Cooks Overboard

by Joanne Pence

  “A waste of time,” George said dismissively. “Look at him. He’s nothing.”

  Grundil shrugged. “Myself, I vould have somevon vatch him, but I’ve got the young, handsome von, so I’m sure I’ll have my hands full.”

  “We all will,” George said. “All of you, go to your respective posts, and we’ll rendezvous at nineteen hundred hours.” He checked his watch, stood up, and said, “Now go!”

  Grundil watched as the three men jumped up and dashed from the courtyard. She shook her head and poured herself another cup of coffee.

  28

  Colonel Ortega wandered into the breakfast room wearing only pajama bottoms and smoking a cigar. His hair was a mass of disheveled spikes, and it was clear from his bloodshot eyes and the greenish cast to his skin that he’d had a few too many last evening while waiting for the Hydra to contact him.

  “Did you hear from her this morning?” he immediately demanded.

  Eduardo Catalán was reading the morning newspaper and breakfasting on a baguette, strong black coffee, and orange juice, a carryover from the days when he lived in Paris. He slowly folded the paper, creasing it neatly with one finger, and put it at the side of his coffee cup.

  “I have heard nothing, my colonel,” he said.

  “Damn her!” The colonel sank heavily into a nearby chair. Immediately his housekeeper was at his side, quietly pouring him coffee and putting an ashtray by the cup. “She has had a day to contact me. Maybe it is time for me to go on board the ship and find out what this game is that she is playing. Whatever it is, I do not like it.”

  “Give her time,” Eduardo said. “She would not pull a fast one on you. Whatever is wrong, I am sure she will fix it.”

  “But it has got to be serious or she would not be doing this when she knows I am waiting for a signal.”

  “I know,” Eduardo cautioned. “That in itself is reason not to go onto the ship, or in any way draw attention to ourselves, until we know exactly what we are up against.”

  “Hmpf.” The colonel took the newspaper from Eduardo’s side and opened it up. “I do not like waiting on the whims of a woman!”

  “What if we simply stay on the ship?” Mike Jones suggested. “And when it leaves, we do, too. Let’s just forget about the colonel and his formula. Let him find the damn thing.”

  “I can’t do that,” the Hydra said. She lifted one of the heavy knives from the butcher block storage rack on the counter and tested its sharpness with her thumb. “My reputation would be ruined. In this business, you’re only as successful as your last case. Anyway, on the off chance the professor’s death is traced to Ortega in some way, I need to make sure he doesn’t talk to the authorities about me.”

  “About you? Why would he? He ordered the hit—he’s behind the whole thing.”

  “With a man like Ortega, one needs hard evidence. Receiving the formula will involve him enough that he won’t be inclined to cooperate with the authorities. If I don’t give him the formula, there’s the chance he’d point the authorities in my direction. He’d have no reason not to. And I’d have no proof against him.”

  “Can he identify you?” Jones asked.

  “He might. I met with him in person in Rio. I wore a blond wig, a mole on my chin—a kind of Marilyn Monroe vamp look that turns men Ortega’s age especially hot. But it might not have been enough.

  “I couldn’t go too far because I needed to convince him that I was the one for the job. That he could trust me to take the formula to him, and that the Valhalla was the perfect way to get it out of the country without anyone knowing.”

  “Well, I guess you were almost right,” Jones said.

  Her hand tightened on the knife handle. “I was absolutely right. It would have gone off without a hitch if Ingerson hadn’t gotten sick!”

  “Maybe he was holding it back from you on purpose.”

  “Shut up! He wouldn’t dare! I can’t help but think the cause of my trouble has to do with the passengers. One of them—or maybe more than one—wasn’t what he, or she, seemed.”

  “You’re right,” Jones said softly, his gaze never leaving the knife in her hand.

  “We can still pull this off, damn it!” She slammed the tip of the knife deep into the chopping block. Jones flinched. “We’ve gone through the ship, through all the cabins. The Amalfi woman has to have it on her. There’s no other explanation. So we steal her purse, and if we can’t find it in there, we steal her.”

