Dark Passage

SIXTEEN

‘Over the last five years, sexual assault and physical assaults on cruise vessels were the leading crimes investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation with regard to cruise vessel incidents. These crimes at sea can involve attacks both by passengers and crew members on other passengers and crew members.’

Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2010

(H.R. 3360)

When I went to check in with my sisters, I found Georgina napping in her cabin, an open book propped up on her chest. She’d been keeping Julie company while she slept. Ruth was there, too, paging through an issue of People magazine. When I came in, she looked up. ‘Did you know that Katie Holmes was voted by Fitness magazine as having the best revenge body of the year?’

‘Revenge body? What the hell does that mean?’ I asked.

Ruth shrugged. ‘Eat your heart out, Tom Cruise?’

I crooked my finger and pointed to the communicating door. ‘We need to talk,’ I whispered.

In the privacy of our cabin, I said, ‘I know Georgina asked us not to call Scott, but I’m sorry, that’s nuts. What is the point of keeping the bad news from him? He’s going to find out when she gets home anyway and, if I were Scott, even though I know there’s nothing he could do until the Islander returns to port – unless he flew in on a helicopter – I’d be pissed off that she didn’t call me right away. When she wakes up, I’m counting on you to talk some sense into her.’

I took a deep breath. ‘And, we need to take Fortune’s advice and call a lawyer. We can’t wait for Georgina to do it. Julie was kidnapped, and that’s a federal crime. Ben Martin seems to be cooperating now, but there’s absolutely no guarantee he’s going to follow through once we reach dry land and Phoenix’s lawyers get involved.’ I touched her arm. ‘What I’m getting at is I think you should call Hutch, let him know what’s happened, and ask what steps we should take before leaving the ship.’

‘I already have,’ Ruth whispered, pointing to the cabin phone. ‘Per minute cost was simply outrageous. Seven freaking dollars, but what can you do? Hutch said that as soon as we hung up he’d contact the F.B.I.’s Baltimore field office to make certain that they’ve been notified.’

‘That’s good,’ I said, patting her arm. Then I told her about my plan to meet with David Warren.

As it turned out, tracking David down was ridiculously easy. I picked up the cabin phone, asked the operator to ring his stateroom and when it rang, the man actually answered.

My voice still a little shaky, I told him about the attack on Julie.

‘God damn,’ he said. ‘Not another one. We need to talk.’

We decided to meet in the library, which was such a hotbed of drunk and disorderly activity – as if – that Phoenix hadn’t even bothered to install surveillance cameras there. Pia wasn’t backstage, so I left a message for her at the Oracle bar, then headed for the library where I made myself comfortable at one of the game tables, sipping a latte I’d picked up on the way. Pia arrived, still wearing her server’s uniform, followed shortly by David, who was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and was toting an oversized briefcase.

‘I’m sorry about your niece.’ David pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Maybe I should have posted warning signs all over the ship: Danger: Sexual Predator On Board.’

He plunked his briefcase on the tabletop and got right down to business. ‘I’m convinced that Charlotte had stumbled on the identity of that sexual predator. He learned of it somehow and killed her to shut her up. I have a list of the people that were aboard the Voyager on the day that my daughter died, Miss Fanucci. By keeping my eyes open and asking discreet questions, I’ve confirmed that a number of them are aboard the Islander today. I’ve started a list. I’m wondering if you could look it over.’

David extracted a thick folder from his briefcase and slid the folder across the table. Pia tilted her head and opened it cautiously, as if expecting a Jack-in-the-Box to spring out at her.

‘Holy cow, Mr Warren! Where did you lay your hands on this? I can’t believe that Phoenix Cruise Lines gave up a passenger manifest voluntarily.’

Inside the folder was a sheaf of papers held together with a black binder clip, the print so tiny I thought Pia’d need a magnifying glass to read it.

David’s grin was humorless. ‘The Miami detective I hired had someone on the inside and called in an I.O.U, but you didn’t hear that from me.’

David had given Pia an impossible task. ‘There are hundreds of names on that list, Mr Warren,’ I said. ‘How can Pia possibly know everyone on this list who is also aboard today? My head hurts just thinking about it. I attended the captain’s cocktail party for the Neptune Club – same as you, David. Half the people in the room that night were frequent cruisers and could be suspects – you, me, the lady in the wheelchair, even Cliff and Liz Rowe.’

