A Death on The Horizon

by Mark Ellis

  ISBN: 978-1073540587 (paperback)

  Copyright © 2019 by Mark Ellis

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Cover design by Logotecture.

  Published in the United States of America

  To my granddaughters, Olivia and Mina

  Contents

  I. A Death at Sea

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  II. The Inside Passage

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  III. Woman Overboard

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Out Melissa Blythe’s narrow twentieth-floor office window, the Monday midmorning was living up to dawn’s gray promise. It was almost eleven, but the warm, rain-heavy clouds and roiling low-pressure ceiling had only thickened since Melissa crawled out of bed at six. In the reflection of the framed Tahiti poster, she caught a glimpse of herself—the sheer fall of straight brunet hair, the slightly-hooked nose her mother always called aquiline. In the camera obscura of the poster, her visage looked tired and as pallid as the clouds outside. The forced-air heat came down from the drop-tiled ceiling like a last gasp. With the maintenance crew’s cutbacks, who knew if it was being properly filtered? Melissa ran her tongue over her lower lip, confirming that a nasty center split had opened to the artificial elements.

  She made a mental note to visit the pool in her condominium complex after preparing a solitary dinner in the condo she leased in Port Rachel, a small town just far enough away from the Emerald City to feel liberated. The splashing, crystal-clear, chlorinated water she’d learned to love in her days as a champion high school swimmer strangely always seemed to soothe her lips when the ragged winds that buffeted the canyons of Seattle’s downtown core cracked them open.

  Ms. Claymore broke her ruminations with an email: Mr. Scrimshaw wants to see you in his office at noon. Melissa brought her fingers to her temples and rubbed them with a circular motion—a nervous tic she’d had since puberty. It was well known that Cornelius J. “Skip” Scrimshaw only called his agents on the carpet of his corner office for two reasons, either to offer commendations for a job well done or a reprimand for something less than that. Melissa was pretty sure she hadn’t done anything exactly commendatory for quite some time. The Space Needle swayed and then winked across the sodden city, its monorails writhing like phosphorescent vipers.

  Her last salutary visit to this office came just before what they were now calling the economic Meltdown. A Russian-speaking interpreter was needed to help unravel the mystery of a Georgian tanker operator’s defection to America via a Tacoma house of prostitution. Melissa’s quick procurement of a trustworthy foreign national and her secret phone call to the ship captain’s abandoned wife, the mother of his children, confirmed that the husband had been within a hair’s breadth of being taken by Russian police for helping to smuggle an undocumented Russian woman into the United States. Melissa had no affinity for Putin’s regime, but Charon was bound by a complex set of international laws. With her help, the whoring expatriate had been delivered to his fate at the Russian Embassy in Seattle. Soon after that episode, the economy collapsed, and Melissa hadn’t earned anything like a high-five affirmation since.

  Refocusing on her computer monitor, Melissa willed herself to spend the remaining hour before her meeting with the boss concentrating on the case of the missing Laszlo brother. Laszlo Investments had gone under hard in late 2008, losing billions of their client’s monies due to pyramid schemes and junk paper. Seymour Laszlo had survived his heart attack and was safely under house arrest at his Klickitat Heights mansion, but Morris had vanished just before the indictments were handed down. It was up to her employer, Charon Investigations, to figure out whether Morris had dispatched himself or, more likely, Melissa thought, beat the game even as it turned into a bloodbath.

  Melissa frowned at the inscrutable face of Morris Laszlo on her monitor. Stuck at her desk with few prospects for advancement since the downturn, she felt the money manager’s prim expression seemed to sum up all her resentment. A familiar ceiling was above her—not just the fire-resistant wafers and imprisoning grids but also that old glass one. Fiscal calamity had turned back the clock, had decimated Charon’s clerical staff. Melissa’s low seniority required she redirect her attention to keep the administrative wheels turning. Her butt was getting sore from sitting while her co-investigators, all men, were out uncovering hot trails and unaccounted-for billions. This was not why she had become a private eye.

  Maybe if there was a man in my life, she thought. It was something her mother, Janine, surely thought—might not actually say, but surely believed. It pained her that two clichés had risen up to trouble her this gloomy morning, a glass ceiling ostensibly created by men, and the age-old solution for a woman’s lonely vigil—a man. It couldn’t be as simple as that. Something else was happening, outside the walls of her office, unconnected to her stalled career, and ages away from Washington State’s glittering and oddly chastened crown jewel. She couldn’t identify the cause of this larger malaise but felt that the missing Laszlo brother somehow signified it.

