by Emily James
I wasn’t going to back up her decision this time.
A cold tingle made my fingers go numb. There was one other reason she might have called me here.
She might have called me here to have a witness to the note. The only reason she’d need to do that, though, was if she had actually hurt Garth, and now she wanted to be able to disappear and still be thought innocent.
I’d be the perfect witness if she wanted that. I was a lawyer, and I had nothing personal to gain from Garth’s death or her disappearance. If anyone questioned it, even money couldn’t be a motive for me to lie. My bank accounts wouldn’t show any strange deposits.
There was one person I hadn’t had McTavish look into.
Carrie.
In case my suspicions were wrong, I needed to try one more time to convince her not to leave the ship.
“If they want a ransom for Garth, you have more leverage than you think. We can tell them you’ll get them the money, but that you’ll only do it from the ship.”
“We don’t know who sent the note. We can’t ask them anything.” She crumpled the letter up and tossed it into the trash can, destroying any potential fingerprints. “I’m tired. I think you need to leave now. I don’t want to have to call security again.”
If she wasn’t listening to logic, she wouldn’t have any qualms about calling security on me. Hart would probably love to toss me out after the position I’d put him in.
I made eye contact. “Please think about what I said.”
She didn’t reply. Instead, she directed a stare at the door.
I let myself out. I had to leave, but I didn’t have to give up. At this point, I couldn’t give up and live at peace with myself. Because one of two things was going to happen—either the person who hurt Garth was also going to hurt Carrie, or Carrie was a murderer about to walk away free with all of her new husband’s money.
Chapter 10
I headed back to our cabin, texting Chief McTavish Carrie’s name along the way.
Married name or maiden name? he wrote back almost instantly.
Crap. I didn’t know Carrie’s maiden name. She was going by Bodie because they were married, but she wouldn’t have had time to legally change her name yet. And with the interaction we’d just had, she wasn’t about to tell me her maiden name or even let me back into her cabin to snoop around and look for her passport.
That left me with one option if I wanted McTavish to poke into her background. I’d have to get her last name from the ship’s passenger manifest. Since I didn’t have access to it myself, that meant asking a crew member to give it to me.
Unfortunately for me, the only crew member who wouldn’t look at me like I’d had too much to drink simply for asking was Hart.
Not only was he also a suspect, but he’d made it clear that he wasn’t going to hand over passengers’ names to me. Though, technically, he hadn’t been willing to hand over other passengers’ names. He might be willing, maybe, to give me Carrie’s actual last name.
I stopped my march down the hallway. If I was going to the security office instead of our cabin, I needed to take a left.
I just wasn’t sure if I should. It came down to who I trusted least at this point—Carrie or Hart.
In the past, I would have made my choice and run off after it, but I wasn’t a single person anymore. Everything I did now affected someone else.
I dialed Mark’s cell phone.
“Did you forget how to get back to our room again?” There was a smile in his voice even though he still sounded worn-out.
I’d only forgotten a few times. When we’d originally found our room, I hadn’t planned to need to ever find it without Mark. “I have a slightly bigger dilemma.”
I filled him in on what happened. “So either way, we can’t let her get off this ship, but the only way to stop her is to figure out what really happened to Garth.”
“Within the next twenty-four hours.”
The ship would be getting into port tonight. The announcement at breakfast had said no one would be allowed to disembark due to the late arrival time, but that excursions would begin as scheduled the next morning. “More like twelve, and McTavish isn’t going to want to stay up all night.”
“So let’s run it down,” Mark said. “If it’s Carrie, then the smartest move is to go to Hart and get his help. She can’t be allowed off the ship. There’ll be no finding her once she leaves.”
I checked the hallway to make sure no one was coming down it from either direction at the moment. “If it’s Hart, then the worst he’s going to do is try to delay me because he wants Carrie to leave the ship. I won’t be a threat to him if his goal was to point suspicion at her. He’ll actually be happy I’m doing it.”
Which, thankfully, also meant I wouldn’t be in danger from Hart. I’d only be in danger from him if I continued investigating him as a suspect.
“You don’t think he’s behind this anymore?”
“He might still be, but he’d only have one of two goals at this point. He’d either want money from Carrie, in which case I think he’d have sent a traditional ransom demand. Or he’d be afraid enough that I’m on to him and Nat that he wanted to divert suspicion.”
Even if someone else sent the note, they likely weren’t planning to leave the ship themselves. They had no reason to. We currently had few leads. Once Carrie left the ship and didn’t return, anyone who cared enough to notice would either think they’d disappeared together or that Carrie had killed Garth and fled.
A couple approached from down the hall. I asked Mark to hang on and waited for them to pass by. The halls always made me think of the below deck areas shown in the movie Titanic. They were narrow enough that I had to press against the handrail because the woman didn’t want to release the man’s hand as they passed by.
I waited until they were far enough away that I was sure they wouldn’t hear me. “What do you think I should do?”
In the pause that followed, I could imagine Mark running the probabilities in his head. How likely was it that going there alone would put me in a dangerous situation?
