by Mark Ellis
Rad watched absentmindedly from the bridge as Haenke Island grew larger off the port bow. They’d crisscrossed the wake twice now, and there’d been no sign of anything in the water. His cell rang: Alderson. “Rad, there’s someone I’d like you to meet. I think it might have bearing on the case.” Alderson wasn’t one for half-baked theories. Rad left immediately for his friend’s stateroom.
“Nice of you to finally make an appearance,” Alderson quipped.
His galley kitchen counter was stocked with fine spirits, and a carry-on photo in its frame—To Alvin, All Best, George W. Bush—was propped on his nightstand.
A young woman sat on the couch, blond, catlike, her eyes all promise and requirement.
“Rad, this is Deborah Cummings, one of our Young Conservatives.”
Alderson turned to the woman. “Go ahead and tell the captain what you told me.”
“Well, sir, people are talking about gunfire on the ship,” Cummings answered deferentially. Word has gotten around that that reporter from Portland has gone missing.”
Alderson raised both hands in a gesture of innocence. “It wasn’t me. I haven’t spoken to anyone about the gunfire but you.”
Rad sat on the edge of the Alderson’s galley kitchen chair, ready to hear out the pretty party animal his friend had produced. “What is it you wanted to tell me?”
“Well, it’s probably nothing, but it seems kind of strange in retrospect, considering what might have happened.”
“Yes?”
What Cummings had to tell was that a certain server had waited on the Young Conservatives one night when Sue Ross had joined them for dinner. It seemed to Cummings that the reporter seemed interested in the server, but she dismissed it as just an opportunistic press person trying to get another angle. But later, since Juneau, she’d seen Ross and the server talking together on deck, engaged in what looked like a serious conversation.
Dawn was approaching, and Melissa’s spirits lifted.
She put the still-damp pantsuit she’d wrung out back on, and it was chilly but tolerable, no shivers. More immediate was her parched throat. The gently rolling salty waves that broke on the island shore would not help. She rose from a sea-tossed tree trunk where she had rested, feeling the need to move. The adrenaline rush of her escape from the water had subsided, as had the endorphin balm that had blanketed her from the chill of early morning. What was left was a sickly feeling of constriction, which spurred her to shake off what felt like living rigor mortis.
She headed south, down the beach. Once sure-footed again, she walked vigorously, letting what fuel was left from the soup and salad that had been her last shipboard meal work into her muscles and sinews. The open night sky and stars were waning in a diffused slate wash from the east. She must have walked a quarter mile when she heard the distant cry of the bird that had beckoned her to shore.
Reaching a small cape, she came around to an open hillside that rose upland to the top hat of the island summit. There, amazingly, she spotted a band of besotted white on the clearing’s highest slope. The existence of fresh water caused her burning mouth to crave wetness, and the involuntary instinct to salivate was a painful spasm. She found herself calculating the time and energy it would take to reach the precious snow.
Waxing light illuminated the smartest path upward. She turned inland and soon was off the beach, wading through brambly coastal brush. Then began the climb, and it was the kind of hike she would have undertaken in a heartbeat with companions like Shauna and Randy. Here, fighting to keep her blood circulating, she found that each tread took something vital to perform.
A second wind came as she crested a bluff of yellow grass and saw the glistening of her objective in the growing light. She found the ridge, its spine about the width of a good Port Rachel side yard, and soon was on her knees pushing back mouthfuls of gritty snow as soft and sweet as a 7-Eleven Slurpee. She ate the frosty remnant that had somehow outlasted the warm temperatures too fast, and was beset by a vicious brain freeze, but other organs found succor in the melting liquid. Looking up to where the open slope again became forested, Melissa wondered about beasts and then almost smiled when she thought of Barb Stamen. This wild Alaskan islet was probably the safest place she’d been since leaving Seattle.
Daylight gathered to illuminate Disenchantment Bay. As Melissa looked out over the waters that might have claimed her, it seemed as if a phosphorescent octopus had risen to swim across the surface.