‘Not you, Hannah. You weren’t on the Voyager,’ David pointed out reasonably.

‘True,’ I said.

‘But, Cliff and Liz?’ Pia hooted. ‘You’ve got to be kidding! They’re as nice as they come.’

I flapped a hand. ‘Just saying.’

‘Isn’t that what the neighbors always say when a pedophile is arrested?’ David said. ‘ “He was such a nice man! Dressed up like a clown and passed out candy to all the kids on Halloween. Shoveled snow off my sidewalk. Jump-started my car when the battery died.” Being personable is the pedophile’s stock in trade, Miss Fanucci. It’s part of the job description. Charisma. Think Ted Bundy.’

‘I’d really rather not,’ Pia said, shivering. ‘But Cliff and Liz? Surely…’

David’s gaze didn’t waver. ‘Why else do you think I arranged to be seated at their table?’

I sat back, speechless. The man was as relentless as Inspector Javert.

‘I think I have a way to narrow it down,’ Pia said after a moment as she leafed quickly through the reams of paper David had set in front of her.

‘I don’t think we’re looking for a passenger at all. As far as I know, Charlotte wasn’t fraternizing with any of the passengers – she didn’t have time for it – and I’m sure she wasn’t being stalked, or she would have said something. So, it’s got to be a member of the officers, staff or crew, or maybe even one of the concessioners.’

‘What do you mean, concessioners? I thought everybody on board works for the cruise line?’

Pia shook her head. ‘Absolutely not. Tom and I don’t work directly for the cruise line, for example. We get our gigs through a booking agency. Tom’s immediate boss is the ship’s cast performance manager who reports to the entertainment director, that lounge lizard who introduces all the programs, acting as if he wrote, produced and directed them all himself. Our agency provides acts to a lot of the major cruise lines. We’re just one of them.’

‘And all the shops are concessions, as you probably guessed,’ David cut in.

‘I figured that,’ I said. ‘Like duty frees everywhere, stamped out with a cookie cutter. Frankly,’ I added, ‘I don’t get it. I can buy my Courvoisier just as cheaply at the liquor store back home in Annapolis.’

‘Not in the market for diamonds?’ Pia teased. ‘Or Chanel No. 5?’

‘I’m not the Chanel type. With my husband, it’s splash a smidge of Eau de Bifteck behind my ear and he’ll follow me anywhere. But, seriously,’ I said, ‘if you don’t actually work for the cruise line, why are you tending the bar at the Oracle?’

Pia blushed. ‘They were short-handed – the regular girl is confined to her cabin with a stomach virus. They asked for volunteers, I was available, and…’ She winked. ‘They pay me extra.’

I noticed that David was drumming his fingers lightly on the table. Taking the hint, I got back on message. I rested my forearms on the table and leaned forward, giving him my full attention. ‘So, to summarize. Charlotte was a youth counselor on Voyager and spent almost all of her time while on board in Tidal Wave, right?’

Pia was quick to confirm this fact. ‘Except for the early morning hours – and sometimes even those were taken up with staff meetings – Char had practically no time on her own.’

‘Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that whatever information she’d stumbled on had to do with the teen center. Do you agree?’

David nodded and laid his hand on the sheaf of papers that still lay on the table in front of Pia and pulled it back. ‘As I said, this is a printout where I’ve marked everyone on Islander who I know was also on Voyager. In the teen center, that narrows it down to Wesley Bray, who now manages the Tidal Wave – although he was just a youth counselor back then – one of the other youth counselors, and the overall supervisor, the Activities Director, Ethan Hines.’

That was a new name to me. ‘Pia, do you know Ethan Hines?’

She shrugged. ‘Just to say “hi” to.’

I wondered if I’d seen him hanging around the Tidal Wave. ‘What does he look like?’

‘Medium height, five-eight or five-nine, brown hair in a buzz cut to cover up the fact that he’s going bald. Looks like a Mormon missionary, if you want to know the truth.’

I didn’t remember seeing the guy, but wanted to learn everything I could about the folks in charge of the place where Julie went missing. ‘What does an activities director do, exactly? My only frame of reference is Julie McCoy on The Love Boat.’

Pia looked puzzled, and then I remembered that she probably hadn’t even been born when The Love Boat was popular on television. ‘Basically, they are in charge of making sure everybody has a good time,’ she said with a shrug.

That covered a lot of territory, I thought.

