Stolen Hearts

by Elise Noble

  Sweeping-dude kept watching me, which I suspected had more to do with my ass in the shorts I was wearing and less to do with me sizing the place up. In the dark with nobody around, I’d get into the building in a heartbeat, but with an audience? Tricky.

  Black could hear me through a microphone built into my necklace, and I could hear him via an earpiece.

  “I want to go in,” I said.

  “Of course you do.”

  On the left, the building joined to the one next door, but there was an alley on the right with room to park a car. A shabby door led inside. A good setup if you wanted to abduct somebody—knock them out in the restaurant, then bundle them straight out and into a waiting vehicle. I paused. The swish of a broom on stone told me sweeping-dude was still busy out the back. The door itself was secured by a simple mortice lock, and I was about to get out my lock picks when a man turned into the alley. Not Gunther. This guy was a local in chef’s whites.

  “You are looking for something?” he asked.

  “Yes, actually. Is Gunther here?”

  “Not now. He comes later.”

  “You work here?”

  “Yes, I cook.”

  “Do you know where Gunther lives?”

  “Assalah.” The chef pointed left along the promenade. “He walks that way.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  A shrug followed by a shake of the head. “He comes soon.”

  Dammit. Foiled again.

  “New plan,” I told Black. “I’m going to get breakfast. Do you want anything?”

  Happy Fish might have been closed, but the café on the other side of the Sweet Dreams Hotel was open for business, so I plopped onto a seat and ordered an Egyptian breakfast of falafel, eggs, cheese, and ful medames—mushed fava beans, for the Hannibal Lecter fans amongst you—served up with pitta bread. When in Rome and all that.

  Who worked there? What did they know?

  “You want coffee?” the waiter asked. A young guy, more of a kid. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen.

  “I need coffee. And I also have a couple of questions.”

  He came back with an insulated jug and poured me a generous cup, then perched on the chair opposite.

  “What questions?”

  “Did you hear a man got killed the other day?”

  “Naam, by the water plant? I heard.”

  “Yes. I’m part of an exchange program with the Dahab Police Department—you know, some of their people visit the UK, and we come over here—and I’m helping to investigate the case.” I fished out the flyer with Duncan’s picture. “Have you ever seen this man?”

  “That is Mr. Duncan.” The kid’s eyes widened. “This is who died?”

  I nodded. “How do you know Duncan?”

  “He came here for dinner with his family. Lunch, sometimes. He always gave me a big tip.”

  “As far as we can tell, he was last seen somewhere along the seafront here, walking back to Assalah. Were you working on Friday evening?”

  “The day the American girl disappeared?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was here, but I didn’t see Mr. Duncan.”

  “Was anyone else working that night?”

  “My father and my brother.”

  “Could we ask if they noticed him walking past?”

  We could, and they didn’t. The father seemed too frail to manhandle a guy Duncan’s size, and the brother had one leg in a cast. A fall downstairs, apparently. I couldn’t honestly imagine any of the trio committing our murders.

  It was a similar story at the next two restaurants along the seafront—no likely suspects, and nobody who’d seen Duncan—and I began to get jitters from all the caffeine. Ten fifteen. Was Gunther back yet?

  The door was locked, but when I knocked on the window, the chef ambled through from the kitchen and fumbled with the catch.

  “He’s not here yet.”

  “The guy next door said he came at ten.”

  “Sometimes eleven, sometimes twelve. There was a big group here to eat last night, and he stayed late. Maybe he sleeping?”

  Should we try calling him? We had his number from earlier in the investigation, but if he was our culprit, I didn’t want to scare him off. I was just about to consult with the oracle when his voice sounded in my ear.

  “You’re not gonna believe this. Zena’s gone missing again.”

  CHAPTER 36 - EMMY

  “YOU’RE KIDDING?” I muttered, careful to keep my voice low. “Gone? Again?”

  “Bob just called. She’s not in her room, and they can’t find her at the hotel.”

