Man Overboard

by J. A. Jance

  Even so, for the first three years of high school, things were relatively smooth for Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Taken together, they amounted to a reasonable whole, presenting a united front to a world in which they were perpetual outsiders. Together they learned to do enough work to get by, an achievement school administrators erroneously credited to the previous efforts of their special ed teachers. For a while Stu and Roger were the undisputed champs of the Dungeons & Dragons crowd, but as for the rest of the usual high school cliques? They were too straightlaced for the Goths; too citified for the cowboy types; too boring for the sophisticates; too clumsy for the athletes; and way too Anglo for the Hispanics.

  By the end of their freshman year, they had tired of playing other people’s games. When Roger showed up with a pair of discarded computers his father had brought home from work, the two boys embarked on creating their own. Once caught up in the magic of coding, they were hooked.

  Just before school let out for the summer between their junior and senior years, two catastrophes occurred almost simultaneously. Roger came home from school one day and found his father in the garage, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His mother waited around long enough to make it through the funeral, but within weeks, she had called for a moving van. Before the house even sold, she took Roger and disappeared into the wilds of California.

  Without his best friend beside him, Stu was lost and unable to cope. Then, halfway through the summer, he woke up one morning, walked out of his room, and found his grandmother lying on the floor in the hallway just outside his door. She had suffered a massive stroke and had been lying there helpless for hours. She was carted off in an ambulance and spent the next three weeks in the hospital.

  Grace had never owned a car or learned to drive. As a consequence, neither had Stu. When Roger had been around, he sometimes gave them rides back and forth to the store. Otherwise they rode the bus. It took Stu an hour and a half each way to visit Grace in the hospital. He went there and sat in his grandmother’s room, day after day, listening to the machine breathing for her while the doctors and nurses discussed what should or should not be done about her situation. Stu knew she would have wanted the machines turned off, but no one listened to him when he tried to tell them so. Without Grace’s calming presence and without Roger’s as well, Stu lost ground. Soon he was once again unable to communicate. On the day he arrived at the hospital to find his grandmother gone and another patient occupying her room, he didn’t speak to anyone. He simply turned on his heel and went home—back to the mobile home where he had lived for as long as he could remember.

  Sometime the next day, a man from the funeral home came knocking on the door. He asked for some of Grace’s good clothes in order to dress her for a funeral that had been arranged for and paid in advance. The simple graveside ceremony wasn’t an open-casket affair, something that left Stuart wondering why they had bothered with dress-up clothing in the first place. Stuart was prepared to go to the funeral on the bus, but at the last minute one of the longtime tenants of the trailer park, rather than the owner, offered him a ride to and from the cemetery.

  When the service was over, Stuart went back home. It was summer in Phoenix, and he was totally on his own. He turned the swamp cooler on high. There was food in the fridge and the pantry. He ate it until it was gone. For the next several weeks he did nothing but play video games around the clock. The halfway normal existence Stu had achieved as part of Tweedledum and Tweedledee evaporated. Stuart Ramey was lost.

  That year, when school started, Stu didn’t bother going back, and no one from school came looking for him, either. A few weeks later, when the landlord showed up with eviction papers, Stu—who was too young to be on his own and too old to be in foster care—was suddenly left homeless. His only possessions were what he could carry away from the mobile home in a single duffel bag. Those included the Swiss Army knife that had once belonged to his grandfather, a few items of clothing, and the latest cast-off computer Roger had left behind.

  A social worker at a Salvation Army shelter encouraged him to visit the shelter’s computer lab. The instructor there, just like the one in Payson who, years later, would rescue Roger, helped Stuart find a job doing coding for a video game software developer who had set up shop in Tempe.

  Stu had said something to Julia Miller about Roger going dark, but the truth was, he had gone dark, too. Both of them had wandered in the wilderness for a long time. It was five years later that B. Simpson had noticed Stu’s postings in a video game chat session. That had been their initial connection, and B. had ended up offering him a job.

  As far as Stuart knew, B. Simpson and probably Ali were the only people aware of the fact that he was a high school dropout. Acquaintances familiar with the position he held at High Noon Enterprises naturally assumed that Stuart had multiple degrees in computer science behind him, and he was convinced that most people had probably made the same erroneous assumptions about Roger’s educational background.

  Yes, Stu realized, even without being together, his life and Roger McGeary’s had been more alike than either of them could have imagined.

  “Score!” Startled out of his reverie, Stu looked around to see Cami with her arms raised in triumph.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You should see the deal I got from Late Breaking Cruises. The ship sails the day after tomorrow. Compared to what the cruise line was charging originally, it’s an absolute steal.”

  “Have you checked the weather?” Stu asked.

  Cami looked at him with a puzzled frown. “Why?”

  Stu shook his head. “Crossing the Atlantic in September? There may be good reasons some of those cabins are empty.”

  13

  Odin had discovered that he liked the aftermaths of his various exploits almost as much as the events themselves. LuAnn Abernathy continued to make a pest of herself, and Frigg dutifully kept track of all of LuAnn’s protests as her op-ed pieces and any number of letters to editors showed up in various media outlets. The pieces all complained that the police investigation surrounding her son’s death had been given short shrift due to the fact that he had previously abused drugs. Eventually she teamed up with a group of other mothers—primarily mothers of murdered prostitutes whose cases, like Paul’s, may have been haphazardly investigated and remained mostly unsolved.

