by Hy Conrad
He was right. Again. The blow she suffered before hitting the water could have been enough to kill her instantly. Even with an autopsy, no one could say for sure if she’d been killed before her fall or after.
“The alarm was pulled in the crew area of the Calypso deck, near the bow,” the doctor continued, telling us what we already knew. “The bow is always more bumpy, especially on an old ship design like this at the speed we were going. And there was a large wet patch on the deck. My guess—I shouldn’t call it a guess, because it’s going in my report—is that she’d had too much to drink, slipped on the wet patch, and fell.”
“Wait,” I said. “Mariah didn’t drink. I was at a bar with her last night. She had club soda.”
“Mariah drank,” Aaglan countered. “Many an evening, we tossed back a few brews at the Valencia bar.” The doctor had a slightly odd way with American slang. For some reason I was thinking Dutch or Danish.
“No. She stopped drinking,” I insisted.
“You’re wrong,” said Dr. Aaglan. “We have the equipment on board to do basic blood work. For employee drug tests. There was alcohol in her system. It was one of the first things I checked.”
“Well, you made a mistake. Mariah didn’t drink. She was pregnant.” I don’t know how I was so sure of it. But I was, so we’ll just leave it at that.
“Pregnant?” asked Aaglan.
“Why don’t you check?” Monk was obviously annoyed with the doctor’s work. “It’s too late to check body temp or lividity or to time the onset of rigor. But you can still do a pregnancy test.”
“Of course,” said Aaglan. “I’m just surprised Mariah didn’t tell me, if it’s true. We were friends and I was her doctor.”
• • •
“Mariah Linkletter didn’t tell you about her pregnancy,” whispered Monk as we stepped out onto the Calypso deck. “You can’t fool me. You guessed.”
“The same way you guess with your eighty-six percent or your nineteen percent.”
“Those aren’t guesses.”
“I’m putting this one at ninety-two. You want to lay odds?”
Monk didn’t take the bait. “We’ll find out soon enough.” We both were nursing bad moods, but mine was worse. I was upset with myself, with the world, mostly with Captain Sheffield.
“It certainly increases the motive,” Monk said. “Even if Sheffield didn’t know about the pregnancy, Mariah would have been pressuring him to leave his wife.”
We had left the infirmary and gone straight to the Calypso deck, to the spot that, just between us, we were calling the crime scene. We checked for passersby—no one—then unhooked the chain that read CREW ONLY and let ourselves in. Nothing had been changed since the night before, except that the lifeboat was back on deck, hanging from its davits.
“Do you think we should call Stottlemeyer?” I asked.
“Jurisdiction,” Monk said simply. “Plus, no official crime. Plus, the man legally in charge of your floating island is our bad guy.”
I sighed in exasperation. This was a relatively narrow space, just a dozen yards or so before the starboard and port sides met to form the prow. With the ship moving, there was a constant, buffeting wind. It would be easy enough to fall.
“What was she doing up here?” Monk asked. “Why wasn’t she at dinner?”
“I’ll ask around,” I said. That was one part of the job I did better than him, asking questions without people hating me or becoming scarred for life.
It felt odd to be investigating a scene without yellow tape or gloves or plastic booties. It also felt odd not to have Monk circling the scene, holding out his hands in front of him, framing the scene. Monk was currently using his hands to hug the wall behind him.
“Do you want me to walk around and frame the scene?” I volunteered.
“What good would that do?”
“I don’t know what good it does, period. Just thought I’d offer.”
“Let’s get this over with,” Monk said. “The front is one of my eighteen least favorite parts of a ship.” I had no clue what the other seventeen parts were, but I assumed they added up to the whole rest of a ship. “Where’s the alarm?” he asked. “The one that was pulled?”
I found it five feet away, on the same wall he was hugging. Like all the others around the ship, it was red, about four feet off the deck, with a handle below and a bell on top. The bell was large, about the size of a honey bun, with an old-fashioned hammer poised about an inch and a half away. Above it was a sign, also in red: MAN OVERBOARD. EMERGENCY USE ONLY.
