Caribbean Moon

by Rick Murcer

  Just then, as if prompted by some divine cue, a warm gust of ocean breeze blew her long hair from her face. The wind danced and circled her wet eyes, seemingly bent on drying her repentant tears. The gentle wind was like a baby’s breath, and her eyelids fluttered shut. She let herself become lost in the moment.

  Sophie didn’t believe in omens, but she had seen a prayer answered a time or two and confession always seemed to be good for the soul.

  In the interrogation rooms, she had witnessed hardened killers bawl with unadulterated relief after admitting their crime, hoping against hope their profession could erase their treachery.

  She wasn’t sure if the breeze had been heaven sent, or if it had even been real, but she suddenly felt better.

  Perhaps her solitary confession had been good for her spirit.

  Is there really a God who forgives and brings about a peace that passes all understanding? At that moment, she believed it.

  “I’ll do all I can to find your killer. I owe you that. And Liz, thanks,” she breathed softly.

  Turning to leave, she noticed a small piece of blue and white paper, resembling a torn movie pass, resting underneath the white crank handle that controlled the raising and lowering of the lifeboat. She glanced around the deck and was still alone. She was sure it wasn’t there a minute ago, but in her current state...

  She squinted, stretching her arm to pick it up--halting in mid-motion.

  The used excursion ticket for Trunk Bay called her like early morning coffee. Her heart thudded in her ears as she gawked at the clean imprint in the middle of the pass.

  There was nothing latent about the flirtatious fingerprint winking at her from the surface of the stub.

  CHAPTER-44

  Eli Jenkins glanced down the hallway of Deck Six’s starboard side and watched the blue-haired couple squeeze through their cabin door, giggling like young lovers. The rest of the hallway was clear.

  Damn, he hated having to be cautious.

  But soon all caution would be as necessary as a fur coat in Aruba. Every spinning molecule of his body brayed with enthusiastic prospect. This was what he was born for. He was here to set things in order. This was just another predestined step structured by destiny itself. He felt invincible.

  A few seconds later, he raised a huge paw and rapped on the steel door with authority.

  I wonder if she likes surprises.

  The cabin door swung open and, dressed in a Carousel embroidered pink tank top and hiking shorts, her shining black hair tied in a neat ponytail, stood detective Christina Perez.

  Her eyes became slits when she scoped the tall man dressed in the tux-like room steward’s uniform. After a few seconds, her right hand pulled reluctantly away from her back. Jenkins knew she was ready to pull the .38 Smith and Wesson revolver that served as her back-up weapon. The one she didn’t turn in when she boarded. He counted on her having the gun, and she didn’t disappoint.

  All cops were the same. They lived lives as borderline criminals who didn’t think rules applied to them. Add a touch of paranoia to the recipe and Jenkins was just that much closer to finishing what he had started.

  Perez was a bit jumpy. Good. That meant that she and fear were dining at the same table.

  “Yes?”

  “Here are the extra bath towels you requested. My supervisor said to bring you these right away,” he spoke in his best Middle Eastern accent.

  Perez looked at him and smiled. “No. I didn’t request any more towels. But thank you anyway.”

  She was more of a looker than he thought. Nice legs, too. Then again, he had only seen her from a distance, until now. They were about to get closer than she ever bargained for.

  “This is room 6578, yes?”

  “It is, but you must have the wrong room.”

  The detective began to shut the door just as he lost control of the stack of bath towels. They tumbled, in slow-motion, to the floor just inside the cabin’s entrance.

  “My apologies miss,” pleaded Jenkins as he bent to recover the scattered mess.

  Christina Perez stepped back and waited for him to finish.

  With suddenness and agility that was incredible for a man his size, Jenkins clutched her waist and pulled her to him, slamming the door with his foot. The detective never saw the drug- saturated cloth until it covered her face.