  The last man had been Jimmy, a garage mechanic who’d troubleshot her 2002 Subaru Legacy and lifted the hood on her shut-down spirits after her father, Dennis, died in 2006. She’d wanted to believe his manly cocoon of cars, sports, and postponed maturity would be the antidote to come home to each night, as the travails of ordinary people fallen into the web of investigatory science played out in her working hours. But he proved over the course of an intimate nine months not to be the man to bring home such mental exhaustion and situational nihilism to. The break-up was amicable, as they say, they kept in irregular touch, and Melissa had listened distractedly as he maundered about the carefree hair stylist that had become his heart’s desire. Recently however, his communiqués had ceased, and a little research showed that his two-bay shop on the outskirts of Port Rachel had vanished.

  Melissa allowed herself the fantasy of having Jimmy waiting at home for her that very night. It was true, and it was human nature that could not be denied: the oppressive effect of the all-male investigators she worked with might not seem so oppressive after a night of Jimmy’s surefire virility.

  Skeleton crews labored in the towers all around her. At street level, a gauntlet she ran every day going to and from the parking garage, the mentally challenged and chronically homeless now owned the chancy intersections and
postage-stamp parks, their wandering rants radiating an aural penumbra of sane truth. The muggy marine layer that dampened western Washington was forecast to hang on all through the weekend.

  On the elevator headed up to Scrimshaw’s office, she mentally reviewed the Laszlo file in case her boss had any questions. When Seymour and Morris’s clients started complaining about lost millions, authorities had first gone to the family compound on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge. Someone had been there recently, had started a fire in the main cabin fireplace. If it had been Morris, he was long gone from the secluded granite shoreline where a generation of Laszlos had celebrated their bullish rise into the stratum of billionaires. He had no wife, no children.

  Melissa knew she was lucky to still have a job. When hell had frozen over, Scrimshaw and company had made a nice pivot. Charon had made its name on domestic investigations, the messy nuts and bolts of a divorce-ridden, morally relative, electronically addled society. But, like van-and-storage companies once designed for people moving that switched after the bust to cleaning up and storing items from foreclosed properties, Charon quickly adjusted to changing economic conditions. A large part of the social fabric involved sustaining myths about everything from real estate to Wall Street investments, and many of those myths had imploded. The year 2008 provided the shock; the following one was about the rippling-out effect, the aftermath. Charon’s job now was to intercept and/or expose malefactors seeking to unscrupulously and illegally capitalize on the misfortune afflicting the economy. Melissa’s job, if she still had one, was to research financial statements, sift through pre-Meltdown balance sheets, and paper-push documents related to them.

  She mentally ran the gamut of possibilities for Scrimshaw’s request to see her. Business was good, but nobody expected it to last. Investigative arms would sew up the last body bags as corporations hunkered down to shield whatever fortunes still lay in the coffers. The Great Recession inquiry boom would come to its Donner Pass, the result of having been investigated too well. Strapped for new mysteries, Charon would look inward, assess its own roster of talent. Melissa had proved herself as an intuitive solver of domestic intrigues but demoted to a desk job focused on document analysis, as Jimmy might have said, she sucked. When cost cutting inevitably rose to the top of Scrimshaw’s to-do list, she would likely be on a short list of expendables.

  She deep-breathed into a state of Zen stoicism by the time the elevator doors parted on Scrimshaw’s floor, but once she was down the hall, her deadwood fears looked to have been prescient. A man and a woman sat waiting in Charon’s human resources department. She was a young Latina, a good decade younger than Melissa, and he looked to be midfifties, blue eyed and smartly dressed in a button-down suit. A vision of herself formed: Melissa, back at Cape Lookout Community College, her sights newly settled on a fresh growth industry like baby boomer health care.

  Ms. Claymore nodded warmly when Melissa took a seat in Scrimshaw’s outer office. Too warmly, Melissa thought. She chastised herself against Monday paranoia and yet prepared for the worst. She had fallen victim to a simmering career-burnout syndrome. Poring over archives of precise and pedantic corporate legalese had benumbed her brain. The paper trails were labyrinthine, and the face-to-face work was worse. Interrogations of the alternating hapless and stonewalling had left her with the sense that Charon’s clients and their targets were all rotten to the core, even—or maybe especially—those who had evaded the maw of the disaster.

  She had become a go-to gofer. When the successfully adapted sleuths left early for a Friday round of golf, she stayed at her post. She’d been forced into the role of courthouse liaison and now suffered the indignity of countless hours waiting in lines to see this or that midlevel, passive-aggressive gatekeeper. Despite high marks all through the two years she invested in her Cape Lookout certification program and a promising start in domestic investigations, the money washout had washed her out too. Wearing pantsuits and respectably hemmed skirts of every imaginable pastel, she had verified, cross-checked, and researched her way into mediocrity.

  To be let go while Charon was doing land-office Meltdown business would raise eyebrows. Personnel managers would pause to look over her résumé but nothing more. Millions had become suddenly unemployed.