“Shouldn’t it be ‘person overboard’?” I asked, crossing back to where Monk stood. “Just to be correct.”
“Bird, bird, bird,” Monk said. “Bird, bird, bird.”
“Bird overboard?”
I turned back in time to see a gray and white plover with horizontal stripes across its chest, like a feathery inmate. It stood directly below the alarm, drinking in little gulps from a puddle on the deck.
Monk’s normal disdain for nature quickly turned into fascination. “Do those things drink salt water or freshwater?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. I knew from a childhood spent near the beach that seagulls drink salt water. But a lot of other coastal birds don’t. I wasn’t sure about cute little plovers.
“Shoo,” Monk said, and jerked his head just enough to scare the bird into flight. “Good. That’s better. Natalie, go taste the water. I want to see if it’s salty.”
I looked at the puddle, then back at him. “You want me to taste the puddle?”
“Yes. I’d do it myself, but I’m germophobic.”
I almost laughed. “You would not do it yourself, not if the puddle was hermetically sealed and filled with Fiji Water.”
“That’s why I’m asking you. You’re not germophobic, are you?”
“No, I’m not germophobic. But I’m not an idiot.”
“I never knew you to be afraid of a little water. Just taste it. On your finger.”
“No,” I said. “It’s water on a dirty deck that a bird was stepping in. Besides, it has to be salt.”
“We’ll know for sure if you taste it.”
“I am not tasting it.”
“Does that mean you’re ornithophobic? An irrational fear of birds? Even I’m not ornithophobic, and I’m everything.”
“Then you drink the puddle,” I told him.
“I’d love to, but I’m germophobic.”
It was almost a relief when Captain Sheffield caught us, forcing us to stop our annoying banter. He was dressed in his blues today, perhaps his form of mourning, and came walking around from the port side. He stopped when he saw us. “Mr. Monk? Miss Teeger?”
Out of five hundred passengers, we were two he remembered by name. I wasn’t sure I liked that. “This area is restricted to crew,” he informed us.
“Captain. Good morning.” I turned on the charm. “So sorry. I guess we didn’t see the sign.”
He looked past us. “You mean the sign on the chain you had to take down in order to get in here?”
“Natalie just wanted to see the spot,” Monk said. “She’s got this morbid side to her, don’t you, Natalie? Do you have any idea why Ms. Linkletter was on a slippery outside deck in the dark, instead of in the dining room, Captain?”
“I don’t know why she was here. No one does.”
“Someone does,” Monk said. “I mean, the girl wasn’t alone. Someone must have seen her and pulled the alarm. Unless she did that herself.”
“Yes. We were wondering about that,” Sheffield said with a thin smile. “Who pulled the alarm?”
“And do you know?”
“As a matter of fact, it was a passenger. Teenage boy. He came forward this morning. Poor kid was afraid of getting into trouble for being in a crew area. And then the whole trauma of the death scared him.”
I was taken aback by this revelation. This could change everything. If someone innocent had seen the whole thing, then how … “Did this bo
y actually see Mariah fall?”
“He didn’t actually see it, but …” The captain had steely blue eyes, which were now piercing my watery brown ones. “What are you implying?”
“We would like to speak to this witness,” said Monk, “if that’s okay.”
The captain squared his shoulders. “You’re free to speak to any passenger, of course. I can’t stop you, as long as you don’t annoy them to the point they complain, which you undoubtedly will, given your history. But this is not a police investigation.”
“An investigation?” I tried to laugh it off. “Who said anything—”
“I have informed the San Francisco authorities of the accident. If Ms. Linkletter’s relatives want an autopsy, that’s their right. This sort of event is tragic but hardly unique. The cruise industry has systems in place to deal with accidents.”
“So that’s it?” I found his attitude more than a little callous. “Life just goes on?”
