Duplicate Daughter

by Alice Sharpe

“Well, it was their honeymoon,” she said, once again walking. “What about his reference to thumbnails? Torture?”

  Nick had checked his father’s thumbnails. They looked fine, which meant if anyone was being tortured it was Katie’s mother and he didn’t want her thinking about that. He said, “No idea.”

  “How about car chase?”

  “Now that’s interesting.”

  “Let’s make a scenario. Say your father was coming south. Didn’t he mention something about someone following him?”

  “Like everything else, he said something and then failed to explain it.” They crossed the busy street and began walking down the sidewalk, looking in at different restaurants. He’d leave the choice to her.

  She said, “Okay. Say he figured out there was someone trailing him. Say he still had whatever it was he stole from the mob.” Her voice dropped dramatically as if she feared being overheard.

  “I’m with you,” he said.

  She stopped walking and, turning to face him, gripped his arms with her hands. Looking up at him, she said, “So what if he came into Seattle knowing someone was following him and he wanted to lose them. He made his way down here and parked and disappeared into one of these stores or restaurants. It was summer—it would be a lot more crowded than it is today. The big public market is right up the hill. That place is a maze of flowers and fresh fruit and seafood and jewelry and heaven knows what else. Think about all the different levels, all the quirky corridors and twists and turns, all plugged with so many shoppers you can hardly see a foot in front of you. Dad used to take me there when I was a kid. Great place to get lost.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “Then he got hungry and wanted something to eat,” she said.

  Playing along, he said, “There are dozens of places to eat in that market.”

  “Yes there are.” She gazed behind him, biting her lip, concentrating. Then she smiled. “Or he could have walked down to this street.”

  “Why down here?”

  “It’s closer to the water? I don’t know.”

  “Okay, where down here?”

  She turned him around until he was looking at the restaurant she’d been facing. Bright green letters spelled out, Emerald Water Fish Company…home of Seattle’s best clam chowder!

  Speaking over his shoulder, she said, “Right in there.”

  “THIS IS DELICIOUS,” Katie said, spooning the creamy chowder into her mouth.

  Nick sat watching her, his own bowl empty. He said, “Okay, Sherlock, we found emerald and clam and even water. Now what?”

  “Now we figure out where he would hide something in this restaurant.”

  Nick looked around them. Again, given the off season and the in-between mealtime hour, the restaurant wasn’t terribly crowded, but on a summer day two years ago? It was a large room with wood-plank floors, round tables with captain chairs and windows surrounding three sides. A bar ran along an interior wall. Every inch of wall space was covered with some sort of nautical memorabilia or framed photos of fishing boats hauling aboard huge catches. There were a million places to slip something, but now that they seemed to have identified the meaning of emerald in his father’s rambling words, exactly what kind of treasure were they actually looking for?

  Gemstones? Something green?

  Katie said, “I found the restaurant. You find the…whatever.”

  He sat back in his chair as she crunched into a slice of garlic toast. “Okay, let’s see. Assuming that he stashed it here and assuming it’s still here after two years, it has to be somewhere not likely to be spotted and that means in or on or behind something prominent—remember, he didn’t have long to figure this out—and permanent.”

  A waitress stopped to refill his coffee cup and, after he thanked her, he said, “Nice restaurant.”

  “Best chowder in Seattle five years running,” she said with a practiced smile, obviously reciting the company line.

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Eight or nine months.”

  “Would you happen to know if it’s been redecorated in the last, say, two years?”

  “This place?” She chuckled. “No,” she said. “The management’s view is if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and we pack this place in the summer. Tourists like the ambience and locals like the food.”

  He smiled as she wandered off on her mission of keeping the five people in the restaurant content until tip time.

  “Behind a picture?”

  “Worked at your house with the computer disk, might work here,” Katie said, dabbing her smiling lips with her napkin. She stood up and moved to examine several of the large, framed photographs, touching them as if to admire their totally pedestrian frames. “Bolted to the wall,” she said, sitting.

  “Behind the bar?”

  “Too awkward.”

  “Taped to the bottom of a table?”

  “I work in bars and restaurants. They clean those fairly often. How about heater vents?”

  “Kind of dangerous, and besides, the ones here are located up toward the ceiling. What about looped in one of the fishnets hanging on the walls or stuck to a knickknack?”

  She looked around this time, then shook her head. “It’s cluttered in here, but it’s not dirty. It’s not even dusty. I bet they regularly clean every doodad.”

  Nick stood up and scanned the restaurant from this slightly elevated vantage point. He couldn’t see a single place that something could be tucked away, no matter how small, that wouldn’t have been discovered, either in routine housekeeping or in everyday use. It seemed hopeless.

  “I’ll go check out the men’s room,” he said with a sigh, and investigated a few little corners and moldings on his way.

  The bathroom was small and clean and judging by the strip of a slightly different color showing under the paper hand-towel dispenser, newly painted. He frisked it anyway and then looked up. There was a fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling and for a moment he thought he’d found a good hiding place. The cover was clear plastic, however, and spotless. It appeared to be brand spanking new. There was also a vent on the ceiling, about a foot square. He dug out his pocketknife and flipped open the small screwdriver. Working quickly above his head, he easily removed the vent cover.

