by Sue Henry
Maybe Walt wasn’t so much after all. When the man came back, he was going to find out just what the hell was going on.
27
3:30 P.M.
Wednesday, July 16, 1997
Spirit of ‘98
Revillagigedo Channel, Inside Passage, Alaska
“CARLSON IS STILL ABOARD. HE MADE NO ATTEMPT TO GET off,” Jensen told the group assembled in Captain Kay’s office shortly after the Spirit left Ketchikan, heading for Misty Fjords National Monument. “Wherever he is, I want him. But right now, I’d like to lay out all the pieces of what has become a real puzzle, so you’re all aware and can help.”
Besides Alex and Jessie, the captain, Ray McKimmey, Don Sawyer, Carla, the assistant chef, and two of the company men who had come aboard in Ketchikan—Dick West and Gordon Thorn—had gathered on the bridge to hear what Jensen had to say. Tim Torenson, the officer from Petersburg, had left the ship to catch a plane home. Chuck West, retired from active management of the company, had left its representation to his son, and remained in the owner’s suite with his wife. “But, if you need him, he is right next door,” Dick told Alex.
The trooper quickly brought the two company men up to speed on the unpleasant events that had plagued the Spirit for the last two days. They asked a few questions, but, for the most part, they remained thoughtfully quiet, waiting to hear the rest of what he had to say.
“Who is this Glen Carlson?” Thorn asked, frowning. “What do we know about his background?”
“That’s one thing I’m trying to find out,” Alex told him. “I’ve asked the Seattle police for help, and they’re running a check on him, looking for wants and warrants, and your people in the main office are also working on it. But Carlson may not be his real name. I don’t like the idea of him loose on board. He’s a dangerous threat, an unknown factor. Got any more ideas, Ray?”
McKimmey gently scratched the bandaged stitches on his chin. “Nothing I haven’t already told you, but did you find out anything about how he got the engineer’s job—got onto this ship? How about Steve Broughton? Did he have anything to say?”
“I’m waiting for a couple of calls on that. One from Broughton himself, and one from the Seattle police, who are checking the car he wrecked as his ticket to the hospital. They’ll find out if there was anything funny about it, and, believe me, they know what to look for. The detective I talked to was already wondering about it, because of some suspicious things about the way it all happened. Had been assigned to find out. He said Steve would be okay, Ray.”
McKimmey nodded. “So there was something funny about the wreck. I had a hunch.”
“Let’s wait for the call and not make assumptions. Solid evidence is important now on all the things that have been happening. How many of you read today’s Ketchikan paper?” Jensen asked the group. He spread it out on the captain’s desk, where they could see the headline of the article about the Hazlit’s Gull. I called Juneau on this, to report the woman we found in Tracy Arm. There’s not much doubt it’s Michael Hazlit’s wife. He recognized the clothes she was wearing, and the description fits.
“Now, this seems to have nothing to do with other things revolving around the thefts that have been going on. But I thought we should get that item out of the way, since we were involved in finding her body.
“Captain Kay, did you get anything back from the security company on those two guards?”
“Yes,” the captain told him. “But nothing that will help. They’ve both been in the same job for at least two years. One of them for almost three. Their credentials seem okay. They faxed the application forms they filled out when they were hired, and a list of the jobs they’ve worked on in the past two years.” He passed them across to Jensen, who looked at them briefly, and handed them to Jessie.
“I’ll go over them carefully when we’re through here. No fingerprints?”
“Not yet. They said they’d try to enlarge them enough to fax, but they’re evidently still working on it. They weren’t too happy about having any of their people’s reputation questioned without something more definite than a suspicion.”
‘Too bad. I’ll give them another call …”
As he spoke, the fax machine came to life and three pages slowly printed out and dropped into the basket.
“I don’t believe it,” said Jessie, with a grin. “Are you a magician, or what?”
The pages were, indeed, the fingerprints of the two guards.
