A Death on The Horizon

by Mark Ellis

  “Meet Barb Stamen, aka sauna tech Barbara Stafford. She knows I know, and she’s looking to feature me on her website.”

  After mulling his passenger’s revelations over a half-league of shrouded waters, Rad dialed Security Chief Leroy Collins. He wanted the revealed investigator to see for the record exactly the actions he was taking.

  “Arrange security-focused interviews with all employees,” he said into his phone, “ideally without any noticeable disruptions to our passengers.” Rad turned back to Melissa. “Are you aware that Ms. Stafford is not accounted for at the moment?”

  Melissa gulped, “No, sir.”

  “I’ll be assigning you a full-time security escort.”

  “Sir, with all respect, I think I can accomplish more—”

  “This is nonnegotiable,” he told her.

  Stan Hundtruk had heard the Stafford page too, and now he sat face-to-face with Chief Collins, a broad-shouldered man north of thirty, copper eyed with a pinkish-sunburn complexion. Hundtruk had shown some federal credentials and explained to the head of security how very soon the Northstar chain of command would include extremely influential entities, and how his performance this night would augur his future as a Trans Oceanic security professional.

  Collins had balked when first seated in Hundtruk’s borrowed cubicle off the communications office, but now he was becoming receptive to the idea that big changes were afoot.

  “I’m not asking you to be disloyal to Captain Squier, not at all,” Hundtruk told him. “It’s just that due to the extreme sensitivity of the Lara Svenko case, having to do with jurisdictions, there is information we’d like to be in the loop on, independent of the ship’s command.”

  Then Hundtruk asked, “What can you tell me about sauna tech Barbara Stafford?”

  A waxen sheet glistening on his forehead, Collins offered a factoid that was already common knowledge among the ship’s command. “We’re not sure if she didn’t reboard at Juneau or is hiding somewhere on the ship.”

  “Hiding,” Hundtruk repeated flatly.

  “If you know the ship, sir, it is very possible.”

  “Have you notified Juneau authorities about her absence?”

  “Affirmative.”

  Hundtruk cautioned the reluctant lawman to proceed with Captain Squier’s directives and to not divulge Hundtruk’s federal intervention.

  “I’ll remind you that I am acting at the behest of Admiral Blaisedale, and if you value your future at Trans Oceanic, you’ll keep our little secret.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Stan Hundtruk’s laptop chimed with an incoming message from Melissa Blythe to Skip Scrimshaw, marked urgent. She was calling something in.

  His eyes fevering over the gist of his co investigator’s email, Hundtruk digested his co-investigator’s message:

  Confirmed: Blythe thinks Stafford/Stamen is Lara’s killer.

  Blythe’s lock has been tampered with.

  Confirmed: Blythe thinks she’s next on Stamen’s hit list.

  Hundtruk’s instincts about Barb Stamen had been correct, no surprise there. The blond-rooted harpy seemed wrong from that very first meeting in the Siletz Spring Sauna Center and was probably guilty as sin. The unfolding narrative was starting to read like a Sue Grafton mystery: R Is for Return. For Hundtruk, that was problematic. Blythe, the vanilla Bushie and community college sleuth had ferreted deeper into her potential complicity in the Svenko case than he had.

  The storyline developing was not the story President Obama’s czars wanted. Several of Hundtruk’s superiors were new Emanuel appointees who were ready to give Hundtruk the advancement he deserved. To have the over-and-done Svenko case luridly surface now would overshadow the talking points Democrats hoped to highlight, their desired story of beneficent federal oversight of the cruise industry.

  It would have been better if the malcontent Stamen had been implicated and taken into custody before the election. Conservatives would have raised toasts and excoriated media that rushed to judgment spinning that a shipboard conservative likely committed the crime, but at least the Svenko denouement would be behind them now. Blythe’s theory put the Rainier Policy Institute and Trans Oceanic in the clear, not by the chance of an inebriated fall but by the hand of a downscale progressive psychopath. The way things were panning out, with a lapsed Republican female gumshoe closing in on an apparent coven of lesbians, Imbroglio magazine’s crusading liberals would end up ruing the day they reopened the case.