  Odin had to give the old lady credit. LuAnn was persistent, if nothing else. Fortunately, most of her protests fell on deaf ears. Had she been able to hire a private detective, an independent investigation might have been able to make the case that there was something fishy about a guy who had once been strung out on heroin suddenly scoring a fatal dose of fentanyl. Odin now knew that there was at least one security camera located on Kester that might have captured an image of him wielding his cell phone to film Paul Abernathy’s passing. The cops had never bothered tracking down the footage. A PI might have gone to that much trouble, but Odin didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. LuAnn’s economic situation—getting by on little more than her social security and a paltry widow’s pension—stymied her from hiring any outside help.

  After Roger McGeary’s death, Odin and Frigg had kept careful tabs on the progress of the official investigation launched by the Panama National Police. Odin’s assessment said that Detective Inspector Esteban Garza was smart but arrogant. In addition, the detective had a clear understanding as to which side his bread was buttered on. No doubt that was why he had cleared the case in jig time. It was easy to assume that political connections between the cruise line and the people calling the shots inside the Panamanian government carried the day.

  All that was to the good. From combing through the contents of the victim’s cell phone as well as his Web presence, Odin understood that Julia Miller, Roger’s aunt, was his only surviving relative and heir. Odin had Frigg track the woman down, and what he learned about her wasn’t especially impressive. She ran a racehorse
refuge of some kind, somewhere in the wilds of Arizona. Frigg had come up with a few online images of the woman. All of them had been taken at racetrack venues where she participated in protests objecting to the treatment of racehorses after their racing days ended.

  Studying the images, it was easy for Odin to dismiss Julia Miller as a nonentity. She appeared to be your basic backwoods country hick—a harmless-looking older woman who customarily dressed in a cowboy shirt, jeans, and boots. Like LuAnn Abernathy, Julia peppered the media with blog postings, complaining of the way her nephew’s disappearance and presumed death had been investigated by both the cruise line and the authorities. And although she may have been better off economically than LuAnn, she didn’t seem to get any better traction.

  Odin’s whole focus at the moment was on his next target. While researching Roger, Frigg stumbled upon his therapist, one Dr. Amelia Cannon—a psychiatrist specializing in the inter-generational long-term effects of family suicide. Once the AI brought the good doctor to Odin’s attention, he felt he had hit the mother lode. Dr. Cannon’s whole practice was devoted to the very people Odin wanted to find—the children of suicides who were themselves potential suicide victims.

  Hacking into the doctor’s records hadn’t been that much trouble. As Odin scanned through the case notes, he was struck by the similarities between Roger’s case and that of another patient, Beth Wordon. Both she and Roger had apparently made substantial progress under Dr. Cannon’s care. Beth was currently back in school, working on an advanced degree, and engaged to be married. When Roger had discontinued his weekly sessions a few months earlier, Dr. Cannon’s case notes had pronounced him to be “in recovery.”

  Recovery my ass, Odin had thought when he read the words. You’re not in recovery. You’re mine.

  Taking out Roger McGeary had been especially gratifying, far more so than dealing with a miserable loser like Paul Abernathy. Nothing could be better than using cyber to take down a cyber kind of guy, but there had been an additional double whammy involved. Since Roger was one of Dr. Cannon’s much vaunted “success stories,” Odin felt he was striking a blow against that arrogant twit of a therapist at the same time.

  Once the McGeary mission was successfully accomplished, however, Odin had been drawn back to Beth Wordon like a moth to the flame. Of course Frigg had counseled against selecting another target from Dr. Cannon’s pool of patients, but Odin had overruled her. With the McGeary investigation fizzling out on the far side of the Atlantic, he had discounted the risk in favor of convenience. The wealth of information they had already gleaned on Beth from Dr. Cannon’s files made her a far easier target than some random name plucked off Odin’s Target List. As far as Odin was concerned, Beth Wordon was easy, and that made her “it.”

  The woman may have been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but she had led a troubled life. From junior high on, her well-off family had bailed Beth out of one scrape after another, always intervening in the direction of treatment rather than interactions with law enforcement. Her problems seemed to recur in cycles, and she’d gone through one stint in rehab after another. When she had turned up in an ICU weighing less than a hundred pounds, her parents had taken her home and hooked her up with Dr. Cannon. If Dr. Cannon’s case notes could be trusted, Beth, like Roger, was finally getting her life on track.

  One of the things that had fascinated Odin about Roger was the idea that he had, seemingly against all odds, succeeded in turning his life around. He had a good job and had made something of a name for himself. No wonder both he and Dr. Cannon assumed that the years spent in counseling had done the trick and helped him put all that old, bad stuff behind him.

