by Dale Mayer
On one side, he found a rope with knots. He quickly climbed up, slipped onto the deck, and down toward where the steering was. He found an open space to go below. He took one last glance around and headed down. At first, he could see nothing but darkness. Then shapes formed in the gray light.
On the side were bunks and a small kitchen and a little bit of a galleyway. Large holding tanks—which were fairly common on a fishing boat—plus lots of buckets full of fish heads, and a couple whole fish were here too. No fish still flopped, and the flies were pretty numerous. As a way to disguise the other aroma, it was pretty effective.
He checked everywhere inside that he could and found nothing. With his heart sinking, he knew the boat was deserted. He headed to the hold, quickly opened it up, immediately dropped into it and stepped back. Holding his nostrils firmly pinched for a moment, he quickly stopped the smell from overcoming him. The family line was no more. The fisherman, Ming Hania, son of Awan Hania, had been shot once in the head. Simple, effective. With another glance around the interior, Asher saw something that made him stop for a moment. A scarf. He picked it up and then slipped over the side and swam back to his boat.
As he pulled into their small fishing boat, Ryker and Mickie stared at him.
“And?” she asked, her voice on the verge of breaking up and leading to tears. “Did you find them?”
He held out the scarf and asked, “Do you recognize this?”
Her fingers closed around the material, and she nodded. “It’s from Alisha’s dress.” She stared down at it with tears in her eyes. “Were they there?”
“No,” he said. “They weren’t.”
“And what about the owner of the boat?” Ryker asked.
Asher shook his head. “He’s there. But he’s not alive anymore.” He quickly explained what he’d seen. “So the twins have already been taken.”
Ryker nodded. “Unfortunately that means we have no idea where they are or who may have taken them.”
“But they couldn’t have gotten far,” Mickie said. “They haven’t got that big a lead on us.”
“No,” Asher said. “But somebody knew they were here.”
“Which means that somebody probably got the information from Ming’s family,” Ryker said.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Asher said. “And then they got here ahead of us.”
“Well, those fishing boats were here when we arrived,” she said. “What if they’ve got something to do with it?”
He turned to see two fishing boats meandering back toward the coastline. “We can’t know until I can get some satellite imagery going,” Asher said. “And I don’t know if it’ll be any good out here or not.”
“Hopefully it will,” she said, “but I wouldn’t let those boats out of my sight anyway. It couldn’t have been easy to move the twins anywhere, so another boat is by far the likeliest method.”
“Particularly with Ming moored out here,” Ryker said. “That’s the only option.”
“Or a floatplane,” Asher asked.
“I think people would have heard it, and that would have caused much more of a nuisance than anything,” Ryker said. “In this area, too memorable.”
“I’m pretty darn sure we’re talking about another boat.” On that note, Asher, still wearing his boxers, slowly piloted the ship away from the one that held just the dead. “We need to tell the police,” he said.
“I’ll arrange that,” Ryker said. “Our team can notify the police anonymously.”
As Asher angled their boat toward the shoreline, he kept pace with the two boats ahead of him. He could see no markings to identify either of them. “Why two?” he asked Ryker.
“Disguise? Extra manpower? Maybe they’re splitting up the girls?”
“They’ll be sorry if they do that,” Mickie said behind them. “If there’s one thing in the world the twins cannot tolerate, it’s to be separated.”
Both men turned to look at her.
“I get that they’re probably still drugged, but, as soon as they wake up, there’ll be nothing but hell, and they will not be calm until they have each other, or until they are knocked out again.”
“Right,” Asher said. “But small boats are definitely easiest to work with out here.”
“Easy to move one twin to one boat and the second into a second boat.”
“And that explains why these two are sticking so close together.”
“Well, we’ve at least got something to follow,” Mickie said. “But it’ll be pretty messed up if we get to the shore and these two fishing boats have nothing to do with the twins’ disappearance.”
“Absolutely,” Asher said. “But we can track them. Track where they were, how long they were there, and if any odd movement between them can be seen. We can’t forget that someone else was murdered. The police not only need to recover the body but also to find the killer.”
“And is that happening right now?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s so frustrating,” she said. “The twins should have been given a tracker a long time ago. Like an ID chip.”
“It’s not all that common,” Asher said. “In fact, it’s still pretty rare for people to implant that chip.”
“No, but I remember Chandra talking about it,” she said. “I wonder what the decision was on that.” She made a move for her phone and quickly called Chandra and put the call on Speakerphone. “Did you not get something like a tracker ID put into their wrists?”
“I did,” Chandra said. “And they both hated it so much I had them removed.”
“They could feel them?”
“They said it was a foreign body, and it was aliens or some such nonsense.”
“Well, that sounds more like something somebody would have told them that,” she said. “That’s not something they would have dreamed up themselves.”
“Maybe. It was likely Lana.”
“Who’s Lana?” Asher asked.
“Lana was the woman I replaced,” Mickie said, her tone thoughtful. “Speaking of Lana, what’s she doing these days?”