Sheffield pursed his lips and shook his mane of white hair. “I know who you are, Ms. Teeger. Mr. Monk.” Then from out of a jacket pocket he pulled one of our glossy brochures and unfolded it.
“Where did you get that?” I asked. Probably from his security officer, I thought. Little snitch.
“You two are private detectives, trying to drum up corporate clients. Isn’t that why you’re here? Isn’t that what you’re trying to do now, create a big, flashy case out of a poor woman’s tragedy?”
“No.” Monk glared my way. “I’m here because my ex-employee suddenly thinks she’s my boss and wanted to take this stupid, useless trip without me. Hold on, is that a brochure? Natalie, we have a brochure?”
“Yes,” I confirmed. “We have a brochure.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Monk grabbed a corner of it for a closer look. “Is that a four-color process? It looks expensive.”
“Adrian, the brochure will pay for itself.”
“Does that mean we don’t have to?”
“No, we still have to pay for it.”
“Thought so. How many of these did you make? How many did you hand out already? Maybe we can get our money back.”
“We’re not getting our money back.”
“My God.” Sheffield pulled back the brochure. “You two are like amateur hour.”
The captain had a point. Not just about amateur hour. About everything. To an innocent man, it might appear that we were trying to take advantage of the death to impress a captive audience. But Sheffield wasn’t innocent. He was, in my expert opinion, a cold-blooded killer trying to shame us into stopping before we even began.
“Who is your number two on this ship?” asked Monk out of nowhere.
“What? My number two?” The captain seemed thrown.
“The person who takes command if you’re incapacitated,” Monk explained. “You know, sick or dead. Or arrested for murder.”
“Arrested for murder? What murder?”
“Let’s say, for the sake of argument, a crew member.”
“What kind of insanity is this?” The captain’s face turned red, which I find often happens when people are bellowing at full voice. “First off, Mariah Linkletter was not murdered. And if by some chance she was, it wasn’t me. I was with you in the dining room, in full view of hundreds of people.”
“Yes, you were,” said Monk.
“Damn right I was.”
“Meanwhile, you checked your watch every few seconds and pretended to want dessert and waited for the alarm to go off.” Monk had stepped up. He was toe-to-toe with Sheffield now. Good for him.
“I believe it’s the first officer,” I said. “He would have the authority.”
“I knew that,” said Monk. “Don’t you think I know? It was a rhetorical question.”
“It didn’t sound rhetorical.”
“You two are crazy,” said the captain, and started to cross away. “No wonder you’re so desperate to drum up business.”
“Did you know she was pregnant?” That was me shouting it into the back of his uniform, trusting my ninety-two percent instinct.
The captain stopped and turned. “Pregnant?” His face was no longer red.
“Dr. Aaglan’s confirming it now,” I said. “I thought you might like to know.”
“That makes it even more tragic,” Sheffield said slowly, separating each word.
“When we get back, I’ll get the police to do a DNA test,” Monk said. “It will tell us who the father is.”
“I’m not going to let anyone swab my DNA. Out of the question.”
“We didn’t ask you to,” said Monk with a sly grin. “Unless you think you’re the father. Do you think you’re the father, Captain? Because we never even suggested that.”
I stood there with Monk, waiting until Captain Sheffield was through yelling his profanities at us. Then we watched him leave, past the CREW ONLY chain and up a flight of exterior stairs.
I wanted to be the first to say it. “He’s the guy.”
Monk scowled. “That’s for me to say.”
“We’re partners now. I have just as much right to say it as you.”
“Okay. Let’s start from the beginning,” said Monk. “He’s the guy.”
“That’s what I said.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mr. Monk Arranges Things
So here we were. Monk and me. Ignoring whatever else might be in our lives and trying to get justice for a girl who’d done nothing worse than fall in love with the wrong married man—not that there ever is a right married man.
I don’t want to make us sound like saints. Focusing on our own lives is certainly more important in the grand scheme. But moment to moment, we always choose something else. For example, I could be having a poolside piña colada with Malcolm Leeds. Instead, I was in the cafeteria, having lunch with a teenage boy with acne and braces and a doting father.