  Knife back in his pocket, he felt around inside the opening. Nothing but metal walls. He couldn’t reach any kind of bend in the pipe that would form a platform up inside the pipe, but one might exist right out of reach. His father was a smaller man than Nick, with a proportionately shorter reach. Might he have thrown something up inside there if he was desperate?

  Nick opened the bathroom door, checked to see that there was no anxious-looking male approaching the restroom, then closed the door again. This time he climbed on top of the sink and stretched out toward the open vent and looked up inside.

  He hadn’t felt a shelf of any kind, because there wasn’t one for three or four feet. If what they were looking for had landed way up there, Nick would need a flashlight and a stick with a brush of some kind on the end. And a guard outside the door.

  He made it back to the floor but was still holding the cover when the door opened and a young restaurant employee entered.

  “Damn thing fell right off the ceiling and just about hit me on the head,” Nick said, depositing the four little screws and the vent cover in the startled kid’s hands.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’ll call the manager—”

  “No problem,” Nick said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  He found Katie standing right outside the restroom door. She shoved his coat into his hands and grabbed his arm. “What took you so long? I sent the busboy in there to tell you to hurry.”

  “Don’t you want to know if I found something?” he asked as she hustled him through the restaurant. “Hey, Katie, stop. Did you pay our bill?”

  She tugged on him again. “Of course I paid the bill,” she said as they erupted onto the sidewalk. “And I know you didn’t find anyt
hing because I did.”

  “What!” He ground to a halt again, shrugging on his jacket and gloves. “Where—”

  “Hurry,” she pleaded, glancing beyond him. He turned to see what she was staring at. Through the haze, he found a huge passenger-and-vehicle ferry that had apparently docked at the pier next door while he’d been away from the table. A modest line of pre rush-hour cars were leaving the ship as fog-blurred pedestrian shapes moved along the elevated walkways connecting the ship’s deck to the top floor of the terminal.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he allowed Katie to pull him down the sidewalk.

  “Look at the name,” she said anxiously. “On the ferry, Nick. Look at the name.”

  He found the name high on the boat, scrolled into a board, painted black, just barely visible as the fog swirled around it.

  Emerald Star.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Holding hands, Nick and Katie dashed across the street to retrieve the rental car. What followed was a hair-raising trip to the terminal parking lot only to find they needed to proceed a few blocks farther south, make a U-turn and return to enter in the proper lane. Nick did this as Katie held on for dear life and silently chanted, hurry, hurry.

  They forked over cash to the ticket agent as Katie read from a sign. “It’s the Bremerton Ferry,” she said. “Says here it’s a fifty-five-minute trip across Puget Sound.”

  “That’s going south. Makes sense,” Nick said.

  As they were one of the last cars through the gate, they were waved immediately onto the boat, pulling to a stop behind a red truck that dwarfed their little rental compact. Another big vehicle, this one a gray SUV, pulled up behind them. Both drivers got out of their cars at once and headed for an internal stairway dividing the parking deck into three sections, a single lane on each side and a double lane in the middle. Ramps at either end of the ferry led to a second deck of parking.

  Nick clicked off the engine and turned to Katie. “Let’s try a new scenario. My father knew he was being followed when he drove into Seattle. He didn’t stop and park and try to get lost at the public market or in a restaurant. Instead, he drove straight to the ferries.”

  “Maybe he lost his tail while driving through the city.”

  “As far as I know, he’d never been here before. Who knows what route he took? Anyway, he gets down here just in time to speed onto this ferry, leaving the other guy high and dry. That gives him fifty-five minutes to hide whatever it is he had to hide.”

  “Or maybe he bought a round-trip ticket and had almost two hours.”

  Nick opened the car door and got out. There were a couple of dozen cars in sight but not one human being. For all intents and purposes, the deck was little more than a floating parking lot. Lots of privacy for their search, only what exactly were they searching for?

  He thought of what his father had said, the rambling words. What would a man afraid for his life take from someone connected to organized crime? An insurance policy, he’d said. So what constituted an insurance policy?

  The answer was so obvious it amazed him.

  He turned back to the car in time to see Katie getting out, wrapping her pale blue wool scarf around her head. He said, “Not a ledge, Katie. Ledger. He took financial records from the mob.”

  Her approach slowed as she came around the car, staring at him, obviously considering what he said. “Of course. But in what form? Another CD?”

  “Probably. But we can’t be sure. It could have been a book or it could be audio, like on a tape. We’ll have to keep an open mind.”

  “Where do we start?”

  “You’ve been doing pretty good. You choose. Do we divide and conquer? Do we start at the bottom or the top, aft or forward?”

  She bit her lip. “We start at the top,” she finally said. “Together. At the pointy end.”

  SEEING AS IT WAS a car ferry, Nick explained, there was no pointy end. The bow became whichever blunt end pointed in the direction the boat currently headed.

  They climbed the interior stairs, exiting on a huge deck that consisted of a large heated passenger lounge bookended with covered and open decks for observation. Looking aft, the city of Seattle had already disappeared into the heavy fog.

