I left the others staring after me in shock while I went in search of the refrigerator. I found one in the very last room I came to. The two glass syringes were still there.
“Aha!” I exclaimed in triumph, as I grabbed them and started back toward the morgue.
I never got there.
Something hit me very hard on the back of the head, and everything went black.
Tuesday
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO
11
One eyewitness is of more weight than ten hearsays.
—Plautus
I WASN’T OUT for very long.
I woke up, still on the floor by the refrigerator, surrounded by my five companions. Hal knelt next to me, patting my cheek. When I opened my eyes, he said, “Oh, good, you’re awake. Can you sit up, sweetie?”
I was too smart for that. The last time I’d had a concussion, I’d puked all night. No way was I about to sit up or even move my head. “You remember what happened the last time I did that,” I murmured.
“Did you see who hit you?” Nigel asked.
“No,” I said, still not moving my head. “Did he take the syringes?”
“He must have,” Nigel said. “I don’t see them anywhere.”
“Damn,” I said. “What about the rest of the stuff?”
“No joy,” Nigel said. “We looked everywhere.”
“Dr. Day,” Captain Sloane said, “you should see a doctor.”
I almost laughed. “Are you serious?”
“Antoinette,” said my mother reprovingly, “the captain is only trying to help.”
“I’m not staying here,” I declared. “For all I know, the doctor is the one who conked me on the head. Maybe he murdered the lady in the cooler. Take me back to our room. Hal can wake me up every fifteen minutes to make sure I’m not bleeding into my brain.”
“Oh, thanks a lot,” Hal grumbled. “Just what I wanted to be doing all night.”
“She’s right, you know,” Nigel said. “She’s safer there than she would be here. Besides, the doctor’s missing, so it would be rather pointless to stay here, don’t you know.”
“Darling, can you walk back to your cabin?” Mum asked worriedly.
“Not unless you want me to throw up,” I said. “Surely there’s a gurney around here somewhere, isn’t there?”
“There’s a wheelchair,” Captain Sloane offered.
“No, I need to stay flat,” I said.
In the end, they found me a gurney—no doubt the same one that had transported Mrs. Levine—and took me back to our cabin where I lay flat on my bed, still fully dressed. Hal offered to help me undress, but I wasn’t having any truck with that, as it would have involved movement and probable vomiting. My head hurt, but I wasn’t bleeding, thank God, since that would have involved sutures and would have required the doctor.
Mum offered to spell Hal so he wouldn’t have to stay up all night. Captain Sloane said he’d check on me in the morning and organize a searching party to locate Rob. Sarah patted my hand and told me if I needed anything to just ask. Then they left, and Mum and Nigel went back across the hall to their own cabin.
Mum and Hal changed places at around three in the morning. At that point I decided that I needed to go to the bathroom, and Mum helped me out of bed and into the bathroom without incident. There was no nausea, so I consented to let Mum help me undress and get into my pajamas, and then I went back to sleep.
When morning came, I felt almost normal except for a slight headache and a very tender goose egg on the back of my head. Mum was gone. So was Hal. Mum had hung my clothes on the back of a chair, but I wondered if they might contain evidence of my attacker, so I put them into the laundry bag and dressed in more casual attire to go meet my family for breakfast.
As I left our cabin, Hal came out of Mum and Nigel’s cabin. “Oh, you’re up,” he said by way of greeting. “How do you feel? Are you okay?” Then he saw the laundry bag I was carrying along with my boat bag. “What’s that?”
I explained. Nigel came out into the corridor in time to hear me explaining. “Oh, jolly good,” he said. “Here, let’s put that in our room, and then we can examine them after a bit of breakfast, eh what?”
“Are you sure they’re safe there?” I asked.
“Safer than they would be in our room,” Hal said.
Nigel went back into his cabin, and Mum came out. “Good morning, kitten. How do you feel? Do you feel well enough to eat something?”
Suddenly I became aware that I was starving. “I certainly do.”
“Do you remember anything that happened before you were struck?” Nigel asked me as we climbed the stairs to the Lido deck.
I thought a minute. “I remember finding the glass syringes in the refrigerator. I also remember the lady in the cooler.”
“Nothing after that?”
“Not until I woke up.”
“Did you hear anything behind you before you were attacked?”
“Not that I can remember.”
We didn’t talk about the case while going through the cafeteria line in the Lido restaurant so as not to gross out the other passengers at breakfast. But a thought had occurred to me, and I ran it by Nigel as soon as we’d carried our plates into the pool area and sat down at a table. “Whoever put Mrs. Levine in the cooler had to move the evidence to make room for her. We didn’t have a chance to look for it, because I got conked on the head. We need to go back and look for it.”
“Toni, old thing,” Nigel said. “Think. If the lady was murdered, chances are that the murderer put her there. Why would he not just get rid of the evidence?”
“Well, then, why leave the syringes in the refrigerator?”
“Perhaps that person didn’t know about the syringes,” Hal suggested. “Not until you went back there to get them.”