  “They’ve tried calling her?”

  “Phone’s turned off. And with everything that’s been going on, they’re understandably worried.”

  If she’d run away again, I’d kill her myself. “Any arguments this time?”

  “Apparently not. But Lynn says she hasn’t stopped begging for a dog, and Chris reckons there’s a hundred bucks missing from his wallet.”

  “I bet she’s come into town to look for the damn mutt.” She probably took the cash to buy it a rotisserie chicken or something. “Have you tried Aurelie?”

  “She’s not answering. I’ve left a voicemail.”

  For a moment, my chest tightened, but then I relaxed again. Aurelie had never visited the hospital. Without a blood test, she wouldn’t be on the killer’s radar.

  “Do you want to head over there, or shall I?”

  “Let’s both go. If Zena’s loose in town, I want to find her quickly.”

  So did I. Joking aside, there was a nasty niggle at the back of my mind that Zena had been to the hospital recently. If she’d been targeted, we didn’t have any time to lose. I jogged down an alley, found Black in the pickup on el-Melal Street, and jumped into the passenger seat.

  “Did Bob say how long she’s been missing?”

  “No one’s seen her since last night.”

  Last night? Fucking hell.

  “According to the chef, Gunther worked late yesterday evening. And Bergeron had his lady friend staying.” So both had been otherwise occupied.

  “I’ll call Khaled and get him to spread the word.”

  Shit, shit, shit. I hated when people close to me got wrapped up in the middle of nasty stuff. It had happened in the past with Tia, my ex-boyfriend’s sister, who had an uncanny ability to get herself kidnapped with no bloody warning. Twice I’d rescued her, and the second time, I got shot in the chest. I’d been wearing a bulletproof vest, thankfully, but it still stung like a bitch.

  “Khaled?” Black had the phone on speaker. “We’ve got another problem.”

  “You heard already?”

  “That Zena’s missing again? Yes.”

  “No, about the body.”

  My spine went rigid, and Black’s knuckles turned white where they gripped the steering wheel.

  “What body?” he asked.

  “At the Blue Hole. A woman’s body. Someone just reported it. My colleagues are on their way.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The captain is making me update the Twitter. He says I should not have helped you.”

  “We’re on our way to the Blue Hole. Just get outside and look for Zena.” Black hung up. “Fucking Twitter.”

  The road to the Blue Hole clung to the edge of the shore with the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. Occasionally, the beach widened enough for a hotel or a café, but in places, there was just a drop from the tarmac into the water.

  Black floored it around convoys of scuba divers, busloads of tourists from Sharm el-Sheikh, and locals dawdling along in ageing taxis and pickups. The driver of a water tanker blasted his horn as we swerved in front of him, narrowly missing a car coming the other way. After the Canyon dive site, the tarmac ran out, and we bounced over the rocky desert. It was a good thing I didn’t have any fillings because they’d have come loose.

  “If this turns out to be Zena, it won’t just be us her killer has to deal
with,” Black said. “Bob’s gonna gut him.”

  “Well, I’ll help to hold the fucker down.”

  Often, looking at Bob in his sandals and Bermuda shorts, it was easy to forget he’d been Black’s commanding officer in the Navy SEALs. He may have lost some of his edge in semi-retirement, but he still kept in shape and went out to the desert regularly to practise shooting. I wouldn’t want to face him in a fight.

  The suspension rattled as Black took off over a rocky lip, and the engine didn’t smell too happy either. A girl in a bikini riding a mangy camel hurled a mouthful of abuse as we roared past, missing her by inches, but Black didn’t slow down until we reached the small strip of restaurants and shops that had sprung up around the Blue Hole. I was out and running before he’d stopped the vehicle.

  “Hey,” I called to the nearest man. “I hear they’ve found a body here?”

  He shrugged, confused, and replied with a Russian accent. “Not speaking English.”

  Fine. I tried Russian. “Has somebody found a body here?”

  “A body?”

