Everyone's Dead But Us

by Zubro, Mark Richard

  Movado said, “So now we have a conspiracy?”

  Scott said, “Why do you think sneering nastily is going to help?”

  “What have you lost?” Movado asked. “Why do you care so much? What has the killer done to harm you?”

  I said, “Our room? Our stuff? One of us could be next.”

  Movado snorted. He said, “What we need to do is protect ourselves and our reputations and the reputation of this resort. Most of us don’t want to lose this as a refuge.”

  Scott said, “There are other refuges.”

  “Are there?” Movado asked. “Then why aren’t you at them?”

  “The charming company here,” Scott replied.

  We all indulged in a round of nasty glares. Movado broke the silence. “There are not a lot of places left for us to go to and keep ourselves away from prying eyes.”

  “This isn’t going to be one of them anymore,” I said.

  “People have been murdered. You really think what has happened here can be kept under wraps?”

  Movado shot back, “You really think the rich can’t control anything they want?”

  I said, “Are you saying the rich are controlling this right now? You don’t seem to be in control. Unless you’re the killer and planner.”

  Movado said, “Henry Tudor was my friend.”

  I said, “Don’t you think we actually need some protection right now? Whoever is doing this is still at large. You and the rest of us are still in danger.”

  “Perhaps you’re the killer, Mr. Movado,” Scott said.

  Movado didn’t deign to become defensive. He said, “Mr. Oser is in charge for now. That’s good enough for me. He will know what to do.” Movado must have assumed he could control or intimidate the functionary.

  Oser looked put upon, nervous, and out of his depth. His hands still trembled and his shade of gray would suggest an immediate visit from a team of paramedics, which we weren’t going to have anytime soon. Oser said, “I’ve never been involved with murder. We have to be careful.” He also didn’t seem ready to defy Movado.

  I said, “I intend to do everything I can to find out who the killer is. I am not bound by any restraints of decorum the rest of you might feel about dealing with death.”

  Movado said, “You’re one of the rich or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “That may be,” I said, “but I haven’t joined the ranks of the superasshole rich.”

  “Haven’t you?” Movado said.

  Scott said, “We should all stay together.”

  Movado said, “I’m staying in my villa with my bodyguard. Any of the other guests who wish to join me may do so. I don’t care where the rest of you go or what the rest of you do. Once we are in contact again with civilization, we’ll see who’s in charge and what will happen to whom.” He marched out of the room. Deplonte followed him and Virl followed Deplonte. Oser looked crushed. He left with them. They’d forborne preventing us from examining this villa. I didn’t know why. We were armed, but so were some of them. They’d come to their senses? But we had no evidence of that. We would find no clues to the murder? And the killer knew that and didn’t care what we saw?

  Alice Gavin and Joseph Martikovic stayed with us. When the others were gone I said to her, “We’ve got to find your other graduate student.”

  “We checked our boat, but Bobby wasn’t there. He’s got to be on the island. I hope he hasn’t come to harm. We’ll be happy to stay here and help with any investigation. Finding a killer could prevent harm coming to him or to the rest of us. I have no connection to those morons. What do we do now?”

  I said, “Carefully examine the villa. I wish they had all stayed with us.”

  “Well, they didn’t,” Scott said.

  Martikovic was tall and raw-boned. His bright red hair was soaking wet. Alice and he followed in our footsteps. We made a circuit of the rooms in the villa, opening every drawer as well as the suitcases.

  “No guns,” Alice said. We returned to the foyer.

  “Was he here with anyone?” Scott asked.

  “Only one size underwear in the suitcases,” I said.

  Alice said, “Dirty laundry, one pair of shorts, one pair of socks, and one shirt.”

  “You could get your laundry done the minute you stopped wearing it on the island,” I said. A satellite radio sat on the nightstand next to the bed. It was simply a receiver, not a communication device. In the drawer we found his passport and his wallet. He was thirty-six. His address was listed as the Hamptons in Rhode Island.