  He felt her reach for her gun again, but she was far too late, and he was far too quick. His strong hand clasped around her arm and squeezed with the force of two men, causing her to yelp in pain, breaking her wrist in the process.

  ****************

  The drug performed its assigned task with extreme efficiency. Perez’s right arm wouldn’t obey her brain’s command to unholster the .38. It was as if someone had unplugged her nervous system. She wondered how she could be so stupid.

  Christina’s world spun uncontrolled. She thought of Pedro and Ivan and wished she could hold them one more time before black waves of unconsciousness washed over her like riled surf. Her arms wilted to her sides as she descended to the waiting darkness.

  CHAPTER-45

  “This is fricking unbelievable,” moaned Alex Downs, sitting on the edge of the bed, his thick legs pointing out at forty-five degree angles, right foot tapping to an orchestra only it could hear. “I thought we’d find more than this. Who is this maniac, a damned forensic expert?”

  “I’ve seen stranger things,” answered Agent Tucker. He was finishing the complicated process of packing away the FBI’s portable argon laser.

  Man, Alex loved these new toys. He saw how this one had located latent fingerprints so that they could be lifted in more detail than just the brush-and-lift method. The laser illuminated residual finger oils, and, in many cases, picked up the hidden print. It was a modern wonder that cut down processing time. But not on this occasion. Because of the machinery’s propensity for detail, it had revealed at least thirty prints that needed to be lifted and cataloged then run against the IAFIS database.

  “We’ll run these prints and find out who belonged in here, and who didn’t,” said Tucker.

  “There have been hundreds of people in this cabin, and besides, how long will it take to get the results?”

  Tucker pushed his glasses forward on his nose, “About eighteen hours.” His voice rattled with frustration. “I know. I know. We don’t have that much time, but we’ll have to wait.”

  The two men grew silent. They didn’t have eighteen hours. That fact did little to boost Alex’s mood.

  “We did fine, Alex. We know this guy is using bleach to clean up the scene. He obviously has knowledge of how some of these procedures work. Like Corner said, very bright. We also knew there would be less information here. Hey, at least we’ve determined this is where she was killed.”

  “Yeah, that’ll have to do for now,” Alex said. “Somehow there’s no consolation in that. Liz is gone.”

  “I’m sorry Alex. We can’t fix it. We have to do all we can to stop this guy.”

  “You’re right. But I’m not sure how much closer we got to that.”

  Alex looked at the labeled evidence bags stacked on the loveseat and felt his stomach drop. There were only half as many as there should be. No fabric or fibers that were out of the ordinary. No detectable shoe prints. They had found several hairs, but Alex would bet his next paycheck they belonged to Liz and Lynn or previous guests and staff. They had combed the bathroom for any sign of irregularity and it was clean, except for the blood spot on the bathroom wall, but he doubted it was anything important. In fact, everything was too spotless. It was obvious the room had been cleaned to hide something, or someone.

  Tucker and he had worked meticulously through each closet, each dresser drawer, and each suitcase and found little. Nothing on the balcony was really out of the ordinary except the rose leaf, just busy work and exasperating dead ends.

  The whole thing was maddening. Was this all there was, all he could do, to help find his friend’s killer? He was hoping for somet
hing palpable. He didn’t find it. But that was the dichotomy of forensic science. It wasn’t like Hollywood depicted it. Hardly. Occasionally the microscopic evolved to an open book, and he hoped it would in this instance. But the forensic gods could be cold and uncaring, and he hated praying to them.

  He had just returned from the lifeboat with the torn cover that Manny had seen earlier. There were definite signs of blood, and he was also able to recover a minute swatch of human skin Alex was sure would match the DA’s husband. Poor bastard. Lynn hadn’t been everyone’s favorite person, but to be murdered and then bounced off the ship like a piece of garbage was unthinkable. At least his body had been recovered. Dead is dead, but it would help to bring sometimes elusive closure to Lynn’s family.

