by K. J. Emrick
“So the question becomes, who would have that kind of card?”
Cookie had been on this track earlier, thinking this through to its logical conclusion, but she’d been sidetracked by Jerry’s proposal and Cream’s return and a dozen other little things. Now, the answer seemed so obvious she wondered why they hadn’t seen it before. Who would have an access card that could get them into both a guest’s room and to secure areas of the ship?
“A crewmember,” they both said at the same time. That’s who.
Cookie picked Cream up as he pranced at her feet, his breakfast gone. “Don’t they have… I don’t know. A background check for their employees here on the ship?”
Jerry put his own plate on top of hers. “Of course. Probably as strict as what they have for police officers.”
“Then what does that say about our theory that the killer knew Joseph from prison?”
“I wouldn’t give up that theory just yet. Our killer could have known Joseph after prison, or before, and never have been in prison himself. For that matter one of the cards could have been stolen. I think that’s what the captain is hoping for… wait. Go back to what you were saying a minute ago. About that crewman over there and the security cameras.”
She thought back. “Oh. I was just mentioning that he was the man who told me the cameras had been out since the start of the trip. Why?”
Jerry pursed his lips in thought, slowly shaking his head. “That doesn’t make sense. The captain only found out about that when I asked him to check the recordings. We went down and found the room locked up and the equipment smashed inside. No one had known about it before. But… yeah, I remember now. When I told you about it in our cabin almost right after we found everything broken, you said you already knew.”
“Because that crewman had told me…”
“Which means…”
“That crewman destroyed the equipment,” she said in a hushed whisper, finishing Jerry’s thought.
“More than that,” he said, just as quietly, at the same time that Cookie was thinking it. “That man isn’t just our saboteur. He’s our killer.”
Several things fell into place at once for Cookie. Not just the fact that only a crewmember would have the kind of access card that would let him get into their cabin and access the secure room with the surveillance computers. Other things as well.
That crewman with the black wristwatch knew about the cameras being out before the captain did. Not only that, but she remembered thinking it was so odd that he didn’t have a walkie talkie to find the captain’s whereabouts, when all the other employees she’d seen had one with them at all times. It was a big ship. Someone who worked here would want some way to keep in touch with everyone else.
The killer was right here, in the room with them.
She looked around for him now, searching for his brown hair and that black watch. She found the spot where he’d been sitting. His plate was empty on the table. He was gone.
“We have to find him,” she said, but Jerry was already on his feet and on his way out of the dining room.
In the morning rush of people everywhere it was hard to find one man, even if his red vest would narrow it down to just the people working on the ship. Cookie was looking off in one direction while Jerry was looking in the other and that was why it took her a moment to realize when she got left behind.
She turned to say something to Jerry, only to find that he had already started running through the crowds. Had he spotted the man? She didn’t know, but she wasn’t going to just stand there like a bump on a log!
“Hold on, Cream,” she told her trusty sidekick, and together they chased after Jerry.
She saw him duck through a door that closed slowly again behind him on its hinged arm. She followed, hesitating before pushing the door open again, wondering if she should find someone and have them contact the captain, or send a text message to him herself. No. There wasn’t time. Jerry was after the killer.
Stepping through the door, letting it swing back into place with a slow hiss of springs, she found herself in a service passageway that was narrow and seemed to connect every few dozen feet to another hallway, all of them exactly the same. White walls and bare tiled floors. The lighting in here came from fluorescent bulbs lined up along the ceiling. No decorative paintings. No fancy wall paneling. Everything was utilitarian and functional. It was an area, Cookie realized, meant just for the staff.
Jerry was nowhere to be seen.
Cream whined a little question and Cookie scratched under his chin to reassure him, even though she was cursing herself for not moving faster. With no other choice, she started off in a straight line. That way, if she didn’t find where Jerry had gone, she would at least have an easy enough time backtracking to get out to the public deck again.
All around her was the hum of machinery. She felt it more than she heard it, a vibration in the walls and the floor that vibrated in her ears. It wasn’t the engines making the sound. She wasn’t in the right part of the ship for that. Some other kind of big machines were running nonstop, and very close by.
The passageway she was following ended not far ahead. Frowning, she thought for a moment about taking one of the open hallways leading off to the side, or trying one of the doors, but she knew that could end up leading her around in endless circles. Wherever Jerry had chased the man with the black watch she might never find him that way.
“What do you think, Cream?”
“Whoof,” he said.
She scratched behind his collar and nodded. “I couldn’t agree more. Going back is our best option. We’ll have to find one of the crew or the captain to help us navigate through here. I want to send a text message to Jerry, too, and let him know we’re trying to find him. Foolish man. And he says I take risks!”
There wasn’t any service when she checked, so she put her phone back into her pocket and started back with her head full of questions. Who was this man they were chasing? Why would he hurt Joseph? There were few answers to be found, at least from where she was standing in the middle of this service hallway. It seemed like the more they learned the more she didn’t know.