  Ditto for Beth. After almost two decades of first cutting herself and then wandering in an anorexic wilderness, she, too, seemed to have recovered. Her storybook destination wedding in Big Sur was just days away, and she was about to marry Joel Williams, her high school sweetheart—her first-ever boyfriend and the varsity football hero who had invited her to what had turned out to be a disastrous junior/senior prom. Joel was divorced now. This would be his second wedding. At age thirty-five, it was Beth’s first.

  Odin leaned back and studied the series of texts that had just popped up on his computer screen, a supposedly private conversation between Beth and Marissa, her best pal and only attendant.

  The alterations are finished. I promised Mom she could come with me tomorrow afternoon for the final fitting.

  OMG. You’re going to take your mom? Are you kidding? I know she’s the MOTB, but do you really want her there? I get off work at three. I can meet you at the shop and run interference if you need it. What if she sees you know what?

  Don’t worry. She won’t. I’ll be careful. Mom’s been dreaming about this wedding for my whole life. Considering everything I’ve put her through, I owe her this.

  Okay. Let me know how it goes.

  Odin knew all about the wedding dress—a designer gown with long sleeves that wouldn’t be entirely in keeping with a warm September afternoon ceremony at a cliffside wedding venue overlooking the Pacific. But a gown with short sleeves or no sleeves at all would have given away the game because, at Odin’s direction and with Frigg’s capable assistance, Beth was back to cutting.

  For weeks now Frigg had been locked and loaded, delivering a full catalogue of Beth-specific messages that were designed to keep the bride-to-be in a mental pressure cooker at all hours of the day and night. That was one of the things Odin appreciated most about Frigg—once given a task, she was utterly relentless. In a way she reminded Odin of that old Ron Popeil rotisserie commercial—all Odin needed to do was set her and forget her and count on her to do the job.

  As for Beth? Living at home with her folks, going to school, and no longer seeing Dr. Cannon, Beth was now forced to struggle with her addiction issues entirely on her own. She journaled about it on an almost daily basis, while Odin from his virtual vantage point observed every keystroke and smiled at every pained entry typed into her computer. It amused him that so far she had yet to share any of it with her fiancé.

  Once Beth was targeted, it had been no trouble at all for Frigg to break into the woman’s various social media accounts and eventually into her computer files as well. It was in her V-vite account, an online invitation Web site, where Frigg had encountered a “Save the Date” message announcing the upcoming wedding. This wedding. This Saturday’s wedding. A wedding that, with any luck, would never happen.

  Not if Odin and Frigg had any say in the matter. And when Beth Wordon happened to come to an untimely death either after her bachelorette party or the next night, on the eve of her “perfect” wedding? No one would bother looking around for a murderer. All the reasons needed for her suicide would be found right there in her own computer, written in her own words.

  Sweet.

  Odin was so caught up in planning for the weekend that when an IOI (item of interest) alert came in from Frigg, he almost skipped it. One of the AI’s ongoing responsibilities was to monitor anything that showed up online having to do with either Roger McGeary, Paul Abernathy, Dr. Amelia Cannon, or any of their known relatives.

  In this case, it was a brief Facebook posting from Roger’s aunt Julia:

  I tracked down Roger’s oldest friend yesterday, a guy by the name of Stuart Ramey. They were very close as kids. I asked Stu if he’d help me find out what really happened. He didn’t make any promises, of course, but I think he and the people he works for may look into the situation. It’ll be good to have someone else on my side for a change. I’m tired of fighting this battle all on my own.

  Odin paused for only a moment before sending Frigg a message of his own and giving her a new set of search marching orders:

  Who is Stuart Ramey?

  Frigg’s next IOI was her standard evening announcement:

  Dinner.

  Owen Hansen glanced at his watch, the Rolex he had inherited from h
is father, which still kept perfect time. Caught up in his computer screen, the hours had gotten away from him. Hurriedly he locked up the lab. Then he showered, shaved, and rushed upstairs, where he found his mother in the library, sipping a Negroni and smoking like a fiend.

  The years hadn’t been especially kind to Irene Hansen. Yes, she was still a brittle-thin, size-two wisp of a woman, who dressed for dinner every night usually in a chic two-piece knit suit of some kind. Worried about falling, she had given up wearing her once-loved stilettos. Even so, low heels and hose were always part of her ensemble, along with a tasteful string of pearls. Although her figure remained unchanged, her face had not. Decades of smoking had damaged her narrow, sunken cheeks in ways that no amount of expensive cosmetic work could erase, and behind a pair of thick-lensed glasses, her faded blue eyes were enormous.

  “You’re late,” she said accusingly when her son appeared in the doorway. “But you’re just in time to make me a refill.”

  “Sorry,” he said, taking her glass and going to the drinks cart parked by the fireplace. “I was working. Time got away from me.”

  He was glad that she never asked what he was working on, and he never volunteered any information.

  For more than twenty years their mother-and-son evening routine had gone virtually unchanged, although there were fewer guests these days, and Irene had far fewer outside social engagements. They would meet in the library for a before-dinner cocktail or two. Or, in this case, Owen thought, maybe even three.

  After drinks they moved on to the dining room. A personal chef arrived at the house each morning to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The evening meal was served by a young woman who doubled as both sous-chef and server, and who left the house each evening after cleaning up.