  “You mean kidnap her?”

  She slid her fingers under the waistband of his jeans, taking hold of his belt and jerking him close, almost eye to eye. “I don’t give a damn if we have to slice her into little pieces to find that formula. One way or another, we’re going to get it.” Then she shoved him away from her and left the room.

  29

  Angie took a pamphlet about Mazatlán from a table by the front desk of the hotel. It was old and yellowed. Obviously this wasn’t a hotel that catered to tourists, but since her interests lay in the historical parts of town, which wouldn’t have changed, it didn’t matter. She and Paavo had a whole day to play tourist.

  Paavo had talked her into leaving her big tote bag in the room. He remembered her complaining about Mike Jones’s concern about it. Maybe it meant nothing. On the other hand, he wasn’t leaving anything to chance, and if Mike Jones was a part of this—and Paavo suspected he was—Jones could take the bag. Instead of carrying a purse, he had persuaded her to strap around her waist a pouch like bicyclists and other athletic types wore.

  Normally, she hated wearing waist packs. She felt like a kangaroo having a pouch stuck on her stomach. Besides, it was so small she could carry only essentials: her passport, credit cards, lipstick, compact, comb, money, and keys. When she tossed in a tube of mascara, just in case, it bulged more unflatteringly than ever.

  She was so focused on the bulge around her middle that she made no protest when Paavo convinced her to leave her camera behind, too.

  Pamphlet in hand, they set out for the Basilica de la Inmaculada Concepción, to be followed by the Plaza Republicana, and finally the big central market.

  Livingstone almost missed seeing Mike Jones slip into Angie and Paavo’s room, he did it so quickly. The Englishman had been standing behind the door of his own room, peering through a glass he’d installed the day before in place of the normal peephole. Now, instead of affording a view of whoever might be knocking at his door, it gave a wide-angle panorama of the hallway, and an especially good view of the entrance to the room opposite.

  As a backup, Livingstone had put a bug in the Smith-Amalfi room, in case someone entered while he wasn’t looking through the peephole, which was one of the more boring ways to spend one’s time.

  This stakeout had certainly turned out to be a lot easier than most. It hadn’t lasted even an hour when, already, he was about to catch his man. Instinctively, he patted the gun in his jacket pocket.

  He’d wait five minutes, then go in. By that time, Jones should be smack in the middle of whatever criminal activity he had in mind.

  Livingstone put on his earphones to listen to what was going on in the room. He hadn’t mentioned to Paavo that he’d bugged their room, but he was sure the cop would understand. Besides, Livingstone had done it once before—in their cabin on the ship. Unfortunately, it’d been found before he’d managed to learn anything. Now he heard the opening of a drawer. Still searching…just as he’d suspected.

  Suddenly something hard and cold pressed against the back of his neck, right at the base of his skull, a most deadly spot for a bullet to be placed.

  A sick feeling oozed through him. Moving only his eyes, he caught a reflection of the room in the mirror over the dresser…of the open balcony door…of the face of his assailant.

  “You!” he cried.

  The silencer caused the bullet to go off with only a dull popping sound, a bizarre prelude to the roar it made when it entered his skull.

  Mazatlán was much larger and busier than Angi
e had expected, and with fewer historical tourist attractions. Even the big basilica, which had a lovely gilded altar, had been built in the late nineteenth century. Very little architecture from the early Spanish settlement survived.

  After checking out the central market, she and Paavo walked to the beach, the Playa Olas Altas. There she quickly discovered that the stores she was most interested in were in the new, northern part of the city, the Zona Dorada, or Golden Zone.

  They caught a taxi. Looking into the side-view mirror, Paavo saw that Grundil Duchievor and the strangely named Shawn MacDougall had also caught one and were doggedly following them to the Golden Zone. Once in the Zone, the odd couple got out of their cab about a half block down the street from Paavo and Angie.