  They had slightly better luck locating DNA samples with the help of a forensic scientist’s best friend, luminal. The magic concoction caused body fluids like blood, saliva, semen, vaginal fluids, and even perspiration to glow when exposed to black light.

  There were eighteen different areas from which they had swabbed samples. Alex winced when he thought about the “good time” couples had enjoyed in the room.

  The gathered samples would be shipped, including the blood-stained rose leaf, along with the fingerprints, to one of the FBI’s crime labs. The techs would run the DNA samples through CODIS, the fed’s DNA profile database, hoping for a hit that would help.

  “Do you think the blood on the leaf is Liz’s?” ventured Alex.

  Tucker shrugged. “Probably. Since the rose was lying across her chest. We’ll know in a day or so. I guess the real question is how did it get there?” He snapped shut the black, padded case containing the laser. “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe the perp poked himself with a thorn and his DNA will be in the computer,” said Tucker without much conviction.

  Alex hoped that was true and often that’s all there was, hope. It was fragile, but hard to destroy.

  Rubbing the back of his neck, he studied the room, noticing its cozy layout. The cabins were small, but enough. The ship’s architect did a wonderful job of designing intimacy with efficiency, and the rooms weren’t set up to spend a lot of time in. After all, this was a party boat.

  His eyes followed the narrow aisle leading from the outside door, past the bathroom, and opened up the room just past the closet. Suddenly, he was inspired.

  Jumping from the bed, he stepped to the door, and placed his back flat against it. Alex called to Tucker. “Come here for a minute. I need to check this out.”

  “What for? We’ve been ove…” Max Tucker’s brain kicked in like a NASCAR racer reaching the straightaway at Michigan International Speedway.

  “Lynn was a tall guy and in pretty good shape, right?” asked Tucker.

  “You got it.”

  Alex tried to stand shoulder to shoulder with Max facing the inside of the room, their backs to the outside door. There wasn’t enough room for the two men to occupy the narrow doorway unless one of them stood at a fifty degree angle away from it. The walls were too close together.

  “There is no way the killer would have been able to get into the room, at least without a struggle, if someone were standing right here. Liz may have answered the door, but the killer needed to take Lynn out to get to her, right? So it stands to reason Lynn answered the door, or came to help Liz, and the perp would have had to incapacitate him first,” said Alex, stepping away.

  “Since there’s no room for two grown men to stand in the aisle leading from the door; one of two things happened,” chimed in Max with a tinge of excitement. “So if it was Lynn, when he answered the door, he was taken out like that.” Max snapped his fingers to drive home the point. “The other possibility is that he or Liz was expecting someone, maybe room service, and never bothered to check who was at the door before opening it.”

  Alex stroked his chin like Basil Rathbone playing Sherlock Holmes. “So either way, the killer would have had to do it quickly.”

  Max dropped to the floor in front of the cabin door, reaching into his blue dress shirt pocket and unsheathed the magnifying glass from its fleece-lined case. “The fastest way to take someone out of the picture is a sucker punch to the jaw...”

  “…And you just might split open a knuckle hitting someone that hard,” finished Alex.

  “Thus, split skin could cause minor blood loss. Low-velocity impact bleeding could mean drops on the floor. But since we’ve already checked the carpet inside the room and found nothing. Maybe...”

  Max opened the door and Alex held it, allowing the agent to get to his knees, bending his face to the colorful hall carpet. He ran the magnifying glass about two inches from the floor in grid-like fashion, and then stopped abruptly. A low, triumphant whistle escaped his lips. “You’re the man, Alex!”

  “What?”

  Max handed over the magnifying glass. He scrambled to his knees near the spot where Max was pointing.

  There, just below the hinge side of the door were two dark red stains half the width of a pencil eraser. A triumphant grin spread across his face.

  “This psycho bitch bleeds,” he said.