“Hey,” said Alex. “Sometimes coincidence actually works. Now … Captain, how is the trash collected from the gold room?”
“Carla?”
“They put it outside the door in trash bags. It’s picked up and added to the trash from the galley. It all went off the ship in Ketchikan. It’ll be dinnertime before any more is collected. Crew usually picks it up when they turn down the beds.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “Here’s what I want. The next time it’s picked up, I want it brought directly to me, unopened. Something in that bag, soda cans probably, will give me their fingerprints. I have a print kit from Petersburg. We’ll find out if they are who they say they are.”
“Why so much attention on the guards?” Dick West asked. “You think they’re part of this theft from the three staterooms? I thought all the missing pieces had been returned.”
“They have, except for the cash that was in Lovegren’s money clip—a little over four hundred dollars, but it’d be hard to identify. Bills are bills. No way to say that any we find are the ones stolen with the clip.
“It’s not so much the thefts. We only suspect Carlson on either the theft or the death of Morrison because the two are linked. But someone else let him loose and hit Ray on the head. It’s a murderer—or two—that we need to be concerned about here. What bothers me are small things; the attitude of the guard I met in the gangway …” he glanced at Ray, with a grin, “the condition of his face, and his lie about falling down. Someone beat him up and was good at it. Could be the other guard, but I doubt it. He hasn’t a mark on him, and whoever did it would have to have hurt his hands, skinned his knuckles or worse.”
“Wayne Johnson came to breakfast this morning with bandages on his hand,” Carla commented.
“He cut it pounding on the bar last night,” Jessie told her. “He was drunk.”
“Well … I took a bowl of fruit to the buffet and overheard him growl at his wife that it was already bruised when he cut it, so now he couldn’t use it at all. I didn’t know about the bar incident, just wondered what he did to bruise it before.”
“Worth looking into.” Jensen looked around the circle. “Let’s all be on the lookout for anyone with injuries to their hands. I want to know who knocked him around, and why.
“The ax that killed Morrison went to Anchorage and they’ll be getting back to me pretty quick if there are any fingerprints on it.”
“Well?” said Gordon Thorn, with a long look at the fax machine. “Where is it?” This occasioned a laugh from the rest of the group.
“Sorry,” Alex told him. “I can’t make it work with mental telepathy. Often wished I could.”
“What about the other people you asked Ivan about?” Jessie asked.
“He’s looking into them, too, and will get back as soon as he has anything.”
“Who’s that?” Carla questioned.
“I’d really rather not say till I know something. They’re both passengers and may be completely innocent of anything. Just a couple of small things made me wonder. I asked for a background check, that’s all.”
“Reasonable,” Captain Kay said. “Now, what do you need from all of us?”
“Well, the best thing, I think, is to let Carlson and whoever got him loose stew for a while. I want him, but where’s he going to go? We aren’t stopping now until we get to Seattle. Wherever he’s hiding, he’s going to have to stay there. I don’t think upsetting the passengers with a full-scale manhunt would help them, or us. Besides, we don’t know who it was that helped hi
m. If we can figure that out we’ll be able to get them both. We could watch again tonight.”
He turned to the company CEO.
“Mr. West …”
“Dick. Please, just Dick.”
“Okay, Dick, I’d like you to call your main office and expedite the things I asked for from there. I took the liberty of telling them they could expect a call from you, when you came aboard.”
“Sure. I’ll be glad to do that, or Gordon can.”
“I’ll do it,” Thorn said. “I’ve got to call anyway on a couple of other things. I’ll check with Harmony and see what’s being done.”
Jensen went on. “Captain Kay, will you somehow double up the crew members who do the night watches. I’m not comfortable having them by themselves. If Carlson decides to do some crawling around after dark and runs into one of them alone … if he killed Morrison, he’s got no reason not to …”
“I’ll get right on it.” Kay opened the door and spoke to the first mate, who was working outside the captain’s office on the bridge. “Get out the schedule of who’s on watch tonight, please.” He returned to his chair. “We’ll go over it as soon as we finish here.”