  As Angie began her study of the boutiques of Mazatlán, Grundil and MacDougall kept their distance, sometimes following her into the larger shops or waiting outside as she went into the smaller ones. Paavo finally concluded that they were simply watching Angie’s every move and were most likely harmless.

  “Oh!” Angie cried. “This store is having a huge sale. Let’s check it out.”

  Paavo stepped into yet another store with her. It was bigger than any of the others they’d been in so far, filled with many rows of dresses, all being pawed over by masses of women. Overwhelmed by the sudden noise of the shoppers, the clatter of cash registers, the ringing of telephones, and the wildly hued displays of clothes in clashing plaids and stripes and dots, he backed up. This was worse than chasing criminals. “I don’t think so.”

  “Come on,” she urged. “It’ll take me only a minute or two.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll be sitting at a table at that outdoor café across the street. When you’re through here, come and join me.”

  “That’s fine,” she said, handing him her shopping bags. “Would you mind holding these for me? I need a nice dress to wear when we go to dinner this evening. We should try one of the restaurants facing the beach.”

  Clutching Angie’s shopping bags, Paavo fled the store before she could even say good-bye.

  Although it was true that the shopping was giving him a definite hatred of crowds—a condition he had never known he had until he accompanied Angie on a couple of her shopping sprees—what he really wanted to do was call Yosh.

  “Looks like you’re with a very dull group of people,” Yosh said as soon as Paavo got him on the line.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Ruby and Harold Cockburn, retired military and retired statistician for the Department of Education—looks like she made sergeant. Nellie and Marvin Nebler, housewife and retired used-car salesman.”

  “What about the last guy?” Paavo asked.

  “At least he’s more interesting. He’s supposed to be some sort of art dealer, but everything about him is vague. It’s all there—the papers say the right thing, but it’s too plastic, too pat, if you know what I mean. Just a hunch.”

  “Okay. That’s good. And Ingerson, the steward?”

  “Botulism. He died yesterday. Kidney and liver failure.”

  “Botulism? How the hell…?” He hadn’t been expecting to hear anything like that. Poison, yes, but not botulism that was so erratic it wasn’t used by killers. Only nature dealt blows like botulism. “What about the cook?”

  “Peter Lichty had some sort of nervous breakdown. He kept muttering about a woman. That’s all anyone could tell me. INS saw to it that he was sent back to Norway. He had no papers to allow him to stay.”

  “A woman. Interesting,” Paavo murmured.

  “Your last question,” Yosh said, “about Professor Von Mueller. It’s a big case, Paav, and a lid’s been clamped on it. I had to call in some big-time favors.”

  “It’s appreciated.”

  “The guy was murdered. It’s not in the papers, but he was. A couple of homicide cops in Berkeley were doing a routine investigation—being careful, of course, because it’s not every day that you investigate the murder of some scientist—when all of a sudden, the FBI shows up. Everyone involved is more nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, as they say.”

  “What’s going on?” Paavo asked impatiently.

  “Didn’t I just say there was a lid on it?” Yosh loved to torment his serious partner. His partner wasn’t laughing, though. “Okay, here goes. The glorious, albeit dead, Professor Von Mueller is said to have invented a way to create cold fusion, which is a way to create nuclear energy.”

  “Nuclear energy?” That was the last thing he’d expected to hear.

  “Yes, but with a difference. A big difference. There’s no heat, no core that could melt down and cause another Chernobyl—in fact, there’s not even any nuclear waste to store for the next gazillion years.”

  Yosh’s words caught Paavo’s interest. “Is this for real? Safe nuclear energy?”

  “Well, that’s the problem. No one knows if cold fusion can really occur or if it’s just a theory. The Berkeley PD didn’t understand what the scientists were talking about and tried to cut off access to the lab to protect the crime scene. Then the FBI brought in some of their own scientists. They spent a day in there going through the professor’s files and computer. Then the FBI took the professor’s computer, his disks, and all his records. The Berkeley PD heard them say that it was looking real good, but all they could find was old information. They were missing the actual formula and all the most recent data that led up to it.”

