“Sorry, Georgie. That was more than rude. Are you mad at me?”
“A little if you consider me the sort of woman who would fall for any of that baloney. I recognize fake charm when I see it.”
“It’s not that. I just couldn’t stand the way the guy was ogling you—and with me standing right there. He’s like a male version of Jennifer’s tacky friend, Caroline Chambers.”
I paused for a moment recalling how annoyed I had become when she fawned over Jack the night we met her at a restaurant in Corsario Cove.
“I know what you mean. Caroline was working it that night. She had an excuse, at least, since we weren’t even officially a couple at the time. It’s that blond, blue-eyed Romeo-wannabe who was rude.” I shuddered a little. “There’s something about him that makes me want to go wash that hand he just kissed. Why can’t Gerard see that, Jack?”
Jack tucked my arm around his and moved us along. “Gerard hasn’t been as fortunate as we have been to find true love and trustworthy friends, I guess.”
“Maybe he needs our help. I know Paolo has an alibi, and I’m sure the cruise line checked him out before they hired him, but don’t you have someone who can snoop and see if he’s got a criminal history of some kind?”
“Not officially.” Jack stopped speaking for a moment, perhaps considering what options he had given my concerns about Paolo.
“I know, I know. Paolo's not a suspect,” I said.
What about snooping into Paolo's past, unofficially? I wondered. The image of Carol, my talented and resourceful administrative assistant, popped into my head. She likes Gerard and would want to help if she thought he was in trouble.
Since the Marvelous Marley World cruise line had hired Paolo, it might not be as simple for her to access his records. Not as simple as it would have been if we had employed him in the Food and Beverage Division, but not impossible either. It was still early enough to contact her. I was pondering the issue when I realized Jack had started speaking again.
“You can’t even hold those blond hairs against him any longer. It’s not just that he’s no peroxide blond like the owner of those stray hairs. Maggie called me to say the ones she found in Abby Kinkaid’s locker are a match to those already in evidence. They're Abby's, not Paolo's.”
“Is that what's going on? Are we headed to the infirmary to meet with Maggie about evidence she picked up at the spa?” I had a sinking feeling that I was asking a ridiculous question even as the words came out of my mouth.
“We’re meeting Maggie—and Bill. Not in the infirmary, but in Abby Kinkaid’s cabin on Deck 6. Once Maggie had that match, she called Bill. As soon as he could do it, he took a team to Abby's cabin hoping to speak to her.”
That sinking feeling worsened as the door to an elevator taking us back to Deck 6, for the second time today, slid open. Right before we stepped into it, my phone beeped. Jack held the door open while I checked my phone.
It was a text message from Max. My skin crawled even more than it had done when Paolo kissed my hand.
ON A STOPOVER IN HONOLULU. EXPECT YOU TO UPDATE ME ON THE INVESTIGATION BEFORE WE TAKE OFF. I NEED ANSWERS! MAX
Jack took one look at my face. “Max?”
“Yep. There’s something very wrong about dealing with your boss on your honeymoon,” I groused as I tried to avoid looking at that grinning Olly-Olly Octopus hovering above us. “Max needs answers, Jack.”
“Don’t we all,” Jack said, pulling me into his arms as that elevator door shut behind us. Jack’s kiss was the answer to all my questions, including why not run for it while we still could?
Imagine fantasizing about an escape from a cruise to the South Sea Islands? I thought. I even chuckled when I shared that idea with Jack. As we stepped from that elevator, my laughter fled.
“Please tell me you’re not taking your one-week-wife to another murder scene on her honeymoon,” I pleaded as we strode down the corridor to Abby Kinkaid’s cabin.
“I can’t say that for sure,” Jack said. “You can wait out here in the hall if you’d prefer.
“With a knife-wielding, killer who has struck more than once already? No way!” I said as Jack knocked and the cabin door swung open. I gasped.
11 Cabin Fever
Abby Kinkaid’s cabin was a disaster. Either a fight had broken out or someone had demolished it during a search, or both. Blood on the mattress, now lying on the floor, suggested Abby or someone else might be injured.
