by Jerold Last
“If Corley was a close colleague of yours, that makes you dirty too, and I don’t like dirty cops. Are we clear on the topic? And no, I wouldn’t care to tell you what I’m doing or why I’m doing it, here or anywhere else.”
Raul looked thoughtful. “Then I guess we don’t have anything more to discuss, Roger. Watch your step. I intend to keep an eye on you.” He stood up, bowed to Suzanne, turned, and walked away.
“What did you think of Raul’s little speech?” asked Suzanne.
“Not much,” I replied. “He’s either pretty stupid or very crooked and a good actor. Some day we may find out which.”
Suzanne and I headed directly to Bruce’s cabin to pick up Robert. Bruce and Sophia sat comfortably while Sophia read Little Red Riding Hood to a half-asleep Robert in gentle Spanish. Bruce told us, very softly, “Sophia will entertain Robert a little longer while the three of us have a discrete visit with Eduardo. He and I both have a lot to tell you. Let’s get over there as quickly as we can without anyone seeing us. I think that means a circuitous route via the deck to make sure we’re not being followed.”
As we walked out on deck we almost literally bumped into Raul Vonhorst, who was walking behind Suzanne as if he had been following us. He appeared to think desperately for an excuse to be where he was, then decide to run a bluff.
Without any warning he took a few steps toward me and swung a huge roundhouse right cross at my face, a blow aimed to break the jaw. “Roger, I told you I’d keep an eye on you, you dirty killer!”
Unfortunately for Raul, he was slow as well as stupid. I’ve spent the last dozen years or so in competitive martial arts and am very quick and alert to sudden attacks. I stepped inside Raul’s wild swing, and hit him with my bunched fist in the solar plexus just hard enough to knock all the wind out of him. He dropped like a rock, gasping for air. I stepped over his flailing body and made sure he heard me say, “You’re lucky you only got the wind knocked out of you. You’re no match for me, Raul. I’d advise you not to try anything like that again. If you do, I’ll put you in the hospital.”
We continued walking towards our destination. After a few additional evasive maneuvers we knocked softly on the door of Eduardo’s cabin. He checked the corridor on both sides of us before letting us in. A moment later, six of us sat scrunched together in Eduardo’s small cabin, Suzanne, Bruce, Eduardo, Detective Obregon, General Vincente Aleman, and me. Sophia would watch Robert in Bruce’s cabin until we reclaimed him.
We were all sitting around a tiny table in a very small cabin on a medium-sized cruise ship in the heart of the Pacific Ocean. The ship rocked gently in the ocean swells as we sailed towards our destination. The closed cabin felt warm, and was getting even warmer as we sat there. Things were better organized for visitors this time, including a couple of newly opened bottles of a nice Malbec wine and six glasses on the table. Eduardo poured generous amounts of wine for us, then we all looked towards our host for him to tell us what was next.
Eduardo sipped from his wine glass before clearing his throat. “You all deserve to know more about what’s going on, especially Roger. Your seatmate on the flight into Baltra wasn’t a coincidence, Roger. Vincente and I arranged for him to meet you on the flight. He’s the one who first approached me and my bosses about joining this cruise to investigate what was going on here in the islands. We’ve been friends and colleagues for a long time.”
The general smiled ruefully before he looked up at us. “Eduardo suggested it would be a good idea to chat with you on the flight from Guayaquil to get an idea of who you are, since we’d be working towards the same goals here. You weren’t completely candid with me when I asked you what you’d done in South America on your previous visits, Roger. But that was totally my own fault. I certainly wasn’t completely candid and open with you either. So far, I’m pretty comfortable with the way you and your friends have handled yourselves here in the Galapagos. Eduardo can update you on all we’ve discovered about what’s actually going on here.”
We turned to Eduardo to hear his news. “Computers and e-mail are wonderful inventions. My employers sent me a digital audio picked up from the cabin of a Frigate Birds group member very early on our first morning at sea. I think you’ll recognize at least some of the speakers when you hear the tape. We’ll start in the middle so you don’t have to listen to a lot of junk before we get to the good part.”
I sipped the wine, which was very good, and listened carefully.
A voice on the tape was saying, “Just how the hell do you expect us to go along with everything you say when there’s murder involved? You promised us a nonviolent liberation of exploited animals, not killing and other violent crime. It isn’t bad enough you killed the park ranger last week. Now it’s Rita, who never did anything bad to anyone except to help finance plans to rescue captive animals from theme parks and shelters.” The voice was badly distorted, but the accent made it easy to guess the speaker was Dieter Schultz.