  Yosh chuckled. “I should add that the crime scene was a complete mess. Based on fingerprints and other evidence at the scene, the BPD had incontrovertible proof that six different FBI agents and three scientists killed Von Mueller.”

  “What a nightmare!” The homicide inspector in Paavo shuddered at the thought of having the crime scene wrecked that way. “So, where was the actual formula? Was it stolen? Is that what they think was behind his murder?”

  “The reason the FBI got involved in the first place was that there were rumors the professor had sold the formula to some international consortium instead of keeping it here in the good ol’ USA. The trouble is, it wasn’t his to sell. He developed it, but he did it as an employee of the university and on government grants. There was no way he could argue he came up with it in his home office in the evening. He had to do most of the work at the Lawrence Laboratory, and it is specifically what the government paid him to come up with.”

  “Interesting. What else did you learn?”

  “I think that’s about it. Except that the going price for the formula to create cold fusion is around a hundred million dollars. And that’s not from the people who want to use it—it’s from the oil and gas industries that would be hurt by a new, cheap source of energy. They want to see it buried.”

  Paavo whistled. “Anyone check the professor’s bank account?”

  “Swiss bank account, you mean? As far as I know, the Berkeley PD didn’t have the money for any long-distance calls.”

  “I’m not surprised. Speaking of money, I’d better get off the phone. This will cost a small fortune.”

  “You’re right, buddy. And after you get off the phone, see what you can do about getting away from that ship. Between botulism, phony art dealers, and people asking about cold fusion formulas, it’s not the best place for a vacation.”

  “You’re right.”

  “But at the same time…” Yosh stopped, hesitant.

  “Yes?” Paavo asked.

  “Keep investigating. You sound like my partner again.”

  Actually, Angie had to admit, she was glad he’d left her alone for a short while. What she wanted to do even more than look at dresses was to buy something for him. Although this vacation hadn’t turned out the way it was supposed to, she felt closer to him somehow—ever since he’d told her on the ship how much he’d been bothered by the death of the police officer. It also helped clarify her own feelings about his job. He was a cop—that defined his nature, his personality. And she didn’t want those things to change.
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br />   Now, what could she buy him? She turned down an aisle between some dresses. She’d found in the past that at times, when she was mindlessly shopping for herself, she’d come up with ideas for other things—like a gift for her man.

  Shawn MacDougall couldn’t believe the woman had disappeared. He’d noticed her abandon her companion and then begin to drift among the clothes as if she hadn’t a care in the world. While most shoppers were pulling dresses, suits, and blouses off the racks and holding them up against themselves, she was walking up one aisle and down the next, pretending to be deep in thought. How deeply could one think about little black dresses and sequin-studded evening shoes? He hadn’t dared to get too close, of course, but had simply followed behind to see what she was up to. Then, somehow, he’d lost her.

  A number of women were giving him strange glances, as if they thought he was a masher, or maybe a cross-dresser. He even told one he was looking for a present for his wife.

  He shouldn’t have let Grundil talk him into watching the woman. It was too embarrassing. On the other hand, what was his alternative? The man? No way! Too big and tough-looking.

  Then again, the woman was the Hydra—tougher than any man, he’d heard.

  He squared his narrow shoulders. He had studied Greek mythology. The Hydra was a ferocious, multiheaded monster that only Hercules could kill. Well, if Hercules could manage it, so could he. He threw out his chest and charged into the racks of velvet pantsuits where he’d last sighted the Hydra.

  Still, he couldn’t shake the thought of her callous, calculating brown eyes. The eyes of a killer. Her companion, he now realized, was clearly just a dupe. Blue-eyed, big, and brain-dead. Obviously, she just kept him around to watch her back by day, and he didn’t want to think about what the big moose watched by night.

  No wonder Grundil had selected the man for herself. She’d pulled what George would have called “a fast one” on him. Took the easier of the two. Could he blame her?