  It was cold out in the open, and by mutual agreement, they went inside the cabin. A few long benches sported sleeping figures stretched out to catch a little shut-eye during the ride, while a few other benches and tables held small groups of people visiting with one another or reading. The walls were covered with huge framed photographs of the city.

  If there was a more utilitarian ship than a car ferry, Katie couldn’t imagine what it was. The Emerald Star’s purpose was to ferry cars, bicyclists and pedestrians and it did so in a no-frills manner that left little in the way of nooks and crannies to hide anything.

  They found all the furniture bolted to the walls and floors. All the pictures were also secured. No handy cubbyholes, very little in the way of adornments, nothing that didn’t look as though it was hosed down quite often, handled every day—like the traffic cones, or painted off and on over the years.

  “If he felt safe leaving it on this ferry for two years, it has to be attached to something permanent,” Nick said.

  They split up. Katie took the starboard side, Nick the port. Katie sat on every unoccupied bench, felt under every table, pulled and pushed on anything that looked remotely loose.

  They met at the far end of the cabin and walked back outside into the chill, this time at what passed on this voyage as the bow of the ship. A stairway leading up to the bridge was barricaded by a tall wire fence and a locked gate. Without a key or some good wire cutters, they weren’t going to get through now any more than Nick’s father would have been able to get through two years before.

  The metal bulwark handrails seemed to interest Nick, and Katie paused as he knelt down to investigate one.

  “They’re all shaped like an upside-down U with a flat bottom,” he said. “Maybe he was able to jam something up inside one of them.”

  “There are miles of the things,” Katie said.

  They sat down on one of the outside benches. It was foggy and cold—they were the only people braving the open deck. But in the summer, the ferry would likely have been crowded and, depending on the time of the day, packed to the gills with commuters. Katie mentioned this to Nick and he sighed.

  Katie had seldom in her life admitted defeat and she wasn’t about to now, though she was close to admitting profound discouragement. Maybe she was wrong, maybe the ferry wasn’t the answer to the riddle. Maybe whatever Nick’s father had left as his life-insurance policy was already gone, washed away during a hose down or discovered by someone who had no idea what it was.

  Nick said, “Let’s use our heads.”

  “Mine is about ready to explode,” Katie said.

  He took her gloved hand in his, tucking her hair beneath the scarf and smiling. “We can’t have that.”

  “Can’t have what?”

  “Your pretty head exploding.”

  She leaned forward and rested her forehead against his shoulder. His arm wrapped around her shoulders and, for a moment, she pretended they were two lovers sitting on a shipboard bench, striking out across the water, on a trip or sightseeing. Maybe Lily was there, too. Maybe she leaned against Katie’s other arm, humming and happy.

  “Okay, no exploding head,” she said, pushing herself, and her fantasy, away.

  “I was thinking about what you said about crowded decks and the cabin—and also my father’s trip to Seattle,” Nick said. “First he sees Patricia killed and decides to leave before he has to face me. He’s so determined to avoid any emotional situation that he doesn’t even go back to my house to collect his things including the CD outlining a hefty chunk of change. Instead he gets in his car and leaves Alaska. It must have taken him a couple of days of hard driving to get here. Then he realizes he has a tail.”

  “Okay, but answer this. He came all the way from Alaska
. How did he pick up a tail?”

  “Maybe a letter or phone call he made from the road was intercepted. We’ll probably never know for sure, but he said he had one, so let’s go with that. If we’re right and he drove onto this ferry, he might wonder if he was still being watched. He could be sure he was the last car, for instance, but he couldn’t be sure he was the last person aboard.”

  “You mean his tail might have abandoned his car at the ferry parking lot and walked aboard as a passenger.”

  “Exactly. So there Dad is, cowering in his car. He’s got his life-insurance policy and damn little else. The bad guy might be on board.”

  “What would you do?” Katie said.

  He thought for a moment. “I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t come running up here and risk bumping into someone. I wouldn’t stay in my car too long, either. Anyone could come looking for it—and me. I’d get out of my car, stash my evidence in a way that would attract no attention from anyone, and then I’d climb into an unlocked vehicle or camper. I’d leave my car on the ferry and take my chances driving off with some poor unsuspecting tourist.”

  “So that narrows our search to the two parking decks.”

  “Three sections on each deck. If I’m right.” He glanced at his watch. “We have forty-three minutes before the boat docks. We can always turn around and ride it back to Seattle, but remember, he probably didn’t do that, so think like he would have—hurried and desperate.”

  Katie got to her feet. “That shouldn’t be hard,” she said drily, thinking of the huge ticking clock hanging over her mother’s head.

  Unless they found what they were looking for and called the number Nick’s father had given them. Unless they figured out how to get her back alive without using Nick’s father as a bargaining tool.

  Unless.

  KATIE TOOK the starboard while Nick took the port. They started on the second-to-lowest deck. The ferry down here contained only a few permanently attached accoutrements on which to hide anything. The office was closed tight and that left the metal bulwarks and the inverted U-shaped rails that Nick had mentioned earlier. Katie took off her right glove to heighten her ability to feel what she touched. Even though she was technically indoors, there were dozens of windows and the fog outside pressed against the glass.