by Jane Haddam
“Thanks,” he said. “The way I was going, it would have taken me a year just to find Mr. Shay.”
“Charlie is probably as far forward as he can get, trying to do exactly what Dad told him to do.”
“Maybe we ought to go stop him.”
Tony nodded slightly and came forward, moving easily past Gregor and on toward the bow. Gregor followed him patiently. He could walk now, but not really well. Tony moved as easily as he did on dry land.
“What’s that?” he called back.
Gregor strained to hear something besides the ever-increasing wail of the wind and failed.
“What does it sound like?” he asked.
“It sounds like—Jesus H. Christ,” Tony said.
“What?” Gregor asked him.
Tony was in that narrow place that was the only open passageway between the main part of the upper deck and the bow. The other side was still clogged with tables and chairs from this morning’s breakfast. The place was like the hall downstairs, too small to take two people at once. Gregor had to push Tony forward to get into the bow and see. His task was made that much harder because Tony seemed glued to the deck beneath his feet.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Tony said again, as Gregor pushed on through.
And then Gregor saw it—or him, to be precise.
It was Charlie Shay, jerking and jumping and shuddering in convulsions, coming closer and closer to the low bow rail every time he moved.
Part Two
November 17–November 18
One
1
LATER, GREGOR DEMARKIAN WOULD wonder what on earth possessed him to go for Charlie Shay’s feet. Certainly it wasn’t anything he’d learned about fighting at Quantico, because he hadn’t learned about fighting at Quantico. Of course, even in the days when he had joined the Bureau, agents had been expected to know how to protect themselves. They’d been put through a short training sequence that had seemed to Gregor like a cross between boot camp and a National Rifle Association Expert Eye Gun Club. The thing was, in those days almost everybody who joined the Bureau was male and almost every male had been in the army. They were all assumed to be in good shape or capable of getting that way. That was good, because as a matter of fact Gregor Demarkian had never exactly been in good shape. He was not a physical man. He was not comfortable with guns, either. The Bureau had wanted him to learn how to shoot a machine gun—what had been going on in the minds of the people who set up training for the Bureau in those days, Gregor would never know—and so he had spent the requisite amount of time duly aiming one of the silly things at a target. He got muscle spasms in his right shoulder and a crick in his neck and a pass up at the insistence of an officer on kidnapping detail, who wanted him available for an assignment out in Palo Verde, California. After that, he’d been allowed to do what he was good at doing, meaning use his head. He’d used his head carefully and methodically for ten steady years of promotions and then been handed Theodore Robert Bundy. Never in all that time had he had to shoot anybody, or fight anybody, or even much raise his voice. In the higher echelons of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, crime—even the habitual pursuit of murder—was a very civilized way of life.
On the Pilgrimage Green, the death of Charlie Shay was anything but civilized. That he was dying, Gregor had no doubt. Gregor barely knew the difference between an Uzi and a Colt .45, but he did know poisons. Strychnine wasn’t even a very difficult poison to detect. The convulsions, the rigor, the look of shock on the face, that strange leaping St. Vitus’ dance of agony—there was nothing in the world like it. There was no question that Charlie Shay might live. He had probably been dead before Gregor or Tony ever saw him. The only mystery here was whether or not Charlie Shay would end up in the sea. The storm had built up around them now. The boat was pitching and yawing under their feet. The motion exaggerated Charlie Shay’s dance beyond the merely grotesque. In a more superstitious age, the assembled company would have taken one look at what was happening in the bow and started looking around for a witch.
Gregor’s only thought was that, no matter what else happened, Charlie Shay must not disappear. He might be able to spot strychnine poisoning just by looking at it, but no district attorney would prosecute—and no court would convict—on just his word. If Charlie Shay’s body fell into the sea, whatever investigation there might have been would be dead before it started. Gregor kept staring at Charlie Shay and what he saw was Charlie Shay leaping. Charlie Shay’s feet came up off the deck and did little tap steps in the air. Charlie Shay’s body arched back over the sea and snapped forward again, almost making the dive.
Gregor couldn’t stand it any longer. The boat dropped with the water beneath it. Charlie Shay went into the air one more time. Gregor held his breath and launched himself forward, sliding across the wet deck toward the low bow side. As he was skidding, the water and the boat rose again and Charlie Shay came down. Gregor got a single fistful of grey flannel trouser and felt it tear away from the trouser itself as Charlie once again began to rise in the air. Up and down, up and down. If Gregor had had a chance to think about it, he would have been seasick. All he had a chance to think about were Charlie Shay’s ankles. The boat began to rise again. Charlie Shay’s body began to fall again. Gregor put out his hands and grabbed. One of those hands got hold of something solid, dead flesh and brittle bone. The other got smashed. Charlie Shay was wearing thick-soled canvas deck shoes, the tie-up kind people order from catalogs like J. Crew and Land’s End. One of those deck shoes hit Gregor’s hand like a hammer hitting a nail. Its full force was blunted by the fact that Gregor had hold of the other leg and was pulling it in the other direction. The result was paralyzing and painful, but nothing worse. Gregor got his hand out from under as soon as he could and put it up near his chest.