“It’s a mess, but there’s no body,” Maggie said as we stepped into the small stateroom and shut the door behind us. Bill snapped photos of the wreckage in that room. Items were upended, drawers removed from the dressers. Someone had tossed mirrors and pictures on the floor. Some lay on top of the mattress shoved off the bed. Both the mattress and box springs had been sliced open.
Thank goodness we had taken a moment to leave those beautiful take-out boxes Gerard had prepared for us with the concierge. The butler assigned to our suite would pick them up and stash them in our suite. They didn’t belong anywhere near the noxious fever that had possessed whoever destroyed this cabin. Jack handed me his dinner jacket.
After that, Jack went into action, helping Maggie collect prints from surfaces in the room using a makeshift kit he had created. He and Maggie did their best to pick through items without moving them around much, at least until Bill snapped a photo. They searched as systematically as they could in the debris, for clues as to who might have been responsible for the carnage.
Maggie swabbed the blood on the wall behind the bed and collected a small swatch of cloth from the mattress where blood drops had fallen.
"Nothing like the amount of blood we found this morning. Maybe the person angry enough to do this got careless. See?" She asked. "There's blood on the glass from this broken lamp. Careless," Maggie muttered, repeating herself as she placed shards of blood-smeared glass into a baggie.
"Careless works for me," Jack said. "More of a chance that we'll nab whoever did this."
Maggie and Jack picked up a few hairs from bedclothes and pillows on the floor. More blond hairs, but several that were darker.
“Tina’s?” I asked.
“The longer ones, maybe, but we have a couple short enough that they could belong to a man,” Jack responded.
“If we’re lucky, Abby yanked them out by the roots, and we’ll get the follicles, too,” Bill commented.
Ick, I thought. I got his point, but it was still gross. I felt almost claustrophobic as I tried to stay in a corner, out of the way. I did not want to get the powder they were using to dust for prints on my dress. Nor did I relish the idea of bumping into something that had blood on it, although the colorful floral print might provide camouflage if I did.
At least it was cool in this air-conditioned cabin. Unlike that murder scene out in the open air, this room could be left much as it was when we found it. There was less risk that the biological evidence would degrade fast, as it had done outside.
“Tropical heat, even in January, isn’t helpful to crime scene preservation,” Jack had said when we were back in our suite dressing for dinner.
The tent hadn’t helped matters, either. While it kept passengers from stumbling across a vacation memory that would last a lifetime, it was getting hot in there by the time they finished evaluating that crime scene. Once they had documented the scene, preserved the evidence, and moved the body to the ship’s morgue, they had cleaned up the area to avoid another problem—a biohazard on a ship crowded with adults and children.
“Didn’t anyone report noise coming from in here? That blood could mean there was a fight, even if most of the carnage in this room is from a search,” I asked.
“No. The blood is fresh, so this happened recently. Most of the passengers were likely up on Deck 2 eating dessert. The Captain says Chef Gerard has outdone himself and it’s one of the biggest turnouts for an event on any cruise.”
“They must have been searching for valuables in Abby’s possession. The safe in the back of
her closet’s open, but empty. Have you checked that area already?”
“Yes. It’s one of the first things we did as soon as we made sure Abby wasn’t in here—dead or alive,” Bill said.
“No personal items or luggage around. Do you think Abby was all packed and ready to go when her visitor or visitors decided to ransack the room before dragging her out of here?” I asked.
“More likely, Abby did the same thing that Tina did. We can check but I bet Abby packed up, left, and had the steward assigned to her cabin clean it,” Jack said.
“That must mean Tina and Abby decided to go undercover either before they set that plan into motion to have Perroquet run us down, or as soon as they found out how badly it went,” I said.
“That makes sense in Tina’s case because Justin could identify her. He’d gone to her cabin to find Martin Santo and again when he picked up that stupid parrot costume,” Maggie said. “Why would Abby run? Justin never saw the two women together, did he?”
