by Kathi Daley
“Okay, why wouldn’t it be an option?”
I opened my mouth to explain when Mac and Ty walked in through the cabin door.
“Any luck?” I asked.
Ty shook his head. “If I could get into the engine room, I think I could figure out a way to bypass the alarm on the jammer, but until then, we’ll need to do what we did before. It is about time to send the second email to Woody. Hopefully, there will be one from him waiting to get through to us.”
“Okay, let’s figure out what we want to say to him, and then we’ll all go up to the deck to send it.”
“Any luck getting into the staterooms?” Mac asked.
I nodded. “I took a bunch of photos of the files Harris left all over the place.” I looked at Ty. “It would help if you’d take a look at them after we send off the next text.”
“Of course. I’d be happy to.”
“Evan showed up while we were in his cabin, but we managed to sneak back into Harris’s and get out that way,” I added. “Bret was with him.”
“Bret is part of this?” Mac asked.
“We don’t know,” Trevor answered. “Bret was with Evan, but we didn’t hang around long enough to know what he might be up to. I think we should assume that no one can be trusted and watch what we say to and in front of them all.”
“Agreed,” Ty said. “I’m not liking this one bit.”
“If this is all about the money, as we suspect, whoever is behind this probably knows that you’re aware of the missing funds,” I said to Ty. “I think you need to watch your back.”
Ty nodded.
I glanced at Mac, who had gone pale.
“We are pretty sure Evan is behind everything. Why don’t we grab him the next time we see him, tie him up, and make him tell us what he is up to and where we are going,” she suggested.
“We don’t know who is working with him or what sort of weapons might be on board,” I pointed out. “It’s too dangerous to make a move until we know more.”
Mac let out a long groan. “I just hate all this waiting.”
“Me too,” I sympathized. “But we need to keep things as normal as we can. For now, let’s send off the text, then come back here and try to figure out what needs to be done next.”
Trevor got up and walked over to the sliding door. “The ship has slowed down considerably.”
I got up and followed him to the door, which allowed for a view of the sea. “I wonder if they realized they were lost and decided to conserve fuel until they figured where to go, or if they have figured that out, they could have slowed the ship for the rendezvous we assume Evan has with some other ship.”
“Do you think it is safe to head up to the top deck to send the text?” Trevor asked.
“I’m not sure. Let’s go up there and take a look around. We can post someone at the doorway to the stairs so that if anyone comes up, we’ll know about it.”
“Someone like Alyson,” Trevor whispered.
I nodded.
Trevor squeezed my hand in return to communicate that he understood.
“I’m going to make a quick stop in the bathroom before we head out,” I said. Once I was in there, I called quietly to Alyson. When she appeared, I told her what I wanted her to do: follow us up to the top deck while we made certain no one was there. Once that was accomplished, she’d keep an eye on both the stairwell and the elevator, and if someone was on their way up, she’d come to tell me right away.
When we arrived on the top deck, there didn’t seem to be anyone there. We separated and took a closer look at the gym and seating areas around the pool and forward, near the bow. Once we were fairly certain the deck was completely unoccupied, Ty brought the jammer offline, we sent the text we’d already prepared, and Ty brought the jammer back online.
“Let’s head back down to our stateroom,” I said. “Just in case someone comes up here.”
Alyson appeared. “Take the back stairway. Evan and one of the men from the engine room are on their way up in the elevator.”
“Let’s take the back stairway,” I said to the others. “And hurry.”
I figured that my knowing that we were about to have company was going to create questions from Ty, but getting off that deck before the others arrived seemed to be the most important thing just then. As soon as we all arrived in the stateroom, Ty checked the messages that had come through on his phone during the brief time the jammer was disabled.
“I have a text from Woody,” Ty said.
“What does it say?” I asked.
Ty opened it and read it. “The ship’s GPS locator seems to be inoperable. Woody assures us that he has the coast guard looking for us, but so far, they haven’t had any luck. We are definitely nowhere near where we are supposed to be. He is trying to see if he can find someone who can backtrack our text in the hope of locating the GPS point from which it was sent.”
“Okay, what else?”
“Apparently, before she died, Lucy called a cousin of hers who is with the FBI. She told him about the missing funds and asked him to look into them. According to what Woody says, she didn’t feel right about keeping everything to herself when so much money had been stolen.”
“I knew that,” I said. Everyone looked at me. “Okay, I didn’t know that. But I suspected that Lucy told someone, although I had no idea it was her cousin.”
Mac and Ty were both looking at me with an expression of confusion.
“That’s what you were about to tell me when Mac and Ty walked in,” Trevor said.
I nodded and then glanced at them. “Trevor and I were discussing the fact that it made no sense that Evan hijacked the ship. We felt that it was likely that Evan would just get off the ship at the next port and catch a plane to some nonextradition country once he found out that the huge embezzlement had been found. We were discussing reasons he might not have done things that way, and it occurred to me that perhaps Lucy had gone ahead and notified the authorities. She told me that was what she’d wanted to do, but Harris had asked her not to. If she did, she might have told Lance or Bret what she had done, and perhaps the person she told had passed that information along to Evan. Evan might have realized that there could be law enforcement personnel waiting for him when he debarked, so instead of following the original route, he mixed things up and set out to international waters.”