Barry Gilchrist was the chief operating officer of Ethersafe. According to the B. to Sea folder, it was a security company with a mandate to protect the secrets of its big business clients. This was a man I’d probably want to meet anyway. Who knows what kind of problems we might be able to help his company solve? But the reason I had sought him out and sat at his table was his son, Gifford.
In the past few hours, Gifford had become a minor celebrity on board, the thirteen-year-old who had pulled the alarm and tried to save Mariah Linkletter. “Are you a real detective?” he asked, putting down a greasy Tater Tot and picking up my card.
“Natalie and her partner are famous,” said Barry. “And she’s proud of you, buddy, for pulling that alarm.” The man was being so solicitous. All the clues pointed to a divorced dad taking his boy on a business vacation and hoping to survive the week.
“Very proud,” I improvised.
“Is your partner joining us?” Barry asked. “I’ve read a lot of articles about Adrian Monk.”
I glanced across the cafeteria to the massive circular buffet, where dozens of diners were pushing their trays along and reaching under the glass for plates of brown and white and faintly green food. Monk was right in the middle, pushing his empty tray, every now and then reaching in a hand, then pulling it out, as if he’d just touched fire. I think he and his orange vest were on their sixth time around the endless circle, and still his tray was empty.
“He’s trying to join us,” I said. “But I’m not sure he’ll make it.” They say a cat will starve itself to death rather than eat something it doesn’t like. Monk wasn’t that bad. He’d find a way to feed himself.
“Natalie wants to hear your story,” Barry prodded his son. “Tell Natalie.”
“Da-a-a-ad.” According to Gifford, the word has five syllables.
Barry explained. “I was worried when Giff stormed out of the dining room last night.” He lowered his voice. “But if he hadn’t gone out on deck and happened to see … you know, the accident … it would still be a mystery. The poor woman would have just disappeared, never to be found. It was lucky.”
&nb
sp; “Everyone was wondering who pulled the alarm,” I said. “Why didn’t you come forward?”
“I didn’t want to get in trouble.” Gifford looked at his father and rolled his eyes. “But Dad kept bugging me. ‘Where were you? Where were you?’ I had to tell him something.”
“So, you were in the crew area,” I prodded. “Exploring the ship. I understand. And you saw Mariah fall.”
“I didn’t actually see her.” Gifford shifted his little brown eyes away from mine. “I mean, I couldn’t tell you what she was wearing. Or how she fell. But I heard a splash. And I looked over and I saw someone in the waves. A woman with red hair.”
“Was she conscious in the water?” I asked. “Was she still alive?”
“I don’t know,” said Gifford. “It happened so fast. Anyway, I pulled the alarm. That’s what matters.”
“Good. That was fast thinking,” I said. “Was it hard to pull? Did it take a lot of strength?”
“Strength?” He thought about it. ““I don’t know, you know? Sort of medium. Not hard, not easy. It was like, you know, loud. Very loud.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. “I’ve never pulled an alarm like that.”
“Well, I did.”
When I glanced up to the space between father and son, I nearly jumped. There was Captain Sheffield heading straight for us across the cafeteria. He had plastered on a broad smile. “If it isn’t our little hero,” he said, hands spreading wide toward the thirteen-year-old. “I guess everyone wants to hear your story.”
“Yes, I do.” It wasn’t my wittiest line but it got my point across.
Papa Barry was beaming. “Hey there, Captain.”
Young Gifford rolled his eyes. “It’s no big deal. I wish people would stop asking me.”
Sheffield turned suddenly serious. “Is Ms. Teeger asking too many questions? Do you want her to stop?” He turned to Barry. “It’s probably not wise to subject a young boy …”
“No, no, not at all.” Barry Gilchrist laughed. “We’re honored. Do you know who this woman is?”
“Yes. She’s a criminal investigator.” The captain had managed to make it sound dangerous and sleazy, both of which it can be.
“I help catch bad guys,” I explained.