The Northstar’s lights searching the waters, searching for her.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was Hundtruk’s move, if there was to be any salvaging of the Svenko narrative for the Democratic Party. His plan was to seek out Chief Collins in the security office, which was tucked discreetly in a small smoked-glass complex across the lobby from flagship embarkation. When he arrived, however, only one person stood duty at the reception desk, a forlorn-looking Officer Robert Thompson. The vacancy of the security post at dawn backed Hundtruk’s gut sense that events were in flux.
Without sitting down, he laid his spoken credentials on Thompson’s desk like a new sheriff arriving in a lawless town.
“I’m from the Department of Homeland Security.”
Hundtruk explained to the young officer that every Northstar employee, from the grill cleaner at the Victoria Station to Captain Squier himself, would soon be under a microscope based on Hundtruk’s report about the cruise. “Make no mistake,” he warned. “The chain of command you’re operating under is subject to change. Give me the information I need to ensure the government’s interests, and your prospects will be greatly improved.”
Hundtruk remained standing, lording over the seated officer. “Loyalty is an admirable quality,” he stressed, “but there comes a time in every man’s career when such loyalty must take into account new realities.”
Thompson’s eyes sidled over to his desk phone.
“You’re thinking about calling your boss,” Hundtruk said. “You should probably know that a short time ago, Chief Collins was cooperating with me. Something changed when we reached Yakutat Bay, and I find him to be suddenly unresponsive.”
Hundtruk intimated that Collins’s pivot away from the federal apparatus would create opportunity for those coming up in the ranks.
“Are you familiar with the Lara Svenko case?” the beleaguered Thompson asked.
“Intimately. That’s part of the reason I’m here.”
“We believe her killer is on the ship, in the person of Barbara Stafford, a technician at Siletz Springs Sauna Center—”
“I know all that. What’s happening right this minute?”
“We believe that Stafford has repeated her crime, has thrown a reporter who might have known too much overboard.”
“Name?” asked Hundtruk.
Thompson paused again, his gaze flittering through the obscure glass windows to the early-morning stirrings in the flagship lobby.
“Sue Ross.”
Hundtruk factored that people this far down the security chain still did now know the true identity of the woman they were looking for. “Go on,” he said.
“She has not been accounted for since two passengers on the Kodiak Terrace observation deck heard gunfire and a scream near the aft deck rail.”
Hundtruk ceased his lording and calmly sat down in the chair facing the reception desk. He leaned in. “I demand to know—as a federal agent who will soon be presenting a report that will shake the hulls of the entire Trans Oceanic fleet—what is happening right now?”
Thompson’s pause was but a brief collection of milliseconds. “Security is preparing to enter the stateroom of a member of the waitstaff, Maria Centavos. Some kind of connection has been established. That’s all I know.”
“Excellent, Officer Thompson. Now, please, if you would provide Centavos’s room number?”
Again, from the young officer, an infinitesimal pause. Any good security man would protect his fellow officers in the context of an operation in progress.
“I should inform you that I have the full staff housing chart back in my stateroom. But time is of the essence here. It is vital that a federal entity be present for this operation.”
Thompson’s eyes had ceased to wander, unable to avoid Hundtruk’s desktop staredown. He glanced at his keyboard.
“I swear to you,” Hundtruk promised, “I will not jeopardize the mission or put any of your fellow officers in harm’s way. I simply wish to represent the federal government in this matter, which has been tasked by President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel himself to help solve the case of Lara Svenko.”
Hundtruk knew capitulation when he smelled it.
“The operation commences at 7:45 a.m.,” said Thompson, now fully vested in whatever future the long arm of Hundtruk’s law had in store.
“Stateroom 3011.”
Every able-bodied crewmate not actively involved with the Northstar’s core functions had kept a sharp eye after Rad directed the ship to backtrack its recently traveled leagues. They had watched like many had watched in vain for Lara Svenko. But there was no sign of any human body, alive or dead.
Chief Collins came onto the bridge with his report about preparations for the visit to Maria Centavos, the second time stateroom 3011 would be visited that night.