  “Like a dead body?” What did he want, a fucking biology lesson?

  “I haven’t heard that.”

  At the other end of the beach, I spotted a cluster of white uniforms against the sandy cliffs. Their black epaulettes told me they were Khaled’s colleagues, but I didn’t recognise any of them. Friend or foe? I didn’t particularly want to find out. The second person I asked was no help either, or the third, but a Bedouin who’d overheard my question stepped out of a tiny supermarket.

  “There is no body.”

  “Really? We heard from the police that there was.”

  “It was a jacket in the water. A woman thought it was a person and began screaming, and somebody called the police. But it was just clothing.”

  Oh, thank goodness. I didn’t know whether to be happy it wasn’t Zena or pissed because we’d wasted time driving over there. Probably we owed Bob a new transmission too. In the end, I settled for feeling relieved, and I ran back to Black, who was striding in my direction.

  “It’s not her. It’s not anyone. Somebody made a mistake.”

  He closed his eyes for a brief moment. “Good. That’s good. Everyone’s jumpy right now.”

  “We need to get back to town. Perhaps a bit slower than we came here.”

  It was almost as if Black hadn’t heard me, but as we approached civilisation, he didn’t have any choice but to hit the brakes because the traffic in front of us had ground to a halt. He cursed as we ended up parked behind a pickup filled with air tanks and scuba gear. Two Bedouin kids riding on the back hopped off and knocked on my window, trying to sell us bracelets.

  “Not now, kids, okay?”

  “What the hell is going on?” Black asked.

  “I can’t see a thing. Maybe someone hit a goat or a camel. I’ll go and take a look.”

  Except before I could climb out, my phone rang. My heart jumped. Every call at the moment seemed to bring drama, and we desperately needed good news. An unknown number from the Netherlands flashed up on the screen, and I eased my door shut again.

  “Hello?”

  “Emerson Black?”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “My name is Beatrice Marten. You asked me about Gosia?” Beatrice spoke carefully, precisely, her English fluent and her Dutch accent thick.

  I relayed the story for what felt like the millionth time that week, expanding on what I’d written in my email to Beatrice. “So we were wondering if you recall seeing her any time that week?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. She took my produce order, but my box never arrived.”

  “Didn’t you think that was odd?”

  “Not really, because I saw the posters saying she’d gone missing.”

  “You didn’t contact anyone to say you’d seen her?”

  “Should I have done that? We only had lunch. I didn’t think it was important.”

  “You had lunch? On the twenty-seventh of June?”

  “Yes, I checked my calendar. I had a business idea, and she agreed to talk with me about it.”

  “What kind of business idea?”

  “I make jewellery, and we discussed her delivering flyers for my pieces with her produce boxes in return for a commission. But then she disappeared, and I got a contract to write for a travel blog, so I left Dahab for a while. I’ll go back in the spring.”

  How did this fit? “Lunch would have been what, about twelve o’clock? One o’clock?”

  “Around twelve o’clock. My painting class finished at eleven thirty, and I’d just got back home. If Gosia had come any earlier, she’d have missed me.”

  “Did you talk about anything else? Did she mention any unwanted attention? Maybe something that made her uncomfortable?”

  “No, we just ate, and then she said she had to rush off to see Gunther at the fish restaurant by the Sweet Dreams Hotel because he’d promised her a big order that week.”

  Wait. What? “Are you certain? Gunther at the fish restaurant? Because he said she came earlier and spoke to one of his staff.”

  “Definitely Gunther. I know him.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “Sometimes I ate there. He asked me to go for dinner with him once, but I said no.”

  “He gave you bad vibes?”

  “Not really, but he was loud and I prefer women.”

  Fair enough. “He misjudged that one, didn’t he?”

  Beatrice chortled. “Sometimes men look but they don’t see. Gosia didn’t care for Gunther either. She hated that he served fish in his restaurant, but she viewed his custom as a necessary evil.”

  “I think you might have been the last person to see Gosia alive.”