  While thumbing through last year’s copy of Business Week’s Top 100 Companies for 2008, she realized with ephemeral gall that apparently Scrimshaw would see the HR hopefuls before he would see her. Although HR officially did the hiring, Scrimshaw always insisted upon a brief interview before sending prospective hires over for a full evaluation. It was often an applicant’s time with Boss Scrimshaw that augured who would come aboard. When Ms. Claymore summoned the Latina, who answered the bidding with more perkiness than Melissa had managed in months, Melissa leveled a perfunctory grin at her. The male applicant remained seated, eyeing her, as if interested in a feral way.

  Had it come to this? Would she lose her job to a middle-aged white man? She casually reached into her jacket pocket and turned her cell phone off. Even that dull buzz could lead to trouble if it vibrated at the wrong moment.

  After too short a time, the Latina proved to be stereotypically fiery, bursting out of her audience with Scrimshaw and heading for the elevator in a huff. Melissa couldn’t feel sorry for her, not in this environment. Thankfully Charon’s ethic still honored one chivalry of a bygone era: ladies first. “Melissa,” said Ms. Claymore, “Mr. Scrimshaw will see you now.”

  Cornelius Scrimshaw ran the show from a nautically appointed corner office that overlooked the downtown waterfront. Melissa had nicknamed him the Old Turtle, a moniker she kept to herself.

  He sat like an immense sea turtle, his forehead still sharp and intelligent but his jowls and throat gone froggy, descending down into the stiff collar of his storm-gray business shirt. He looked up from what she recognized as a personnel file, probably hers, transmuting one of his straight-mouthed grins of conditional regard. Once upon a time, this amphibian hulk had been a trim, hungry, expenses-submitting maritime investigator, cutting his teeth on fatal galley-fight reconstructions and dogging the murky trails of shanghai artists. Legends abounded as to his legacy, a career studded with archipelagos of instances when he bent rules in ways that no reputable firm would tolerate now. Somewhere along the line, he founded Charon with partners, men whom he had systematically and mostly legally shown the door over the years. At once receptive and wholly contained within his turtle-shell black suit, he motioned for Melissa to sit. Behind him hung a massive oil painting of the precise moment when the Andrea Doria struck the Stockholm, unsubtle testament to the gravity of his life’s work uncovering the secrets of seagoing misfortune.

  “Thanks for coming up, Ms. Blythe.”

  Out Scrimshaw’s panoramic window, Melissa saw that Mount Rainier–bound gusts had blown all but the last remnants of snow off pine trees at the Olympic Range timberline and were now sweeping sections of newspapers up the downtown streets. In the mini-Manhattan of post-Meltdown Seattle, there were only the rush hour traffic jams anymore, and the phrase parking karma had almost become quaint.

  Sitting before him at last, Melissa was ready to hear that the firm’s patience had come to an end regarding her employment, so it was a great surprise when Scrimshaw said, “I think we might have a little job for you.”

  Chapter Two

  Melissa sat up straighter in her chair. It was only just before noon, yet her boss had a weary late-afternoon air when he asked if she was at all familiar with the Lara Svenko case.

  “Well, of course I know the general story, sir.”

  Anyone who had been paying attention did. The case of Lara Svenko had been cycled with Laci Peterson/Natalee Holloway rotation one summer ago, the summer of 2008. The young female reporter’s death at sea had been covered in everything from Time to the National Review before sinking into the mire of the tabloids and finally the conspiracy theory websites. An investigation conducted by the King County District Attorney’s Office
bottomed out, plagued by missteps, and a concurrent federal probe came up with zilch. Some opined that the feds rubber-stamped the Washington State investigation to pare down a docket replete with untimely and mysterious ends.

  The mystery of Svenko’s death—her apparent fall from a cruise ship and subsequent drowning-- had never been solved. Given how much human misery and loss had befallen society since, Melissa was surprised that anyone was still interested in solving it.

  A University of Washington journalism student and freelancer for the far-left magazine Imbroglio, Svenko had been assigned to and approved for the 2008 Inside Passage voyage of the Trans Oceanic liner Northstar. What made the case seem to be more than one of another drunken passenger overboard or a tragic domestic skirmish was the auspices of the cruise. The luxurious liner, pride of the Trans Oceanic line, was chartered each summer by the Rainier Policy Institute, the Pacific Northwest’s respected conservative think tank. Each year several hundred influential conservatives packed their ideological bags and made the journey up the Canadian and Alaskan coastlines, with the final destination being Hubbard Glacier.

  Each year, in the interest of objectivity and transparency, Rainier kept a handful of press slots open for opposition media, and Svenko had been the farthest-left representative of the Democrat side of the spectrum. From the moment the big ship backed out of the Port of Seattle, her adverse progressive credentials notwithstanding, Svenko was apparently a hit with her fellow passengers, her collegiate charm proving effective at getting her in proximity to Rainier Policy Institute’s brain trust. Then, sometime on the night of July 6, after the ship left Juneau for Hubbard Glacier, she turned up missing.