“Centavos was interviewed and the room searched per your original order,” he told Rad. “We had Officer Shelly Heiner in there three hours ago.”
In her report, Heiner wrote that Ms. Centavos submitted willingly to the search and admitted she had become acquainted with Barbara Stafford as a coworker, “but that was all.”
Rad directed that Officer Heiner be brought along so as to have a woman present at the time of the return visit to Centavos’s room.
“Do we know for certain that Ms. Centavos is in her room?” asked Rad.
“Heiner left her in her room,” Collins affirmed, “and as far as we know, she has been there since. She is scheduled to punch in at the Victoria Station at 8:00 a.m.”
Rad met the glances of both Briggs and Holdren, and all three men looked out the Northstar’s panoramic window. The snowcapped coastal ranges were fully in relief, but a stubborn murk of condensation clung to Hubbard’s face, as if the foggy warmth and the bastion of ice had achieved a fleeting polarity. Briggs began another long, slow turn. Due east, a fully risen sun glinted at the fog-adapted eyes of the bridgemates. On any ordinary cruise, this would be shaping up as a beautiful day, but there had been no such thing as an ordinary Rainier Policy Institute cruise since the summer of 2007. Off the starboard bow lay Haenke Island, a resistant little evergreen promontory spared by the glacier’s inexorable march.
Rad’s thoughts turned to Nancy, doubtless now rising to a searing Palm Springs summer day with Rebecca and the family. His wife, a certified trooper on both land and sea, was obviously affected by Lara Svenko’s disappearance on last year’s cruise. McCain vs. Obama had been slipstreamed into perspective by the raw loss of life. Nancy had stayed close to Rad, troubled the way Hubbard Glacier was now troubled by fog, after the reporter went missing,
Svenko, and now Stafford and Blythe. Rad thanked God that Nancy had not made the voyage this year. To Chief Collins he said simply, “Go.”
Armed now for the first time since the voyage began, Stan Hundtruk moved swiftly toward staff lodging and the quarterdeck berth of Maria Centavos. The salvation of the Svenko narrative might lie in room 3011, a berth in the middle of a corridor that was now only twenty feet and a gleaming-white staircase away. If Captain Squier and his security apparatus had learned something important enough to go there, he would go there too. He worked his way around scores of passengers convened along the starboard rail to witness what looked to be a promising sunrise over Hubbard Glacier.
Hundtruk had fired his weapon numerous times. But, and this he considered fortunate, he’d never fired a fatal bullet; they had all been warning shots of one kind or another. His most dangerous job had been his first, tracking Department of Human Services fraud after Boss Clinton declared “the end of welfare as we know it.” Some of the neighborhoods he visited had been downright embattled. One of the reasons Shirley had left him—he knew because she had admitted it—was the risks he took in his profession. He’d been essentially a paper pusher when they first tied the knot. As his assignments grew increasingly more perilous, Shirley seemed to distance herself emotionally from the possibilities. None of the committed leftist women he’d dated after the divorce harbored such qualms about his movement into more hazardous professional waters; in fact, they viewed such assignations as badges of honor.
As Hundtruk reached the staircase that led down to the staff accommodations area, he reminded himself that aside from Mother Hundtruk, Shirley was the last woman who ever worried when his job took him from behind a desk into danger. And his mother did not know he was moving towards potential trouble now.
The second he landed on the corridor floor, he knew that he was only seconds from being too late. Chief Collins stood with a male and female officer outside room 3011. Breaking his stride for only a heartbeat, Hundtruk approached them.
“I’m a federal agent,” he said, flashing his all-purpose laminated ID card. “I request permission to observe the action being taken here. The Department of Homeland Security has been duly designated as having jurisdictional standing in the case of Lara Svenko, and in fact, part of the reason for my presence on this cruise is related to the circumstances of her death.”
Hundtruk watched as Collins seemed to weigh his sense of loyalty against his instinct for self-preservation. There was annoyance in the security chief’s expression, and professional respect, but also a renewed pragmatism.
“Request granted, sir,” said Collins, having apparently decided to answer to any and all authority. The security chief knocked on the door of 3011.