  Hundtruk worked himself over. If he’d figured things out in time, he might have orchestrated a quiet arrest. Fortunately, the Cape Lookout graduate had not acted quickly enough on her hunches. Hundtruk had been late to the banquet, but he understood all now, and couldn’t suppress a gallows grin. Investigator Blythe probably was the target of Stamen’s return, and her lethal wish fulfillment.

  Day had ended with the ship’s arrival at Yakutat Bay. Night was encased by fog like oily cotton placed over a dimming flashlight. Captain Squier had announced his intention to lay over, hoping to enter Disenchantment Bay and give the Rainier Policy Institute cruisers a view of Hubbard Glacier at dawn. The Northstar’s engines throbbing beneath him, Hundtruk set a pot of tea to boil in his galley kitchen.

  He could already hear the Fox News alerts, millions tuning in to feast on details about same-sexuality and murder on the decks of the Republican flagship. He could already hear Grant Sharpe’s unctuous firsthand account about how, after all the suspicion centered on the GOP after the reporter’s death, a lesbian affair right out of progressivism’s tawdry annuls unfolded around him.

  See, the right-wing pundits would say, it’s always blame with these people. Blame Bush, blame oil, blame global warming, blame conservatives, blame Republicans, and always blame America first.

  Hundtruk took a worried sip of his cinnamon tea. One thing he knew in his gut: Stamen had never gotten off the ship. Blythe, a quick study when you got right down to it, was probably nursing the same hunch as the ship trolled slowly over the fogbound depths.

  Ten seconds after her coming-out meeting with the captain, Melissa’s tail got picked up by a muscular late-twenties officer whose tan suit was different from the usual blue, white, and gold of the ship’s colors. He followed her down the starboard top rail, eyes fixed as if to say, “My career depends on this.” With the security officer dogging her from a discreet distance, she’d grabbed a late soup and salad to go from the Victoria Station and returned to her stateroom. Melissa reopened her message to Scrimshaw in her Sent Items box. They all knew the score on Stamen now, the Old Turtle, the captain, and probably Jeff Griffin too. It was entirely plausible that her Charon stablemates were already gawking at Stamen’s galleria of demise and had probably already seen many of the photos in their original context. After opening her window and breathing in a drought heavy with still-falling droplets, she removed the jacket of a dun-colored pantsuit that was creased in bad places and stunk like day-old dryer lint. She hung her Glock in its place on the headboard. The second she lay down on the bed for a recuperative nap and nestled her head into the pillow, she knew she would not sleep that night.

  Let the Charon boys take a good long look. The maker of those Deathknell pages was at large on the ship—Melissa was sure of it. Ship security was looking for her on the sly, but come morning she would recommend the captain stop pussyfooting around and implement a ship-wide alert, appearances be damned. She knew from her studies in maritime criminality that such an alert—a dangerous criminal on the loose--would prompt an immediate order to head for the nearest port. There, the passengers and crew would disembark to allow for a squad of FBI search professionals, likely with dogs, to comb the ship.

  Some would argue that Melissa should have acted more quickly on her suspicions. If she’d sent her call for backup before Juneau, Stamen might have been taken quietly.

  Melissa could not sleep, but she realized it was not because she feared the arrival of Svenko’s slayer. Her young escort, Security Assi
stant Robert “Sonny” Thompson, was right outside the door. He had proven unshakable, watching her every move like a shoreline raptor watches for surfacing fish. Deathknell’s sick mistress would have to get past him and a locked stateroom door.

  The sleeplessness Melissa felt in every organ had more to do with her need to get out of the stateroom, to stalk in kind the killer who waited somewhere on the ship for her moment.

  In the postage-stamp park that only a few feather-worn pigeons seemed to frequent, Viktor Svenko prepared to open the second-to-last entry in Lara’s Imbroglio journal.