“Great. I can’t thank you all enough. But what I want to stress is that this is not about any petty theft from some staterooms. This is a homicide. It’s all about who killed Julie Morrison, and why.” He nodded to Don Sawyer. “We’ll get him, Don. Anyone have any questions? If not …”
The meeting adjourned, and all but the captain left the bridge.
Jensen and Jessie walked around to the owner’s suite with West and Thorn.
“Come in for a minute and meet my father,” Dick West invited.
The room they entered seemed enormous to Jessie, compared to the compact size of the stateroom she and Alex occupied.
Chuck West and his wife were sitting at a table, playing cribbage, as the group entered. He got up to meet Alex and Jessie.
“I have your book,” Alex told West. “It’s a good read. You really started something with this company.”
“It’s grown a lot. And it’s been a lot of fun. We like the way we operate with smaller cruise boats—see more.”
“Do you come along often, sir?” Jessie asked.
“Oh, every so often we sneak aboard for a run, or part of one.”
They talked for a few minutes about the problems aboard the Spirit, then Alex and Jessie excused themselves. Thorn, the public relations consultant for the company, followed them out, and they walked slowly toward the stern, around the waterproof tables and chairs, to the checkerboard pattern on the aft deck.
“It’s disturbing to have this trouble on one of our ships,” he said, with a worried frown. “Upsets the passengers and doesn’t do the company any good either. I’m terribly sorry about the crew member who died, Morrison. Tell me about Sawyer. You indicated in the meeting that he had some relationship to her. Is there anything we can do for him?”
Alex told him the story of Morrison’s flight from her husband and how the whole alias situation came to be. He shook his head when he understood. “What a nightmare. Especially with a young child. What will happen to the grandmother and the boy?”
“I don’t know, but it will take a lot of legal untangling.”
“I got the pictures. Showed Glen clear, but wouldn’t give them anything else.”
“Good. Our friends make it into Canada okay?”
“Yes. They’re waiting exactly where they’re supposed to be, ready to follow us down the channel to the right spot and time. Called to check earlier. The message was there.”
“Good thing it will be soon. With the big brass on board and all, that cop’s getting just a little too nosy to suit me.”
“Hey, so what? They’ll never figure it out in time, or know what hits them tomorrow. We get what we came for—a big piece of that lovely gold—leave them, make a run down the channel, and before too long … bang … they’re gone. Everyone but you, me … and … what’s her name.”
“Never mind about her. You sure Walt got enough stuff to do this boat?”
“Whole box full. It’d do a Princess ship, let alone this tub. Punch a hole right through the bottom. They’ll go down like a rock. No witnesses. And I’ll enjoy watching it go. Brought it on themselves.”
“Can we get away without the rest of them?”
“Why not? Takes just a minute or two to untie a boat and take off.”
“We’ll have to time it just right.”
“Of course.”
“Okay. I’ll see you later. Down here, ready to open the door. Right?”
“Right!”
“He’s okay,” Jessie commented on Thorn, as she and Alex went back to the bridge to see if anything had come through from Anchorage.
“Yeah. Lot of energy. Seems honestly concerned, not totally worried about overhead, like some company people I’ve met. Pretty good attitude. I’m excluding Carlson from that category, you understand.”
“I sincerely hope so.”
A message had come in for Jensen to call Anchorage, and Captain Kay handed him a fax. “I was just coming to find you. This is interesting. Sorry. Can’t help reading what comes in over the fax, until they start sending it in envelopes.”
The page he had given Alex had the tracings of two partial fingerprints on it. A note at the top gave Commander Swift’s phone number both at home and at the office.
Alex went to the phone and called Anchorage.
“Ivan? What’s the deal on the prints?”
