A Death on The Horizon

by Mark Ellis

  The all-important Northstar Communications Officer Lieutenant Beckman knew only that Hundtruk was an important personage, government related, and so was helpful in providing Trans Oceanic employment documents. Hundtruk found the salary listing for sauna tech positions. While Stamen’s tawdry personal life and mordant predilections did not yet rise to much importance, a sauna tech’s income did. He did the math reflexively. If a tech’s per-cruise salary package was raised a few hundred dollars, then taxed at a higher rate, she’d take home the same amount. All up and down the salary ranges, from Squier to housekeeping, there were opportunities to extract more from Admiral Blaisedale’s fleet.

  For good measure, Hundtruk called Lieutenant Beckman and requested an interview with the hot-tub imposter. “It will be a great help to my report if I can visit with some of the rank and file,” Hundtruk said.

  “I can have her report to one of our interview rooms as soon as her shift ends,” Beckman promised, informing Hundtruk that Stafford typically punched in at noon and out at 8:00 p.m.

  “No, let’s keep it informal, if you don’t mind,” said Hundtruk. “A table at the One World Pool would work for me.”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Beckman, “I’ll get word to her to meet you there, we’ll find you.”

  “Is the Siletz Center busy these days?” Hundtruk asked inconsequentially.

  “With the warm weather, demand is way down. We usually get lows in the lower 40s this far up the Passage. Not this year, not even close.”

  “Are you a believer in climate change, Lieutenant?” Hundtruk asked.

  “I think the jury is still out, sir.”

  This was good proof of Beckman’s potential for a role in the coming realignment. There was some demographic overlap, but if you believed in climate change, you almost surely voted for Barack Obama.

  All fell under a canopy of northern constellations. There was gentle laughter poolside,

  some martini-fueled laps in the illuminated pool waters, as if the conservative cause and the drubbing it had taken were as distant as the bow of Aries.

  Hundtruk’s thoughts wandered to Shirley, who’d realized sooner than he had that their marriage wasn’t working. Her new conservative fast-food husband was so generic that Hundtruk had been unable to hate him. A McDonald’s in the Dallas suburbs could net its franchise-holder over a $100K a year, and Shirley’s guy had several—and a villa in Tuscany.

  Shirley embodied the kind of woman who Stan never fully believed he could possess: bright, attractive in the cerebral way favored by college professors, with a perky brown shoulder-length coif, creamy cleavage, and legs like a Macy’s mannequin. In their earliest time together, when he was home and between assignments, there’d been what Democrat’s liked to call a “Camelot” period. Shirley was apolitical, seemingly uninterested in politics to any extent that would match her with her husband. That’s what made it work in those early days, a time in which she was actually proud and respectful of what her husband did for a living. She became his best friend too, before the long absences sapped her willingness to wait at home while he answered the call of duty. Their friendship, that’s what hurt about losing her—not, as those close to him had speculated, her defection to the right. Sadly, her very lack of core political values is what made it possible to move from him to a McMuffin Magnate.

  A deck runner found him at his table on the One World Pool upper plaza and asked if he wanted a drink. “Make it an iced tea,” he told the young man.

  While waiting for the tea, Hundtruk saw a woman come out of the dressing lounge in a bathing suit. She found a table near a pair of massive potted shrubs and began bundling her brunette hair under a powder-blue bathing cap that matched her one-piece suit. It wasn’t until she waded into the lighted aquamarine of the pool that Hundtruk realized he was looking at Melissa

  Blythe. Before her smooth slip into the water, Melissa looked right at him, and it seemed again

  that she didn’t much care for Jeff Griffin.

  It would be unseemly for Hundtruk to remain seated and watch her swim, though he wanted to. Blythe was definitely comfortable in the water, her strokes smooth, and her kicks efficiently rippling the surface. No. The code of ethics begged him to retreat, to rearrange his meeting with Barb Stafford. But Hundtruk sensed the approach of someone behind him, so he turned in his seat.

