, and they heard paper shuffling. "He got in late yesterday afternoon after having been away for two days, had dinner in the dining room by himself, and went to his room. That's the last time anybody saw him until the maid found his body."

  "Well," Bill said, "I don't know …"

  "Please, Mr. Fitzgerald, there's more. His laptop computer was open on the table displaying a file that appears to be a journal. It listed the details of each of the murders, as well as describing how he abducted Mrs. Fitzgerald and used her to entice you into the trap that you so fortunately evaded yesterday."

  "I knew it, damn him, I can't …"

  "Wait, please, let me finish before I lose my train of thought. He describes how you blackmailed him into carrying out the killings by threatening to disclose some illicit relationships he had with his students, which would have cost him his job."

  "That's bullshit!"

  "Nevertheless, he said you put him up to this so you could collect the material for an academic paper of some sort. He said he couldn't live with his guilt any longer, and he hoped this document he prepared would see you brought to justice."

  "Jesus! He was crazy. How could I not have seen that?"

  "So, you can imagine that just now, the police are not too interested in your proposal to lure Cardile into a trap. Quite to the contrary, they're considering that you could very well be an accessory to several murders, conveniently overlooking, of course, your own near death and Cardile's confession that he watched you both blown to pieces."

  Bill sat in silence, shock displacing his initial surprise at the news of Cardile's death.

  "There was one other thing they mentioned which puzzled them."

  "What was that," Dani asked.

  "I gather Mr. Cardile was quite a handsome man, with a head full of curly hair."

  "Yes, that's right," Jane said.

  "When he was found this morning, his hair had been clipped, leaving just a bit of stubble over his scalp."

  "That matches what the water-taxi guys in Portsmouth said when Sharktooth showed them his picture," Liz said.

  "Mm," Lawson said. "That's strange, because the woman who served him his dinner said he still had his curly hair last evening before he retired."

  ****

  The killer sat in the open-air bar that overlooked the anchorage in Bequia, slowly eating his order of fish and chips as he listened to the proprietor — Leon, he heard someone call the man a few minutes ago — chatting with a young police constable in a smart uniform who seemed to be a relative. The blond wig that covered his stubble was causing his forehead to perspire, and he paused between bites of fish to blot the moisture from his face with a paper napkin. The gossip mill was running at full speed; the constable and Leon were discussing Cardile's journal.

  "You know," Leon said. "That mon, Fitzgeral', he on Vengeance wit' Dani and Liz. They eatin' lunch right here one time when David Cardile start talkin' to Fitzgeral'. So Fitzgeral', he dead now?"r />
  "No," the constable said. "Cardile say he kill Fitzgeral', but the mon, Fitzgeral', he still alive. His lawyer call the p'lice in St. Lucia this morning."

  The killer almost choked on his mouthful of fish.

  "He say Fitzgeral' an' he wife, they 'scape from the bomb. This Fitzgeral' he wan' the p'lice to go after Cardile; say he kill those people."

  "So the police, they gonna arres' Fitzgeral' again?"

  "Mebbe so, if they can find him. I hear the Chief Super say he t'ink Fitzgeral' in Ste. Anne, Martinique. He get this from talkin' wit' a mon in the p'lice in St. Lucia. Ste. Anne, tha's where he go when he get out of jail las' time they arres' him. Say the lady own Vengeance, she got some frien' there."

  ****

  Vengeance was at anchor off Ste. Anne. Phillip and Sandrine had come out to join them for sundowners; they were all sitting around the cockpit table, enjoying the pleasant offshore breeze as they sipped Ti punch and munched on the fruit Liz had put out. Phillip had talked with Paul Russo just before he and Sandrine had left their house, and he was passing on Paul's news about David Cardile.

  "Did the Feds or whoever come clean once they knew Cardile was dead, or what?" Bill asked.

  "No, they're not that logical. That financial hacker Paul knows managed to backtrack the money. That's how they figured out who he was originally. The Feds would have a fit if they knew Cardile had hung on to his offshore deposits; if Paul and his friend could find him, so could the mob, but I guess all of them who cared are still locked away."

  "The mob?" Jane asked.

  "Cardile, or Francis John Toole, as he was called before, is the only son of a mobster from Chicago called Pinky Toole. Pinky was into just about everything that was illegal and made money: drugs, women, gambling — you name it. Francis -- Frankie, they called him -- was a financial wizard. He laundered the money for his old man. He was also helping himself to a sizable percentage of it, and the old man's partner found out. Frankie got the word they were onto him and ratted them out to the Feds. They went to prison, and Frankie became David Cardile and got his doctorate in English at the University of Virginia."

  "What a mess," Jane said. "So how did he get mixed up in whatever this is that Bill's caught in?"

  "Good question. Paul's bet is that it's unrelated; Cardile, or Toole, was in the wrong place. The killer probably saw him as a way to get to Bill."

  "The question is still who this killer is, then, and why he's focused on Bill," Dani said.

  "Yes. That's what Sharktooth said. I filled him in this afternoon, and he's ready to drop everything and come down here."

  "He's just worried there'll be a fight and he won't be in on it," Dani said. "Did you tell him he's welcome?"

  "Of course."

  "Is he coming?"

  "He'll let us know after he checks with Maureen; you know who runs that operation."

  They chuckled and watched the sunset in silence, disappointed that there was no green flash.

  "Are Clarence's people ready?" Dani asked.

  "Yes. They'll start standing watches ashore tomorrow morning. And the patrol boat from St. Lucia will be on station by noon just outside the three-mile limit. We figured there wasn't much risk tonight, but if you disagree …"

  "No, that's fine. The tracker's in the microwave. If he's tried to use it, he probably thinks it's broken, but I'll take it out as soon as we hang up."