  On a telephone that lets a person see who he’s talking to, it seemed like months ago now but it had only been days, he had tipped Investigator Blythe off about Lara’s lover. He passed a moment watching pigeons watch him, wondering how the investigation was playing out.

  7/6/08. I wonder if it was something with your dad. It always seemed that when I wanted to talk about my father, you’d listen, but your eyes would glaze over in a way that suggested your life force was being drained. You never talked about your father, and maybe Viktor was why. I love my father, always have, but I put that away for you, treating it like a sin of omission that, with patience, I could someday share.

  The lines around your face would soften when you talked of your mother’s mobile home and addiction to nicotine. The way you and she got on after the divorce. But she didn’t understand your life, your aspirations. I sometimes wondered if she was as bad as or worse than a father figure imbued with negativity. Maybe both of them were bad, but you decided that your mother would be the good parent.

  You had a man at least once, and a daughter who, though you seldom talked of her, I guessed had been legally wrested from you by her father. I never spoke about Circe, and you seemed to like it that way. I have always dreamed of a daughter, and in America that can happen even for a lesbian. It is one of the great regrets of my country for lesbians, at least in the Lake Stavack region, where women loving women is a secret life with or without children.

  I fear it was my friendship with Karen that sent you down another of the dark paths that truth to tell I should have realized informs all the tributaries of your life. Your green monster side was a surprising smallness in a woman I had taken for a talented and transgressively daring artist. But was it really that? Were Viktor and Karen rivals you could not countenance? I believe it is more than that.

  Dark Eros thrives on what we called our “crazy sexual energy.” You’ve said things on the phone, never in writing, and I never taped a word of it. You said that it was not that easy to walk away from you and that I would not escape you. When this cruise is done, I have to face that. It is a sad commentary, here, on this ship, in the middle of this beautiful summer, with beautiful Barack Obama headed to the White House.

  I will be handing Imbroglio my version of Mozart’s Requiem Mass. Unlike Hunter S. Thompson’s thwarted epitaph of fear and loathing, it will show compassion, allowing for the dignity of death your website always ignored. Decades in the making for all progressives, my right-wing postmortem will write itself. I might even feel confident enough to toss the Republicans a historical bone or two, if I can find the words.

  And then I will turn my attention to the problem of you.

  With the sadness and fear of your heart’s vendetta awaiting me in Seattle, I will enjoy my last few nights on the ship, even surrounded by the whiff of conservative decay. I will start my piece. I will enjoy the delicious Northstar kitchens, her heavenly saunas, and watch for this doomed glacier that is only hours away.

  Melissa lay wide awake atop the navy-blue bedspread. Only the bedside reading lamp was on, so the rest of her stateroom was filled with interior shadows. A sentient throb intimated from the back of the headboard. She thought about flicking off the reading lamp, but somehow leaving it on was important, as if what she needed to think about called for muted light. She was saddened by Lara’s fate and sad even for the pathological woman lurking on the enshrouded ship. But she coveted their passion. It was more important suddenly than anything Mr. Scrimshaw would have to say to her. No man had ever obsessed over her the way Stamen and Svenko obsessed over each other.

  Melissa now felt a pull toward her own resolution. She laughed out loud at the context of the first expression to come into her mind: back onto the marketplace. For all the Meltdown horror, it had come to this. She was tired of going life alone. Compartmentalizing had only succeeded in keeping her in very unfulfilling box. When all this was over, and Stamen was either brought to justice, or dead, or, conversely, unless Melissa had finally cracked the case that would fatally end her own life, she was going back on the market. She was ready to find someone to share her life, the loneliness, and whatever passion waited for her too.

  That’s when the email chimed through on her iPhone. Scrimshaw was finally going to answer her email, Charon was finally going to tell her what to do.

  There are political exigencies which bear on how we must proceed. Good work. Please sit tight.

  Cornelius Scrimshaw

  After reading it, she walked to her porthole and looked again into a treachery of Alaskan fog. She’d expected something like “Sit tight,” but somehow, with Stamen plotting murder on the Northstar again, the standing order which often made up a large percentage of an undercover investigator’s fieldwork just didn’t seem possible.