“Wouldn’t the cops have just boarded the ship in Port Townsend and arrested him there?” Mac asked.
“Not if they had to wait for a warrant to do so. Maybe they planned to meet up with the ship at Friday Harbor, but if Evan had been given a heads-up, it might have given him time to get out to international water before anyone was able to legally board the ship.”
“Are you sure they needed a warrant? Couldn’t the captain have just given them permission?”
“Not if he was detained and the men who are now piloting the ship had been put in charge before that could happen,” I supposed.
Ty nodded. “Amanda is right. This text says that when Lucy called her cousin, he planned to meet the ship at Friday Harbor and take all the Hamilton Investment employees into custody for questioning.”
“But the ship was long gone by the time anyone figured out that the ship was no longer going to dock in Friday Harbor,” Trevor said.
“What else did Woody say?” I asked.
“That the coast guard found a life raft with the original ship’s crew floating off the coast of Vancouver Island, so they had been focusing their search in that area ever since he realized we were missing.”
“Are the crew all right?” I asked.
“He doesn’t say that they aren’t. We can ask when we text again.”
“Did the crew tell him what happened to them?” Trevor asked.
“Just that they were ambushed and the bridge and engine room taken over. Rather than heading north as planned, the ship was taken toward the open sea. The crew was set adrift near Port Renfrew.”
I took a deep breath and blew it out
slowly. “Okay. That answers part of the question of what happened to everyone on board. I wonder where the other passengers are.”
“We’ll ask that in the next text too,” Ty said.
“Lance disappeared at the same time Lucy did. Chances are he, at least, is dead,” Trevor said quietly.
I knew he was most likely right, but I hated to consider the possibility. “Does the text say anything else?”
“Just that Woody has a lot of resources looking for us and he promises that he will find us wherever we might be. He cautions us to play it cool and clueless. He points out that given our situation, it won’t do anyone any good to try to play the hero.”
I knew Woody was right, but the entire situation was getting on my nerves.
Chapter 14
After we had read and reread Woody’s text, the four of us looked at the documents I’d photographed until it was time to head down to see about dinner. I wasn’t sure they would give us any information we didn’t already have, but it was best to look at everything as a potential clue.
“Okay, so this seems to be a list of GPS coordinates,” I said, pointing at my phone screen. “I have no idea what locations the points refer to, but from my knowledge of GPS coordinates, these figures seem to fit the pattern.”
“I agree, they do look like GPS coordinates.” Ty reached for the phone. “I’ll write them down and try to figure out what points these lead to. I obviously don’t have every GPS coordinate on the planet memorized, but I am familiar with the way things are laid out, so I can probably come up with some approximations.”
I handed him the phone and waited for him to write down the information. For about the millionth time in the past two days, I realized I was really happy he was on our team.
“What else did you find?” Trevor asked after Ty handed the phone back to me.
I moved to the next document in my photo folder. “This one features two columns, each containing a series of numbers. I don’t know for sure, but I think these might be bank account numbers and perhaps deposit amounts. If you look at the column on the left, the number sequence in each row is pretty long and each number sequence has twenty digits. The use of zeros at the beginning of some of the sequences says to me that the zeroes are placeholders for numbers with fewer than twenty digits.”
“So, if the bank account only had eighteen digits, the first two numbers in the series would be zero, zero,” Trevor said.
“Exactly.” I pointed to the screen. “The column on the right, however, shows number sequences of randomly differing lengths from seven to ten digits in length. I suspect these could be dollar amounts, but I don’t know that for certain yet.”
“So, the first number sequence in the right-hand column could represent the dollar amount $47,326.07?” Trevor asked.
“Perhaps. Commas and decimal points were not used, so it could also represent $4,732,617, if cents were not recorded.”
“Wow. If that were the case, we are looking at a lot of money based on the totality of all the numbers on the page,” Mac said.
“The total is substantial however you look at it, although, again, for all we know, the number represents something else entirely.”
Trevor leaned forward so that his face was right next to mine. I took in a breath. God, he smelled good.
“It looks like the GPS coordinates are associated with points in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” Ty said. “I am going to take a stab at a location off the west coast of southern Alaska, or perhaps northern Canada.”
“I’m thinking the coordinates were worked out as a route for Evan to provide for whoever he is trying to meet up with.” I listened to the engines. “We are still moving along pretty slowly. It makes me think whatever is going to happen will be soon.”
We fell into silence. I was sure we were all trying to figure out what we had to look forward to occurring next.
“Okay, so what else did you find in Evan’s stateroom?” Mac asked.
“We found a passport with his photo but some other name.” I held up my phone screen with a photo of the passport on it. “And a message that looked to have been written in code. I took a photo of it as well so we can work on it later. There were maps and diagrams that looked like routes. I took photos of everything I could. I imagine once Evan realized there were going to be people waiting for him in any US port in which he might try to debark, he set to work figuring out an escape route.”