“You should go to Hart,” he said. “Tell him about the note, and ask him to give you Carrie’s last name.”
I started to move the phone away to disconnect, but Mark wasn’t done.
“And if you’re not back or I haven’t heard from you in twenty minutes, I’m sounding a fire alarm.”
Even though it would mean evacuating the entire boat and probably getting arrested for tampering with safety equipment, I knew he’d do it if it meant keeping me safe.
* * *
Hart was still in his office when I came by. A female officer who wore her ponytail a little too high and tight to be comfortable and two other male officers closer to fifty than to my age stood in a semicircle around him, almost blocking him from my view.
They were going over something together on the desk, and they didn’t seem to notice when I entered. I rapped my knuckles lightly on the edge of the door.
Hart glanced up, then looked back up again as if my face hadn’t fully registered the first time.
If an expression ever said oh crap, his did. He hadn’t been expecting me.
That could mean either of two things. It could mean he’d sent the note and he thought I’d figured it out, or it could mean he hadn’t sent the note and so he thought our conversation this morning would have gotten me out of his hair for longer than a few hours.
It’d be nice if people came with motivation subtitles.
Hart swept the pages on his desk together and handed them to the female officer. “We’ll go over the rest of the security reports later. Go back to your rounds for now.”
I stepped out of the way. The male officers didn’t even glance at me on the way by, as if they’d become immune to whatever crazy thing would happen next on the ship. The female officer had that I’m-curious-but-I’m-trying-not-to-show-it look written all over her.
Since I knew what happened when I got c
urious, I was never entirely comfortable when someone else was. For all I knew, she’d have her own reasons to suspect Hart of wrongdoing, and she’d be investigating me next.
They all exited, and I glared at the door. It had no way of locking it to make sure someone wasn’t going to walk in on us. In fact, it was probably thin enough that anyone serious about eavesdropping would be able to without needing any fancy equipment or help.
Hopefully Hart wouldn’t be thinking the same thing. He’d never give me Carrie’s last name if he suspected we might be overheard. Even though he’d be sending it to a police chief, his job could still be on the line depending on the cruise company’s privacy policies. They didn’t have to release passenger’s names without a warrant. In fact, I was sure the powers that be would refuse to release any information without a warrant.
“You ever hear the saying about the bad penny,” Hart said.
I’d take the showing up at an inopportune time part of that reference, and I was probably unwanted, but…okay, he had used that in a way I couldn’t argue with.
Given that he saw me that way, I’d need to be cagey in how I approached this. “I know we agreed that there was no need to send the list of names from the poker game to my police contact.” That wasn’t entirely a lie. I hadn’t sent McTavish a list per se. I’d simply given him two names of people I knew had a grudge against Garth Bodie. “But I do need your help with something else.”
He looked for a second like he wanted to tell me that he had important work to do—real work. He looked like he wanted to, but he didn’t, probably because I still knew something he didn’t want his employers to find out. That did give me a bit of negotiating advantage.
He stared at me with his eyebrows raised, waiting.
“I’m not convinced anymore that Carrie wasn’t involved in the disappearance of her husband. I need her maiden name so I can have my police contact run a background check on her.”
Hart had been leaning on his desk. He pushed away from it now. “I’m glad you’re not my lawyer, if you swap sides that easily.”
Ouch. I didn’t see it as swapping sides. I saw it as being on the side of truth and justice from start to finish. “I only defend innocent clients. Carrie knows that.”
“And what makes you think she might not be innocent?”
It felt like he was fishing for information. That was okay by me. I wanted him to think he was no longer a suspect. Not only would that increase my chances of him helping me investigate Carrie, but it’d also take his guard down and increase his chances of screwing up.
I told him about the note and how she was insistent about leaving the ship and waiting for whoever sent it to contact her.
His eyes narrowed slightly at the edges, a micro-tell that he couldn’t control. Like he suspected I was trying to trick him. “That’s a funny reason to suspect she’s behind her husband’s disappearance. Receiving a ransom note would make me think someone else kidnapped her husband for money.”
I met his gaze without blinking. “They didn’t ask for money, didn’t tell her where to go, and didn’t say how they’d get back into contact with her.”
He nodded his head in such slow motion that it almost felt like he was trying to buy himself time to think. “That does sound staged,” he said, equally slowly.
Something was definitely brewing in his mind, but I wasn’t sure what. It could be that he’d sent the note. But if he had, he should have been glad I was looking somewhere else. Though perhaps he wasn’t glad despite that because I’d figured out that the person who sent the note wasn’t after money at all.
I wanted to stomp my foot. This case was tangled up into more knots than if I’d tried to take the knot-tying class the cruise ship offered as a free activity during our days at sea.
Hart pressed the knuckles of one hand into the top of his desk and leaned his weight on that arm. “So you want Carrie Bodie’s legal name so that you can see if she’d been involved in anything suspicious in the past.”