  ****************

  CHAPTER-46

  Agent Josh Corner tapped his silver Cross ballpoint on the table of the conference room as he waited for the second meeting of his makeshift task force to convene. It had been a long-ass day, and it was getting longer. The flight and lack of quality sleep were catching up to him, but it was more than just a little jet lag, much more.

  As an agent on the rise within the FBI, he had been witness to some ruthless, perplexing, and bizarre forms of behavior. But it still shocked him to see these kinds of disturbing acts against God’s prize creation; and this rampage was disturbing.

  To add insult to injury, he was out of the comfortable environment he coveted, sailing on a cruise ship that was going to dock in sunny Aruba, without his full resources. Every question had to be communicated via phone or fax without easy access to department heads or their expertise. He had to send whatever Tucker and Downs had found to the airport and then to the ERT lab in Miami. Then have the results faxed to the ship and the originals couriered to Aruba. He didn’t like it. There were too many things that could go wrong.

  Out-of-sight, out-of-mind was not some justifiable metaphor, it was the truth, even for an FBI Wonder Boy. He squeezed the pen a little tighter.

  There were far too many variables ricocheting out of his control, and if he hated anything, it was lack of control. It would be fourteen to eighteen hours before the results would be available. Time was a commodity he didn’t think they had. In fact, he was sure of it. These demented psychos didn’t stop playing the game; they just made up more rules.

  They had nothing. Maybe a tall muscular man that Detective Williams may have seen making threatening gestures to some newlyweds who could be some biting rapist from eleven years ago.

  Damn it.

  Rubbing his tired eyes, he reached for more coffee. This unsub was way too far ahead of them. Keeping them off balance so they didn’t have time to focus on what might be next. And the profilers were having a hard time pinning him down, too. It was almost as if he were toying with them. Josh hated being mocked, but hated even more that they were helpless to stop it.

  But maybe they had an ace in the hole. Detective Williams. He couldn’t stop the wry smile. A little too emotional for his taste, but a brilliant detective, nonetheless. He had seen this type of personality on other occasions. They weren’t all as intense as Williams, but it seemed to work for him, and there was no denying his talent.

  Manny Williams probably didn’t even realize his gift as a profiler. He thought he was just doing good police work and putting things together. He guessed that Williams had no idea how rare it was for one individual to solve cases at the rate he did without “the gift.”

  The FBI had a half dozen or so criminal investigative analysts who did the work of profilers (true profilers like Manny were rare), most were assigned to the BAU, but none with more pot
ential. Most held PhDs in psychology and criminal justice but not much field experience. (Good thing because they had each other to talk to when some of the real sick stuff was over.) But Josh thought the best were cops that had seen a thing or two; if their insight didn’t drive them towards some psychotic episode, or worse. But he didn’t think Manny had to worry about that. He didn’t drink, and his family life seemed stable and strong. Even if the Lansing detective did work too many hours, there were worse things.

  Family. He thought of his young boys and his loving, patient wife, and the time he spent away from them. He wished he were home for a famous Corner family hug.

  He shook his head like a punchy boxer trying to shake the effects of a big right hand. “Stay on the case, boy,” he uttered.

  None of the detectives-turned-profilers that worked for the FBI had the Lansing detective’s closing rate on open murders. It was the real reason Corner wanted Williams involved. Even his own Chief said that Manny felt things. He hoped like hell that Detective Williams was feeling something, anything, now.

  The door opened softly and Captain Serafini shuffled in throttling a piece of paper in his right hand. His demeanor told Josh that things had gotten worse.

  “We have more problems,” he said, barely loud enough for Josh to hear, handing the paper to him.

  “What’s this?”

  The letterhead belonged to the Dominican Police Force. That got his full attention.

  Suddenly he was choking like he was standing in a room full of smoldering cigars. He studied it again, hoping it read differently the second time. The killer had struck again. This time, he had shredded a tour guide at the National Rainforest.

  “They want to speak with us and are threatening to delay our departure.”