  “No threatening notes,” Scott said. We opened O’Quinn’s laptop computer. It was not set up to connect to the Internet. The battery had two hours and seventeen minutes of memory left on it. There were three documents listed on the computer desktop. One was a grocery list that had three items: ketchup, aspirin, and toothpaste. Another had a list of four addresses with the fourth not finished. They were for people whose names I did not recognize. The third document was a letter written to the Pope. I could make no sense of much of this and none of it seemed to be a motive for murder.

  I said, “There’s got to be some rationality behind these murders.”

  “I hope not,” Alice said. “I hope it’s some crazy person. And doesn’t a person have to be crazy to perpetrate this kind of madness? Rationality behind madness? Does that really qualify as rationality?”

  I said, “Maybe that depends on your definition of madness.”

  “Or rationality,” Scott added.

  Wayne Craveté swept into the room. He wore his rain poncho as if it were a royal robe. Of any of us, he would be able to carry such a thing off. He motioned to Scott and me. “I must speak to you two.”

  Craveté ignored the suspicious looks given him by the archeologist and her helper. Craveté, Scott, and I took refuge in a living room whose vast windows gave a view of the lightning and rain. Wayne Craveté was either a disgraced Polish aristocrat, a distant claimant to the czar’s throne in Russia, or a gossipy queen who happened to parlay an Internet investment into riches beyond his wildest dreams before the crash of the late 1990s. Craveté always had the wildest rumors of treasures piled in secret caches, or Euro-trash in clandestine trysts, or pool boys run amok. Scott repeated the various bits of drivel to our mutual amusement.

  We could hear nearly continuous booms of thunder. Craveté snuggled into a black leather chair. The gloom between lightning flashes was relieved only by a series of candles I had lit and placed on cast-resin raindrop tables around the room. One was next to Craveté. I sat with my back to the window. Scott faced me. Craveté was at a perpendicular angle to both of us. On the floor between us was a hand-knotted rug, with a floral pattern made of wool and silk flowers.

  Craveté said, “I found out who the investigator is. I found out that all the rich people currently on the island are under suspicion. And it must have something to do with all this death and destruction.”

  “Under suspicion of what?”

  “Of looting the treasuries of Europe and Asia, for centuries.”

  “They haven’t been alive for centuries,” Scott said.

  “They’re complicit in a long line of theft.”

  Scott said, “But the first rich guy only bought the island back in the eighteen nineties.”

  “He supplemented his family fortune by selling and trading looted items from around the world. Sort of eBay for the rich that got started in the horse and buggy era. The elite thieves of the world knew where to go. He was the latest in a long line that goes back centuries.”

  “There’s proof for this?” I asked.

  Craveté looked hurt. “Proof? Well, really, there’s just things that make logical sense that you know are true.”

  Scott said, “Can you tell us who gave you this information?”

  “I’ve pieced it together. I’ve talked to everybody. There’s a lot of people very upset by what’s happened. Who wouldn’t be upset? All this death and destruction.”

  If his rumors and gos
sip led to a murderer, great. I would be patient. I would definitely want facts, but if his scandalous tittle-tattle led to them, I’d be happy with the result. Besides, neither our list of leads nor our roster of allies was terribly long.

  “How’d they get away with it?” I asked.

  “They’ve got their own private island here. There’s supposed to be all sorts of places to hide secret caches. Hidden dungeons. Ancient ruins. That cavern everybody uses for back-to-nature trysting supposedly used to be the entrance to an extensive gold mine.”

  And I’d thought of it as our place.

  Scott said, “I’ve never noticed anything that suggested it went any further.”

  “It’s a rumor. I tried looking once. I didn’t find anything.”

  “But if it was rumored there were riches,” Scott said, “why haven’t half the adventurers on the planet been after the loot? They could have landed a small Nazi division on the island in the late thirties and just taken everything.”

  “Well, they didn’t. Supposedly, herds of people have come and never found anything. Supposedly some of those same people have died or disappeared over the years, including every investigator.”