“I don’t know,” Chandra said. “And I don’t care. The sooner that woman left, the better. I can’t believe I was tricked into listening to her bloody stories all this time.”
“I don’t remember hearing too much about her.”
“She was always making life very difficult for the twins. Things like, those trackers.”
“Isn’t she related to Wilson Chang?”
“Brother and sister,” Chandra said. Her voice sharpened. “Why?”
“I was just wondering if maybe they had something to do with this.”
“You keep harking back to it being somebody in my family or my business,” Chandra said. “That gets very old, very quickly.”
“I get that,” Mickie said in a soothing tone. “But it doesn’t change the fact that Lana left in an ugly manner. You fired her. And that tends to make for very upset people.”
“I did fire her, yes, but I doubt she would have done anything to have hurt the twins. She loved them.”
As Mickie hung up, she looked at Asher and said, “Now I have a completely different theory for you to consider.”
“And what’s that?”
“Lana looked after the twins for a good ten, possibly more years. They traveled the world together, and they were very loving together. I know that the twins had been quite upset when Lana left. The twins didn’t handle it well.”
“Of course not. A big change for them,” Ryker said. “Why did she get fired?”
“Because Chandra felt that Lana was inveigling herself too much into the twins’ lives. However much of that opinion came from her son Edward. Chandra agreed but might not have seen it originally until he pointed that out. Then when she caught Lana talking to the lawyer about the twins, well, Chandra realized that she’d handed over too much control. She quickly nipped it all in the bud to make sure that nothing gave Lana access to any of the bank accounts, but it worried Cha
ndra for a long time.”
“And yet, she never mentioned Lana to us?” Asher couldn’t believe it.
“You must understand that Chandra is big money. And servants and workers don’t really have any involvement in her life. It’s almost like we don’t have lives.”
He nodded slowly. “Interesting. So you’re thinking that she didn’t even consider Lana as a suspect, yet she was important enough to the twins to do something like this? And do you really think that Lana would kidnap the twins?”
“Her brother is Wilson Chang, Chandra’s marketing manager. But more than that, they’re half-Asian with ties to China.”
Both men turned to look at her.
She shrugged. “I get it. I didn’t figure it out myself either until just now.”
“But would they hurt the twins?”
She gave them a wry smile. “You see? That’s the thing. That’s one of the reasons why it suddenly clicked in as to what might be going on. I don’t think Lana would hurt the twins. I think she loved them.”
“So what are you talking about?”
“I think that she probably misses them and decided that Chandra didn’t deserve them. It’s quite possible that Lana is doing this because she thinks the twins are better off with her than with anybody else.”
Chapter 13
Mickie was kicking herself for not even considering Lana before. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Lana didn’t get mentioned because of the way she left. It made Chandra livid to even hear Lana’s name. And you never asked me if there were any disgruntled employees or anybody who would retaliate. You only asked about who would want to hurt the twins.”
“Versus somebody who would want to take them away in an effort to save them,” Ryker said, nodding. “And we’re used to looking at everything from every angle, but that doesn’t mean that we came up with all the right questions to make that information pop for you.”
“It would make me feel a lot better if that’s what’s going on,” she said.
“How so?” Asher asked.
“Because I don’t think Lana would hurt the twins. She really cares. She was basically their mother for a long time.”
“What’s a long time again?”
She shrugged. “I’ll say for over ten years, basically, I guess? The twins are thirty, and she was part of their modeling days, even their early adult years.” She nodded to herself. “Yes, and I think she’s the one who got her brother hired. But you can’t quote me on that.”
“I think somebody is telling stories,” Ryker said.
At that, she gasped. “And that takes me right back to considering that maybe it’s Lana.” She groaned. “Lana apparently told lies really badly, and every time they got more and more elaborate. It’s one of the reasons why Chandra finally fired Lana because Chandra could never find the truth of what Lana said.”
“That bad?”
“That bad. For example, if some pocket money of one of the twins came up missing, Lana would say things like, One of the other twins took it at first. Then Chandra would be like, no, the girls have lots of their own money or whatever. So Lana would say something like, Oh, well, a servant must have taken it. Then it would be a break-in. Thereafter it would be something even stupider, like the twins would have mailed it to a fan or something like that.”
The two men just stared at her.
She shrugged. “If you’ve never been around a notorious liar,” she said, “you don’t know how bad it is. Lana was a liar, which was very distressing to Chandra, but the twins loved the stories that Lana told them all the time—about how they were princesses and how this world was special for them.”
“Lying isn’t a good tactic when raising children,” Ryker said. “Fairy tales are one thing, but then you must teach them about the reality of life.”
“Especially with the twins. I think Lana also considered herself the reason the twins were so successful at modeling. Because she’s the one who would coax them into doing what was needed. And … she was why the twins stopped cooperating when Chandra forbid Lana from attending their sessions.” Mickie had never really considered that point, but it made sense now.