“For God’s sake, help me,” he called out in the general direction of where he thought Tony Baird must be. He felt as if he’d been fighting the sea and the wind and the corpse of Charlie Shay for hours, even though he knew it must only have been seconds. “Help me,” he said again, with a strength born of exasperation in his voice. “What in God’s name are you doing over there?”
What Tony Baird was doing over there was nothing, because he hadn’t been over there for most of Gregor’s struggle with the body. As soon as he’d seen what was going on, Tony had headed for the mess, running and shouting at the top of his lungs. His report had been impossible to understand, but also impossible to ignore. Now he was back on deck, with the rest of the company behind him, craning over his shoulder to see anything they could.
“For Heaven’s sake, help him,” Bennis Hannaford screamed. “You can’t just leave him out there like that in the rain.”
“Tony, you’re blocking up the passage,” Jon Baird said.
“Right,” Tony said, suddenly leaping forward into the wet.
Gregor felt him land beside him just a moment before he was about to let the body go. Tony got hold of Charlie’s other leg and then seemed to be trying to push Gregor aside. Gregor held on ever more tightly. The one thing he had no intention of doing was letting this corpse out of his custody until he got it safely into a cabin. Tony shoved again. Gregor held on. Then Gregor got hold of a coiled line and began to use it to haul himself upward.
“I can do this,” Tony shouted in his ear.
The shout seemed abnormally loud, because it was no longer really necessary. The wind had begun to die down. Gregor secured his hold on the lines and pushed himself almost to a standing position. He was still holding on to one of Charlie Shay’s ankles with his right hand.
“All right,” he said to Tony Baird. “Forget about the legs. Take the hands.”
“I can carry him myself.”
“No you can’t.”
Tony shot him a black look, but this time he obeyed. He dropped the leg he’d been holding, making it necessary for Gregor to bend over again to pick it up. Then Tony moved around until he was standing over Charlie Shay’s head and reached fo
r the corpse’s hands.
“Let’s get him out of the rain,” Gregor said. “Then I think we’d better all sit somewhere and talk.”
2
Getting the corpse of Charlie Shay out of the rain was a project easier planned than executed. Gregor had always thought of the halls and passageways belowdecks as “tight.” Now they made him feel as if he were being squeezed through the neck of a tube of toothpaste. In order to keep Charlie Shay’s body off the floor, both Gregor and Tony had to keep their elbows cocked slightly outward. They were both too big to do that comfortably on this boat. Elbows smashed into doors. Elbows smashed into beams. Elbows smashed into the smooth-planed wood of the walls. Their heads took a beating, too. Gregor was getting used to what was happening to his. Getting knocked on the head was practically a definition of his life on this boat. Tony seemed more surprised by just how much of a beating he was expected to take. Every time his forehead smashed into a beam, he swore.
The maneuver wasn’t aided much by Jon Baird’s taking charge of it—but Jon Baird had taken charge of it, and there was nothing the rest of them could do. Gregor supposed Jon Baird took charge of everything. That was the kind of man he was. Gregor also supposed Jon Baird created a fair amount of resentment in his employees. Now what Jon Baird wanted was Charlie Shay’s body on the lower passenger deck, one flight down from the deck where they were all staying for the holiday. That required the navigation of a second flight of ladderlike stairs and the negotiation of a second set of even tighter passageways. What was worse, the rest of the company insisted on coming along with them, en masse. Gregor had refused to let go of the body. Now they were refusing to let go of it, too. They were refusing to let go of anything.
Going down to this deck, Jon Baird had taken the lead. Now he stopped in front of a narrow door and waited for Gregor and Tony to catch up. Behind Gregor and Tony, the rest of the party was murmuring and coughing and nervous. They had every right to be nervous. Nobody had thought to bring a torch or a tallow candle. It wasn’t absolutely dark down here—nothing outside a scientifically engineered black box, or a deep-earth cavern, is that—but it was close. The darkness made the air seem wetter and clammier and more alive than it was.
“Here we are,” Jon Baird said. “We can put him in here. This is the crew’s deck. They’ll look after him.”
“I don’t want the crew to look after him,” Gregor said. “I want the room locked up.”
“We should have buried him at sea,” Tony Baird said. “That’s what you do in cases like this. It’s going to be days before we reach land.”
“We’ll radio the Coast Guard for help,” Gregor told him.
Tony Baird snorted. “We can’t radio the Coast Guard for help. We don’t have a radio. We don’t have a motor. We don’t have anything. We should have buried him at sea.”
Jon Baird opened the door behind him and peered inside. Then he rummaged around in his pockets and came up with a box of wooden matches. “Just a minute,” he said, “I’ll get things going here. There’s the candle. There we are.”
The candle wasn’t much help, but it was some. Jon Baird placed it in the holder just inside the door he had opened and then edged back out into the passageway to let Gregor and Tony and the body pass. Gregor and Tony edged the body inside and then headed for the only thing they could head for, the small built-in bunk on the far wall. The bunk was even smaller than the ones on the deck above. Gregor didn’t think they were going to be able to get Charlie Shay to lie down flat in it.