  “Apart from Gunther, you mean?” She paused as my words sank in. “You can’t honestly think Gunther killed her?”

  “His name’s already come up for other reasons. Why don’t you think it was him?”

  “I’m not sure. I think… I guess… He was always happy. Always smiley.”

  You know who else was always smiley? Keith Hunter Jesperson, and he killed at least eight people in Canada.

  “I promise we’ll look into this carefully.”

  “But—”

  “There’s another girl missing, so I really have to go. But thanks so much for calling, and I’ll give you an update when I know more.”

  I hung up, stabbing the phone screen so hard my finger hurt. Fuck. Gunther? I got what Beatrice meant—he was kind of irritating, but despite the little clues pointing in his direction, he didn’t give off creepy serial killer vibes.

  “Gunther lied,” I said. “And if he lied about the time, it means our route for Gosia on the twenty-seventh was wrong, and she never talked to Carmela—”

  “And Carmela was never in Dahab City that day, therefore we wasted our time on Bergeron,” Black finished. “Plus his sister’s involved. She was his alibi that day.”

  “Murder. A family enterprise.”

  “I’ll get Mack to shift all the Richmond team’s focus to those two.”

  He dialled, and the ringtone filled the cabin. Five a.m. in Virginia—had Mack gone to bed yet? Left to her own devices, she was practically nocturnal.

  “Hey, y’all.” Mack’s Texan drawl filled the cabin. “I was just gonna call.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Did you find something?”

  “Maybe. D’ya have time to talk?”

  “We’re stuck in a traffic jam,” I said.

  “In that case… I divided the list of hospital employees into four and split the quarters between me, Luke, Agatha, and Mouse. Agatha’s grandfather came from Berlin, so she speaks German, and she’s got her hooks into a bunch of German databases I’ve never looked at, so she took anyone from the list who sounded German.”

  “And? What did she find?”

  “One of the nurses at the hospital is married to a doctor who got suspended from the German Medical Association—the Bundesärztekammer—for ethics
violations.”

  “What kind of violations?”

  “Taking bribes from patients on the transplant waiting list.”

  Holy fuck! We had him. “What’s the nurse’s name? And the surgeon’s?”

  “Magdalena Fleischmann. And her husband’s Stefan Fleischmann.”

  “Magdalena?” I remembered that name. “She was the nurse who stitched Zena up when we took her to the hospital.”

  Black rested his head against the back of the seat and closed his eyes. “Magdalena. Maggie. Maggie and Stefan. She’s Gunther’s sister.” Fuck. “We need an address for him—he lives somewhere in the Assalah section of town.”

  “I’ll get right on it.”

  I opened the door again. “And I’ll try to find out what the hold-up is.”

  Up ahead, the scuba divers had got out of their truck, shorty wetsuits dangling around their waists. Two of them were smoking as they chatted in French.

  “Any idea what’s going on, guys?”

  “Oui, there’s a roadblock ahead.”

  “A roadblock? What for?”

  Please, say the police were actually doing their job for once and looking for Zena.

  “Apparently, two tourists are running around impersonating police officers, and there’s a rumour they were seen at the Blue Hole.” He shook his head, and ash dropped onto the ground. “What kind of person pretends to be a cop?”

  Ah, shit. “I have no idea.”

  “It’s crazy, no?” He chuckled and held out a packet of cigarettes. “Gauloise?”

  “No, thanks. I don’t smoke.” But at that moment, I was really, really tempted to start again. “Guess we’ll just wait then.”

  Black was watching me as I hurried back to Bob’s truck.

  “It’s bad news?” he asked.

  “Yup. Al-Busari heard we were at the Blue Hole, and this roadblock is for us.”

  CHAPTER 37 - EMMY

  BLACK TWISTED TO look into the back of the crew cab pickup.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Seems we’ve brought Mr. Murphy along for the ride.”

  Ah, yes, Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame, otherwise known as “what can go wrong, will go wrong.”