  I said, “What? There’s a gay militia? Homosexual vigilantes? Queer commandos on the island killing investigators, holding off legions of Nazis?”

  “A fabulous idea,” Craveté said, “But who knows what the rich can get away with? They’re very good at concealing things.”

  “You’re rich,” Scott said.

  “I only made my money in the past ten years. I’m looked down upon and despised. The old money here doesn’t let anybody in.”

  His face looked eerie in the candlelight. For the moment I thought I detected doubt and suspicion or, more likely, resentment.

  I said, “You were pretty quiet when we asked for help earlier.”

  “Well, yes. How could I defy the whole crowd when they were assembled?” Peer pressure. It’s a wonderful thing at any age and in any socioeconomic class.

  “Who is the investigator?” Scott asked.

  “Dimitri Thasos, the member of the staff who was burned so badly in the fire at the castle.”

  “Who told you this?” Scott asked.

  “Well, I can hardly say.”

  “It would help us to know. If we’re going to stop a killer.”

  “Well. ..” He snuggled farther into his chair, pulled his knees nearly to his chest, and wrapped his arms around them. “I guess I can tell you. I don’t think Pietro much cares for some of these people. He and I have had some long talks.”

  I remembered that at least I’d gotten a bit of a sympathetic nod from Pietro when the rest of the aggregation was busy bailing on any kind of investigation.

  Craveté said, “I think he’d like to talk to the two of you. He likes you. You aren’t impossible to take care of like so many visitors to the island. Of course, you don’t take any of the villas.”

  “I can’t afford to stay in the villas,” I said.

  Craveté cleared his throat. “Pietro likes you.”

  “We’ll try and talk to him,” Scott said. “Do you know why he told you this?”

  “I think he thought I might be able to help him. I’m awfully good at getting hold of gossip. He wanted information. I was ready to give it to him. We’ve been swapping stories for years. He’s a dear in those late nights when the wealthy don’t need you or want you, when the pool boy is as shallow as you suspected he would be, and you’re thinking of things that no one should think about on an island like this.”

  “How did Pietro find out Thasos was an investigator?” Scott asked.

  “Pietro watches everything around here. I suppose all the help do. Dedicating your life to the pleasures of the super-rich can’t be easy.”

  “Can we talk to the investigator?” I asked. “He seemed pretty bad off.”

  “We can see,” Scott said. “If he’s too bad off, we’ll leave him alone. He may have the key to the killings.”

  I asked Craveté, “Do you know who inherits the island next?”

  “Jeff O’Quinn does. A nice man.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Craveté gasped. “No.” He gulped. “What happened?”

  Scott said, “He was shot.”

  “No! How awful! And you’re investigating. Thank god!”

  When we got back to the room we’d left Gavin and her helper in, they were gone.

  We struggled into the storm, dodged the drops to Apritzi House. Rufus Seymour, supposedly fifteenth in line to the British throne, was sitting with Dimitri Thasos. I didn’t see Seymour’s lover.

  “Should they be by themselves?” Scott asked.

  We approached the luxuriant divan on which Thasos lay. His arms and upper torso were blistered, blackened, and red. His eyes stared out at us. For the first time he seemed not only conscious but somewhat coherent. I was told the worse the burns, the less the pain. I’m not sure I believed that, but what I did see were numerous degrees of burns, so maybe he was in numerous degrees of pain.

  Seymour’s face was lined with worry. “We found some Vicodin. Louis Deplonte gave it to us. Thasos is not in as much pain, but he’s still in pretty bad shape. He needs proper medical care.”

  Some of the wounds oozed. I didn’t know if it was better to tape a man’s burns or leave them open to the air. It was obviously better to get them treated with something. We needed to get him to a doctor.

  I said, “It would help if we could ask him a few questions.”

  Seymour said, “I don’t imagine it will make his pain any better or any worse. Do you really think answering questions is going to make much difference to him?”

  I said, “It might make a difference to the rest of us if it can help us find a killer.”