  "Well, they're not foolproof," Phillip said. "It doesn't take a lot to block the signal. He probably knows that, so if it starts working again, he won't be put off by the temporary interruption. He may have other ways to find you, though. Vengeance is pretty distinctive, and this is one of your regular hangouts."

  After they were silent for a moment, Sandrine stood and said, "You are tired, for sure. We go and let you rest. I am watching in the computer for this man's names: Cardile, Galligan, even Fitzgerald. I will call you if I see. But I think he may have other passports, no? Or maybe he sneaks in. Anyway, thank you for the lovely evening. Come, Phillip, we go now."

  Chapter 29

  Le Petit Refuge de Caritan was a small, rustic resort perched on the palm-covered hillside just above Anse Caritan. Caritan itself was a tiny village less than a mile south of Ste. Anne. The killer had discovered it via the Internet and had booked a room using a fresh identity. He had checked in late last night after dinner and a scouting expedition in the village of Ste. Anne. Satisfied that his prey was where he had expected, he had slept late this morning, recovering from his recent activity and the hurried trip from Bequia. He had ordered breakfast from room service and signed for it using his new name.

  He had to assume that using Fitzgerald, Cardile, or Galligan would trigger alarms with the authorities by now, so he had disposed of those passports and credit cards by the simple expedient of putting them in a weighted package and dropping them over the side of the high-speed ferry that had brought him from St. Lucia. He was now Cornelius O'Brien, an Irish-American freelance journalist. The Neil O'Brien identity was well-traveled; he had used it off and on for years, all over the globe.

  When he had still been working for the federal government, he had cultivated a network of shadowy contacts who did freelance work and were beholden to no one, anticipating the day when he could no longer call on the professional hackers and forgers that were on the government's payroll. He had maintained these contacts over the years since he had been discharged from his government position, keeping them active by spending money with them periodically. Because of his foresight, he could have a new set of documents on demand, almost without regard to where he found himself. In his free time between contract jobs, he rotated through several 'clean' identities, traveling extensively under each one, establishing random patterns of movement. These identities he kept distinct from others that were of a more temporary nature, like the ones he had been using in the islands before now. O'Brien was one of a few identities for which he had developed personalities; those were the ones he used when he wanted to be invisible. O'Brien was a favorite; he enjoyed the time he spent as the jovial, hard-drinking, back-slapping, ne'er-do-well newspaper correspondent. If anyone checked, there were even a few articles written by Neil O'Brien as a stringer for a number of publications in several countries.

  One of the reasons he liked this identity was that it made a lie of David Cardile's assessment that he couldn't put two words together coherently. He chuckled at that, remembering explaining to Cardile who he was the other night. He wasn't surprised that the jerk was unable to remember him from the creative writing class so many years ago. Even after being reminded, Cardile couldn't recall having held him up to ridicule in front of the class, while Jane, the faithless bitch, had laughed along with the rest of them. Cardile wouldn't do that to any more undergraduates, nor would he have his pick of the women, either.

  He hadn't dropped out of school immediately after being embarrassed by Cardile and shunned by Jane Alexander, but it had been those two things that had led to his decision not to return after the end of the term. As had other young men before him, he sublimated his anger, joining the military and ultimately transforming himself into an accomplished killer through his black-ops time in the Middle East.

  The bureaucrats he had worked for had failed to understand that it was his extracurricular experiences which honed the very skills they prized. They couldn't countenance his killing of innocent civilians, even inconsequential foreigners in enemy territory. They had eventually come after him, but he heard their footsteps, figuratively, and had well-prepared defenses. They could certainly have killed him, as they had initially set out to do, but they couldn't risk having his memoirs go public, and he had convinced them his death would trigger disclosures beyond the scale of anything they could imagine. He had, of course, been bluffing, but the stakes were too high for them to risk calling him.

  He laughed at the memory of the gutless wonder who had stopped his execution, caving in and settling for his resignation and his signature on a non-disclosure a
greement. That had been the last time he had signed the name his parents had given him. "Patrick Michael Nolan." He said it aloud in the quiet of his room, chuckling at how foreign it sounded to his ears, at the difficulty of forming the words after all these years.

  He shook off the memories; he rarely gave in to the luxury of reminiscence. He was weary; he recognized the symptoms: the wandering thoughts, the inability to focus. He could rest soon; it would be over tonight. He pumped himself up with the thought that the Fitzgeralds wouldn't die in an impersonal explosion after all; he would get to do it the way he liked, with his bare hands, looking them in the eye. It had been his good fortune that the mine had failed to do its work; everything happened for a reason, just as the nuns in grade school had said.

  He stepped out onto the balcony and surveyed the small, secluded beach below. He couldn't see the anchorage off Ste. Anne, but he knew Vengeance was there. He had spotted her last night as he strolled out onto the town dock after his late dinner in town. It would be an easy swim from the beach tonight. He recalled the layout of the yacht from his brief time aboard when he had captured Jane in Dominica. The Fitzgeralds were using the aft cabin, and the two blondes had a stateroom forward. He would lock the Fitzgeralds in their stateroom and deal with the two blondes first. He would give the one called Dani cause to regret that she hadn't hit him harder; he pondered what he might do to her before he finally let her die. He considered which of them he would kill first, and decided on the one with the reddish blond hair. He would tie Dani up so she could watch her friend die.

  And then for the Fitzgeralds; Jane would definitely be the last to go. The only real value in Bill was that his suffering would torment Jane. He hadn't personally offended the killer, although he was one of those arrogant academics who had the brass to analyze what they could never understand. But Jane, that was different. She had chosen Cardile over him, and then she had laughed when Cardile had ridiculed him. Yes, she would be the last to die.