  “Mr. Griffin? We met in the sauna. You wanted to see me?”

  Stafford had every appearance of being scrubbed. Of a woman who needed scrubbing to blend with Trans Oceanic’s customer service patriots. The kind of dim, sensual woman who would consider herself a liberal without having a clue what the word meant. Who, washed in the dye of political litmus, would turn out as nasty a free marketer as the people selling chin exercisers on television. Her ears were pierced in a matrix of holes, but only one pearl was placed, set in a gold clamshell. He could only guess at how many times the pierced lips, nostrils, and cheeks had healed over. The shipboard uniform she wore precluded knowing, but Hundtruk was willing to bet his next month’s expense check that she sported lurid tattoos in undisclosed locations. Her dyed black hair showed incrementally longer shabby blond roots at the scalp than before in the sauna. The only question left about the woman was whether she had turned away from her decadence or was only on sabbatical.

  He rose to his feet. “Ms. Stafford, yes, of course.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Investigator Blythe had gotten out of the pool and gathered up her towel and flip-flops. Trapped there with the woman he’d summoned, Hundtruk was forced to sit as Blythe climbed the plaza staircase, passed by his table, and took penetrating measure of the woman who had joined him.

  Hundtruk turned to Stafford with freshened eyes. “I’m making this voyage to gather information about the way the line operates,” he told her. “That includes the people who work for it and, of course, the guests.”

  “So, my bosses are OK with…this?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” he assured her. “My assessment of operations has been approved by Admiral Richard Blaisedale himself.”

  The interview started with him offhandedly asking about how she had gotten into the sauna repair and maintenance business. She disclosed that she had learned from an older boyfriend who worked in the field “back in the seventies, when the whole hot tub–sauna thing started.” She explained how the onboard gig was just that, a job she’d fallen back on when her regular business—website design for entertainment purposes— “dropped to nothing after the economic collapse.”

  Hundtruk decided to forego any mention of her role at the depraved website. “But the Meltdown didn’t occur until fall of that year.”

  She told him that business had been off all through the spring of 2008, and that her design accounts were no longer earning her a living wage. “I Googled my skill sets and saw that Trans Oceanic had an emergency opening.”

  The deck runner brought the iced tea. “Can I get you anything?” he asked Stafford.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  Hundtruk took a long sip. “Are any of your websites still up and running?”

  “I’ve left that world behind,” she answered. “I don’t even have a computer.”

  “This is your second Rainier Policy Institute cruise,” Hundtruk continued. “Are you a conservative?”

  “Oh my god, no,” she blurted, shrinking back with catlike canniness. She clearly knew now that he had researched her employment with Trans Oceanic. Recovering, she told him that she was not a political person and claimed never to have voted.

  “This is just another cruise assignment to me.”

  “You have a college education, I presume?”

  “Oh yes, Mills College. I guess when I think about it, I would have to say either I’m a liberal or I don’t know anymore.”

  “You’re happy working here?”

  “Absolutely,” she answered. “It’s one of the coolest jobs I’ve ever had.”

  “Great, well, I have to ask this.
As I’m sure you know, there was an unfortunate incident on last year’s cruise. Did you happen to have any interaction with Ms. Lara Svenko, the reporter?”

  Again she flinched and recovered quickly—quickly enough that Hundtruk couldn’t be sure whether the frozen micro seconds were due to any association with Svenko or merely the fact that he had uttered her name. She was casual again, as if at that very moment she was lying back in one of the hot tubs she was charged with keeping expertly clean and heated.

  “No, sir, I never did meet her. You know, I was a replacement for a guy who got sick. I didn’t even come aboard until Ketchikan.”

  “I see. No, I did not know that. Thank you, Ms. Stafford.”

  After she’d gone, Hundtruk thought the idea of a nightcap sounded good. He looked around for one of the plaza’s roving servers, and as his eyes swept the plaza, he instantly felt something instinctive and predictable. Something he didn’t know for certain but was as sure of as he was sure that Barb Stamen’s story, her very presence, didn’t quite figure. Melissa Blythe had watched the entire interview from somewhere on the plaza.