I turned to David. ‘Earlier, Pia was telling me that during one of Charlotte’s voyages, a girl, a fifteen-year-old, was drugged, abducted from the teen center and raped. Did Charlotte ever mention that incident to you?’

‘Yes, she did. When the ship docked in Montego Bay, she called me. At the time the girl, Noelle Bursky went missing, Charlotte was on a white-water rafting expedition in the rainforest with a bunch of kids, but it upset her all the same.’ David bent over, fumbled in his briefcase and pulled out a manila folder. ‘This incident was reported in the Florida Sun Sentinel,’ he told us while thumbing through its contents. ‘Damn it, I have it here somewhere. Well, never mind. The gist of it is that the girl was drugged, raped and then stashed in one of the lifeboats. The parents were party-hearty types – didn’t even notice their daughter was missing until hours after the rape – so by the time they reported it, she’d already come to and climbed out of the lifeboat. The girl had the good sense to flag down somebody and report the incident, but when she got to Security, she couldn’t remember anything about the attack – it was all a blank between the time she drank a Coca Cola in the bar and the time she woke up in the lifeboat early the following morning. Nobody was ever accused. The girl had something of a reputation for being a cock tease – I beg your pardon, Miss Fanucci – so her interrogation was emotionally brutal. The family disembarked in Jamaica, hired an attorney, but eventually they declined to pursue the matter, saying they wanted to save their daughter the embarrassment of a court trial. Char was pretty steamed about that.’

As David told the story, I was staring at the etched glass doorway, thinking it was possible that the same person abducted both that poor fifteen-year-old girl and my niece, Julie. Both girls had been drinking sodas in the ship’s teen bar, and both had no memory of the attack. Julie wasn’t a cock tease, as David had so crudely put it, but what if the attacker had been scouting for victims, had observed Julie getting drunk on Sex on the Beaches with the Crawford boys in the bar and figured she’d be a vulnerable target?

If so, Julie had been extremely lucky. Somehow, she had managed to escape. Why had the rapist not followed through? Had he lost his nerve? Or had the crime been interrupted?

I turned to David. ‘You have reams of paper in that briefcase, David. You know there have been previous assaults. Do you have any statistics on how many girls have been sexually assaulted while hanging out in the Tidal Wave area on Phoenix Cruise Lines?’

‘I was more interested in the statistics on persons overboard, of course, but all those numbers are hard to come by.’ He adjusted his reading glasses, flipped over a couple of pages and ran his finger down a multi-columned table. ‘Between October 1, 2007 and September 30, 2008, there were one hundred and fifty-four sex-related incidents on board cruise ships, twenty-eight of them against a minor, and of those, four – or about fourteen percent – were on Phoenix ships.’

Fourteen percent of an industry total seemed like a lot to me. ‘What about since 2008?’ I asked.

David considered me over the top of his eyeglasses. ‘Ah, that’s where it gets difficult. Because of last-minute changes to the wording of the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2010, comparable data simply isn’t available.’

‘That’s crazy,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t the public have a right to know? If I were taking a kid on a cruise, I’d certainly want to be able to check out the safety record of the cruise line I was considering.’ I shuddered. ‘We never dreamed that Julie would be in any danger.’

‘I filed a Freedom of Information request in 2011, but when I finally got the reports, all helpful information had been redacted.’ David leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. ‘The act requires that cruise lines operating in and out of U.S. ports report all alleged crimes to the F.B.I., and that the Coast Guard maintain that information in a public database.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ Pia said.

‘Yes, but…’ David smiled crookedly and raised an eyebrow. ‘There’s always a “yes, but,” isn’t there? Anyway, just before passage, the bill was amended so that the F.B.I. is only required to tell the public about their closed cases. Until the law is changed back to its original language, all we have to rely on now is media reports, or when lawsuits are filed in U.S. courts.’

Holy cow, I thought. If the public only got to see information about closed cases, nobody would ever have heard of Jon-Benet Ramsay, the Black Dalhia, Andrew and Abbie Borden, D.B. Cooper or Jack the Ripper. I was mentally scratching my head. ‘Surely that can’t have been the intent of the act?’

‘No, and as the father of a murdered daughter, I feel let down by the Congress. This absence of data serves no one’s interest except that of the cruise lines. When you get home, write your senator,’ David ordered, wagging his index finger for emphasis. ‘We need to get this law changed.’