“Oh, shut up, you stupid wuss! You signed up for this job, and by all that’s holy you’re going to do it unless you want to end up the same way Rita did. The freighter we transferred the animals to after we grabbed them last week must be at least half way to their new home. There’s a full shipment of tortoises on route to their destination, and a bunch of their relatives already at the new farm waiting for them. In a few weeks we’ll be safe at home running a tortoise farm, and you’ll be getting the first of many checks to serve as a supplement to your retirement pension plan. This is definitely not the time to fall apart.” The voice was totally distorted on the recording. There were threats and promises made, but no real discussion of the plans. Too bad! After a while a door slammed as the visitors left the cabin. I couldn’t tell whether the voices were male or female, much less identify the speakers.
Eduardo switched off the tape. “Whose cabin was this tape made from?” I asked him.
He gave me an off-center smile. “Who do you think?”
“I’d guess the Schultz’s.”
“It was indeed the Schultz’s cabin.”
It was my turn to have some juicy information to share. “Suzanne, why don’t you tell everybody about today’s accident on the trail?”
Suzanne described how we had been arranged single-file for the climb up to the plateau, the mini-avalanche, and Dieter Schultz’s accusations that Michael Smart had deliberately created the avalanche to kill or injure him and Inge, who were directly behind the Smarts on the trail climb.
Eduardo went back to his computer and flipped it back on. “It sounds like there’s a pattern here and the pattern implicates the Smarts and the Schultz’s in some kind of conspiracy, as well as in the murders aboard the Santa Cruz and maybe the earlier murder of the park ranger last week. I’ve been getting transcripts of the conversations my bosses are picking up piecemeal. I think they sit around waiting for translation until someone realizes they can send them to us in English. This one came in just an hour or so ago.” He turned the computer playback on and fast-forwarded to another snippet of conversation. This time it was eavesdropping a different conversation from another cabin, he told us. Michael Smart’s voice came over clearly. “It sounds like we’re going to have a few little problems to clear up on this tour, Linda. The Aussies spent a lot of time talking to Rita in the bar the first night. We can figure out how and when to take care of the Germans some time during the tour.”
General Aleman turned to Detective Obregon. “Does this sound like enough for you to get a search warrant for all of the possible suspects’ cabins, Juan?”
“No, General Aleman, we can’t use these recordings for any legal purpose, investigation or trial. Could you imagine the political ramifications if the USA or any Western European government found out the Ecuadorian government colluded with an agency that bugged the cabin of any of their nationals?”
“So what do you suggest we do next, Juan?”
“Excuse me, but maybe you’d like to hear about Bruce’s afternoon activities
before you try to answer that question, Detective Obregon,” I suggested. “I graduated from law school and have a license to practice law in California. I never studied Ecuadorian law, but if it’s the same as in the USA, and I believe it is, a private citizen performing an illegal search doesn’t automatically contaminate any evidence they find. The police can’t just hire stooges to do their searches for them, but if the police legally find evidence against a suspect who we’ll call criminal #1 obtained by an unauthorized search performed by a third party, that evidence should be admissible in court at a trial of criminal #1.
“For example, if I burglarize Eduardo’s home and steal a pistol, and Juan arrests me for a different crime, finds the pistol, and determines it was used to kill Bruce, Juan can arrest Eduardo for murder and use my testimony as to where I obtained the pistol at Eduardo’s trial.”
I turned towards Bruce. “I think we’re all ready now to hear about what you discovered today.”
Bruce took a deep drink of his wine, put down his glass, and turned to General Aleman, who seemed to be in charge here. “I stayed behind this afternoon when everybody else went on the tour of Genovesa Island. It seemed like a great opportunity to visit all of the suspects’ cabins and take a look at what was in them. Based on what Roger just said, I should be able to tell you what I found in each cabin without ruining any case you might make against somebody for murder in the future.”
Everybody nodded.
“My first stop was the victim’s, Rita Caldwell’s, cabin. There were a lot of travel magazines about Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands there, but nothing more than you’d expect for a tourist who was also a writer doing a story on her travels. The police seem to have removed all the personal notes and her computer.”
Bruce paused for another gulp of wine. Or maybe it was two gulps. “Stop number two was the Schultz’s cabin. It was a lot more interesting. I left everything exactly where I found it, but took digital photos of everything with my cell phone. I e-mailed copies to Suzanne, but didn’t have an address for you, Detective Obregon, or Eduardo. If you give me your email addresses I’ll send each of you a set of the photos. To summarize what I thought was most significant, I found lots of interesting paperwork in a drawer in one of the night tables alongside the bed. The Schultz’s had made a substantial donation to an organization called “Save The Tortoises”. This wasn’t a charitable organization, but some kind of corporation they bought shares in as an investment. There were also several books on the Galapagos Tortoises on one of the night tables by the bed. Now that I’ve heard the tape
from their cabin, it all makes a lot more sense to me.”