“You mean someone waited back there just on the off chance that someone else would come in—and then go after them?” I asked. “Sounds pretty chancy to me.”
“Unless that someone knew we were coming,” Nigel said.
“Who knew you were going to the infirmary?” Mum asked. “Other than the captain and his wife, that is.”
“They didn’t know until Nigel asked about it at dinner last night,” Hal said.
“But when Nigel went over to the captain’s table to talk to Rob about it, the table was full,” I said. “Officers Grant and Dalquist were there, and the Chief Engineer, and First Officer Lynch. They probably all heard Nigel asking Rob about the evidence. By the time we joined the captain and his wife, they’d left the table. Any one of them could have gone to the infirmary, disposed of the evidence, and laid in wait for us.”
“But kitten, what would be the point of lying in wait?” Mum asked. “Why wouldn’t they just get rid of the evidence and be done with it? Why complicate things by attacking someone?”
“Perhaps,” Nigel said, “we caught someone in the act of trying to get rid of the evidence. Perhaps that person heard us come into the infirmary and hid, hoping we’d not find the evidence and would go away so he could finish the job. And then when Toni went back to the room with the refrigerator, he coshed her to prevent her from discovering him.”
“And to create a diversion,” Hal said. “We were too concerned about Toni to go looking for her attacker at that point.”
“As I recall,” my mother said, “we were also anxious to get out of there, lest we be attacked as well.”
“How did your attacker get in?” Hal asked. “The doctor and the captain are the only ones who have keys.”
“You’re assuming the doctor didn’t do this, then,” said Mum.
“Not necessarily,” Hal said. “But the doctor knew where the evidence was and could have gotten rid of it at any time. It had to be someone who’d found out about the evidence but didn’t know exactly where it was and
had to wait for us to show him. Only Toni got too close for comfort.”
“We’re assuming that the person who murdered the lady also murdered Leonie,” I said. “It could be completely unrelated. In which case, the person who put the body in the cooler didn’t know what all that stuff was and just moved it, and if that’s the case, the evidence is still somewhere in the infirmary.”
“Two murders in one cruise?” Hal asked skeptically. “What are the chances that they’re unrelated?”
“Okay, suppose they’re related,” I argued. “Why put the body in the cooler? Wouldn’t you think he’d want to get rid of it?”
“Chances are she’s traveling with someone,” Mum said.
“She is. Jessica told me that she’s traveling with her sister,” I said.
“Well, there you are, then,” Mum said. “That mousy little person she was with at our table must be her sister. She’d be missed. Her body would have to be accounted for.”
“Then someone would notice that she was strangled,” Hal said. “That might start a panic among the passengers.”
“Not necessarily,” Nigel said. “The petechiae in her eyes and mouth and the ligature mark are hard to find and difficult to see. You and the doctor are the only ones who would know to look for them. Chances are nobody else would even notice them.”
“What’s going to happen to the body now?” Mum asked.
“She’ll probably be taken ashore in Fort Lauderdale,” Nigel said, “and out of our jurisdiction. Good thing you took those pictures.”
“Let’s hope they’re good enough to convince the police that she was murdered,” Hal said. “The lighting in there wasn’t very good.”
“They’re not bad,” I said, reaching into my boat bag. “I’ll show you. If I could find my damn cell phone. Where could that have got to?” I continued rummaging in my boat bag, but I couldn’t seem to locate my smartphone. Finally I dumped the contents of my bag out on the table. The phone wasn’t there.
I felt tears of frustration building up behind my eyes. First the head gets stolen. Then my laptop disappears. Then the evidence disappears. Now my cell phone. When was I going to catch a break here?
“What are you doing?” Hal asked.
“Looking for my phone,” I said. “I don’t see it, do you?”
“Could you have left it in the infirmary last night?” Mum asked.
“No, I remember putting it back in my bra.”
“It wasn’t there when I undressed you,” Mum said.
“Did it fall out when we put you on that gurney?” Hal asked.
“Surely one of us would have noticed,” Nigel said. “It’s far more likely that your attacker took it.”
“You mean he took it out of my bra?” I asked in disbelief. “God, I feel so violated.”
“It’s of a piece with everything that’s happened so far,” Nigel said. “And a fine kettle of fish, to boot. If Scotland Yard needs those pictures, we’ll be dead in the water.”
“Nigel, dear,” said Mum, “could you possibly put that another way?”
“We’re not dead in the water,” I said. “I e-mailed those pictures to the Royal Barbados Police, and also to Pete. Remember?”
“So all we have to do is tell Pete to forward them to Scotland Yard,” Nigel said.
“I’ll text him from my phone,” Hal said, “and tell him to forward them. Tell me the e-mail address.”
“Fine,” Nigel said, and did so. “Now then, what I want to know is, if the doctor didn’t attack you, why did he disappear right after I talked to him. That’s suspicious behavior, eh what?”
“That’s true,” I said, “but Officers Lynch, Dalquist, and the Chief Engineer all left too, while we stayed to have cordials with the captain and his wife.”