‘What’s in it for the F.B.I. to keep cruise-ship crimes so hush-hush?’ Pia wondered. She raised a hand. ‘Never mind, I just answered my own question. Maybe they’re embarrassed because shipboard crimes have such a low solve rate.’

‘Well, not reporting crimes doesn’t make crime go away,’ David grumped. ‘It simply lulls the public into a false sense of security. And if this kind of thing happened in a junior high school in the United States, you’d better believe the cops and the media would be all over it. According to these recent statistics,’ he continued, ruffling the pages on the table in front of him, ‘serious shipboard crimes have dropped from more than four hundred a year to only a few dozen.’ He snorted. ‘Defies belief.’

‘So, what we know for sure is that in 2008 there were four sexual assaults against minors on ships owned by Phoenix.’

‘Yes.’

‘And since then?’

David shrugged. ‘Only two that I know of. The one on Voyager on the cruise when Charlotte was murdered and the attack yesterday on your niece.’

I turned to Pia. ‘Didn’t you tell me that you knew of four, maybe five, Pia?’

Pia nodded. ‘Unofficially.’

‘Somebody with easy access to the Tidal Wave had to be responsible for drugging those girls,’ I said. ‘What if Charlotte discovered who it was?’

Pia frowned. ‘Wesley Bray is a common denominator.’

I shook my head. ‘Yes, but he couldn’t have attacked Julie because he was on desk duty in Tidal Wave at the time. I saw him there myself.’

‘But, he would have had time to slip the drug into your niece’s drink,’ Pia observed.

‘What would his motive be?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s in cahoots with the rapist. Maybe they work as a team.’

I tried to imagine what would motivate a personable, clean-cut guy like Wesley to enter into an infernal partnership with a serial rapist. Money? Blackmail? Or maybe… my heart did a somersault… maybe they took turns?

‘What about that photographer, Buck Carney?’ I asked after a moment. ‘I’m sure I saw him taking pictures at the disco while Phreakin’ Phil was performing. And he’s practically stalking my sister, Georgina.’ I paused, as a thought struck me like a clap of thunder. ‘He’s got a fetish for red hair. My niece, Julie, has red hair. He’s tried to take her picture, too.’

‘I know the guy you’re talking about, Hannah. He’s a bit of a creep, but aren’t all paparazzi creeps? It kind of goes with the territory.’

‘Was Carney taking pictures on Voyager, too?’ David asked.

Pia nodded. ‘He goes freaking everywhere with that camera, but, honestly, I think he’s harmless.’

‘Buck Carney has just shot to the top of my list, David.’ I sat back in my chair. ‘So, we’ve narrowed it down to the bartenders, Wesley Bray, Ethan Hines and Buck Carney,’ I said, counting the suspects off on my fingers. Then I had a sudden thought: ‘Pia, who did you mean when you mentioned the “usual suspects”? Am I missing anyone obvious?’

‘Only myself and Tom to add to the three you mentioned that I know of, staff-wise.’ Pia paused. ‘What do we do now?’ she wanted to know. ‘Do we have a plan?’

‘David?’ I asked.

David shuffled his papers, tapped them on the table to even up the edges, then stuck the papers back into his briefcase. ‘Up until now, I’ve been keeping a low profile, but I think I’m going to come out of the woodwork. Start playing hardball. Officer Martin doesn’t know who I am, but I think he’s about to find out. He wasn’t involved in the investigation into my daughter’s disappearance, so he probably can’t see the connection. But I can’t imagine any honest officer would want to tolerate the presence of a pedophile and murderer on his ship. If we put our heads together…’ David let the sentence die.

Pia squirmed uncomfortably in her chair.

David noticed. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t involve you, Miss Fanucci.’

‘So, what’s your plan?’ I asked him.

‘I’m going to talk to Martin, of course. Lay it all out. I’d appreciate it if you’d come along, Mrs Ives. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about dealing with cruise ship corporations, it’s never go in alone. Always take a witness.’

‘I think it goes both ways, David,’ I said with a smile. ‘Ben Martin always has Molly Fortune and her trusty little notebook along.’

I agreed to accompany David to the security office, but I felt a twinge of guilt about blindsiding Ben Martin like that. And then I thought, no, that’s why they pay him the big bucks, to deal with people like me. Martin was between a rock and a hard place. To keep his job he had to keep the owners happy, but that meant keeping customers happy, too. If so, we might find him more willing to cooperate.

‘When shall we beard the lion in his den?’ I asked.

‘What’s wrong with now?’