In another dozen steps, a laundry cart wheeled out of a side passage and blocked her path. Cookie was beginning to think there was nobody back here, and now this. The worker behind the cart immediately twisted it to the side, trying to turn it, and only managed to get it wedged sideways. Then the crewman in his red vest bent down to tug at the wheels.
“Stuck,” he muttered, in a rough voice. “Go around.”
Alarm bells went off inside Cookie’s brain. No. This was far too coincidental. Just as she began chasing after the killer someone rams a laundry cart across her path?
Well, it could be just a crewman, she thought. In his red vest…
Except all of the crew who served food or did the laundry wore white. Not red.
She backed up, holding Cream close to her chest. There must be another way out of these hallways. Other doors that led back to the public areas of the deck. All she had to do was find one. Quickly. Like, right now.
Run, she told herself. Run.
Turning on her heels she made straight for the first branching hallway to her right.
The feel of something hard and metallic against her throat brought her up short and wiry-strong arms wrapped around her from behind.
“I told you,” a man’s voice hissed in her ear. “I told you that if you kept snooping around someone would get hurt. Guess it’s gonna be you, huh? You just wouldn’t let it go. Stupid woman.”
Terrified, Cookie rolled her eyes down to see the knife at her throat. She didn’t dare move her head, but she could just see the weapon glinting at the extreme edge of her vision.
On the hand holding the knife, she saw the black metal watch that she recognized all too well.
Cookie had found the killer.
Chapter Ten
Cream did not like this man.
The little Chihuahua was growling and
yipping for all he was worth, pawing incessantly at Cookie’s arms to try and turn around, to get at the man holding her hostage. No doubt Cream would have bitten the man for all he was worth, but Cookie held her friend tight. There was no way to tell what this crazy man would do.
“Can’t you hold that mutt still?” he hissed into her ear. “He’s driving me nuts.”
Cookie bit her tongue around a comment about how he was already there.
“Where are we going?” she asked him instead as they slipped down what seemed like an eternity of hallway, one step at a time, with his heavy breathing in her ear and that knife at her throat.
“Where do you think?” he said. “We’re going on a romantic cruise.”
Cookie decided she didn’t like this man, either.
Up ahead Cookie could see the door that she’d followed Jerry through. This guy in his crew uniform was planning on walking right out and disappearing into the crowd, Cookie realized. Who would recognize just one more ship employee rushing off to somewhere else? “I’m getting us away from your boyfriend,” he said. “After that, we don’t ever have to see each other again, as long as you behave.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Cookie corrected him.
“That right?” he snarked. “Well, not that I care but you two are staying in the same cabin. You’ve been all over this ship together. I know, because I’ve been following you to see what you’d do. I can’t tell you how long it was before I had a chance to get into your cabin and take this little fur rug you call a dog. If you weren’t in there, your boyfriend was!”
“He is not my boyfriend,” she repeated, as she heard footsteps running in their direction.
“Fine. If he’s not your boyfriend then what do you call him?”
Jerry stepped into the hallway ahead of them from a side passage, hands held up in fists, blocking the exit. Cookie nearly melted in relief. “I call him my fiancé,” she said with a smile.
The man snarled. Cream snarled back. Jerry started to say something and his eyes glared in anger, but everything stopped when Cookie felt the knife tapping at her throat. “Stay back!” the man told Jerry. “You’ve got no play here, Officer Jerry Stansted. Yeah, that’s right, I know who you are. I know what you are, too. You got no jurisdiction out here on the open water.”
“I don’t need jurisdiction to pound your face,” Jerry told him, taking a step closer.
“Uh, uh, big man,” Cookie’s captor warned. “You stay back or I cut her throat.”
Jerry hesitated. His mouth closed around whatever he had been about to say next, and instead of another step forward, he took a step back.
“That’s better. Now, me and the lady here are going to find another way out. Don’t follow me, or I’ll make sure she dies in your arms. I’ve already killed one man on this trip. Think I’m going to hesitate to do that to someone else?”
The rage seeped away from Jerry’s eyes, replaced by anxious concerned. “Don’t hurt her,” he pleaded.
“You don’t want me to hurt her? Then get out of my way.”
Jerry looked at Cookie like he wanted her to tell him what to do. She understood. If he let this man go, he could be saving her life. At the same time, he’d be endangering everyone else on board. She held his gaze, and mentally poured her love out to him.
Then she nodded. Cream added his own opinion with two sharp barks.
That was all Jerry had been waiting for.
“We can’t let you back out into the ship,” he said, advancing a careful step again. “You won’t get away with this.”
“Are you nuts?” the guy asked in disbelief. “I’ve got the knife. I’ve got your woman. Your fiancé, she says! You willing to risk all that?”
“I’m willing to trust her,” Jerry explained. “Like I should have been from the beginning.”
If the situation hadn’t been so dire, Cookie would have kissed him for that.
“You two are something else,” the man told them, shaking his head, leaning into Cookie in a way that let her know he was going to do something she was definitely going to regret.
Cream barked and with a mighty shove he pushed himself up and snapped at the bad man holding his best friend.