“And what were on the files in Harris’s cabin?” Mac asked.
“Most were customer files. I think he was trying to figure out who had been affected by the fraud.”
“So we have that information?”
I shook my head. “Most of the information on the hard copies relating to names and addresses had been blacked out. I can’t really tell who the files belong to now. The files do have account numbers, though, so if we had access to Hamilton Investments account numbers, we could figure it out.”
“Ty and I can get in to that, if we ever get internet, that is,” Mac said.
“I suppose we just need to wait and try to appear totally oblivious to everything that is going on, as Woody suggested,” I said. “Trevor, I think you should start dinner. If Evan does suspect that someone is disabling the jammer, we need to act as casually as possible to keep his focus off us. Mac and Ty can help you. I’ll help as well, but first I’m going to take another look at the life raft storage lockers. If one was used to offload the crew, maybe someone left some sort of evidence behind.”
“You aren’t going alone.” Trevor said.
“I’ll to with her,” Mac said. “I’m pretty useless in the kitchen anyway.”
The four of us headed to the lowest deck, where both the kitchen and the storage area were located. Trevor and Ty went toward the kitchen as soon as we got there, while Mac and I continued to the storage lockers.
“I assume that Alyson gave you a heads-up about Evan coming up when we were on the top deck,” Mac said.
I nodded. “It is working out to be very helpful having her here.”
“I think that Ty suspects there is more going on than we are telling him, but so far, he hasn’t made an issue of it.”
I paused and looked at Mac. “You can tell him whatever you want. It is totally up to you, although my having a spirit half that seems to pop in and out of my body is a lot harder to understand than having the ability to see ghosts. Your relationship is new. You might want to ease into the whole Alyson thing.”
“I agree. I really like Ty, and we are so good together, but this is all very new, so it’s not like I know where we’ll end up. If our relationship stands the test of time, maybe I’ll tell him. In the meantime, as long as he doesn’t bring it up, I won’t either.”
I paused when we arrived at the area set aside for storage. In addition to the life rafts and vests, there were cabinets for deck chairs, extra linens, and other supplies.
“There are three life rafts,” I informed Mac. “They appear to hold ten to twelve people each, and from what I can tell, they are all about the same size.” I lifted the lid of the first storage unit. The inflatable boat that was supposed to be inside was. The same was true of the second unit I opened. “Third times a charm.” I lifted the lid and gasped. Not only was the boat missing, but a body was in its place.
“Harris,” Mac said.
I lowered the lid. “I’m afraid so. I guess that answers the question of where he, at least, has gone off to.”
“What about his wife?” Mac asked.
I frowned. “I don’t know. I suppose it might be time to search the ship again. We’ll wait until after we feed everyone. Hopefully, everyone will gather in the bar after dinner and we can take a look around without so many potential witnesses.”
“Given all the alcohol that has been consumed today, I’m surprised anyone is still standing.” Mac fell into step beside me. “Do you think we are going to find the bodies of the other missing passengers stashed away in some out-of-the-way places?”<
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“By my calculations there should only be one person unaccounted for. When the ship left Seattle, there were eight crew on board, twenty guests, including us, and the band, who I was told planned to debark at midnight after we docked in Port Townsend. Assuming the musicians left as planned, and all eight members of the crew were in the life raft that was set adrift and found by the coast guard, that just leaves the twenty guests to account for. We know now that Harris, as well as Lucy are dead, and Dotty, Claudia, Lisa, Brody, and Lance are missing. So far, everyone else who boarded in Seattle is accounted for, as far as we know. And I am fairly certain I saw four people get off the ship last night while I was speaking to Lucy’s ghost. Assuming those four individuals weren’t members of the initial crew or anyone who came aboard while the smaller ship was tied up to this one, I suggest that four of the five missing guests left under their own power.”
“I guess that makes sense, but which four?”
I slowly shook my head. “I don’t know. But I intend to find out.”
By the time Mac and I returned to the kitchen, Trevor and Ty had something wonderful-smelling in the oven. Every available countertop was covered with chopped veggies, diced herbs, and grated cheeses.
“Something smells heavenly,” I said.
“It’s one of my specialties,” Trevor informed me. “Any luck?”
“Unfortunately, yes. We found the storage space with the missing lifeboat, but I’m afraid it has been replaced with a body. Harris’s body.”
Ty’s mouth tightened. “I was afraid things were headed in that direction.”
“We currently have five passengers unaccounted for,” I said, then listed their names. “I saw four people leave the ship last night and board the smaller vessel that was tied up to this one. I can’t be absolutely certain, but I think they were four of the five missing guests.”
“Which four?” Ty asked.
“I can’t say, but Lance was missing before the others,” I reminded everyone. “My guess right now is that Lance is probably the unaccounted for guest and is most likely dead, unless, of course, he turns out to be the one who tipped Evan off that Lucy had called the feds. In that case, he might have been paid off by him and took off while he was still able to get away.”