I nodded and tried not to imagine what he must be thinking about the fact that I’d taken on a client without knowing her real last name. In my silent defense, it wasn’t like I’d intended to have to defend her. In fact, I hadn’t intended to become this mixed up in the case on my own honeymoon at all. If Mark hadn’t been so sick and cabin-bound, we might not be in this position at all.
Hart shifted his weight back off his arm and tapped his knuckles lightly on the desk. I could almost see his mental ledger making calculations. Was it better to keep me off his trail by giving me what I needed to investigate Carrie? Or was it better to not risk his job by giving me passenger information? For all he knew, I wasn’t looking into Carrie at all, and I planned to use his breach of confidentiality against him to get him investigated more closely.
If that’s the path his mind was headed down—and I suspected it was—I needed to set him at ease. “I’m still Carrie’s legal counsel. Giving me her last name doesn’t breach any privacy laws. You’d have a strong case for it being the right thing to confirm for me that I have her name correct.”
His eyes did that slight narrowing at the edges again. “I’ll look it up for you, but then I need you to stop showing up at my office unannounced. I have other work to do. I can’t keep helping you chase down a man who no one wants found anyway. If you’re right about his wife, she just made sure she’s never going to have to think about money for the rest of her life, even if she bathes in diamonds and eats three squares a day of truffles and caviar.”
I sent Carrie’s legal last name—Donovan—to Chief McTavish, but it was late enough his time that he didn’t know if he’d be able to get back to me before morning. As much as I hated to do it, I told him to contact me as soon as he found anything out, regardless of what time it was for me. The ship would be docking tonight, and excursions started tomorrow morning at eight.
That meant that, if I couldn’t stop her by seven fifty-nine tomorrow morning, Carrie would get off the ship and likely never be heard from again.
Chapter 11
I turned my phone’s notification volume up as loud as it would go before settling in to bed. Even though it would wake up Mark, I couldn’t take the risk of missing Chief McTavish’s call because I slept through it. With how tired I felt, I pretty much needed the phone to be fire-alarm loud.
I must have drifted off almost immediately. The next thing I knew, I jerked awake from a nightmare where Carrie and Hart were fighting over who would get to throw me overboard. The blankets had tangled around my legs, and my Bible lay flopped open on the bed beside me where it must have fallen. Mark had turned off the over-the-bed light at some point.
The red numbers of the bedside clock glowed so brightly my eyes blinked instinctively. Two in the morning. Too early for Chief McTavish to be calling. My dream must have woken me up.
I closed my eyes.
My phone beeped with a text notification. It was probably the follow-up notification, and the first one was what woke me.
But it was the middle of the night pretty much everywhere right now. It was probably some sort of automated text from my cell phone company telling me about updates.
They didn’t normally text that sort of thing in the middle of the night, though. Their customers would get annoyed awfully fast if that was standard practice.
I ought to check my phone just in case.
I groped around on my bedside table, bumped my phone, and knocked it to the floor. It hit the deck with a cringe-worthy thunk. It’d be par for the course for this trip if I also broke my phone.
My body was so tired that, even as I told it to lean over and reach for the phone, all it wanted to do was go back to sleep. There couldn’t be anything important anyone would be texting me about right now. Anything important would merit a phone call.
I squinted over the side of the bed. My phone had landed face up, glowing up at me.
The message looked like it was from Carrie Bodie, but I couldn’t be sure from this distanc
e. Whoever it was from, there wasn’t much to the text. A letter or two at most.
A bit of the grogginess left my system.
I leaned over the side of the bed and fished my phone off the floor. The text read He. The three flashing dots that said she was writing another message blinked below it. She must have hit the Send icon too soon.
I shifted back in bed to wait. Whatever it was better be important, like she’d been trying to type He’s back and Garth interrupted her with an affectionate embrace.
The dots kept flashing. A minute passed. Then two.
The sleepiness drained from my body and collected into a heavy lump in my stomach. She obviously knew she’d sent me the first text. In the middle of the night. Even if Garth had returned, she should have been able to take the time to finish.
Unless she couldn’t.
He could also be the start of Help.
“Mark.” I slid out of bed and hit the lights. “Call security to Carrie’s room.”
“What?” his voice was groggy.
I had to find my running shoes. I couldn’t move fast enough in flip flops, and I’d already wasted a lot of time. Assuming I was right and she was in trouble. I might be over-reacting.
It wasn’t a risk I was willing to take. Forget the shoes. Forget the fact that I’d have to run down public cruise ship corridors barefoot. I had to go.
Mark was sitting up now, reaching for his phone. “What time is it?”
“Late. Early. I got a weird text from Carrie.” I headed for the door. “Send security or whatever staff you can reach to her room.”
I didn’t wait to see if Mark would do it. I knew he would, if for no other reason than I was running off in my pajamas in the middle of the night. Thank goodness I slept in shorts and a t-shirt rather than a lacy nightgown.
I sprinted out the door and down the hall. At least I’d been to Carrie’s room enough times to keep from getting lost.