  For the first time since learning of the link between Barb Stamen and Lara Svenko, Melissa experienced her journey on the Northstar as likely being shared by a killer. A killer whose nametag jolted Melissa when she passed Jeff Griffin’s table: Barbara Stafford. She had watched her Charon associate interview the white-trashy-looking woman out the small, square window in the top deck corridor that led to flagship embarkation. Now, back in her stateroom, even as she struggled to fathom why her suspect would sign on for another tour at the scene of her crime, the first trill of real discovery and danger tingled up her spine. There was no mistaking the helmet of dyed-to-death ash-black hair that was succumbing to a dingy grow-out of her real color, blond.

  If Melissa’s coalescing theory of Stamen’s complicity in Lara Svenko’s death was sound, what was this horrid woman doing back on the ship. Could it simply be that she liked the job, had found a solid position, and was sociopathic enough not to let a very personal murder get in the way of an opportunity? Melissa didn’t think so. The woman was sick, but there was an artistic, stylized aspect to her pathology. Melissa did not make her as the kind of miscreant who is looking to get caught. There had to be another reason why the webmistress had re-upped.

  Melissa opened the employee records that lay on her stateroom’s fold-down work table. She’d pored over the 2008 records, found that Maria Centavos served on that year’s cruise, recognized deck runner Miley’s name, and learned that a sauna technician had left midcruise due to illness and been replaced, apparently, by Jeff Griffin’s poolside interview subject. Now she turned to the 2009 records.

  Down and down her finger went, found Miley again, Centavos again. Like in 2008, Barbara Stafford’s name was not to be found on 2009’s official manifest. With growing trepidation, she turned pages, until she found another staff change notation. Latecomer again, another write-in. Alarmingly, Barbara Stafford had been hired the day before the Northstar sailed, a replacement for sauna tech Celia Holmes: due to criminal justice issues.

  That took the last wedge of cake. Fingers to temples. Stamen had signed on to the Rainier Policy Institute cruise many days after Mr. Scrimshaw had booked passage for “Sue Ross.”

  Melissa double-checked her stateroom door lock every night by force of habit, but tonight especially. She also took the step of moving her holstered Glock from the small stateroom closet to her bedstead. Most investigators never fire their weapons while on active duty, and they mark that as a badge of honor. Most of them do find occasion to sleep with their weapon ready at hand, though, and now Melissa did too.

  Viktor Svenko had stopped telling himself the lie that he was afraid to read what was in Lara’s journal. But he hadn’t the strength to read it all in one sitting. He paced his reading, for there was no hurry now. Whatever revelations his daughter’s last words held he had reconciled would die with him. It didn’t matter now. He prolonged, anticipated, and cherished what was left of his daughter’s voice.

  He knew that the Northstar would be on the Inside Passage cruise that marked the one-year anniversary of his daughter’s death. Before opening the laptop, he imagined the fateful ship as it must appear at that very moment, headed north, slipped into a circumference of the planet far removed from New York City’s muggy and somnambulant sundown.

  7/1/08. It would be remiss to the spirit of this journal not to admit that by the right wing’s treatment of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, they have created in me a committed foe.

  I just sat through the most amazingly bigoted workshop: “The Compassionate Conservative’s Guide to Same-Sex Marriage.” The most startling thing is how plausible and mainstreamed their homophobia is. Their logic proceeds from the assumption of mere tolerance. To accept, welcome, celebrate the rights of those who are same-sex oriented never enters their minds. They see it as doing us a big favor by tolerating our presence. They can’t and they won’t countenance us walking down the aisle.

  It would be funny if it weren’t so insane. It’s basically, “Look, homosexuals do exist, and though they represent only a fraction of the population, they have an augmented voice in society for various socioeconomic reasons. They’re entitled to fair treatment and, in many cases, even the same rights as heterosexual couples. But you can’t, we don’t, would never give them the top of the cake.”