“What about Officer Grant?”
“He wasn’t there at all,” I said, remembering. “That’s odd. Maybe he was on duty.”
“That’s another thing,” Hal said. “We were all impatient to go down to the infirmary, and the captain wasn’t budging. Do you suppose he did that on purpose to allow someone time to get rid of the evidence?”
“That would suggest that the captain was in cahoots with my attacker,” I said. “What I was thinking is how anyone would dispose of the evidence. Rob told me that all the solid waste gets sorted prior to disposal. How would anyone get the brain and the rest of the head past that?”
“How about the kitchen?” Nigel suggested. “It could have been handled as food waste. Chopped up and mixed in with meat scraps. What do they do with that?”
“Officer Dalquist would know,” I said, “but who would do the chopping up? And how does one dispose of an entire skull?”
At this point, Mum, who had been uncharacteristically tolerant as we were eating during this discussion, lost patience. “Antoinette, really, must we have body bits at breakfast? This is fairly turning me up.”
“P’r’aps we’d better change the subject,” Nigel said, and the discussion turned to the upcoming excursion in San Juan.
“I think I should go down and talk to the purser,” Nigel said after breakfast. “It seems we won’t be needing to mail anything in San Juan after all, more’s the pity. I should do him the courtesy of letting him know that his efforts aren’t unappreciated.”
“Are you planning to call Scotland Yard again by any chance?” I asked.
“I do need to let them know that the evidence has gone missing,” Nigel said. “Or do you have something else in mind?”
“Well, so far we know that our captain was on the Southern Cross twenty-five years ago, but maybe there were others,” I said. “I can’t get that information, but maybe Scotland Yard can.”
Nigel chuckled. “Two suspects aren’t enough for you?”
“They might both be innocent,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s worth checking out?”
“Why don’t I just ask our captain?”
“If he’s guilty,” I said, “he might lie to you.”
“Toni, old dear, you can’t have it both ways.”
“You may as well make that call,” Hal advised him. “She’s not going to give up on this. You know that as well as I do.”
“I always said Antoinette would be a good lawyer,” Mum said. “She’d fairly argue me to death even as a small child.”
“And you love me anyway,” I said.
“That I do, kitten. Nigel, love, do go make that call.”
“Very well. Where will you be?”
“Right here, dear. Perhaps I can get Antoinette to join me in another cup of coffee.”
I’d felt well enough to put away a substantial breakfast, but my headache worsened enough that I opted not to go ashore in San Juan but instead to spend the day lounging by the pool. Or maybe I’d avail myself of some spa services. That would give me an opportunity to question some of the spa employees about what had happened to Leonie’s head.
Accordingly, I went to the spa as soon as Hal and Mum and Nigel left for their shore excursion and booked myself a massage and facial. Then I went back to our cabin, set the alarm on the clock radio, and went back to bed. But I couldn’t sleep.
A thought wormed its way into my subconscious and niggled at me until I threw off the covers and sat up, thoroughly awake and pissed off.
Why could the murderer not simply have thrown Leonie’s body overboard?
It would disappear forever in the vast depths of the ocean and never be recovered. Even if it washed up on a beach somewhere, the crabs and lobsters would have nibbled away whatever was left of the flesh so that nobody would recognize her.
Not that anyone would have recognized her in any case. Even by the time I got a look at her when her head was in the pool, her face was so puffy and discolored that I wouldn’t have known her. The next time anyone saw her face, it was falling off the bone. If sh
e hadn’t been wearing those earrings, perhaps we still wouldn’t know who she was. By the time anyone realized she hadn’t turned up in Bridgetown in time to board the next cruise ship, we had already sailed.
But that begged the question of why it was necessary to retain the body at all.
Why was it necessary to make that awful mess by crushing it in the roof?
I could think of only one reason.
Well, maybe two.
It was possible that the murderer might have been seen carrying the body up to the observation deck.
But why carry it up there in the first place? There were probably outside decks all around the ship on multiple levels. If the captain had killed her in his cabin, he’d only need to dump her off the back end of the Nav deck. To do that, he’d have to walk the length of the ship from front to back. The problem with that was the aft pool and bar. If anyone had been up and hanging around the swimming pool, he’d be seen.
Maybe he could just dump her off his own veranda.
Would that work? Could his veranda be seen from the bridge? Someone would be on watch, but what were the chances? Was there more than one officer on watch at a time?
For that matter, would the body clear all the other decks and hit the water if he did that?
Would it clear the other decks and hit the water no matter where it was thrown from?
Clearly this called for some reconnaissance. And what better time than now, while everybody was ashore?
I swung my legs out of bed, stuck my feet into my Birkies, and gingerly ran a comb through my hair. I picked up the booklet containing the floor plans of all the decks, which all passengers had received upon boarding. There was no way I could check out the captain’s veranda without being invited, so I went out onto our own veranda and looked down. Three decks below me hung the lifeboats in their davits. A body thrown from any of these verandas would land in one—or on one, since they were enclosed.
The Body on the Lido Deck Page 12