  She had her theory, a suspect, and her Glock. She had Deathknell, which was all the evidence she’d ever need. Till morning, when she would formally request that Captain Squier abandon appearances and make for the nearest port under general alert, she would scour her hunches, track her own intrigues. She sensed that somehow everything would get resolved here in the black stew that held the entrance to Disenchantment Bay. As Stamen had made Melissa her new obsession, Melissa would now return the favor with the most daringly independent move of her career.

  She swung her shoulder arm into place and threw the pantsuit jacket back on. She laced up her suede walking shoes. The voyage and her political reawakening had put her in Lara Svenko’s shoes, and somehow the calling to justice had taken on a personal aspect. She wouldn’t hide behind locked doors and the Charon apparatus while the case she’d been sent to solve exploded in everybody’s faces. Let the chips fall when Investigator Blythe disobeyed a direct order.

  Just outside, Officer Robert Thompson waited. She knew the type: sleepless, all about the mission, looking to advance. But Melissa had been instructed on how to lose a tail, and there was no law that said she couldn’t go out for a nightcap. She opened the stateroom door only a millimeter. Sure enough, her protector leaned against the rail at the observation nook at the far end of the corridor. With her iPhone in the inner pocket of her suit coat and her Glock snug against one breast, Melissa came out and swept toward the young officer with confidence.

  “I’m going down to the Aurora Lounge. Care to join me?”

  “Uh, Ms. Ross, do you really think that’s a good idea?”

  The question revealed that whoever up the chain might now be apprised of her true identity, it was unbeknownst to the man charged with protecting her. She told him she was restless and couldn’t sleep. Reluctantly, like a father handing car keys to his sixteen-year-old daughter, Thompson gathered himself to full height. She knew then that he would follow her, and he did, while relaying their movement to Chief Collins.

  An abyss opened over them amidships. An unseen arctic bay lay under that gloom. The pine and soil and salt that had enriched Melissa’s nose for days were gone, and a brackish, fathomless-blue watery scent had taken their place. Out there in some direction only a compass could tell lay the remnants of an Ice Age glacier, rock-hard preserver of mammoths, of water, and of an inhabitable earth. And yet the air was mild—there was a languishing, lower-meridian warmth.

  The Aurora Lounge was sparsely populated with a few younger marrieds and a smattering of single men watching an extra-inning Mariners game. She found a table near a long dark wall, sat, and asked Officer Thompso
n if he liked his work.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied and then asked about the life of a college reporter.

  “Well, it’s not usually this exciting,” she quipped.

  An aged version of Maria Centavos appeared. Melissa ordered a glass of Merlot, and Thompson ordered Diet Sprite. It was too late for obligatory conversation, so they just sat until she excused herself, knowing he would follow to the restroom alcove.

  The women’s restroom was as deadened an interior space as could be found on the ship, spotlessly clean with only one way out. But there was a bet Melissa was making, a bet that Thompson would make the calculation that men often made, that women always took longer in the bathroom. She knew that there was no facility in the corridor outside her stateroom where he had kept his vigil, and he’d been at his post for hours. This would be his chance to relieve himself, quick, in and out, before she would even have her skirt down. Using the neglected nails at the ends of her fingertips, she pulled the door open just an increment. Indeed, she’d caught her tail with his pants unzipped and could later say with confidence that none of the insomniacs at the bar noticed when she slipped between some unoccupied tables along the far wall, out the frosted-glass double doors, and back into the darkest night she had ever known.

  While going over the employee register looking for oddities, she had noticed a certain name tied to a certain stateroom number. It was the stateroom of the waitress who had served her dinner with the Young Conservatives. That stateroom was Melissa’s destination now. Of all the knowns and unknowns in the sequence of events, this was one fact that only she knew, a fact that would die with her if it came to that. Only Melissa would ever know that she was hoping for a visit with Maria Centavos that night.