No answer.
“Ms. Centavos?” Collins’s deep tenor was made for police bullhorns and crackling transmissions. “Ship security. I’m going to have to ask you to open the door.”
Long pause. No sound behind the gull-gray enameled door. Collins repeated his security pitch, made it more believable, imminent. When there was no response, he added, “Maria, we’re coming in. Talk to me.”
The sound of a latch drawn back. Heiner gripped the butt of her sidearm. The door opened slowly onto the secrets, dreams, and complicity of Maria Centavos.
The room smelled of hand cream and tuna fish. Hundtruk could never remember seeing a Latina so pale.
Centavos remained silent, though not technically under arrest, as officers Davis and Heiner hustled her away.
“Do you mind if I look around?” Hundtruk asked Chief Collins.
“Sure, just don’t touch anything.”
Centavos’s room was decorated with woven wall hangings depicting hacienda scenes, with fabrics and curios themed in rosy tans and sunny yellows. She displayed one of the light-blue pottery bulls that Hundtruk remembered seeing for sale on the streets of Tijuana. But for the stateroom’s cultural accoutrements, 3011could’ve been the lodging of any working girl. Then one item piqued Hundtruk’s investigatory instincts. On the wall in the small kitchenette was tacked a 2009 Northstar calendar. It still hung open to June, a few days out of date. The image the calendar’s designers thought best captured that transitory spring/summer month was a photo of the cascading water feature marking the entrance to Siletz Springs Sauna Center.
Something tingled along Hundtruk’s spine, not unpleasant. It was a professional trill whose melody meant discovery. Careful not to excuse himself too quickly, he left Collins talking on the phone in the corridor and passed a chastened Officer Robert Thompson redeployed to the top of the stairwell.
Meanwhile, the ship’s passengers had awakened. The starboard rail was stacked three deep in anticipation of the Hubbard sunrise. Siletz Center was deserted. As Hundtruk ducked his head into the sauna rooms one by one, he was struck by this unlikely lair of a murderess. Here Stamen had abided over two
voyages, the first to plot the murder of her lover. Now she’d struck again, possibly taking out his co-investigator and demonstrating a cold-blooded capacity that eclipsed even the heartless taking of her former lover’s life. He remembered sniffing that on her when first they met in these humid rooms.
He came upon a door marked Utility Room. Picking the lock was easy with his assortment of coded cards. Inside was a makeshift break room with a small table, a mini-fridge, and a microwave. Cubbies for the sauna staff were arrayed over the counter. Cases of elixirs and formulas of the sauna industry towered over everything.
The space smelled like bath salts and microwaved tacos, but there was something else, something perspiring like a living organism in the stomach of the ship. Back in the shadows of an L-shaped alcove stacked with empty boxes and dust mops, an access panel was affixed to the wall. Hundtruk stepped closer, allowing the fluorescent light to retreat from his eyes.
The panel was a rectangle just big enough for a person to step through, secured indistinguishably to the wall by six oval-headed bolts. As Hundtruk’s pupils became one with the murk of the alcove, he saw that the paint on the bolt heads had been ground away, gnawed down to bare metal. He touched one of the worn bolts and found it loose. Finding a slippery purchase with his fingers in the humidified air, he backed it slowly, soundlessly off. They would all come off easy like that. The bolts accounted for in his suit coat pocket, he tested how well the panel door sat in its prefabricated guides. It, too, was no problem—it lifted right off.
Hundtruk drew his weapon. There was a candle burning in the space behind the walls. A fetid-sweet stink wafted out as he peered in. He made the woman out, lying on a pile of sauna mats. There was a Siletz Center towel over her breasts and a bloody efflorescence at her shoulder. In her slack left hand was a firearm, a Glock. Her eyes burned like two infernally buried ingots of flame in the candlelight, but Hundtruk instinctively knew he would keep his record of never shooting to kill. He approached, knelt. The glowering from those unclosed orbs was only a sidelong candle reflection in two vigilant dead eyes. The deceased’s grimace was sad erotic, sadly wounded.