His teeth didn’t get anywhere near skin but it was enough to scare the guy and make him pull away from Cookie, just enough so that the knife wasn’t right up against her skin, giving her the breathing room she wanted so badly. She shoved backward against him, turning her face away from the blade.
The edge of it scratched her, not deep enough to cut, but enough that Cookie saw her life flashing before her eyes.
Jerry lunged forward at them, but he was still so far away.
Cream was still trying to sink his teeth into the man’s hand or arm or anywhere he could. Cursing and swearing, the killer grabbed Cream by the collar of his leash and yanked him away from Cookie. She screamed and desperately tried to hold onto him but it was too late.
She watched in horror as the guy cocked his arm back in a softball stance, underhand, still holding Cream by his collar.
Then he pitched him at Jerry.
“Catch!”
Her little friend spun head over feet in a twisting arc that Jerry had to dive to intercept. His body slammed up against the wall and he held his hands out… and Cream fell into his arms like he was a quarterback making a last second catch in the end zone.
Cookie’s heart started beating again.
When she looked, the killer had snuck away. Again.
Cream was licking Jerry’s face when she took him back into her arms. “You saved his life,” she told him. “I thought that evil man was going to… going to…”
His hands cupped her face and his mouth kissed hers with such heat and passion that all the words that described the terrible things she had just imagined were erased completely from her mind. “I know,” he told her. “I was thinking the same thing about you. I couldn’t let him hurt you, but I didn’t know what to do, and then this... I’m so glad you’re all right.”
“Me too,” she said to him. “Now, come on. We have to catch him.”
Easier said than done, Cookie realized. They raced down the hallways into a maze as complicated as any Funhouse. All of these passages had to be here for a reason, didn’t they? She didn’t know. As they went in deeper, the hum of machinery got louder, and louder, until finally she could recognize it for what it was.
The hallway ended at a huge room full of bustle and activity. Tall machines with round glass-front doors stood lined up against two walls, all of them running and humming. Washers and dryers. Cookie had finally realized what she was hearing. It was the same thing she heard at home on Tuesdays when she went down to the laundromat to do her washing, only amplified about a thousand times.
Women and men wearing the white shirts and pants uniform of the cleaning staff were loading linens and bedsheets and articles of clothing into the washers on one side, and then taking the finished loads over to the other side to the dryers. Cookie saw some of the crew uniforms, too, like dozens of those red vests. Laundry carts like the one the killer had pushed in front of her were everywhere, some with bags of dirty laundry, some with tall stacks of clean laundry all dried and folded.
Everyone stopped and stared when Cookie and Jerry burst into the room.
“Hey,” one man finally shouted at them over the drone of the machines. “You can’t have that dog in here! This is for staff only.”
Jerry held up a hand to him like everything was fine and Cookie recognized his cop mode settling in even as he took out his leather badge case and flashed it for everyone to see. “Sir, my name is Jerry Stansted. I’m a police officer. There was a man who just ran through here a moment ago. Can you tell me which way he went?”
For once, she was actually glad he’d brought that badge with him.
Still a little skeptical, the man scrubbed at his bald head and hooked a thumb over at the opposite wall. “Uh, he went that way. You should go, too. Can’t, uh, can’t
have a dog in here.”
“I understand. Thank you.”
Then he grabbed Cookie’s hand and they were off again.
It was kind of thrilling, this headlong rush after a man who was so dangerous. Cookie kept her hand in Jerry’s and kept her other wrapped around Cream, and with the two of them there with her she felt safe. More passages met them in a continuation of the maze. At the second intersection, Jerry slowed, and then he stopped.
Cookie looked up at him. “What is it?”
“We’re never going to find him this way.” He slammed a fist against the wall and shook his head. “For all we know he doubled back, or took a shorter route out to the public decks, or… or anything! He’s one of the staff. He’s got to know his way around the ship a lot better than we do. I don’t know where to even start looking.”
Cookie wanted to say they should keep going and find this man who had killed her daughter’s husband but she knew Jerry was right. At least about part of it. There was no way of knowing where he was, or where he was going. For now, the killer had gotten away.
“We should go talk to the captain,” Jerry said after another moment. “He’ll need to know that the murderer is someone working on his staff. That should make it easier for us to find him. Maybe you should text Jessica and ask her if she’s gotten through those photos yet, not that it will do much good if the guy is a staff member.”
“It’s a needle in a haystack, to be sure. I think she should still look at everything in the file. If nothing else, it will give her something to do.”
Jerry shrugged. “I suppose you’re right. We should look through the photos too. We both got a good look at the guy. I know I’d recognize him if I saw him again.”
Cookie wasn’t so sure if she would. She’d talked to him that one time up on the stairway, but she hadn’t paid him much attention. Today he was behind her almost the entire time, with a knife, which made it very hard to concentrate on his appearance. He had brown hair… but was it short, or did it go down over his ears? There was something about the line of his jaw. Kind of a pointed chin, but not really. His eyes were… she couldn’t even remember. The thing she remembered most was that black metal watch.