  “We believe,” the workshop moderator intoned, “based on demographics, that unless the tide is reversed, the one-man-one-woman ethic will hold for as little as twenty more years.”

  Can you believe this? They’re actually fearfully ticking off the days to when their reign of oppression will end. The elders among them probably thank god they’ll never live to see the day. The moderator doofus went on to explain that when the millennial generation reaches majority, the institution of traditional marriage would likely end. “Unless there’s something out there we haven’t seen yet.”

  In Russia we had no time for such things. There was no calculation about

  queerness beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell, and be careful.” I never learned to despise being outcast because in Russia outcast can mean anything they want it to mean. For me it was better not to exist, like you’d have to do in Ahmadinejad’s Iran.

  There it is, Barbie. By the time these ancient superstitions fall to the dustbin of history, I’ll be pushing fifty. You’ll be pushing sixty before these stunningly hateful people are too dwindled to vote away basic human rights.

  I remember when you said, “I refuse to adopt their barbaric agrarian-age arrangements. I will not be mainstreamed by their bestowal of straight marriage.”

  You clung to that. It was a big part of the buzz, the transgression. You weren’t marriage material, as they say.

  The corpses piled up on Deathknell. You let your queerness turn you away from life.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Reports came that an oil spill off the Canadian coast lay in the Northstar’s path. The spill was not catastrophic, nothing like the infamous Exxon Valdez disaster, but summer currents were driving an offshore skim of Alaskan crude toward a twenty-mile stretch of pristine coastline. Canadian and United States containment teams had launched a wide-scale effort to prevent its landfall.

  Waiting in the captain’s suite at midmorning for further developments, Rad went online to watch the media coverage. It took him no time to find streaming footage from a chopper circling the spill. Norwegian tanker Von Hummer had grazed a submerged shoal at a bad angle, rending a recently emptied compartment of the ship’s hull. What had leaked was bottom sludge, and Rad had seen enough to know that indeed the spill was manageable. Environmental Protection Agency–licensed tugboats were already corralling the mess into dirty circles, and while there’d been no reports of landfall, wildlife rescue personnel were waiting at the threatened beaches with absorbents and degreasers.

  It was a very good thing. Trans Oceanic’s summer and fall Passage cruise pa
ckages would be decimated by mass cancellations in the wake of an environmental catastrophe. The company would have to honor those cancellations with full refunds or show up in court. Even in a recession year—and 2009 was the worst Rad had seen—peak-season fortunes depended upon the spill containment effort.

  At the curved window of the suite, Rad saw there was a commotion at the aft quarterrail looking south. A deck runner pointed at something along the shoreline. Rad followed his finger to where considerable dust was rising, as if an explosion had occurred at the base of the gray-green granite ramparts that connected with the bedrock deep below sea level. He grabbed a pair of binoculars and saw an entire stratum of weathered rock scaling off and rumbling into the sea. He watched until the gritty cloud dissipated in the clear blue morning.

  Miles up the Passage, the lights of Coast Guard patrol boats were visible, refracted flickers of yellow and blue through unfiltered sunlight.

  Rad’s stateroom phone rang—Beckman, with news about the spill. “They’re directing us to layover in Ketchikan one night.”

  Rad recalled an instance years ago when the order to drop anchor had not come in time to prevent the ship from plowing through a three-mile spill. The Northstar had sailed into Juneau with a slick of congealed oil across her bow.

  “Please indicate our intention to comply,” he instructed Beckman. “I’ll make my announcement at noon.”

  Ketchikan was usually a six-hour stopover. Local flavor, shopping the strip, and a big early dinner at Yukon Pete’s famed restaurant. The stop order would set the cruise off by one night, but Rad didn’t think that too many of the passengers would mind. Those with ironclad scheduling conflicts and deep pockets could always purchase a helicopter ride to the nearest airport.