They came up to the bunk’s open side, sidled around until they were holding the body with its head where its head was supposed to be, and then began to lower it carefully into position. The legs were stiff, although not as stiff as they would be later, with rigor. Gregor winced a little as they resisted his attempts to bend them. He managed to get them cocked just enough so that the body would fit into the bunk. As soon as he did, he stepped quickly away from the corpse and back toward the center of the cabin.
“Dear God,” Tony said. “He’s stiff as a board. I thought it took hours for rigor mortis to set in.”
“It does,” Gregor told him. “That’s not rigor mortis. That’s a side effect of strychnine poisoning. It’s not a hundred percent sure—”
“Strychnine poisoning?”
“—the stiffening doesn’t occur in all cases and it’s rarely as pronounced as this, although I have seen it this pronounced before. I shouldn’t call it strychnine poisoning, though. I just gave a young man a lecture about that yesterday. Technically, no one gets poisoned with strychnine.”
“Wait a minute,” Tony Baird said, “what are you trying to tell me here? Do you want me to think somebody murdered Charlie Shay?”
“You’ve either got to think that, or you’ve got to think he took strychnine in cocaine like your father’s friend Donald McAdam—”
“Donald McAdam was no friend of anyone on this boat.”
“—and my guess would be that Charlie Shay wasn’t the cocaine type.” Gregor nodded. “Quite frankly, the way he appeared to me was as someone who wasn’t even the cocktail type. A nice, steady, middle-of-the-road gentleman.”
“He was a cipher,” Tony Baird said positively. “Why would anyone want to murder Charlie Shay?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you’re thinking it’s business, you might as well know right up front you’re wrong. Charlie Shay didn’t know shit about the business. I knew more about what went on at Baird Financial, and I didn’t even work there. Charlie’s been a nonperforming partner for years.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“So you’re probably wrong,” Tony insisted. “It wasn’t strychnine poisoning. It was some kind of fit.”
Gregor looked back at the bunk. His own bulk was blocking most of the weak light of the candle from reaching Charlie Shay’s face, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been able to look at the body under a Kliegl light. Strychnine poisoning wasn’t like some other things, like arsenic or lye, that left telltale traces long after death. There would be no blue tinge along the jawline or burned patches of skin. A forensic pathologist would be able to find traces in the blood, but all the outward manifestations were limited to the time when the victim was in the process of dying. If you didn’t see those, you had to wait for a coroner’s report. If you did, though, there was nothing else like them on earth.
Gregor retreated to the door, took the candle out of its holder, and gestured to Tony to follow. “I’m not wrong,” he said, “because I saw Charlie Shay die—or immediately after he died—and I know what someone looks like when they’re dying of strychnine. I’m also not wrong because murder is the only thing that makes sense in this case. Don’t you think so?”
“No,” Tony Baird said.
“You’re lying,” Gregor told him. “And you don’t do it very well.”
“You’re obsessed with murder,” Tony said. “You’ve spent so much of your life dealing with it, you’ve started to see it under every bush.”
“Do you really think you’re going to help anyone with this attitude of yours?”
“Do you really think you’re going to help anyone with this attitude of yours?” Tony shot back, and then he moved toward the door, furious and cold, the fine-boned lines of his back almost as rigid as Charlie Shay’s had been in death. “I told my father it was a mistake to invite you here. I told him he’d regret it. I was right.”
Gregor moved away from the door. Tony had it all the way open now. He was presented with a bouquet of faces, looking in expectantly, waiting for something to happen. He turned his shoulder toward them and started to edge through.
“Wait,” Gregor said. “I want to talk to your father. Do you think you could ask him to come in here for me?”
“Do it yourself.”
“I want all these people to get back up into the mess hall as soon as they can,” Gregor went on. “It isn’t good for them to be crowded up out there like that. A couple of them hav
e been sick as dogs since we started out anyway. Tell them I’ll come up and explain the whole thing in a minute or two.”
“You tell them,” Tony said. Then he whirled around, stared at Charlie Shay’s body in the shadows, and whirled back. His face was white. His eyes were red. His jaw was so taut, Gregor thought it was going to snap in two all on its own volition.
“You damned interfering son of a bitch,” he said.
Then he shoved his shoulder into Sheila Callahan Baird’s throat, pushed her aside, and plunged into the passageway, not caring in the least who he had to rearrange to get where he was going.
That, Gregor thought as he watched him leave, is one very ruthless young man.
3
Five minutes later, with the (expected) help of Bennis Hannaford and the (somewhat surprising) help of Fritzie Baird, Gregor had what he’d asked Tony Baird to help him get. The spectators had retreated to the deck above the one where he now stood, probably to crowd together in the mess hall and speculate. Gregor had been present at a number of these mob scenes over the last five years, and in his experience the witnesses liked to talk—to each other. Once the police started to ask questions, some of them inevitably clammed up, but Gregor had never known an innocent witness not to want to talk to other witnesses as long as he thought he wasn’t being overheard. Gregor’s instinct was to let this sort of thing take its course, without interference. Every once in a while there was a case where individual impressions, unfiltered by group consensus, were important. Then you had to divide the witnesses up. The rest of the time, it only helped their memories, and their moods, to let them talk.