Suzanne interrupted politely. “After the first session with the biologist, where he talked about poaching in the islands, the Weavers talked about the very high prices you could get for Galapagos Tortoise shells in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and China, where they use the ground-up tortoise shells for Chinese traditional medicine. Does anybody here besides me wonder whether there’s any connection between their telling us about this illicit trade and their murders?”
Eduardo sipped his wine thoughtfully. “There’s certainly the suggestion of a motive there, Suzanne. I like that idea a lot more than a random killing. It sounds like Bruce had a fruitful afternoon. Did you find anything else we should know now, Bruce, before we read it on our e-mail?”
Bruce thought a bit. “I’m not sure. One other thing I should mention was something I noticed during stop #3. I found several books about Galapagos Tortoises in Linda and Michael Smart’s cabin. Of course they’re on a Galapagos Islands tour, so they could have a legitimate reason for the books,. Still, that’s a lot of coincidence given what we now know and think we know about the Schultz’s.
“I also took a quick look through Raul Vonhorst’s and the Kaufman sisters’ cabins. They both had plenty of tourist information on the Galapagos Islands and at least one big book on Galapagos Tortoises. I don’t know where any of those three stand in our hierarchy of suspects. There was a lot of hand-washed laundry and some suspicious looking red spots on the carpet in the Kaufman sisters’ cabin and some coded notations in Vonhorst’s papers. I’ll send you photographs of the coded notes by e-mail.. But I didn’t have enough time to really search any of the cabins thoroughly. I certainly didn’t want to do anything destructive that would indicate I’d been there and searched the cabin. So I could have missed the gun if it was there and properly hidden in any of the cabins, especially the last two.”
Detective Obregon stood up and responded to Bruce. “That’s very interesting, Bruce. It fits in some ways with our theory of the murder of Ms. Caldwell. According to the autopsy results she was hit on the head with a hard, blunt instrument with sufficient force to render her unconscious for many hours. We theorize she was caught searching one of the cabins late at night, where she was knocked out. The wound might have bled a little bit. We believe she was later taken out on deck, shot, and thrown overboard under cover of darkness. The tides and winds would have combined to move the body in the right direction for it to have been floating in the ocean about where it was found the next morning.
“It’s unlikely that either of the sisters is strong enough to have carried the body up to the deck. I doubt that the two of them together would have been able to do this by themselves. But, if they also had the assistance of Raul Vonhorst, this could be a very plausible theory of how and why Rita Caldwell was murdered, and by whom. We will arrange to check all of the cabins for traces of dried blood stains with luminol before the ship is thoroughly cleaned after it returns to Baltra.”
The detective sat down and scribbled some notes for himself in a small notebook he carried in his pocket. Bruce finished by saying, “that’s all I have to tell you.”
“Does anyone else have any information to share?” asked Eduardo.
Nobody did.
Chapter15.It’s time for the good guys to go on the offensive
Darwin: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Eduardo stared directly at Suzanne as he spoke to General Aleman. “OK Vincente I think I’m finally ready to demonstrate what Roger and Suzanne can do to help us humble cops solve murders. And they really are a team. It’s not just all about Roger. Suzanne, let’s see a demonstration of your wonderful intuition, or scientific use of inductive logic, or whatever it is you do where you take all of the messy bits and pieces we’ve got and put them together into a logical theory. Can you give us a coherent explanation for these killings yet?”
Suzanne looked thoughtful. “Yes, I believe I can. Give me another minute to think about a few odd facts and where they fit in, and I’ll try. While I’m doing that, can I ask you to think about another impossibility, Eduardo? We may have to solve the problem of what’s the fastest way for Bruce to fly halfway around the world starting from here to get the proof Detective Obregon wi
ll need to arrest and convict his murderer or murderers. Does anybody think they might have an idea about how we can do that?”
General Aleman smiled broadly and put a hand in the air like a college student asking the professor for permission to ask a question during a lecture.
Eduardo played the part of the professor at the podium. “What’s on your devious mind, Vincente?”
“I might just have the perfect solution to Suzanne’s problem if I’m guessing correctly what she has in mind. But I think we need to hear her theory first before I make any suggestions.”
Eduardo made an elegant gesture to suggest it was time for Suzanne to share her thoughts.
She cleared her throat, sipped her wine, and began. “Based on the snippet of tape we heard from the Schultz’s cabin, it sounds like all of this is about tortoise poaching. First and foremost, we have to consider the possibility that the scene was phony, and was staged for our benefit. I believe that’s highly unlikely, but let’s begin with the question of whether we should believe this is what’s behind the murders or rule it out.”
Eduardo nodded, while some of the others looked like they were considering Suzanne’s hypothetical question.