“Right,” Ryker said, nodding. “And, if Lana didn’t get any extra money for her extra efforts, yet the twins were raking it in, then she might have felt that Chandra owed her.”
“Chandra felt the twins owed her for their existence, since she gave birth to them,” she said. “It was a very dependent relationship like that, and the twins missed her terribly, so I’m sure Chandra also felt that the twins needed her.”
“Needed, wanted, depended on … It doesn’t really matter what kind of twisted relationship was going on. It obviously went on for way too long, whether the dysfunctional relationship between the mother and her daughters and then again the dysfunctional relationship with the daughters and their nanny. Do you know what Lana’s ties to Chandra were?”
Mickie shook her head. “Chandra never said.”
“So then, why hasn’t Chandra told us about this?”
“I guess,” Mickie said honestly, “because it ended badly.”
“And Chandra obviously ignores the fact that Lana was her servant and was fired, so Lana’s wiped off the earth because she’s no longer in Chandra’s orbit.” Ryker nodded.
“Yes, but I’m not sure Chandra would agree that Lana had the brains for this either,” Mickie added.
“She wouldn’t need much in the way of a plan, would she? I mean, Chandra already delivered the twins to Asia. All Lana had to do was get help on this side,” Asher suggested.
“And I’m afraid her plan may have changed,” Ryker said, “because, even if Lana is involved in this, I highly doubt that she would be involved in all the multiple murders.”
“No,” Mickie said, “unless Lana’s brother was involved, and the two of them are fighting.”
Asher stared at her in shock. “Are you serious?”
She shrugged. “Unless you’ve met Lana’s brother, you wouldn’t understand. But he’s Chandra’s aggressive marketing manager, and he’s all about the bottom line.”
“And Lana?” Ryker asked.
“I think she’s more about the heart,” Mickie said. “But I’ve never met the woman, so I really don’t know.”
As far as Mickie was concerned, this was a nightmare that kept going. She agreed with the guys. She didn’t think Lana would have anything to do with drugging the twins or the deaths of the professional kidnappers and everybody else afterward. But, unless there was a falling out among thieves, the only other possibility was that Lana had lost control of the entire scenario. And that didn’t bode well for the twins.
Asher sorted out what this new information meant in terms of the manipulation behind the twins’ kidnapping. “In a way,” he said, “it would be the best answer of all.”
“Meaning,” Ryker said, as they gently floated along behind the two boats in front of them, “you think that this Lana woman would be the one to keep the best care of the twins, in a kidnapping context.”
“But only if she still has them,” Mickie said. “If she has them, then she probably will look after them as if they are her own. One of Chandra’s complaints was that the twins were looking to Lana more as their mother than to Chandra.”
“Are the twins in any danger of making that mistake?”
“No, not at this age,” Mickie said. “I don’t think so. But it doesn’t change the fact that Chandra felt very much like she’d been usurped as their mother.”
“And, if Chandra wasn’t around very much, it would make sense, as the twins would become more dependent on Lana.”
“Exactly.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that Lana could very easily have lost control over them now. Because, once we start talking about multiple murders here, the stakes have gone up.”
“And that usually means hate or revenge,” Ryker said.
“We can’t rule out the other main motivators either,” Asher said. He pointed to the t
wo boats ahead of them. “Looks like they’re setting out lines.”
“A diversion?”
“It’s possible,” Asher said. “Go past them, and keep an eye on them.”
With that in mind, the two of them sat opposite each other so as to see more without being obvious about it, while Asher piloted the boat slowly forward, his hat on, to all intents and purposes to look like locals moving across the waters. Nobody waved; nobody smiled, and nobody said a word. There was almost a tenseness to the atmosphere.
As they went past and headed around a bend, he said, “The two boats are following us now.”
“Interesting,” Ryker said. “I wonder where they’re headed.”
“Well, there’s a place to dock up ahead,” he said. “We could pull in there.”
“Unless you are taking their spot,” she said suddenly.
“Well, it’s big enough for two.”
“Making it all the more likely that it’s their parking spots.”
“If it’s a rendezvous spot, it would make sense because a lot of docks and decking are around. But they must carry the twins on land. That’ll be hard to miss.”
“Unless they’re capable of walking right now,” she said.
“If they’ve been drugged up until now, I would imagine they’ll stay that way.”
“Possibly,” she muttered. Then she paused before bursting out, “I hate this. I hate this subterfuge. I hate the fact that we can’t just board the boats and grab the girls.”
“And what if the girls aren’t there?” he asked.
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I hate it. I don’t like games.”
“All of life is a game,” Asher said. “It’s just a game you must learn to play.”
“Maybe, but I can’t say I’m terribly impressed.”
“I hear you,” Asher said as he headed toward the far side of a dock with just enough room for him to pull their boat in. There, he set them up against the wharf. “Now keep an eye out,” he said. The two boats, sure enough, followed slowly and moved gently through the water, keeping close to the shoreline. They pulled up to those two empty spots as expected. “Bingo on that one,” Ryker said.