“It didn’t take us that much effort to put the two women together. Even if we hadn’t suspected there was a connection between Tina and Abby before we went to the spa, I’ll bet Kayla or one of the other attendants would have made the connection for us. Ask about how to find Tina, and you get a lead to Abby,” I replied.
“It could be,” Jack muttered. “News sure gets around on this cruise—and fast. For Tina to steal that costume and recruit Justin, she must have picked us out as targets soon after we started asking questions.”
“Well, someone had already warned Gerard. Maybe my visit to him triggered her interest in me, and she went into action. I must have been on my way to lunch with Gerard when Tina used that as an opportunity to set the scene for Justin. That’s the only time Gerard and I were out on deck together.”
“Yeah, well that’s my point. You hadn’t been with Gerard more than an hour or so before Tina stole that Perroquet costume and started working on Justin to get him to discourage you from any further snooping. Someone called Tina while Justin was in her cabin, setting his attack into motion. We were being watched by then for sure since Justin knew precisely where to find us.” Before he could say more, Maggie interrupted and got us refocused on the present melee.
“So, let’s say both women went into hiding, why come back here in the last hour or two?” Maggie asked.
“Abby had something Tina or that third man wanted back. Whatever double-dealing set all this in motion this morning hasn’t been settled. If the blood is Abby’s, either she wasn’t cooperative, or they didn’t find what they were looking for and took it out on her. The sooner we find them, the better chance Abby has of living through this. Any idea where else to search?” Jack asked. “What about the crew’s quarters?”
“Well, they don’t show up on video collected today at the main entry points to areas that are off limits to passengers. It’s not like the cameras elsewhere on the ship that are fixed to capture a wide angle and leave gaps in coverage. At our core checkpoints, no one gets through without leaving a clear video record. At access points to the bridge, the engine room, crew quarters, and other sensitive restricted areas, we don’t just record what goes on. We have eyes on them, too, using CCTV—closed circuit TV. We can reposition cameras or zoom in for a close-up. I had the video in those locations double-checked just in case someone missed something because this has been such a demanding day for security. Anyway, we can rule out those restricted areas as a place for Tina and Abby to hide out.”
“Even if you’re right about that, Bill, someone on the crew must be mixed up in this if it turns out Passenger X was a stowaway. If Georgie's right and Jake Nugent's killer used a fillet knife, it must have come from one of the kitchens, even though we haven’t located it yet. The disarray Gerard found in the commissary kitchen means more than one crew member is involved if he’s correct that a dispute between employees created that mess. Not to mention that the nasty message someone left for Gerard, using a dead duck to make the point, occurred in the crew quarters.”
“I understand what you’re saying, and I’m concerned about it too. Even with help from employees, if our passengers entered the restricted areas, we would have captured their images on video.”
“Then where are Tina and Abby?” Jack asked as he stood and removed the gloves that he had been wearing.
“Justin is young and not too bright, but there are a surprising number of men on cruises who can be taken in by a woman like Tina Marston. Abby, too, maybe. They could be in another passenger's stateroom. It’s possible someone noticed a man with one of the women when they left their cabins rolling their luggage behind them. We’re making the rounds asking about that now—among other things. Here on Deck 6 and above us on Deck 7 near the cabin assigned to Tina. We have a security team going cabin by cabin, with pictures of the two women, Jake Nugent, and Martin Santo.”
“Martin Santo? Why?” I asked.
“I should have mentioned this when I called Jack a few minutes ago. When we had the sketch artist sit down with Justin and draw a picture of Martin Santo, it resembled the one we already had. We showed Justin the first drawing from Wendy Cutler and David Engels’ descriptions of the third man they saw running away this morning. Justin got real excited. ‘That’s him! He must have ripped off other passengers, too, huh?’” Bill shook his head before going on. “Ya think? We had told him more than once that Martin Santo, if that’s his real name, probably had a ring in his possession that wasn’t his. Box of rocks.”
“Stupid doesn’t necessarily make him any less dangerous,” Jack said.