  We gathered around the bed. I sat on one side of him. Scott on the other. Craveté and Seymour sat at the foot of the bed. Up close the wounds looked grotesque. I heard Scott draw in his breath. In the past few hours, he and I had pretty much had our quota of horror for our lifetimes. Then again, everybody still alive on the island who had helped with the rescue or recovery had pretty much seen plenty enough to keep them up nights.

  Dimitri gasped at each breath as if the air was painful as it hit his lungs.

  I said, “We’re trying to get you help.” I desperately didn’t want to say, “Are you okay?” “Where does it hurt?” “Everything is going to be fine,” because he obviously wasn’t okay, it must hurt all over, and there was no guarantee anything was going to be alright. In the face of spectacularly mortal injuries, I could barely figure out what to say. I couldn’t bring myself to hold either of his hands. Both were bloody, oozing stumps, with bits of flesh burnt and red and blistered. I touched the first patch of clear skin I could see. It was on his upper arm. “Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

  Thasos turned his head a quarter of an inch toward me. He rasped, “Danger.” His head seemed to sink back on the pillows. He breathed deeply.

  “I know this is hard,” I said. “Can you tell us what the danger is?”

  His head moved a fraction of an inch up and down. Part of his gray hair had been singed away. I thought he might be in his late sixties. His attempts to rescue paintings in the castle had been above the call of duty. Or was there another reason for his presence? There could be a faction on the island that believed he was an investigator. Certainly they’d be a danger to him if they actually were thieves. Thasos shut his eyes and breathed deeply for several moments. I looked at Scott. Should I back off or continue? Scott nodded at me. I interpreted it as encouragement.

  Thasos opened his eyes and gazed at me.

  I said, “I know this is awful, but we’re trying to figure out who set off the explosion and who’s done the killings. We’re afraid.” Up until that moment, I hadn’t articulated that thought. Storms and destruction had kept me too busy to reflect, but I was afraid. Very afraid. I hated to pressure anyone so horribly wounded, but as long as he was conscious, I’
d give it a shot. I said, “If you can tell us anything.”

  He blinked several times.

  “Do you feel strong enough to talk?” I asked.

  He nodded weakly.

  I explained about Tudor and O’Quinn. His eyes were riveted to mine as I told him what we knew about their deaths. When I finished, I asked, “Can you tell us what happened in the castle?”

  He looked at Craveté then back to us. I said, “Wayne told us you were investigating art thefts.”

  Thasos gasped several times. He clutched my arm. My Marine training and innate sense of sympathy for someone so horribly hurt kept me from flinching from the grotesque touch. I remembered that his wounds couldn’t hurt me. Showing any level of discomfort wasn’t going to help him. The psychic cost to me was less than the pain he was so obviously in.

  “Danger,” he rasped again. “Danger.” Tears rolled down his cheeks. He tried to pull himself from the bed, fell back clutching at the air. The parts of him that I could see that weren’t burnt and scarred turned deadly pale.

  Desperately as I wanted to ask more questions, he looked a few breaths short of dead. I whispered, “We’ll come back, Dimitri. You need your strength.”

  Thasos grabbed my arm with both of his. It felt damp and oozy like the clutch of death, strong, desperate, and unbreakable, but I didn’t flinch or pull away. “No,” he said. “Talk. Now.” Looking down at where he clutched me, I saw that the back of his fingers were charred and raw.

  I said, “You don’t look up to it.”

  He did not relinquish his grip on my arm. He said, “Now. Maybe never.”

  I thought my leaving would bring more agitation. I said, “Okay.” He visibly relaxed, but he retained his grip on my arm.

  Thasos tried to rasp out some sounds. He pointed at the end table. I touched the glass of water on it. Thasos nodded. Scott helped him lean forward, and I held the glass so he could take sips. After he gulped and gurgled for several moments, we helped him return to the supine position. His eyes glittered as he spoke. “Just you,” he said.

  “You want to talk to only me?”