“No wonder you missed them. We were all looking mostly at the handle. They came out under the lights—on the ax head. He—it looks like a he—wiped it all right, but must have been in a hurry, or flustered. Forgot where he was holding the head while wiping the handle. Got these two from under the pointed spike at the back. They’re not perfect, but enough so you may be able to make some comparisons. We’ll run them, of course, but don’t expect much.”
“Good. I’ve got prints for the guards from the security company and will get right on it. We should know in a couple of hours just what that story is. That it?”
“Two other things. John’s doing the autopsy, as we speak, by the way, but says from initial exam he doesn’t think there’ll be any big surprises. Looks like she suffocated. Choked on her own vomit with the tape covering her mouth. He doesn’t expect to find seawater in her lungs. But that’s not your problem.
“Second, you asked about that rope on the woman’s body. Pink and blue?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a kind of rope that mountain climbers use, and sometimes boaters. Comes in blue and pink, or blue and black, nylon, dry treated so it won’t absorb water, which makes it sensible for boaters. It’s 10.5 millimeter line, made by the Blue Water Company. Not particularly unusual, but not widely available either. This boat, the Hazlit’s Gull, is registered in Nanaimo, B.C. The closest place to get it from there would be R.E.I. in Seattle, or somewhere in Vancouver. But it’s not carried in marine supply outlets. Does it matter?”
“Not particularly. Just curious. It looked abraded, like it had rubbed on something. I think she was put in the water with some kind of weight that got loose and let her float to the surface. Does the rope tell us anything like that?”
“Funny you should ask. It seems to have rubbed against rock—some small fragments embedded, and Hazlit says there’s an anchor missing from his boat. He flew down to Ketchikan earlier today to see what he could tell, in spite of the condition of the boat.”
“That it? Raymond and Prentice?”
“Not yet.”
‘Thanks, Ivan. Call if you find out anything else. I can use all the help I can get.”
28
10:00 P.M.
Wednesday, July 16, 1997
Spirit of ‘98
Lower Revillagigedo Channel
Inside Passage, Alaska
JESSIE HAD EXPECTED MISTY FJORDS TO LOOK LIKE THE glacier-scraped cliffs of Tracy Arm, and parts of it di
d, but it was much more of a green untouched wilderness paradise, more welcoming somehow, a place in which she wished they had time to stay and explore.
The Spirit cruised over twenty miles up the Behm Canal, as far as Rudyerd Bay, a long fjord, as promised. There they slowed and moved through the late afternoon mists and tree-crowded slopes that looked as they might have before the hand of man conquered the planet. In the canal, before they entered Rudyerd Bay, a tower of rock, half covered with brush and a few trees, rose out of the water, once a plug for a now vanished volcano. It was called New Eddystone Rock, which seemed a little cliched to her, thinking it could have been given a much more romantic, suitable name. The ship cruised past it and into the bay, where waterfalls rushed down the green faces of mountains too steep to climb. So much water falling was, they had been told, unusual, a result of the afternoon’s rain, for it had rained more heavily here than in Ketchikan, and was raining still.
They had put on the slickers they had brought along, and stood together at the rail, holding hands, watching what passed with appreciative eyes.
“We do make a mess of the places we choose to live in,” Alex had said, causing her to smile, because it fit so well with her own thinking. “It’s nice to see a place like this that sort of rejects us as anything but visitors.”
Jessie had been glad the captain had insisted on sailing from Ketchikan in time for them to see this monument to wilderness, though she had heard several passengers complain of too little time allowed for shopping. No one seemed to be complaining when they slowly cruised a few miles into the bay. The ship turned and headed out when Alex spoke suddenly.
“Look. There’s a bear. Over there by the edge of the water.”
“Ladies and gentlemen. We are slowing the boat because, on the port side of the ship, there is a black bear with at least one cub.
“Look closely just to the left of the large rock, at about two o’clock, for the mother. Behind her about thirty feet is the cub, trying to catch up. Oh, there’s another, in the brush above her. It’s coming down.”