“That is true. I’m glad Justin didn’t hurt you and Georgie any worse than he did.”
“Let’s say Martin Santo is the third man in that fight this morning—a dark-haired, left-handed slasher who used what might have been a fillet knife to kill Jake Nugent. He’s not on the passenger manifest. How can that be?” I asked.
“Who knows if that’s even his real name? If he booked the cruise using another name, he could be sitting tight in his cabin right now. Tina and Abby could be with him,” Bill replied.
“Not necessarily by choice, for Abby, given the disaster in this room,” Maggie said as she pointed to a tiny object on the floor. “Can you get a photo of this before I bag it, please, Bill?” Bill did as she asked.
“What is that?” I asked Maggie.
“I’m not sure.” Holding the item up for closer inspection as she dropped it into a plastic baggie. “It’s part of an earring or some other piece of jewelry. Not a real gem.”
“There was a stone missing from that fake necklace Jake Nugent had on him, wasn't there?” I asked.
“More than one, as I recall,” Jack replied.
“Yes,” Maggie said. Maggie tagged the bag containing that fake gem. Then she got down on her knees and peered under the bed. “Maybe there are more like that under here.”
“Bingo!” she cried a moment later. “I’m going to need a fresh glove and a bigger bag.”
12 No Honor Among Thieves?
“Abby may have had a male companion after all,” Maggie said as she bagged and tagged what appeared to be a man’s shoe.
“One who was at our murder scene,” Jack added. “I hate to jump to conclusions, but the waffle-weave on the sole looks like a match to the print we found near Jake Nugent. It’s distinctive.”
“That’s an overshoe—a shoe cover like you wear if you’re working in slippery areas of a kitchen where there's water or grease. It’s non-skid, easy to get on and off, and washable, too. You might not find much blood on it,” I said.
“Easy off might explain why we didn’t find more than one footprint. If Martin Santo saw that print, he might have removed it before running away and leaving more tracks for us to follow.” Jack leaned in to get a closer look at that shoe as he spoke.
“It’s squishy,” Maggie said, squeezing the plastic bag a little. “I guess that’s how it got shoved up against the back wall under the bed.”
I stood there, g
azing at yet another link to the jewel thieves who seem to be behind all the horrible events of the day, including that murder. The silliest of concerns pounced upon my overtaxed brain as it ran a super-fast video replaying all that ugliness.
My feet hurt! I grumbled silently to myself. Everyone in this cabin had to be as exhausted and discouraged as me. How petty to worry about sore feet! Why had I worn heels?
Jack caught my eye and smiled, providing an immediate answer to that unspoken question. I’d worn the heels, the dress, and the lovely pendant I held between my fingers for Jack. Remembering, now, the way he had reacted when I stepped out of our bedroom, endorphins rushed through my body, soothing my aching feet.
“Georgie Shaw, you are a delight to behold,” he had exclaimed when he looked up from the laptop he held. His fingers had been moving rapidly over the keyboard, working on that report he was putting together compiling details about the investigation into the murder of Jake Nugent. Plus, notes about circumstances surrounding the man overboard, jewelry thefts, and our encounter with a giant parrot. Jack sat in a comfortable oversized chair with a Siamese cat perched on each arm of the chair, supervising his efforts.
“I’m glad you can say that after the day we’ve had,” I had responded as I moved the laptop he was using to the coffee table in front of him. Their supervision no longer required, the cats took off. I slipped onto Jack’s lap and wrapped my arms around him. “You work too hard, Detective. Some honeymoon, huh?”
“What are you saying? An adventure in the South Sea Islands is what I call a honeymoon to remember. None of this is your fault, but I had no doubt from the moment I saw you that life with you would be an adventure!”
“You’re just saying that because I had a giant Persian cat in my clutches, at the base of Catmmando Mountain, on my way to a crime scene.”
“Zing! Cupid’s arrow struck on Valentine’s Day in Arcadia Park earning the right to Max's claim that it's the most marvelous place on earth. You made my point exactly!”
Georgie Shaw Cozy Mystery Box Set Page 47